Food and Cooking

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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)

I love cooking and experimenting with different food combinations to make my own recipes, so I tend to gravitate to books about food nutrition value vs traditional cookbooks, though I do have a lot of those around. The one book I still have as a go to in my kitchen is the one below. Highly recommend it, as well as subscribing to their Wellness Letter since there is a huge amount of information on diet and nutrition under one roof, including cookbook recommendations, along with other evidence based health research articles. Good stuff! 😊

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

We have an early edition of this on the shelf in our kitchen; yes, it's terrific.

[–] [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.

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

We go back to Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi a lot. Also latley The Flavor Equation by Nik Sharma.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, love Ottolenghi — he had a nice piece in NYT recently, referencing Segnit, actually. I need to find a copy of the Sharma, sounds like.

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

I think you will love Sharma's books if you like Ottolenghi.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Cool! Gonna check those out, then. Thanks.