Product Description

Great cooking goes beyond following a recipe--it's knowing how to season ingredients to coax the greatest possible flavor from them. Drawing on dozens of leading chefs' combined experience in top restaurants across the country, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg present the definitive guide to creating "deliciousness" in any dish. Thousands of ingredient entries, organized alphabetically and cross-referenced, provide a treasure trove of spectacular flavor combinations. Readers will learn to work more intuitively and effectively with ingredients; experiment with temperature and texture; excite the nose and palate with herbs, spices, and other seasonings; and balance the sensual, emotional, and spiritual elements of an extraordinary meal.Seasoned with tips, anecdotes, and signature dishes from America's most imaginative chefs, THE FLAVOR BIBLE is an essential reference for every kitchen.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #221 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 392 pages

Review
Inspired....Open yourself to a delicious new experience. (Oprah Winfrey in O Magazine )

The Flavor Bible...is amazing. (Sandra Lee on the Today Show, on her favorite books for holiday gifting )

One of the best cookbooks of the year. (Sara Moulton on Good Morning America )

A seminal work...Destined to become a classic. (Lucinda Scala Quinn on Martha Stewart Living Radio )

I love The Flavor Bible...[One of 19] must-have food books [of all time] (Ellen Rose on NPR's Good Food  )

One of the best books of the year. (People )

Unique (Newsweek )

Flavor masters Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg have compiled an encyclopedic primer to flavor. (Associated Press )

Readers will find themselves referring to this handsome volume again and again. (Publishers Weekly )

A unique resource...Wonderfully inspiring and immensely useful. (Library Journal )

Sets down in print what has often been believed inexpressible. (Booklist )

Resembles none of the foodie culture's memoirs or cultural histories or cookbooks...It's more like the I Ching. Open it randomly, and it will open you up to an array of possibilities in your culinary future. (Emily Nunn in The Chicago Tribune )

About the Author
Recently cited as two of a dozen "international culinary luminaries" along with Patrick O'Connell, Alice Waters, and Tim and Nina Zagat (in Relais & Chateaux's L'Ame et L'Esprit magazine), the award-winning authors Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg have written several groundbreaking books chronicling and celebrating America's culinary revolution. What to Drink with What You Eat, Becoming a Chef, Dining Out, and The New American Chef were all winners of or finalists for Gourmand World Cookbook, IACP, and/or James Beard book awards. In March 2007, Page and Dornenburg were named weekly wine columnists for the Washington Post. Karen Page is a graduate of Northwestern and Harvard Business School. Andrew Dornenburg studied with the legendary Madeleine Kamman at the School for American Chefs and has cooked professionally in top restaurants in New York City. Their Web site is www.becomingachef.com.
  

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Customer Reviews

Lives Up To Its Title
This book takes the core of the authors' previous book "Culinary Artistry" (which contains a list of just about any food you might wish to eat, and the flavors do and do not go with that food), and expands it to include a greater range complementary flavors, based on interviewing chefs and reviewing menus and recipes throughout America, based on evolving tastes since the earlier book came out.

The Flavor Bible is better organized in many respects than Culinary Artistry - more food combinations listed, flavor affinities ranked (from "marriages made in heaven" to merely recommended), flavor conflicts better identified, and less of the authors' rather frou frou prose. Classic combinations of multiple flavors are provided as well (use these herbs and oils for Greek, use those for Thai). Chef's quotes provide interesting insights about flavor and technique throughout as well.

If you are an improvisational cook, this might well become the most useful cooking reference on your shelf. Buy this volume instead of Culinary Artistry if you don't already own the earlier book, but if you already own Culinary Artistry, you will want to own this one as well (I grabbed it the day I saw it). Pass on your much used, food stained copy of Culinary Artistry to a new cook.

My main quibble with the Flavor Bible would be that the three-column layout make it somewhat difficult to spot the main food at the head of each list - in this regard, I would have preferred that the authors stick with the layout of the list in Culinary Artistry.

I noticed that at least one flavor conflict (lavender and chestnuts) identified in a chef's quote did not make it into the lists - it might be worth scouring the quotes to look for other affinities and conflicts within the pages of the book for the next edition. They do not list two of my personal favorite flavor pals (strawberries + Drambuie, and cherries + harissa); however, my wife disagrees with me over the latter, so perhaps that is just as well.

A searchable CD-ROM containing the lists would be a valuable enhancement to this text; it would be wonderful to be able to cross reference compatible flavors with the other dimensions of flavor (taste, mouthfeel, aroma, and "the X factor") which are identified in the book, in order to facilitate experimenting with the types of contrasts which often lead to the creation of a successful dish.

None of the foregoing, however, should take away from the scope and accomplishment of this magnificent, ambitious, and highly useful work.

Highly recommended.

A Must-Have Resource Book for the Kitchen
The Flavor Bible is a great resource for those of us who like to cook without a recipe from time to time. I would say it is not for the beginner cook, who might need step-by-step instructions for creating a meal. The Flavor Bible presents, in alphabetical order, a rich variety of foods and flavours with corresponding ingredients to complement them. Some may be classic pairings and others quite unexpected and inspiring. The pairings are not just from the authors, but are a compilation of the best combinations from dozens of world famous chefs.
This is a perfect book for me, a spice and condiment collector who, once I get these treasures home, wonders what to do with them!
The book is prefaced with two chapters devoted to all the factors that go into how we taste foods, and the rest of the book is an encyclopedia of flavour matchings. I love that it is peppered with quotes and facts from chefs and cooks from around the world.
I look forward to reading Culinary Artistry one day soon.

expand your palette
After reviewing the other user comments for this book, I had to write my own. There is no index... however the book is entirely A through Z. Under each product (beef, chicken, beans, types of cheeses and so forth), they have a list of common flavours to accompany it. They have them in a rating system using italics and bold to show the most desirable and the average combinations. They also list flavour affinities which are groups of spices/herbs/ingredients to use on the product. Chefs from restaurants all over the US have also added personal comments throughout the book detailing how their restaurants use the ingredient. As a young culinary mind seeking to expand my palette, I find this a commonly viewed reference when trying to come up with new ideas for dishes. It is certainly a better reference than some of my 100$ + books for school :P