This is kind of a weird cookbook. I haven’t used it before and looking through it I don’t think I would have picked it up on my own. It’s one of the books I received recently from a family member.
I hadn’t ever seen Hay’s cookbooks before, or known anything about her. She’s an Australian food personality with a strong multimedia presence there. (This book is tied to a TV series, I think.)
The best thing about the book is the food photography in it. Gorgeous pictures and great layout design. It’s a great coffee-table cookbook in that respect. It makes you hungry just looking through it.
The basic structure of the book is that it offers a series of “basics” recipes that are the starting place for a series of ideas about what to do with the result of the basic preparation. In a way, it resembles Sam Sifton’s really great No-Recipe Recipes book published recently—it’s almost a kind of family-tree here’s a mother-sauce approach: here’s how to make crispy roasted pork belly; now here’s some things you could do with it once you make it. (That’s the “brilliance” of the title.)
I appreciate the concept but a lot of the basics are just a little too basic for me (one two-page spread is devoted to mixing salt, five-spice powder, chili flakes and Sichuan peppercorns as a “basic”) and a lot of the brilliance is sometimes just a bit yeah, ok, put the meat in a brioche roll with cucumbers, fine. Also the concept shifts around: sometimes it’s about three or four uses for the basic preparation, sometimes it’s about three or four side dishes to go with the basic preparation. It feels padded, to some extent, a book for looking at that isn’t all that useful.
It also teaches me incidentally that Australian grocery stores have some ready-to-use items that aren’t in US grocery stores, but also sometimes I think she’s calling for store-bought ingredients where they really aren’t quite right for what she’s doing (and that wouldn’t produce the pictures associated with the recipe).
Anyway, I’m going to make the pulled pork recipe that’s one of the basics—it’s quite different from anything I’ve done and I’m curious about whether it will work well—the pork is put in a tightly-sealed pot in the oven with tomato puree, beef stock, maple syrup, bourbon (quite a lot of it), malt vinegar, garlic, ancho chilis and smoked paprika. I’ll use the “brilliance” that suggests making a slaw and putting the pork and the slaw on brioche rolls. I was toying with making the pork empanadas instead but I think that’s one place where her suggestion is wrong (she calls for store-bought ‘shortcrust pastry’ sheets, which I assume is what would be called puff pastry in the US), so I would want to make the empanada dough from scratch.
I may give the book a real workout this weekend and use it for the lamb I’m making tomorrow as well, so I may hold off on reporting how it did until Sunday evening. I come at it as a skeptic, so we will see whether I can see using it again. (A reliable simple pulled pork recipe that can be done in the oven would be a good thing to have for those months where hours of grilling are a bit much to imagine—I don’t think I could manage that in between shovelling snow this afternoon.)