Product Description

The Great Ceviche Book by Douglas Rodriguez

Ever the innovator, Douglas Rodriguez was the first American chef to give ceviche the attention it deserves, creating such signature dishes as Spicy Shrimp Ceviche with Popcorn and the decadent Squid Ceviche in Black Ink Sauce. His New York restaurant, Chicama, is a temple to the bright, clean flavors of this remarkably simple dish, and patrons crowd around the ceviche bar to marvel at the day’s offerings. In THE GREAT CEVICHE BOOK, Rodriguez presents over 50 traditional and contemporary recipes, as well as extensive information on ingredient basics, food safety issues, and suggestions for pairing ceviche with other dishes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #523207 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Released on: 2003-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
"Mr. Rodriguez’s reinterpretations of Latin American dishes have made him something of a godfather of contemporary Latin American cooking." -- New York Times

"The most important Latin chef in the restaurant world." -- Nina Zagat, Zagat Guides

From the Publisher
•High in protein and low in fat, ceviche is the perfect food for health-conscious cooks not willing to sacrifice flavor.

•Douglas Rodriguez’s books have sold over 60,000 copies.

About the Author
Award-winning chef DOUGLAS RODRIGUEZ is regarded as the inventor of Nuevo Latino cuisine. He is the executive chef of Chicama in Manhattan and in Philadelphia.

Customer Reviews

Great flavors, terrible binding, short on recipes
For those who are perhaps unfamiliar with the term, `Ceviche' (I've heard it pronounced "seh-vee-chay" and "seh-veech-ee") refers to a delicate method of cooking certain foods (usually seafood) by immersing it in an acidic brine (typically a modestly salted lime juice, but sometimes a mixture a vinegar and various other citrus juices instead) for 1-3 hours. The acid has the same effect on the proteins that heat does, except that there's no heat or caramelization involved. After a set period of time, the acidic brine is then drained off and discarded, and the ceviche is dressed (seasoned) and served in much the same way that a seafood salad is - with diced vegetables and herbs, and a light finishing sauce (typically citrus based).

The `Ceviche' process (which is most popular in central and south america) is related to, but somewhat different from, classic pickling, in that the former uses more acid, and is much less aggressively salted/spiced ... the intention being to serve it almost immediately (within a few short hours), rather than to preserve something for long term storage.

Ok, on to the book itself. I have very mixed feelings about this particular offering:

What I liked:

TOPIC: There's a great paucity of books on this one particular topic, so this book is a very welcome addition to an otherwise grossly overcrowded field.

FLAVORS: I've also (as of this writing) worked with several of the recipes in this book, and so far, the flavors have been impeccable. I'm also fortunate to have eaten (several times) at a restaurant owned and operated by a chef who's worked for/with the author (sample dish: diver scallop ceviche on the half-shell, lightly dressed with blood orange and grapefruit). In fact, it was the chef/proprietor of this restaurant who recommended this book to me. It's always nice to encounter a book in which virtually everything has already been tested and approved by actual use in a successful restaurant, and to see ripples from said book (and restaurant) slowly spread outward into the larger culinary community. As I write this, Sushi is all the rage here in (semi)urban America, and I can easily see ceviche following hot on it's heels.

INTRO: The author has a decent introductory chapter that overviews both the method of cooking, as well as some of the regional variations in style (Ecuadorian, Peruvian, etc.). I wish that more authors were as diligent.

GLOSSARY: The author includes a helpful glossary of terms and ingredients. I wish more authors would do that.

TECHNIQUES: Chapter 4 (unintuitively titled "basics") provides some helpful preparation instructions on how do things like cook octopus, blanch shellfish, open oysters, etc.

HEAD NOTES: Many of the recipes contain interesting head notes about what inspired the dish or where it came from. That's something else that I wish more authors would do.


What I disliked:

AWKWARD FORMAT: The edition I have is a 4" wide by 10" long by ½" thick soft-cover "chap-book" binding, on stiff paper, with a glued-binding. It's designed to be visually appealing on a bookstore shelf, but I cannot emphasize enough what an annoying format it is. It's awful. It's too stiff to open comfortably, you can't lay it flat on a table and work from it, and you actually have to exert hand strength just to hold it open - almost like the book doesn't want you to read it. Think hard-shell clam, struggling to close on your fingers, after having been caught gaping. The space-wasting format also causes even short recipes to spill across 2 full pages ... sometimes even 3-4, if there's a photo involved.

NOT ENOUGH RECIPES: The author, on page 6, claims this book includes 60 ceviches. The back cover mentions "50 of his favorite recipes". Both numbers are WRONG. I counted - there are only 35 ceviche recipes in this book. All of the other recipes hinted at on the back cover, and in the introduction, involve recipes for things like interim procedural ingredients (ex: poaching liquids, flavored oils, etc), condiments, and accompaniments. Surely this book is a candidate for Consumer Report's infamous "black hole" award ... a book 162 pages, with a over price of $18 US, but only 35 recipes of the style implied on the cover. I'll overlook the fact that some of those 35 recipes involved shellfish & bivalves cooked by heat, rather than acid, and thus could be considered "seafood salads" rather than true ceviches (ex: "Indian Mussels", "Peruvian Black Ceviche", "Honduran Fire and Ice Lobster", "Peruvian Tuna Causa", etc.) ... but that's splitting hairs.

INTRO: In my opinion, the author did not provide adequate coverage of explaining the why behind why certain types of seafood should be cooked (or handled with greater care), rather than eaten raw. There's also insufficient attention to sanitation issues (how to sanitize cutting boards to cut down on bacteria, dangers of cross-contamination, etc.), as well as concerns involving resistant parasites (nematodes, worms, etc.) ... how to spot/minimize/avoid them, techniques that can kill them, etc. A book that champions such a delicate cooking technique, and revolving around RAW flesh for it's subject matter, should show a bit more responsibility to the topic and aggressively deal with such matters head-on, rather than lazily tucking tail and short-sheeting the matter.

PROCEDURAL TIPS: Chapter 4 could have been MUCH longer and more robust. I would have like to see more information (and pictures) on things like assessing fish quality; cleaning and butchering fish (esp. ones you've caught yourself); more advice on timing (such as how long the various recipes will maintain peak flavor/texture, once assembled); a fuller discussion of bivalves (size grading, point of origin labeling protections, types of knives used to open them and pictures of how to do it, etc.); a general discussion of tools (fillet knives, scalers, slicing knives, etc.) and also more supplemental information on how to make use of throw-away items (like shrimp shells, fish heads & frames, fish skins, fish innards, etc) to make things like fish stock & soups, bone cracklings, skin cracklings, etc. All of those things are a natural byproduct of making ceviche, and the book is so criminally short that there's little no reason why they chose to be so stingy with such material.

NO RECIPE INDEX / DISCERNABLE ORDER: A book this short should have a convenient recipe index ... either right up front, or at the start of each of the 4 chapters. No dice here. If you want one, you'll have to type it yourself, fold it up, and stuff it in. To compound matters, the recipes do not appear to be in any discernable order within in their respective chapters ... alphabetical or otherwise. They seem to be a random jumble.

PHOTOS: There's a shortage of photos of finished dishes, and a gaping void of helpful procedural photos. The photos that ARE present are far too big (taking up an entire page, and sometimes 2 pages), too few, and are often so myopically close that it's hard to tell what it's supposed to be. [Note to would-be food photographers - if the far side of the plate is out of focus, and the foreground is so close that it causes claustrophobia on the part of the reader, you're zoomed in too much. Please consider an alternate career in pornography.] There are also irrelevant photos present that have nothing whatsoever to do with making ceviche ... such as the picture of beer opposite page 1, popcorn on page 120, several pictures of the author and his friends/staff, etc. Oh, and as long as we're on the topic of popcorn, the author's recipe (p.121) is a bit weak ... the amount of oil required should be 1/3 cup, not 2 tbsp (popcorn follows a classic 2:1 ratio of kernels to oil), and the author neglects to include a 60 second rest off the heat, after the 1st kernel pops, before putting it back on the heat to finish popping (which greatly increases the yield and reduces scorching).

IMPRECISION: I was pleased to see the author include a brief discussion of gourmet salts in his introduction. However, in standardizing to the generic (and vague) term "salt" in all his recipes, he neglects to mention that the two most common salts in culinary use (i.e., plain table salt and coarse kosher salt) cannot be substituted on a 1:1 basis of for each other. I find that to be a glaring omission that could lead to irregular levels of salt, from one reader to the next, depending on which salt is the default usage for their household. For those who are curious, 1 tbsp regular table salt is roughly equivalent to 1.5 tbsp of coarse kosher salt, with a slight upward or downward variation on that depending on just how coarse the kosher salt really is ... it varies. As you can see, a 50% salt difference is NOT negligible - esp. in a book dealing with raw fish. I'm also not keen on recipes that use imprecise terms like "one bunch of thyme" (p.136) and don't bother to give better guidance how big a `bunch' is, or if it's fresh or dried. For the most part, the author does a decent job of precision throughout his book, but he definitely drops the ball when it comes to salt and herbs. It's one of my recurring pet peeves with many cookbook authors.

FOCUS: I think the author would have served the subject, and the reader, better if he'd focused on presenting the material from a practical home-cook standpoint (which is where the cuisine originated to begin with), rather than faithfully parroting the elaborate recipes he prepares at his restaurant. As is, many of the recipes in this book are highly impractical restaurant-only offerings, and are thus useless to most readers, even those who are fairly serious about the hobby. For instance, the "Honduran Fire and Ice Lobster" (p.81) calls for ¼ cup of lobster stock {p.136}. Speaking from personal experience, very few home cooks, even those who cook lobsters, go to the trouble of making classic lobster stock ... much less do it just to get ¼ cup to make ceviche with {and by the way, only restaurants will squander a full cup of butter just to sweat mirepoix for making stocks in general ... home cooks uniformly use oil}. I repeat - it's a restaurant-only recipe. Ditto for the "Sea Urchin Shots" (p.56) ... it's a restaurant-only recipe. Someone like Thomas Keller can get away with that sort of thing (primarily because he's famous and his books are as much about the philosophical quest for perfection as they are about documenting what he does at his iconic restaurant) ... this author cannot. Sorry. For a book pushing the $20 mark that only has 35 ceviches, I expect recipes that are practical and make-able.

RESPONSIBLE CONSUMPTION: Several of the recipes in this book call for varieties of seafood that are either already endangered (Chilean Sea Bass), or well on their way to getting there due to overfishing (Sea Urchin, Red Snapper, etc.). I think boosting the popularity of such products still further is a bit irresponsible. I was pleased that the author mentioned the overfishing of conch, but he could have gone quite a bit further in extolling farm-raised alternatives for more of his ingredients.


Bottom line: This is one of those books in which I love many of the recipes, but for which the book as a whole gets a negative review. I wish I could give it the thumbs up, but it's long laundry list of annoying shortcomings and omissions drag that back down into the below average zone. My advice is to hold off on buying this one and hope the author eventually decides to republish a greatly expanded and reformatted edition. If, however, you love ceviche, and if you're physically holding the book in your hand there in the bookstore, go grab a cup of coffee, then spend 20 mins reading the intro to overview the basic technique (i.e., ½ cup lime juice & a heaping spoon of salt, stir, use to marinate 1-1.5 lbs of sliced/diced fish for 1 hour, drain, and then dress and combine all the rest of the ingredients like you would a fancy seafood salad ... that's pretty much the gist of it), then skim a few recipes to get a general idea of flavors, and then put it back on the shelf ... you can find whatever else you need on the internet.

Excellent Book on a Subject which Deserves a better format
`the great CEVICHE book' by Douglas Rodriguez presents what may be the second great native American food style, after barbecue. While both styles of cooking have serious non-American influences, both are also certifiably born and raised in the New World.

Ceviche is a method of `finishing' seafood with citrus or other edible acid such as vinegar. Language leaves me at a loss here, as I am not fond of saying the acidic marinade `cooks' the fish as no heat is involved, yet there is no other word which quite seems to fit.

Douglas Rodriguez is an experienced cookbook author, as this is his third book, appearing in the 10 Speed Press' series of tall and skinny books on culinary topics. I have seen three of these titles and this is better than Mark Miller's book on salsa, but not as good as David Lebovitz' book on chocolate. I confess the relative quality has a lot to do with how much interesting history there is to give about each subject. My opinion of the chocolate book also has a lot to do with the fact that of the three, it has the most background material meant for the easy chair rather than the kitchen counter. I simply do not see what 10 Speed Press was trying to do with this long, skinny format with a binding which works against propping it open and following a recipe on one of its pages. The publisher would have been much more intelligent to put the material in a squarish volume with spiral or plastic rib binding similar to what Random House did with Paula Deen's `The Lady and Sons' cookbooks.

In spite of all that grousing about the format and binding, I must recommend Rodriguez' book because there are simply very few books on this most interesting subject, and even fewer good books. And, Rodriguez' material in this book is very good. As with Lebovitz' book on chocolate, there is a lot of introductory material on the origin and homeland of this culinary technique. In a nutshell, modern ceviche seems to have been developed by a meeting of Peruvian and Ecuadorian fishermen's techniques with fish and citrus with Japanese immigrants' overlaying Japanese raw fish techniques.

The book divides the world of ceviche dishes very neatly into the simple `tiraditos', dishes made with only one raw seafood protein and `mixtos', dishes made with two or more raw seafood proteins. To these two styles, the author adds recipes for side dishes that complement ceviche dishes. The author does not dwell on this aspect of this cuisine, but it should be evident that ceviche is very healthy, very easy, and relatively cheap. The hardest thing about this cuisine is finding a trustworthy source of fresh fish. Once you have that, virtually the entire cuisine reduces to variations on the fish plus five ingredient types. These are citrus, onion, salt, herbs, and chiles. Aside from salt, all of these groups are pretty broad, so what seems like a limitation is really more like the requirements that a poem scans and rhymes. It imposes a discipline that leads to creativity.

And, the book is about the creativity of the author rather than being a catalogue of traditional Ecuadorian or Peruvian dishes. The foreword by eminent New Yorker foodie writer Calvin Trillin makes it clear that Rodriguez' inspiration is rooted firmly in the traditions of Peru and Ecuador, but the photos show dishes which are 100% New York City food styling.

For an annoying binding and page format, the $17.95 list price seems a bit high, but the contents are very, very good. Highly recommended for anyone who likes fish and easy culinary methods. My feeling about this book is that the thing to do is to assimilate Rodriguez' principles behind the technique and go off on your own improvisations.

Good book bad binding
Lots of great recipes, so far we have liked all tried. The problem with this book is the size, binding. It is so narrow that it is very hard to use, gets lost in the bookcase and is a real pain. Are thinking about taking it to an office supply / copy store having holes punched then putting it in a three ring binder. Please don't let the bad binding stop the purchase if you like ceviche. This is one of the better ceviche books out there. It also has us creating our own recipes with the base of the ones in the book.