Friday, January 9, 2009

Mediterranean Street Food or Savory Sweets

Mediterranean Street Food: Stories, Soups, Snacks, Sandwiches, Barbecues, Sweets, and More, from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East

Author: Anissa Helou

Who can resist a chickpea fritter in Nice, a kebab in Athens, an aniseed cookie in Tuscany, hummus in Tel Aviv, stuffed zucchini in Genoa, or a potato omelet in Spain? Cold or hot, sweet or savory, street food is everyone's temptation.

Anissa Helou loves street food. When she travels, she stops at every tea cart, sandwich stand, and candy stall to trade stories with local vendors and learn the recipes that tempt the crowds. Join her on a fascinating adventure around the Mediterranean, where eating on the street is a way of life. Learn the secret ingredients to the perfect Stuffed Mussels sold on the streets of Istanbul. Come along to a Berber woman's Moroccan Bread stall in Marrakech. Buy a sweet, sticky Semolina Cake from a cart in Cairo. From simple salads to fragrant barbecues to irresistible dips and drinks, each dish can be enjoyed on its own, or two or three may be combined to make a meal. With lively black-and-white photographs from Anissa's travels and more than eighty-five fast, flexible, flavorful recipes, Mediterranean Street Food offers home cooks the chance to experience the tastes of distant lands without leaving the kitchen.

Publishers Weekly

This quirky cookbook features both tasty snacks and more substantial meals, all of them available on the streets of Italy, Turkey and other Mediterranean countries. Helou (CafE Morocco) is a friendly, inquisitive guide who's not afraid to express her own occasional squeamishness about eating on the street, especially in places like Cairo, where diners are expected to use the same spoons, cleaned only with a dunk in questionable water. A fascinating introduction shows a keen understanding of the entire region (Helou herself grew up in Beirut and fondly remembers the Corniche, an area filled with vendors of snacks, sweets and drinks). Recipes are organized by type of food (e.g., soups and sandwiches), and Helou provides a simple formula for arranging them into a traditional meal. Snacks include Farinata, a chickpea flour pancake from Genoa, and Stuffed Mussels from Istanbul, which are filled with rice and then steamed. A chapter on breads and pastries offers Lebanese Thyme Bread and Ramadan Bread with Dates. A few dishes, such as Greek Octopus and Onion Stew, sound like unlikely, albeit delicious, candidates for the eat-and-walk formula. A few more most notably a french fry sandwich from Beirut are just too strange to catch on. But on balance, this covers just the kind of food for which it is often near-impossible to locate a recipe. Desserts (Walnut Pancakes) and drinks (fermented Bulgur Drink) round out this solid collection of both curiosities and serious dining. (July) Forecast: This traveler's notebook of tasty snacks is interesting on both the sociological and culinary levels, and these days, anything with the word Mediterranean in the title sells this will be no exception. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.



Book about: Troubled Tiger or The New Dynamic Project Management

Savory Sweets: From Ingredients to Plated Desserts

Author: Amy Felder CEPC

A new approach to flavor, ingredients, and techniques

"From a simple idea, Amy Felder has practically conceived a new category of dessert ideation. And her instructional skills, honed in classroom kitchens, allow her to convey this knowledge in a clear, systematic, and inspirational fashion."
--Peter Reinhart, author of The Bread Baker's Apprentice and The Whole Grain Revival: Mastering the Art of Whole Grain Breads

Traditionally, pastry chefs have worked mainly with a sweet flavor palette, leaving savory tastes and techniques to their culinary colleagues. Today, fusion cuisine promises new blends of the savory and sweet. For pastry chefs, this means a new world of flavor opportunities--as well as the need to integrate them into dynamic dishes and cooking practice.

The pastry chef's key to the culinary side of the kitchen, Savory Sweets offers a complete, systematic discussion of flavor, techniques, and ingredients, then puts the discussion into practice using specific plated desserts. Author, chef, and acclaimed teacher Amy Felder brings together the culinary and pastry realms, giving students and professional chefs a new, up-to-date approach to flavor. Though the book comes from a baking perspective, culinary chefs will also find the discussion of savory flavors and fusion cuisine extremely useful.

Savory Sweets is divided into four parts:



• Vocabulary starts with a scientific explanation of taste, then establishes concepts of flavor and overall plate profile

• Culinary Skills looks at cooking methods other than baking and what they have to offer plated desserts;these techniques include sauce work and manipulation of texture

• Ingredients examines an assortment of vegetables, herbs, spices, dairy products, and dry pantry products with regard to flavor and partner flavors for each ingredient; plated dishes showcasing each ingredient are also provided

• Plated Desserts applies the information from the previous three sections in the form of eight specific desserts, each with its individual personality, plate and flavor profiles, theme, and integration of pastry and culinary practice; recipes for all of the plates' components are included



Filled with helpful figures and brilliant color photographs, Savory Sweets offers advanced baking students a unique, sophisticated, and practical classroom text, while also providing professional chefs and culinary students with an organized and detailed approach to flavor.



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