Absurdly challenging recipes from actual cookbooks

Ben Schott collects some instructions from the cookbooks of noted chefs that will likely never be attempted by the home chef (unless you’re this woman). Like this one from A New Napa Cuisine that calls for phytoplankton:

20 grams marine phytoplankton
100 grams water
4 matsutake mushrooms, peeled and left whole

Or this one from Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck Cookbook to make frankincense hydrosol:

50 grams golden frankincense tears
100 grams water

I’ve owned several cookbooks where one recipe on page 107 calls for the product of a recipe on page 53 which in turn calls for the output of a recipe on page 28. Rube Goldberg cooking. Living in NYC, it’s often easier, faster, cheaper, and tastier to walk to the restaurant in question and just order the damn thing. Or head to Shake Shack instead.

• Ben Schott
• books
• cooking
• food