Customer Reviews

Edible Pockets for Every Meal: Dumplings, Turnovers and Pasties (Nitty Gritty Cookbooks)

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

 

 

My copy of this unpretentious little book is rapidly getting dog-eared. If the recipes weren't so very good, my family would surely be dog-tired of pies and turnovers by now, because I can't seem to stop making them! I literally had to start decorating my productions so that we could distinguish the three or four kinds we usually have on hand.

The book has two parts, one on wrappers, and one on fillings. Wrappers are further subdivided into yeasted, pastry, and ready-made wrappers. Fillings are split into Savoury, Vegetarian Savoury, and Sweet. I have no sweet tooth whatsoever, so I can't comment on the sweet fillings, but of the fifteen or twenty savoury fillings I've made so far, there has only been one dud.

So why only four stars?

1) The section on pastry wrappers could be a little longer, with more instruction on the often-devilish details of pastry-making.

2) I like my fillings to have interesting textures. Ms. German seems to prefer puréeing everything.

3) She has a tendency to overcook fillings (astonishing comment, coming from a Brit!)

4) She has a fondness for frozen vegetables.

The last three quibbles are obviously easily rectified by adjusting the recipes to your taste.

Highlights: Spicy Asian Chicken, Chinese Orange Beef, Piroshki, and both of the empanada recipes.

Ladies and Gentlemen, start your bread machines!

The strongest part of Edible Pockets is the various dough recipes. I've tried only a couple, but they worked. I did have to adapt the process to working dough with a stand-alone mixer. I didn't mind, but in a book that seems aimed at the complete novice, it's surprising that German doesn't address this popular alternative to bread machine and totally manual approaches.

My biggest complaint, though, is the filling recipes. Have you ever made tuna salad as usual for sandwiches and wondered how it would work if heated? Probably not, but German recommends this in the "tuna and cheese" filling and I was sucker enough to try it. For the record, celery just enough off crisp to be soggy is not a wonderful texture. And the cooking directions for fillings are misleading, as another reviewer has pointed out. An example is the "Cornish Pasty Filling," which was already well on its way to mush at half the hour's cooking time prescribed. In general, most fillings lack moisture and make for a mighty dry pocket.

German's directions for assembling the pockets are also at fault.
It's nice to know one can roll out the pastry to 1/8", but there are plenty of fillings that work best with a thicker-sided pocket. German does mention the possibility of letting the yeast-dough pockets rise before baking but fails to point out that the fillings must be at room temperature if this is going to happen. I also wonder why she is so keen on using pressing molds for calzones and other standard pockets. Unless you are cooking for an army, crimping with fingers seals the pockets just dandy.

When German says "If you have leftovers ... try using them as pocket fillings," she hits the nail on the head. If you have access to a toaster oven at work, her book helps provide a tasty lunch solution. Throw away the second half of the book, though, and dream up your own fillings.

The equipment section at the front of this cookbook has a brief bit of information on using "pocket makers" (also called turnover presses or dumpling presses), pierogi or ravioli makers, and cutting and sealing gadgets. There's a section on "simple pairings" (things you can throw into a pocket dough as a filling without needing a recipe-many leftovers work well).

There are yeast dough wrappers, pastry dough wrappers, and "ready-made" wrappers. Fillings include poultry, meat, seafood, cheese, vegetable, herb, and sweet.

Each dough section has a detailed list of instructions at the front. Then each actual dough recipe covers ingredients, oven temperature and baking time, and expected yields for different sizes of pockets. This way each recipe can fit on one small page, and a great number of recipes can fit into a relatively short space. The filling recipes are extremely simple. There's a short list of ingredients (most recipes make one to two cups of filling, which actually goes quite far) and usually a brief paragraph of instructions. Then there's a quick list of suggested wrappers for the filling and the pages you'll find them on.

The recipes in this cookbook are awfully good. What about a chicken curry filling, or a Moroccan chicken filling? How about an Italian ham filling, Asian pork filling, sausage eggplant filling, or bacon and cheese filling? There are meat pie recipes from various countries, a Chinese orange beef filling, tuna and cheese, crab and cream cheese, crab and cheddar, and ginger shrimp.

Or maybe you'd prefer herbed feta and walnut, cheese calzone, three cheese, tomato rice, spicy tomato cheese, mushroom, mushroom and cheese, broccoli cheddar, or similar cheese and vegetable fillings.

For a cookbook that's so incredibly simple, and fillings that take so little time to make, this is a delicious resource. The only real problems we noted were some amounts of salt and/or sugar that seemed low, and it's easy to fix those.

For those of you on a diet, don't despair too much. Most of these are meant to be baked, not fried. And if you stick with the yeast doughs rather than the pastry doughs, pick your fillings carefully, and do a little judicious substitution of cheeses and reduction of oils, they can be pretty healthy. Besides, by packaging the fillings in such small wrappers, it's easy to make sure you don't eat too much!

The ingredients are pretty common and easy-to-find, and until you start playing with the one or two recipes that call for things like crab, they're cheap too. We even found that a good handful of the recipes can be made from the ingredients already found in a well-stocked kitchen and pantry, so you can do some of this stuff on the spur of the moment.

My copy of this unpretentious little book is rapidly getting dog-eared. If the recipes weren't so very good, my family would surely be dog-tired of pies and turnovers by now, because I can't seem to stop making them! I literally had to start decorating my productions with alphabetical pastry cutouts (made with the help of a Play-Doh lettering kit), so that we can distinguish between the three or four kinds we usually have on hand.

The book has two parts, one on wrappers, and one on fillings. Wrappers are further subdivided into yeasted, pastry, and ready-made wrappers. Fillings are split into Savoury, Vegetarian Savoury, and Sweet. I have no sweet tooth whatsoever, so I can't comment on the sweet fillings, but of the fifteen or twenty savoury fillings I've made so far, there has only been one dud.

So why only four stars?

1) The section on pastry wrappers could be a little longer, with more instruction on the often-devilish details of pastry-making.

2) I like my fillings to have interesting textures. Ms. German seems to prefer puréeing everything.

3) She has a tendency to overcook fillings (astonishing comment, coming from a Brit!)

4) She has a fondness for frozen vegetables.

The last three quibbles are obviously easily rectified by adjusting the recipes to your taste.

Highlights: Spicy Asian Chicken, Chinese Orange Beef, Piroshki, and both of the empanada recipes.

Ladies and Gentlemen, start your bread machines!

Informative book on the many types of different dough used in making meals from appetizers,meat dishes and even deserts.
I was impressed with the various doughs and how they can be used in different ways, from baking, frying, boiling and steaming.
There is something for almost every one

I purchased this book as a quick way to make tasty healthy lunches for my husband to take to work. I found many very delicious filling recipes, which I have prepared and enjoyed myself. I also found a wide variety of wrapper recipes as a scrumptious variation for the fillings. It also has a selection of ready-made wrappers that you can purchase in your grocery store. I'm sure you will enjoy this delightful book.

I was first attracted to the book by the cover page and looked forward to more scrumptious looking food inside, but was going to be dissappointed.

To be fair, though - it is still a good book if you want to understand how to assemble edible pockets. At least there are many good ideas in the book to get helpful hints, but when there are no 'finished product pictures' it can sometimes make it difficult to know if you are getting it right. That's why it gets an OK rating from me this time.

I bought this book as it is so often advertised in conjunction with the Dough makers Pastry presses, but very little inside the book pertains to them. Very disappointed.