The Great Ceviche Book

You will be amazed with all the recipes. Easy and quick. You will impressed your friends and family, I did it! Bravo Chef Rodriguez you are the best! Who eats better than us?

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.

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.

Lots of great recipes, so far we have liked all tried. The problem with this book is the size, binding. It is so narrow that it is very hard to use, gets lost in the bookcase and is a real pain. Are thinking about taking it to an office supply / copy store having holes punched then putting it in a three ring binder. Please don't let the bad binding stop the purchase if you like ceviche. This is one of the better ceviche books out there. It also has us creating our own recipes with the base of the ones in the book.

`the great CEVICHE book' by Douglas Rodriguez presents what may be the second great native American food style, after barbecue. While both styles of cooking have serious non-American influences, both are also certifiably born and raised in the New World. Ceviche is a method of `finishing' seafood with citrus or other edible acid such as vinegar. Language leaves me at a loss here, as I am not fond of saying the acidic marinade `cooks' the fish as no heat is involved, yet there is no other word which quite seems to fit. Douglas Rodriguez is an experienced cookbook author, as this is his third book, appearing in the 10 Speed Press' series of tall and skinny books on culinary topics. I have seen three of these titles and this is better than Mark Miller's book on salsa, but not as good as David Lebovitz' book on chocolate. I confess the relative quality has a lot to do with how much interesting history there is to give about each subject. My opinion of the chocolate book also has a lot to do with the fact that of the three, it has the most background material meant for the easy chair rather than the kitchen counter. I simply do not see what 10 Speed Press was trying to do with this long, skinny format with a binding which works against propping it open and following a recipe on one of its pages. The publisher would have been much more intelligent to put the material in a squarish volume with spiral or plastic rib binding similar to what Random House did with Paula Deen's `The Lady and Sons' cookbooks. In spite of all that grousing about the format and binding, I must recommend Rodriguez' book because there are simply very few books on this most interesting subject, and even fewer good books. And, Rodriguez' material in this book is very good. As with Lebovitz' book on chocolate, there is a lot of introductory material on the origin and homeland of this culinary technique. In a nutshell, modern ceviche seems to have been developed by a meeting of Peruvian and Ecuadorian fishermen's techniques with fish and citrus with Japanese immigrants' overlaying Japanese raw fish techniques. The book divides the world of ceviche dishes very neatly into the simple `tiraditos', dishes made with only one raw seafood protein and `mixtos', dishes made with two or more raw seafood proteins. To these two styles, the author adds recipes for side dishes that complement ceviche dishes. The author does not dwell on this aspect of this cuisine, but it should be evident that ceviche is very healthy, very easy, and relatively cheap. The hardest thing about this cuisine is finding a trustworthy source of fresh fish. Once you have that, virtually the entire cuisine reduces to variations on the fish plus five ingredient types. These are citrus, onion, salt, herbs, and chiles. Aside from salt, all of these groups are pretty broad, so what seems like a limitation is really more like the requirements that a poem scans and rhymes. It imposes a discipline that leads to creativity.