Cobaya Divino with Chef Julian Baker of Toscana Divino

Chefs, like actors, can get typecast. Do a certain thing well, and often enough, and people will start to think that it's all you can do. Chef Julian Baker is the chef at Toscana Divino, a restaurant in Brickell that, as the name suggests, operates in a mostly traditional Tuscan vein. Before Toscana Divino, he'd helped open Bice restaurants around the world. Though Baker's an Englishman, his resume would lead you to expect classical Italian through and through.

We like when our Cobaya events defy expectations - when chefs recognize it as an opportunity to venture outside of their, and their regular customers', comfort zones. Chef Baker did that with his Cobaya dinner, which we've been working on coordinating nearly since the restaurant first opened. Baker's culinary background happens to be much broader than the Italian cooking he's done lately, and other than a pasta course, I don't think anything he served at his dinner last week would immediately register as Italian. That's just fine by us.

From start to finish, every dish reflected a lot of thinking behind it, from concept to presentation to flavor. It was a thoughtful dinner that was also a lot of fun.

(You can see all my pictures in this Cobaya Divino flickr set).

A barrel-aged Gentleman Jack "Negroni"^[1] started the festivities, along with a few passed "bar snacks," all with clever, fun presentations. Smoked sweet potato croquette "cigars" were served in a cigar box billowing with smoke; foie gras "roll ups" wrapped in strawberry fruit leather and sprinkled with pistachios stuck up out of a field of greens planted in a box; and best of all, crispy chicharron-like beef tendon "frazzles" which emerged, still audibly crackling, from inside a false book.

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Truck Party! (Part II) - gastroPod

I told you, Starbury, it's not that kind of truck party. Go back to China. Anyway, as I drove south on Biscayne Boulevard, it gleamed like a shining beacon from a block east: the gastroPod! The gastroPod is Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog's mobile foodmobile, a converted 1962 Airstream trailer retrofitted with a high-tech kitchen to crank out some gourmet street eats. I got a preview sampling of some of the gastroPod menu at a Cobaya event we did a couple months ago, but this was my first chance to actually pay a visit to the Silver Submarine.

Though the gastroPod was set up near Biscayne Boulevard and 18th Street for the day, the vintage Airstream trailer would fit right in along the more northerly stretch of Biscayne whose "Miami Modern" architecture earned it the designation as the Biscayne Boulevard Historic District. The guts of the gastroPod, though are completely 21st century.

Along one side is a station rigged for an immersion circulator for sous vide cooking (he's got one running with room for more); along the other is a CVap Cook and Hold oven, another wonder of contemporary technology that uses a combination of air and vapor heat to hold foods at specific temperatures without drying out or overcooking. Eventually a couple CVap warming drawers will be installed underneath the area set up for the grill.

So what's Chef Jeremiah doing with all this new-fangled technology? Here's the menu:

Having already had a burger at Latin Burger, I went in a different direction with gastroPod and started with the "Old Dirty Dawg."

No ordinary hot dog, this one is home-made of beef short rib which is ground, stuffed into a wide casing, and then smoked. It is just loaded with flavor, and has a nice snap and a good meaty bite to it. Chef Jeremiah gives it a shmear of mustard "if you're nice" and then tops it with "stupid slaw," which Chef told me has "something like ten different ingredients." I couldn't figure out ten, but I could detect at least a couple different kinds of cabbage, carrots, possibly some beets (though it could have been red cabbage), possibly some red pepper, all with a lightly vinegared tang and whiffs of spice (turmeric giving the cabbage a neon-yellow hue?). The slaw was the perfect contrast to the smokey dawg, and I liked the Martin's potato bun too which was soft without being mushy.

Joël Robuchon - Molecular Gastronomist and Revisionist Historian?

Of the chefs who are typically credited with the popularization of "molecular gastronomy," several may jump to mind: Heston Blumenthal, for sure, who was a participant in the first 1992 "International Workshop on Molecular and Physical Gastronomy" (Harold McGee, one of the other original participants, has written a great history of the event); Pierre Gagnaire, the only other chef participant in that original workshop, and a regular collaborator with scientist Hervé This since then; Ferran Adrià, who was doing his own pioneering work in experimental cooking at the same time and whose food is often given the "MG" label;^[1] here in the U.S., Grant Achatz, Wylie Dufresne, Homaru Cantu.

And Joël Robuchon? Yes, if he is to be believed. In a recent interview in the New York Post, Robuchon is quoted as saying:

Too many chefs are attracted to molecular gastronomy. ... It's not the kind of cuisine that should be important, with all the additives. I know I was really the first one to make it famous, but I have complete control of what I'm doing. The danger is that those who don't have the knowledge and that control start using additives that are not acceptable.

***

Right now, I am doing the reverse of molecular gastronomy. I'm working with scientists to find ingredients and produce that are proven to be good for you. Turmeric is very good for you. White tea is better than green tea. One of the dishes I'm experimenting with is carrot purée with turmeric. Also white-tea gelee and sea urchin.

Robuchon is undoubtedly a great chef, duly recognized as "Chef of the Century" by Gault-Millau in 1989.^[2] And yet there is no way around it: he has absolutely positively no clue what he's talking about here.

"I was really the first one to make it famous." WTF? Unless you consider the physics of incorporating a stick of butter into a pound of potatoes to be "molecular gastronomy" (and of course, it actually is, but I don't think that's what he means), then I don't think there's another soul in the food universe who would back up that claim. Indeed, a Google search of "Joel Robuchon molecular gastronomy" yields nothing at all until 2006 (nearly 15 years after the term was coined, and so late in the game that other chefs had made a point of disassociating themselves from the term "molecular gastronomy" as describing any particular style of cooking, much less their own), and even then, none of those references would remotely suggest he had anything to do with making it famous.^[3]

"Additives"? What is an "additive"? Agar agar (a seaweed derivative)? Gelatin (derived from animal collagen?) Cornstarch? Flour? And is there really a significant risk that restaurant chefs are serving untested ingredients to unsuspecting diners, and waiting in the kitchen to see if they blow up like Violet Beuaregard? I suspect there's more danger for diners lurking in all that butter in the potato purée.

But even more absurd: "Right now, I am doing the reverse of molecular gastronomy. I'm working with scientists to find ingredients and produce that are proven to be good for you." Chef, I don't know how to break this to you any more gently: using science to understand your ingredients better is, um, the definition of molecular gastronomy.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

^[1]Blumenthal and Adrià, among others, issued a statement years ago noting that "The fashionable term 'molecular gastronomy' was introduced relatively recently, in 1992, to name a particular academic workshop for scientists and chefs on the basic food chemistry of traditional dishes. That workshop did not influence our approach, and the term 'molecular gastronomy' does not describe our cooking, or indeed any style of cooking."
^[2]He apparently actually shared this honor with Paul Bocuse and Fredy Girardet.
^[3]Robuchon was, perhaps, an early adopter of sous vide cooking. But it turns out it was actually Marcel Vigneron who taught Robuchon everying he knew about "molecular gastronomy," as Vigneron claims in an interview mentioned here last week.

Room 4 Dessert 2 Pop-Up w Chef Will Goldfarb

I suspect when you're around Chef Will Goldfarb, you often feel like you're playing catch-up. He always seems to be about three steps ahead - he thinks fast, he moves fast, he works fast. Last week, he made a quick stop in Miami for a one day pop-up, dubbed "Room 4 Dessert 2." The name, anyway, is a spin-off from his well-regarded if brief-lived New York dessert-and-drinks place from about five years ago, but trying to keep track of everything Chef Goldfarb has done is a bit like trying to nail jelly to a wall - a stage at El Bulli, a tour of Australia including work with Tetsuya Wakuda, back to the U.S. at Morimoto in Philadelphia, Cru in New York, his own sandwich shop, Picknick, a sojourn in Bali to work as pastry chef at Ku De Ta, a business supplying provisions for the contemporary cupboard, WillPowder, and the list continues to go on.

Chef Goldfarb is an unabashed practitioner of what goes by the various misnomers of "molecular gastronomy," "science cooking," or most recently "modernist cuisine."^[1] Which is simply to say that he eagerly uses any and all ingredients or techniques available to him - hydrocolloids, gelling agents, emulsifiers, stabilizers, liquid nitrogen, and so on (much of this stuff is conveniently available for purchase at WillPowder).

It's interesting to me that even less adventurous diners seem to take a little less umbrage to the use of such things in a dessert format. When used in savory courses, you often hear complaints that people don't like their food "manipulated" and that it doesn't "look like" food any more. But we're already accustomed to eating desserts that are manipulated, and to using processed ingredients in desserts that don't taste good on their own (baking powder, cocoa, or even flour for that matter). Everybody loves a chocolate mousse, but very few people think about the processing of the ingredients that leads to its creation, or complain that it doesn't resemble its "natural" form. As Chef Alex Stupak (former pastry chef at wd~50, now running his newly opened taqueria, Empellon) put it: "Birthday cake is the most denatured thing on earth."

Here's a run-down of the event; you can see all of my pictures in this R4D2 flickr set. You can also get a look from inside the kitchen via Chadzilla, and another take on it from Mango & Lime.

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Wildebeest - Vancouver, British Columbia

While our visit to The Willows Inn was the most exceptional meal of our trip to the Pacific Northwest this past summer, it was certainly not the only good one. I was particularly excited by a couple places we tried on the front end of our trip, in Vancouver. First up: Wildebeest.

Wildebeest is a new-ish place in Vancouver's Gastown neighborhood with a rustic, vaguely steampunk aesthetic, an offal-centric menu, and a naturalistic, unfussy style. The brick walls, bare bulbs and rough wood are in perfect sync with Chef Wesley Young's cooking style, which is dominated by meat and smoke.

Snacks and cocktails help set the stage. Crunchy hazelnuts are infused with seawater; buttery, bright green Castelvetrano olives are smoked. They're both great nibbles to go along with an intriguing Tequila Sazerac, served up in a little flowered granny glass. This was a delicious reinvention of the classic cocktail, using reposado tequila and mezcal in place of the rye, and a green Chartreuse rinse in place of the absinthe.^[1]

Though Wildebeest has made a name for itself with its meat offerings, they don't neglect vegetables either. I particularly liked a starter that combined a variety of different radishes, served in a puddle of fresh, creamy cheese, along with a bright carrot sorbet and a crumble of toasted hazelnut "soil." Even more delicate was a slow-poached farm egg, served over a celadon-hued green pea tapioca with fermiere cheese, pea tendrils, and a thin sheet of crispy bread for dipping and scooping.

But obviously, a place called "Wildebeest" is really about the meat. And it's great stuff here - prepared simply but thoughtfully and presented essentially ungarnished. Quail is hay aged, and then smoked, brought to the table with a wad of still-smoking straw protruding from its carcass. The intense flavor of the tiny bird's flesh, still rosy-hued, belies its size. Served with little dipping bowls of a fermented wild berry honey and a salt and pepper mix, and just begging to be eaten with one's hands, this was one of the best birds I ate all year.

A big slab of beef short rib gets a similarly minimalist treatment: slow roasted on the bone, then carved into large hunks to reveal the pink meat concealed by the darkly burnished exterior, served with a sprinkle of smoked salt and a hay jus.

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The Ravenous Pig - Winter Park, FL

Ever since rave reviews began appearing a couple years ago on Chowhound, I've been meaning to get to The Ravenous Pig in Winter Park, just outside of Orlando, Florida. It sounded like my kind of place: it's got "Pig" in the name, it styles itself as an "American Gastropub," its menu shows a strong focus on locally sourced product and in-house charcuterie - what's not to like? It took a while for the stars to align, but they finally did a couple weeks ago as we took a two-day jaunt up to Orlando before New Years'. All the raves proved completely justified: this is a place that does what it sets out to do exceptionally well.

The Ravenous Pig doesn't really look all that much like a pub, rather more like a tony suburban restaurant: lots of burnished wood, brick walls, and taupe fabrics. There is indeed a lively bar as you walk in, though, with overflow perching itself around a long bar-height table. A second dining room is more civilized and peaceful, with an assortment of booths and tables. Winter Park is apparently far enough away from the amusement park tourist magnets that the crowd seemed to be made up much more of locals than out-of-towners. And the menu holds pretty true to the "gastropub" concept. It's an assembly of mostly hearty, straightforward dishes, using carefully selected ingredients and prepared with panache. Much of the produce comes from local farms, many meat products are cured in-house.

We were torn on whether to start with the house-made soft pretzels or the gruyere biscuits, and so opted for both. The pretzels were good - toasty, with a litle bit of crispy bite to the outside while still pleasingly chewy within, and served with a grainy mustard and a tallegio-porter fondue for dipping. But they were outshined by the biscuits, warm and perfectly flaky, with a nice whiff of salty, nutty gruyere, almost like cheese gougeres. The smoked sea salt butter that came with them was a superfluous but welcome addition. Salads include a "Farmer" or a "Gatherer" - the former turned out to be a frisée aux lardons in drag, with some sprightly bitter greens tossed with house-smoked bacon and a Caesar vinaigrette, crowned with a perfectly poached egg and a dusting of grated parmesan cheese. It was, according to Mrs. F, the best frisée aux lardons she's ever had, and that is not a short list.

There was a charcuterie plate, all house-made, and really quite impressive. It featured several different thinly sliced cured meats - a soppressata, a coppa, a salami redolent with spiced orange - as well as a nice rich country pork terrine, topped with some stout-macerated cherries. The plate was rounded out by a couple different cheeses (one a rich triple-cream, the other not quite as memorable), some nice mustard, pungent house-made pickles, and grilled bread draped with melted lardo. It was all very well done, nearly on the same level as the boucherie plate I'd had at Cochon in New Orleans.

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Tomatoes, Top Chefs and Pop-Ups

A few upcoming events that may be of interest to discriminating eaters:

March 23, 2011: "Celebrate the Florida Tomato," a Slow Food Miami event at Sustain Restaurant + Bar. Sustain will be putting together a 4-course menu featuring local heirloom tomatoes from Teena's Pride Farm. Starts at 7:30pm, $90pp including cocktails, four courses and wine. Click the link or the invitation below to reserve.

April 1, 2011: Johnson & Wales Distinguished Visiting Chef Dinner with Chef Kevin Sbraga, winner of Top Chef Season 7 and a graduate of J&W's North Miami campus. The menu preview includes lobster bruschetta and veal sweetbread hors d'ouevres, caesar salad with sous vide chicken, fish and chips with "a variation of tartar sauce," meatloaf with chanterelles, bacon marmalade, pickled onions and truffles, and a banana split with strawberries, chocolate ganache and pineapple. The event, which is a scholarship fundraiser for the University's College of Culinary Arts, starts at 7pm at Johnson & Wales' North Miami campus. Seats are $85pp, RSVP to 305-913-2108.

And, perhaps most intriguing of all:

April 2, 2011: "Room4Dessert 2" - a 6-course, pop-up dessert tasting by Chef Will Goldfarb, the self-styled "ultimate outlaw of pastry." Two seatings (8pm and 10pm), $75pp, with assistance from some local suspects and paired wines. Click the link above or the picture below for more info.

The preview menu:

Key Lime Margarita

Geisha 2011: Geishysoisse of coconut with black sesame and raspberry

Rouge featuring hibiscus, cherry, beet, red wine and Campari

The Sugar Refinery

Nobody says I love you anymore with shortbread and epoisses

And introducing:

THE JEFFREY

That’s the best part about the Jeffrey, it goes away and then it comes back

CobayAnaya - Chef Jacob Anaya at OTC Restaurant

There is no requirement that chefs have a "theme" when they do a Cobaya dinner - but it sure makes things fun. For our dinner a couple weeks ago with Chef Jacob Anaya of OTC Restaurant in Brickell, he went with an animal heads theme. The theme played out in the decorations (taxidermy trophies mounted throughout the dining room), the staff (who wore animal-face masks all evening) and on the plate, where every dish used parts of at least one animal head.

Chef Jacob Anaya is actually a Cobaya veteran - when we had our Cobaya dinner at Azul restaurant a couple years ago (the one that Bizarre Foods' Andrew Zimmern joined us for), Anaya was in the kitchen with Azul's then-executive chef, Joel Huff. When Huff left the following year, Anaya took over Azul, and more recently left Azul himself to run the kitchen at OTC. When OTC first opened it pitched itself as a casual, comfort-food place, but with the addition of Anaya, OTC and its owner Michael Sullivan are looking to step up their game. Since we had an idea of what Chef Anaya was capable of from his work at Azul, we gave him the Cobaya green light.

Even the menu itself followed through on the theme of the night.

(You can see all my pictures in this CobayaAnaya flickr set).

The evening started on OTC's patio facing out onto Miami Avenue with a series of passed around snacks - brown-bagged crispy fried pig's ears dusted with smoked salt, citrus dust and chili powder, rice crackers shaken with tapioca maltodextrin cheese dust, sgaghetti squash twirled on forks along with espelette dusted goat ricotta and kabocha chips, grilled squid heads paired with an anchovy mousse, garlic dust and tiny greens.

The first plated course - dubbed "Hard-Headed" - led off with a local lobster crudo, served family style. The raw lobster was paired with an orange-hued sauce made from the lobsters' heads with an intense crustacean flavor, a green olive purée along with crumbles of dehydrated black olives, supremes of ruby grapefruit, and chewy, salty dried shrimp. There were lots of strong flavors here, but they balanced rather than competed, the pairing of olive and citrus in particular striking a resonant Mediterranean chord.

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gastroLab Dinner with Chef Jeremiah

There's a difference between "clever" and "smart."^[1] Clever may make you giggle. Smart makes you think. The difference is sometimes overlooked in what was called "molecular gastronomy" five years ago, then was redubbed "modernist cuisine" a couple years back, and now, according to ponderous dipshit shnorrer John Mariani, is already passé. Some of the criticism is fair: in manipulating form and texture, and disregarding flavor, some chefs were more clever than smart. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something - in particular, it doesn't mean it tastes better.

Going back to one of our first Cobaya events, I've enjoyed several dinners with Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog (perhaps better known as the pilot of the gastroPod food truck) over the years. His latest "gastroLab" dinner was the smartest meal I've had with him - one where everything on the plate had purpose and focus, one where the thought behind each item translated into flavor.

(You can see all my pictures from this meal in this gastroLab flickr set).

The site for the dinner was the new location of GAB Studio Art Gallery in Wynwood, and Jeremiah pulled the gastroPod right inside to serve as the kitchen.

The meal started with a procession of snacks, served communally on a big wooden plank. Crispy chicken foot chicharrones used the skin from deboned chicken feet - someone must have doing a lot of chicken toenail trimming. Toast squares were topped with a creamy, rich duck liver mousse. And morcilla and eggs - something of a recurring theme with Chef Jeremiah - came with the blood sausage in two forms - in puffy, chicharrone-like morcilla-tapioca crisps, and more traditionally in the meaty, creamy, loose sausage that filled them, dabbed with a rich egg yolk jam.

Borscht has always seemed like something of an oxymoron to me - a cold, refreshing soup, but also a hearty meat stew. Jeremiah's "Watermelon Borscht" played off both those angles but focused mostly on the former. Cubed watermelon was compressed with beet juice to yield a cool, juicy bite with an undertone of the earthy root vegetable, as well as a stunning ruby hue. Meanwhile a ribbon of whipped bone marrow and a "rare beef jus" (rare because the beef was cooked sous vide to keep its color) dropped the meaty bass note onto the plate, with strands of pickled cabbage and dehydrated beet "streusel tied into the theme too. A multitude of textures instead of a simple puréed soup, but with the same happy interplay of flavors. (More complete explanations of several dishes are on Jeremiah's blog - the watermelon borscht is here).

Next, the South meets the Tropics with fried green carambola. We've all heard of fried green tomatoes. Well, unlike the rest of the country, summer isn't tomato season in South Florida. But we do still get carambola a/k/a starfruit, and often they're less than perfectly ripe.^[2] So Jeremiah took the unripe carambola and treated it like a green tomato - compressed them with ricotta whey, coated them with semolina and fried them, yielding a similar texture and tartness to the classic southern staple. This was paired with house-made goat's milk ricotta (wherefrom the ricotta whey), Georgia peaches pickled in rice wine vinegar and then charred, and a radish green for a little zing. Entirely unexpected - entirely successful, the kind of dish that sounds unlikely until you taste it.

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Eating House - Coral Gables

A month ago I had no idea who Giorgio Rapicavoli was. It had been a couple years, and a couple chefs, since I'd been to the Angler's Resort where he was last working. I can't stand watching "Chopped," the Food Network cooking competition show where chefs with varying degrees of skill are asked to prepare dishes from mystery baskets of ridiculously incongruous and often unappetizing ingredients; so the fact that he had won an episode did nothing to put him on my radar.

But then I caught word that he was opening a pop-up restaurant to be called Eating House in a hole-in-the-wall café on the outskirts of Coral Gables. And then I took a look at his preview menu. It read like no other menu I've seen in Miami, all sorts of unexpected combinations and flavors.

I went to Eating House a week after they opened at the beginning of the month. I've already been back twice in as many weeks. I know who Giorgio Rapicavoli is now. And at risk of hyperbole, I will say this: at Eating House, he's putting out some of the most exciting food I've had in Miami in some time.

Tuesday through Sunday nights, Eating House takes over Café Ponce, a non-descript breakfast and lunch place near the corner of Ponce de Leon Boulevard and 8th Street. What atmosphere there is - and there's not much - is contributed by some graffiti artworks hanging on the walls and a soundtrack dominated by '90s hip-hop. But it's a pop-up, the point is the food not the decor. Service is also a minimalist but efficient affair - if it's not general manager Alex Casanova, as often as not it'll be Chef Rapicavoli himself bringing your food to the table.

(You can see all my pictures in this Eating House flickr set or click on any picture to enlarge).

The menu is tight as a Snoop Dogg blunt - typically ten items, mostly "small plate" sized, plus a few dessert options. It's changed around the edges each time I've been in, with dishes coming and going or morphing from one visit to the next. The influences are as much Slow Food as Ideas in Food - lots of local ingredients, lots of creative preparations.

A perfect example: local Homestead tomatoes. But instead of a typical salad, Rapicavaoli takes them to Thailand, with lime, ginger, fish sauce, peanuts, fresh herbs, nasturtium flowers, and frozen coconut milk. It's a perfect rendition of the flavors of Thailand in an unexpected format, the frozen coconut milk in particular lending an intriguing icy creaminess to the composition.^[1]

Even better - indeed, one of best dishes I've had in recent memory - were the baby eggplants, topped with a banana miso, vanilla salt, yuzu kosho, sesame seeds and baby greens. Here, the starting point was a classic - nasu dengaku, or Japanese miso-glazed eggplant - but with multiple added layers of complexity. The banana and miso echo back to each other in both texture and flavor, a salty-sweet creamy richness, while the yuzu kosho adds the bright contrast of both citrus and spice, and yet another note brought in by the vanilla salt. This is really virtuoso stuff.

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Harding Dinner Series with Chef Jeremiah

It's only going to be around for a week, so I've moved my writeup of the first "Harding Dinner Series" with Chef Jeremiah to the front of the queue. As I mentioned here earlier, the original Chow Down Grill in Surfside is being converted into Josh's Deli & Appetizing during the day, and a pop-up dinner venue for visiting chefs in the evenings. The first guest chef is Jeremiah Bullfrog (of the gastroPod and also a two time Cobaya veteran) and several of us got a preview dinner^[1] on Wednesday. It bears repeating once more:

There are some genuinely interesting and exciting things going on in Miami's dining scene right now.

The format of this dinner was a lot tighter, more focused than the sprawling 17-courser Jeremiah did for his last Cobaya: seven courses plus a cocktail to start. But the style and spirit was very much the same - playful, but with a serious focus on maximizing depth of flavor.

(You can see all my pictures in this Harding Dinner Series flickr set).

You want local flavor? How about the "Instagram"? Not a popular new photo app, this was the other kind of gram. But the fine white powder in this baggie, unlike many others commonly seen in Miami, was only baking powder, which reacted with the acid in the drink (Bombay gin and lemon) to make for a fizzy, frothy cocktail. It's the same chemical reaction that powered the volcano you made for fourth grade science fair.

beet composition

The first course, a "Beet Composition," was like a terrarium:^[2] inside a glass jar were beets in various forms - salt roasted garnet beets, sous-vide candy-cane beets, ribbons of pickled red and golden beets, magenta-stemmed micro beet greens, plus bits of creamy cheese, all nestled in a black sesame "soil." Not merely a presentation ploy, this had great vivid flavors, ranging from the more deep roasty notes to brightly acidic pickled notes.

duck pastrami

The next course was one of the best things I've eaten this year. Jeremiah' s duck pastrami was cured  in salt, sugar and pink salt for about five days, then thin shavings of the duck were plated on a long communal plank^[3] with brussels sprout "kraut" and a spiced pumpernickel streusel. It was just a perfect combination of flavors: the duck, meaty and fatty; the sprouts, bright, vegetal and tart; the streusel providing an earthy, spicy anchor for it all. Great stuff.

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Reading Material - Part III - James Beard Books

In Part I and Part II, I listed links to the pieces I could find that were nominated for James Beard Media & Journalism Awards. Finally, here's the nominees for the James Beard Book Awards:

AMERICAN COOKING
Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited
Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans
Screen Doors and Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook

BAKING
BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking with Over 200 Magnificent Recipes
Baking for All Occasions
The Art and Soul of Baking

BEVERAGE
The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea
The Wines of Burgundy: Revised Edition
WineWise: Your Complete Guide to Understanding, Selecting, and Enjoying Wine

COOKING FROM A PROFESSIONAL POINT OF VIEW
Alinea
The Big Fat Duck Cookbook
Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide

GENERAL COOKING
How to Cook Everything (Completely Revised 10th Anniversary Edition): 2,000 Simple Recipes for Great Food
Martha Stewart's Cooking School: Lessons and Recipes for the Home Cook
The Bon Appetit Cookbook: Fast Easy Fresh

HEALTHY FOCUS
Cooking with the Seasons at Rancho La Puerta: Recipes from the World-Famous Spa
The EatingWell for a Healthy Heart Cookbook: 175 Delicious Recipes for Joyful, Heart-Smart Eating (EatingWell Books)
The Food You Crave: Luscious Recipes for a Healthy Life

INTERNATIONAL
Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China
Jewish Holiday Cooking: A Food Lovers Treasury of Classics and Improvisations
Southeast Asian Flavors: Adventures in Cooking the Foods of Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, & Singapore

PHOTOGRAPHY
The Big Fat Duck Cookbook
Decadent Desserts: Recipes from Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte
Haute Chinese Cuisine from the Kitchen of Wakiya

REFERENCE AND SCHOLARSHIP
Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages
The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs
The Science of Good Food: The Ultimate Reference on How Cooking Works

SINGLE SUBJECT
Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes
Mediterranean Fresh: A Compendium of One-Plate Salad Meals and Mix-and-Match Dressings
The Best Casserole Cookbook Ever

WRITING AND LITERATURE
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China
Raising Steaks: The Life and Times of American Beef

And there you have it. Happy reading.