Secret Restaurant Recipes

Secret Restaurant Recipes by Victoria Dwek and Leah Schapira is a fairly new cookbook featuring recipes from kosher restaurants (simplified for the home cook when necessary). I love the idea of the cookbook but was worried that the recipes would be too difficult or time consuming.

Unlike the other cookbooks by Leah and Victoria, this cookbook is hardcover. The layout is nice and very similar to their previous cookbooks. There is a beautiful photo with every recipe.

More about the book:
Most of the mains are fried. As a somewhat health conscious person, this bothered me, but it IS restaurant food. One restaurant puts red 40 in their corn beef recipe to make it more appealing, which really turned me off.

Most of the parve desserts heavily featured whip or non dairy creamer. Again, not surprising, but annoying for me. One day when I have lots of spare time, perhaps I will try subbing coconut milk in those recipes and see how it goes. Many of the recipes also call for egg yolks (not one or two either) and I hate having to use up the whites so for now I'm skipping them.

I loved the salad section and wanted to taste almost every salad featured. Unfortunately for me, I don't usually have the patience to roast some veggies and dice up some raw ones to make a salad. The dairy recipes also were very appealing to me.

There are a few hard to find ingredients used, but the kosher groceries will probably have them in stock pretty soon (ex. sun dried tomato paste, porcini mushroom powder). Victoria and Leah have a two page spread in the beginning of the book about the secret ingredients in a chef's pantry.

Each recipe features the name of the restaurant its from, the restaurant's location. the name of the chef and a short piece about the restaurant. It was interesting to read about the background of so many different kosher restaurants.

Check out the recipes I tested from this cookbook here.

To purchase the cookbook on Amazon click here,
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