Book review: How to cook everything vegetarian by Mark Bittman

The first time I saw Bittman he was on a PBS cooking show. Different from other chefs who start their dish with well washed and cut ingredients, he in fact brings you into the field where the food grow. Not only that he also shows you how to make the dish (of course), and then how people enjoy/hate eating it in the end. Yes the hate bit is the most refreshing bit. Normally you only saw the "My God, this is insanely delicious" reaction , but in his show there was also frowning and eye-rolling and "This is crap" faces.

Next I started subscribing his blogs in New York Times called The Minimalist. At first I thought he tried to be an minimalist in terms of what ingredients he used, nothing except for the absolutely essential, you know, olive oil, salt and pepper as pasta sauce school. But according to this Wiki entry, that the minimalist here at least also refers to the amount of editing efforts he puts into his film. Oops, Cut my finger! No worries. That is in fact salt not sugar? Not the end of the world.

No nothing happened like that on his show. But his point is that kitchen is not a scientific lab, mistakes are allowed so, take it easy.

That is part of why I like about this book. It gives you options--after the basic recipe there are often a couple more with some alternations for you to play with. The message there is that it is OK if you don't like beet root (in MM's case) or you don't have butter for bread.

Not everybody can improvise, especially when a cooking pan is sizzling. That is why Bittman lists the basic principles at the beginning of each chapter. For example, in the chapter on bread he starts with the basics of flour then moves onto yeast, and only after nine pages there came the first recipe! How good is his recipe? I have tried several of his bread recipes so far (pizza, Irish soda bread, yeast sandwich bread, sweet golden bread, and yogurt biscuits) and most of them turned out quite well, and I didn't have much experience of making bread before Bittman.

Although in one case I think he did make a mistake about the olive oil salt bread recipe (pg 689), which requires 1 tablespoon baking powder. I followed it and my "bread" ended up in trash bin--it was way too bitter for any human to bear. On a retrospective, he must have meant "one teaspoon"...

The last thing I like about the book is that it has recipes for food from all over the world, from stir-fry and kimchi to core bread and coleslaw. What I am still waiting to find out though, is how authentic they are. The falafel was pretty good, according to MM. The kimchi recipe was not so satisfactory, and the Chinese ones, I haven't bothered to look at (for the same reason I normally don't go to any Chinese restaurant overseas). For the food we don't know enough, a good way is to compare Bittman's recipes with those from a book solely on a certain type of food (assumption: a person who was brave enough to write an Indian/Italian/Thai/Mexico/Jewish cooking book must know enough about the food and provide authentic recipes).

I have about 20 cooking books and I found myself keep reaching out for this one lately. Yes it is new so I am curious to check it out. But I assure you he must have done something right. Don't take my words, others seem also like it judging from its 4.5 stars at Amazon site.

Update: Here is Bittman's TED presentation on why eat Vegetarian (it is a matter of personal health as well as Planet health). Very impressive.