Product Description

A unique work dealing in-depth with flavor and flavorings!

With the increasing popularity of regional and ethnic cuisines, cooks frequently encounter recipes calling for unfamiliar seasonings. Seasoning Savvy: How to Cook with Herbs, Spices, and Other Flavorings serves as a guide to identifying, locating, selecting, storing and using these exotic ingredients. Well-established flavorings are not neglected as Seasoning Savvy also brings new insights into cooking with these old favorites.

No other book supplies so much information about so many herbs and spices as Seasoning Savvy. This book discusses over 100 herbs, spices, flavorings, and blends in detail, describing their origins and how to select, store, and use them--and what the reader might substitute if a seasoning is unavailable. You will also discover the flavor role of foods such as almonds, citrus fruits, and coconuts. Not a cookbook, Seasoning Savvy is a powerful compliment for every recipe and will help you get the most out of the seasonings you use to flavor your food. Within Seasoning Savvy you will explore:

• how to select and use the right seasonings for a recipe and how to tell if a spice is fresh
  
• drying, freezing, toasting, chopping, measuring, and storing herbs and spices
  
• culinary practices in the use of flavorings from chocolate and vanilla to amchur and mastic
  
• flavor combinations, including both well-known and exotic blends, flavored oils and vinegars, compound butters and seasoned salts
  
• how to reduce the intensity of some seasonings such as garlic and chili peppers
  
• an examination of the nature of taste of flavor along with a history of spice usage in the US
  
• brewing teas and tisanes
  
• savvy culinary tips, such as polishing a copper a bowl with lemon juice and salt, or storing a lump of asafetida in the spice cupboard to discourage insects
  
  Seasoning Savvy's tips and techniques will help you bring out the flavor in your food and teach you how to use seasonings to achieve the tastes you like. With this vital book, you will transform your cooking from satisfactory to sensational!
  

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1434388 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-10
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.38 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 268 pages

From Amazon.com
Seasoning Savvy is the reference book every cook needs--a comprehensive and clearly written compendium of everything worth knowing about ingredients for flavoring food. Packed into a mere 265 pages (18 of which are black-and-white photos), Alice Arndt, a food historian, teacher, and writer, presents 87 individual items, 36 seasoning blends, plus other flavorings, like vinegars, salt, and sugar.

Each entry--from Ajowan, an Indian spice with pungent, thyme-like flavor that is also known as bishop's weed, omam, or netch azmud (botanical name Trachyspermum ammi), to Woodruff, the herb that gives German May wine its grassy and vanilla notes, and from Advieh, an Iranian spice mix, to Quatre Épices, the variable combination used to spice French pâtés--is ample without being esoteric. These entries describe how an herb or spice looks and tastes (Winter Savory is like a peppery, pungent thyme while Summer Savory is milder) and how the item is used in its native tradition. Arndt then suggests other possibilities. Hence savory, or sariette, flavors French goat cheese but would be good in a three-bean salad, and it reduces the odor of cabbage during cooking. She also recommends substitutions, suggesting that oregano can replace cilantro, and vanilla extract might replace Kewra Water, a floral Indian flavoring, when necessary.

Because the taste of food is affected by more than the aromatic compounds added by spices and herbs, Arndt explains how heat, cold, and other variables influence our perceptions of flavor. In sum, she makes Seasoning Savvy a user-friendly reference book that cooks of all levels, from beginners to professionals, will value. --Dana Jacobi

Darra Goldstein, PhD, Author, The Vegetarian Hearth, A Taste of Russia, The Georgian Feast, Williamstown, Massachusetts
"Alice Arndt's passion for the flavors that spice up our lives is felt on every page of this indispensable reference work. . . . Arndt draws the reader into an exciting world of flavors. This book belongs on every library shelf, but should also be brought into the kitchen. . . . Provides a comprehensive list of seasonings and offers reassuring advice on their culinary uses so that even novice cooks can use flavorings like asafetida with aplomb. . . . IDENTIFIES THE WORLD'S MOST IMPORTANT SPICE MIXTURES AND GIVES RECIPES TO FOR RECREATING THEM . . . A WONDERFUL BOOK."

Nancy Harmon Jenkins, Author of The Mediterranean Diet Cookbook
"Well-written and wonderfully comprehensive exploration of the world of herbs, spices and aromatics-at once authorative and easy to use. There's inspiration and good advice for everyone from cooks and restaurant chefs to culinary historians and food scholars."