Food and Cooking

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All things culinary and cooking related. Share food! Share recipes! Share stuff about food, etc.

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Your Essential Food Books? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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For those of you with a cooking/food writing/food science collection, what's indispensable? What do you currently find yourself returning to again and again?

For me, Nikki Segnit's "Flavor Thesaurus: A Compendium' and Flavor Thesaurus: More Flavors are both in there, along with The Noma Guide to Fermentation, Koji Alchemy, and *Burma: Rivers of Flavor." Oh, and Sercarz's *Spice Companion."

For food writing, I'm always happy to dip into some M.F.K. Fisher.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you tell me more about Koji Alchemy? I do a lot of Japanese cooking, and I enjoy fermentation, pickling, sourdough, etc. This book sounds like it's be up my alley.

I also heard that store bought koji is generally subpar in quality. What does this book have to say about that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@KRAW@[email protected], It's a deep dive, pretty rewarding. The basic food science, history, and a lot of things to try. Really nice alongside the NOMA Guide, actually.

I've grown many batches of koji (it gets easier as you learn more about how it behaves), but my one foray into store-bought stuff wasn't too bad — it seemed a bit dry, but that's easily enough remedied.