There are still chefs who want to share everything they’ve learned in order to make you a better cook. In the spirit of Judy Rodgers’s “Zuni Café Cookbook” or Paul Bertolli’s “Cooking by Hand,” the chef Naomi Pomeroy, of the restaurant Beast in Portland, Ore., doesn’t want to show off. She wants to hold your hand and take you there — “there” being a land where demi-glace and soufflés are actually cool, and where teaching is preferable to telling.
The nearly 140 recipes in “Taste & Technique: Recipes to Elevate Your Home Cooking” incorporate the building blocks of cooking, from shopping for produce to “aerial salting”; searing protein to tasting for balance. Few are shorter than one page; if you’re in a hurry, this is not the book for you. But that’s because Ms. Pomeroy, in collaboration with the writer Jamie Feldmar, sheepdogs the reader through the reasons behind every step in the bossy but warm tone of a hipster den mother. A recipe for whipped crème fraîche begins, “Grab a large, deep bowl — one that’s much bigger than you think you need — and a large whisk.”Photo
“Taste & Technique” is doably aspirational: While the recipes are unabashedly complex, working through them with patience and persistence will indeed make you a better cook, one who prepares complex, restaurant-quality food like lacquered duck confit, butter-poached halibut and duchess potatoes with smoked onion soubise. Thanks to Ms. Pomeroy, there will be many soufflés served at dinner parties this fall, the work of newly confident cooks.
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