We don’t see much innovation in cookbooks nowadays but The Family Meal: Home Cooking with Ferran Adria
What most people don’t realise is that most book publishers don’t test their recipes properly. Yes, the chefs and celebrities that write them actually cook the dishes sometimes even in their home kitchens. But a recipe tester using crappy basic cookers and bog standard equipment aren’t used. It keeps the price of cookbooks down but also leads to complicated and difficult recipes that often don’t work or miss ingredients.
The Australian Woman’s Weekly cookbooks are legendary because they cook everything in a crappy test kitchen. Several times. And Murdoch Books does the same.
And you can be sure that Adria, the most pedantic of chefs has tested these home cooking recipes to bxggxry.
The format of the book is rather than the traditional starter/main/dessert format it is split into meals of three courses. At a launch dinner at Gerald’s Bar we ate “Meal 21”, Gazpacho, Black rice with cuttlefish and Bread with chocolate & olive oil. The ingredients above are for “Meal 1”, caesar salad, cheeseburger & potato chips and Santiago cake.
The recipes start by laying out the ingredients and giving a timeline for cooking. In this instance, make the Santiago cake 2 hours before, the burgers 1.5 hours before…right up to cooking the burgers five minutes before.
The quantities of ingredients are given. For two, for six, for 20 and for 75, if you happen to be feeding your own brigade of chefs or the whole neighbourhood.
And the process is illustrated with captions, comic-book style.
Most of the recipes are accessible to normal people but occasionally you’ll find the need for a blowtorch, a nitrogen oxide syphon (or siphon) and oxy acetylene cutting equipment (just joking) in addition to pantry and fridge basics.
You can find it locally for around $39.95 but as usual I’ve posted a link to my Amazon shop above where it is available for under $20.
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