Bowls and Broths By Pippa Middlehurst Cookbook Review
Bowls and Broths By Pippa Middlehurst Cookbook Review
Cooking from scratch in Bowls and Broths by Pippa Middlehurst
Do you enjoy making far eastern food, but can’t put your finger on which cuisine in particular? Then Bowls and Broths by Pippa Middlehurst might be the cookbook for you.
It’s filled with noodle, rice, and dumpling recipes, and takes inspiration from south and southeast Asian cooking. But Pippa is probably the first to admit that the recipes are largely non-traditional.
Pippa is a molecular biologist by day, and the recipes in Bowls and Broth come from foraging in her kitchen. They combine a cacophony of different ingredients in experimental ways, to produce dishes that broadly sit under an Asian umbrella.
What are the recipes like in Bowls and Broths by Pippa Middlehurst?
One of the main ideas in Bowls and Broths is the concept of ‘seasoning’ a bowl.
Pippa describes this as adding home-made sauces and seasonings directly to an empty bowl, before layering other elements on top. Those other elements could be noodles, rice and other sauces and broths.
And if you’d like to make your own noodles, there’s a detailed section at the start of Bowls and Broths that goes through various techniques. There are recipes for the more common noodle, like udon and ramen, and the less common, like hand-pulled noodles and wholegrain tsukemen noodles.
But one thing you should know about Bowls and Broths is that you’ll cook pretty much everything from scratch. That’s because the recipes ask you to build flavour by layering home-made sauces, the kind you probably won’t find in a shop.
And some of the remaining ingredients are quite niche so you might not already have them in the pantry. Examples include gochugaru, doubanjiang and Chinese sesame paste to name a few.
My impression of the recipes in Bowls and Broths is that you’ll need to spend some time making different elements, which you then combine in one finished dish. What’s more, a few of the recipes call for 20 or more ingredients, and they don’t easily cut corners or offer substitutes.
So, Bowls and Broths is best suited to a cook who sees cookery as a labour of love, and who enjoys spending time on food. If that’s you, then you’ll also pick up a lot of tricks when it comes to combining different flavours.
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Hot oil gun gun noodle recipe
At nine ingredients long, this is probably one of the easiest recipes to make from Bowls and Broths by Pippa Middlehurst. Which makes it a good place to start.
The more difficult part of the recipe is to make hand-pulled noodles from scratch. I admire people who take the time to do that, but making my own noodles isn’t something I’ve ever been drawn to. And although the recipe doesn’t offer a substitute, I go ahead and use pre-made udon noodles.
The idea is simple. First you cook the noodles and place them in a bowl. To this you add raw seasonings and ingredients. Then you pour hot oil over those raw ingredients to flash-cook them.
I like the idea, but not all the ingredients will properly cook this way. So, instead of adding raw garlic to the noodles, I’d sauté them first to get a more even cook.
Otherwise, it’s an interesting recipe that shows you how to do something new with minimum faff.
Kimchi and bacon udon recipe
This is my favourite recipe from Bowls and Broths by Pippa Middlehurst. And what I like best is that you need just 12 ingredients to pull together a brilliant bowl of noodles.
I did make a couple of tweaks though. I don’t eat bacon, so I omitted that, and I don’t have gochuchang in the pantry so substituted with tomato paste and chilli flakes.
Tweaking the recipe doesn’t seem to do it any harm, and the finished noodles are delicious.
Duck offal Biang Biang recipe
I loved the look of this recipe as soon as I saw the title. Biang Biang noodles are the best, amirite?
But it’s also one of the recipes in Bowls and Broths that has a super high faff factor. In the end, I made quite a few tweaks to get it over the finish line.
First the recipe asks you to make the Biang Biang noodles from scratch. Now, if you like making noodles then all power to you. But I think I’d like the recipe better if it also suggested an easy-to-buy substitute.
Luckily, I found some dried Biang Biang noodles on Amazon which look the part. But I’d guess any wide noodles would work.
The recipe also asks you to make a mala paste, for which there is another recipe at the beginning of the book. I dutifully flick to the paste recipe and read down the list of 21 ingredients to make it.
21 ingredients. Le sigh. And once you’ve made the paste, you’ll need just 2 teaspoons of it in the noodle recipe. Which then needs another 19 ingredients to finish.
I don’t have half the ingredients and I don’t feel great about filling my pantry with condiments that I’ll only use once. So, I workaround that by making a ‘paste’ using a few ingredients I already have.
It ends up being an interesting dish, although I’m not sure how true it is to what Pippa imagined.
Miso claypot chicken rice recipe
I really enjoyed making the claypot chicken rice from Bowls and Broths. It’s an easy to follow and intuitive recipe, and it taught me a new way to think about one-pot cooking.
At 12 ingredients it’s also not too taxing and comes together quickly. Best of all, the resulting dish is delicious.
Overall thoughts on Bowls and Broths by Pippa Middlehurst
I feel like I’ve gone through a bit of a journey cooking from Bowls and Broths by Pippa Middlehurst. When I first flicked through the book, I really liked it – the photography told a story of delicious food.
It was only when I looked a bit more deeply that I realized just how much faff is involved in making some of the recipes. Running my fingers down massive ingredients list was a bit off-putting
if I’m honest. And I found myself feeling a little locked-out of those recipes unless I made significant adjustments to simplify them.
Now that I’ve sat with the cookbook for a few months and made some of the recipes, I’ve come to a realization. Going forward with Bowls and Broths, I think I’ll take a leaf out of Pippa’s book. And that’s to use these recipe not as hard and fast rules, but as inspiration. Maybe I’ll do some of my own foraging in the kitchen, without following the cookbook to the letter.
In the end, whether you’ll enjoy this book depends on the kind of cook you are. It’s not super practical all the time, but it is full of lots of ideas. And one thing is for certain. Bowls and Broths has given me food for thought.
Buy Bowls and Broths by Pippa Middlehurst.
Have you tried Bowls and Broths by Pippa Middlehurst? Do you have any favourite recipes? Let us know :)
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