Customer Reviews

La Cucina Siciliana di Gangivecchio: Gangivecchio's Sicilian Kitchen

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you like to cook and you want authentic Southern Italian cooking (compared to the Tuscany inspired cooking that has been all the rage), then this is absolutely the best cookbook you can buy...with the possible exception of the Tornabene's new cookbook,which I am just about to buy. The recipes are pretty easy to follow, but most require either a fair amount of prep or some time to stir the pot. The pasta dishes are fantastic. My family loves the fava bean recipes (I cooked one as a joke in honor of Silence of the Lambs, but it was a hit, so I've been making them ever since) and the anchovy tomato sauce. I love this cookbook so much that I actually made the trip to the restaurant. It's not a place you get to by accident, you really have to want to go because it is way way out in the middle of Sicily. But the food there is excellent, and I was lucky enough to eat things familiar to me from the cookbook, as well as some new dishes. I'm not sure I'll ever try any of the desserts in this cookbook (too much work) but I've eaten some of them at their restaurant - and I can recommend them highly!

P.S. If you decide to make the trek, I recommend that you stay at their hotel. The grounds of Gangivechio are lovely and worth enjoying on their own.

This is one of my most frequently used cookbooks (and I have a lot of them) just for the pasta section. The recipes are simple enough to use for everyday, and good enough to use for company. The ditali with spinach, the rigatoni daniela, the arugula and fresh tomato sauces, the zucchini pasta sauce---all are easy, draw raves from guests, require no special ingredients, and taste like the wonderful pastas I had in trattorias in Sicily. The risotto recipe is the best I've ever used; the salads are also good; the desserts and main dishes are mostly too complicated for daily use, or for any but the experienced cook.

I bought this book over a year ago, and still there are many recipes I want to try. Every time I look through the book something here or there will call my attention. Most recipes can be made with commonly found ingredients. Any cook should recognize the love for a constantly inspiring book --the best advertisement is just to list some recipes I've tried: roasted pepper and cream sauce with penne, risotto milanese that can be modified with your favorite vegetable, risotto with pumpkin and walnuts, risotto with spinach and pecorino, baked stuffed swordfish rolls, baked stuffed zucchini, and sweet and sour pumpkin. There are lots of diverse, fantastic sounding recipes in the book, but I haven't tried them for lack of time. But all of the recipes I've listed can be made in under 1 hr with prep time included. My risotto wasn't great before, now it's fool proof.
I would recommend this for someone that knows how to cook and can draw on this book for their own recipes.

The book contains straightforward, easy recipes that let good ingredients shine through. It's a good reference for recipes suitable for every day home cooking. But the binding is atrocious! Clumps of pages started falling out after my first use of the book. That shouldn't happen with a book [of this price]. As a result, I wouldn't bother buying the book unless it came at a VERY steep discount.

This is a wonderful book, full of very interesting background into the cooking of the region and to the personalities of the proprietors of the restaurant. While not all recipes are ones that you will make on the spur of the moment, many are worth the effort. I have thrown several dinners of recipes from this book and they have won raves from all attendees.

We received this book as a gift over 10 years ago and are still using several of the recipes as regular staples...in particular it has several excellent pasta recipes using pancetta that you'll enjoy.

The recipes in this cookbook use exciting, distinctive ingredients. But if you look to the recipe instructions to tell you how to cook them, you will be in the dark. The instructions are misleading, confusing, and incomplete. However, if you know how to cook, that is, if you are an experienced chef, you will be able to make wonderful dishes from the recipes.

It's funny but I think they modify the recipes so they don't work out quite the way they should. You always hear about old women doing this,leaving out some ingredient or changing a quantity to keep it from being as good as theirs!

In particular, the pasta frolla recipe, an essential part of many sicilian desserts, had 22 tablespoons of baking powder in it which caused tart crusts to puff up like a cake and not be flat. Checking many other sicilian recipes for pasta frolla there is no baking powder in it.

Perhaps it's my lack of ability, perhaps not! But it created a Frankenstein tart that was still edible but more like fruit-topped dry cake.

After returning from a trip to Italy and Sicily and enjoying so much of the cuisine, I wanted to get a cookbook that was authentic Sicilian. Well, this is definitely the one. The recipes are awesome and the stories took me back to the wonderful vacation.

Loved the book. Immediately tried out a recipe with eight of my favorite Sicilians, and they loved it! Two of them went home and tried it out on their families. Easy to read, easy to follow. My favorite! I would buy other cookbooks from them. Thank you Amazon. You made it so easy to bring this into my home.