Booklist- Mamane's exhaustive guide to understanding and preparing stocks and broths aims to be the definitive modern guide to the subject. Mamane illuminates the science, history, and cultural anthropology of this all-important culinary foundation, in addition providing step-by-step instructions. As chef and owner of Brooklyn Bouillon, she is an authority on the challenges and importance ... Read moreof sourcing high-quality ingredients and speaks with abundant first-hand experience about its benefits, from animal welfare to the environment to the cooking pot. The book's first half covers those major principles, then offers specific methods to produce a variety of meat, poultry, seafood, and vegetable stocks and broths. Each is followed by distinctive recipes that rely on the slow-simmered brews and their byproducts, such as veal marrow dumpling soup, requiring the marrow as well as veal stock and chicken stock, or clams in saffron emulsion, which uses shellfish, stock, clam liquor, and whey. Mamane even includes directions to up-cycle leftover fats and bones into cosmetics, fertilizer, and other home products. A full-throated ode to slow food cooking and a zero-waste ethos. It's always been my preference to surround myself with people who are willing to go deep. I'm not really interested in making time for anyone else. By deep, I mean people who work and study hard, people who aren't afraid to ask questions, people whose enthusiasm for experimentation never wavers, people who, above all else, are willing to sacrifice for the sweet pleasure of slowly obtained mastery. I especially like to read books written by those people. Rachael Mamane is one of those people. In this remarkable tome, she manages to write about bones and broth and stock on four very different levels at once: the spiritual, the symbolic, the technical, and the practical. Maybe I should throw in the political, too. Read this book. Like Rachael's stocks and broths, it will heal you. It will also bring you into the deep.
Camas Davis, butcher; writer; owner, Portland Meat Collective Rachael Mamane takes stock making to a whole new level in Mastering Stocks and Broths, from making a basic stock to the many ways of thickening and flavoring this fundamental ingredient into delicious sauces, gravies, soups, and stews. This book deserves a place in the kitchen of all serious
and not so serious
cooks.
Sally Fallon Morell, president, The Weston A. Price Foundation Equal parts inspiration and encyclopedia, this fabulous book will be reached for again and again. It truly does contain everything you need to know to let broths and stocks enrich your kitchen with nutrition, flavor, and depth. Mamane's recipes are truly irresistible, and the science and history she weaves throughout add multilayered meanings to the guidance she provides, inviting you on an adventure with each dish she offers.
Jessica Prentice, author of Full Moon Feast; cofounder, Three Stone Hearth Mastering Stocks and Broths is the most thorough book on the subject I've come across. Rachael Mamane's writing is as beautiful, thoughtful, and caring as her approach to food, the table, and her stocks. And I love the intriguing recipes that she has interspersed throughout the book. If one really used this book, one would emerge a truly excellent cook and, I dare say, person. Here is to deep passion and thoroughness. Kudos!
Deborah Madison, author of Vegetable Literacy and In My Kitchen If you have ever tried to imagine the most definitive encyclopedia on stocks, sauces, and broths, here it is. Mastering Stocks and Broths is wildly practical and comprehensive. Everyone who aspires to see health germinate from their kitchen needs to follow Mamane's lead. I can't imagine a single question unanswered in this marvelous book.
Joel Salatin, Polyface Farm; author of You Can Farm Show Less