As snow swirled outside, a smallish group met on the last day of March to discuss our experiences with two Food52 titles.  Our main book was Food52 Genius Recipes: 100 recipes that will change the way you cook.  A few people also checked out Food52 Baking: 60 sensational treats you can pull off in a snap.  Both of these titles are, in one way or another , the brainchild of Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, co-founders of the popular crowd-sourced Food52 website.  Their ever-expanding list of titles includes a book of vegan recipes, one on salads, and a forthcoming one about ice cream.   With so much experience behind them, do these authors/editors deliver on their promise of “genius,”  in changing the way we cook?

It turned out that most of us made vegetable-centric recipes from the Genius book.  The chickpea stew with saffron, yogurt, and garlic was delicious and different, but it did have a pronounced saffron flavor; so if you don’t like this pricey spice then you won’t like this dish.  The radicchio salad with Manchego vinaigrette was also a bit different, and delicious as well.  One good tip that appeared in this recipe: to tame the bitterness of radicchio, soak it in ice water for 15 minutes.  This did seem to work!  Two people tried the potato scallion cakes and thought they were a great use of leftover mashed potatoes, though the potato mixture was on the sloppy side and couldn’t be shaped into patties as described.  But it was easy enough to scoop the batter into the pan with a spoon.  The green lentil salad was on the bland side; the predominant flavor was vinegar, which wasn’t enjoyable.  And the garlic green beans were boringly basic; the cooking technique didn’t elevate them the way the recipe claimed it would.  The warm squash and chickpea salad with tahini used some ordinary ingredients, but the sum turned out to be greater than the parts, and this was  a delicious and substantial salad.  Three people made the gratin of zucchini, rice and onions with cheese;  we all agreed it was a yummy dish, but we weren’t sure if it was worth all the fussy extra steps involved in making it.  It did make a largish amount, though, so you could definitely eat it more than once.  Another tip we picked up from this recipe:  a spoonful of raw rice added to soups and sauces will thicken them nicely without contributing obvious flavors.  And of course this works best when the resultant dish is one that is pureed.  The zucchini gratin used this trick, and the rice did make for a more substantial final product.

In the breakfast department, one person tried the poached scrambled eggs, which were very good– tender with no added fat needed.  However these also took more work than average to prepare, so you probably wouldn’t make them on a regular basis.  The cottage cheese pancakes were a hit– easy to make and “really delicious– these would be great for brunch.”  And the roasted applesauce was also simple to make and quite tasty.

Unsurprisingly, there was a lot going on in the dessert department.  The dense chocolate loaf cake was, as advertised, very chocolatey; and the flavor improved over a few days’ time.  The directions instructed you to add the wet and dry ingredients to the butter/sugar mixture “spoon by spoon” which seemed unnecessarily fussy.  Perhaps their spoons are larger than ours?  Two of us tried Marie-Helene’s apple cake, with somewhat different results.  The recipe called for “four large apples;” and depending on that definition, you could wind up with more or less moisture in your batter, which is important in a recipe that was mostly apples.  The consistency of one cake was more like a bread pudding; it was moist and delicious with lots of apple flavor, but not a cake in the usual sense of the word.  Smaller apples produced something more cake-like.  This concept might be fun to tinker with, but it would have been helpful had the recipe given weight or volume for the apples.

Staying with the dessert theme, but shifting to another book, those who used the Food52 Baking title were highly satisfied with it.  The double layer coconut pecan bars were awesome, and a big hit with “Mr. Fussy,” who, it is claimed, does not like coconut.  The cold oven pound cake was “to die for,” and the tomato soup cake tasted like a spice cake, with the secret ingredient completely incognito.  The lemon sponge cups were fantastic, and brought back good memories of our member’s mom’s lemon sponge pie.  The cream cheese cookies were “OK,” but when brought to a meeting they quickly disappeared, to rave reviews.  The chocolate banana bread was good, though it took much longer to bake than the directions indicated, and wasn’t exciting enough to tempt our member away from her usual banana bread recipe.  The easy as pie apple cake suffered a similar fate, being good but not outstandingly better than other recipes.  The cheese crispettes, though savory (not sweet) were excellent– crispy and cheesy and just the thing for serving with drinks.  Easy to make, too.

The books themselves are both large format, about the size of a sheet of paper, which seems to have become the standard size for new cookbooks.  As is also true of most newer books, there were many luscious photos, and some showed a recipe’s entire sequence from ingredients to finished product.  There were a few complaints– some recipes had directions that were unnecessarily wordy, to the point where you had to read them two or three times to get at the actual meaning.  And measurements could be inconsistent; sometimes an ingredient would be listed by weight, sometimes by volume, and sometimes in random fashion (see “four large apples” above!).  In these books, the recipes come from many sources, so perhaps that explains the different measurement units, but we felt the editors should have standardized things to make it simpler.  A few of us checked out the Food52 website and weren’t terribly impressed.  The way it was organized didn’t seem user-friendly, and there’s a lot going on visually, which can get annoying.  The search function is also kind of fussy– I was looking for the recipe for soft chocolate cherry almond cookies, and I typed “chocolate chip cherry cookies” (and the recipe does have chocolate chips in it)– and I got zero hits!  It took a bit of fiddling to figure out how to find what I was looking for.  However those cookies are really, really good!

We must have been distracted by the snow piling up outside, or our conversation– because we forgot to vote!  But judging from our discussion, I’d guess the baking book would score near a 5 (the top rating), and the Genius book maybe a 3.5.  We’ll have a retrospective vote at our next meeting, and I’ll post the results here.

Next month’s titles will coordinate with our One Book title, Stronger, by Chelmsford native Jeff Bauman.  We’re focusing on Boston and New England with The New Boston Globe Cookbook  and The North End Italian Cookbook.  Copies are available at the main desk.  Please join us for our next meeting on Friday, April 28 at 11 AM in the Fireplace Room.   All are welcome; see you there!

Do you, like author Ken Haedrich, have a “lust for crust”?  As our Bibliobites group discovered through this month’s title, pie crust (and its cousins) isn’t just for dessert anymore– it’s for pot pies, galettes, quiches, strudels, handpies, and tarts.  Many of these dishes are familiar cold-weather favorites, but this book introduces some variations we’d never seen, as well as twists on tried-and-true favorites.  But the common thread is, of course, the crust; and this topic made for an active discussion!

As it turns out, some in the group are not fond of pie crust at all.  How can this be??  Some do not enjoy making the crust, with all its fussy details (more on that in a moment), and some thought the most frequently used crust in the book (the “go-to pie dough”) had too much fat in general, and too much butter in particular.  Many of the recipes contained cream, cheese, or sausage; and adding pie crust to this mix just seemed to put the whole dish over the top in terms of fat and calories.  Many of the pot pie and shepherd’s pie recipes called for both a top and bottom crust, which some thought was the “correct” way, and some felt was overkill, as they prefer only a top crust.

The details of making the pie crust sent some of us over the edge.  In his zeal to demystify crust-making, author Haedrich is very, very specific about how to treat both the ingredients and the mixing process.   Perhaps that is why he is known as the “Dean” of The Pie Academy. There are many steps and multiple pauses to chill the dough at various stages, which meant you had to set aside a fair amount of time to complete everything.  For some of us, the precise instructions increased anxiety, rather than giving us confidence; we worried that forgetting one part of a step or mistiming another would lead to disaster.  The overall methodology was a bit odd for those of us with prior pie crust experience, and the author didn’t explain why he made certain recommendations.  We weren’t sure if the extra attention to detail made a noticeable difference in the final product.

But we did make lots of pies!  Among the ones we tried were the old-fashioned chicken and biscuits, which was solidly good but time-consuming and made lots of dirty dishes.  But more than one person commented that the biscuits were “to die for!”  The turkey crumb pot pie had a topping made of crushed stuffing mix and french-fried onions, which was delicious and easier than making a crust; though the recipe called for a bottom crust, it was omitted for the sake of speed.   The meatloaf wellington was a bit of a pain to make– it was hard to wrap the crust completely around the meatloaf, and of course the crust beneath the meatloaf stayed mushy.  The meatloaf itself was good but not outstanding, so overall it didn’t seem worth the trouble or the calories!  The tarte choucroute was different and delicious; but as with many of these recipes, you needed a lot of lead time to make, chill, and par-bake the crust.  And the filling also needed to be cooked ahead and cooled before final assembly.  The savory winter vegetable crisp had a cracker-crumb crust that was fairly simple to make; the vegetable combination was enjoyable and it made a large quantity.  The downside– it took a long time to prepare, so dinner was much later than desired!  The sausage and Guinness pot pie was requested by “Mr. Fussy,” and despite the cook’s doubts about the combination of ingredients, they both loved it.  Whew!   Three galettes that we enjoyed were the sweet potato and herb Parmesan, the kale, potato, and ricotta, and the curried winter squash.  The smoky bacon and cheddar cheese quiche and the shepherd’s pie both suffered from having a not-quite-done bottom crust, despite faithful adherence to par-baking instructions.

Not to be deterred, when our intrepid cook next made the fresh corn pudding pie she “baked the hell out of the crust” before filling it, and this worked better.  All three pies were tasty, though.  We tried a couple of hand pies too: the Cornish meat pies and the chicken, broccoli, and cheddar turnovers were good and hearty.  And the tempeh and brown rice empanadas were successful, too; they were made with a wrapper of pizza dough rather than the called-for pie crust!

The taco pot pie had a crust with some cornmeal in it, which was pleasantly different; it made a large casserole so it was fortunate that it was tasty!  One member “went rogue” and found her own recipe for a spinach pie seasoned with sumac; it had a yeasted crust.  Sounds good, and similar to this recipe?

The book itself was praised for its beautiful and numerous photographs; and as always, we like when the book stays open on the counter, as this one did.  While recipe instructions could sometimes be overly detailed, they usually resulted in a successful product.  We enjoyed reading the text; author Haedrich has a distinctive  “voice” that always sounds friendly and down-to-earth; we could see ourselves enjoying a conversation with him about almost anything.  If we sat down with him, here’s what we’d like him to know: “Ken, your pies are great– they make a lot of solidly good food and are perfect when you’re in the mood for some comfort food and have an afternoon to give to a cooking project.  We could do with some quicker choices for a weeknight, though, and– enough with the crust already!  We don’t really share your obsession, though we appreciate your quest for perfection.”

In the end we agreed that this book had some delicious choices; it’s just not a title that’s very practical for everyday cooking, and if you don’t care for pie crust then definitely don’t bother with this book.  The majority of our group members gave this book 4 chef’s hats (out of a possible 5); but the overall average was 3.5, reflecting some  “crust ambivalence.”

If you’d like to explore other Ken Haedrich cookbooks, he has written on everything from soup to vegetarian cooking to simple desserts. Check out the titles available here. 

Next month’s title is Food52 Genius Recipes; copies are available at the main desk.  We’ll next meet on March 31 at 11 AM in the Fireplace Room.  Happy cooking!

French cooking has (despite Julia Child’s efforts) a reputation for being complicated, fussy, and maybe a bit pretentious.  It’s a cuisine famed for its reliance on butter, cream, and rich sauces.  Traditionally it’s a meat-centric cuisine as well, with vegetables being little more than an afterthought.  Well-known food blogger Clotilde Dusoulier, author of the January Bibliobites selection, aims to show us that modern French cooking is also vegetarian and straightforward.  With the excesses of the holidays behind us, this book would seem to be the perfect way to welcome in a new year of healthier eating based on grains, legumes, and seasonal produce.  As always, the group had strong opinions about their experience at the French Market.

……And those opinions were strongly negative!  There wasn’t a person at the meeting who enjoyed the book, with most actively disliking it.  More than a few people wound up making none of the recipes.  The most common complaints were that “nothing called to me,” and that the author frequently used ingredients that are difficult to find in the U.S. (the author is French but has lived in the U.S. and the book is written for an American audience).   Par example, she uses spelt berries, rolled barley, lemon verbena leaves, chestnut flour, and celery root, all of which are not readily available.  Another common criticism was that the recipes are on the bland side and/or have odd (or should we say unusual?) spicing.  For instance, the only flavor in the otherwise very neutral lentil croquettes was a teaspoon of coriander, which was overpowering, with nothing else to balance it out.

Other recipes that we tried included the cauliflower gratin with turmeric and hazelnuts, which was good but used enough turmeric to make the sauce “neon”!  The couscous with vegetables was ordinary, with a few people commenting that they already had similar, and better, recipes for this dish.  The softly spiced carrot and almond soup tasted very strongly of cardamom and anise but still seemed like it was missing something; and the butternut and celery root soup was “OK but not outstanding– and I have other squash soup recipes that I like better.”  The blanch-roasted new potatoes were a two-step process, as the name implies, but the difference in taste or texture was negligible, and therefore not worth the extra effort. The mushroom and chive quiche was heavy on the mushrooms, which made it unexpectedly expensive; it tasted good but didn’t have that smooth custardy texture we were looking for.  The above- mentioned lentil croquettes also lost points for being a bit tricky to assemble; the lentils had little to bind them and tended to fall apart.  The tahini sauce that accompanied them was delicious, though.

Some of the more successful recipes (in our opinion) included savory pumpkin and cornmeal quick bread,  leeks vinaigrette, and endive, orange, and walnut salad.  The green bean, red rice, and almond salad, was “good– but I used brown rice because I had it;” the goat cheese and rosemary sables were tasty but the texture was unexpectedly soft– “I wish they were crunchier, more like crackers.”  The Corsican turnovers with winter squash were “good but not great,” though they scored points for cuteness and portability.

The book itself, also came in for some critical comments: the format was too small for most people, and there weren’t enough photos.  Some of the recipes had unnecessary steps, or it was unclear why those steps were needed.  But of course these complaints would have disappeared had everyone enjoyed the food!  So, nous sommes désolés (we’re sorry) Clotilde– as far as we’re concerned your book just doesn’t make the grade; our vote yielded an average of 1.625 chef’s hats (out of a possible 5).  Mon Dieu!

Join us when we meet again on Friday, February 24 at 11 AM in the Fireplace Room.  This month’s title is Dinner Pies by Ken Haedrich.  You still have a week to try out recipes! Copies are available at the main desk.