Rating: 
Summary: A delightful array of innovative and refreshing ideas
Review: Recipes from a popular San Francisco institution and culinary tradition are packed between the covers of Zuni Cafe Cookbook, with dishes providing a delightful array of innovative and refreshing ideas, from Spicy Squid Stew with Red Wine and Roasted Peppers to Beef & Onion Gratin with Tomatoes. Cooks who don't mind spending time in the kitchen will find these dishes appealing and delicious.
Rating:
Summary: A delightful array of innovative and refreshing ideas
Review: Recipes from a popular San Francisco institution and culinary tradition are packed in here, with dishes providing a delightful array of innovative and refreshing ideas, from Spicy Squid Stew with Red Wine and Roasted Peppers to Beef & Onion Gratin with Tomatoes. Cooks who don't mind spending time in the kitchen will find these dishes appealing and delicious.
Rating:
Summary: A teaching tool for serious cooks
Review: San Francisco chef Rodgers teaches as she cooks and her clear, authoritative voice is an inspiration, reinforced by 24 luscious color photographs and 50 black and white photographs illustrating technique. Emphasizing quality ingredients and constant tasting, she painstakingly explains what to look for and how to taste. More than once she cautions that it may take several tries before a dish sounds that note of perfection on the tongue. Rodgers' style of cooking requires some forethought - all her meat and poultry is lightly salted at least a day before cooking - to "open up" the proteins, and some dishes, like Artichoke Caponata, improve when made ahead.The book is organized by course and the introductions to each recipe offer tips on ingredients or technique, suggestions for leftovers and sometimes the dish's history in her repertoire, which is French and Italian-influenced. Some dishes are simple - her signature Roast Chicken with Bread Salad is a snap as long as you remember to salt the chicken the day before (it does make a difference). Several soups (Asparagus & Rice with Pancetta & Black Pepper) are quick and easy, as long as you've got the stock on hand - canned stock is beneath mention - and several pickles, condiments and sauces (Preserved Lemons, Roasted Pepper Relish, Sage Pesto) are simple enough to keep on hand, but basically, Rodgers is not about quick and easy. The hamburger that the pickles are served with starts with grinding your own chuck - twice. Pasta with Sardines & Tomato Sauce begins with cleaning, broiling, then filleting the sardines, although the roasted tomato sauce is quick, easy and different. Pot Roast begins with reducing a bottle of red wine to a half cup and four cups of beef stock to two. There are detailed instructions for cooking omelettes and risotto, making the best stock, braising meats, preparing a cheese tray, making granitas and sorbets. She gives reasons for every step from choosing a pot to skimming fat - or not. The introduction is a fine primer on basic technique (especially "early salting") and equipment and she concludes with "notes on frequently used ingredients and related techniques" and mail order sources. This is a book for aspiring cooks, good cooks looking to be better and armchair cooks.
Rating:
Summary: New Classic
Review: The Zuni Cafe Cookbook is a new classic in my kitchen. It includes both recipes and classic cooking principles that can be applied to other cooking adventures. It was love at first read and will be on my Christmas gift list this year for other serious cooking friends.
Rating:
Summary: New Classic
Review: The Zuni Cafe Cookbook is a new classic in my kitchen. It includes both recipes and classic cooking principles that can be applied to other cooking adventures. It was love at first read and will be on my Christmas gift list this year for other serious cooking friends.
Rating: 
Summary: Less than 10 photos but very good recipes
Review: There 're lots of very good recipes in this one, and lots of those techniques & explanation. So if you're curious & you wanna learn more about the chemistry of cooking, this is the one for you. But if you're the lazy kind who love interesting photos to come with the recipes, maybe you'll need sth else.
Rating:
Summary: Less than 10 photos but very good recipes
Review: There 're lots of very good recipes in this one, and lots of those techniques & explanation. So if you're curious & you wanna learn more about the chemistry of cooking, this is the one for you. But if you're the lazy kind who love interesting photos to come with the recipes, maybe you'll need sth else.
Rating:
Summary: An Extraordinary Cookbook
Review: This ambitous masterwork seems to be doing just fine (as I write this, it ranks 215 in sales on this site). It hardly needs a recommendation, for the book will surely find its audience without this review. But it is so unique, so fine, that I can't help myself. While I am a chef and cookbook writer myself, I choose to remain anonymous for personal reasons. Judy Rodgers is well known in San Francisco, but she hasn't published much before. I don't recall any articles by her in food magazines, but I could have missed them. She is simply the best food writer that has emerged in a long, long time. She seems to have absorbed cooking knowledge the way the rest of us breathe, and in her book, she puts it all down. Open any page, I mean ANY page, and you will get a piece of information, an idea, a tip, or tidbit that will make you rethink the way you cook. Her recipes are written with the same loving detail that she puts into her restaurant cooking. She writes a recipe like she might simmer a complex and utterly delicious stock--slowly, gently, without shortcuts. Cooks who are looking for the fast and easy should pass this book by. I do have a few criticisms, which are totally immaterial when you think of the vast amount of gold to be mined. Nonetheless, they are worth mentioning for those who calculate the amount of recipes they might use from a book. The dessert section reflects Judy's simple tastes in this area, and it could have been balanced with a few more cake-like pastries. There are plenty of recipes that mere mortals will not make, unless you dedicate the auxilary refrigerator in your garage to hold the odiferous masterpiece (salted anchovies, salted cod), but at least she is frank about the problems you face in making them. And, like a lot of California-based cookbooks, the success of many recipes depends on the excellence of your produce, which is certainly a basic cooking rule, but more so when you have a tight palette of flavors. My hat is also off to Judy's editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, who seems to have said "Judy, tell me everything!," rather than "Judy, tighten this up." The book and any cook that reads it are better off for the collective vision of these two extraordinarily talented women.
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Summary: I want more!!
Review: This book has moved in the top 3 ranks of my home cookbook collection (i have about 75). The reason? Judy has captured the true essence of making simple flavors extraordinary. I have only cooked a few recipes out of the Zuni Cafe Cookbook but have been amazed every time that I'm even proud of what I've created. Normally, after spending some time preparing dinner, the element of surprise is usually lost when it's time to dive in to my culinary creation; however, after creating the Chicken Braised with Figs, Honey and Vinegar last night, I couldn't stop relishing every bite -- as if i was being served at the Zuni Cafe. Let me put it this way: who needs to read romance novels when you've got the Zuni Cafe cookbook? It's just as thrilling.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful book, fantastic recipes
Review: This book has taken over my nightstand, I read it before going to bed almost every night. The writing is compulsively readable, affectionate and entertaining. The recipes are, for the most part, fantastic. I made the Roast Chicken with Bread Salad this weekend, and have never had guests rave more loudly. Yes, it was a little more complicated than other roast chicken recipes (I didn't salt in advance, and the chicken was gorgeous anyway), and the bread salad was a little fussy (I also cut some corners here with no real drawbacks to the salad), but the results were absolutly worth it for a special dinner evening. The Onion Soup with Poached Egg was a study in simplicity and flavor. I can't wait to try every recipe in the book. I highly recommend this book.
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