For those of you with a cooking/food writing/food science collection, what’s indispensable? What do you currently find yourself returning to again and again?
For me, Nikki Segnit’s “Flavor Thesaurus: A Compendium’ and Flavor Thesaurus: More Flavors are both in there, along with The Noma Guide to Fermentation, Koji Alchemy, and *Burma: Rivers of Flavor.” Oh, and Sercarz’s *Spice Companion."
For food writing, I’m always happy to dip into some M.F.K. Fisher.
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We go back to Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi a lot. Also latley The Flavor Equation by Nik Sharma.
Yeah, love Ottolenghi — he had a nice piece in NYT recently, referencing Segnit, actually. I need to find a copy of the Sharma, sounds like.
I think you will love Sharma’s books if you like Ottolenghi.
Cool! Gonna check those out, then. Thanks.
I love cooking and experimenting with different food combinations to make my own recipes, so I tend to gravitate to books about food nutrition value vs traditional cookbooks, though I do have a lot of those around. The one book I still have as a go to in my kitchen is the one below. Highly recommend it, as well as subscribing to their Wellness Letter since there is a huge amount of information on diet and nutrition under one roof, including cookbook recommendations, along with other evidence based health research articles. Good stuff! 😊
We have an early edition of this on the shelf in our kitchen; yes, it’s terrific.
Can you tell me more about Koji Alchemy? I do a lot of Japanese cooking, and I enjoy fermentation, pickling, sourdough, etc. This book sounds like it’s be up my alley.
I also heard that store bought koji is generally subpar in quality. What does this book have to say about that?
@KRAW@KRAW@linux.community, It’s a deep dive, pretty rewarding. The basic food science, history, and a lot of things to try. Really nice alongside the NOMA Guide, actually.
I’ve grown many batches of koji (it gets easier as you learn more about how it behaves), but my one foray into store-bought stuff wasn’t too bad — it seemed a bit dry, but that’s easily enough remedied.
