So look, even if this wasn’t the first go-round with Baco, I’d be keeping it—I quite like the author’s approach to food, despite the hint of pretention. Most recipes offer the slight olive branch that if you don’t have urfa biber, go ahead and use Aleppo pepper, and so on. Not exactly “hey, any red pepper flakes will do”, but it’s fine. It’s not wrong that different ingredients from different places yield different flavors. Urfa pepper from Turkey is prepared differently than a lot of dried peppers in other parts of the world—it’s kept a bit wet and when you get it at the other end, it often looks more like coffee grounds after brewing than dried ground pepper. That makes a different in how it tastes and what it does when it’s added to food.
I liked the version of bagna cauda. If I can cross the streams somewhat, people who like the show Babylon 5 may remember a first season episode where the security chief Michael Garibaldi has to smuggle bagna cauda past his chief doctor because it’s supposed to be bad for you, but holy crow, it’s generally just anchovies, garlic and olive oil kept warm while you dip raw vegetables in it. It’s the Mediterranean diet in Platonic form. The walnuts in this version are good (even if I didn’t have the “red walnuts” the author extolls as available in Los Angeles once a year). I have no idea what he’s thinking in advising avocado as a crudite, though: it does not work even if the avocado is fairly unripe and thus sliceable.
(With the bagna cauda:)
The main dish was inspired by Ethiopian cooking, so I really felt I should cook the flatbreads that the author’s main restaurant is apparently famous for. I didn’t want to do them in the oven the way he wants, so I did them on the stovetop. I should have used the cookery I use when I’m making flour tortillas, I think—heated in a flat cast iron pan on low heat, then thrown in a hotter pan to blister and finish. But they were fine after I got over a first try that was too thick and had too much oil in the pan.
Otherwise, the berbere chicken was pretty delicious. I used boneless breast rather than thigh because that’s what was in the fridge already, but thigh would be better for this recipe—it wouldn’t dry as much or as fast.
Sadly, I don’t have a picture of the final product—my phone camera was behaving very strangely tonight and didn’t save a lot of images after the mid-cook. But I will make the rare comment that I would actually recommend this book to others—not just that it will remain on my shelf. I don’t think it’s for a home cook who is too obedient to the recipe—this is one for someone who knows where and when to ignore what the author is demanding of you. But there are some good ideas here for crossing Japanese, Ethiopian, Tex-Mex, and Middle Eastern flavor profiles/ingredients and if you ignore the high-end “make a chili powder worthy of my vision” demands, the recipes are very simple in a very attractive way—the chicken dish that was our main took minutes to assemble before being shoved into the oven, and it cooked within 35 minutes.
Cookbook Survivor: The Resolution
I’m ready to buy your own cookbook, entitled “Rather than…” Love your approach to writing and creating.