Recipes for Ingredients From Around the World
4 stars
Fans of AMT and Milk Street will really appreciate this cookbook that strives to kick recipes up a notch by incorporating 65 ingredients from around the world (e.g., oyster sauce, Benton's bacon, marmite, harissa) into familiar dishes. Authors hope to offer readers alternative ways to use these ingredients that might have been picked up for a specific dish then languish in the pantry for lack of other uses.
Recipes are well written and most are easy to follow, a few seemed more complicated than necessary but that seems due more to the passion and general foodiness of the authors than anything else. There could have been more pictures of finished dishes. As is often the case when there aren't pictures for each recipe, the ones I wanted to see the most were often the ones sans photo. This might not have been worth noting except in several cases there were …
Fans of AMT and Milk Street will really appreciate this cookbook that strives to kick recipes up a notch by incorporating 65 ingredients from around the world (e.g., oyster sauce, Benton's bacon, marmite, harissa) into familiar dishes. Authors hope to offer readers alternative ways to use these ingredients that might have been picked up for a specific dish then languish in the pantry for lack of other uses.
Recipes are well written and most are easy to follow, a few seemed more complicated than necessary but that seems due more to the passion and general foodiness of the authors than anything else. There could have been more pictures of finished dishes. As is often the case when there aren't pictures for each recipe, the ones I wanted to see the most were often the ones sans photo. This might not have been worth noting except in several cases there were non-dish pictures accompanying the recipe (like a pic of the packaged ingredient used in the dish) so why not show the finished dish instead?
Most recipes were hits in how the ingredients were used but there are a few misses (like using banyuls vinegar on a tomato salad or panko bread crumbs on top of mac & cheese, of course you would use these products in these ways!). The authors provide a great deal of useful information for each dish but at times I found the layout a bit busy and overwhelming. Despite this, cooks of all levels will likely find inspiration in these recipes.