Cooking Books / TV

Jolteh

Jolteh

Jolteh

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21 Nov 2002
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I'm guessing most people here are self taught cooks, so I'd be really interested in hearing what sources you guys use to learn about cooking.

I'll start with my suggestions:

Book: Harold McGee On Food and Cooking - This is like a encyclopaedia for science in cooking, which I find totally fascinating. McGee was one of the earliest pioneers of a scientific approach to cooking. If you're using a particular technique in the kitchen you can read for this book and understand what is happening. Good old Heston is often quoted as saying that McGee is one of his mentors and this book is one of his favourites.

Book: The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adria - Adria is regarded by many as the best chef in the world. He ran El Bulli until it closed last year to become a cooking school. I'm not normally a fan of this style of cookbook, but rather than this being a normal recipe book with the ingredients and process written down and a photo of the finished dish, this has a photograph showing every step of the process along the way. The pictures are excellent and I think this is the best recipe-style book I've seen.

TV: Good Eats. I saw this recommended on another forum. It's an american show that ran for 14 series. It picks one food type per show and explains it in detail with a few recipes. The host is extremely charismatic and the show is very funny at times. Not sure you can buy it in the UK, but most of the episodes are available on places like YouTube.
 
Book: Plenty by Yottam Ottolenghi

Vegetarian cookbook by a non-vegetarian. Really interesting recipes, most of which look amazing but not the kind of thing you'd think of straight away and drool-worthy photography. :) He has a food blog too on the Guardian or one of the major newspapers anyway.
 
Books: Hawksmoor at Home and Ginger Pig Meat Book.

Both contain excellent easy recipes with accessible ingredients for the carnivore!

I also got Heston at Home recently too which, although an amazing insight in to his complex recipes, is just not practical for the home and I doubt I will cook anything from it. Some of the preparation time he spends on his dishes are just mad!
 
LocalNative said:
Mostly cooking blogs by self aspiring chefs :p

I like that a lot of them give tips/tricks, whereas I find a lot of cooking books by professional chefs are more pretentious, and I haven't a clue as to what they're asking me to do :o

Anyways, some of my favourites:

http://cupcakesandcashmere.com/recipes/

http://achowlife.com/

http://foodloveswriting.com/

http://www.davidlebovitz.com/
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I love home foodies blogs too. I end up stumbling across most via foodgawker. Some of the stuff these guys make puts me to shame.


Rich_L said:
Book: Plenty by Yottam Ottolenghi

Vegetarian cookbook by a non-vegetarian. Really interesting recipes, most of which look amazing but not the kind of thing you'd think of straight away and drool-worthy photography. :) He has a food blog too on the Guardian or one of the major newspapers anyway.
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That book looks interesting. Reasonably priced on the Net too! My lady's old man is a veggie so I might snag it and see if I can impress him with something different.
 
River Cottage Everyday is the cornerstone of my cooking. A great example of amazing food with simple ingredients. Made me confident enough to create many of my own dishes too. Recommended highly.

Two Greedy Italians. Fantastic book. Med food is probably my favourite, and this book delivers. Again, very simple (and humble in most cases) food, excellent results.
 
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Jolteh said:
That's a formidable collection!

I spy "The Family Meal" down at the bottom there. What do you think of it?
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It is really good book but I would say that as I like cook books, I like the photography in them as much as recipe ideas.

I haven't tried to reproduced anything from it. :D
 
Jolteh said:
I'm guessing most people here are self taught cooks, so I'd be really interested in hearing what sources you guys use to learn about cooking.
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I collect cookbooks and other food-related items (magazines, newspaper clippings, recipe cards from supermarkets, etc) and thus have a massive library of recipes to draw inspiration from, but I seem to get most of my 'better' ideas from eating out and thinking up ways of 'improving' something I've really enjoyed.

That being said, I do spend an inordinate amount of time looking through cookbooks and recipes, but sometimes it's a little hard working out where to start! One of these days I really ought to get around cataloguing everything I've got and then work out a way of putting it on my iPad.

Jolteh said:
Book: The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adria
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While I agree wholeheartedly with you about McGee, I found The Family Meal to be one of the most disappointing cookbooks I've come across in a long time. Were this 'written' by anyone else but Adria, it would be in the bargain bin within weeks of release.

It's by no means the worst cookbook I've read, but for me it fails to deliver in one crucial area - the recipes. There's probably about five recipes in the entire book that I thought might be worth a go - the rest just did nothing for me. I just don't see how cooking for a brigade of 75 translates into something suitable for filtering down and using in a domestic kitchen.

That said, I will happily praise its layout; the step-by-step recipes, accompanied with detailed photography and superb mise en place explanations, are just the sort of thing you should find in more cookbooks. I just think it's more suited to people who want to see a little glimpse of the inner workings of El Bulli than anyone who wants to learn something new about cooking.
 
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