Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is such an incredible disappointment from a chef of the calibre of Eric Ripert. I had so anticipated enriching my plant-based diet with new vegetable delights, and pre-ordered a full price because I was so excited to add a soupçon on Riper's culinary brilliance to my overworked pandemic veg repertoire. But the recipes here are "simple" to the point of dullness. There is a recipe for buttered string beans--or, "baby string beans au beurre" (129), for instance, that I assumed would offer some sort of wow! technique or ingredient. Nope. It's buttered beans. Also, you can boil Yukon potatoes and serve them with butter, salt & pepper, and chives (131) or you can cut a tomato in half, drizzle on olive oil, add salt and pepper to create Tomato "Croque Sel" (117). No way! The lack of depth in recipe notes makes many recipes confounding. Like, why am I eating tagliatelle with pesto (93) cold? Why would I go to bother of painting each leaf of a simple butter lettuce salad (45) with a pastry knife instead of just drizzling the vinaigrette on and perhaps gently tossing? What does this preciousness add? Is it a meditative practice? Okay, maybe I'd go for that, but there's little weaving of Ripert's Buddhist take on cooking that might have contextualized and enriched the very, very simplistic recipes (with a couple exceptions) offered. There are glitchier disappointments in the book as well. Though Ripert notes in the introduction that "the recipes are set out in a loose natural progression from starters to dessert" (2), and the lack of a table of contents with section headings is aimed at inspiring "freedom" and "fun" by breaching traditional categories. But, you know, if you're actually using the conventional structure minus section headings, you're really just signaling creative boundary-crossing without actually inspiring it. And you're annoying cooks who are just looking for a soup recipe in the "soups" section. Here, again, there is a preciousness that mars the overall project. Beyond this, some recipes are just off. A cauliflower that you roast at 450º for a total of 20 minutes is not "slow roasted" (165). If you set the oven at 400º, skip the boiling, and roast with seasonings suggested by Ripert (I use Christopher Kimball’s recipe at Milk Street) in a dutch oven for about an hour, you'll get a much richer flavor than from warmed up, boiled cauliflower. Other annoyances trouble the book. Recipes note "special equipment." But a box grater or a blender hardly count as such in most home kitchens. An iSi whipper, and maybe a kitchen torch or perhaps even a mandoline. A food processor or a pastry brush? Probably not. Yes, there are some interesting options in Vegetable Simple. I'm going to try to perfect the mushroom consommé (30) and the caponata toast (18) seems like a nice upgrade of bruschetta. And the photographs by Nigel Parry are lovely (though even he couldn't do much with a baked sweet potato (145), or backed butternut squash (173) which, you know, you bake). But, overall, a book that I awaited with great anticipation turns out to be a tremendous, pricy disappointment. "Vegetable cooking has become a growing trend in recent years," Ripert writes in the introduction (3). My sense is that he attempted here to capitalize on that trend without actually having anything like the passion he describes for cooking fish. Alas.