How to Cook Everything

The Basics, by Mark Bittman.
4.5 Stars on Amazon.

I'm going to hospital in an hour and I'll take this book with me to give to any one of the nurses. I'll ask them if they know anyone who could use a good book similar to Betty Crocker. Except better.

I have Bittman's original How to Cook Everything but that one doesn't have any photos. It's very well written. Each recipe is brief, actually terse. Then variations are given for nearly everything. It's great for imparting the understanding that you can basically clean out your refrigerator by some variation of one of your favorite things.

I've never actually used it. I'll give away that one as well.

This book is for beginners. I read it in three minutes like zip, zip, zippity do dah, zip, zippity, zap.

Immediately the scrambled eggs don't tell you how to make them like a sauce. The omelet is done poorly. The frittata is so plain and basic it's ridiculous. Nothing about quiche. Nothing about all the marvelous things that can be done with eggs. Nothing about the properties of eggs that make them so important in cooking.

The fish section doesn't say how to prepare sushi or sashimi or Hawaiian poke. There is nothing in it that describes an Asian approach.

The rice section shows the difference between short grain rice and long grain rise but fails to mention anything about the millions of categories of each. It doesn't suggest how to get the best short grain rice nor how that can be used for risotto. Nor why. Although, it does show how to make risotto. It shows what it should look like -- the degree of creaminess and how to get that.

The soup bases are extremely basic. It instructs to use commercial chicken broth for making soup base from Turkey pan drippings. There is no mention of using the carcass, far less breaking the bones and roasting them for more flavor. Nothing about using a pressure pot to speed up the process. The true glory of bone broth with its wonderful gelatinous aspic is missing.

(A friend of mine was throwing that away because he didn't know what it is. He thought it was like fat.)

The bread section helpfully has the NYT no-knead overnight bread, but it doesn't tell how to make sourdough. Nothing about sourdough culture. Nothing about how to make it more sour. There is nothing about Pullman loaves. Nothing about wet dough and cloches for wide open crumb.

Nothing about aging pizza dough.

Distressingly, the pasta section assumes all commercial pasta. There is absolutely nothing about how to make your own pasta, the various types. How to cut it. Various ways to make it. Nothing about machines or how to roll it. Nothing about egg pasta. Nor Asian noodles. Nothing about changing the pH.  Nothing about various flours, nothing about Durum wheat.

Each section I'm thinking, more is left out of this book than is put in it. I could write a more thorough book. Wait. I have written a more thorough book, far more thorough,  over ten years in blog-form showing all the experiments, successes and failures. The photographs in this book would be extremely helpful for someone who's just starting. But I already have 100X more photographs about everything. Everything.

Somebody else needs to own this book. Nothing against the book. It's a very good book.  It's just not for me. It's for a beginner. A teenager perhaps.