All About Braising

I received All About Braising, by Molly Stevens, for my birthday from Mom. It is the first cookbook that I’ve received from my long Amazon wish list. (Thanks, Mom!)

I got the book soon after learning about The Julie/Julia Project, where Julie Powell maintained a blog about cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child‘s classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I in one year. The blog was extremely popular and has now been made into a book. When I heard about it, I thought that cooking through a cookbook sounded like a great idea. It gives me structure and goals to cooking, providing a sense of accomplishment with every meal. If there is something unusual, as there sometimes is in ethnic food cookbooks, then it forces me to meet a challenge that otherwise would have caused me to skip that recipe. Similarly, it causes me to try new recipes and foods that I have mentally relegated to the “not really interested” corner of my mind. (For me, this tends to be foods that have lamb or shellfish or that I think are “unhealthy”.) I still think it’s a great idea, but I have to think through the logistics, still. And, more importantly, I have to decide what cookbook(s) to cook through! No matter what, I won’t start in earnest until Juliana and I get to Santa Barbara.

To date, I’ve prepared four of the dishes in book: chicken do-piaza (pg 137), chicken breasts braised with hard cider and parsnips (pg 150), bisteces rancheros (pg 222), and veal shoulder braised with figs and sherry (pg 310). All have been delicious, and the casualties have been minor (a wine glass and one of Mom’s clay pots). I’ll make an separate post for each of these.

So far, I’ve been massively pleased with the cookbook. Braising has been a completely new kind of cooking for me. Stevens claims that braising is “simple”, but her descriptions and recipes bely her words. For multiple recipes she has us roasting and grinding our own spices! I did so, and it wasn’t bad, but nonetheless… I know that braising can be easy, of course, and Stevens gives lots of good advice for your own, possibly simpler, braised dishes. So even though the recipes were a challenge (I figure that if a book doesn’t challenge you, you probably haven’t learned a whole lot), it does a great job of covering the fundamentals of braising. In addition to being delish, the recipes are illustrative, and I’ve used what I learned in this book to come up with my own slow cooker recipes (Mexican pantry soup and slow cooked goulash and sauerkraut).

Widmer Hefeweizen

Juliana and I tried the Widmer Hefeweizen on tap from Zelo Restaurant. We “shared” the 24 oz hefeweizen. It paired with my spicy chicken dish decently, though the citrus in the beer seemed to overwhelm the subtle spiciness of the chicken dish rather than complement it.

Japanese, Bricks Cafe, Zelo Restaurant

Juliana and I visited Santa Barbara over the past couple days. We did not check out the wine, but we did eat out each evening, once in a good little Japanese restaurant in Goleta and twice on State St. in Santa Barbara.

Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light

by M. Rosenblum

My sister got this book for Christmas from my girlfriend, so of course I had to read it pronto. It won an IACP Cookbook Award, which at least implies it is well-written. It also looked like a fun approach, kind of like a biography for a food or a popular science book. (As an aside, I think that these single-topic nonfiction narratives are becoming more popular, but I can’t say for certain.)

Though I’m not a chocolate fanatic, as many of the characters in the book are, I enjoy a good truffle now and then. Reese’s cups and Hershey bars are not included in Rosenblum’s definition of chocolate; they’re candy. He primarily addresses chocolate as artisanal, gourmet, and traditional food. He does spend some time on industrial chocolate, but only to discuss the history. Generally, there is little detail on recipes, techniques, processes, technology, science, or business.

Roseblum is telling the story of chocolate, from the Olmecs to 2004 A.D. The focus is on the culture and the people. Rosenblum makes significant use of experts, traveling the world and meeting the modern practitioners of the chocolate art. Halfway into the book, he has met French chocolatiers, Mexican mole venders, and a professional chocolate taster. He goes on to meet cacao farmers, innovators, and chocolate makers. He tries to interview government officials and manufacturers (though both are extremely secretive). He also uses many historical sources, like the writings of explorers and monks from the 15th and 16th centuries. Rosenblum is not an expert himself and only rarely injects a personal opinion except on his personal tastes, which crop up often. This all adds up to a book that is accessible to the everyman but still feels rigorous and accurate, though biased towards a purist and slightly snobbish approach to chocolate. (Even though he offers frequent assurance that taste in chocolate is individual and appreciating fine chocolate is acquired, he gives the strong impression that liking mass-produced chocolate is not simply unsophisticated, but nearly a character flaw.)