Ultimate Cook Book_ 900 New Recipes, Thousands of Ideas - Bruce Weinstein [2]
No, what makes this cookbook the ultimate is the philosophy we developed in 1999 with The Ultimate Ice Cream Book. In a nutshell, this book takes solid, basic recipes and allows you to customize them endlessly to your taste. You get the best of both worlds: hundreds of recipes from two established food writers, combined with thousands of ways to make the dishes exactly as you want them.
We don’t have employees, we don’t farm the recipes out, and we don’t subcontract their development. We work in our small New York City kitchen (it’s four feet wide, including the appliances) and test every recipe ourselves. Needless to say, our friends eat well.
And the recipes in this book are all original content. We’ve written plenty of single-subject ultimate books. Ten, to be exact—from brownies to chocolate cookies, ice cream to peanut butter, shrimp to potatoes. But this volume isn’t a compilation. Rather, The Ultimate Cook Book picks up where the other single-subject ultimate books left off.
It’s the ultimate expression of our ultimate philosophy: hundreds of base recipes, thousands of variations, nothing complicated, a compendium for all your cooking needs—and a way to take just about every dish and either follow our lead or turn it into something that reflects your taste.
How Did This Ultimate Philosophy Get Started?
It got started (where else?) in New York City. We were talking about (what else?) food. More specifically, our first cookbook. How would we choose between Chocolate Ice Cream, Chocolate Cheesecake Ice Cream, German Chocolate Ice Cream, and Chocolate Banana Chip Ice Cream?
It hit us like a bolt. Most of the time, we want the creamiest, fudgiest chocolate ice cream. After that, we may twist it up a bit and that’s easy enough: just an addition here, a substitution there. But we want solid recipes that we can eventually dress up, take beyond their inception to something more personal.
Who Is an Ultimate Cook?
Everyone, we reckon. We developed and tested the recipes ourselves, then we packed them off in draft to see how well we were doing—never to chefs, culinary professionals, or people in the food business; instead, we sent them to our mothers, cousins, friends, and people we’d never met but who volunteered via e-mail. We gave everyone the same task: make two or three recipes from the chapter, any you choose, and tell us exactly what you did.
Many stuck to the base, but others played with the recipes. “Cinnamon makes me sneeze.” “I hate crunchy peanut butter.” “Who has port?” They liked knowing where to start: a solid, fairly easy recipe with bold flavors using everyday ingredients. They also liked finishing on their own, adding their own nuances to the dish. And that’s the very heart of the ultimate philosophy.
So How Do These Variations and Customizations Work?
In almost all the recipes, it’s a matter of small additions, substitutions, and changes: spices, flavorings, and the like. Some variations may switch out the centerpiece of the dish—say substituting chicken thighs for pork chops. But most are small changes that can add up to big flavors in the dish. In other words, you can choose the dish by its title with the confidence that this is in fact what you’ll get. The nuances can then be rearranged as you like.
In some recipes, the variations are a nutritional matter, best decided by your preference: for example, “1 cup milk (regular, low-fat, or fat-free).” The challenge was to create, say, French toast that lived up to all three options.
A few recipes are road maps that will lead you through various choices to create many different versions of a dish—for example, The Ultimate Granola, Bacon-Wrapped Anything, or Creamy Vegetable Soup.
Finally, some recipes are choices in and of themselves: Spice Rubs for Steaks or No-Fail Roast Turkey with Four Wet Rubs.
What’s Inside This Book?
Breakfast to dessert, the full range. Some recipes are for