The Best Cookbooks of 2011. So far...

[AaronM]

MC aside, there hasn't been anything worth even glancing at this year.

Those cute "The Sriracha cookbook!" things make me angry.

Death to False Cooking.

[melissafitz]

My favorite so far is Plenty -- it (and ottolenghi) definitely have my home eating more veg meals than usual.

[Moopheus]

[

I mean like traditional cultural food practices, such as regional Indian cookery, or rural Thai food, authentic Mexican, regional Chinese, etc. I'm not criticising Modern Cuisine

Have you seen India: the Cookbook? (Technically, end of last year, but still pretty recent) I'm wondering if it is worth buying (a tad expensive).

[Jenni]

^^^

Yeah, I have that one (last year? or was it this year...I'm not actually sure). It's excellent.

[dougal]

Have you seen India: the Cookbook? (Technically, end of last year, but still pretty recent) I'm wondering if it is worth buying (a tad expensive).

^^^

Yeah, I have that one (last year? or was it this year...I'm not actually sure). It's excellent.

Jenni - have you any comment on the rather serious criticism on Amazon UK of a distinct lack of recipe-testing/proofreading?

This is a beautifully presented book, as all the Phaidon ones tend to be and the recipes are really enticing. Unfortunately I have tried three recipes so far and each and every one has failed as key ingredients are missing (yeast, I would assume, in the naan breads where it asks you to leave the dough for two hours to rise in a warm place) or it asks you to prepare ingredients for pastes which it then never refers to again (Imperial Chicken) or where it imagines you can make 12 portions of lentil filled puffed bread with only 1 tablespoon of self raising flour (which is going to form a dough to encircle 120g of lentils).

Beautiful but utterly worthless. I will be writing to Phaidon to complain and ask them to send me a corrected edition.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/0714859028/

[mkayahara]

Really? No updates since April? C'mon, people!

[Twyst]

Well, now that the end of the year is here I guess we can list our favorites for the year!

For me its

1. Modernist Cuisine (obviously)

2. Heston at Home

3. EMP

4. Volt Ink

[JBailey]

Kokkari: Contemporary Greek Flavors

Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams

The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adria

The Art of Beef Cutting: A Meat Professional's Guide to Butchering and Merchandising

Les Petits Macarons: Colorful French Confections to Make at Home

Edited November 21, 2011 by JBailey (log)

[OliverB]

seems like it was a slow year, but I like Odd Bits quite a bit, though I have yet to acquire said bits to cook from it. I'm not too overly impressed with The Family Meal, do I really need photos to guide me through a Caprese salad? I love books with lots of photos, but to me it seems there's quite some filler in there to make the book nice and thick. An odd one IMO.

Modernist Cuisine - so far to me - is a great collection of photography, I have yet to cook from it, simply don't have the time for most of it. (and I'm still miffed at all the errors in the first edition, something I still believe should not have happened in a book collection of this caliber - and price)

I mostly got older books it seems, some in German, some about meat and meat cutting, but the year went by with not much that attracted me.

[Honkman]

Overall a very good year (including a few I will buy in the next few weeks and hopefully more time to cook after having our first baby three months ago):

- Modernist Cuisine

- Heston at home

- Eleven Madison Park

- Rustic Italian Food

- Volt INK

- The food of Morocco

- Essential Pepin

- Mourad - New Moroccan

- Odd Bits

- Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams

- Mozza

[mukki]

It looks like all the 2011 cookbooks I'm interested in have been published; here are the ones I'm keeping:

- Foods of Morocco (Wolfert)

- Mourad: New Moroccan

- Mozza

- PDT Cocktail Book

- The Italian Baker, Revised (never bought the original, not sure how much I'll use this one)

- Momofuku Milk Bar

- Make the Bread, Buy the Butter (have been following her blog for a while, kind of a fun book which has convinced me to try making Camembert at home)

- Sweet Confections: Beautiful Candy to Make at Home (hate the title, but I bought it for the pumpkin and chocolate caramel recipes)

- Les Petits Macarons

- Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams

A few that I thought I would like and thus pre-ordered, but ended up being returned:

The Food of Spain (did exactly nothing for me, despite the nice photography)

Off the Menu

Sugar Baby

So, what's up for 2012?

Edited November 23, 2011 by mukki (log)

[Anna N]

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler with an introduction by Alice Waters (Oct 18, 2011).

Lyrical writing and a very different approach to meal preparation and planning. I was captivated by her relaxed approach to getting food on the plate and her philosophy of seeing the future possibilities of that food. I bought the Kindle edition and the downside to that is not being able to lend it out!

[OliverB]

I have to get Tamar's book, I took a butchery class from her a year or so ago that was a lot of fun. You'd never expect it from her (she's more on the petite side than burly butcher), but she carried half a pig from the walk in fridge to the cutting table! We shared the sawing though :-) We had a great bbq of some of the freshly butchered instruction meat and got a good load of meat to take home :-)

She's a great instructor, I expect that book to be a winner.

[rgruby]

Overall a very good year (including a few I will buy in the next few weeks and hopefully more time to cook after having our first baby three months ago):

- The food of Morocco

- Essential Pepin

Good luck on the cooking - my kid's six and I'm still hoping I'll have more time to cook some time soon (said only half in jest).

Ok, do these books add anything different to their earlier editions. If I have Paula's first Moroccan book and Complete Techniques is there any point in looking at these?

Cheers,

Geoff

[Honkman]

I think both Wolfert books are quite similar whereas the Pepin books might have some small overlap in recipes but are very different. (Cooking got already much better over the last few weeks - we are close to our old schedule of cooking 3-4 times a week and going to restaurants with our daughter 2-3 times).

[maggiethecat]

I think I own every Pepin cookbook, plus the articles from "The Pleasures of Cooking" and the Time-Life books. I'll be buying "Essential Pepin."

[wkl]

so far i like these:

Ruhlmans, 20

Molly Stevens, Roasting

Davdi Tanis, Heart of the Artichoke

Marc Vetri's new book. (name escapes at the moment)

i think these are all 2011 releases.

[Zeemanb]

Many fine books this year, but right now I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of "The Art of Living According to Joe Beef". I ordered it as soon as I knew I wasn't getting it as a Christmas gift. First glance at a friend's copy a couple of week's ago was love at first sight.

[Kerry Beal]

Many fine books this year, but right now I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of "The Art of Living According to Joe Beef". I ordered it as soon as I knew I wasn't getting it as a Christmas gift. First glance at a friend's copy a couple of week's ago was love at first sight.

I picked that one up at Homesense the other day (the Canadian version of Marshall's housewares dept) - I saw the bone marrow picture and since that was one of my favourite dishes at Joe Beef I had to have it. Sadly it's not the same as they make the marrow at the restaurant.