El Farol: Tapas and Spanish Cuisine

By James Campbell Caruso

At the El Farol restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a collection of delectable ingredients-smoked paprika, saffron, spicy chipotle chiles and piquillo peppers, capers and caperberries, and a variety... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1586851012
• ISBN13: 9781586851019
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 2.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 0.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Wonderfull

I am living in Italy, close to Parma, so I am used to good cooking and food. When I buy El farol I wish to learn to cook some spanish dishes, but what I have found is more. Recepies are written in an easy way, step by step, and it is impossible to make a mistake. There are a lot of suggestions and I have immediatly tried to cook Caldo Pescado and Gambas al Alcaparra. There is a lot of living joy in this book

Extravagant, memorable dishes with cross-cultural zest

El Farol: Tapas And Spanish Cuisine features more than one hundred recipes from Santa Fe's oldest restaurant and cantina, El Farol, which is famous for its award-winning cuisine. Blending the culinary traditions of New Mexico with flavors from Mediterranean, Spanish, and Latin American cooking, El Farol combines practical instructions with spectacular full-color photographs to showcase some of the finest restaurant-quality preparations imagineable, from Aguacate (Crispy Fried Avocado) to Shrimp Escabeche with Black Olives and Mint, Pulpo Asado (Grilled Octopus), and so much more. El Farol is a lavish and superbly presented resource for creating extravagant, memorable dishes with cross-cultural zest.

Classic Spanish Restaurant Cookbook. Recommended

This book, `El Farol' by Chef James Campbell Caruso contains recipes from the menu of the Santa Fe restaurant of the same name. A few restaurant cookbooks transcend their very simple objective of publicizing the restaurant. Some of the more obvious examples are `The French Laundry Cookbook' by Thomas Keller and the `Zuni Café Cookbook' by Judy Rodgers. Both take the reader far beyond simple recipes and provide either very basic insights into what makes a great restaurant or truly inspired instruction on what it takes to cross the boundary between good food and great food. While both of these cookbooks offer over the top attention to details, there are some transcendent restaurant cookbooks which succeed through simplicity, at the cost of providing instruction. The premier examples of such books are the cookbooks of Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers of London's River Café. If this book is to break out of it's mold as an elaborate advertisement for the El Farol restaurant, it will want to emulate these great River Café cookbooks.I believe this book almost succeeds in matching the quality of the Gray and Rogers books. The first thing that impressed me was the modesty of the book's author and `sponsor', the El Farol owner David Salazar. There was no posturing, preaching about using fresh ingredients, or gratuitous photographs of strolls through the hills around Santa Fe. The next pleasant surprise was that in spite of the fact that El Farol is very close to `Tex-Mex Central', the cuisine is almost entirely Spanish, and a fairly faithful Spanish cuisine at that. As we see in the subtitle, the cuisine also specializes in tapas. In fact, fully half of the book is dedicated to hot and cold tapas, with another full quarter of the book dedicated to sauces, flavored oils, stocks, and other pantry preparations. The scant last forty pages of the book contain main dishes and desserts.The second thing to impress me about the book was the chapter on `El Farol Basics'. This is the kind of stuff that most authors stick at the back of the book. I am glad Caruso has gone against this trend, as this very valuable chapter may otherwise be overlooked. Among the thirty-four (34) recipes in this chapter, there is plenty of pretty familiar stuff such as aiolis, stocks, flavored oils, salsas, and vinaigrettes, but even these staples are often done with a twist. I really appreciated that the aiolis are made with mortar and pestle. Jamie Oliver may have single-handedly resurrected this simple tool, but just in case, I really like to see it used whenever possible. It is utterly simple, easy to clean, and actually produces a better result than a blender or food processor for many jobs.I have not studied Spanish cuisine as much as French and Italian, but if this book is any evidence, it seems that butter is an important ingredient at least in some regions of Spain, the world's leader in production of olive oil. There are several recipes here for flavored butters. There are also artifac

Five star spanish cuisine in your own home

As a former resident of the beloved Santa Fe, one of the things I miss most about it is the food. A no other restaurant ranks higher on my list than that of El Farol. The food is superb! Executive Chef Caruso pays extra attention to their famous, mouth-watering tapas. It has been a long awaited arrival for this book and it's about damn time. I can only hope to rekindle some of my fondest memories by attempting to recreate his masterpieces in my own kitchen. If you take pleasure in dining on Spanish cuisine, I implore you to buy this book. I, personally, am excited to add it to my collection of cookbooks.Oh and one more suggestion, I recommend the fried avocado (a.k.a. aquacate). It's delectable, although not nearly as pretty as when it is served at the restaurant. I, however, am not a culinary artist nor even close to being a chef.