The Native Foods Restaurant Cookbook Review

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(More customer reviews)I would love to give this book five stars. When I first bought it, I certainly would have. However, as I worked my way through the book and cooked with more of the recipes, I found myself with headaches as often as I had great food.
Here's why: This book is not edited well, and it is not written with a beginning or even an intermediate cook in mind. That combination spells disaster. In roughly a third of the recipes in the book, vital details are missing, details that might seem minor to a casual reader or obvious to advanced cooks but mean the difference between beautiful food and a disgusting, and in some cases expensive, catastrophe.
Here's a good example. Many of the book's recipes call for a meat substitute called seitan, a sort of gluten loaf cooked in broth. A recipe for seitan is provided in the early chapters of the book. Interested in making at home what can be a very expensive item in the store, I set out to make seitan one day according to the recipe provided in Petrovna's book.
So, I followed the directions to the letter, going through the entire process of making the dough and rinsing out the starch and kneading the resulting gluten ball, a process that takes place over the course of hours. Then, I prepared the broth that the gluten is cooked in - a very salty broth, I should add - and put the whole thing on the stove to cook, a process that also took hours. However, as I put the pot on the stove, I found myself rereading the directions over and over again, hoping that I'd find a clue as to whether or not to put the lid on the pot while the seitan cooked. There was none, except a picture of the seitan cooking, which featured a pot with no lid on it. So I decided to take a chance and leave the lid off.
What I got at the end was a very time-consuming, very messy ball of salt. This is no exaggeration. Eating the seitan was comperable to taking a shot of salt and washing it down with another shot of salt. The liquid had boiled down, depositing all of the salt in the gluten loaf. I had no way of knowing that this was probably not the intended effect until I tasted the seitan and found it completely unedible. Had I been instructed in the directions to simply put the pot lid on, I might have had something to show for my effort besides a huge loaf of gluten-flavored salt.
Unfortunately, there are a ridiculous number of this type of omission in "Native Foods." Slips as simple as forgetting to instruct readers to grease a pan, to drain canned vegetables before using them, or to add more water if a recipe gets dry can leave all but the most experienced cooks with a disaster instead of dinner. Most of the recipes in this book are fun and imaginative, and if the directions are clear they come out beautiful and delicious. Unfortunately, every time I use this book I feel like I'm playing Russian Roulette, so I've come to pass this book up for ideas unless I've got a lot of time and money to buy groceries.

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