THE NIBBLE Gourmet News & Views
Trends, Products & Items Of Note In The World Of Specialty Foods
Read all of our content on TheNibble.com, the online magazine about specialty food.
Archive for Books
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March 8, 2008 at 6:26 pm
· Filed under Fish/Seafood/Caviar, Books, Recipes, Daily Food Holidays
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The whitest, biggest chunks of crab—known as Jumbo Lump crabmeat—are also the priciest. |
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How can you celebrate National Crabmeat Day and still have change to spare? Here’s the secret: Those pretty puffs of lump white crabmeat on the buffet are up to three times the price of the darker body crabmeat. But the darker meat is actually tastier. If you’re mixing the crab into a salad for sandwiches (think crab rolls, like lobster rolls, or serve it on brioche, as a crabmeat BLT) or to stuff eggs or omelet, save money—and enjoy crab more often—by using dark crabmeat.
Also celebrate National Crabmeat Day by:
- Learning about the different types of crab and crabmeat, and what you should look for when you purchase canned crab.
- Read our review of Miller’s Select, our favorite brand of crabmeat (it’s shelf-stable too, no refrigeration required).
- Make one of these crabmeat recipes.
- Buy this nifty little crab cookbook: Crab: Buying, Cooking, Cracking, by Andrea Froncillo and Jennifer Jeffrey. |
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February 16, 2008 at 8:12 pm
· Filed under Cookies/Cake/Pastry, Books
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Elizabeth Falkner proposes everything from
The Real McCoy Ice Cream Sandwich to Blueberry Paper. |
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We put an ace baker to work, finding the best new baking cookbooks. After baking up a storm, here’s Part I of her recommendations (Part II arrives next month):
- Classic Stars Desserts, by Emily Luchetti, executive pastry chef at Jeremiah Tower’s pioneering San Francisco restaurant, Stars
- Elizabeth Falkner’s Demolition Desserts, recipes from the famed San Francisco sweet spot, Citizen Cake
-The Greyston Bakery Cookbook, by Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan, featuring recipes from a community bakery in The Bronx whose brownies are used by Ben & Jerry’s
- Pure Dessert, by Alice Medrich, one of the Bay Area’s legendary bakers, called “The First Lady of Chocolate”If you’d rather buy a great dessert than bake one, check out the Cookies and Desserts & Ice Cream sections of THE NIBBLE online magazine. |
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December 31, 2007 at 1:57 pm
· Filed under Cocktails & Spirits, Books, Tip Of The Day
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| Today is National Champagne Day. Most people bring a bottle of Champagne as a gift to New Year’s Eve parties. Add a book about Champagne, and your gift will be remembered long after the bubbles are gone. This is one of our favorites. (Find more of our favorite books in the Books Section of THE NIBBLE online magazine.) Happy New Year from all of us at THE NIBBLE! |
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No one expects to get through all 4,000, but there’s lots of educational information about Champagne itself. |
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December 9, 2007 at 1:44 pm
· Filed under Salts/Seasonings, Gourmet News, Books
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| The weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal devoted a lot of space to an article called “A New Taste Sensation,” umami. This was news two years ago when Anna Kasabian and David Kasabian wrote their seminal book on the topic, The Fifth Taste: Cooking with Umami. It was the talk of gastronomy circles, and THE NIBBLE wrote a long article on umami. But, like sous vide and Gewürtztraminer, it didn’t trickle down to most fine food enthusiasts—it’s just a bit too east of mainstream. We have often thought about teaching a course on umami, because the fifth taste is not as easy to understand as the other four: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. Want to taste sweet? Sugar is unmistakable, and you can find that same taste in baked goods, fruit and other sweet substances. The same with salt, the sourness of lemon juice or vinegar, and the bitterness of arugula. But there is no one umami flavor (the word itself means “deliciousness”), even though it is described as “brothy.” Umami foods are characterized as having a high level of glutamate, an amino acid; MSG, a manufactured form of it, adds flavor to food, just as sugar adds sweetness, salt adds saltiness and vinegar adds tartness—all heighten the flavors of the foods they enahnance. |
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Parmesan cheese: salty or umami? |
| Yet, back to the argument: We can identify sweet, salty, bitter and sour. What does umami taste like? You can name foods and dishes that contain umami flavor, but cannot point to any single, easily-recognizable flavor attribute. Here are some of the cornerstone products that showcase umami: MSG, Parmesan cheese, anchovies, soy sauce, dried mushrooms, ketchup and konbu, a large seaweed used to make dashi. What do they have in common? If you asked, what do ice cream, chocolate, orange juice, cherries and marzipan have in common, one might say “sweetness” or “sugar.” What about ketchup and Parmesan, seaweed and anchovies? One might describe the first four umami ingredients as salty, and try as we can, we still can’t get brothy out of a tomato or konbu, until they are made into broth. And this is why umami, the fifth taste, has not “broken out” in the West. You can train people how to combine ingredients for heightened umami flavors, you can hand out umami-enriched recipes, you can print lists of umami-rich foods for people to memorize, but you can’t train them to identify them “umami taste” as you can sweet taste, salty taste, etc. If someone had you taste watercress, it wouldn’t be too hard to classify it as bitter. If given bacon, ham, salt pork or sausage, you’d put them in the salt category. But, umami claims them as well. We would find a tomato sweet; umami calls it umami. See? None of this is addressed by The Wall Street Journal article or any other article we’ve read. We lack the scientific expertise to say that umami isn’t the fifth taste, experts say that it is. We just think that it double dips. It seems to us that every food that umami claims as its own can fall within one of the four existing classes, whereas sweet, salty, sour and better are completely discrete. All comments are welcome. |
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December 2, 2007 at 11:10 am
· Filed under Books, Gifts
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Chef or emperor? Mario Batali is one of 50 memorable portraits by Melanie Dunea in her book, My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs And Their Final Meals.
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So many books…so little time. When we looked at all of the food books published this year to put together our holiday gift lists, we found wonderful ideas for everyone—and while the books stand on their own, we paired most of them with actual food products for an even bigger gift. A few were published in prior years, but they’re not so well-known; we find them so valuable that we’d be grateful to get them as a gift. To develop expertise in specific areas of food, we have books on chocolate, crab, oysters and truffles (the fungus). For food history, Alice Waters & Chez Panisse, Moveable Feasts, a book on the history of food from farm to table that is a real page-turner, and the snarky The Food Snob’s Dictionary, a good stocking stuffer. There are many more, including cookbooks. But one that every foodie must own is My Last Supper by Melanie Dunea, intimate portraits of 50 top chefs who describe their last meals. Dunea’s photography is stunning—each portrait is as special as Mario Batali’s, at left. Read the full review. See many more gift ideas in the Gift Finder of THE NIBBLE online magazine. |
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November 6, 2007 at 8:17 pm
· Filed under Gourmet News, Books
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| If your idea of stardom is a celebrity chef, you must read My Last Supper, 50 Great Chefs and their Final Meals. The stunning volume is a perfect coffee table book. The portraits of each chef are divine—from a near-naked Gabrielle Hamilton (Prune, New York City) suckling her infant (and wishing for caviar, cold radishes, soft-scrambled eggs, buttered yeasty toast and ripe cherries), to Dan Barber (Blue Hill, New York City), ethereally slender behind Boris, a huge heritage hog he has raised, who will also be his last meal (“If I’m going, so is Boris”), to Mario Batali, looking like a Roman emperor in a headdress of turnips (his menu is vast). Boston’s Lydia Shire is holding a lobster the size of a two-year-old child, with claws larger than her head (she’ll have a super-prime sirloin steak and two great Burgundies, thank you). You’ll also see El Bulli’s Ferran Adria with his two bulldogs, Anthony Bourdain naked (holding a large, strategically-placed thigh bone), and Laurent Tourondel furtively contemplating a conveyer belt of Krispy Kremes. |
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Buy several for gifts. You can order the book for $26.37 on Amazon.com. |
The chefs also tell you who they’d share the meal with, what wines would be served, the setting, and what music would be playing…and they share recipes, as well. This book is true delight for any lover of great restaurants and the chefs who make them possible.
PINUP CHEFS
For a slam dunk, cruise on over to The Gourmet Institute to order a copy of The first-ever Chefs of The Gourmet Institute calendar. Melanie Dunea, photographer of My Last Supper (above), took these gorgeous photos, too. They don’t call it a pinup calendar of top New York chefs, but we will. Dan Barber, Anthony Bourdain, Cesare Casella, Scott Conant, Kurt Gutenbrunner, Masaharu Morimoto, Charlie Palmer, Dave Pasternack, Eric Ripert, Marcus Samuelsson, Laurent Tourondel and Jonathan Waxman are the pinup guys. Calendars are $19.95 each, $1.00 of which goes to Citymeals-On-Wheels. The photo of Marcus Samuelsson (at right), looking like a culinary Cole Porter, is alone worth the price; but each photo is suitable for framing. By the way, Gourmet Institue: why are there no women in this calendar? Were Lydia Bastianich, April Bloomfield, Alex Guarnaschelli, Gabrielle Hamilton, Sara Jenkins, Anita Lo, Jody Willliams and Patricia Yeo all busy the day of the photo shoot? Or is Moet & Chandon, the calendar sponsor, more comfortable with an all-male roster of “favorite chefs?” |
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October 24, 2007 at 5:16 pm
· Filed under Gourmet News, Books
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Many women will be at least a little jealous of Kathleen Flinn. At age 36, she leaves her high-powered corporate job to pursue her lifelong dream of attending Le Cordon Bleu Culinary School in Paris. She falls in love not only with the City of Light, but with a man she eventually marries. And, she gets a book deal to write about it all. It has all the makings of a Lifetime movie.
The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry is not just a story about all the feel-good moments in Flinn’s life. She also records the many trials and tribulations of attending culinary school—the backstabbing, the stress, the intimidating chefs and the grueling classes. But, her feelings of self-doubt are quelled by her motivation to receive her Superior Cuisine diploma—despite the fact that she never intends to be a professional chef but just an excellent home cook. Flinn shares many recipes as well as hilarious stories of her many house-guests, including one particularly repugnant self-dubbed “wine snob.”
We finished this book in just a matter of days and really wished there were a second volume. Is Flinn still cooking regularly? Where does she work now? Is her husband still a knight in shining armor? The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry reads like good, romantic fiction, except that it all actually happened.
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October 22, 2007 at 6:48 pm
· Filed under Gourmet News, Books
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Take this book to your next dinner party. |
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After devouring The United States of Arugula last year, we couldn’t wait to read The Food Snob’s Dictionary, David Kamp’s newest book that both pokes fun at and educates Food Snobs and non-Food Snobs alike. Kamp defines the Food Snob as a “reference term for the sort of food obsessive for whom the actual joy of eating and cooking is but a side dish to the accumulation of arcane knowledge about these subjects.” Throughout the book, Kamp’s snarky tone allows those already in-the-know to test their food knowledge (and perhaps make fun of themselves a bit), while also educating “everyone else” (or, perhaps, Food Snob wannabes) about unfamiliar culinary terms. No longer will you have to struggle with the difference between Romanesco and romesco, for example. Also fun are the “extras” Kamp includes, such as his list of “Six Things that Food Snobs Like, Even Though They’re Not Supposed To.” |
| We beg to differ with some of Kamp’s choices, though. You will never catch us eating Cheez Whiz; but then again, we don’t consider ourselves Food Snobs. Rather, we are Food Enthusiasts. P.S. Romanesco is not a sauce, but an Italian dialect spoken in Rome. (Originally it was spoken only inside the walls of the city, while the little towns outside the walls had their own dialects. Talk about territorial!) Romesco is a famous sauce originating in the Catalonia region of Spain, most often served with seafood. It is typically made from almonds and/or hazelnuts, plus roasted garlic, olive oil and small, dried red peppers called nyores. Other ingredients can include roasted tomatoes, red wine vinegar, onion, fennel and mint. The sauce, also called romescu, can be served with a poultry, vegetables and other foods as well. Feeling like a Food Snob yet? |
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October 18, 2007 at 11:37 am
· Filed under Chocolate, Gourmet News, Special Sweets, Books
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| What do master chocolatiers cook and bake for themselves? You can find out in Lindt Chocolate Passion, a new book that chronicles the history of premium chocolate and Lindt’s evolution as a world chocolate power (it is the world’s largest producer of mass-market premium chocolate, defined as chocolate priced from $15 to $25 per pound). In the midst of it, you’ll get what the Swiss chocolate manufacturer describes as “a robust collection of gourmet dessert recipes.” The recipes were contributed by Lindt’s master chocolatiers from around the world, who share the recipes and techniques they use when cooking and entertaining for their own family and friends. Recipes categories include Truffles; Bark Fruit and Fondue; Mousse, Creme and Parfaits; Cookies and Brownies; Cakes; Tarts, Cheesecakes, and Small Desserts; and Chocolate Drinks infused with chocolate. |
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First, you melt the chocolate. Photo by Diego Basseggio | SXC. |
| The book is available in Lindt retail stores nationwide and online at LindtUSA.com, for $35.00. Read our review of Lindt Excellence chocolate bars, the finest chocolate in the line. |
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