Food Porn for the Bookworm

“Time spent reading is time well spent” or so I will begin to always say. Not those purple paperbacks or self-help books so frequently seen cluttering bookshelves these days, I’m talking about books that really add to (and refresh) the fountain of knowledge we’ve collected over the years.

When I can tear myself away from the Larousse Gastronomique, I’m studying Sarah Labensky’s On Cooking. Reluctantly I’ll peruse my copies of Gordon Ramsay’s World Kitchen and A Chef for all Seasons before diving headfirst into my own copy of Heston Blumenthal’s Big Fat Duck Cookbook. But the true gems in my collection are Herve This’ Molecular Gastronomy,  Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, and Niki Segnit’s Flavor Thesaurus. The first four are valuable for picking up technique and learning classic recipes. The last four are a boon to anyone looking to experiment with flavors once the fundamentals are well understood.

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to another great tool – I’m going to print this out as a huge poster and put it on the wall of my test kitchen. Check out “Taste Buds: Complementary Flavors“.

Enjoy, and keep on truckin’

7 minutes, boiled.