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Cookbooks are letting me down
I love cookbooks. And I’m so excited about this cookbook.
Sure, a lot of the recipes are meat-based, but a lot are not. And it is loaded, just loaded, with fast and easy weekday meals. So how perfect is that?
But then I made one of the recipes.
Thirty Minute Pasta: 100 Quick and Easy Recipes
Written by Giuliano Hazan, son of the famous Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan, I expected great things from this book. So, with the gorgeous broccoli I got at the farmer’s market just asking to be cooked, I decided to make his Orechiette with Broccoli.
And what an easy recipe this was! First, I was instructed to boil my broccoli for 5 — 6 minutes. Second, I was told to saute some anchovies (skip the anchovies if you are more strictly than almost vegetarian, please) with a minced garlic clove and some red pepper flakes. To this, I added my cooked broccoli and cooked it for another 8 minutes. Third, I made pasta. And, fourth, when everything was done, I was instructed to drop a little pasta water in with the broccoli to make a sauce, then mix everything together and serve.
Nom nom, right? Yeah, no.
Where, oh where, did I go wrong? Let me count the ways …
- Boiling my beautiful broccoli sucked all the taste (to say nothing of the nutrients) right out of it, turning it into a nasty, mushy mess.
- Adding the broccoli at the same time as the garlic did not give the garlic time to roast. No roast = no wonderfully deep and sweet flavor.
- Speaking of flavor, where was it? Don’t tell me it came from that sorry single clove of garlic. And those red pepper flakes and anchovies? Yeah, not worth the effort. This was just, yawn, yawn, boiled broccoli and pasta.
- Water does not = sauce. Water = water = no flavor.
How to improve this recipe, or, Giuliano Hazan should know better
- If you are going to tell people to boil the broccoli, you have to also tell them to blanch it afterward so it will not turn that nasty swamp-green color (the ice water stops the cooking so your green vegetables retain their invitingly bright color)
- Or, better, have people roast their broccoli (toss with oil and pop into a hot oven until caramelized) to bring out its wonderful sweetness
- If you are going to add garlic, then add garlic damn it. The one measly clove you instructed us to add did nothing
- Add some flavor. Any flavor. A squirt of lemon. A drizzle of cream. Some Parmigiano-Reggiano. Something.
So what did we end up eating?
I wanted to ditch the whole mess and make something else, but the husband could not bear to waste what had been truly beautiful broccoli. So he smothered the whole thing in hot sauce and shredded cheddar. I should note, it was late at that point and he was also ravenously hungry. As for me, I took some plain pasta and tossed it with some amazing French olive oil and a dash of Parmigiano-Reggiano.
It left us craving chocolate. That, at least, would have had flavor.
Cookbooks making you cuckoo?
I always thought if I screwed up a recipe, it was me. But now that I have a bit of culinary training under my belt, not only can I see where recipes go wrong, but I can see where they could have gone right. Meaning the problem, at least not today, was not me.
Which really pisses me off.
So what about you? Are cookbooks letting you down? What do you do about this?
Comments
11 Responses to “Cookbooks are letting me down”
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November 11th, 2009 @ 8:21 am
I’ll tell you what cookbook HASN’T let me down…America’s Test Kitchen big encyclopedic cookbook. Really, anything by America’s Test Kitchen has turned out really well for me. I have a cookbook on my shelf that I am dying to try out, but it hasn’t happened yet. It is so pretty and seems so yummy. Takahashi’s Noodles. I hope it is as easy to follow as it is to read.
November 11th, 2009 @ 9:05 am
I don’t understand this. I mean, I understand your point, and it’s happened to me many times, too(and many other people). What I don’t get, is how cookbook authors can publish recipes like this.
Don’t they have testers? If not, shouldn’t they? And if they do, are these people afraid to say “Hey, this has no flavor?” Recipes should be tested and retested before being published in a book. I don’t care who your mother is, or what your Food Network show is called.
November 11th, 2009 @ 9:46 am
Been there. Nothing worse then “trusting” that a cookbook author knows better only to ruin your meal.
I have actually made Marcella’s Orrechiette with Broccoli and it is delicious, all the parts are the same but it actually does come together.
November 11th, 2009 @ 5:14 pm
Well, I have two minds of this…
Fist mind says: all right! You’ve got people who are preased for time eating broccoli! How many of them would have opted for fast food instead? As veggies are foreign to many the flavour would probably be enough as is. My aunt actually LIKES overcooked veggies. I seriously doubt “foodies” will ever be the target audience of a “meals in minutes” book!
Second mind: This chef obviously is only a shadow of his momma if that recipe was the best he can do! In fact I doubt he contributed more than his name to the book, which happens often. I love browsing cookbooks and just from reading that recipe alone I would have said “pass”.
November 11th, 2009 @ 5:25 pm
I think it’s VERY subjective. For example, I love Mark Bittman’s recipes and many of the recipes from Gourmet and Alton Brown or Shirley Corriher are great. That being said, I have had some other awful experiences with cookbooks. I had to review a cookbook from a prominent chef for my externship and the best thing I could say about it was that the photography was gorgeous! And I tried like 5 recipes from that book!
November 11th, 2009 @ 5:53 pm
You know, I’ve been thinking about what everyone has said and it occurs to me that it would be helpful to talk about the cookbook authors we like. I’ve talked before about cookbook authors I like a lot, such as Julia Child and British writer Nigel Slater (I desperately want to get my hands on his book “Appetite”).
And that’s just for starters! But what about you? What cookbook authors do you recommend?
November 11th, 2009 @ 6:17 pm
Since I am just starting to build my kitchen and cooking skills, I decided to put a lot of cookbooks on my wedding registry. When I was trying to decide which ones would be good, I looked at the blogs that I liked and saw what they recommended. If a blogger had a cookbook, I added that too. I have not used every single cookbook, but I have made some tasty food. My current favorites are Isa Chandra Moskowitz (she has a blog and has vegan cookbooks; I think that the blog is called post punk kitchen), Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything vegetarian, and Robertson who has one cookbook that is entirely comprised of one pot vegetarian meals. Additionally, I LOVE Lynn Rosetto Kasper. I subscribe to her weekly email and I also got her cookbook, Sunday Night Supper.
Also, I get a lot of recipes from blogs. The hardest part of cooking for me is the time. I find that it always takes me longer than what the recipe says to prepare a meal. That is tough because if I plan to spend an hour cooking by the time two hours is finished I am starving and a bit cranky!
November 11th, 2009 @ 6:50 pm
We have had the cookbook letdown, too. Unfortunately, I think when people publish cookbooks the pressure is on to have SO many recipes it is hard to have all great ones. I am currently waiting for Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. It should be here tomorrow or the next day, but so far everything I have tried from her, I love.
November 14th, 2009 @ 8:39 pm
I think my biggest problem is finding a cookbook that actually is filled with interesting food that I would actually eat. So often I run across cookbooks that are full of food that my family wouldn’t eat or would be impossible to find the ingredients to do since I live in a small town.
I also agree that a lot of times chefs are turned into authors and made to fill pages and that leads to thrown together recipes with no quality control.
November 14th, 2009 @ 10:32 pm
I completely agree with you. The more mass-marketed the chef – the worse the book is. This is why I love blogs. Someone actually tried the darn recipe and you can see how it turned out.
November 19th, 2009 @ 9:41 am
I have had good luck with Deborah Madison’s “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone”, Madhur Jaffrey’s “World Vegetarian”, and Didi Emmons’ “Vegetarian Planet”, not to mention the Silver Palate and America’s Test Kitchen books. For baking, I trust Rose Levy Beranbaum, Carole Bloom, Alice Medrich, and Dorie Greenspan, among others. Don’t give up!