The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco's Beloved Restaurant

Judy Rodgers is well known in San Francisco, but she hasn't published much before. I don't recall any articles by her in food magazines, but I could have missed them. She is simply the best food writer that has emerged in a long, long time. She seems to have absorbed cooking knowledge the way the rest of us breathe, and in her book, she puts it all down. Open any page, I mean ANY page, and you will get a piece of information, an idea, a tip, or tidbit that will make you rethink the way you cook. Her recipes are written with the same loving detail that she puts into her restaurant cooking. She writes a recipe like she might simmer a complex and utterly delicious stock--slowly, gently, without shortcuts.

Cooks who are looking for the fast and easy should pass this book by. I do have a few criticisms, which are totally immaterial when you think of the vast amount of gold to be mined. Nonetheless, they are worth mentioning for those who calculate the amount of recipes they might use from a book. The dessert section reflects Judy's simple tastes in this area, and it could have been balanced with a few more cake-like pastries. There are plenty of recipes that mere mortals will not make, unless you dedicate the auxilary refrigerator in your garage to hold the odiferous masterpiece (salted anchovies, salted cod), but at least she is frank about the problems you face in making them. And, like a lot of California-based cookbooks, the success of many recipes depends on the excellence of your produce, which is certainly a basic cooking rule, but more so when you have a tight palette of flavors.

My hat is also off to Judy's editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, who seems to have said "Judy, tell me everything!," rather than "Judy, tighten this up." The book and any cook that reads it are better off for the collective vision of these two extraordinarily talented women.


Smart, beautiful, revolutionary   September 23, 2002
 16 out of 26 found this review helpful

I read this book like a novel. The well written chapters at the beginning gave me a deeper understanding of how to realize quality and flavour from food - just like what I am used to having at Zuni.

And the recipes will inevitibly be among my most used.


Not another restaurant cookbook   September 20, 2002
 49 out of 52 found this review helpful

I have just become Judy Roger's biggest fan! The Zuni Cafe Cookbook is not another cookbook about artfully-presented, impossible-to-duplicate-at-home restaurant food. It is full of the food we all want to eat when we come home from a stressful day at work. Judy's recipes make it possible. The Chicken Braised with Figs, Honey and Vinegar is just the kind of meal that, once made, you look forward to the leftovers for the rest of the week!

All the recipes I have made from her book have become standards in my repertoire. They are the sort of things that you want to make again and again -- like the rosemary grilled chicken livers with bacon, just the thought of them makes me want to rush home and start cooking.

I have only just begun working my way through this book, but the results are so great that I have told my friends: "We will be eating well all year long at my house!"


Really far more than recipes   September 15, 2002
 27 out of 32 found this review helpful

This is one of the best cookbooks in my prodigious collection. It is so so true that she goes much further than the recipes and describes the how's and why's of what she is doing. Her writing has confirmed many of my own experiences I never found described elsewhere and has also taught me completely new twists on such fundamentals as making stock and dicing onions.

This is the woman who accidentally ended up living with the Troisgros brothers in France as a teenager and then ended up being the lunch chef at Chez Panisse instead of going to grad school. She was also a Stanford student. So you have genius and an unmatchable pedigree for California cuisine. That recipe cooks up a stellar cookbook...the surprise would be if it didn't.

Every preparation is paired with a specific wine and there is a fairly extensive section on cheese pairings. I mean, she's actually sharing the details here...including the crown jewel recipes of her franchise.

Although I live only two miles away I have never found occasion to go to her restaurant though I've always wanted to. I will go a few times now to see what the master's renditions of these remarkable plates come out like. You see, you share the recipes and everyone flocks to your restaurant. Why keep your skill a secret?

And I just ran and salted half of what I've got in the fridge!

OK, after a few months, an update:

I've been trying the pre-salting meat approach regularly, and pushing it. The results have been quite good, but there have been times when things have come out too salty. However, pushing it, and being forced to throw out some stuff, I have come up with the following safety guidelines so far.

I believe Ms. Rodgers is working with extremely fresh product in ideal circumstances, which most of us aren't able to duplicate in our supermarkets. Therefore her practices which she might find safe will not always be safe for us. While salt does act as a preservative for meat, in the small quantities used here (e.g. 3/4 tsp per pound) it's not enough to extend the life of the meat particularly long.

My rules of thumb for the most time you can salt, refrigerated (and after rinsing poultry and seafood thoroughly), the best consumer meat in San Francisco follow. If I was shopping at an average place, I wouldn't risk any delay in cooking at all.

Beef, Pork: 48 hours
Poultry, lamb: 24 hours
Seafood: 6 hours tops, less better

Note these probably aren't much different than you would have done prior.

Furthermore, she argues that you must let meat come to room temperature before cooking. For her parameters, this might work well, but I feel it is an unnecessary risk even with the "protection" of the salt. You can lengthen cooking with lower temperature to get the inside of a roast done as well if it's thick. So 15 mins tops at room temp.

Don't abandon common sense, or any other sense, when cooking. Trust your nose and eyes. The salt isn't a miracle worker. The times above are enough to let it do what it needs to to achieve the effect she wants I believe.

The recipes have been utterly fantastic however. I still strongly recommend the cookbook. It is unquestionably one of the best. I also strongly recommend, as I believe would she, that you take everything in it, ahem, with a little grain of salt.