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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thorough Coverage of an Important Food, March 13, 2004
This is one of the easiest types of cookbooks to review, as it is largely a matter of determining whether the author has covered all the bases you can think of and whether the quality of the information on a quite limited range of information is up to snuff. As people who write these one-topic books are usually experts on that particular field, the likelihood that the book will be of a high quality is very good.James Peterson does not disappoint us in this book all about the various methods for cooking salmon. Peterson is a culinary writer of the first water to begin with, having written many award-winning books already, including a book on fish and shellfish. Since Peterson has already covered salmon in his seafood book, one can wonder what else there is to say. It turns out there is very much else to say. One of the most valuable parts of the book appears before we even start thinking about cooking. Peterson describes all of the commercially available species of salmon you may find in your fish market, the relative price of these species, depending on whether they are farm raised or caught from the wild. This is important because there is a very big difference in price between the least and most expensive, and the difference in price is not fully returned in difference in value. Another chapter in the book gives detailed instructions on how to both cold and hot smoke salmon. This is a doubly section in that I suspect the same techniques could be used for most types of finfish. Be warned, however, that unless, like Alton Brown in his popular Good Eats episode `Junkyard Chef', you are exceptionally handy, cold smoking can be rather expensive and messy. Peterson is always an engaging writer, as his opinions and personal tastes often come through in his writing. One may object to this if these opinions are unfair or needlessly critical of other writers, but they are not. They simply leaven the discussion and make his work more fun to read. One example is that while he claims to have covered virtually every method of cooking salmon, he does leave out steaming, as this is simply too boring to deal with. I will not miss this discussion. The presentation of techniques he does cover is very, very thorough. In dealing with poaching, he covers techniques and special equipment needed for poaching a complete fish as well as salmon steaks and salmon fillets. He is especially careful to warn the reader about overcooking while poaching. The anomaly with poaching is that if the poaching liquid is heated to a boil, the fish will actually be too dry when removed from the liquid for service. The treatment of sautéing, grilling, curing, roasting and baking, broiling, and other methods, including serving raw as with sushi and carpaccio are equally thorough. The book includes sources for special materials required for smoking, as well as good sources for spices and the like. This book is doubly important with the recent findings on the food value of salmon. The book was published before the recent concerns with farm raised salmon, but it does give intelligent information on what kinds of salmon are available farm raised and what species are available caught wild. My only complaint about the book may be that Peterson describes how to create a medallion from a steak, but provides no pictures of the technique, even though he has published pictures of this technique in other books. He does not even refer one to these other volumes. Highly recommended. Better than his book on duck cooking.
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by James Peterson
by James Peterson
by James Peterson
by John F. Nicolas
by James Peterson
