Dessert First

Whether ganache feels boringly familiar or frighteningly challenging, Adventures with Chocolate has a recipe for you. Though the book (from Kyle Books, 2011), looks—and is—geared toward experienced cooks eager to experiment, Paul Young has provided a surprising number of simple recipes.

Simple to execute, anyway—these recipes bring complex, bold flavors to the table, with ways to work with chocolate that may be new even for experienced home bakers.

Young, who worked under chef Marco Pierre White before opening three chocolate shops in London, starts with some intimidating chocolate snobbery. Nothing like a Hershey bar here, or even a bit of Ghirardelli; the book opens with lessons on single-source chocolates, called for throughout the recipes—for example, those from certain countries in Africa, South America, or the Caribbean. No need to be intimidated, though: Young includes a handy chart on flavor pairings for chocolate from each country, and explains the “snobbery” well. He also offers information on how to taste chocolate, and a long lesson on making a truffle, from ganache to the tempered shell. For the ganache, he shows how to make it with cream or other liquids, such as water, fruit juice, tea, or coffee—a little-used technique for many home cooks who equate ganache with cream.

Not quite up to tempering on a regular basis? No worries—there’s plenty here to keep you cooking. Young uses his sure taste to combine chocolate with spirits, herbs, flowers, bacon, Stilton (including a sandwich of bacon, stilton, and chocolate), even … vinegar?

Yes, and that chocolate vinegar really shines. Three ingredients, two minutes, add a little olive oil, and you’re off to an exquisite salad (for testing, it went over a simple salad of red-leaf lettuce, apples, and dried cranberries). Young recommends using the vinegar for salads, pasta, fish, meats, and ice cream; a slightly different version makes a vinegar ganache. The only complaint less adventuresome cooks may have is with the lack of more concrete suggestions and recipes to use the vinegar.

Other simple recipes include two chocolate spreads, one sweet, one savory. The sweet ganache calls for just six ingredients (although American cooks will wish the book explained muscovado sugar, which turns up repeatedly in ingredient lists). Made with cream, water, and a touch of nut oil, this light, silky-smooth spread answered a Nutella craving with ease. The savory option, which blends cream cheese, sugar, Worcestershire, chocolate, and olive oil, may seem more bizarre, but follow Young’s advice and spread this on a sandwich of Stilton and pear slices, or cream cheese and smoked chicken.

Finish that meal off on the spicy-sweet side of chocolate, with gingerbread ganache rolled into simple truffles; for a test, these were rolled just in a mixture of confectioner’s sugar and cocoa powder, though the recipe calls for a tempered-chocolate coating. Rich with ground ginger and bits of crystallized ginger, even this less-fancy test felt rich enough (Young calls for sprinkling the tempered truffles with a mix of ground ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon; testers liked these spices added in small amounts to the ganache itself).

Once you start, it may be hard to stop. Even a first skim through the book will likely lead to many pages marked for further testing: a rich hot chocolate made with cocoa powder, dark chocolate, and water; chocolate syrups (five ingredients), deeply flavored with liqueur, spices, or herbs; dark chocolate sorbet (four ingredients); chocolate water biscuits to serve with cheese (five ingredients, plus two optional ones for variations); ganache made with honey and tahini and rolled in toasted sesame seeds; rosemary poached pears with Stilton ganache and walnuts; tea truffles (three ingredients, using the tea on hand in your pantry); chocolate pancakes with chocolate maple syrup (serve the maple syrup just once, and the book will feel worth its cost); salt and pepper ganache for dipping fruit (four ingredients); lemon-thyme chocolate caramel (six ingredients); an “ultimate” chocolate martini; sweet chocolate pesto (yes, for pasta); chocolate and chili gnocchi; chocolate sauces for white meat, red meat, and seafood; and vodka infused with cacao nibs (yep, two ingredients).

Finish off the evening (and possibly yourself) with “mulled wine hot chocolate,” made with cocoa powder, cinnamon, star anise, cloves, dark chocolate, clementines, rosemary, and red wine—and head to bed dreaming of the chocolate adventures left to test.

John Besh doesn’t mince words. Making a “passionate plea” in his introduction to My Family Table (Andrews McMeel, November 1, 2011), he writes of his alarm at the “terrifying wasteland of food options” sprawling between home kitchen stoves and restaurants. Bemoaning high-salt, high-sugar packaged foods, drugged-up meat, and pesticide-laden produce, he calls fast-food options “the devil’s work.”

And, he says (while acknowledging that he is part of the problem): “I worry that the more cooking becomes entertainment and a spectator sport (instead of a family activity) and the more we fetishize celebrity chefs, the awful result is that we discourage folks from even setting foot in their kitchens. More and more, I’m concerned that by glamorizing chefdom, we turn off the very thing we seek to promote: getting people excited about cooking dinner.”

Does this book help to turn that around? Well, at least somewhat. Despite Mr. Besh’s attempts to gin up the excitement, his book may not strike his audience as thoroughly useful for everyday cooking.

Depending, of course, on who’s in that audience. This cookbook, like many today, leaves this reviewer wondering exactly what readers were the target.

Novice cooks? The book isn’t quite basic enough in most of the recipes for today’s novices—who, in an admittedly grand generalization, are truly completely new to the kitchen, lacking even the basic understanding earlier generations would get from watching mothers and grandmothers cook.

Self-professed foodies? These tend to be, in another grand generalization, either people who think they “know food” based only on much experience eating out, or people who take their cooking and ingredients very, very seriously, for whom this books would strike the right philosophical notes but be far too basic.

Because, at their heart, these recipes are pretty basic comfort food, sometimes with a flavor twist. They do make good food, and, if a home cook is able to practice one of the methods Mr. Besh preaches—cooking something big for Sunday dinner (pork roast, roasted chicken, a big ham or chuck roast), then using the leftovers for weeknight suppers—they will ease the nightly cooking burden somewhat. Cooks who can’t, however, may find many of the recipes, which rely on previously prepared ingredients, frustrating and less useful.

Not that the whole book follows that method; other chapters include “dinner from a cast-iron pot,” with such recipes as braised brisket and coq au vin. Here again, though, one of the recipes that looks appealing and relatively quick—pork and sausage jambalaya—relies on cooked pork shoulder from the previous chapter.

And not all of the recipes are about getting supper on the table; other chapters include breakfast, seafood, “barbecue wisdom,” classics including fried chicken, “jazz brunch,” holiday recipes, and desserts. Recipes run the gamut from fried eggs to an entire smoked suckling pig.

As do many of the recipes throughout the book, desserts stick to Southern standards, such as chess pie, lemon icebox pie, rice pudding, blueberry cobbler, and hummingbird cake topped with a seriously rich icing (1 pound of butter and a half-pound of cream cheese). A tested blackberry cheesecake recipe, in which a plain cheesecake layer covers a layer made purple with pureed berries, offers an example of one recipe that seems geared neither toward brand-new cooks nor toward experienced ones: the recipe is quite basic, despite the slight difference of having two layers of cheesecake, but fails to tell a novice baker how to tell when the cheesecake is done, saying simply “bake one hour, until the topping is set. (Additionally, the photo doesn’t match the recipe; it appears to have another layer on top, like a separate sour cream or whipped cream layer—but this is not noted in the recipe.)

Mr. Besh provides a list early in the book of essential pantry ingredients, with a caveat at the beginning about not worrying too much about ingredients or complicated techniques. It’s an interesting, seemingly somewhat quirky list, and not all are easily bought; still, Mr. Besh provides good reasons for the inclusion of each item. Most are store-bought, but a few, such as chicken stock and a cherry tomato sauce, refer to recipes. (One complaint: for such recipes as that tomato sauce, Mr. Besh talks about enjoying both freezing and canning the recipe—but fails to give instructions on canning.) An ingredient he leaves out, but uses repeatedly, is five-spice powder, one of the flavor twists that elevates many of the recipes.

For all his professed ease with cooks who don’t worry about ingredients too much, readers may wonder how much Mr. Besh means it, when he emphasizes organic ingredients, points out the provenance of many, and notes that he raises his own beef. Not everyone has means or access to do any such thing, of course. Nor does everyone have the lovely photo settings on the bayou, the photogenically mussed children, or the time to do all Mr. Besh recommends—the book may leave many cooks wondering how to live up to the standards set here.

But for cooks who understand the very basics of the kitchen, and those who need a reminder of how to cook both basic and somewhat more complex recipes (mostly Southern but wandering through some far-flung spots such as Asia and Germany), My Family Table may offer just the right back-to-basics preaching combined with chef-kissed basic recipes, such as tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches—prepared with homemade cherry tomato sauce and a touch of sambal chili paste for the soup, and sandwiches made with pecan-baked ham.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.