The Best Cookbooks of Summer 2022
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My America: Recipes From a Young Black Chef
Bludso’s BBQ Cookbook: A Family Affair in Smoke and Soul
I Dream of Dinner (So You Don't Have To): Low-Effort, High-Reward Recipes
Cooking With Plant-Based Meat: 75 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes for All Your Meaty Cravings
Perhaps it's Covid, or some supply-chain catch-up, but boy are there a ton of good cookbooks out there right now. So many in fact, that I'm doing two roundups this year instead of just one. Since it’s still summer, I found books for grilling, with plenty of options for carnivores and vegetarians. Others take a direct look at what it means to be an American in 2022, all while providing astounding recipes. One is full of creative and incredibly satisfying dishes that are surprisingly easy to make, perfect for hot summer nights. Finally, a book from two CDC employees uses science to create fabulous cookies. Grab your apron, put the cutting board on the counter, pour yourself something cool to drink, and get cooking.
- Courtesy of Knopf
My America: Recipes From a Young Black Chef
By Kwame Onwuachi with Joshua David Stein (Knopf)Scouting for this story, I stopped in at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, and four staff members wanted to share this book so much, they bent over backward to make sure they found the last copy in the city-block-sized store. Sold out in the cookbook section, this copy was in with the best sellers. Kwame Onwuachi came out of the blocks strong with his 2019 literary memoir, Notes From a Young Black Chef, and his first cookbook does not disappoint. He calls it a "celebration of the food of the African diaspora," and it touches on dishes from places like Jamaica, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago, Louisiana, and New York. Having recently come back from a trip to Puerto Rico, I made his pollo asado and yellow rice, favorites of his from growing up in the Puerto Rican section of the Bronx. Like other recipes in the book, these are dishes built in layers, where flavor-packed “pantry” items you make, such as garlic-ginger purée, mojo sauce, and sofrito, are augmented with store-bought powerhouse ingredients like powdered bouillon, sazón, and adobo seasoning. The result is high-end devourable food you'll make again. (Bonus: For more on the diaspora, check out chef and writer Stephen Satterfeld hosting the recent Netflix series High on the Hog.)
- Courtesy of Ten Speed Press
Bludso’s BBQ Cookbook: A Family Affair in Smoke and Soul
By Kevin Bludso with Noah Galuten (Ten Speed Press)Most writers spend years struggling to find their voice. Kevin Bludso, pitmaster at Bludso’s Bar & Que in Los Angeles and a regular television personality, establishes his voice in the first paragraph: “I was born and raised in Compton, California, with a police officer father and a Black Panther-supporter mother. Every summer, to stay out of trouble, I went to Corsicana, Texas, to work at my granny's illegal, bootleg BBQ stand.” He never lets you go after that. What's equally impressive is how much you can learn as you read and cook your way through his book. Even for potato salad, he's encouraging you to mix with your hands, taste frequently, and season as you go. “It should taste good every step of the way.” His brisket, which can take up to 14 hours (or more), gives you an escape hatch with a sidebar titled, “The ‘If You Get Drunk and Go to Bed’ Method.” I made his spicy creole cabbage, as well as a smoky, three-meat extravaganza with ham hock, andouille sausage, and bacon. It's always a good sign when my wife Elisabeth gets into a meaty dish. Here, she wanted seconds.
Only last year did we get the first major cookbook from a black pitmaster (Rodney Scott). Let's hope that Bludso's is a sign that we'll see more and more in the near future.
(Bonus: For a scholarly take on the history of Black BBQ in the United States and how their contributions were often sidelined, check out Arian Miller's excellent Black Smoke.)
- Courtesy of Clarkson Potter
I Dream of Dinner (So You Don't Have To): Low-Effort, High-Reward Recipes
By Ali Slagle (Clarkson Potter)A reimagining of dinner recipes that take less than 45 minutes and use less than 10 ingredients might feel like the theme of some crummy cookbook you impulse-purchased on Amazon at a low moment. Instead, Ali Slagle's recipes make you think of the smart simplicity of Sam Sifton and the creative gusto of Hugh Acheson. Slagle’s recipes feel inventive, new, and doable on a Tuesday. Huzzah! Polenta with lime butter gets a fresh boost with pepitas, cumin, lime, and kernels from ears of corn run through a box grater. Should we put an egg on top? Hell yes, we should! Next, try her chicken Caesar, where you make a vat of dressing and use some as a marinade to enhance the flavor of the boneless, skinless thighs, the favored chicken part of professionals everywhere. Out of gas? Make her mom's chili, which isn’t fancy but, as she puts it, is “so good, people joke it'll be celebrated on her gravestone.” There are about 150 recipes in this book and every one feels about 150 times more clever than what I would have come up with after a long day. This is a cookbook that you hang on to and get covered in sauce stains—in other words, the best kind.
- Courtesy of America's Test Kitchen
Cooking With Plant-Based Meat: 75 Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes for All Your Meaty Cravings
By the editors at America's Test Kitchen (America's Test Kitchen)America's Test Kitchen has a huge archive of excellent, tested recipes, and it frequently cherry-picks from them to make specialized cookbooks. Across the board, these books are smart and helpful, yet this one does something different. Yes, the answer is in its title, but the team at ATK being the team at ATK, the book formalizes their—and our—relationship with plant-based meat. The approach focuses on getting us to use it just like we might for ground beef or ground pork; the art on the front and back of the book features photos of meat-lover classics like a burger, chili, tacos, pizza, banh mi, and lettuce wraps.
Two things I appreciated were basics about plant-based meat that I hadn't yet internalized: You should cook it less, especially for burgers, as the texture is best when it's cooked to about 130-135 degrees (you're on your own after that). And you can embellish it just like real ground meat. For example, I made a chorizo seasoning to mix into Impossible Burger for excellent tacos with potatoes and salsa verde. Change up the herbs and spices and create meatballs, breakfast sausage, and sweet Italian sausage. These aren't groundbreaking recipes, but repertoire-builders that normalize an ingredient that's relatively new to all of us. Can I get an amen? One note: You'll want to experiment to find your favorite brand of meat. I find Impossible Burger—ATK’s favorite—solid across the board, but Beyond Beef—the runner-up—is not my thing, so shop, taste, and make sure you're cooking with one you like.
(Bonus: For more earth-friendly barbecue, check out Argentine chef Francis Mallmann's Green Fire.)
- Courtesy of Countryman Press
Fabulous Modern Cookies: Lessons in Better Baking for Next-Generation Treats
By Chris Taylor and Paul Arguin (Countryman Press)The basics of baking appeal to my inner sense of order. There's a precision that speaks directly to my detail-focused recipe-writer's mind. Ingredients are weighed out, instructions are precise, the causes and effects are nakedly on view. The cookie canon, though, could use some shaking up, and that's exactly what makes this book stand out. FMC is modern because it mixes solid technique and envelope pushing, particularly when it comes to flavors. A “classic” recipe here might be the authors’ spin on chocolate chip cookies where the butter is “bronzed,” meaning the nutty, buttery goodness of brown butter is amped up by adding milk solids in the form of milk powder. (Side note: Bronze me in butter anytime, baby!) The book includes all shapes, sizes, and types of cookie, including savory. I got off to a great start by making Thai coconut macaroon bars where fine-chopped makrut lime leaves are mixed into the filling along with cashews and two forms of coconut—cream of and shredded. I brought them over to celebrate my nephew's birthday, and the verdict was clear: They were fabulous, as promised.
- Courtesy of Clarkson Potter
Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home
By Eric Kim (Clarkson Potter)It's hard to write a cookbook that tells a story, harder still to get people to read it, but this book by the New York Times columnist and Atlanta-born son of Korean immigrants balances expertly between well-written recipes and tales of growing up in the United States. It's also a big, beautiful tribute to Kim’s mother, Jean. As he says, it's “a story about what happens when a family bands together to migrate and cross oceans in search of a new home.” Kim did the recipe writing and testing with Jean during the pandemic. “Getting a recipe out of my mother is like pulling teeth from a tiger's mouth,” but we should be grateful for their work.
If you don't regularly cook with Korean ingredients, pick out a couple of recipes to make, figure out what's not in your cupboard, and head to H-Mart for a head start. I'd never made anything like his take on doenjang jjigae, a stew with enoki, zucchini, and giant, wobbly shards of silken tofu in a broth of fermented soybean paste. It's a bowlful of umami and texture. For incredibly easy fun, make the “chicken radishes,” so named because they're designed to be eaten with the fried chicken that graces the cover. Just mix vinegar, salt, and sugar in a mason jar, pop in some radishes, go to bed, and wake up to have them transformed into something crunchy and delicious. “Daebak!” as his mom might say. Exceptional.
