The Best Cookbooks of 2024: Big Dip Energy, Ottolenghi Comfort, and More
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The pandemic really threw a wrench into cookbook publishing. Things got weird for a while there, but then such a wonderful flood of books came out that we expanded our coverage to accommodate it all. This year, the momentum shows no signs of letting up.
First, congratulations to two of our 2023 favorites, The World Central Kitchen Cookbook and Sohla El-Waylly’s Start Here for picking up two of the top James Beard awards! The magic continues this year, and the range is as wide as ever. We’re seeing books that help us expand on the basics, figure out what to do when we encounter a mystery vegetable, and learn pasta sauces from a dude who’s so into cooking them that he has even invented and marketed new pasta shapes. Like last year’s Made in Taiwan by Clarissa Wei, travelogue cookbooks continue to knock our socks off in 2024.
In fact, I’m hoping we’re starting to see a sort of quiet, yet profound progression in cookbooks. There’s the whole Instagram and influencer side, which sometimes lacks depth but really brings it with great photography and good vibes. We’re also seeing high-end chefs team up with skilled cookbook writers to wondrous effect. The best of the lot tell stories with words and photos and have high-quality recipes to match and they’re starting to make traditional cookbooks and some cookbook publishers as a whole look fusty and staid and … I love it.
Read on to get our take on what’s the freshest. We’ve tested every one.
Update, December 19, 2024: We added six final titles from the batch of cookbooks that were released late in the year. The newest additions to our list are at the top.
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The League of Kitchens Cookbook
By Lisa Kyung Gross and the Women of the League of Kitchens Cooking School with Rachel Wharton
This list comes together over the course of the year, the process of sifting and cooking my way through a giant stack of books. This one might have sat around for longer than normal since it’s typically hard to make a “global kitchen” book like this work, let alone stand out. My mistake. The catchy title eventually made me think of some sort of kitchen superhero team, and that turned out to be true. The League is made up of 14 foreign-born grandmas (their word) who live in New York City and teach cooking classes from their homes featuring the food of their homelands. It’s helpful in a book this international to know that they’re working in the US, meaning that with a bit of effort, we should be able to track down the ingredients. More importantly, the book’s author and League leader, Lisa Kyung Gross, has turned their grandma-quality recipes into something you can reproduce at home.
I started making salata sayfieh, a Lebanese salad by League member Jeanette Chawki, where big chunks of cucumbers, white onion, bell pepper, and tomato marinate in a dressing with thyme, sumac, and lemon juice. This is really more of a summer salad, and I used some of the winter season’s first crappy tomatoes in it, but that zippy dressing and a tart drizzle of pomegranate molasses pulled it successfully over the line.
Next up was korma murg, an Afghan stew from Nawida Saidhosin that required a fair amount of time over the stove and was absolutely worth the effort. To make it, you slice up what they call a “pile of paper-thin onions,” sweat them in a Dutch oven, and cook them down for so long they start to melt and create a gravy-like sauce when you add in the chicken. This was the single best recipe of the testing process for the whole list, a full batch disappearing in mere moments from the test kitchen.
As Kyung Gross says, the recipes “might seem a little long-winded,” but they are some of the most detail-focused I’ve seen in years, featuring, for example, both imperial measure and metric weights for ingredients. This level of explanation might not be critical in a book where you’re familiar with the cuisine, but chances are low that you will be familiar with all 14 covered in this one. This handholding will definitely get you much closer to amazing results than something less precise.
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Courtesy of Artisan
The Book of Pintxos
By Marti Buckley
Years ago, I rented a little Barcelona apartment that shared a wall with one of the best tapas bars in town, which meant I spent a fair amount of time down there. In the tiny, standing-room-only space where every wall was lined with shelves full of wine bottles, I got culinary and cultural lessons and could fill up on good cheer and stunning food at the end of a long day.
That vibe is taken to extraordinary heights in the Basque Country where journalist Marti Buckley has written a love letter to the pintxo. Pintxos are bar snacks typically served on a toothpick, downed with a drink and enjoyed with friends. (Let’s elide some Spanish controversy and call pintxos the Basque cousin of tapas.) This cookbook manages to be fun, quirky, and informative, and Buckley highlights the region’s specialities and how to make them at home.
You should certainly eat pintxos in the Basque Country if you can, but until then, I recommend heading to a specialty food store and picking up the ingredients to make some at home. Start by making some gildas to put out when you have friends over. Perhaps the most classic pintxo, they’re served on a big toothpick with manzanilla olives and pickled guindilla peppers bookending a plump and luscious anchovy. It’s a bracing bite. Have that alongside some croquettes and a glass of txakoli and you’ll be living right. Personally, I’m working my way up to the tosta de bogavante, a pintxo-ified lobster roll with a drizzle of parsley oil. I might even riff on this one, make it with tinned clams, and wash it down with a glass of Cava.
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Courtesy of Harper Collins
Hot Sheet: Sweet and Savory Sheet Pan Recipes for Every Day and Celebrations
By Olga Massov and Sanaë Lemoine
This cheekily titled two hander would have slipped right by without a gentle reminder of its greatness from my friends at Eat Your Books*. It’s written by experienced recipe authors Olga Massov and Sanaë Lemoine, who take turns with and occasionally collaborate on each dish.
Nobody needs another book full of middling sheet pan meals, yet this one stands out with what they call “elevated but accessible recipes.”
I tried sheet pan “fried” rice, which is more of a clever technique to help get lots of crispy rice and clear out leftover veggies from the fridge and freezer. It ends with a flourish where you make a divot in the center of all the food, pour in three beaten eggs, and tuck it back in the oven, where they cook up in minutes. A fish tacos recipe has you roast spice-coated fillets while you make use of the pan’s time in the oven by prepping guacamole and a cumin-lime crema to go on top.
Things happen pleasantly quickly with their recipe for chicken with clementines, dates, and capers, a riff on a lovely number from Team Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem cookbook. This version uses powerhouse ingredients like date molasses, clementines, fennel, dates, and capers spread across the pan—and, soon, your plate—to keep you engaged from start to finish.
My current favorite recipe has you lay down a bed of Greek yogurt on a serving dish, then top it with roast sweet potatoes and red-onion wedges, sprinkled with toasted pistachios, bits of date, za’atar, and flaky salt. It’s a low effort, big reward meal that earned a quick spot in my regular dinner rotation. People like me sometimes overcomplicate their meals, and genre-buster books like this are good reminders that we can get sophisticated flavors and be a bit more hands off about it.
*An Eat Your Books subscription makes for a great gift (or gift to yourself) for cookbook lovers. It creates a searchable index of your cookbooks, so if you’re looking for a bolognese recipe, it tells you which of your cookbooks has one and what page it’s on, and can do the same for ingredients you’d like to cook with. I use it almost every day.
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Courtesy of America’s Test Kitchen
When Southern Women Cook
By Morgan Bolling and the Editors of Cook’s Country
America’s Test Kitchen has made notable headway in the last several years to diversify its staff and the breadth of its culinary offerings. At 25, the brand is also slowly switching up how it presents itself—a little more approachable, a little less textbook-y. This book reflects those efforts combined with what ATK is best at: giving you the tips and techniques to make the best version of what you’re cooking. A cocreation between Cook’s Country editor in chief Toni Tipton-Martin (author of landmark books Jubilee and The Jemima Code) and Cook’s executive editor of creative content Morgan Bolling, Southern Women looks at the women who influenced Southern cooking from the past to the present day. They pay respects to luminaries like Edna Lewis, a version of whose biscuits grace the cover, and feature scores of contributions from modern scholars like Rafia Zafar. This being an America’s Test Kitchen publication, they keep their smart and tested recipes at the center of it all.
Look, for example, at their Waffle House–inspired recipe for crispy hash browns. In it, you’ll run medium-starchy Yukon golds through the shredding disk of your food processor before soaking them in a bowl of water and wringing them dry in a dish towel. Doing this gives the spuds that perfect crispy-pillowy texture. After that, it’s dealer’s choice if you want them next to or underneath your eggs. I also made their pickled shrimp, a recipe originally conceived before refrigeration was available, where the cooked crustaceans bathe in a complex cider vinegar mixture with bay leaves, allspice berries, garlic, dill, Worcestershire, and red onion. Pop them in your fridge to marinate, and even after a couple of days they retain their snap. I also made their smoked chicken wings one evening, fancy finger food when cooked at home, with success ensured thanks to good technique.
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Courtesy of Penguin Random House
Cured
by Steve McHugh with Paula Forbes
I love cookbooks where a confident, capable chef teams up with a great writer and photographer to create something restrained, focused, and full of knowledge. Enter San Antonio’s Steve McHugh, whose new book carries the name of his first restaurant. His specialty is transforming food with salt, and I was sold on it as soon as I saw he likes to ferment or quick cure (or pre-salt) veggies to draw out flavor. No surprise, McHugh is a sauerkraut fan, and I had a big batch at home and loved making his kraut hash browns, a funky twist on the classic. I was also excited to try his sauerkraut with sausage, made with brats and bacon on a weeknight, a simplified wink at choucroute garnie.
Also fun to make was his pinto bean hummus, which he tops with vegetables confit and a drizzle of the confit oil. It works great as a dip for vegetables, or if you’re me, a Triscuit. There is plenty for carnivores to be excited about and learn from here, but what makes this book stand out is the attention paid to vegetables and grains, and how they can before transformed with some salty TLC.
There are the books that resist the slow tides of your personal taste and will still be on your shelves years from now. Think Lior Lev Sercarz, Gabrielle Hamilton, or Vishwesh Bhatt. Cured fits in perfectly among them.
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Courtesy of Clarkson Potter
Kalaya’s Southern Thai Kitchen
by Nok Suntaranon and Natalie Jesionka
I first opened this book right after trying a recipe from another book that was so full of problems that it made me angry. Nok Suntaranon’s big, opinionated voice calmed me right down. She runs Philadelphia’s Kayala restaurant, but for this book, she returns to her southern Thai homeland to find all of the best recipes from her hometown and pass them on to us. Her voice is the strongest part, telling you the best way to enjoy her food. She’s got a whole section called “It’s not too many chilies!” and there’s no point disputing her.
“My mothers turmeric chicken soup for a cold,” or gai tom kamin, was a perfect place to start since we were two for two on the “having a cold” front at home that day, and I appreciated the simplicity and humor Suntaranon tucks in there. You start a pot of water with cilantro, shallot, and the chicken along with gobs of smashed garlic and smashed lemongrass. “Smashing is therapeutic to get that tension out, another way to heal your heart and restore your soul,” she counsels before you “add the turmeric to kick your germs away.” It all bubbles away for half an hour, before the heat is cut, and you add fish sauce to give it some great je ne sais … anchois. It’s served over rice and showered with cilantro, fried shallot, sliced chilies and scallions, and a squeeze of lime. Don’t be afraid of the chilies, the soup is smashing.
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Courtesy of Penguin Random House
Ottolenghi Comfort
By Yotam Ottolenghi, Helen Goh, Verena Lochmuller, and Tara Wigley
I used to like to razz the Ottolenghi books for making delicious yet impressively fussy food. Cooking from them could be enjoyable but crazymaking when he’d call for a slice of lemon to be dipped in batter and fried as a garnish when you really needed to be getting dressed because your dinner guests just pulled up out front. His more recent cookbooks are much better, but I took some of that lingering cynicism into his latest book where he’s listed as an author alongside his cookbook team. Yet just a few pages in, I dog-eared a recipe—flip!—then did the same twice more a few pages after that—flip, flip—then got up a head of steam and must have folded over more than 50.
Comfort-themed cookbooks are typically pretty monotonous, full of mac and cheese, sheet-pan whatevers, roast chicken, and casseroles. Here, however, Ottolenghi and his team use a global pantry and diverse influences to make a much more interesting book. Sheet-pan cauliflower is coated with Yemeni hawaij; the spice mix with coriander, cumin, fenugreek, clove, cardamom, turmeric, and sugar is nothing you can’t find in the spice aisle but it easily breaks you out of the weeknight doldrums. Also great is garlicky linguine slathered in miso butter, shiitakes and spinach—not too much of a stretch for a Tuesday night but delicious and different. One night when we had guests, I made a mushroom ragù with surprise guest ingredients like miso, preserved lemon, and celery root, all of which made for a luscious sauce to slurp up with egg noodles. Next, I’ll try “Helen’s bolognese,” featuring onion, carrots, celery, and pork but also Shaoxing wine, ginger, doubanjiang (chili bean paste), and Sichuan peppercorns. Yes, please!
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Courtesy of Harvest Publications
Zahav Home: Cooking for Friends & Family
By Michael Solomon and Steven Cook
You could imagine a book written by a chef and his business partner during Covid lockdown turning out lovely or just being a hot mess. Philadelphia chef Michael Solomonov and his business partner, Steven Cook, hit a nice groove and stay in it in Zahav Home. The duo is known for restaurants like Zahav and Federal Donuts in Philadelphia and Laser Wolf in New York, yet this is not a restaurant cookbook. Part true effort to concentrate on home cooks and part chatty back-and-forth, where the two occasionally seem to be auditioning to be a pair of Jewish grandmothers in an off-Broadway comedy, Home has a lot of encouragement and recipes different and intriguing enough to get us to try many of them. Photography by Michael Perisco does an admirable job of educating and creating a bit of a story over the course of the whole thing.
Spatchcocked chicken with Hungarian seasoning (in this case just paprika) is nice, especially as it cooks in a pan with fingerlings, garlic, onion, and red bell peppers, everything steeped in the juices. The revelation for me was a fermented mango sauce with Iraqi roots called Amba that’s made with fenugreek, turmeric, and chilies. I needed to special order a jar but ended up getting two because I knew I’d love it. Home suggests using it as a marinade or accoutrement, including part of what the authors call broiled eggplant à la sabich, a riff on the famous pita sandwich with broiled eggplant, tomato wedges, and hard-boiled eggs, slathered in a tahini and amba. I put their version out as an appetizer at a dinner with friends, and once they figured out how to eat it, it disappeared. In fact, amba pops up with such frequent enthusiasm in the book that they hype a recipe for it used as a roast-chicken marinade on the back cover yet appear to have forgotten to put the recipe in the book. Maybe next time? I’m guessing I’ll love that book, too.
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Courtesy of Color Books
The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes From Phú Quoc, Oakland, and the Spaces Between
By Tu David Phu and Soleil Ho
I’ve been really happy to see a cluster of books that often, but not always, combine a chef and food writer in what could be called the “travel/diaspora” category that are really raising the bar for cookbooks as a whole. Recent examples include Koreaworld, Korean American, Made in Taiwan, Asada, and now this book. Here, Oakland-born chef Tu David Phu presents his food with roots in Phú Quốc, Vietnam. Working with food writer Soleil Ho and photographers Dylan James Ho and Jenny Afuso, they tell a tale about food that’s both Vietnamese and American, delivering a beautiful story and pictures with recipes that work.
Those recipes are wrapped in a smart format where the chef returns to Phú Quốc and tells his story through his relationship with his parents while also adding smart thinking on sustainability.
I started by cooking the cover, making coconut and fish sauce rice noodle salad, a sort of healthy textural bonanza with slippery rice noodles, cucumber, and thin slices of cabbage and banana flower that I found up the street from my Seattle home at Fou Lee Market. Later, I made their ginger-braised chicken, taking them up on their suggestion to substitute thighs for wings and letting them bubble away with shallot, lemongrass, makrut lime leaves, and a couple of tablespoons of coconut caramel sauce, creating a savory warmth with a bit of chili heat, a welcome bit of warmth on a damp fall night.
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Courtesy of Hardie Grant
BBQ Days BBQ Nights: Barbecue Recipes for Year-Round Feasting
By Helen Graves
Barbecue cookbooks had some shameful recent years where almost all of the them were written by white dudes, almost completely ignoring women and people of color. There’s still a long way to go, but we’ve seen some change in the right direction in the past few years. Recently, I was excited to see Hardie Grant put out Helen Graves’ BBQ Days BBQ Nights, a follow up to her 2022 work, Live Fire. Instead of being a giant meat fest, this book is more along the lines of “food to grill and lots and lots of delicious stuff to eat with it.” Flip through it and it’s easy to pick up that she’s got a high-functioning palate. Try, for example, anchovies with burnt-shallot butter which you can serve over focaccia (her suggestion) or crusty sourdough (mine). I’m eager to try her soba noodles made green with a sauce of spring onions and cilantro served with asparagus and crispy garlic. Ditto for her “secret weapon” salad dressing that includes fish sauce and an entire avocado. She’s also got bomber ideas for drinks like mezcal and Maggi micheladas or fermented tomato and gochujang Bloody Marys. If you like Amy Thielen, Meera Sodha, or Alice Waters, you’ll be happy here.
Over the summer, my sister and I made Graves’ charred tomato seven-layer dip, a riff on the classic where cherry tomatoes get crisped on the grill and spread over a mix of cream cheese, feta, and yogurt and sprinkled with a pickled apricot salsa. Eating it, it dawned on me that I could just write out recipe names from this book as its review, and that would likely be enough to persuade most people to buy it.
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Courtesy of America’s Test Kitchen
The Complete Beans & Grains Cookbook
By The Editors at America’s Test Kitchen
There’s a higher-profile bean book out there this year, but this is the one to get. A fairly classic ATK book, Beans & Grains is not flashy, but it’s packed with practical how-to information which is where a lot of people looking to get more beans and greens into their diet would like to be met. Some bean-focused books are a little too wishy-washy about whether beans need to be soaked, but this one is not: “We definitely recommend [overnight] brining dried beans prior to cooking.” Then they go on to explain why. It makes for tender interiors and skins, a better-seasoned final product, no beans exploding during cooking, and faster cooking. From there, it launches into scads of recipes with photography that’s a bit workmanlike but with such breadth and depth that it’s impossible not to dog-ear a dozen or more pages on your first pass alone.
I went straight for comfort and classics, making pressure-cooker black beans and brown rice, a fairly hands-off dish given depth and kick with tomato paste and jalapeños. My favorite so far might be a cheesy bean and tomato bake, which they say is “perfect to cook with kids” and I say “is perfect to cook for me.” It uses canned cannellinis—they’re not above ’em—and tomatoes along with herbs, Parm and mozz, and a shower of panko for textural wonderfulness. There’s also plenty of globe-trotting: Laotian, nam khao, congee, and chana masala among them. The book is so helpful that I would find interesting bean recipes elsewhere, then cross reference with similar recipes in this one, cribbing its techniques to get the best results.
(If beans are your bag, also check out the brand new The Bean Book by the folks at Rancho Gordo or 2020’s Cool Beans by Joe Yonan.)
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Courtesy of WW Norton
Amrikan: 125 Recipes From the Indian American Diaspora
By Khushbu Shah
“The main ingredient in the Indian American culinary lexicon,” explains food writer and journalist Ksushbu Shah, the child of Indian immigrants, is adaptation. Shah’s family began coming to the United States from India in 1971. If you want the famous fried dessert gulab jamun in the US, you can’t fire up the fryer and pull out the premade khoya, the key ingredient, because it’s hard to find here. Instead, the waves of immigrants realized you could use Bisquick and milk powder and get surprisingly similar results.
Shah’s recipes were exciting enough to motivate me to buy a waffle iron to make her moong dal waffles, where the namesake split mung beans are soaked overnight, then blitzed in the food processor with ginger, a serrano pepper, and garlic, and poured right into the waffle iron. Top this with a blenderized cilantro and mint chutney that’s got roasted peanuts, more serranos, and lemon juice and you’ll be sitting pretty. The savory waffles get a crispy exterior and pillowy interior thing going on and the chutney gives the whole endeavor some backbone. I also made pav bhaji—toasted bread with veggies matched with bhaji spice mix—something somehow as good on a late summer night as on a wet fall afternoon.
Shah presents her story through the lens of someone who loves both American and Indian cultures and, in that light, I’m very excited to try her Keralan fried chicken sandwiches along with her Desi egg sandwich. For our Canadian neighbors, she offers a masala poutine. Pretty cool, eh? There’s a nice story to go with the fun, too. Her dad’s a character in this book, a sweetheart with an impish smile who doesn’t cook but loves to eat. Give Amrikan a try and you’ll be smiling, too.
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Courtesy of William Morrow
Big Dip Energy: 88 Parties in a Bowl for Snacking, Dinner, Dessert, and Beyond
by Alyse Whitney
It’s always a neat feeling for cookbook aficionados to find something truly new. Some books speak to your soul or your practicality, some drive you crazy. Still others wrap you in a warm cocoon, whether or not you ever cook a thing from them. Never, though, have I imagined an author and a group of her friends getting face-meltingly high, coming up with a bonkers idea for a concept album of a cookbook about dips, then, miraculously, selling the idea and executing at a high level.
Grab a chip, friends, it’s time for some dip. You will likely be stopped cold by the art here, a tilt-shift-esque extravaganza of kitschy-fun props and dips galore, all wrangled by a team of six stylists who had to be doing it for the love. There is, for example, a two-page summer-grilling-themed photo featuring miniature figurines lounging in the outdoors around a giant ceramic hamburger, arm-in-arm squeeze bottles of ketchup and mustard, a pool with a plastic piano and “chopped cheese (burger) queso” dip in a “burger and all the fixings” themed plate/bowl combo, all on a checkerboard of white tile and possibly real grass.
Pun lovers, rejoice! Whitney goes so deep on dip vocabulary that eventually you’ll succumb and become a—brace yourself!—“dipficionado.” Her “freak-a-leek beer cheese dip” is the dipification of her friend Erin McDowell’s cheddar-ale soup, which can be served hot or cold. Chez Joe, I made the chilled version, adding a bit of horseradish for kick. When you’re ready to go wild, throw a head of romaine into the food processor, the first step on your way to Caesar salad dip, an extra-fun cousin of green goddess dressing.
Many of Whitney’s other recipes are as over-the-top as the Caesar, but along with being a big dip person, Whitney is clearly a food person, with credits that include stints with magazines and TV shows. Her energy and skill will rub off on you. Go ahead and dare yourself. It’ll be diplicious.
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Courtesy of William Morrow
Anything’s Pastable
by Dan Pashman
Speaking of puns, here’s one right on the cover right above author Dan Pashman’s name and the words “pasta shape inventor.” Who knew that this was still a thing? This became even more impressive when I found boxes of his pasta at my local grocery store. “Cascatelli” is Italian for waterfalls, and these pasta inventions resemble giant ruffly commas. Pashman, the host of The Sporkful podcast, says the idea came from combining two of his favorite existing shapes, mafalde and bucatini, which make the cascatelli particularly good at holding onto slurpable sauces.
Instead of packing Pastable with his favorite versions of classic sauces like ragu and bolognese, he and a team of recipe developers came up with new and notably non-Italian sauces to serve with your choice of pasta styles. My wife Elisabeth and I latched onto cavatelli with roasted artichokes and preserved lemon, a sort of earthy-acidic flavor bonanza with an air of sophistication brought from lemon, capers, parsley, pecorino Romano, and garlic. Pappardelle with arugula is a dish with what Pashman refers to as a “high chunk factor” and is a nice way to get some greens in with your gluten. Simplicity reigns supreme here and we zhuzhed ours up with some chili crisp, though something funky, like guanciale or feta would be welcome to the party.
Speaking of chili crisp, I am excited to try the cover dish, “cacio e Pepe e chili crisp,” which also features Sichuan peppercorns and pecorino Romano on frilly ribbons of mafalde pasta. After that, I’m trying the linguine with miso clam sauce. Pashman and his well-credited (yay!) team have deftly taken what could have been a book full of weird ideas and made something wonderful. Grab your spork and get ready to twirl.
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Courtesy of National Geographic
Big Moe’s Big Book of BBQ
by Moe Cason
There is a latent sweetness, humility, and sense of humor in competition barbecue pitmaster Moe Cason’s book that you don’t usually get from barbecue cookbooks. He opens by praising his family, particularly the support of his wife and grandmother, and recounts boyhood efforts at cooking, coming up with “concoctions” as he slowly learned to cook, emphasis on the slow, saying “you gotta burn some crap before you get it right.”
Flash forward and he eventually swaps from a Navy career to working as a water treatment operator in Des Moines, Iowa, then to, starting in 2006, a national barbecue competition competitor. In 2023, he hosted the National Geographic television series World of Flavor With Big Moe Cason. In the Big Book, the sides quickly grabbed my attention, a nice mix of inventiveness and classics that are often re-creations of dishes from his wife and grandmother. I made his smoked ham and butter beans, a dish with little hands-on time and lots of flavor. I also pulled together a black-eyed peas and sausage dish that was like a tomato-free chili cousin.
Big Moe, who was born in Iowa and describes his barbecue style as “between Kansas City and Texas,” is known for wrapping his brisket in pink (untreated) butcher paper for the last half of smoking, which allows it to breathe enough to keep the bark on the exterior from getting “mushy.” I also like his attention to texture on bone-in chicken thighs: brined in brown sugar and salt, then cooked in a mesh basket in a 300 degree Fahrenheit smoker until they hit an internal temperature of 185 degrees, which, as he points out, is more than breasts can take, but it makes for an excellent texture for thighs. I do wish the book gave workarounds for the Cason-branded sauces that occasionally pop up on the ingredient lists, but those instances aren’t frequent, and the upside is too good.
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Courtesy of Voracious
The Authentic Ukrainian Kitchen: Recipes From a Native Chef
by Yevhen Klopotenko
I had a series of wonderful revelations when I began cooking and learning about Ukrainian food. One of them was that folks like Midwesterners, the Pennsylvania Dutch, and most of the rest of us will find lots to love here. Another was to seek out unrefined sunflower oil, which pops up often in Ukrainian recipes and is packed with enough nutty flavor that it is often used as a one-ingredient salad dressing.
Ukrainian chef and restaurateur Yevhen Klopotenko uses this book to introduce us to his war-torn country’s food, giving us a surprising amount of weeknight-friendly meals that are still transporting. I followed my gut to cucumber, green onion, egg, and radish salad, which is all of those ingredients under a generous drizzle of sunflower oil, perfect for when you want to quickly make up for a vegetable deficiency in your diet. On the skillet side of things, Elisabeth and I had an unspoken competition about how fast we could demolish both zucchini fritters with a yogurt-mint sauce and deruny, aka potato pancakes. Even better were “lazy holubtsi,” or deconstructed cabbage rolls with a sour cream and tomato sauce, where the cabbage is sautéed with onion and carrot and folded in with ground beef and rice, making it easier to get all of the flavors we love without all the painstaking work of making regular cabbage rolls.
The publisher should have done some tighter editing here, but buy the book anyway. You’ll figure it out and support Klopotenko and his country.
(For more Ukrainian deliciousness, check out our 2022 favorite, Budmo! from Anna Voloshyna, and the 2023 update of Caroline Eden’s beautiful Black Sea, a travelogue cookbook that gives a feel for the Ukrainian city of Odesa.)
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Courtesy of Clarkson Potter
Koreaworld: A Cookbook
by Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard
You’ve gotta love a cookbook that could take a cuisine—Korean in this case—that’s been having a moment for about 20 years and make it feel as exciting and important as ever. A follow-up of Koreatown from 2016, Koreaworld is a cookbook, a stock taking, and a philosophical jag all wrapped in a “two guys on a road trip with a crackerjack photographer” vibe.
On that trip, chef-author Deuki Hong, food writer Matt Rodbard, and photographer Alex Lau analyze and decrypt recipes in Seoul, then swing through Koreatowns across the United States. In Seoul, they check out the third-wave coffee scene and stop in to see Mingoo Kang, a chef they liken to a mashup between chef René Redzepi of Noma and restaurateur Danny Meyer of Shake Shack. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, they connect with chef Ji Hue Kim, who makes a pesto from perilla leaves (Korea’s shiso cousin), garlic, pine nuts, and fish sauce, then suggest spreading a layer onto avocado toast. Yes, please!
I made what they called “extremely addicting soy sauce–marinated eggs,” whose Korean name, they explain, can be “loosely translated as ‘drug eggs’” thanks to a marinating bath in nori, sesame, garlic, and ginger. I happily ate them over rice for several days in a row. I did something similar with sesame oil pickles pleasantly heavy on rice wine vinegar and fennel from chef and recipe developer Susan Kim.
Next up to try is chef Mingoo’s spicy fried chicken—thighs, of course—with gochujang spicy sauce, wagon wheels of lotus root, and fried baby anchovies. If you’re ready for an exciting jolt of a book, start here.
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Courtesy of Countryman Press
Misunderstood Vegetables: How to Fall in Love With Sunchokes, Rutabaga, Eggplant, and More
by Becky Selengut
Months ago, I caught a talk with Seattle chef Becky Selengut, who was interviewed by Seattle Times food writer Bethany Jean Clement. They were naturals up there and cheered on by a big crowd of supportive fans. Watching Selengut with their mix of wit, ease, and humor felt like witnessing the birth of a new weekend NPR star.
Selengut has written many cookbooks, and this one coaxes us into cooking what they call “misunderstood vegetables,” those perceived produce-aisle weirdos that you might hold up and wonder aloud what to do with them. They sometimes start by putting googly eyes on the veggies (really), then getting out the cutting board. Celery root, which looks like something pulled out from under the bed in a Guillermo del Toro movie, gets a shave and the mashed potato treatment, soaking up horseradish, rosemary brown butter, lemon, and gobs of cream. Tomatillos are cooked like fried green tomatoes and served with a high-powered yogurt and chipotle sauce. Selengut counsels that a “hot fry keeps them from softening and getting all mushy” and likes 375 degrees Fahrenheit for the shallow-fry oil, flipping them as soon as their buttermilk, panko, and cornmeal batter turns golden brown and crispy.
A savory cousin of Kate Lebo’s Book of Difficult Fruit, Misunderstood introduces us to radicchio by putting it on sourdough toast, taming the bitter leaves by searing them and hitting them with sweetness in the form of balsamic vinegar and brown sugar, before draping them over a cloud of ricotta and a walnut-mint pesto. Never would I ever have thought to pair mint with radicchio, and it makes for a very cheffy appetizer if you’re looking to impress some guests or just yourself.
You might as well have fun while you learn about some “weird” new veggies, and Selengut, ever charming, gracious, and funny, is the perfect guide.
