Gifts They’ll Crave: 10 Books for Every Foodie on Your List

Inspired by the nutritional research of Weston A. Price, the regenerative farming practices of Joel Salatin, and the traditional Asian recipes passed down through her family for generations, Sophia has curated a unique collection of wholesome dishes in The Nourishing Asian Kitchen.

These recipes explore the proper preparation of grains, dairy, meats, and ferments, emphasizing fresh ingredients and traditional cooking methods while focusing on flavor, food quality, ingredient sourcing, seasonality, and eating nose-to-tail.

Featured Excerpts:

Turkey Egg Rolls With Vietnamese Dipping Sauce

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Salt is extraordinary. A fundamental, ancient resource used for thousands of years around the world, it is the one essential ingredient that transforms all cooking: elevating flavors from good to great, to unforgettable.

In this stunning new cookbook, chef, TV presenter, food photographer, and sustainable living expert James Strawbridge shares with you the fundamentals of this artisan ingredient: from distinctive flavor notes and profiles of different salts found around the world, to brilliantly useful techniques—such as brining, baking, charring, fermenting, and preserving.

Featured Excerpts:

Mint Salt: A Fresh Take on Seasoning

Sweet & Salty: Salted Caramel Sauce

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The New Wildcrafted Cuisine is sure to inspire both chefs and adventurous eaters 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:

A Guide to Making Jams and Syrups With Wild Ingredients

8 Steps to Fermented Hot Sauce With Wild Greens

Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys reminds us that the magical power of fermentation belongs to everyone, everywhere.

Perfect for adventurous foodies, armchair travelers, and fermentation fanatics who have followed Katz’s work through the years—from Wild Fermentation to The Art of Fermentation to Fermentation as Metaphor—this book reflects the enduring passion and accumulated wisdom of this unique man, who is arguably the world’s most experienced and respected advocate of all things fermented.

Featured Excerpts:

On the Rise: How to Make Salt-Rising Bread

Simple Sugars & The Sweet Side of Fermentation

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New York City forager, cook, kitchen gardener, and writer Marie Viljoen incorporates wild ingredients into everyday menus and special occasion fare.

Forage, Harvest, Feast―featuring hundreds of color photographs as well as cultivation tips for plants easily grown at home―is destined to become a standard reference for any cook wanting to transform wildcrafted ingredients into exceptional dishes, spices, and drinks.

Featured Excerpts:

Foraging Up the Perfect Fall Picnic

Foraging 101: Where to find your bounty

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Until now there has not been a comprehensive culinary guide to stocks in the canon, save for snippets here and there. Hard to believe, since most passionate home cooks and professional chefs know that using stocks and broths—both on their own and as the base for a recipe—can turn a moderately flavorful dish into a masterpiece.

Mastering Stocks and Broths is the comprehensive guide to culinary stocks and broths that passionate home cooks and innovative chefs have all been waiting for.

Featured Excerpts:

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

The Etymology of Stock and Broth

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Typical books about preserving garden produce nearly always assume that modern “kitchen gardeners” will boil or freeze their vegetables and fruits. Yet here is a book that goes back to the future—celebrating traditional but little-known French techniques for storing and preserving edibles in ways that maximize flavor and nutrition.

Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning offers more than 250 easy and enjoyable recipes featuring locally grown and minimally refined ingredients.

Featured Excerpts:

Easy to Make Drying Trays

Four Ways to Preserve Your Green Bean Bounty

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For viewers of “Salt Fat Acid Heat,” the first book devoted to processes, concepts, and recipes for fermenting and culturing foods with koji, the microbe behind the delicious, umami flavors of Japanese cuisine.

Chefs Jeremy Umansky and Rich Shih 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

Holiday Cookies with a Koji Twist

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Pioneering food expert Pascal Baudar completes his wild fermentation trilogy by tackling acetic acid ferments and the wide array of dishes you can create with them. Baudar delves deeply into the natural world for wild-gathered flavors: herbs, fruits, berries, roots, mushrooms—even wood, bark, and leaves—that play a vital part in infusing distinctive gourmet-quality vinegars.

More than 100 recipes show how to use homemade vinegars to make a wide range of delicious foods: quick pickles, soups, sauces, salad dressings, beverages, desserts, jams, and other preserves.

Featured Excerpts:

The Soup-er Secret Ingredient: Vinegar in Soups

Wild Dijon Vinaigrette: A Spin On Classic Salad Dressing

The Grain-Free, Sugar-Free, Dairy-Free Family Cookbook offers a new system to preparing food and approaching the kitchen that gets kids involved in cooking, which encourages excitement around food (a major challenge with restrictive diets).

The recipes are rich in healthy fats, nutrient-dense vegetables, ferments, and grass-fed meats, and include snacks, school lunches, and delicious sweet treats that rival the flavors of sugar-dense desserts.

Featured Excerpts:

Vanilla Strawberry Beet Smoothie

Fantastic Frozen Fruit Smoothies

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