Lateral Cooking: Foreword by Yotam Ottolenghi

Product Information

The result is greater creativity in the Lateral Cooking encourages improvisation, resourcefulness, and, ultimately, the knowledge and confidence to cook by heart. So the faff is not necessarily in the complexity of the recipes, but the amount of reading you will need to do before you get into the kitchen. Once you've got the hang of flatbreads, for instance, then its neighboring dishes (crackers, soda bread, scones) will involve the easiest and most intuitive adjustments.

Most of the times, you miss one ingredients and need to replace it with something, you are short on time and need to cut a corner etc. So, for example, in the potato gnocchi entry Segnit tells you about the flour potato weight and add flour in patient increments but there is no explicit recipe.This may result in small marks to the dustjacket and title page, please also bear in mind that each signature will be a little different from the one we show here. Lateral Cooking is a comprehensive work and notable academic achievement, taking a fresh perspective on a well worn subject that will have you thinking about cooking in a new way. Alongside the illustrations, other design details such as a repeated arrow motif, stepped painted edges and footnote-styled supporting texts reflect and experiment with the visual language of traditional reference books. Our bold but simple approach to the design evolved out of the unique structure and extensive content of Lateral Cooking, making it enjoyable and accessible for the reader. It will give you the confidence to experiment with flavour, and the variations that follow are a springboard of inspiration to the contents of your fridge and kitchen cupboards.

Lateral Cooking is organised into 77 'starting-point' recipes, reducing the phenomenal variety of world cuisine down to its bare essentials – and then building it back up again. If you don’t own a copy of Larousse Gastronomique, Le guide culinaire by Escoffier or La Repertoire de la Cuisine and are a novice cook who wants to take a more serious approach to learning the craft, then Lateral Cooking will fit the bill.Niki Segnit, author of the landmark book The Flavour Thesaurus, gives you the tools to do just that. This book close to fundamentally changed my way of cooking and is still one of the books I regularly use. So you might want to try and track down candied melon to make your own Calissons D’aix, a lozenge shaped sweet from Aix-en-Provence made with a marzipan like mix of ground almonds and flavoured with honey, Grand Marnier and orange flower water as well as the aforementioned candied melon. Lateral Cooking is organised into 77 'starting-point' recipes, including plenty of tips for substituting ingredients and reducing the phenomenal variety of world cuisine down to its bare essentials - and then building it back up again.

The book looks at a core recipe and takes you along a continuum, so that you can tweak a bread recipe, for example, by replacing some of the liquid with another form (egg for water) and it will still work (probably! Ultimately, Signet wants her readers to develop their own recipes based on the starting points and flavouring options, so your imagination is your only limit to what you include in a recipe, which means you might have trouble finding ingredients if your ideas are really out there. It's goal is to teach the reader method and technique and then skills to riff on that with whatever is available. But as she tested the combinations that informed The Flavor Thesaurus , she detected the basic rubrics that underpinned most recipes.This book shows the many ways ingredients can be replaced, how there's always leeway in a dish, and how just the smallest changes can take you into new territory. My new favourite and I would recommend it to anyone who is comfortable enough cooking to break away from the traditional recipe layout and bend the rules.

Once you have the hang of each starting point, a wealth of flavour possibilities awaits, each related in Niki's signature combination of culinary science, history, chefs' wisdom and personal anecdote. Otherwise, I’m not sure this book would be the first I’d reach for when planning a weekly household menu for example. We created over 400 original illustrations for the book to bring the words and ideas within its extensive text to life, reflecting Segnit’s desire for suggestive rather than prescriptive imagery to accompany her writing. You will find yourself inventing novel dishes, just by applying the logic from this book, with surprising results.The groundbreaking new book that reveals the principles underpinning all recipe creation, from the author of the bestselling The Flavour Thesaurus Do you feel you that you follow recipes slavishly without understanding how they actually work? As she explains in her introduction, ‘Marzipan can be nothing more than a mixture of equal weights of ground almonds and sugar with just enough egg white to bring them together. Each chapter opens with an illustrated double page spread which introduces the reader to that chapter’s recipes.