It can be intimidating to shop for seafood. You wonder if it’s healthy for you, you worry about whether it’s overfished and whether it’s caught in ways that harm other species or the environment. Making smart seafood choices has never been more confusing or more important for the planet and our health. Chef and seafood advocate Becky Selengut knows from good fish, and in a voice that’s informed but down-to-earth, she untangles the morass surrounding seafood today. From shellfish to finfish to littlefish, fifteen good fish are featured, and the accompanying seventy-five recipes will appeal to a wide range of home cooks: from beginners, to busy parents trying to put a healthy weeknight meal on the table, to the more adventurous who want to create special-occasion dishes. Sommelier April Pogue provides wine pairings for each recipe. Good Fish is an invaluable resource for anyone living on the Pacific Coast. Chef Becky Selengut is an advocate for seafood sustainability and seasonal, regional cuisine. Her writing has been featured in Seattle Homes and Lifestyles and Edible Seattle magazines. She lives in Seattle
This engaging and approachable (and humorous!) guide to taste and flavor will make you a more skilled and confident home cook.
How to Taste outlines the underlying principles of taste, and then takes a deep dive into salt, acid, bitter, sweet, fat, umami, bite (heat), aromatics, and texture. You’ll find out how temperature impacts your enjoyment of the dishes you make as does color, alcohol, and more. The handbook goes beyond telling home cooks what ingredients go well together or explaining cooking ratios. You’ll learn how to adjust a dish that’s too salty or too acidic and how to determine when something might be lacking. It also includes recipes and simple kitchen experiments that illustrate the importance of salt in a dish, or identifies whether you’re a “supertaster” or not. Each recipe and experiment highlights the chapter’s main lesson. How to Taste will ultimately help you feel confident about why and how various components of a dish are used to create balance, harmony, and deliciousness.
When she’s not squid jigging, fishing, or cavorting through the woods picking wild things for her next meal, BECKY SELENGUT is a private chef, author, humorist, and cooking teacher. A regular instructor for PCC Natural Markets and The Pantry, Selengut is also a private chef and the author of two other books: Good Fish: Sustainable Seafood Recipes from the Pacific Coast and Shroom: Mind-Bendingly Good Recipes for Cultivated and Wild Mushrooms, and co-author of Not One Shrine: Two Food Writers Devour Tokyo. In her spare time she co-hosts a comedy podcast called Look Inside This Book Club where she reviews only the free Look Inside samples of outrageous romance novels. Selengut lives on Capitol Hill in Seattle with her wife and their two dogs.