Lateral Cooking
by Niki Segnit, Yotam Ottolenghi · first published 2018
67% recommend33% neutral
A practical handbook, designed to help creative cooks develop their own recipes. It is based around a set of recipes which, once you're familiar with them, will prove almost infinitely adaptable, according to whatever is in your fridge, in season, on offer at the market, or you feel like making.
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I would also recommend Niki Segnit's Lateral Cooking which aims to teach you how recipes associate with one another. So you just remember core ratios and what adjustments have to be made get other dishes. It's a very lazy-hacker way of approaching cooking…
on “Are Mail-Order Meal Kits Doomed?” ↗…food writers that are good at getting to the core of a dish idea, listing out the variations. Felicity Cloake's "Perfect" column in The Guardian for example. For the Wikipedia of food, Nikki Segnit's Lateral Cooking / Flavour Thesaurus are great -- you start out with basic "stew" technique and then a dozen usual and unusual variations.
on “Based Cooking” ↗In addition to Twenty and Food Lab already recommended, I'll mention Niki Segnit's books: Lateral Cooking and the Flavor Thesaurus. Lateral connects "adjacent" dishes -- you know of dish X, but Y is almost the same but from another food culture but everyone agrees on these basic things with just these slight…
on “The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday” ↗…tempering). The extreme is probably Modernist cuisine. You can look at the book "ratio" which presents a small number of standard recipes as proportions, with some hints for modification. I'd also recommend Lateral Cooking which describes recipes in terms of spectrums of ingredient variation or addition, usually starting with the simplest form. Finally there's a lot of interest in physics for coffee brewing, particularly…
on “Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce” ↗…Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails with ISBN 978-1668003398: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Book-of-Cocktail-... https://ruhlman.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ruhlman Lateral Cooking: One Dish Leads to Another by Niki Segnit, 2019, ISBN 978-1635572643 (978-1635572643 US ed.) https://www.nikisegnit.com/lateral-cooking . Seems to lean on Segnit's prevous book, 2010's The Flavour Thesaurus,…
on “Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce” ↗