John Currence

As a cookbook, this is fantastic. The recipes are delicious and creative, taking breakfast (or any meal) to another level. However, I find the book too heavy on personal anecdotes, name-dropping, and profanity. Currence quite obviously considers himself to be 'Big Bad John'.

A chef including stories about themselves and/or their recipes can often make their book more relatable, even charming. John Currence would’ve easily pulled that off, if he’d left his massive ego at the door. Bragging about his drunken adventures with celebrity-chef friends was not relatable and constantly dropping f-bombs (especially in reference to his daughter) was definitely not charming.

Currence obviously has plenty of talent. He should've let it speak for itself; this book would've been profoundly better for having done so. Five stars for the recipes, zero stars for everything else in this book.… (meer)

I want to go to there.
Introduction: An ode to breakfast, including The Ten Commandments of Breakfast. Cute and funny introductions to the recipes.
Photos: Lots. And I'm really hungry for breakfast now.
Techniques: Good section on how to cook eggs in different styles, plus two "master" omelet recipes.
Recipes: If you can eat it or drink it for breakfast (or for breakfast-for-dinner) it's here and it looks amazing. I want to cook and eat every single thing in this book, but I also want to go to Big Bad Breakfast every single morning to start my day. This is one of those cookbooks I want to keep forever.
… (meer)

Breakfast. A meal I tackle at 10 AM, after being up for a while nursing a pot of coffee. But anytime, day or night, the foods of a proper cooked breakfast are my favorites.

This is the second breakfast book added to my shelf. The other one is more "healthy", more California, and more whole-grainy. Excellent when you want that kind of thing. Big Bad Breakfast is for food that fills you up, warms the soul, and keeps you going for a full day's work. While I might crack the other book when I have dainty house guests, this is the book when I feed myself and my cowboy friends.

Reading notes:

* Excellent TOC. All recipes listed.
* Good range of recipes
* Lively text
* Awkward page layout with the recipe appearing in varying places. It might be ok in the final ebook, not the ARC I have.
* Lots and lots of excellent egg recipes
* "German pancake" is a Dutch Baby
* "Livermush" is scrapple with some non-German spices
* Shrimp, oyster, and crab recipes but no fish. Odd. Fish for breakfast is pretty common where I grew up fishing.
* Home made breakfast cereals like frosted flakes and bran-nuts
* Good photos

Unless you are a cholesterol and fat fearing wimp, you will love this book.

I received a review copy of "Big Bad Breakfast" by John Currence (Ten Speed) through NetGalley.com.… (meer)