![Sous Vide at Home: The Modern Technique for Perfectly Cooked Meals [A Cookbook]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81ivlU3pJZL._AC_UL165_SR165,165_.jpg)
(My 5-star reviews are few and far between.)
I got this book three years ago; read it cover-to-cover in one sitting, loving every page, but for some reason never cooked from it until last week, when I made the roast chicken. It's no doubt best to start with a chicken that actually had a life, rather than the factory-raised and infinitely-parsed "free-range organic" bird that I had to resort to, but the result was brilliant, anyway. (See Michael Pollan if you need help understanding "free-range organic", "naturally-nested", "cage-free", or any other of the all-but-meaningless terms the American Food Machine has lobbied and muscled its way into ownership of.)
But the roast chicken is just excellent roast chicken. The parsley soup is beyond imagining. Here's the ingredient list: butter, parsley, leek, chicken stock, potato, cream. But the parsley is actually three ingredients prepared in different ways, each designed to play up a different chord of the full parsley sound. The result is ... parsley, as imagined by God. My two guests (rather sniffy food-snobs, much like myself to be candid) were struck dumb, and declared it the best thing I'd ever made...
...until this afternoon, when one, feeling peckish, reached for the leftovers, which I'd serendipitously saved in an Old-Fashioned glass. It was by then parsley mousse, and even better.
(Recipe note: It can be improved by exactly one tablespoon of fish sauce, believe it or not. It rounds and fills it out without giving a hint to its own presence. My usual "invisible body-builder" is trace amounts of peanut butter, but that's too coarse for this delicate recipe.)
My mind is now in overdrive, utterly inspired by that one recipe. What would similar treatment do for cilantro ... sorrel ... watercress? I plan to serve it again in a few days' time, this time also infusing some parsley oil to add green globules of garnish, but am also dreaming of inventing potato ice cream and serving "cold parsley soup with potato dumplings", all covered with a drizzle of beetroot oil instead of raspberry syrup. That's the sort of way this book might get you thinking. If you pulled it off, you might then start to dream of castles in Spain, or at least famous restaurateurs...
Ahem! Back to the cookbook review. Some of his ingredients seem strangely ... amateurish, for one so insistent on pure, simple ingredients. Sure you can get "Tom Yum cubes" in any Asian store here, but in the same store you could also get fresh lemongrass and galangal and shrimp paste, and blow Mr. Hopkinson's recipe for cilantro and coconut soup away with actual tom yum paste, made fresh with a blender and five minutes work.
This IS a cookbook review. I'm trying to accurately describe the effect this marvellous book has had on me, and might well have on you, if you let it. I probably won't try any of the brain recipes, either (been there; done that: brains taste rather chemically-unpleasant-acidy), but I WILL steel myself and reapproach tripe, at least. It'll no doubt taste of cow's stomach, as imagined by God, but hey: we only live once...
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the authors
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently purchased items with fast delivery
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 9, 2011
- Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2015
- Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2023
- Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2014
- Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2023
Top reviews from other countries
- Seymour CliffordReviewed in Australia on July 22, 2021
If you only own one cook book, make it this
-
