Think of what you are interested in making, then Google "Alton Brown" and "<name of food item>"

That's the way I do it, yeah.

If you are looking for a good starter cookbook, I highly recommend Ming Tsai's East Meets West. He starts with a sauce or base and then teaches you 3 or 4 meals you can make with it. You always have some lefotver and start to think of your own recipes. It was a great intro book for me to get really into cooking.

I'm surprised this cookbook didn't get mentioned already.

For Sichuanese and Hunanese cuisines, Fuschia Dunlop has a couple of outstanding cookbooks.

Thanks for the book recommendations on the last page (and into this one -- should have read on), guys. I will check out the ones listed.

My recommendation would be to go to a bookstore and pick one that you think looks interesting - but make sure you pick one that has a picture of each dish. Don't get one with sporadic pictures.

I seem to recall trying this once, but was disappointed with the few that I picked up. I can most likely chalk up my not finding anything to a small sample size and my general lack of patience. I will have to try this again.

I really like Deborah Madison's "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone," though it works well with my routine, which is backwards from yours: hit the farmer's market, see what they have, bring it home & use the Madison to figure out how to cook it. For each vegetable, Madison lists good accompanying oils, spices, etc., so it becomes easy to improvise recipes along with the formal recipes in the book. She also goes into how to select and store the different kinds of produce.


I would love to get to the point where I can do this, but I currently don't feel confident enough in my abilities to go to the store and base my meal off of what looks good at the store.

Think of what you are interested in making, then Google "Alton Brown" and "<name of food item>"

Heh -- this is actually where I'm at right now. I've made his oven-roasted broccoli (with panko and garlic) and have a pork tenderloin ready to attempt his pork wellington recipe.

Think of what you are interested in making, then Google "Alton Brown" and "<name of food item>"

Heh -- this is actually where I'm at right now.

I had a friend attempt his prime rib (with the terra cotta planter) it was a ####### hilarious, watching him fumble around with that thing, burning his hand and such. It was pretty tasty, no doubt, but didn't look like it was worth all the BS.

My recommendation would be to go to a bookstore and pick one that you think looks interesting - but make sure you pick one that has a picture of each dish. Don't get one with sporadic pictures.

I seem to recall trying this once, but was disappointed with the few that I picked up. I can most likely chalk up my not finding anything to a small sample size and my general lack of patience. I will have to try this again.

I was about to give opposite advice. The cookbook spectrum spans the divide between coffee table books and encyclopedias. Typically, the more pictures a cookbook has, the less information it does.* My preference, thus, is for the big books with tons of information, and less flash.

The best first book for any beginning cook to buy is probably How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

From there I would probably try and find the best cookbooks within certain cuisines. Thai Food by David Thompson, The Essential Cuisines of Mexico by Diane Kennedy, The Cooking of Southwest France by Paula Wolfert, Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan, The German Cookbook by Mimi Sheraton. Big books with zillions of recipes.

Maybe this is too intense, but, for me it's the best way. I find that when one selects slimmer well-photographed books, the recipes are usually presented without context, and thus you are only learning how to make one specific dish, but not how that dish fits within a tradition, how it might be altered, how you might adjust next time to improve your results.

My other pet peeve with cookbooks is when recipes do not EXPLAIN how to cook. When I was 18 I tried to make a beef bourgignon that was absolutely disastrous - today I would have known that the meat was underseasoned, it needed to cook for another 30 minutes, and the sauce needed to reduce, but the recipe didn't explain the technique so I didn't understand how to adjust. Even recipes followed to the letter can have horrible consequences - good cookbooks teach you how to apply your own adjustments. A great example of this is the Bouchon cookbook, which describes the technique of making a perfect quiche for two pages before you actually get to the recipe.

*The significant exception to this is when the cookbook specifically aims to teach through photos, like Pepin's Technique or The Breadmaker's Apprentice, and this is the best of both worlds. Bugiali's Classic Techniques of Italian Cooking. The Richard Olney edited Time-Life series, if you run into them.

That's informative and extremely helpful, PF. I realized while typing that my generic "can anyone recommend a decent cookbook?" question was awkward and thus going to be difficult to answer without more details, but the answers you guys have provided have at least given me some particular books to explore.

I have only made it half way thru this thread so I apologize if this has already been posted. It is an interesting rant against 'foodies' in The Atlantic. Living in Portland, Or I think it describes a certain portion of the people I meet when I dine here.
http://tinyurl.com/4q26bzl

My other pet peeve with cookbooks is when recipes do not EXPLAIN how to cook. When I was 18 I tried to make a beef bourgignon that was absolutely disastrous - today I would have known that the meat was underseasoned, it needed to cook for another 30 minutes, and the sauce needed to reduce, but the recipe didn't explain the technique so I didn't understand how to adjust. Even recipes followed to the letter can have horrible consequences - good cookbooks teach you how to apply your own adjustments. A great example of this is the Bouchon cookbook, which describes the technique of making a perfect quiche for two pages before you actually get to the recipe.

This is a really good point. I had the same basic experience of trying to follow recipes from cookbooks that didn't first teach me what I needed to know to understand whether the recipe was working or not. The cookbooks that taught me how to cook with some small level of proficiency, by teaching me concepts as well as recipes, were:

Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything
Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Judy Rodgers, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook (really wonderful)
Anthony Bourdain, Les Halles Cookbook

I also found that I learned a ton from reading Michael Ruhlmann's The Making of a Chef, which is an engrossing read to boot. Pepin's Technique is also terribly useful.

(Thanks for the list of cookbooks within various cuisines, PF.)

The old Craig Clairborne New York Times cookbooks are also quite good, and you can find them for nothing, since they were ubiquitous back in their day.

and another old school writer: Maida Heatter's cookbooks still stand up for baking/desserts.

Ken Hom and Lucille Liang have good basic cookbooks that teach Chinese techniques. (Hom's Chinese Technique has lots of pictures.) For Indian (and other Asian cuisines), Madhur Jaffrey also has some good teaching books. These are basic, serviceable, everyday recipe books; you will find a lot of staple dishes in them.

The restaurant discussion above makes me realize how little I go to restaurants, even in Ft Worth, let alone Dallas. But if anyone's in Arlington on a ballpark odyssey and wants to know about very local ethnic storefront places, send me an e-mail :)

GregQ - Weird article. If Myers had simply set his sights on the moral ills of eating meat, he'd have a good case. There's a following case to be made that the privileging of small producers is a class-based response to the evils of factory farming, an out available to only the rich. But Myers wants to do more than just write a manifesto for veganism, or he wants to dress his manifesto for veganism up in "counterintuitive" garb to get it published in the Atlantic, so he makes regular, unargued appeals to "common sense" and hurls bits of Aquinas around willy-nilly as if gluttony were the only sin that medieval theologians abhorred.

If he'd just gone and written a manifesto for veganism arguing that food nerds don't get to use their class privilege as way out, that would have been coherent and defensible. That wouldn't have gotten published in the Atlantic, though. So instead we got a lot of pointless spite and showy but fake erudition surrounding the core of a reasonable argument.

#513- I read it as his being very mad and writing a mostly incoherent and unfocused article as well. (A lot like most of my letters to the editor to my local newspaper)It is, as I read it, not so much in support of veganism, but a put down to the high end of the Foodie food chain and their affectations. I think he hit on a few points that are pet peeves of mine which is why I kind of like it. There was a strong response here-http://tinyurl.com/4uwywun

I am not reading this whole thread but my go to cookbooks are The Gourmet Cookbook (the big yellow one) and The Silver Spoon.

Sure read like this Myers guy was wrapping up veganism in a papery thin anti-snobbery rant.

Although I do always get a kick out of people claiming free-range meat to be vastly superior. I'd love to give all these people a series of blind taste tests with the method of preparation controlled. I be theres probablly <5% of the population that would be significantly different from 50% in picking the free-range meat out of a lineup.

I've never noticed any taste difference between free range chicken and beef and the supermarket stuff, but commercial factory farmed pork seems to be flavorless. Where's the fat?

I also found that I learned a ton from reading Michael Ruhlmann's The Making of a Chef,

I absolutely hated that book. I actually went to school with some of the students mentioned in that book so I was there at the time he was putting this book together. I couldn't even finish the whole book which is something I have never done before or since. My girlfriend at the time tried to read it as well and she couldn't finish it either. Simply a dreadful book in my opinion. The whole thing is just a fantasy.

I find myself going back over and over to Mario Batali, Tom Douglas, Rick Bayless. I also like the previously mentioned Fuchsia Dunlop book.

I've met and cooked for/with Tom Douglas and Rick Bayless. Rick's stuff is outstanding while I found Tom's stuff to be cromulent though he has an excellent out-of-this-world pork brine recipe in the book you linked to. I've been using that recipe for over 10 years now and for virtually all white proteins.

I've met and cooked for/with Tom Douglas and Rick Bayless. Rick's stuff is outstanding while I found Tom's stuff to be cromulent though he has an excellent out-of-this-world pork brine recipe in the book you linked to. I've been using that recipe for over 10 years now and for virtually all white proteins.

Oh, that's awesome! I find Douglas' recipes match really well with my own penchant of matching random things I buy on trips to Thailand and Cambodia with coastal seafood flavors. I was given the book by someone who had it lying around, never been to one of his restaurants.

I've made the pork brine also, it's lovely.

I've been thinking about buying a book called The Flavor Bible to help get a better grasp of how different flavors react with each other and what each spice brings to the table, Preserved/McCoy or any of the other chefs, what do you think of it (if you have seen it that is)

Rick's stuff is outstanding while I found Tom's stuff to be cromulent though he has an excellent out-of-this-world pork brine recipe in the book you linked to.

Mind listing that pork brine recipe if you can remember it?

I'd love a good pork brine recipe.

Vegan is anti-snobbery now?

I've got it written down somewhere but I'm not at home but it was basically water, salt, sugar, maple syrup (the key to this brine), molasses, star anise, cinnamon sticks, black pepper, and maybe a one or two other spices in minute amounts.

My favorite thing to do with this brine was to brine thick cut pork chops (think 2 inches or larger),then grill the pork chops off, make a maple syrup pork jus, and then finish off the pork chops by sticking them in a saute pan full of the pork jus and placing them in an oven. The char from the grilling process would add a smokey flavor to the pork jus that was quite nice. Serve it with some sort of sweet potato thingy, either a hash, custard, or mash type side dish and some kind of green, preferably bitter.

So far googling has turned up that it is on page 129 but I can't get more yet and google books omits those pages.

edit:
Google Books reveals at least part of the recipe:
5 cups cold water
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup kosher salt
2 cups Maple Syrup
2 T Molasses
2 bay leaves
1 tsp ginger

and then it trails off. I'm pretty sure the recipe also included star anise, it might not contain cinnamon. That might be one of the little changes I made to the recipe.

I do a lot of marinating, but until recently I only brined Turkey/Chicken(thinking that poultry is the only thing you brine). America's test kitchen did a brine on pork and since then I have expanded my brining and reduced my marinating. I use a simple brine for now(still expanding my repertoire) that is basically water kosher salt, maple syrup, and brown sugar. It's great to read that you can play with brine in much the same way you do with marinade. (can't use the star anise, my girlfriend hates it--made chicken a l'orange with it and she refused to even taste it, came out surprisingly good for a first effort--it was a bobby flay recipe, I think- but would have been better without the anise, too dominant of a flavor)

I've been thinking about buying a book called The Flavor Bible to help get a better grasp of how different flavors react with each other and what each spice brings to the table, Preserved/McCoy or any of the other chefs, what do you think of it (if you have seen it that is)

Haven't seen it but it sounds like a cool concept. I can't really get a good grasp on how effectively it does what it sets out to do based on the limited Amazon displayed pages. From what I saw I would say it is a mildly useful book.

thanks, the reviews on Amazon for it are top notch, and I've picked it up a few times in Borders and it reads in a way that works for me, I have a book called Cooking Ingredients and it's just a primer on the basics,(you have to remember I have no formal training, it probably takes me 10 minutes to dice an onion) on the different cooking ingredients and their flavors, it introduces a lot of fruits/vegetables I didn't even know existed, and now I'm looking for something a step above that.

Live again, awesome food thread, liiiivvvvvee!

Another Rasika opening in DC. Anybody in the area who hasn't tried it really should go.

Speaking of openings does anyone have any information on when Society Fair will be opening in Alexandria?