Mastering Spice: Recipes and Techniques to Transform Your Everyday Cooking: A Cookbook

This is a top three cookbook EVER for me. It is awesome. You should get it if you are reading this review. About two years ago, my wife and I swapped roles managing my sons condition (he is doing great) and I went from doing high tech management to managing children, driving (lots of driving), and general family maintenance. In order to challenge myself, I decided to up my cooking game to better my family. Now I did a lot of cooking before I met my wife. I love my wife but she is a meat and potatoes with some California-Mex mixed in so my cooking - when I did it, fell into this rut and my children’s preferences did as well. I focused my first 12 months on cooking things my picky family would eat. I’ve got 5-6 tried and true chicken recipes, 2 beef recipies, another 2 pork recipies and 8 to 9 vegetable recipes and mix and match things they would eat with new recipes to introduce them to new tastes. We ate healthier but all my recipies came out of cookbooks. Since I’m have celiac’s these cookbooks focus on non-wheat based cuisine such as barbecue, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese and since I live in North Carolina, gluten free cooking and Southern food. Things are good but I started mixing and matching ingredient when cooking for myself and liked the results. I bought this cookbook to help me on my journey and boy do I wish I had read this book earlier! This is MUTCH more than just another cookbook. First, I’m not a professionally trained cook. I learned a lot of techniques to simplify cooking while managing my kids. ALL of my techniques I developed and a WHOLE LOT MORE are in this book. This book includes things like how to plan, prep and perform cooking while ALSO teaching me a whole lot more about spices and how to use them as well as how to mix and match ingredients to tweak recipes you already love. Just an outstanding book! You should buy it.

I'm really horrible at following recipes religiously. This book is pretty much made for my 'digging through a cookbook for the tool I need right now' approach. "Hmm, I have some squash but want to do something other than just roast it up. This has recipes for both carrot soup and sweet potato puree that would translate well to using squash instead. And look, the variants on the carrot soup include using it as pasta sauce. Spicy squash pasta for dinner tonight." The spice blends run from fairly obvious parings (garlic/basil/rosemary/tomato) to ones I wouldn't have tried on my own (raisins with coriander/fennel? Made a winter veggie salad sing) and thus gives me some new mental groupings of spices to improvise with. As a vegetarian, I'm also really appreciative that a rather small section is devoted to meat dishes, and pleased to have a whole section that includes eggs, which tend to be neglected in cookbooks. I've been pulling this out regularly since I bought it.

Beautiful book by author: Lior Lev Sercarz has many spice blend recipes. Most recipes offer many variations for vegetables, poultry, seafood and meats. Recipes look easy and many are quick to make. The glossary of spices is a treaure! I look forward to cooking these recipes and also the many recipes on his spice company's La Boite website.

Enjoy the wonderful, colorful pages in this boom. Each spuce is explained and the uses or additions each can be on your kitchen. Bought one as a gift after receiving mine!

I have purchased several of Liors publications, which give an amazing knowledge of spices there origins and uses, but his latest publication is full of spice/herb blends that really work, I have made several meals, using recipes from this book to great success and delight to my guests. The book contains several versions of the same recipe with slight variations in blends and ingredients to give you a choice to suit your personal tastes on which dish you prefer. I personally have a pantry full of spices and herbs so I can make almost any recipe in the book, but I encourage you to invest in a larger selection to try out the blends in this book, essentially they work really well

This is one of the best cookbooks I've ever bought. When you first look at the number and quantity of spices used in the recipes, you think "Wow, that's a lot." But the combinations in these recipes are perfect blends that enhance each other. No spice tend to overwhelm any of the dishes I've cooked, and I have cooked several. One of his cooking methods for chicken (p. 178) starts with a cold pan. I use skin-on, bone-in thighs because I really don't care for chicken breast, but this is now my go-to method of cooking chicken. It comes out incredibly juicy! Each recipe is actually a set of five variations, and you can get creative by working with the whole mix. Yes, you will probably have to add to your spice collection (and he sells them. I use a company out of Chicago). But it's worth it! You will not be disappointed in this book,if you like a little adventure in your kitchen!

What a wonderful book. Lior Lev Sercaz takes you through many spice combinations to give you familiarity with using many different ones on a one recipe. I had never heard of ajawain, amchur powder, and cubeb (and neither has autocorrect). One cookbook club has already brought friends together with dishes from the book that we all got to sample. You have to make his olive oil cake variations. Another cookbook club has yet to meet where we cook together in advance and make a dinner with a planned menu from the book. So looking forward to it. The beauty of this book is the first recipe followed by about 4-5 variations on the next page that showcase different spice mixtures. I did buy a small electric spice grinder for this and our family is using this grinder all the time. (Bought the Shardor brand one on Amazon with 2 containers—one for dry and one for wet spice combos). Don’t know how we cooked without it. You are in for a treat at the hands of this master chef.

This is a good book for people who want to master the use of spices-that’s exactly why I purchased it. But I found it to be a bit more than what I bargained for— in that many of the spices I have NEVER heard of, which s fine, but have no idea where to find them, and I had to google them to see what they were (mahleb, ajowan, amchoor, sumac, muntok White peppercorns, and cubeb) just to name a few. I love spices and am always looking for ways to mix them and incorporate them into my dishes. I have many cookbooks and I get excited to find a recipe that calls for a particular spice and I just happen to have that one or two in my cabinet. I don’t think I will be cooking very many dishes calling for some of the spices in this book, and I’m saddened by this. I would love to be able to go to a specialty and just pick up some spices, I am not interested in always having to order something online that I need to cook with. I rated it 3 stars because of this, however, I don’t want to discourage anyone from buying this book, because I actually think it’s a good book, and it tells you how to prepare one recipe a couple of different ways. The recipes included within look very taste worthy and worth the effort of preparing, but how will you get the full benefit of them if you can’t find the needed ingredients??? I think the spice connoisseur would really appreciate the challenges this book presents, I.e. finding and preparing the spices to make a wonderful meal. It just became a bit overwhelming and too much for me.

Wonderful book ~ just excellent

Maybe it's me, but l wanted a book with spice blend. This one has cooking recipes. I know how to cook, l wanted, l repeat myself, a book for blending spices.

ist mit diesem englisch-sprachigen Buch gut bedient. Früher kannte ich vor allem Pfeffer und Salz sowie ein paar typische Gartenkräuter. Lior Sercarz führt verständlich in die Welt der Gewürze ein und beschreibt genau was man damit machen kann. Die Rezepte sind gut nachvollziehbar, einfach nach zu kochen und eröffnen geschmacklich neue Welten. Viele der eingesetzten Gewürze muss man allerdings im Internet bestellen da sie im normalen Handel nicht erhältlich sind. Auch meine Englisch-Kenntnisse haben sich verbessert, endlich weiss ich was fenugrek und caraway bedeutet und kann Fahrenheit in Celsius umrechnen. Der Schreibstil ist unterhaltend und mit tollen Bildern aufgelockert, man kann das Buch auch einfach mal so lesen.

Haven’t made anything yet but recipes look amazing and beautiful photos

This is the best cookbook that I have ever purchased. I am a culinary school grad and this book and its approach have taken every thing to another level. Highly recommend to buy and try.