Do you want to learn about artisanal cheeses? Are you unfamiliar with the many different kinds of mushrooms available, let alone how to prepare them in the kitchen? Have you ever wondered about the merits of wild versus farmed fish? Do you want to learn more about seasonings?
New Good Food will tell you all of these things, and more. This book is one of my newest favorite culinary resources, and it has earned a spot on the cookbook shelf in my kitchen (a great honor, indeed). It’s right up there with Joy of Cooking for its range of relevant topics, though it’s not recipe-based. New Good Food talks about an amazing variety of foods in a way that is as easy to read as it is informative. The book starts out discussing fruits and vegetables, and it makes its way through grains and grain products, legumes, nuts and seeds, cooking oils, animal and dairy products, seafood, seasonings, and sweeteners. For each topic, Wittenberg breaks the category down by variety, providing insightful wisdom for each one.
What I love most about this book is the literary space it fills in my cookbook collection. I have several wonderful cookbooks full of traditional recipes, but what I have always lacked was a manual of sorts, a reference that expounded upon the virtue of one ingredient over another, a guide that could educate me about the basics of choosing and preparing whole foods. New Good Food is that book. I’ve found it useful for so many things since Ted brought it home for me several of months ago, and I even gave it to my sister for Christmas. She’d been asking me for a long time how to eat healthy, which is a topic that’s difficult to teach someone who lives over 400 miles away. I gave her this book because I knew it would do a much better job at educating her about heathy eating than I ever could, mainly because the book is still teaching me something new every time I open it.
I’ve been particularly pleased with the section on culinary oils. Wittenberg covers every conceivable kind of fat and oil, as well as providing answers to questions about oil production methods, smoke points, and hydrogenation. And though she discusses the Omega balance issue at a glance, my one criticism of this chapter is that I wish she had written more about good fats versus bad fats, and why saturated fats aren’t always bad for you (i.e. coconut oil). Still, the individual entry for coconut oil does bring up the fact that not all saturated fats react the same way in the body, and it discusses the different kinds of fatty acids in coconut oil and their health benefits. I also thought that the entries for palm fruit oil and flax seed oil were right on. However, while Wittenberg’s glowing praise of canola oil mirrors the current attitude within the natural foods industry, many people find its health properties to be highly debatable. I personally choose to avoid canola oil whenever possible, though many people would tell you it’s great for you. Wittenberg is one of them, but I think that her well-researched points of view on many other oils cancels that out.
Another great section in this book is the seafood section. Though the chapter is short, it provides an in-depth look at several issues relevant to modern seafood consumption, such as contaminant levels, seafood sustainability, nd the humane treatment of aquatic animals. It also includes a helpful chart that sorts different kinds of fish by flavor level (mild, medium or robust), and by texture. I’ve found this chart to be very helpful when navigating the seafood counter, which is sort of like my last frontier.
Speaking of helpful charts, I love the sweetener conversion chart in this book on page 261. It’s called the “Sugar Substitution Guide,” and it gives the amounts you should use for many different alternative sweeteners in place of white sugar in any given recipe. The chart also tells you how to adjust the liquids in your recipe and other modifications based on the alternative sweetener you’re using. Many of you have sent me emails about alternative sweeteners, so I figured I’d add this chart to my list of New Good Food’s praises.
You can buy New Good Food on Amazon.com, as well as the pocket-guide version, or you can find it in your local Whole Foods.
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