Scott Conant's New Italian Cooking [Hardcover]

Scott Conant (Author), Joanne McAllister Smart (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 25, 2005

The award-winning chef of two of New York’s most celebrated restaurants presents his fresh, vibrant approach to Italian cooking with recipes that reveal the secrets behind his most acclaimed dishes.

Scott Conant, chef-owner of L’Impero and Alto restaurants in Manhattan, has been thrilling diners and impressing critics since L’Impero opened in 2003. Now he translates his inspired combination of the best of New American cooking with the best of Italian cuisine into more than 130 sophisticated but easy-to-follow recipes. Here are the dishes that have garnered national attention and unanimous praise, including melt-in-your-mouth beef short ribs, the creamiest polenta, intoxicatingly fragrant roast chicken, and a deceptively simple Spaghetti with Fresh Tomato Sauce that transforms an everyday meal into something sublime.

Because Scott understands that home cooks don’t often have as much time to spend in the kitchen as they’d like, his New Italian Cooking includes many dishes that suit hectic weekday schedules—meaning they can easily be made in 45 minutes or less—such as Seared and Slow-Roasted Sirloin of Beef or Grilled Shrimp with Mint, Orange, and Fennel Couscous. When he slows things down for the weekend, it’s with luxurious braises and roasts that require more time but not necessarily more effort, including Oven-Braised Lamb Shanks with Red Wine Vinegar and a sumptuous, long-simmering Bolognese Sauce.

Featuring 30 captivating color photos, new insights on Italian ingredients, and friendly yet meticulous instructions, Scott Conant’s New Italian Cooking is a book to turn to again and again for the best of contemporary Italian cuisine.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Conant, chef/owner of New York's L'Impero—which won a James Beard award for the country's best new restaurant in 2003—brings together the best of Old World cooking and modern twists in this sumptuous cookbook. Italian food; the use of fresh, seasonal ingredients; simple foundations giving way to complex flavors—Conant takes all these trends and whips them up into a fabulous mix of recipes, offering a perfect blend of easier weeknight dishes as well as weekend extravaganzas. His food has "an Italian soul": some traditional elements remain, but inventive surprises add excitement. To wit, Conant's Spaghetti Puttanesca (Scotty's Style) uses both plum and cherry tomatoes, and tones down the amount of capers, black olives, anchovy and garlic so that the flavors continue to build as one eats. "Boneless" Osso Bucco turns the classic "bone with a hole" dish into a deeply flavorful revelation thanks to a reversal of order in two of the steps. Conant includes dishes adapted from his restaurant, which may find readers happily spending an entire weekend afternoon in the kitchen, making stews and fresh pasta, as well as quick-cooking fish, chicken and meat dishes. He smartly alerts readers up front as to which recipes fall into which camp and includes plenty of fascinating asides on, for example, seasoning with salt or transforming pantry staples like olive oil and canned beans into the elements of delicious pasta dishes. Wine recommendations accompany each recipe in this invigorating collection. Photos.
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Review

“When I started reading Scott’s book, I was immediately impressed with his fresh and innovative approach to classical recipes. The simplicity of most of the recipes, make this a must for the kitchen of any Italian-food-loving cook.”
—Pino Luongo, author of Simply Tuscan

“Scott Conant is a fine cook. He combines strong culinary skills with a deliberate flair for the creative and unexpected.”
—Jonathan Waxman, chef, Barbuto

“Simple Italian meets American ingenuity. Good, easy-to-find ingredients matched perfectly with good, easy-to-follow recipes. This book is a wonderful addition to my kitchen bookshelf.”
—Gordon Hamersley, chef-owner, Hamersley’s Bistro

“I have enjoyed Scott’s cooking for years at his restaurant, and now you have the opportunity to do it right in your home. Scott Conant’s New Italian Cooking is a wonderful book where you can see Scott’s true passion for Italian flavors.”
—Marcus Samuelsson, chef, Aquavit

“The moment I tasted Scott’s food I knew it was going to be big. The flavors are unique to Italian cuisine. In New Italian Cooking, Scott provides great recipes that allow people to create simple or more intricate meals at home.”
—Dean Fearing, chef, The Mansion on Turtle Creek

“A handsome book of sophisticated, relaxed, and inspired recipes. This book is a must for professionals and home cooks alike.”
—Alfred Portale, chef and co-owner, Gotham Bar and Grill

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; 1ST edition (October 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767916824
• ISBN-13: 978-0767916820
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 0.9 x 9.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #114,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Superior Chef's Cookbook for Serious Foodies. Buy It. November 12, 2005

By B. Marold HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

`Scott Conant's New Italian Cooking' by, you guessed it, Scott Conant (chef-owner of L'Impero in New York City) and cooking writer for hire, Joanne McAllister Smart impresses me as being the kind of book I was really expecting from Terrance Brennan's `Artisanal Cooking'. While it is not quite as cerebral as Paul Bertolli's `Cooking by Hand', it is definitely more thoughtful than some other leading neuvo Italian cookbooks such as those from Rose Gray and Ruth Rodgers of London's River Café or their irrepressible protégé, Jamie Oliver. While Oliver and River Café offer lots of smart but easy recipes, Conant gives us somewhat more involved recipes dealing much less with pasta and more with some of Italy's more exotic ingredients such as bottarga (dried, pressed fish roe) and guanciale (cured pig's jowls). And Senor Conant is totally unapologetic about using these hard to get ingredients. While my hero Mario Batali will often specify this ingredient and say you can substitute pancetta, Conant insists that the real guanciale have a flavor that simply cannot be reproduced by protein from some other part of the pig.

Conant's sense of `new Italian' cooking is also different from Mario, who, with his love of ramps and other local ingredients, sees himself as adapting the Italian concentration on local ingredients with those ingredients which are local to the farms around the New York metropolitan area. Conant relies on purely Italian ingredients with an emphasis on Italian techniques such as carpaccio that may not be familiar to most American fans of Italian cuisine....

Conant is also very big on pairing dishes with wine and being almost totally ignorant of wines, I will take it for granted that Senor Conant knows what he is talking about in this area and, if wine is your thing with Italian food, this book is doubly valuable to you.

Conant's culinary center of gravity seems to be the northern coasts of Italy, with much more risotto, polenta, and gnocchi dishes than dishes with dried pasta. He also does a lot with seafood.

Many of the recipes in this book are relatively easy. But, on average, they are not as easy as Rodgers, Gray, and Oliver. Many recipes also seem to be not too far removed from the professional kitchen, as there are a lot of instructions for prepping up to a point and bringing to table readiness at the last minute. This restaurant orientation also gives us several very interesting pantry preparations. One, in particular, is a ginger flavored oil which almost seems like a throwback to the Medieval European lust for oriental spices including ginger and the now-rare galangal.

The book is also filled with very nice insights about Italian cuisine and food in general. I found his comment on salmon very interesting when he said that he rarely serves salmon as a main course, as it is easy to become bored with the tastes from a big chunk of this fish. I never thought of this before, but it is really true that grilled or poached salmon can get old in the mouth really fast, although I have a hard time imagining becoming bored with lox.

The chapters are quite conventional, with one each for:

Small Tastes

Salads and Soups

Pasta and Gnocchi

Risotto

Main Courses

Vegetables and Side Dishes

Sweets and Cheeses

There are several comments which go to the heart of cooking technique, such as his recommendation to quickly pan-sear beef and other meat, followed by a slow roasting to bring it up to serving temperature through and through. This means the book has, for me, the most important quality in a restaurant cookbook. It gives valuable clues on cooking common ingredients which help you deliver good, hot food to the table.

The one thing I find totally puzzling about this book is how poorly it is designed, especially compared to some other recent publications by Broadway Books. While Sara Moulton's new cookbook by Broadway is a model of typographical clarity, almost worthy of something from Alfred A. Knopf, this Conant volume is done in stark black and white with a really light, uninteresting font and ascetic gray borders around the headnotes. Some of these borders are in slightly more interesting colors, but I get the impression they gave Broadway's artistic staff the day off when they designed this book. The cover and the few color photographs are nice, but there are none for the important section on how to make fresh pasta. You can read this and go visit one of Marcella Hazan's excellent illustrated tutorials on how to do this. This artistic economy is surprising in light of the conventionally high list price of $35, compared to Ms. Moulton's nicely modest $29.50 list price.

This is an excellent supplement and alternative to one of the recent encyclopedic Italian cookbooks from Batali and Michele Scicolone. It may put off the casual cook, but it is pure gold for the serious foodie.

Highly recommended. Read more ›

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A generally good cookbook with some flawed recipes June 12, 2006

By J. V. Lewis VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

At first perusal I felt some reservations about Scott Conant's modernizations and reworkings of classic Italian fare, but these were misfounded. Conant really is one of those exceedingly rare chefs who can take a classic dish and bring it to new life through creativity, free thinking, and great technical chops. So, after cooking many of his recipes, I can comfortably and gratefully say that Conant knows his way around the international kitchen. No doubts there.

Trouble is, several of these recipes just don't work. I know that in saying this I'm in danger of admitting incompetence in the kitchen. But I am a very accomplished home cook and I have never experienced the same frustrations cooking from Marcella Hazan's equally refined recipes. I have to conclude, with respect for the chef, that whatever alterations he and writer Joanne Smart made to the restaurant recipes [to make them suitable for home kitchens] were not carefully edited.

For example: the Tuna Poached in Olive Oil Infused with Thyme, Rosemary, and Lemon was realy quite bad, despite two attempts with premium ingredients, including sushi-grade tuna. The results were overpoweringly flavored of thyme and Rosemary, and the fish turned to an indigestibly oily mush. Not edible. I consulted our excellent neighborhood seafood-loving chef, who suggested reducing the herbs to 1/10 of what's in the recipe, using the oil as a marinade at room temperature, and then searing the tuna briefly. I did this and loved it. Note that my attempts cost me 40 ounces of premium tuna at $10.99/lb, and two QUARTS of my best olive oil. Grrrr. I wish this recipe were a fluke.... The Silken Brussels Sprouts for Two, besides being a nuisance to make, has resisted several attempts at something appealing: it results in an unattractive, oily mass. It tastes pretty good, but if I were to serve it as part of a "romantic dinner for two", as the author suggests, I would lose my dinner date and spend the evening wiping olive oil off the stove, alone. I have several other black marks in the margins of this book.

But there have been glorious successes, too. The White Bean and Escarole Soup is excellent. The Braised Short Ribs have great bang for the buck. The Warm Fagiolini and Goat Cheese Salad is very nice indeed, and the Wild Mushroom Ravioli is outrageously yummy. I could go on.

Some of these recipes suffer from their trip from restaurant to home kitchen. Read the recipes carefully before you start, and remember that art-house cuisine is a high-wire act that few can follow, no matter how competent we are as home cooks. Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Italian cookbook for serious foodies July 19, 2009

By Lauren A. VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I got this book a few months ago as a gift. I really like to cook, but I tend to be scared off by recipes with long ingredient lists and lots of steps. My husband and I are both very busy during the work week and then on weekends, we tend to cook simply because we have two kids. We typically use gourmet recipe books for dinner parties. Unfortunately, many of the recipes in this book have long ingredient lists and lots of steps. While I am sure they are delicious, I am afraid to select something so involved and intensive when expecting guests. Nonetheless, I have tried some basic recipes. This book is worth it just for the creamy polenta! That recipe is simple albeit time consuming and a good side for many dishes.

Conant gives lots of great tips about selecting Italian ingredients and has recipes for great foundational items such as reductions and broths. The recipes also include lots of helpful tips about selecting cuts of meat, types of cheese, etc. I also like Conant's wine suggestions at the bottom of the recipes.

This book doesn't have many pictures. Most recipes are not pictured at all. While I appreciate Conant's chatty style, I prefer cookbooks with numbered, less wordy steps.

Overall, I reach for Giuliano Hazan's Every Night Italian more quickly than this book when I am looking to prepare a main course for guests. I am more likely to select a side dish from this book than a main course due to the complexity of the recipes.

4.0 out of 5 stars True Italian Cooking May 31, 2013

By Catherine A

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book has great authentic Italian recipes with interesting stories and comments from Scott. If you love pasta, this book is a winner.