New Good Food: Essential Ingredients for Cooking and Eating Well

We have a copy of Margaret Wittenberg's book, New Good Food, and find it to be the book we use most in our kitchen. The reason is simple, it is a book about food, not cooking, about ingredients, not recipes. If you are like us, a complicated recipe misses the point that we are trying to make in our kitchen--we want to eat good ingredients and that means knowing where they come from and where they fit in the larger production/wild harvest picture--and the perfection of a complicated meal is secondary. Because it is sold in the "cooking" section, some might be disappointed that it does not contain some new recipe for squashblossom cherry-chutney- garlic biscuits. But if you read the full title (ok I owned it before i really figured out what the book was for) you will realize the book explains ingredients, not cooking. Sure it tells you how to cook something, but not to make a complicated meal, instead it tells you what you need to know to shop for, and eat, good food. If you are interested in organic food and don't want to drive to Joel Salatin's home in Virginia with Michael Pollan just to get a chicken, this book is for you. It respects deeply the values that underpin organic farming and sustainable foods systems, but its really about cooking and eating good ingredients. Nothing over the top like asking the store clerk if the honeybee manure is composted etc. This book is about the future of eating wholesome food--even the top chefs in Paris are starting to offer simpler fare that focuses on the ingredients. In todays crowded and often toxic environment, the best approach is letting the ingredients express themselves rather than make expensive dishes that are best understood by food judges and critics. Don't get me wrong, I love floating island. But we don't approach our meals at home like springboard divers trying to hit a particular degree of difficulty with the higher difficulty always better. Japan now has more top rated restaurants according to Michelin than any other country. That is because Japan has the freshest, best ingredient market in the world. This book helps you pick the best ingredients and cook them well without the back flips. A steamed lentil is a miracle too. This book will ensure you eat well whether you can cook complicated dishes or not. And it has lots of information about the choices that eating particular foods will have on you, and those that you care about and some that you did not know you should care about, like farm animals. A recipe focused meal runs in one direction--towards the plate on the table. An ingredients focused meal like Ms. Wittenberg offers, runs in two directions--to the plate and also back to the farm. Get the book, go with her--you won't regret it.

This book is such a great resource. I refer to it often and I recommend it to many of my clients as a necessary tool for navigating the grocery store, especially Whole Foods Market. It is essential for assisting in the developing of one's own personal dietary plan. I use it also as a guide for choosing an assortment of new foods to try.

Most grocery stores today offer a lot more choices than they used to. There are so many types of cheeses, there are different types of apples, there are choices from the Asian food section, there are a lot of different pastas. And then what do you do with these foods? How do you store them? I found this book to be an excellent guide as to what unusual looking fruits or vegetables were and how they could be used; how to store cheeses; what vegetables should not be refrigerated. In other words if I want to try a food that I am not familiar with I use this book to help me incorporate it into my menu. I find the information on storage very valuable since I don't seem to have time to shop frequently and like to buy in at least a weekly quantity.

Wow! So much of what we eat these days in America is barely recognizable as food. This book is true to what it sayds, it's about GOOD FOOD. Great reference tables (for example, cooking grains). Margaret Wittenberg is the Global VP for Quality Standards for Whole Foods Market, and she helped create the National Organic Standards. This lady knows her stuff! I've used this book as a reference tool, a cookbook and even as lite informational reading. If you're a "foodie," this book should definitely be on your kitchen bookshelf.

Whether you're looking for information on produce or whole grains, seafood or meats, dairy or sea vegetables, it's in here. I've already done quite a bit of reading in whole foods books, and yet I learned plenty of new and fascinating things in this volume. Much of it is incredibly practical. For example, if you want to know the difference between Tamari, Shoyu, and Soy Sauce---the practical differences in how they're produced and what they contain---that's all in here. You'll understand how to figure out which ones are fermented vs. which ones are produced chemically; which ones are better for high-heat cooking vs. which ones are better as a condiment and why; and so on. If you want to know the complex process by which Tamari was originally produced (as a by-product of miso production), you can read about that, too. Or maybe you'd like to delve into the wide variety of sea vegetables available in the whole foods market, but you don't know how to even begin using them. Ms. Wittenberg's book identifies each one and provides detailed instructions for using them in various types of cooking. New Good Food includes plenty of information on various sweeteners---not just how they're made, but what sorts of sugars they're comprised of and how quickly those sugars break down in the body (essential information for diabetics). The section on produce includes information on the peak seasons for a very wide variety of items so you'll know when to go looking for them at their best. Information on whole grains from around the world includes not just historical and nutritional information, but of course basic cooking methods as well. New Good Food is an utterly fantastic reference volume to keep on your shelves as you experiment with more whole foods.