I wanted to like this book, I really did, but in fact, I loathed it for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. The best I'd been able to come up with was the thought that each individual sentence had too much Béarnaise sauce, which meant I could not read it in my preferred fashion -- which is basically to lock myself in a room for three days and read it straight through. At a certain point, the complexity of Pollan's sentences started to make my eyes glaze over. Of course, one could argue that

So as background, let me tell you a little bit about the day I started/gave up reading this book. I woke up in my tiny (494 sq ft) 1920s-era house in a walkable urban neighborhood. As I went outside to water my vegetable garden and take out the recycling, I saw my neighbor had returned my pie plate (I'd brought him the leftovers of my contribution to a pre-thanksgiving potluck) and also left me a mason jar of homemade spiked cider. Then I walked up the block to the coffee cart on the corner, whe...

In Michael Pollan's latest book about food, he takes the reader on a personal journey as he learns first-hand about four different types of cooking. First, he takes a trip to the North Carolina, where he learns how to cook barbecue from a pit master. Pollan volunteers his time, and learns the subtleties of cooking a barbecue, and these subtleties are described in detail. Perhaps, a bit too much detail for my taste.Then Pollan describes the art of making sourdough bread. In great detail. One very...

I wanted to love this book so badly and there are definite 5-star parts to it, but there are also 1-star parts. Parts that I, admittedly, skimmed through. I suppose that is to be expected in a book covering so many topics. The book is divided into 4 parts - earth, air, fire, and water - and I while I understand and can see the appeal of this, I oftentimes felt that the connections were tenuous, at best. For example, there is an obvious connection between roasting a pig and fire. However, the inc...

Not only was this book about transformations in cooking, it was a transformative book for me. After reading this book, I had an uncontrollable urge to bake bread (hello whole wheat hamburger buns!) and start fermenting my own cucumbers.I picked this up at the library because of the title. I had never read a book by Michael Pollan, I had no idea he was one of Time magazines most influential people of the year back in 2010. Now I can see why. He certainly influenced me.This is a well written book....

Space here is limited so to see the review with more pictures go to my blog: https://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot....Michael Pollan, an author and journalist who writes about food, went on a three-year pilgrimage to learn about food associated with the four classical elements: fire, water, air, and earth. Along the way, Pollan consulted and cooked with masters in each field. In 'Cooked', Pollan shares culinary techniques he acquired, along with healthy doses of science, history, anthropology, an...

I've now read all of Pollan's book and I think I could do a really good parody at this point. I'd just have to compare a cheese curd to a dionysian struggle between our innate longing for romance and order. Or something like that. This book was a lot of fun. It gave me a new perspective on food and cooking and I learned a lot. Sometimes I get annoyed at the fermentation zealots out there now or the bread dudes and I wonder if they don't need to be reminded sometimes that we're just talking about...

Another excellent and inspiring book by Michael Pollan. Every topic is heavily researched -apparently for the sheer joy of it- and Pollan's enthusiasm is highly infectious. I've got a 100% whole wheat sourdough started (rather than a mix of white & wh.w.) am determined to make my own kimchi and feel inspired to make homemade mozzarella again. As for home made beer, I have a hunch any batch would explode spectacularly in the Texas summer heat-in spite of AC-. A project for late fall perhaps. As

This was an awesome read, and well worth the effort to borrow and devour.Michael Pollan took a lesson from his last book - that if you eat whatever you make with your own two hands, you will be healthy - and applied it. Here, he takes the four elements of fire, water, air, and earth, and cooks four types of food with those elements. For fire, he apprenticed himself with a Carolina barbecue pit master. In the water section, he learned to braise from an Iranian immigrant who worked at Chez Panisse...

Bullet Review:I didn't like it as much as The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. And that's really what it boils down to in a sentence. Since I rated TOD 4 stars, this gets 3 stars to differentiate (though it ranks better than the other 3 stars it's grouped with - damned rating systems!).Some general problems:+ The tenuous relationship each element has to the supposed cooking method. Fire = barbecue, for sure, but fire is also critical in boiling and, duh, baking. Pollan spends...

"Cooking puts several kinds of distance between the brutal facts of the matter (dead animals for dinner) and the dining room table set with crisp linens and polished silver."Cooked was a book that for the most part, I found interesting. Pollan studies 4 classic elements: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth, and their impact on the creation of food and beverage. For me, the book read in descending order of interest: the fire and water chapters were better and kept my interest much more than air and earth...

This book has pasta on the cover so it must be good.

Cooked is Michael Pollan's love letter to food preparation. In our world of fast food, ubiquitous restaurants, frozen entrees and meal delivery, he wants to remind us of the good old days when we spent significant portions of our time getting food on the table. Pollan references the average family's daily time spent cooking and cleaning up - 27 minutes and 4 minutes, respectively - roughly half what it was when he was a boy in the 60s. Corporations have stepped in to make food preparation easy f...

This book includes two of my favorite things- philosophy and food. The first chapters are a bit off-putting- a bit too much philosophy, but starting with the chapter "Fire" I had a difficult time putting the book down. Food is such a complex part of our life- we need it, it takes our precious time to prepare it, if we choose the wrong food it can make us fat and unhealthy and yet...Food preparation is a sensuous , zen-like necessary art. I'm not much of a meat eater, but Fire was something i wan...