Ken Albala's 5 Essentials for Home Cooks Expert Essentials

Ken Albala is the co-author of two of my favorite cookbooks, The Lost Art of Real Cooking and The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home. What I found in these books, and also with talking with him in person, is an overflowing enthusiasm and delight for the world of cookery. "This is what happens when you really love every food on earth," he confessed recently on his blog. Along with that enthusiasm comes a kind of bravery that I find very inspiring. Ken dives completely into his kitchen projects with a wild curiosity that is also grounded in his deep and thorough knowledge of the kitchen arts. Read on for a little more about Ken and his 5 suggestions for the home cook.

A professor of History at the University of the Pacific, Ken has an impressive resume:

Ken Albala is the author or editor of 16 books on food including Eating Right in the Renaissance; Food in Early Modern Europe; Cooking in Europe 1250-1650; The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe; Beans: A History (winner of the 2008 IACP Jane Grigson Award); and Pancake. He has also co-edited The Business of Food; Human Cuisine; Food and Faith and edited A Cultural History of Food: The Renaissance and The Routledge International Handbook to Food Studies. Albala was also editor of the Food Cultures Around the World series with 30 volumes in print, the 4-volume Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia and is now series editor of AltaMira Studies in Food and Gastronomy for which he has written a textbook entitled Three World Cuisines: Italian, Chinese, Mexican (winner of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards best foreign cuisine book for the US). Albala is also co-editor of the journal Food Culture and Society and is editing a 3 volume encyclopedia on Food Issues for Sage. He has also co-authored two cookbooks: The Lost Art of Real Cooking and The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home.

Phew! Ken may be very learned in the kitchen arts and all his madcap enthusiasm aside, what you will find in his suggestions below is an honest practicality that is refreshing, useful, and above all, very encouraging.

Ken's 5 Essentials for the Home Cook

1. Loosen up. Just get in there! Don't be afraid to fail! You will find out what you know and what you don't know only by doing it, and you will learn this best by doing it over and over. Be careful about cooking too much from recipes, which Ken likens to always using a GPS when driving. You'll never learn how to cook for yourself if you don't improvise every now and then. Make it a routine to cook every day and remember that cooking and eating is pleasurable, that food is a source of pleasure.

2. Don't depend too much on electrical gadgets. Ken is not a fan of most modern cooking devices like food processors, juicers and the like. They're expensive, he says, they take up too much space and they mangle the food. (Like Yotam Ottolenghi, he recommends keeping food as close to its whole state as possible.) Get a good knife, keep it sharp, and use it, he says. It's much more enjoyable to slice up a carrot by hand rather than shove it into a food processor, which you also have to wash and dry afterwards. Ken teaches a lot of sausage-making classes where he teaches people how to chop meat with a knife. You have so much more control the texture that way, he says.

The three utensils that Ken uses the most are a good sharp knife, a set of tongs, and a metal off-set spatula. It's amazing how much cooking you can do with just those three things, he says.

3. Don't be afraid of bacteria. Of course some bacteria are dangerous, but many are really good for you and are even necessary. It's bacteria that turn milk to cheese, grapes to wine, and bread rise. Purchase fresh food, keep your chopping board clean, and cook your food sensibly (but not to death!). Industrial food has really failed us, says Ken. You will more likely to be poisoned by industrially-produced food than what goes on in your kitchen. To understand bacteria better you can certainly read the books of Sandor Katz or check out Ken's latest textbook, Three World Cuisines: Italian, Mexican, Chinese, which just one a prestigious award.

4. Keep your pantry really, really well stocked. Having a lot of staples around means you can walk into your kitchen with confidence and a sense of playfulness, says Ken. Play in your kitchen and remember that the process is as enjoyable as the end result! A well-stocked kitchen means you can try something different and that cooking dinner can become an interesting exploration.

Ken was very excited about a recent discovery he made when he decided to use ground chicken instead of ground beef for burgers. He cooked them slowly instead of searing them like beef and they turned out really well! You will fail on occasion, he acknowledges, but that's good. This is how you will learn. You have to be OK with saying 'so what' and trying again.

5. Don't be afraid of guts and whole animals. Guts are lovely! says Ken. And it's good to know your animal parts beyond the fillet. Ken admits that it's hard to find whole animals like fish with their heads on and whole chickens. It's a real shame, he says, that everything is prepackaged these days. (Try Asian markets, he suggests.) Learning how to cut up a whole chicken or clean a whole fish is an enormously useful skill and pretty easy once you learn how.

Bonus recommendation: Ken always has olive oil on hand, as well as a few kinds of salt (more for texture than for flavor) and a few kinds of pepper in different grinders. He also keeps a dish of odds and ends next to his stove for spontaneous additions. Right now he has some cardamon, 1/2 a nutmeg, a stick of cinnamon and a few cloves of garlic.

Thank you, Ken!

Reviews of Ken's books in The Kitchn:
The Lost Art of Real Cooking
The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home

More from Ken on the web:
Ken Albala's Food Rant
Ken's TEDx talk

Previous Expert Essentials

Preeti Mistry
Jodi Liano & Catherine Pantsios
Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi
John Beaver
Deborah Madison
Andrea Nguyen

(Images: University of the Pacific)

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Yotam Ottolenghi & Sami Tamimi's 5 Essential Tips for Fresh, Vibrant, and Flavorful Home Cooking Expert Essentials

When Yotam Ottolenghi's cookbook Plenty was published here in the United States last year, it was an immediate hit and consistently found its way to the top of everyone's best cookbook lists, including our own. Yotam has followed up that effort with an equally stellar but perhaps more personal cookbook called Jerusalem, which he co-authored with his co-chef and business partner, Sami Tamimi. They sat down with me over mint tea last week to generously share some of their kitchen wisdom for home cooks.

Yotam and Sami wer both born (in the same year) and raised in Jerusalem, Yotam in the Jewish west and Sami in the Arab east. They first met in the late 1990's on the London restaurant scene and soon opened a restaurant of their own together. Several very successful restaurants and cookbooks later, they travelled back to their origins with Jerusalem, to explore and highlight the vibrant and varied cuisine of their home city.

Both chefs are passionate home cooks and in fact develop most of their recipes at home, with ingredients from the supermarket. Yotam explained it was very important to them that their cookbooks are accessible to people cooking at home, that they are not too fancy or chefy. While Sami and Yotam both are handsome and somewhat glamorous men (to my eye at least) they are equally warm and down to earth, much like the food they make: vibrant, beautiful, satisfying and very welcoming.

Sami and Yotam's 5 Essentials for the Home Cook

1. Immerse yourself in a single cuisine. Yotam's encourages a deep and thorough study of a specific cuisine. Set yourself up with the proper ingredients, equipment, spices, and study the terms and techniques, he advises. Cook it as often as possible and you will become quite a confident, focused cook.

2. Don't take on too much, read your recipes, and remember joy. Sami cautions home cooks to not get to complicated. Choose a few good recipes and always read them from A to Zed before cooking, he cautions. And always cook the recipe as written first and then change it next time around if you want. Remember that cooking is supposed to be a joyful, happy thing to do!

3. Knives and simplicity. Sami also advises that every cook should have one good knife, or more specifically one good larger chef's knife and one smaller paring knife. You don't need a lot, he says. Two good knives and maybe a spice grinder - that's it. Simplicity is very important.

4. On cooking vegetables. Yotam rarely boils vegetables and cautions against overcooking them when you do. Maybe 3 or 4 minutes for green beans, he suggests. He prefers to roast or grill most vegetables (beetroot, cauliflower, okra were a few that he listed) as this concentrates their flavors. He also likes to keep the vegetables as whole as possible or, if cutting is required, to slice them in relation to their natural shape and architecture. Fat wedges for beetroot or long slices from root to stem for carrots, for example. Avoid dicing everything and allow the integrity of the vegetable to come though.

5. Slice, dice, chop - know and obey these terms! Both Sami and Yotam agree: it's vital to understand and follow prepping directions in recipes. They are very important and usually there's a reason why something needs to be chopped finely or sliced thinly. Ingredients need to be a certain size in order for a recipe to work. We were obsessed with the details in our books, said Yotam. If you follow them exactly, they will work perfectly.

Bonus suggestions

Like all of the cooks and chefs I spoke with, Sami and Yotam were enthusiastic and generous in sharing their knowledge. Here are a few other points they raised. Always taste as you go: don't wait until you are finished. Fresh ingredients are too random in their strength, texture, and degree of moisture, so you you will probably have to adjust for that by tasting at each step of the recipe. Yotam and Sami notice that people fail to do this all the time when they teach classes and feel it's really, really important to take on this habit.

A list of favorite ingredients: Sumac, za'atar, pomegranate molasses, good Lebanese tahini, rose and orange blossom water, date syrup, ground cardamom, allspice, saffron, chervil, cilantro, fresh herbs in general. Use fresh herbs as an ingredient, not just as a garnish, says Yotam.

Try to find dried barberries, an Iranian spice. Barberries are sharply sweet/sour (emphasis on sour) and a vibrant red in color. Use them in a rice pilaf, or in meat, fish, and chicken dishes, or as a part of a fruit salsa. Yotam sometimes poaches them in a sugar syrup before using.

Thank you, Yotam and Sami!

My favorite video clip on Yotam and Sami and why their food is so good (hint: love)

For more information on Yotam and Sami and their restaurants, visit their website.
Our review of Plenty with recipe, and our review of Jerusalem.

Previous Expert Essentials:
Preeti Mistry's 5 Essential Things for the Home Cook
Cooking Teachers Jodi Liano & Catherine-Pantsios 5 Essential Tips for Home Cooks

(Image: David Sandison/The Times of London)

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Adam Richman Cookbook Recipe Database Growing up in the food mecca of New York City, Adam Richman began his love affair with food early on, sampling all the diverse culinary specialties The Big Apple had ... Real Fast Food Nigel Slater - Cookbook Recipe Database Online ... Colman Andrews is living the life most culinarians would be envious of. Travelling the globe, enjoying great regional food and wine, and getting to write about it in ...

Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi New Cookbook

The city of Jerusalem may be "an intricate, convoluted mosaic of peoples," as Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi describe in the introduction to their new cookbook. But they are also quick, and very insistent, to state that this doesn't mean that there isn't a sense of cohesive local cuisine. There are threads that bind the diverse and layered foods of this city closely togetherthe flavor of lemon juice, the presence of pickled vegetables on a table, an extra drizzle of olive oil, figs, pomegranates, apricots, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Jerusalem is as much a map as it is a cookbook, and following it leads to some very unexpected places.

Quick Facts

Who wrote it: Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

Who published it: Ten Speed Press

Number of recipes: 120 recipes

Recipes for right now: Chermoula Eggplant with Bulgur and Yogurt; Roasted Cauliflower and Hazelnut Salad; Wheat Berries and Swiss Chard with Pomegranate Molasses; Lamb-Stuffed Quince with Pomegranate and Cilantro; Braised Eggs with Lamb, Tahini, and Sumac; Semolina, Coconut, and Marmalade Cake; Spice Cookies.

Other highlights: Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi are in a unique position to write this cookbook. They are both insiders, having spent their childhoods in different parts of the city, and outsiders who have now spent more time away from Jerusalem than in it. They know the flavors and dishes of this city in their bones, but they also have enough perspective to write about them in a way that speaks to those of us who have never been there. The fact that Ottolenghi and Tamimi had different cultural upbringings also adds richness and depth to the stories and recipes in this book.

Turning a page in this cookbook is like turning a corner and discovering a new restaurant or street vendor or tea shop. Each recipe is more enticing and crave-inducing than the last. And the authors are totally right: each individual recipe is as unique as a fingerprint, but if you step back and look at the collection as a whole, there is a clear sense of cohesiveness.

I have only had the chance to make one dish so far, the Burnt Eggplant with Garlic, Lemon, and Pomegranate Seeds. It is a completely simple dish with surprisingly complex flavors. I'm making it again tonight. And I have no doubt that I will be making many more dishes from this book in the coming weeks and months.

Who would enjoy this book? Would it be cheating to say "everyone"?! I really do think that there is something in this book to appeal to each of us. Once you find one recipe that needs to be made right this instant, it's easy to find another....and another...and another.

Find the book at your local library, independent bookstore, or Amazon: Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

More Ottolenghi on The Kitchn: Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi: Cookbook Review and Recipe

(Images: Emma Christensen)

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Ottolenghi: The Cookbook: Yotam Ottolenghi,Sami Tamimi ... "The stage is set for a new era of simple pleasure . . . The philosophy of serving food that is not industrialized is a joy to behold . . . [There is] beauty in the ... Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem: meat recipes Life and style The ... Beef and lamb meatballs, lamb shawarma and roast chicken with jerusalem artichokes recipes by Yotam Ottolenghi Jerusalem (Book) by Sami Tamimi, et al. (2012): Waterstones.com Synopsis. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi are the men behind the bestselling Ottolenghi: The Cookbook. Their chain of restaurants is famous for its innovative ... Jerusalem: Amazon.co.uk: Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi: Books The long-awaited third cookbook from Yotam Ottolenghi About the Author Yotam Ottolenghi completed a Masters degree in philosophy and literature whilst working on the ... Ottolenghi - The cookbook It took us, Yotam and Sami, a whole year, and many hours of testing and tasting to put together our first collection of recipes. The Cookbook, finally out on the 1st ... Jerusalem: A Cookbook: Yotam Ottolenghi,Sami Tamimi: 9781607743941 ... A collection of 120 recipes exploring the flavors of Jerusalem from the New York Times bestselling author of Plenty, one of the most lauded cookbooks of 2011. Ottolenghi - Home From our little kitchens underneath the shops, using an abundance of fresh produce and an outrageous attitude to cooking, Ottolenghi offers a unique culinary ... Yotam Ottolenghi interview: 'If I didn't use more unusual ... Yotam Ottolenghi interview: 'If I didn't use more unusual ingredients, people wouldn't read me' How Yotam Ottolenghi built a restaurant empire and became a ... Ottolenghi: The Cookbook: Amazon.co.uk: Sami Tamimi, Yotam ... Britain's most eagerly awaited cookbook ( The Guardian ) Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi...are purveyors of some of the city's most beautiful food. In this sleek ... Jerusalem (Ebury Press) : Hardback : Yotam Ottolenghi, Sami Tamimi ... Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi are the men behind the bestselling Ottolenghi: The Cookbook. Their chain of restaurants is famous for its innovative flavours ...