The holiday season is upon us, and for the curious cooks and bakers in our lives, there’s no better gift than a new cookbook to inspire their culinary adventures. This fall saw the release of several wonderful cookbooks that are sure to spark creativity. These are my top picks for the best new cookbooks for holiday giving.
Kalaya’s Southern Thai Kitchen by Nok Suntaranon
Season 7 of the popular Netflix series Chef’s Table premiered Thanksgiving week and the first episode featured Philadelphia chef Nok Suntaranon and her restaurant, Kalaya. Her first cookbook, Kalaya’s Southern Thai Kitchen, has just been released.
Thailand-born Suntaranon had been a flight attendant for two decades before reinventing herself at age 50 to become a James Beard Award-winning chef. Kalaya was named to Food & Wine’s Best New Restaurants 2020 list.
In this beautifully photographed volume, Suntaranon demonstrates how to cook authentic southern Thai food inspired by the dishes of her native Trang, a southern port city. With easy-to-follow visuals and beginner-friendly tips, Kalaya’s Southern Thai Kitchen makes home-style Thai cooking accessible to American home cooks. If you have a few of her “building block recipes” stored in your fridge, such as a batch of red curry paste, many of her dishes will come together quickly, making them suitable for weeknight meals. An added plus is that most of her recipes are made in one pot, making cleanup a breeze.
The cuisines of Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries carefully balance hot, sour, salty and sweet flavors. However, Suntaranon notes, “In America, Thai restaurants often serve something unrecognizable as the food I grew up with. I think like so many immigrant communities that arrived here when waves of Thai restaurants opened in the 1990s, they were afraid to show the true potential of our food. I can’t blame them, because their livelihoods depend on it; if a restaurant finds easy and cheap ways to fill people up with sugar and some MSG, then maybe somehow you will make a margin to survive the next day.”
With guidance from Kalaya’s Southern Thai Kitchen, some of the best Thai food in central Illinois could come from your home kitchen.
Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking by Richard Hart
If you’ve been following the hit drama series The Bear on Hulu, you might remember the episode when Carmy sent Marcus to Copenhagen to learn new skills as a pastry chef from a skilled baker named Luca. Luca was patterned after real-life baker Richard Hart, who was once the head baker at the iconic San Francisco bakery Tartin before being recruited by Rene Redzepi to bake bread for Copenhagen’s award-winning restaurant Noma (because the world’s best restaurant needed the world’s best bread).
Richard Hart Bread is a deep dive for bread geeks. Rather than focusing on precise formulas, Richard Hart Bread emphasizes the intuitive art of baking bread. He writes: “I can easily be outgeeked. I meet a lot of bakers who want to talk to me about bread baking in a very scientific way, but to be honest, my eyes glaze over in seconds. I understand and respect the science, but that’s not the kind of baker I am.” He believes the secret to baking great bread is to use touch and feel to understand your dough. Despite his reputation as one of the world’s best bakers, Hart feels he achieves the perfect bake loaf only a couple times a year, and that it is in “the pursuit of that perfection that we find something, often, better.” His philosophy is one of evolution, one where he is competing against himself: where he improves what he did the previous year, the previous day, the previous bake, by questioning it.
Richard Hart Bread can help readers create and care for a sourdough starter, and bake multi-grain loaves, flatbreads, focaccias, bagels, English muffins and burger buns by learning how to see, taste, touch and adapt. The book contains more than 60 recipes with accompanying QR codes to access technique videos for additional support. Richard Hart Bread is the perfect gift for the serious bread baker.
Bake Club: 101 Must-Have Moves for Your Kitchen by Christina Tosi
In contrast to Richard Hart’s almost spiritual, perfection-seeking approach to baking, the recipes in Christina Tosi’s Bake Club are designed to empower home bakers to have fun in the kitchen.
Tosi is a two-time James Beard Award-winning chef and founder of the popular bakery chain Milk Bar. She was featured in the Netflix documentary Chef’s Table: Pastry and hosted Netflix’s Bake Squad.
The origin story of Bake Club: 101 Must-Have Moves for Your Kitchen dates to the early days of the pandemic in 2020. Like many, Tosi was feeling upended by all the uncertainty of the time and needed a way to show up, to bake, to be useful. She posted a photo of butter, sugar, flour and salt on Instagram with an invitation for her followers to show up the following day at 2 p.m. Thousands of home bakers tuned in and Bake Club was born. Every day for a year, Bake Club devotees joined her Instagram Live feed and tagged her in proud posts of their creations. Tosi’s tried-and-true, make-’em-your-own recipes morphed into the Bake Club cookbook.
Tosi’s rules for a Bake Club recipe are simple: no hard-to-get ingredients, no unnecessary equipment and as few dishes as possible to wash. Each recipe leads off with a photo of the ingredients needed. A sidebar suggests substitutions for pantry items. Tosi declares, “Limitation breeds innovation!” Are you out of cream and sugar? Do you have ice cream in your freezer? Then thaw it and use it instead. Ice cream is just cream and sugar.
I’ve long been pontificating the evils of refined sugar, and though I’ll be spending the winter in pursuit of Richard Hart’s perfect loaf, I’m looking forward to making Tosi’s homemade gummy bears with my grandkids.
A cookbook is more than just a collection of recipes. It’s a source of inspiration, a tool for learning, and a way to connect with others through the joy of food. By gifting a cookbook this holiday season, you’re allowing your loved ones to explore new flavors, expand their culinary skills, and create delicious memories that will last a lifetime.
Happy holidays and happy cooking.
This article appears in Project censored 2024.
