Blogs

1080 Recipes

I bought a new cookbook about a week ago and have made five recipes in it so far. So this is a very early "jump to conclusions" review for me. The cookbook is 1080 Recipes by Simone Ortega and Inés Ortega. It has just been released in English after years as a classic Spanish cookbook. I saw it at a bookstore and couldn't resist the illustrations and design by Javier Mariscal (it's a gorgeous Phaidon book). Amazon tells me the Spanish original edition of this book was published over thirty years ago. I think this book is beautifully designed, and there are many recipes in it I'd like to make, but the instructions in the recipes I tried were a little vague at times. I like to follow explicit instructions the first time I try a new recipe, and that wasn't always possible. I wouldn't call this one perfect for a beginning cook (I guess I'd consider myself an advanced-beginner as a cook), but I am not sorry I bought it and I think I will improve my cooking skills by stretching myself to figure out the missing steps and specifications. I want to learn to be more flexible and intuitive as a cook anyway! Recipe 412 (green beans with vinegar and egg yolk sauce) -- mild but pleasant flavor. I wanted the instructions to tell me if the water I covered the beans with was supposed to cook away or if there was still supposed to be a lot left after the 15-20 minutes the beans simmered (which, for me, there was). I wasn't sure whether I was meant to drain them or add the sauce and make it into a soupy mess. Recipe 328 (baked eggplants and tomatoes with grated cheese) -- this was delicious, but quite mushy. I assume that the recipe means for me to use small eggplants, since it counts on 1 eggplant per person. 1 large eggplant was much more than enough for two of us. I had trouble getting my oil to stay at the necessary heat to fry the eggplant, and then the fried eggplant turned soggy while I was finishing frying it in batches. Since the recipe only specifies to "cook them" I didn't know how well they should be cooked. Perhaps I did it for too long. Recipe 77 (classic Béchamel sauce) -- delicious and worked just as the recipe suggested. Recipe 117 (caramel sauce) -- I did not find that the sauce "thickens a little" as you cook it at the end. Mine only reduced, but stayed perfectly thin and liquid. Recipe 969/970 (baked apples with cream and caramel) -- My apples did not get as tender as I would have liked, but I was unsure whether to add more water to cook longer once the water in the dish had evaporated. I used honeycrisp apples and the flavor was amazing. Also, once they were done baking the cored hole in the middle was filled with liquid, which I had to pour out in order to fill them with whipped cream. No big deal, but since the recipe didn't mention that would happen I wondered if I'd done something wrong.