The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs

I love that this isn't a recipe book that tells me what to do moment by moment. Instead, it's a reference book that helps me to add flavor to my own dishes, flavor that differs from my own tried and trues. I love to cook and have been doing so for more years than I care to admit to. I don't always want a recipe to tell me what to do. Sometimes I just want to make something of my own creation. This book really helps with that. I've only had it a few days but it's already been quite useful. It lists flavors that different "experts" (doesn't say who the experts are unless I've missed it) use for particular ingredients. And it lists them in different type according to how many experts recommend that particular flavor combination. Bold type, all capitals, with an asterisk is use for the tried and true flavor combos. Small type, regular print (not bold) is for the least recommended but still mentioned by one or more. Those are the extremes, there are others in between. For instance, there are two pages on Asparagus, covering both regular and white. It begins with the season it's generally available (spring), the weight of the flavor (light-medium), the volume of the flavor (moderate) and the techniques (blanch, boil, deep-fry, pan roast, stir fry). Then it offers a list of the nuts, herbs and spices, other vegetables, cheeses, eggs, sauces, oils, salts, creams, stocks, etc. that work well with Asparagus. It then gives you Flavor Affinities, which are groups of flavorings that work well together such as asparagus + ham + morel mushrooms + Parmesan Cheese. It then offers some dishes from chefs in which Asparagus is featured such as Ricotta Gnocchi with Asparagus, Morels and Pine nuts from Dan Barber, Blue Hill at Stone Barns (Pocantico Hills, NY). Last, it gives a recommendation on how to make asparagus soup from Daniel Humm of NYs Eleven Madison Park: You need a lot of asparagus flavor. You need acidity. You need sweetness that will come from the asparagus. You need the right amount of salt. You need just the right amount of spice, so that it doesn't actually taste spicy. We use a lot of cayenne, but you would never know it is there; it is just an accent. You need fresh lime juice to finish. Then he discusses the balance of flavors in soup and how to manage that with this soup (sweat the asparagus). Instead of a recipe, you get a how to on making your own soup your way. The whole book has tips from chefs just like that. I'm going to love this part on "Chocolate/Cocoa-in general" Stuff that works well with chocolate! Experimenting time!! I hope I've given you an idea of what this excellent book can do for you.

I first picked up a flavor Bible in a B&N bookstore many years ago. As someone who loves to tinker in the kitchen, its an extremely helpful tool when I'm putting together dishes or feel like my dish is "missing something". Not only has this book broadened the scope of ingredients I use, it's also informed the way I cooked and helped a largely self taught home cook about balance and composition. I bring up this book frequently in conversations about cooking and recently a friend asked to borrow it. So I did what any sensible person would do: I bought a loaner copy so I wouldn't have to part with mine for even a moment.

I started learning to cook by following recipes that were either handed down to me or that I got out of a cookbook or magazine. When comparing this method to professional chefs who pull together wonderful, creative dishes with seemingly effortless ease it seems amateurish and simplistic, however it is a necessary phase. By following recipes I learned crucial techniques as well as what a well prepared meal should look and taste like. The next phase started when I tried to create my own recipes by first substituting one ingredient for another and later by going off the reservation completely by trying food combinations that I had never encountered in my recipes. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it led to disaster. Enter The Flavor Bible. A few reviewers have criticized this book for being a mere collection of lists of ingredients. Far from that, I see it as the Rosetta Stone for serious home cooks and professional chefs alike. As I have learned to use fresh, locally grown foods more I am often searching for a way to combine them. Trying to find a recipe that allows me to take advantage of a bumper crop of artichokes, sweet onions and garden grown thyme can be challenging. By using The Flavor Bible I look up artichokes and I can see what ingredients compliment it and I can put together a great tasting dish. However, this is only one element of the book. Beside listing ingredients and pairing them with other flavors the book also lists cuisines that make use of the ingredient in question. You may also look up a specific cuisine (Indian, Thai, Tex-Mex, Moroccan, etc.) and find commonly used ingredients, Flavor Affinities and often, a paragraph or two from a professional chef. Something else that I liked was that you could look up seasons (summer, winter, etc.) and find what foods are best served when it is hot or cold outside. The photographs (by Barry Salzman) are top notch and very inspirational. There are not very many of them but I don't think that there needs to be since this is not a cookbook you don't need to see what a particular dish is supposed to look like when completed. If you are still a little rusty on technique and are unsure about relative proportions you may not be ready for this book. If however you have graduated from only using the recipes of others and would like to explore unique and wonderful flavor combinations, I couldn't recommend this book any higher.

I recently added this book to my cookbook collection, which numbers more than 1,000 volumes (probably more like 1200 but I'm still cataloging). It has immediately become one of my favorites (and definitely my #1 favorite in English). If you are a serious cook, love to read cookbooks like novels, and view recipes as suggestions rather than as requiring strict adherence to precise measurements, then this is the book for you! (Did I say I LOVE this book?) I make all of the desserts for my husband's restaurant. If I snag some particularly luscious fruit and want to make it into a dessert, this is the book I reach for first. I don't WANT to be told how to make a fruit sorbet. I already know how. But I love having a list of suggested flavors and products that go with what I already have. It's like having an uber-creative friend at your side saying "hey, why not try THIS?" And if you are not an experienced cook, this book provides invaluable guidance that a recipe book never could. It is wholly different from every food book I have ever read. The book is clever, useful, and obviously the product of prodigious research. To the authors, I send my humble gratitude. You have made my life immeasurably easier, and my dishes far more interesting than ever before. This book is a must-read if you love to eat or love to cook. I have already bought six copies and have given two as gifts. It's THAT good.

First I have to say... don't buy reference books for your Kindle. Ever. There may be exceptions, but i would not look for them. Kindle simply is not a format that lends itself to research reading or reference; not saying it's impossible, but, generally, it doesn't work well. Now that you've been duly warned, please, don't buy and then rate book *content* because they translate poorly into Kindle *format* unless that is it's primary binding. It's not fair to other readers to drive down the rating on a text's usefulness or interest based on one format. Amazon, of course, should separate them out, or give shoppers the option. The first thing I EVER read about Kindle is, don't buy anything you would normally be "leafing" through, using an index, depending on diagrams or graphics etc. (not the case here) or where formatting is otherwise an issue (e.g. tables). Maybe some years down the road it will improve, and I don't use a Kindle Fire, but I stick to this advice and it serves me well. Now as far as The Flavor Bible goes: If you are anything but a recipe-guided cook--for instance, if you are staring into your cupboards or fridge and wondering what will work with what--and like me, you are too inexperienced or genetically underendowed with smell and taste to figure it out on your own - you WANT this book. you NEED this book. This book is the most useful and most used in my kitchen. IMO, aside from basic culinary skills - how to to cook certain cuts of meat, or how to use a steamer, or how to make sauce, or how many courses to serve ,or what order your menu should proceed through, or how to butcher meat - whatever - this is the only book you will ever need. If you don't have basic culinary skills, you can find everything you need to know on the internet. i went from how to cook different meats, to how to make sauces, and up from there, using sites like about dot com. I'm no chef - i'm a basic cook - but my food is GOOD. Since I don't have a well-developed palate, this book is a life-saver. and of course, once you start learning, you can start jumping around. Now i *know* - am i in the mood for a cream based dish? pineapple? potato? thyme? curry? chicken? pork? and what am i going to do with these leftovers? wow - i can plan a week and have EVERYTHING work together! The hardback version is well bound, easily referenced, and contains literally thousands of cross-references and often suggestions on how to combine dishes and seasonings as well, based on a main ingredient, in a way you will never find on the internet. And it's not just about seasoning--you can look up literally almost any seasoning OR basic ingredient and find a long list of compatible ingredients/flavors, in alphabetical order, with advice to let you know what goes the very best, what goes well, and what works but may not be ideal. AND an index. So you can look up a meat, or a vegetable, or a seasoning, or most any ingredient, and get a long list of what you can safely combine (within reason). and of course the hardback props open well. it's a quality bind on a quality text that you can keep forever.

When I first sank my teeth into reading this book I was very confused by the books organization and overall goal, just seemed overly complex for no reason. To the testament of the book I picked it up at 3am, I was a little sleep deprived so my brain was not functioning at full capacity. After reading Ch.1 I decided I absolutely hate the book to the point I decided to return it. In my 10+ years of purchasing things from Amazon I never returned anything. I just made the best out of my less than satisfied purchases. I hated this book so much that returning it seemed like the most vindictive way to get back at the authors for writing it and Amazon for selling it. A few days later I said let me go ahead in initiate this return process which I had no clue how to do. It had nothing to do with the getting a refund as I order so much I just did an account credit. I just didn't want the book in my home any longer. I am in the midst of developing a spice line so when I'm working and I reach for my other resources and I see the Flavor Bible it puts me in an immediate annoyed mood. Trust me on this guys I never had any product affect me to this degree. It was as if the book was giving off bad mojo. Quickly I learned of Amazon's brilliant and convenient return policy and retrieved my return code. I'm the type of person who does my due diligence on anything I spend my money on so I had to second guess why I purchased the book in the first place. I had reviewed and read samples of so many spice books before my purchase and Flavor Bible kept making the cut. It was not adding up. I decided with return code and book in hand about to head out to UPS, let me crack it open and give it another go. It's when I fell in love. It was as if everything in the book represented perfect harmony and balance. It immediately clicked for me that this is a spice dictionary and that's all it is, with examples of how to use and pair the spices just like a word dictionary. From that moment I was able to explore it and test it properly. Anything I thought of in that 5-minute span to want to get insight about I was able to find in the book due to it's alphabetical arrangement. So why 4-stars and not 5? Technically I wanted to give it 3 1/2 but we all know its not possible. The book is awkwardly arranged. Even when you find what you are looking for you have to take care to make sure what you are reading is not referring to something else across the page. The list format is pretty much annoying because it's like okay you have this list, no what? I'm a pretty creative mind and decent cook so the list suggestions is really all I need to get my wheels spinning. However for less experienced cooks and creative minds, its useless. Content arrangement on the pages does not naturally flow. My biggest pet peeve, NO INDEX. For a book of this size 380 pages, it's weird not to have an index. Only a dictionary is this vast with no index. Had it been called a "Dictionary," I would have understood from the beginning how to navigate it. I decided to keep the "Flavor Dictionary," thinking of it in this form will keep me from wanting to slap the authors for calling it a Bible, a bible has an index. I would recommend this book to those persons with some culinary background and very creative mind. Others, you will receive NO guidance on how to use the items mentioned in the book whatsoever.

This book is not a collection of recipes. The whole point of the book is to help you become an intelligent and creative cook and learn to improvise and not just follow recipes. There is some narrative in the first part of the book, but the majority of the book is a list of ingredients and types of cuisine. For each ingredient, the book lists its peak season, taste profile, best cooking technique and various tips ("Use at the end of cooking", etc.). Then for each ingredient there is a full list of matching flavors designated by 1) recommended by a number of experts; 2) highly recommended by a greater number of experts; and 3) the "Holy Grail" pairings that are most highly recommended by the greatest number of experts. There are also tips from chefs scattered among the ingredients ("Winter vegetables work with winter herbs. Sage and rosemary work with potatoes and root vegetables."), dishes (not full recipes) prepared by chefs ("Yogurt with Caramel, Aged Balsamic and Pine Nut Brittle") and then flavor affinities ("feta cheese + chicken + mint" or "brussels sprouts + cream + nutmeg"). If you are looking to take your cooking skills to the next level and break away from simply following recipes, this is the book for you.

It is a fairly rare kind of book, but it is definitely more of a reference than light reading (unless encyclopedias, textbooks, or dictionaries count as light reading) or even a recipe guide. There are no recipes, and only a few photos; most of it is a kind of dictionary of ingredients with each ingredient getting a short list of ingredients that seem to go well with them, with some short commentary by various chefs. There is also a 50-page guide sections describing flavor and texture profiles. I think it's most common use would be as a look-it-up-yourself offline alternative to asking "what can I use to substitute ____", or "what can I do with ___?", or maybe to assist with modifying existing recipes. More for a recipe tinkering worktable or test kitchen, and probably an easy buy if the word "gastronomy" comes up a lot around you. It is valuable if you do that much tinkering, otherwise straightforward cookbooks are more useful buys for a kitchen library, particularly focusing on regional cuisines, local ingredient availability, or curational themes (historical, seasonal, movie/book/game inspired, etc). The Amazon preview really only shows some pages from the 50 page flavor/texture guide at the start of the book, this kind of book could benefit from showing even just 1 page from the latter 250+ pages, since the rest of the book is arranged the same way, as a list of lists, and would give a much clearer idea of what this book is like.