Customer Reviews

The Best of Clay Pot Cooking

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I have owned a 4-quart Romertopf for a few years and wanted a cookbook to try things beyond my current self concocted recipes for turkey parts and duck. The title of this book sounded very promising, but if I had looked through this book in a bookstore, I would not have gotten it.

Some of the recipes are nice, but could just as, actually more, easily be made using regular baking dishes than clay pots. I was looking for a cookbook where using a clay pot made a difference in the final product--and this book is not it.

As two examples out of many I could use:

1. Braised Red Cabbage with Cranberries - All the clay pot does is provide a covered dish for the final cooking. Prep cooking is done in a frying pan. One could just as easily make this dish completely in the frying pan, covering it until done, or use any covered container one already has and finish it in the oven.

2. Banana Bread Pudding - Calls for use of a cazuela, a Spanish, clay pot that looks like a high sided pie pan. The cazuela is not necessary for this dish to be made. Any similar shaped, metal or glass, baking dish could be used.

Whether one likes lamb or not, the recipe for Gigot of Lamb with Garlic is one of the few recipes in this little book that is probably much nicer made in a Romertopf (or other covered clay pot) than in a normal covered roasting pan.

The most frequently called for Romertopf size is 3-quart.

This book is excellent! Do I really mean it, given the insightful critiques on this page with low ratings for the book?
Yes, I do; and I give it 5 stars to balance out the reviews. Every dish I've made so far has been absolutely delicious--from
the plainer whole chicken and whole turkey recipes to fancier ones like Chicken Tagine with Green Olives and Preserved Lemon and
Meditteranean Fish Stew. I can't wait to try out more recipes, my only regret being that the book is a small compendum rather than a large one with lots of recipes. What you eat, however, will be good!
So add this to your collection and enjoy it.

I love to cook and I love to try new recipes. The recipes are easy to understand and once the meal is in the oven you can forget it until time to dish-up. Sesame Chicken is sensational! A great book for anyone who doesn't mind spending a little time getting the ingredients together.

For some really good and easy recipes this is the book for you. The only drawback to the book is that there is no nutritional information after each recipe.If this is a must for yiu, then skip the book.For me, it was not a deal nreaker, I lost my original copy and was happy to see that it was still in print ! I enjoy cooking meals from this book, as does my family !

Very nice book (i.e. cover, design, etc.) however it is seriously lacking in the number of recipes that are offered. Especially since it is called the "Best of Clay Pot Cooking". I was looking for some great recipes.

This book gives a terrific base-line for clay pot beginners like myself. I found it easy to understand, easy to follow and the meals come out terrific each time. Of course, we have now started to embellish the recipes with our own "improvements", but each recipe in the book is a winner. It is a must have if you own a clay pot to cook in.

One recent Christmas, we gave each of our children's families a clay cooker, which came with a small recipe book, but they complained that the books did not have illustrations and that there were not enough ideas. This Christmas, I bought each of them and myself this little gem of a cookbook, much to our group's satisfaction. We're looking forward to trying each of the recipes and sharing our own extrapolations of the wonderful ideas in the book.

I was very disappointed. I was expecting recipes for common daily food. It contains only "exotic" foods that are not practical for everyday use.
Durwood

This book is awful. The pictures are what sold me and the finished dish looked nothing like the one pictured. I read on the back cover the author writes for the health food industry. You certainly will not get fat on these watery recipes.

Bought this as a Christmas gift, along with a clay-pot roaster, for friends who enjoy cooking. It's a lovely book, and my friends said the recipes were excellent.