Following up on my last post (books I’m currently reading and cooking from), I’m posting about my stack of ‘to-do’ Cookbooks. These are books I’ve been intrigued by, but have yet to delve into.

All the books noted below have been provided as review copies by publishers (when I’m approached, I ask publishers only to send books I’m actually interested in – it would do nobody any good for me to attempt to review a Rachel Ray title, for example, as it’s just not my thing. I may also experiment with reviewers other than me in the near future.).

Sausage, Victoria Wise

I’ve been very much interested in sausage the past few years, since my eyes were opened to the potential of the food by two things: first, here in Nanaimo there’s a great sausage store, aptly named ‘The Nanaimo Sausage House’. They hand-make a wide variety of sausages (the store smells amazing) and I’ve been regularly buying their Breakfast and French Breakfast sausage for years. Secondly, when I bought a quarter pig this winter, a substantial part of it came in the form of sausages. I was surprised when I cooked the first batch, as they were not like the sausages I was familar with – instead of a fairly smooth, homogeneous interior, they were very rustic – roughly ground meat, flecked with a good percentage of fat and only a tiny amount of seasoning. They tasted intensely porky, and have been incredibly useful – not only have I cooked them for breakfast, but I’ve used them as a handy source of ground pork. They are excellent uncased and cooked in Spaghetti Bolognese, for example.

The idea of making my own sausages had seemed intimidating before; I had visions of complicated machinery and wrestling with intestines. Sausage aims to demistify and simplify the whole business. Wise promises to have you creating a wide variety of sausages, all without casings and with no grinding or stuffing machinery required. Considering she has vegetarian sausages (wrapped in cabbage leaves), as well as veggie and meat burgers, and meatloaf, her definition of sausage is fairly broad. Purists may be appalled, but I’m intrigued: I can see this book being a good ‘gateway’ to the world of sausage, and perhaps working my way up to the whole grinder and casing business one day. If so, her first book, American Charcuterie, is probably a good one to graduate to (though there are a number of others out there: charcuterie has seen a renaissance the last few years). Continue Reading »

This is the first of an irregular series of articles about cookbooks I’m working through. These are the books that have come off the bookshelf and are either being actively cooked from or are being added to my ‘to-cook’ list for the very near future. I’ll also be writing soon about new books I’m interested in, but which haven’t made it into active rotation yet. If any books have been provided as review copies by publishers, this will be noted in the article.

The Perfect Scoop, David Lebovitz

The original ice cream tour de force, I’m just getting into this as summer approaches (or at least threatens to approach, considering how damp it’s been on the West Coast so far). I made his Philadelphia-style chocolate with a 66% cacao chocolate I’ve been trying out, rather than the unsweetened chocolate he recommends and it was almost too dark for my kids; a very adult flavour. I have a feeling they might have balked at the original version, but as an adult dessert it gets high marks.

He’s comprehensive enough to provide Philadephia-style recipes for the major flavours, which is handy if you’re in a hurry (recipes with a classic custard take longer to cool before putting in your ice-cream maker). He also has a great introductory section which goes into detail about equipment, ingredients and techniques, including lots of custard advice.

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I’ve had a laptop in my kitchen for several years now. At first it was mostly for checking email and doing a little work when I was away from my home office, but pretty soon I started to use it while cooking – I keep family recipes on it and use Epicurious and other recipe websites regularly.

However, most people I know don’t keep computers in the kitchen. And let’s face it, when you’re cooking do you really want to get tomato sauce splattered on the machine that also holds your quarterly expense reports?

With the rise of e-book readers and smartphones, there are lots of options now for technology in the kitchen, and my laptop is rapidly being supplanted by my iPhone and the new iPad. Here’s a roundup of the current state of the art.

E-book or App?

Mario Batali e-book on the iPad

What’s the difference between an e-book and an App? An e-book, at least for now, is an electronic copy of a paper book. Usually the publisher generates an e-book file from the same material used to make the paper book, so what you see on the screen is very similar to what you see on paper. An app, on the other hand, is a software application, just like a computer game or word processor is a software application. Which means it’s not limited to looking, or acting, like a book.

The most well known e-book reader is Amazon’s Kindle, which seeks to replicate the ink-on-paper experience by using a type of electronic ink. Many readers praise the Kindle for this – it’s easy on the eyes and provides a long battery life.

However, for now at least, the Kindle is restricted to only providing an electronic copy of the paper book experience. Yes, there’s some searchability, and a few other bells and whistles (it can read out loud to you). But a book is pretty much just a book with a Kindle. You turn pages, you read the words. It even requires a book-light for nighttime reading.

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My review copy of David Lebovitz’s newest book, Ready for Dessert arrived recently, and I’ve just started baking from it (the Ginger Cake is amazing, by the way). In our recent interview with him he said “The Chocolate Chip Cookies are a standout. I’ve been making them for over two decades and I’ve not found a better one.” Aha, I thought, when the book arrived – an opportunity for a bake-off!

I set out to test his recipe against two recent contenders for the top cookie honors – Thomas Keller’s recipe from Ad Hoc At Home (of which he writes “this is our version of what is arguably the best cookie ever”), and the famous New York Times recipe from 2008, which was developed after an epic search by David Leite, of Leite’s Culinaria, who called these “the consummate chocolate chip cookie.”

This is a completely subjective test, of course, but I did rope in some tasters to help out. And who could pass up a chance to eat a lot of great cookies in the service of (pseudo) science?

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