Plants Taste Better

I received a DIGITAL Advance Reader Copy of this book from #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. From the publisher --- Plants Taste Better is a plant-based recipe book that pushes the envelope in terms of showing you what you can accomplish in your kitchen when you combine centre-staging vegetables alongside a deeper understanding of the techniques required to make the ingredients shine. Cooking plants is a uniquely different art from cooking meat or fish - it requires not only a solid grounding in traditional cooking techniques but also a deeper understanding of new techniques specific to plant-based cookery. Current vegan cookbooks rarely, if ever, delve into the type of sophisticated cuisine that is available in cookbooks with meat and fish dishes. Plants Taste Better addresses this twofold: by introducing the reader to seventy stunning recipes that take vegetable cooking to a new level and concomitantly sharing with them an understanding of how to cook – by highlighting specific techniques in each recipe – that will enhance their cooking prowess across the board. This engaging and gorgeously designed cookbook will teach the home cook how to use some of the best and most useful techniques – all explained in an extremely accessible way, with recipes designed for home cooking alongside ones especially adapted from the author’s award-winning kitchen.

Plant-based cuisine is such a hot topic these days and this book is right on point. The difference is that this book is decidedly GOURMET and a casual or novice cooker may have problems doing these recipes or just give up and not even finish making them. That is not necessarily a bad thing as I am sure that the (for example) Pea and Herb Soup is fine and dandy without the Almond Milk Foam. I am a very experienced cook and there are recipes that even I would attempt to make: this book, to me, is for the expert cook with a love of experimenting and doing many, many, many things to make a recipes’ parts show up lovingly on the plate. Decidedly five stars for the expert but I am knocking it down to four as it is a little too worldly for the average cook.