Learn to COOK - The Great Ceviche Book
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List Price: $17.95
Our Price: $12.21
Your Save: $ 5.74 ( 32% )
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Manufacturer: Ten Speed Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.694
EAN: 9781580083256
ISBN: 1580083250
Label: Ten Speed Press
Manufacturer: Ten Speed Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 160
Publication Date: 2003-03
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Studio: Ten Speed Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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Douglas Rodriguez was the first American chef to give ceviche the attention it deserves, creating such signature dishes as spicy shrimp ceviche with popcorn and the decadent squid ceviche in black ink sauce. His New York restaurant, Chicama, is a temple to the bright, clean flavours of this remarkably simple dish, and patrons crowd around the ceviche bar to marvel at the day's offerings. In this book, Rodriguez presents over 50 traditional and contemporary recipes, as well as extensive information on ingredient basics, food safety issues, and suggestions for pairing ceviche with other dishes.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Simple but Good
Comment: What's funny is the Great Ceviche Book is a small paperback with lots of good ideas. I found nothing new in the book but at least the recipes and ideas were solid and when made, tasty. More of the fundamentals.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great recipes, wish it were wider,
Comment: This book had all the recipes I'd hoped for..
My only complaint is that because it is so "skinney" It's hard to prop
open while following a recipe.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great flavors, terrible binding, short on recipes
Comment: For those who are perhaps unfamiliar with the term, `Ceviche' (I've heard it pronounced "seh-vee-chay" and "seh-veech-ee") refers to a delicate method of cooking certain foods (usually seafood) by immersing it in an acidic brine (typically a modestly salted lime juice, but sometimes a mixture a vinegar and various other citrus juices instead) for 1-3 hours. The acid has the same effect on the proteins that heat does, except that there's no heat or caramelization involved. After a set period of time, the acidic brine is then drained off and discarded, and the ceviche is dressed (seasoned) and served in much the same way that a seafood salad is - with diced vegetables and herbs, and a light finishing sauce (typically citrus based).
The `Ceviche' process (which is most popular in central and south america) is related to, but somewhat different from, classic pickling, in that the former uses more acid, and is much less aggressively salted/spiced ... the intention being to serve it almost immediately (within a few short hours), rather than to preserve something for long term storage.
Ok, on to the book itself. I have very mixed feelings about this particular offering:
What I liked:
TOPIC: There's a great paucity of books on this one particular topic, so this book is a very welcome addition to an otherwise grossly overcrowded field.
FLAVORS: I've also (as of this writing) worked with several of the recipes in this book, and so far, the flavors have been impeccable. I'm also fortunate to have eaten (several times) at a restaurant owned and operated by a chef who's worked for/with the author (sample dish: diver scallop ceviche on the half-shell, lightly dressed with blood orange and grapefruit). In fact, it was the chef/proprietor of this restaurant who recommended this book to me. It's always nice to encounter a book in which virtually everything has already been tested and approved by actual use in a successful restaurant, and to see ripples from said book (and restaurant) slowly spread outward into the larger culinary community. As I write this, Sushi is all the rage here in (semi)urban America, and I can easily see ceviche following hot on it's heels.
INTRO: The author has a decent introductory chapter that overviews both the method of cooking, as well as some of the regional variations in style (Ecuadorian, Peruvian, etc.). I wish that more authors were as diligent.
GLOSSARY: The author includes a helpful glossary of terms and ingredients. I wish more authors would do that.
TECHNIQUES: Chapter 4 (unintuitively titled "basics") provides some helpful preparation instructions on how do things like cook octopus, blanch shellfish, open oysters, etc.
HEAD NOTES: Many of the recipes contain interesting head notes about what inspired the dish or where it came from. That's something else that I wish more authors would do.
What I disliked:
AWKWARD FORMAT: The edition I have is a 4" wide by 10" long by ½" thick soft-cover "chap-book" binding, on stiff paper, with a glued-binding. It's designed to be visually appealing on a bookstore shelf, but I cannot emphasize enough what an annoying format it is. It's awful. It's too stiff to open comfortably, you can't lay it flat on a table and work from it, and you actually have to exert hand strength just to hold it open - almost like the book doesn't want you to read it. Think hard-shell clam, struggling to close on your fingers, after having been caught gaping. The space-wasting format also causes even short recipes to spill across 2 full pages ... sometimes even 3-4, if there's a photo involved.
NOT ENOUGH RECIPES: The author, on page 6, claims this book includes 60 ceviches. The back cover mentions "50 of his favorite recipes". Both numbers are WRONG. I counted - there are only 35 ceviche recipes in this book. All of the other recipes hinted at on the back cover, and in the introduction, involve recipes for things like interim procedural ingredients (ex: poaching liquids, flavored oils, etc), condiments, and accompaniments. Surely this book is a candidate for Consumer Report's infamous "black hole" award ... a book 162 pages, with a over price of $18 US, but only 35 recipes of the style implied on the cover. I'll overlook the fact that some of those 35 recipes involved shellfish & bivalves cooked by heat, rather than acid, and thus could be considered "seafood salads" rather than true ceviches (ex: "Indian Mussels", "Peruvian Black Ceviche", "Honduran Fire and Ice Lobster", "Peruvian Tuna Causa", etc.) ... but that's splitting hairs.
INTRO: In my opinion, the author did not provide adequate coverage of explaining the why behind why certain types of seafood should be cooked (or handled with greater care), rather than eaten raw. There's also insufficient attention to sanitation issues (how to sanitize cutting boards to cut down on bacteria, dangers of cross-contamination, etc.), as well as concerns involving resistant parasites (nematodes, worms, etc.) ... how to spot/minimize/avoid them, techniques that can kill them, etc. A book that champions such a delicate cooking technique, and revolving around RAW flesh for it's subject matter, should show a bit more responsibility to the topic and aggressively deal with such matters head-on, rather than lazily tucking tail and short-sheeting the matter.
PROCEDURAL TIPS: Chapter 4 could have been MUCH longer and more robust. I would have like to see more information (and pictures) on things like assessing fish quality; cleaning and butchering fish (esp. ones you've caught yourself); more advice on timing (such as how long the various recipes will maintain peak flavor/texture, once assembled); a fuller discussion of bivalves (size grading, point of origin labeling protections, types of knives used to open them and pictures of how to do it, etc.); a general discussion of tools (fillet knives, scalers, slicing knives, etc.) and also more supplemental information on how to make use of throw-away items (like shrimp shells, fish heads & frames, fish skins, fish innards, etc) to make things like fish stock & soups, bone cracklings, skin cracklings, etc. All of those things are a natural byproduct of making ceviche, and the book is so criminally short that there's little no reason why they chose to be so stingy with such material.
NO RECIPE INDEX / DISCERNABLE ORDER: A book this short should have a convenient recipe index ... either right up front, or at the start of each of the 4 chapters. No dice here. If you want one, you'll have to type it yourself, fold it up, and stuff it in. To compound matters, the recipes do not appear to be in any discernable order within in their respective chapters ... alphabetical or otherwise. They seem to be a random jumble.
PHOTOS: There's a shortage of photos of finished dishes, and a gaping void of helpful procedural photos. The photos that ARE present are far too big (taking up an entire page, and sometimes 2 pages), too few, and are often so myopically close that it's hard to tell what it's supposed to be. [Note to would-be food photographers - if the far side of the plate is out of focus, and the foreground is so close that it causes claustrophobia on the part of the reader, you're zoomed in too much. Please consider an alternate career in pornography.] There are also irrelevant photos present that have nothing whatsoever to do with making ceviche ... such as the picture of beer opposite page 1, popcorn on page 120, several pictures of the author and his friends/staff, etc. Oh, and as long as we're on the topic of popcorn, the author's recipe (p.121) is a bit weak ... the amount of oil required should be 1/3 cup, not 2 tbsp (popcorn follows a classic 2:1 ratio of kernels to oil), and the author neglects to include a 60 second rest off the heat, after the 1st kernel pops, before putting it back on the heat to finish popping (which greatly increases the yield and reduces scorching).
IMPRECISION: I was pleased to see the author include a brief discussion of gourmet salts in his introduction. However, in standardizing to the generic (and vague) term "salt" in all his recipes, he neglects to mention that the two most common salts in culinary use (i.e., plain table salt and coarse kosher salt) cannot be substituted on a 1:1 basis of for each other. I find that to be a glaring omission that could lead to irregular levels of salt, from one reader to the next, depending on which salt is the default usage for their household. For those who are curious, 1 tbsp regular table salt is roughly equivalent to 1.5 tbsp of coarse kosher salt, with a slight upward or downward variation on that depending on just how coarse the kosher salt really is ... it varies. As you can see, a 50% salt difference is NOT negligible - esp. in a book dealing with raw fish. I'm also not keen on recipes that use imprecise terms like "one bunch of thyme" (p.136) and don't bother to give better guidance how big a `bunch' is, or if it's fresh or dried. For the most part, the author does a decent job of precision throughout his book, but he definitely drops the ball when it comes to salt and herbs. It's one of my recurring pet peeves with many cookbook authors.
FOCUS: I think the author would have served the subject, and the reader, better if he'd focused on presenting the material from a practical home-cook standpoint (which is where the cuisine originated to begin with), rather than faithfully parroting the elaborate recipes he prepares at his restaurant. As is, many of the recipes in this book are highly impractical restaurant-only offerings, and are thus useless to most readers, even those who are fairly serious about the hobby. For instance, the "Honduran Fire and Ice Lobster" (p.81) calls for ¼ cup of lobster stock {p.136}. Speaking from personal experience, very few home cooks, even those who cook lobsters, go to the trouble of making classic lobster stock ... much less do it just to get ¼ cup to make ceviche with {and by the way, only restaurants will squander a full cup of butter just to sweat mirepoix for making stocks in general ... home cooks uniformly use oil}. I repeat - it's a restaurant-only recipe. Ditto for the "Sea Urchin Shots" (p.56) ... it's a restaurant-only recipe. Someone like Thomas Keller can get away with that sort of thing (primarily because he's famous and his books are as much about the philosophical quest for perfection as they are about documenting what he does at his iconic restaurant) ... this author cannot. Sorry. For a book pushing the $20 mark that only has 35 ceviches, I expect recipes that are practical and make-able.
RESPONSIBLE CONSUMPTION: Several of the recipes in this book call for varieties of seafood that are either already endangered (Chilean Sea Bass), or well on their way to getting there due to overfishing (Sea Urchin, Red Snapper, etc.). I think boosting the popularity of such products still further is a bit irresponsible. I was pleased that the author mentioned the overfishing of conch, but he could have gone quite a bit further in extolling farm-raised alternatives for more of his ingredients.
Bottom line: This is one of those books in which I love many of the recipes, but for which the book as a whole gets a negative review. I wish I could give it the thumbs up, but it's long laundry list of annoying shortcomings and omissions drag that back down into the below average zone. My advice is to hold off on buying this one and hope the author eventually decides to republish a greatly expanded and reformatted edition. If, however, you love ceviche, and if you're physically holding the book in your hand there in the bookstore, go grab a cup of coffee, then spend 20 mins reading the intro to overview the basic technique (i.e., ½ cup lime juice & a heaping spoon of salt, stir, use to marinate 1-1.5 lbs of sliced/diced fish for 1 hour, drain, and then dress and combine all the rest of the ingredients like you would a fancy seafood salad ... that's pretty much the gist of it), then skim a few recipes to get a general idea of flavors, and then put it back on the shelf ... you can find whatever else you need on the internet.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Si" to Ceviche
Comment: I was skeptical I could turn my kitchen into a recreation of the Mecca of Ceviche - Chicama - but a few weeks with this book turned me into a believer. Amazing recipes, light on pictures, but heavy on content, gave me the skill and knowhow to turn out amazing crowd-pleasing ceviche.
Kudos to Douglas Rodriguez for sharing a little bit of heaven on each page.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Enlightening
Comment: The other comments about the print quality of this book are true, but I found the insights and recipes to be well worth the extra effort to deal with the binding. There is a great story and excellent recipes. The philosophy of ceviche is revealed.
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