annieb123's Review of The New Homemade Kitchen

by Joseph Shuldiner

Revive the lost arts of fermenting, canning, preserving, and creating your own ingredients. The Institute of Domestic Technology Cookbook
is a collection of 250 recipes, ideas, and methods for stocking a
kitchen, do-it-yourself foodcrafting projects, and cooking with homemade
ingredients.

The chapters include instructions on how to
make your own food products and pantry staples, as well as recipes
highlighting those very ingredients—for example, make your own feta
and bake it into a Greek phyllo pie, or learn how to dehydrate leftover
produce and use it in homemade instant soup mixes.

• Each chapter includes instructions to make your own pantry staples, like ground mustard, sourdough starter, and miso paste.

• Complete with recipes that utilize the very ingredients you made

•
Filled with informative and helpful features like flavor variation
charts, extended tutorials, faculty advice, and instructional line
drawings

Also included are features like foodcrafting charts,
historical tidbits, 100+ photos and illustrations, how-tos, and sidebars
featuring experts and deans from the Institute, including LA-based
cheese-makers, coffee roasters, butchers, and more.

From the
Institute of Domestic Technology, a revered foodcrafting school in Los
Angeles, each chapter is based on the school's curriculum and covers all
manners of techniques—such as curing, bread-baking, cheese-making,
coffee-roasting, butchering, and more.

• Complete with beautiful food photography, this well-researched and comprehensive cookbook will inspire chefs of all levels.

•
Great gift for foodcrafters, food geeks, food pioneers, farmers' market
shoppers, as well as people who feel nostalgic for a slower way of life

• Add it to the collection of books like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat; The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science by J. Kenji López-Alt; and The Homemade Pantry: 101 Foods You Can Stop Buying and Start Making by Alana Chernila

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The New Homemade Kitchen is a comprehensive reference and recipe collection for foodcrafting by the late Joseph Shuldiner. Due out 2nd June 2020 from Chronicle Books, it's 352 pages and will be available in hardcover and ebook formats.

This is the magnum opus of the director of the Institute of Domestic Technology and contains a solid array of recipes and tutorials for many nearly lost kitchen arts. Covering pantry staples, coffee technology, pickling & preserving, processing grains, dairy, meats & fish, spirits, fermentation, and dehydration - it's an encyclopedic reference book and will go beside The Joy of Cooking and my Ball Blue Book. During this pandemic, when I've been stressed and longing for some continuity and normalcy, cooking and being productive in the kitchen has been a real stress reliever and source of comfort. The idea of "slow food" and of taking control of the processing of our own ingredients makes more sense than ever (and prevents the necessity of "just running out to the grocery store to buy pre-processed items).

The chapters contain techniques for making basic staples (including selecting beans and DIY coffee roasting and grinding - wizardry!). The following recipes highlight and showcase the finished ingredients. Each of the recipes includes an introductory description, ingredients listed in a bullet point sidebar (US measurements given, with metric in parentheses), and step by step instructions. There is no nutritional info provided. The recipes are photographed very well and clearly. Serving suggestions are attractive and appropriate.

The author has also included a resource list and an abbreviated bibliography and reference lists for further reading. The index is cross referenced and includes ingredients and recipes.

I adored the no-waste aesthetic of the book and the gentle, accessible, humorous voice of the author really makes me wish I'd been able to take a class or three with his guidance.

Five stars. Superlative reference book.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

The New Homemade Kitchen

by Joseph Shuldiner

Reviewed by annieb123 on May 24, 2020

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