Raquel Pelzel

Thank you to Raquel Pelzel and Workman Publishing Company for the privilege to read Sheet Pan Suppers Vegetarian: 100 Recipes for Simple, Satisfying, Hands-Off Meals Straight from the Oven early released for an honest review;

I really wanted to love this book more than I ended up loving it. I felt like a lot of the recipes relied too heavily either on carb loading or on pre-cooking things before they ended on the sheet pan. I felt like the recipe pages were far too densely packed with words, almost feeling a bit suffocating to keep reading or even just glance over. I, also, felt like this cookbook fell into the plight of having not enough pictures to really convey the magic of this new "pan sheet" recipe/meal phenomenon.… (meer)

Umami Bomb by Raquel Pelzel
75 (Mostly) Vegetarian Recipes that Explode with Flavor

As I move more and more toward vegan eating I am always on the lookout for new and interesting ways to make meals interesting and perhaps to change things up a bit. This book has some intriguing ways to add flavor intensity that I may and may not have explored before.

The Introduction explains Umami as “the fifth taste” and mentions that is provides “meaty or savory” to the dish. It then lists eight items to use to create umami with each one having a chapter of its own and recipes that include the item the chapter is named for. The ninth chapter deals with fish...not vegetarian at all.

So...here are the eight umami items mentioned in the book.
* parmesan and aged cheeses
* soy sauce
* tomatoes
* mushrooms
* carmelized onions
* miso
* smoke
* nutritional yeast

As I looked through the recipes again I realized that I use most of these items to provide flavor without realizing that I was adding umami. I didn’t really see anything new I would want to try...soy sauce in chocolate cake? Tomato with olives and hot peppers in a paste? Cheese waffles? Just not sure many really caught my fancy. That said, I do think using caramelized onions with beets on toast with a smear of labne or cheese or bean paste and something green might be tasty and using mushrooms more in cooking is something I look forward to doing. Some of the recipes sound like something I might be willing to try while others sound rather bizarre. The chapters that intrigued me the most were the ones on mushrooms, caramelized onions and smoke. I just received my first gift of nutritional yeast and do look forward to trying it at some point in the future.

Thank you to NetGalley and Workman Publishing for the ARC – This is my honest review.

3-4 Stars… (meer)