Malte reviewed Lateral Cooking by Yotam Ottolenghi
Review of 'Lateral Cooking' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
This book close to fundamentally changed my way of cooking and is still one of the books I regularly use. Riding on a wave of cookbooks the last decade oriented more towards process, Segnit follows up on her already mind-blowing Flavor Thesaurus with this cornucopia of dishes. It's like deconstructing 90% of modern home cooking. After working through this book, even just some of it, you will never read and use another cookbook the same way.
Even if I go by another book, I often have this one next by to understand the logic (the book is basically a collection of canonical dishes in their most abstract form and then with all the variations listed as text).
The secret to cookbooks and recipes is that it actually takes skill to cook by the book. Most of the times, you miss one ingredients and need to replace it with something, you …
This book close to fundamentally changed my way of cooking and is still one of the books I regularly use. Riding on a wave of cookbooks the last decade oriented more towards process, Segnit follows up on her already mind-blowing Flavor Thesaurus with this cornucopia of dishes. It's like deconstructing 90% of modern home cooking. After working through this book, even just some of it, you will never read and use another cookbook the same way.
Even if I go by another book, I often have this one next by to understand the logic (the book is basically a collection of canonical dishes in their most abstract form and then with all the variations listed as text).
The secret to cookbooks and recipes is that it actually takes skill to cook by the book. Most of the times, you miss one ingredients and need to replace it with something, you are short on time and need to cut a corner etc. Recipes are blueprints, so there's always a translation going on. This book shows the many ways ingredients can be replaced, how there's always leeway in a dish, and how just the smallest changes can take you into new territory. Especially the last part is where creativity can happen. You will find yourself inventing novel dishes, just by applying the logic from this book, with surprising results.
Did I say that Niki Segnit is probably one of the most hilarious and funny food writers out there? We literally laughed out loud reading random passages from this one together at home.
As the scope of the book is not Eurocentric at all, and is actually very straight forward, I would recommend this as top 3 cookbook for any cook who wants to become better, more educated and inspired in the kitchen.