Modern German Food

by Roz Denny

German cooking is known for old-fashioned virtues: high quality ingredients, simple preparation and robust flavours. These modern recipes capture the new style of German cooking: lighter, fresher and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0859419894
• ISBN13: 9780859419895
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Ltd
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Good recipe ideas, a little iffy on the instructions

I often find that I have to explain to people that German food is not all about sausage and saurkraut. So I was thrilled to see another book about non-traditional "current" German cooking. Overall, this is a good cookbook. It has plenty of recipes that I haven't seen elsewhere, using traditional German ingredients in not-so-traditional ways. Sure, there's a pork and beer stew, but this one has carrots, mushrooms, and allspice. A recipe for crispy fish has you bread-and-fry it with pretzel crumbs. And beets are livened up with blue cheese and cumin. The cookbook is from the UK, so the author doesn't assume you can't get ingredients like Quark (which you *can* get in the U.S., you just have to search a bit) and Black Forest ham (which isn't the same as is available in Germany, but is still good). Most German cookbooks published in the U.S. make substitutions that aren't quite the same and dumb-down ingredients. This authenticity advantage occasionally backfires when you can't find an ingredient after all (I'll need to go for a hunt after katenspeck), but at least I know what I'm looking for: among the positive attributes of Modern German Food is that it has lots of pictures, including sections with photos and descriptions of common categories (such as ham, pickles, sausage). For example, the book shows photos of 15 kinds of German cheese, with a sentence or two for each one. While measurements are given in both grams and pounds (for instance), the book is still very UKish: one potato salad recipe calls for 600g (1 lb 5 oz) potatoes, which we'd consider an awkward measurement. That's not a problem for me (I weigh everything anyhow) but it might irritate you. Plenty of recipes are "lighter fare," including an entire section devoted to "Food for Friends" (such as mini onion tarts and party canapes -- we'd call it "grazing" food). The instructions are simple, but not *too* simple; you could make most of these dishes on a weeknight. With all that praise, why do I withhold the final star? Because the recipes aren't brilliantly written. So far, I've cooked two dishes from this cookbook (and do note that I plan to cook many more!). The apple, lemon, and Kirsch streusel cake calls for two apples, but it never tells you how to prepare them before they get folded into the batter: peeled? diced? sliced? (Diced worked fine. Delicious, actually.) A vinegarette-based potato salad recipe claimed that the just-boiled potatoes would soak up 300ml of chicken stock as they cooled; it was wrong. I poured off the excess. It tasted pretty darned good, and maybe they tested with a courser potato... and it's just a potato salad after all... so I'm not really annoyed. On the other hand, if I were a novice cook, this might make me feel as though I'd done something wrong. It's a good cookbook and I'm glad to have it in my collection. I'm already planning a dinner around that pork-and-beer stew. But this isn't the Must Have cookbook for the German section of your cookbo

Treasure of Modern German Dishes

Ever looking to find more modern German and Austrian cookbooks, this is wonderful find. Well worth search and obtaining.Inventive recipes which capture much of German cuisine traditon delightfully done in well done, full color picture work.Feast upon such inventions as Crusty Pork Loin with rhubarb and celery Sauerkraut, Turkey Fillets with pepper brie and Black Forest ham, Light Potato Dumplings with Buttery Croutons, Cherry, Quark and Pumpernickel trifle, Pumpernickel Ice Cream, Stollen Bread and Butter Pudding.Truly a delight to explore finding ingredients or substituting available ones to create this atypical German fare using vast array of German culinary base: ham, sausage, strudel, etc.