The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisa

I have not eaten at the restaurant, and I have no special culinary skills outside of being a good home cook. In fact, I can rarely follow a recipe. This book is a really fun read, and inspirational. Some rather mundane foods, like stale bread/onions/greens/cheese come together in a most divine way, with lots of variations possible and suggested. It's called a Panade. The big revolution here is salting meat and waiting for the herbs to seep in for a couple of days - a dry brine. Genius, and totally effective. I think the recipes are easier than they look. I am not put off by a three page description because once you read it, it is your own. Not intricate technique, just great ideas!

I love this cookbook, but I understand why some other readers are having a tough time with it. This cookbook would be best for the professional chef, or the serious home cook with skills in fine cooking (not only good home cooking). You have to care about the details to make this food special.It would also help to be a committed foodie. Some key ingredients are hard to find, and usually available only to professional chefs. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I shop in the food mecca of Berkeley, and even I would have trouble finding some of the ingredients.There are reasons why this is restaurant food that people spend big bucks for to go out and eat.If you have skill in fine cooking, if you love to cook for recreation and for art, and if you like this kind of California Mediterranean food, you would probably enjoy this cookbook. It is extremely well-written and thought out. So far I've tried 16 recipes from this cookbook, with excellent results. (Note: I've taken many cooking classes over the years and I've worked as a prep assistant for some great local chefs, so that's my skill level.) Judy Rodgers and her editor have made every effort to convey her signature recipes and deserve applause for that. I think this a great cookbook, a classic cookbook, but not for everyone.

San Francisco chef Rodgers teaches as she cooks and her clear, authoritative voice is an inspiration, reinforced by 24 luscious color photographs and 50 black and white photographs illustrating technique. Emphasizing quality ingredients and constant tasting, she painstakingly explains what to look for and how to taste. More than once she cautions that it may take several tries before a dish sounds that note of perfection on the tongue. Rodgers' style of cooking requires some forethought - all her meat and poultry is lightly salted at least a day before cooking - to "open up" the proteins, and some dishes, like Artichoke Caponata, improve when made ahead.The book is organized by course and the introductions to each recipe offer tips on ingredients or technique, suggestions for leftovers and sometimes the dish's history in her repertoire, which is French and Italian-influenced. Some dishes are simple - her signature Roast Chicken with Bread Salad is a snap as long as you remember to salt the chicken the day before (it does make a difference). Several soups (Asparagus & Rice with Pancetta & Black Pepper) are quick and easy, as long as you've got the stock on hand - canned stock is beneath mention - and several pickles, condiments and sauces (Preserved Lemons, Roasted Pepper Relish, Sage Pesto) are simple enough to keep on hand, but basically, Rodgers is not about quick and easy. The hamburger that the pickles are served with starts with grinding your own chuck - twice. Pasta with Sardines & Tomato Sauce begins with cleaning, broiling, then filleting the sardines, although the roasted tomato sauce is quick, easy and different. Pot Roast begins with reducing a bottle of red wine to a half cup and four cups of beef stock to two. There are detailed instructions for cooking omelettes and risotto, making the best stock, braising meats, preparing a cheese tray, making granitas and sorbets. She gives reasons for every step from choosing a pot to skimming fat - or not. The introduction is a fine primer on basic technique (especially "early salting") and equipment and she concludes with "notes on frequently used ingredients and related techniques" and mail order sources. This is a book for aspiring cooks, good cooks looking to be better and armchair cooks.

This ambitous masterwork seems to be doing just fine (as I write this, it ranks 215 in sales on this site). It hardly needs a recommendation, for the book will surely find its audience without this review. But it is so unique, so fine, that I can't help myself. While I am a chef and cookbook writer myself, I choose to remain anonymous for personal reasons.Judy Rodgers is well known in San Francisco, but she hasn't published much before. I don't recall any articles by her in food magazines, but I could have missed them. She is simply the best food writer that has emerged in a long, long time. She seems to have absorbed cooking knowledge the way the rest of us breathe, and in her book, she puts it all down. Open any page, I mean ANY page, and you will get a piece of information, an idea, a tip, or tidbit that will make you rethink the way you cook. Her recipes are written with the same loving detail that she puts into her restaurant cooking. She writes a recipe like she might simmer a complex and utterly delicious stock--slowly, gently, without shortcuts. Cooks who are looking for the fast and easy should pass this book by. I do have a few criticisms, which are totally immaterial when you think of the vast amount of gold to be mined. Nonetheless, they are worth mentioning for those who calculate the amount of recipes they might use from a book. The dessert section reflects Judy's simple tastes in this area, and it could have been balanced with a few more cake-like pastries. There are plenty of recipes that mere mortals will not make, unless you dedicate the auxilary refrigerator in your garage to hold the odiferous masterpiece (salted anchovies, salted cod), but at least she is frank about the problems you face in making them. And, like a lot of California-based cookbooks, the success of many recipes depends on the excellence of your produce, which is certainly a basic cooking rule, but more so when you have a tight palette of flavors. My hat is also off to Judy's editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, who seems to have said "Judy, tell me everything!," rather than "Judy, tighten this up." The book and any cook that reads it are better off for the collective vision of these two extraordinarily talented women.

I have just become Judy Roger's biggest fan! The Zuni Cafe Cookbook is not another cookbook about artfully-presented, impossible-to-duplicate-at-home restaurant food. It is full of the food we all want to eat when we come home from a stressful day at work. Judy's recipes make it possible. The Chicken Braised with Figs, Honey and Vinegar is just the kind of meal that, once made, you look forward to the leftovers for the rest of the week!All the recipes I have made from her book have become standards in my repertoire. They are the sort of things that you want to make again and again -- like the rosemary grilled chicken livers with bacon, just the thought of them makes me want to rush home and start cooking.I have only just begun working my way through this book, but the results are so great that I have told my friends: "We will be eating well all year long at my house!"