Gift Ideas: 10 Books for the Foodie in Your Life

Do you love to cook? Does someone close to you love to cook? If you’re struggling with gift ideas for the foodie in your life (or if you’re looking for yourself), look no further! We’ve compiled our top 10 picks for foodies everywhere!

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For cocktail enthusiasts, herbalists, foragers, and bartenders, Botanical Bar Craft serves up original, spirited recipes and invaluable plant knowledge, inspired by adventures in the garden and forest.

This book will not only appeal to herbalists, herbal enthusiasts, and home cocktail enthusiasts, but also to professional bartenders looking to embrace the use of innovative and highly flavorful natural ingredients in their bar creations. Botanical Bar Craft provides all the answers for those who are curious and wondering how to make a really good drink inspired by and infused with plants.

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“A beautifully written book by a true artisan. . . . Easy to read and likely to inspire, this book will take your bread-making to the next level.”—Sandor Ellix Katz, fermentation revivalist; author of The Art of Fermentation and other fermentation bestsellers

The Hungry Ghost Bread Book is a window onto one baker’s artisan approach to sourdough bread—the culmination of his time in the tide of dough. The results are quite fantastic: bread that bites back, heels worth chewing on, and scraps worth toasting. A return to real Wonder.

Featured Excerpts:

Rosemary Bread, Scones and Stuffing

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Koji Alchemy chefs Jeremy Umansky and Rich Shih—collectively considered to be the most practical, experienced, generous educators on the culinary power of this unique ingredient—deliver a comprehensive look at modern koji use around the world. Using it to rapidly age charcuterie, cheese, and other ferments, they take the magic of koji to the next level, revolutionizing the creation of fermented foods and flavor profiles for both professional and home cooks.

Featured Excerpts:

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Koji

Growing Koji in Your Own Kitchen

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Mastering Stocks and Broths includes a historical culinary narrative about stocks in the classic French technique as well as through the lens of other cultures around the world. Readers will learn about the importance of quality sourcing, the practical and health benefits of stocks and broths, and detailed methodology on how to develop, store, and use them in a home kitchen. The recipes place a playful emphasis on the value of zero waste, turning spent bones, produce seconds, and leftover animal fats into practical products to use around the home.

Featured Excerpts:

The Fundamentals of Stocks and Broths

A Good Stock Takes Time: Setting up Your Kitchen for Making Stocks and Broths

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The Wildcrafting Brewer opens with a retrospective of plant-based brewing and ancient beers. Pascal Baudar then goes on to describe both hot and cold brewing methods and provides lots of interesting recipes; mugwort beer, horehound beer, and manzanita cider are just a few of the many drinks represented. Baudar is quick to point out that these recipes serve mainly as a touchstone for readers, who can then use the information and techniques he provides to create their own brews, using their own local ingredients.

Featured Excerpts:

Creating Unique Drinks from Nature’s Ingredients: Winter in the Forest Beer

Ancient Fermentation: Homemade Kvass

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The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published. Sandor Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide a reader through their first experience making sauerkraut or yogurt, and in-depth enough to provide greater understanding and insight for experienced practitioners.

Featured Excerpts:

Move Over Squirrels, It’s Acorn Harvesting Time

Chop, Salt, Pack, Wait: Four Simple Steps to Making the Best Sauerkraut on Earth

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In this groundbreaking collection of nearly 500 wild food recipes, celebrated New York City forager, cook, kitchen gardener, and writer Marie Viljoen incorporates wild ingredients into everyday and special occasion fare. Motivated by a hunger for new flavors and working with thirty-six versatile wild plants—some increasingly found in farmers markets—she offers deliciously compelling recipes for everything from cocktails and snacks to appetizers, entrées, and desserts, as well as bakes, breads, preserves, sauces, syrups, ferments, spices, and salts.

Forage, Harvest, Feast is destined to become a standard reference for any cook wanting to transform wildcrafted ingredients into exceptional dishes, spices, and drinks.

Featured Excerpts:

Foraging 101: Where to Find Your Bounty

Recipe: Fermented Honeysuckle Cordial

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At the renowned Black Trumpet restaurant, located in the historic seacoast city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Chef Evan Mallett and his staff reflect the constantly changing seasons of New England, celebrating the unique flavors and traditions of fished, farmed, and foraged foods in their ever-changing menus that rotate roughly every six weeks throughout the course of the year.

Black Trumpet features more than 250 innovative recipes that respect and transcend regional food traditions.

Featured Excerpts:

Recipe: Winter Root Veggie Potpie

A Twist on the Traditional Thanksgiving Feast

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The New Wildcrafted Cusine offers up dozens of creative recipes and instructions for preparing a pantry full of preserved foods, including Pickled Acorns, White Sage-Lime Cider, Wild Kimchi Spice, Currant Capers, Infused Salts with Wild Herbs, Pine Needles Vinegar, and many more. And though the author’s own palette of wild foods are mostly common to southern California, readers everywhere can apply Baudar’s deep foraging wisdom and experience to explore their own bioregions and find an astonishing array of plants and other materials that can be used in their own kitchens.

Featured Excerpts:

8 steps to Fermented Hot Sauce with Wild Greens

Strong, Spicy, and Pleasant: Wild Green Kimchi

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In The Art of Natural Cheesemaking, David Asher practices and preaches a traditional, but increasingly countercultural, way of making cheese—one that is natural and intuitive, grounded in ecological principles and biological science.

The techniques presented are direct and thorough, fully illustrated with hand-drawn diagrams and triptych photos that show the transformation of cheeses in a comparative and dynamic fashion.

Featured Excerpts:

An All-Natural, Traditional Approach to Cheesemaking

Recipe: Fast Ricotta Cheese

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