The Flavor Bible: More Delicious than the Actual Bible!

Imagine this: you have a fridge and pantry full of food, a garden full of herbs, a rumbling stomach, and no idea what to make for dinner.  You rummage through your potential ingredients, racking your brain for something to cook, but inspiration doesn't strike.  Enter The Flavor Bible.  A quick flip through the book, and with some basic cooking techniques, a beautiful, harmonious dinner is just a few minutes away.

Unlike most cook books, The Flavor Bible doesn't actually include any recipes.  Rather, it consists of an alphabetized list of ingredients, followed by other ingredients that match well with the main ingredient.  The lists are based on feedback from hundreds of professional chefs, and the resulting answers are displayed based on the number of people who voiced the same opinion.

For example, if you look up hazelnuts, you'll find that CHOCOLATE and VANILLA are the most-referenced good pairings (as indicated by the uppercase letters).  Less-popular but also mentioned favorites include items like coffee, figs, and honey (as indicated by the bold letters).  The rest of the list is made up of ingredients that fewer people mentioned, like kiwi, cinnamon, and beets. But heck, looking over the options, you might just toss together a beet salad with toasted hazelnuts and a honey-cinnamon vinaigrette. Yes, please!

Although some pairings are quite obvious (who needs a book to know that Lobster and Butter taste good together?), many of them are more surprising, and we can almost always find some of the recommended ingredients around our house.  For instance, halibut and rosemary?  We wouldn't have thought of it, but it was delicious (pan-seared the fish and used rosemary to scent it while the fish cooked).

Additionally, the book lists several ingredients that go well together in the 'Flavor Affinities' lists.  For instance, if you look up pineapple, you'll see things like "pineapple + avocado + watercress" or "pineapple + rum + vanilla + walnuts."

The last aspect that we love is that for a handful of ingredients, they actually quote chefs or list restaurant dishes from some of our favorite culinary geniuses.  Everybody from Thierry Rautureau (chef/owner of Rover's in Seattle, and recent Top Chef Masters competitor) to Charlie Trotter to Hubert Keller to Eric Ripert weigh in on dishes that they serve, or share other interesting tidbits about various ingredients that they love.

The thing that we like most about the book is that it provides inspiration for dishes, rather than recipes.  It still enables the cook to be the creative force in the kitchen, but it provides them with some direction or suggestions for them to use.  In our house, it's become a go-to every time we have some basic ingredients and are looking to add some pizazz or otherwise push a dish over the top. The biggest testament we can give this book is that we've given it as a gift to  folks we know and love on more than one occasion, who have in turn bought it as a gift for their friends, on more than one occasion. Highly recommended, especially if you just want some general direction for a dish or ingredient as opposed to a step-by-step instruction manual.