The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide To Culinary Creativity By Karen Page And Andrew Dornenburg

If you already cook, this book is wonderful. It can enhance every dish you cook. This is one of the best cooking reference cooks I’ve seen. I have been building new salads and dinners ever since I bought it. Don’t fool yourself, you won’t find this information with a quick google search.

Every time I have an ingredient I want to mix with something, I open this book. It’s so simple to consult. I get ideas about what to make in five minutes and the food is just delicious. Five stars!

This is probably not for beginners. Real beginners, like folks who struggle to cook rice of fry eggs. For the rest — an absolute recommendation.

I almost sent this book back when I first received it. It’s not your standard recipe book but if you love to cook, it’s mind-bending. For instance, have a favorite vegetable but tired of cooking it the same way all the time? Look it up in the book and there is a list of recommended spices; techniques to cook it; and great pairings. It’s expanded my flavor vocabulary and delighted my husband’s palate!

I’ve had this book since 2015 and it has served me well. If you treat it as a reference guide when you want (or need) to use a little creativity in your dishes then I think you’ll love it!

Fantastic book! I use it more than any other cookbook I have. Often I’m trying to work with what’s on hand. This book does a great job of helping me select things that will go together really well, not just passably. I’ve even given copies as gifts to other family members who like to cook.
This is not a recipe book. It’s collection of food combinations that go together nicely. There’s a good, better, best ranking to items on the lists. Plus there’s a discussion of the basic flavor characteristics of each ingredient.
A must-have for any cook who likes to make recipes up.

First I have to say… don’t buy reference books for your Kindle. Ever. There may be exceptions, but i would not look for them. Kindle simply is not a format that lends itself to research reading or reference; not saying it’s impossible, but, generally, it doesn’t work well.

Now that you’ve been duly warned, please, don’t buy and then rate book *content* because they translate poorly into Kindle *format* unless that is it’s primary binding. It’s not fair to other readers to drive down the rating on a text’s usefulness or interest based on one format. Amazon, of course, should separate them out, or give shoppers the option.

The first thing I EVER read about Kindle is, don’t buy anything you would normally be “leafing” through, using an index, depending on diagrams or graphics etc. (not the case here) or where formatting is otherwise an issue (e.g. tables). Maybe some years down the road it will improve, and I don’t use a Kindle Fire, but I stick to this advice and it serves me well.

Now as far as The Flavor Bible goes: If you are anything but a recipe-guided cook–for instance, if you are staring into your cupboards or fridge and wondering what will work with what–and like me, you are too inexperienced or genetically underendowed with smell and taste to figure it out on your own – you WANT this book. you NEED this book. This book is the most useful and most used in my kitchen.

IMO, aside from basic culinary skills – how to to cook certain cuts of meat, or how to use a steamer, or how to make sauce, or how many courses to serve ,or what order your menu should proceed through, or how to butcher meat – whatever – this is the only book you will ever need.

If you don’t have basic culinary skills, you can find everything you need to know on the internet. i went from how to cook different meats, to how to make sauces, and up from there, using sites like about dot com. I’m no chef – i’m a basic cook – but my food is GOOD. Since I don’t have a well-developed palate, this book is a life-saver. and of course, once you start learning, you can start jumping around. Now i *know* – am i in the mood for a cream based dish? pineapple? potato? thyme? curry? chicken? pork? and what am i going to do with these leftovers? wow – i can plan a week and have EVERYTHING work together!

The hardback version is well bound, easily referenced, and contains literally thousands of cross-references and often suggestions on how to combine dishes and seasonings as well, based on a main ingredient, in a way you will never find on the internet.

And it’s not just about seasoning–you can look up literally almost any seasoning OR basic ingredient and find a long list of compatible ingredients/flavors, in alphabetical order, with advice to let you know what goes the very best, what goes well, and what works but may not be ideal. AND an index. So you can look up a meat, or a vegetable, or a seasoning, or most any ingredient, and get a long list of what you can safely combine (within reason).

and of course the hardback props open well. it’s a quality bind on a quality text that you can keep forever.

This purpose of this book was difficult for me to encompass, but I finally got my head around it. Then it became useful to me. The progress in my thinking follows, as well as my final conclusion.

At first I felt as if the authors had started out to write a book, but were overwhelmed by the huge collection of notes they had accumulated and instead just published the contents of their index cards, so to speak, in alphabetical order.

Gradually I formulated an analogy with a book intended to teach writing, in which many words of the language are listed in thesaurus format with emotional reactions and typical types of stories in which they might appear. The concepts of style, grammar, and punctuation for which someone might have bought the book appear only as list entries. Thus, to learn where to use a semi-colon in a run-on sentence, one must look up “semi-colon”, after having looked up “punctuation” to find out what one might possibly use in this sentence.

In the end, I found the key in their use of the word “creativity”. I think they purposely left the book as unstructured as possible in order not to place limits on the creativity of the reader. If you want food for summer, you can look up summer. If you want food typically served in Ethiopia, you can look up Ethiopia. If you have a potato in the pantry, you can look up potatoes. If you want serve a meal after which you can drink whiskey, you can look that up, too.

Unfortunately this approach essentially requires that you read the entire contents of this thesaurus in order to know what you might look up, because there are no lists to aid you. I understand that to list the names of all of the foods would be repetitive and space-consuming, but it would be nice to know what cuisines are included, for example. What culinary concepts (sourness, astringency, etc.), what meal-formulation guidelines (dessert, appetizer, etc.), what the rules are by which the authors intended you to use the definitions they supplied (balance, seasons, etc.). All of these things only appear in the alphabetical database and the reader could easily miss them if he or she gave up in frustration or despair before scanning the entire text.

On a final note, this is, as they do say on the cover, a compendium of opinions. The opinions are supposedly those of experts, from supposedly famous establishments. I’ve never heard of any of them, but I don’t get out much so that doesn’t mean anything. There are many anecdotes in the book, most of which serve to demonstrate that even the experts don’t agree on everything. I was amused, for example, to read two diametrically opposed opinions of the use of bay leaves. One expert can’t get enough of them, and one thinks that two in 40 gallons is more than enough. My mother was very conservative with spices, and even she used one entire leaf in a one-gallon pot of stew. I found a number of opinions with which I don’t agree, but that is okay. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Just be aware that this book doesn’t have profiles for foods that are based on any objective measurements. They are all based on the net result of the opinions of the experts interviewed. It can still be a useful book, especially if you start making your own lists to help guide your future use of the book.