Customer Reviews

How to Cook Italian

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Let Giuliano lead you into his home kitchen and you will be richly rewarded with memorable meals.

Giuliano is blessed with the unique combination of an Italian palate and American organization. This book works.

The concise, easy to follow recipes are based on using a handful of ingredients and following a few simple steps. Each one's preparation time is listed, and most take under an hour from start to finish.

The book includes a thorough discussion of kitchen tools, ingredients, and techniques used in the Italian kitchen.

Its gorgeous full color photography will make you want to race into your kitchen and start cooking for your family and friends.

-- Nanette Galloni

Giuliano Hazan does an excellent job of putting together a variety of Italian dishes. His book contains dishes of both northern and southern Italy. The book starts with a very good primer on how to cut vegetables correctly, what tools you will need, and information about basic ingredients of Italian cooking. I also like that he limits the recipes to ingredients that can be found in your local "Mega Mart".

I found the primer in the begining of the book to be very helpful. Sometimes just knowing how to prepare or cut a particular ingredient can help take away any intimidation you may have with a new ingredient. He has step by step instructions for cutting up artichokes, onions, and so much more. I also like he takes the time to tell you what tools are essential, he isn't one for useless gadgets. The ingredients that you will need, you will find in a local grocery store. Nothing too exotic will be asked for in this book. It is annoying trying to make a recipe and having to forage for some rare ingredient.

The recipes do span both northern and southern Italian cooking. So often in the United States I think we often feel Italian food is just red spaghetti sauce. Northern Italian food is rich, has unique sauces, and if you haven't tried any northern Italian food, you are missing out. His recipes also do a good job of spanning appetizers, meats, rice, pasta, salads, vegetables, and desserts.

I like that the recipes are written clearly, and are easy to follow. He lists out steps, so you can make sure you are on the right track with his recipes. Also the recipes have ingredients that you are familar with. His recipes are written to where they are almost fool proof.

This is a well put together cookbook. I like that ingredients are easy to find. Recipes are written out clearly, and they are easy to understand. He also does a good job of featuring recipes from northern as well as southern Italy. If you are looking for a book to start out our Italian cooking adventures you will be pleased with this book.

I run a hands on cooking school and use Giuliano's newest book, How To Cook Italian, as a foundation for the course. If you want to become an expert on Italian foods, cooking and cooking techniques, and how to make your meals genuninely Italian, you must have this book.

In this modern age of information overload, it has become ever more essential to have authorities in different fields whom one can trust. How does one select a title on Italian cooking from the dozens which seem to be published every year? In the realm of authentic Italian cooking, Giuliano is an authority that one can trust.

The son of Marcella and Victor Hazan (acclaimed experts on Italian cooking and wine respectively), Giuliano has shown himself worthy of continuing their legacy with a series of Italian cookbooks (The Classic Pasta Cookbook, Every Night Italian, and now How to Cook Italian). Each book is faithfully dedicated to the true principles of authentic Italian cooking: simplicity, freshness, and flavor. As always with Hazan, the food is the focus. He is not a celebrity chef interested in entertaining his readers, but a cook in the best sense who desires to nourish those he feeds and who use his cookbooks.

The cookbook is wisely laid out in the manner of an Italian meal: appetizers, first courses, second courses, vegetables, salads, and desserts. The cooking is from throughout the varied regions of Italy and, as a result, presents the many different kinds of cooking existing throughout Italy, from the rich and luxorious cooking of Emilia-Romagna in the North to the lively cooking of Italy's Southern regions. Before the recipes is a helpful descriptions of the tools and ingredients one needs to stock a proper Italian kitchen.

The book does have a few faults, however. Although the photography is stunning and beyond improvement, the font and layout of the rest of the book leave something to be desired. There's something overly utilitarian in feel about the book. A more beautifully presented book, such as Marcella Hazan's Marcella Cucina or Mario Batali's Molto Italiano, would have done more justice to the excellent content of the book. I must also admit that I miss the more poetic language of Marcella's books. When reading those, one becomes swept up in the beauty of language as well as food. Perhaps it is unfair to expect from the son what we've come to love in the mother, and perhaps Giuliano's publisher refused such effusiveness. One could only hope in the future for a book which is a little more personal and less textbook like in nature.

Having said this, I in no way mean to lessen the importance or excellence of the book. It fully deserves the five stars I've given it. As a teacher of classic Italian cooking myself, I have become forever indebted to the Hazans for the excellence of their teaching. All of Marcella's and Giuliano's books hold a place of uniqueness in my kitchen, and I would urge anyone interested in Italian cooking to give them a prominent place in theirs as well.

Giuliano Hazan offers rich and varied recipes in his book How To Cook Italian. Suggestions of preparation and cooking time tables provide both the novice and the expert cook with achievable feasts.

We love Giuliano's new book How to Cook Italian! A few years ago we bought Every Night Italian and were ready for some new and exciting options from Giuliano and we got it with this new collection of gems! The recipes were easy to follow and the explanations for each next step were so helpful. My husband loves to cook with Giuliana's books and it was fun for the whole family to join in the kitchen! Thanks for another wonderful book!

You can use this book to learn how to make beautiful food very simply. I have learned how to make risotto, pan roasted pork loin, vegetable soup, meat ragu and veal scaloppine. Even how to roast a chicken. This book is understated. The Hazan way of cooking food, expressed in this book and others, can change your life for the better and transform your kitchen.

THIS IS ONE THE THE BEST ITALIAN COOKBOOKS I OWN. I WOULD RECOMMEND THIS FOR ANYONE, COOKING AT ANY LEVEL. THE BUTTER AND TOMATO SAUCE RECEIPE IS SO EASY AND SO DELICIOUS. THIS IS SIMPLE COOKING AT ITS FINEST.

`How to Cook Italian' by Giuliano Hazan is a highly evocative pairing of author and title, since Senor Hazan is the son of the foremost writer on Italian cooking in America, Marcella Hazan, who has given us more than her share of instruction on how to `cook like an Italian'.

The breezy tone of the title leads me to believe the author will be taking the Mario Batali line on cooking with local (in Giuliano's case, Florida) ingredients in the Italian approach to technique for preparation and cooking. I also expect far more than usual emphasis on technique than in the average cookbook. The third vibe I get is that this is not intended to be an attempt to be exhaustive or a scholarly approach, in the style of either Julia Child's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' or Elizabeth David's `Italian Food'. But why bother, since Elizabeth David and Giuliano's mother have already covered both those bases. Instead, I expect to see genuine Italian cooking interpreted for the average American cook. And, to a great extent, Senor Giuliano has succeeded in this task. The only problem is that the market is so full of good general Italian cookbooks, expecially the recent and encyclopedaic `The Silver Spoon' and Michele Scicolone's `1000 Italian Recipes' that one wonders if there is any room left for this book, regardless of how good the author's pedigree may be. This competition is especially stiff, as the author includes none of his mother's excellent reflections on the doctrinal and procedural underpinnings of Italian cuisine (See `Marcella Says' and the encyclopedaic `Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking'.

True to the expectations created by the title, the first 46 pages are dedicated to techniques, equipment, ingredients, and base recipes. This is all to the good. My only problem here is that the author or Scribner's art department went just a bit too cheap by not providing line diagrams of every piece of kitchen equipment cited in the text. The author says all the right things about the food mill, and yet, from his text, a person totally unfamiliar with the device may be at a loss to appreciate how to find it, especially when faced with less than knowledgable sales clerks.

In the base recipes, there are instructions for bread crumbs, bechamel sauce, mayonnaise, sausage, and meat broth. This seems a bit thin, and I'm puzzled with the absence of fennel in the sausage recipe.

The recipe chapters are:

Appetizers and buffet items, 20 pages

Soups, 30 pages

Pasta and pasta sauces (including macaroni and cheese!), 103 pages

Rice and Risotto, 32 pages

Meats, 84 pages

Vegetables and Side Dishes, 34 pages

Salads, 14 pages

Desserts, 26 pages

It should be no surprise to see pasta taking up the largest chapter. Even at over 100 pages, this is still not a complete manual to Italian pasta; however, it does give about the right amount of space to preparing dried pasta, fresh egg pasta, and gnocchi. The section on how to make the egg pasta of Emilia Romagna is especially good, but one wonders why he didn't simply refer to his mother's excellent writings on the subject. But then, this would not be complete as a good cookbook for the average American who wants to cook Italian now and then, and do a good job of it.

By far the biggest gap in this book's coverage is on the subject of breads. The treatment of pizza is brief, and there are precious few references to bread in the Index. There is not even any references to calzones or bruschetta, let alone artisinal yeasted breads. But then, one can say that that is really outside the scope of this book.

The best evidence I have that this is neither `authentic' nor `complete' are the facts that the recipe for `Classic Bolognese Meat Sauce' is not nearly as classic as I have seen elsewhere, where three different meats, beef, veal, and pork, are included in the recipe. The second evidence is that there is no recipe for the infamous `Pasta Puttanesca', although there is a very similar recipe called `Spaghettini with olives and capers, Vesuvius style'. A third evidence is that after discoursing at length on the importance of olive oil in Italian cuisine, Senor Hazen goes French on us and uses butter to make his frittatas. Oddly, Senor Hazan makes frequent use of a rather uncommon (in America) ingredient from Sardinia, bottarga, in several of his dishes. I must keep an eye out for that one. It may be the new anchovies!

Most of these complaints are really nitpicking, as the book really does succeed in its basic task of teaching basic Italian cooking techniques which are done at home. Just be warned that this book does not cover the whole story, as there are entire worlds of bread and sausage making and timbalo dishes left to be explored.

All in all, this is a very decent introduction to Italian cooking for American homes, as it is true to Italian roots, and is not another `Italian-American' approach.

If you have no other Italian cookbook, this is a very good starting point.

If you're just learning to cook. Or learning to cook more than the same 5 or 10 dishes you've been making for years, this is a great book to start with. The reason I say that, is most of the recipes are based on few ingredients and building the dishes is not a complex affair. The book doesn't look fancy on the inside, or have pages and pages of the author rambling on about his latest vacation that you are paying for by purchasing his book, it's just about the recipes. The food.

Because much of Italian cooking is simple cooking at heart, you'll get to know the ingredients you use. And using a book like this will teach you how to cook authentic dishes. And finally it will also teach you to cook to your taste, because you'll come to know the individual ingredients intimately.

The book will teach you how to make the staples dishes of Italian cooking, and make them well. In particular, pasta and the sauces. Make a few of these, and as long as you are using ingredients that taste good, each on their own before they go into the dish, you will be making bolognese, butter tomato, marinara, alfredo... The idea of buying $3 or $5 jar's of pasta sauce for anything beyond the equivalent of boxed mac' & cheese will make you laugh.

Take it from the guy who couldn't make anything but chilli and frozen pizza until he was 35. You can learn to cook well. Later on you'll probably want to look at some of the celebrity cookbooks when you're willing to spend a couple of hours on a dish, or are looking for new variations on recipes, but you'll have the knowledge from this book in the back of your head telling you, this is how Italian cooking should start.