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« All Italian all the time | Main | Janneen the Marine » Tuesday, March 28, 2006An overly cheffy cookbookLet the cook beware. When I made a few recipes from Mario Batali's "The Babbo Cookbook" (2002) with friends before watching "The Sopranos" on Sunday, two of the three recipes had major errors. And I'm not talking typos, out-of-order ingredients, or even unnecessarily complicated elements -- although it definitely has the latter. No, this is much worse. In a recipe for "tuna al torocco" (torocco is Sicilian for blood orange), the very first step is to preheat the oven -- and yet nothing ever goes in it! All the elements are cooked on the stovetop. In the same recipe, Mario never told me what to do with those shiitakes I sauteed in step 2. And in a much simpler recipe for farro and roasted beets, Mario had me prepare an ice bath, then, much like that hot oven, never referred to it again. Thankfully, in both cases I had read through the recipe before starting, and saw the problems before they really became problems. And given the frou-frou touches I ignored -- a separate recipe for 2 1/2 cups of blood orange vinaigrette when I needed only 1/4 cup, and a separate recipe for 2 cups of parsley oil when I needed only 2 tablespoons -- the results were pretty tasty. But all that seemed in spite of the cookbook, not because of it. I won't be reaching for it again anytime soon. Posted by Joe Yonan at 04:40 PM
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