Cookbook review - Ottolenghi, Plenty

Recently, Amazon sent me an e-mail inviting me to trade in my copy of Plenty. I instinctively wanted to go and clutch it. It is MINE all MINE and they can't take it away from me.

Anyway. This reminded me that I have been meaning to review it for a while though, perhaps, I hardly need to as the fact that I named this blog after one of his chapter titles probably tells you that I like it very much.

It's one of my favourite cookbooks. I particularly love the paella recipe, the ratatouille, and the stuffed onions. When he writes in The Guardian, commenters often make fun of his very lengthy lists of ingredients and it's true that virtually every recipe has more than 15 ingredients in it and is quite fiddly. But that's how you produce complex intricate flavours. It just isn't possible to do that quickly and with two ingredients, people!

I also make fun of his instructions sometimes – I find it particularly entertaining when he tells you things like “fry this for 6 minutes then add this and fry it for a further minute” but, if I'm honest, the recipes kind of do come out better when I follow those instructions than when I wing it. (Except for the stuffed onions which I've made often enough that I don't even bother looking at the recipe.)

What I really like about Ottolenghi's cookbooks is the precision, in fact, though I do mock it sometimes. You can really tell that he runs his own restaurants: the instructions are incredibly detailed and clear. There's none of this “oh, between 325 and 450ml of buttermilk”type stuff, Ottolenghi will tell you exact quantities and timings and will detail all of the spicing, so that you aren't left with “oh, season to taste” or similar rubbish.

The cookbooks are, I think, for the experienced cook but, if you are an experienced cook, especially if you are vegetarian or like to cook complicated vegetarian food, they are absolutely fantastic. If you want a cookbook that will produce nice food but with simpler recipes and shorter ingredient lists, I'd suggest High Fearnley-Whittingstall'sVeg instead.

I will review the Ottolenghi restaurants in a separate post.

Cookbook review - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, River Cottage Veg Every Day

I really like this cookbook.  It's not my natural style - Ottolenghi is more my wavelength, multicultural, complicated, lots of flavours - it's simpler but what I love about it is that the recipes are straightforward but still original.  I love the sweet potato and peanut butter gratin, the leek and chestnut risotto, macaroni and peas.  A couple of the recipes, most notably the chachouka recipe (but also another - I think the risotto) had slightly strange quantities - it said that it would serve four but, even with bread on the side, barely sufficed for two.

In general, I sort of feel that the directions and quantities and so on aren't totally precise, it isn't sensible to follow the recipes completely blindly.  I don't mind, though, I'm more than happy with any cookbook that gives me one or more recipes that make it into my everyday repertoire and this has given me three - and there are still a few recipes in there that I'd like to try.

I'd recommend this one - it strikes me that it would be a particularly good one for omnivores who are experienced cooks but who  want to acquire a couple of good dishes for vegetarian dinner guests as it isn't too scary.

Cookbook review - Marcella Hazan, The Classic Italian Cookbook and More Classic Italian Cooking

Marcella Hazan's books do what they say on the cover - they teach you how to make classic Italian recipes the traditional way.  Marcella is not an innovator.  Experimentation is not encouraged.  Sample comment, "Fresh basil is a must.  Some people may be tempted to supplant it with parsley, but is in no way an acceptable substitute."  Well, that's me told.

However, if you're not from an Italian background, her books are extremely helpful in grounding you in traditional Italian techniques which you can then use as a basis to experiment with.  For instance, it wasn't until reading her long rant about the quality of tomatoes these days that I tried making pasta sauce with good quality Italian tinned tomatoes rather than with fresh tomatoes and found that she's quite right, if you can't get good quality fresh Italian plum tomatoes, you are better off with good quality tinned Italian tomatoes.  My pasta sauces have never been the same again.  Of course, she'd still disapprove of me because I can't seem to find San Marzano tomatoes as she recommends but have to make do with Neapolitan.  Her sauces - particularly the gorgonzola one and the tomato one with lots of butter and an onion which you take out and discard - are extremely good and, often, employ techniques that I would just never have come up with on my own.

In general, her recipes make me realise that I need to let the main ingredients shine when cooking Italian food and fight my instincts to overcomplicate by adding more and more spices/herbs/etc. Both books are dominated by recipes with meat but there's still plenty of good stuff that doesn't have meat and, to be honest, they're worth buying just for the sauce recipes.

Overall, very much recommended.   But there's no way she'll ever persuade me away from my beloved garlic press.  Sometimes, I even substitute parsley for basil. 

cookbook review: Rachel Allen's Bake

I love taking cookbooks out of the library because it gives me a chance to test them out before committing to buying them. I'm glad I took this one out before buying it because it didn't really work for me.   I took it out to try the peanut butter and white chocolate blondie recipe as my lovely husband loves baked goods, peanut butter and white chocolate, so it sounded like a winner all round. 

Peanut butter and white chocolate blondie

They were nice but they weren't nearly squidgy enough to be called "blondies" which I think of as the white chocolate equivalent of brownies - they were more like cake - and the cooking instructions were rather unclear.   They didn't need anything like as much time as the recipe suggested but we were a bit indecisive about when to take them out because the instructions were so vague, "almost firm in the centre" isn't - in my view - desperately helpful.

I also tried the soda bread recipe.  One of our friends invited us over for dinner a while back and made soda bread and I was filled with envy watching her do it by eye (also she added garlic to it which was yummy) that I've been meaning to try soda bread ever since.  It's fun to make and pretty quick and easy.  I think I'll be making it again. 

Soda bread with coriander

But probably using live yogurt instead of buttermilk, as suggested by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall as I usually have that on hand, and maybe rye flour as I have some to use up.  Am also quite tempted to make it in scone form with black pepper and cheddar cheese.  Mmm.  Anyway, I wasn't wildly impressed with Rachel Allen's recipe.

Despite saying in the blurb, that this is made every day in her kitchen, the recipe tells you that you need somewhere between 350 and 425 ml of buttermilk.  

Soda bread with coriander

This is quite unhelpful for a few reasons.  Firstly, if you don't have actual buttermilk but are doing the lemon juice in normal milk thing, do you make 350ml and then make extra if you need it?  Or do you make 425ml and potentially waste some of it (I hate wasting food)?  Also, if you make this everyday, surely you can be a bit more precise here!



As someone who'd never made soda bread before, I wasn't entirely sure what the dough should look like so I wound up (I think) making the dough too liquidy due to the lack of direction on the amount of buttermilk necessary.

The bread itself actually turned out ok, though, I think it could have been better with less buttermilk.  I put coriander in it (she suggests that you can put in rosemary, sage, thyme, chives, parsley or lemon balm but coriander was what I had on hand) and it was really nice and fragrant. 

I'm not a terribly confident baker, though, so perhaps that's why the book wasn't a good fit for me.