Techniques of Healthy Cooking, by the Culinary Institute of America (the CIA, ha!), is intended for professional chefs-in-training.  Don’t let the small image size mislead you; this book is a tome!  Think “college textbook,” and you’ll have about the right size, shape, and weight.  Just because it was written for “official” culinary students, though, doesn’t mean you can’t use it at home!

Unlike some of the other how-to-cook books, this one doesn’t focus only on Cooking, but also spends a good bit of time on menu planning for Healthy eating.  Sections include “healthy eating patterns,” “healthy ingredients,” “the techniques,” and “developing healthy recipes and menus,” before getting into actual recipes.

I’m not crazy about their idea of “healthy,” which is the typical mainstream “low calorie, low salt, low fat” thinking.  However, there is, for the most part, an emphasis on real, whole foods, and there’s a lot of information in here that’s very useful, such as estimated daily calorie needs by age and gender (all the way down to and including preschoolers).  This type of information is not always easy to find in a straightforward format.  Just read some of the details with a grain of salt (no pun intended).  This first section about healthy eating patterns is chock-full of information, but it does get a bit “science-y,” so some readers might find it overwhelming.

The same is true of the section that follows, about healthy ingredients.  There’s a good bit of information about different food-quality considerations, such as sustainability, organic, free-range, biotech, irradiation, etc. and a lot of it will simply be more than the average home cook is interested in reading.  However, there’s practical information, too, like what temperatures to store various foods at (and how to store some trickier types of produce).

And there’s an excellent overview about a lot of the “whole ingredients” available.  The photos in this section are especially fascinating to me.  For instance, there are full page spreads of produce by color, so you can see a wide variety of green foods, or orange foods, etc. all together.  There are pages of grains and grain products, so you can see them side-by-side.  Not 100% of the ingredients included are things I’d consider healthy (margarine — ugh!) but most are, and this is a really great way to get exposure to some varieties of things you might not have seen before.  (This section makes the common error of treating “folate” and “folic acid” as interchangeable terms.  Leafy greens do not contain folic acid; they do contain folate.)

Section three is “the techniques,” and is further divided into general cooking guidelines, and techniques for vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, nuts & seeds, and fish, meats, and poultry.  This section is the highlight of the book.  Dry heat and moist heat techniques are covered, with brief step-by-step instructions for how to do each one.  The other sub-sections include information pertaining to each individual category of food.  The vegetable section, for instance, includes (among other things) instructions for working with leafy greens, and a discussion of vegetable purees.  The section about grains has a full-page chart of ratios (of grain to water) and cooking times for various grains (29 different types/forms).  There’s also a small sub-section about developing flavor, although I’m not sure how helpful it will be for a complete novice.

The healthy menu planning section is probably of limited usefulness to most home cooks.  A lot of time is spent on the idea of giving customers what they want.  There are portions about reducing fat, salt, sugar, and alcohol, which may be helpful if you’re trying to adapt recipes, because they explain the functions of those ingredients.

Surprisingly, almost 2/3 of the book is comprised of recipes.  The selection is not at all what I would consider a basic one; on the contrary, its primary benefit seems to be in the variety it offers, from savory Indian crepes to southern-style collard greens to Vietnamese summer rolls.  In all honesty, most of these foods are not things my children are likely to eat, so I would consider this an opportunity to see the possibilities more than an actual, use-it-every-day cookbook.

The book includes a nice glossary.

All in all, this book definitely has its uses, but if I had to pick one single text for someone new to learn to cook from, it probably wouldn’t be this one.

Techniques of Healthy Cooking {review} is a post from: Titus 2 Homemaker

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