Product Description

Organic products have never been hotter, and, in step with that trend, Uncooked is a celebration of the art of raw cuisine. If eating raw means a more balanced and nutritious diet, it also requires the knowledge of how to choose the right ingredients and how to prepare them. Lyndsay and Patrick Mikanowski bring together recipes that have inspired them on their travels and introduce raw dishes from across the globe: Californian vegetables, Japanese sushi, and lemon-marinated meat from Polynesia are just a few of the tantalizing dishes. These two epicureans reveal the history and culinary tradition of all types of raw cuisine, throughout the ages and across the continents.

The benefits of raw food preparation for health and fitness are explained with recipes that capitalize on the essence of the product's natural flavor or enhance it with spices, herbs, and oils. The authors offer suggestions for varying the dishes according to the season and your personal taste, as well as great wine matches for each dish.

The book's fresh and modern design comes alive with Grant Symon's flawless photographs of the 100 dishes for fruit, vegetables, fish, and meat that are

as pleasing to the eye as they are to the tastebuds. From quick and easy recipes to more sophisticated preparations, this volume is an initiation in tastes both simple and refined. The possibilites—and delights—of raw cuisine are countless.

Featured ingredients: tomato, mushroom, white truffle, arugula, purple basil, beef, mango, salmon, tuna, scallop, caviar, passion fruit, banana, foie gras, olive, crab, fig, Spanish ham, etc.

Uncooked strips gastronomy down to its essentials to reveal the secret of healthy and tasty food in a cookbook that is as beautiful as it is informative.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1295247 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-05
• Released on: 2005-04-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 176 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A shiny, high-flying contribution to the rather earthbound raw foods movement, this volume doesn't shy away from luxurious ingredients and glamorous presentations. Sensibly for a raw foods cookbook, the focus is primarily on traditional raw dishes like carpaccios, ceviches and salads comprised of thinly sliced vegetables and fruits. Some of these recipes, like Creamed Avocado with Osetra Caviar, are tasty; others, like a cold Strawberry, Pineapple, and Tomato Minestrone could put a less hardy soul off her lunch. Visually, this volume resembles a coffee-table book rather than something to dirty up in the kitchen-and it reads like one, too. Dishes are organized not by some logical division like "breakfasts" and "desserts," but less usefully by main ingredient: pineapple, foie gras, duck and so on. Further, the book is so over-designed that sometimes lists of ingredients are nowhere near the instructions for what to do with them. The best offerings in this volume are the brief histories of certain foodstuffs (who knew that the word "apple" was once used to "designate the edible fruit of any tree"?) But a reader interested in such novelties could probably find them in a book unburdened by a hefty price tag and pages of sometimes bizarre recipes. 275 color illustrations.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Lyndsay and Patrick Mikanowski—a landscape gardener and an advertising executive respectively—are passionate about flavor. They wrote Tomate (Editions du Chêne) and Patate (Flammarion).

Grant Symon, from Scotland, is a specialist in advertising and design photography; his photos illustrated Patate.

Customer Reviews

Beauty may be only skin deep here

This book cries out to be admired -- the pictures are stunning, and the binding and printing first rate. Never has an uncooked carrot -- in this case also a raw carrot -- looked so sophisticated and so delicious.

The book does make a strong case for eating healthy foods. The authors suggest that you use the time not cooking on arranging and styling your food, enhancing colors, shapes and textures. It's no secret that great ingredients will enhance any cook's output, beautiful food tastes better and may actually lead you to eat less.

Some of the dishes are interesting, for example balsamic-glazed mackerel with banana chips and cilantro. Enoki mushrooms and cured duck wrapped, tortilla style, in slivers of black radish.

There are practical, in many cases, overwhelming difficulties with applying the lessons in this book. We live near two excellent food markets, but it's tough to find Green Zebra tomatoes, lotus root, daikon sprouts and marsh samphire, to name just some of the "necessary" ingredients as a regular matter. The suggested wines are pricey and sometimes hard to obtain even in a major market like New York City. To make these dishes you really have to become a master at grating, slicing and chopping.

So, as a coffee table book this might appeal to foodies, and might even inspire the creation of a couple of beautiful dishes or sides. I'd be very surprised if you used it for actually making an entire meal.

Overall I found this the weakest of the books in this series: POTATO, Egg and Vegetables by 40 Great French Chefs,

Robert C. Ross

Not so Great
The design and photography is nice. If it only had more content! A little light in the recipes and even skimpier with any extra text. Definitely over-rated, given the press.