Gift Ideas: 10 Books for the Foodie in Your Life

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Do you love to cook? Does someone close to you love to cook? If you’re struggling with gift ideas for the foodie in your life (or if you’re looking for yourself), look no further! We’ve compiled our top 10 picks for foodies everywhere!

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The Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys coverFrom James Beard Award winner and New York Times–bestselling author of The Art of Fermentation: the recipes, processes, cultural traditions, and stories from around the globe that inspire Sandor Katz and his life’s work—a cookbook destined to become a modern classic essential for every home chef.

For the past two decades, fermentation expert and bestselling author Sandor Katz has traveled the world, both teaching and learning about the many fascinating and delicious techniques for fermenting foods. Wherever he’s gone, he has gleaned valuable insights into the cultures and traditions of local and indigenous peoples, whether they make familiar ferments like sauerkraut or less common preparations like natto and koji.

Featured Excerpts:

Unbelievably Delicious Sauerkraut Chocolate Cake

Easy Cheeses to Make at Home

→ Browse the Book…


The Towpath cover

Italian-inspired recipes from the beloved East London cafe, along with stories capturing the ebb and flow of community, food, and the seasons.

Towpath is a collection of recipes, stories and photographs capturing the vibrant cafe’s food, community and place throughout the arc of its season – beginning just before the first breath of spring, through the dog days of summer and culminating – with fireworks! – before its painted shutters are rolled down again for winter.

Featured Excerpts:

Breaking Up Boring Dinners with Lamb and Hummus!

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The Koji Alchemy cover

Koji Alchemy chefs Jeremy Umansky and Rich Shih—collectively considered to be the most practical, experienced, generous educators on the culinary power of this unique ingredient—deliver a comprehensive look at modern koji use around the world. Using it to rapidly age charcuterie, cheese, and other ferments, they take the magic of koji to the next level, revolutionizing the creation of fermented foods and flavor profiles for both professional and home cooks.

Featured Excerpts:

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Koji

Growing Koji in Your Own Kitchen

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The Mastering Stocks and Broths cover

Mastering Stocks and Broths includes a historical culinary narrative about stocks in the classic French technique as well as through the lens of other cultures around the world. Readers will learn about the importance of quality sourcing, the practical and health benefits of stocks and broths, and detailed methodology on how to develop, store, and use them in a home kitchen. The recipes place a playful emphasis on the value of zero waste, turning spent bones, produce seconds, and leftover animal fats into practical products to use around the home.

Featured Excerpts:

The Fundamentals of Stocks and Broths

A Good Stock Takes Time: Setting up Your Kitchen for Making Stocks and Broths

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The Wildcrafting Brewer cover

The Wildcrafting Brewer opens with a retrospective of plant-based brewing and ancient beers. Pascal Baudar then goes on to describe both hot and cold brewing methods and provides lots of interesting recipes; mugwort beer, horehound beer, and manzanita cider are just a few of the many drinks represented. Baudar is quick to point out that these recipes serve mainly as a touchstone for readers, who can then use the information and techniques he provides to create their own brews, using their own local ingredients.

Featured Excerpts:

Creating Unique Drinks from Nature’s Ingredients: Winter in the Forest Beer

Ancient Fermentation: Homemade Kvass

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The Art of Fermentation cover

The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published. Sandor Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide a reader through their first experience making sauerkraut or yogurt, and in-depth enough to provide greater understanding and insight for experienced practitioners.

Featured Excerpts:

Move Over Squirrels, It’s Acorn Harvesting Time

Chop, Salt, Pack, Wait: Four Simple Steps to Making the Best Sauerkraut on Earth

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The Forage In this groundbreaking collection of nearly 500 wild food recipes, celebrated New York City forager, cook, kitchen gardener, and writer Marie Viljoen incorporates wild ingredients into everyday and special occasion fare. Motivated by a hunger for new flavors and working with thirty-six versatile wild plants—some increasingly found in farmers markets—she offers deliciously compelling recipes for everything from cocktails and snacks to appetizers, entrées, and desserts, as well as bakes, breads, preserves, sauces, syrups, ferments, spices, and salts.

Forage, Harvest, Feast is destined to become a standard reference for any cook wanting to transform wildcrafted ingredients into exceptional dishes, spices, and drinks.

Featured Excerpts:

Foraging 101: Where to Find Your Bounty

Recipe: Fermented Honeysuckle Cordial

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The Black Trumpet cover

At the renowned Black Trumpet restaurant, located in the historic seacoast city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Chef Evan Mallett and his staff reflect the constantly changing seasons of New England, celebrating the unique flavors and traditions of fished, farmed, and foraged foods in their ever-changing menus that rotate roughly every six weeks throughout the course of the year.

Black Trumpet features more than 250 innovative recipes that respect and transcend regional food traditions.

Featured Excerpts:

Recipe: Winter Root Veggie Potpie

A Twist on the Traditional Thanksgiving Feast

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The New Wildcrafted Cuisine cover

The New Wildcrafted Cusine offers up dozens of creative recipes and instructions for preparing a pantry full of preserved foods, including Pickled Acorns, White Sage-Lime Cider, Wild Kimchi Spice, Currant Capers, Infused Salts with Wild Herbs, Pine Needles Vinegar, and many more. And though the author’s own palette of wild foods are mostly common to southern California, readers everywhere can apply Baudar’s deep foraging wisdom and experience to explore their own bioregions and find an astonishing array of plants and other materials that can be used in their own kitchens.

Featured Excerpts:

8 steps to Fermented Hot Sauce with Wild Greens

Strong, Spicy, and Pleasant: Wild Green Kimchi

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The Art of Natural Cheesemaking cover In The Art of Natural Cheesemaking, David Asher practices and preaches a traditional, but increasingly countercultural, way of making cheese—one that is natural and intuitive, grounded in ecological principles and biological science.

The techniques presented are direct and thorough, fully illustrated with hand-drawn diagrams and triptych photos that show the transformation of cheeses in a comparative and dynamic fashion.

Featured Excerpts:

An All-Natural, Traditional Approach to Cheesemaking

Recipe: Fast Ricotta Cheese

→ Browse the Book…


Recommended Reads

Break Up Boring Dinners with Lamb and Hummus!

Fermentation as Metaphor

 

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