Meal Monday
As a general rule, I approach restaurant cookbooks with a certain amount of trepidation. What is feasible to make in a trendy restaurant kitchen is often not so practical at home, unless you are the neighborhood Iron Chef.
The Zuni Café Cookbook is different, being as useful to the novice as it is to the expert. As the book’s subtitle indicates, it is “A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurant.” Zuni Café chef-owner and author Judy Rogers has created one of the best teaching cookbooks that I have ever encountered.
The book is chock-full of Rogers’s kitchen wisdom, especially on the topic of improvising in the kitchen. You would think that there is not so much to say about seasoning to taste, but Rogers knows otherwise. She spends an entire page talking about how you adjust the flavor of a dish.
For example, she suggests setting aside a portion of the dish and adding seasoning to that separate portion until it seems right. Then, counter-intuitively, she suggests adding more until the reserved portion is over-seasoned. That way, she says, you know what the dish tastes like over and under-seasoned. Presumably this helps you know exactly when to stop when adjusting the flavor
She also urges her readers to go beyond salt and pepper, suggesting other ingredients to add in to amplify flavor. She suggests trying something sweet (honey,sugar), acidic (vinegar, citrus), bland (egg, water), or rich (butter, cheese).
Rogers is big believer that good cooking starts with good ingredients. She spends an entire page discussing the best way to avoid bitter eggplant. The bottom line: the only way to make sure that the eggplant is not bitter is to taste the raw vegetable before cooking with it. Sweet raw is sweet cooked; bitter raw is bitter cooked.
Even though Rogers believes strongly in the value of pre-salting vegetables and meats, she thinks the practice of pre-salting eggplant is pretty much useless in terms of avoiding bitterness. Either you have bought a good eggplant or you have not. You increase your odds of getting a good eggplant by buying early in the growing season directly from the farmer. Later in the season, the eggplants tend to be seedier and are more often bitter.
One of the book’s many strong points is the selection of recipes for preserving fruits and vegetables. If you have an abundance of zucchini, you should really give the pickled zucchini recipe a whirl, it is delicious, beautiful, easy to make, and lasts forever in the fridge. (Luisa says the flavor just keeps intensifying).
Take a look at my kitchen notes on this recipe.
Extra: Check out what recipes from the book other readers love; Get an autographed copy of the book; Check out the legendary recipe for Zuni Café’s Roast Chicken; Also, take a look at Smitten Kitchen’s test run of the roast chicken recipe.
I have heard great things about this cookbook. Rogers and the Zuni are kind of a spin off of Chez Panisse according to Alice Waters'biography (a place I aspire to eat at some day). I will have to check it out next time I'm on the market for a cookbook. I recently got chez panisse vegetables which is really pretty and full of useful info, but I haven't used the recipes much, yet.
Posted by: Emily Rodman | Monday, July 27, 2009 at 08:23 PM