Taste Pure and Simple: Irresistible Recipes for Good Food and Good Health (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Ngoc Minh (Photographer), Julian Wass (Photographer), (Contributor) "My mother came from a family of melon farmers, and so she always had an abiding love for garden-grown melons, her favorites being cantaloupes and..." (more)
Key Phrases: creamy corn sauce, sweet potato juice, champagne mangos, Lemon Oil, Big Daddy Sunshine, Purple Cherokee (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is a classic culinary redemption narrative that's sure to find its way into a home kitchen: a French-trained chef endures a family health crisis, then rethinks cooking. Nischan, whose young son has type 1 diabetes, revamped his cooking style from top to bottom. Except in his very short, fruit-oriented dessert section, Nischan uses nary a speck of butter, relying instead on canola and grapeseed oil for cooking fats. For flavor, he calls on a battery of rich stocks and reductions: golden beet syrup, rutabaga syrup, roasted garlic stock, rich mushroom stock, chicken "glaze." In addition to coaxing the most intense possible flavor out of generally mild ingredients, Nischan goes for the culinary jugular with the pantry's flavor giants, as in Pan-roasted Quail with Peach and Porcini Mushroom Hash and Rack of Lamb with Pomegranate-Date Chutney. Though the vegetarian entrees seem less than inspired, sides and soups are twisted and tweaked into intriguing forms: Green Tomato Soup with Heirloom Tomatoes and Vidalia Onion Garnish, Tamari Pecans, even "Marshmallow" Corn, pre-soaked in vanilla and milk. This volume is beautifully photographed and elegantly designed, and Nischan's narrative is hard to resist, especially as he caramelizes, roasts and glazes his way to low-fat nirvana.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Michel Nischan isn't French. He's a child of the Chicago suburbs whose first name made him something of a target on the playground but, eventually, a natural in haute cuisine kitchens. And it wasn't just his name that made his early life the chronicle of a chef foretold. Nischan's parents had fled their respective family farms in the South when industrialization made them obsolete, but the couple preserved a slice of rural life in the middle of suburbia. "In Des Plaines, Illinois, we had less than a quarter acre," Nischan says, "and my mother rented two rototillers from Ace Hardware, dug up the backyard and side yard, and planted what our neighbors called 'the farm.' We had a small brick patio with a couple of lawn chairs and a table and rows and rows of vegetables. My mom taught me how to cook, but the fact that I knew what good ingredients were did more to rapid-fire my career than anything."
Nischan never forgot the magnificence of his mother's fresh vegetables, but for a few years he kept her lessons in simple, pure flavors simmering on the back burner. As a chef at various French restaurants and at his own place, Miche Mache, in Connecticut, he often masked the food's true taste with complex, multilayered sauces. "The French 'mount' sauces with fat, usually butter," he writes in the introduction to his new cookbook, Taste Pure and Simple. "This means they thicken and smooth their sauces by adding small amounts of fat during cooking, letting the fat emulsify rather than melt, and then add more until the sauce achieves the velvety texture and superrich flavor that have made French sauces famous the world over. I embraced this technique wholeheartedly."
But eight years ago, the Nischans' 5-year-old son, Chris, was diagnosed with diabetes. The outpouring of empathy made Nischan realize how many people around him had diet-restricting health problems. All those diners who time after time would request the same chicken and fish dishes, sauce on the side the "narrow-minded" ones who Nischan wished would "live a little" - were, he says, "ordering food that way because there was nothing else on the menu for them. They were trying to live a little."
He decided to cook for them. He got his big chance in 1998, when he was hired as chef for a new restaurant in New York called Heartbeat. As he tried to create a menu with no butter, cream, or saturated fat, he realized that fat was overrated as an imparter of flavor. He saw that if you didn't "mount" a sauce, you wouldn't have to dismount it, so to speak - that is, if you didn't thicken a corn sauce with butter, cream, and flour, then you wouldn't later have to add vanilla, nutmeg, and brown sugar to reawaken the flavor of the corn. Instead you could, from the start, bring out the corn's true flavor by squeezing the kernels in a vegetable juicer (Nischan is really big on juicers) and adding just a dash of lemon and seasonings. Drizzle some of this creamy but creamless sauce on scallops, and you'll be showered with gratitude. Pureed pistachios allow you to avoid processed starch in a simple, rich sauce for roasted chicken. Asian flavors like ginger and lemongrass make a robust yet light sauce for grilled snapper.
Nischan found that piling fewer ingredients atop one another saved time as well as calories, and allowed the main ingredient to sing out full-throatedly. But, he points out, "the less fat you use, the more exceptional the quality of your ingredients has to be." To that end, he left the restaurant and committed himself to bringing organic, healthy food to everybody. With a couple of cohorts, he started the New American Farmer Initiative, which introduces immigrant farmers (Cambodian, Chinese, Latin American), with their own growing techniques, to successful small farmers. The organization then links the farmers to chefs, who order their produce. It's a clearinghouse for farmers, and, he says, "the field is the warehouse."
Nischan dreams of the day when "you'll go through an entire produce section in the grocery store and find only local lettuces." Meanwhile, like his parents, he's never quite gotten over leaving the farm and is going to some lengths to reclaim it, recreating his childhood homestead at his house in Fairfield, Connecticut. "Right now it's costing me an arm and a leg and a sex organ to feed my family organic food," he says. "That's why I have to get this farm running, man." A farmer in preppy Connecticut named Michel: C'est le destin. - O Magazine

Formerly the chef of HeartBeat restaurant at the W Hotel in Midtown, Michael Nischan is known for recipes that make the most of flavors without much butter or cream. Relying mostly on heart-healthy canola and grapeseed oils, as well as rich stocks and reductions, every recipe seems to be designed to get maximum flavor with. Be forewarned -- you'll need a juicer. -New York Post

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (October 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811833771
• ISBN-13: 978-0811833776
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 9.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #547,687 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great, if you have the time and a great market, July 6, 2003

By A Customer

These recipes look delicious and healthy, but I didn't know they would be so involved. I have never even heard of some of the ingredients, so I doubt I'd find them at my local grocer. I do love the idea of using vegetable juices instead of butter, etc.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars lengthy preperations but WORTH IT!, February 9, 2004

By A Customer

the preperations are not difficult, but they do take a while- involving many steps. however, i wouldn't want to skip a thing because there is a reason for the preperations and it comes out in the taste. the vegetable lasagne was one of the best i have ever made and it had a substantial taste to it that satisfied my meat-loving and veggie-hating husband. this is one of the better cookbooks on healthy gourmet cuisine.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars not for the basic chef, March 24, 2006

By	blintz "food pro" (brooklyn, na) - See all my reviews

I tried to make the squash pancakes with fig syrup on page 133, and i came up with a squash colored mess. basically it's an egg white pancake, and it stuck to my non stick pan.
still hungry, i whipped it up again, and baked the whole recipe as a souffle in a small springform, and it was delicious.
but i would not expect the average home chef to be able to make this recipe successfully....
the book is beautiful and i love the idea of it, and maybe i'll try to make something else...