About this item
James Beard Award-winning and self-made chef Naomi Pomeroy's debut cookbook, featuring nearly 140 lesson-driven recipes designed to improve the home cook's understanding of professional techniques and flavor combinations in order to produce simple, but show-stopping meals.Naomi Pomeroy knows that the best recipes are the ones that make you a better cook. A twenty-year veteran chef with four restaurants to her name, she learned her trade not in fancy culinary schools but by reading cookbooks. From Madeleine Kamman and Charlie Trotter to Alice Waters and Gray Kunz, Naomi cooked her way through the classics, studying French technique, learning how to shop for produce, and mastering balance, acidity, and seasoning. In Taste & Technique, Naomi shares her hard-won knowledge, passion, and experience along with nearly 140 recipes that outline the fundamentals of cooking. By paring back complex dishes to the building-block techniques used to create them, Naomi takes you through each recipe step by step, distilling detailed culinary information to reveal the simple methods chefs use to get professional results. Recipes for sauces, starters, salads, vegetables, and desserts can be mixed and matched with poultry, beef, lamb, seafood, and egg dishes to create show-stopping meals all year round. Practice braising and searing with a Milk-Braised Pork Shoulder, then pair it with Orange-Caraway Glazed Carrots in the springtime or Caramelized Delicata Squash in the winter. Prepare an impressive Herbed Leg of Lamb for a holiday gathering, and accompany it with Spring Pea Risotto or Blistered Cauliflower with Anchovy, Garlic, and Chile Flakes. With detailed sections on ingredients, equipment, and techniques, this inspiring, beautifully photographed guide demystifies the hows and whys of cooking and gives you the confidence and know-how to become a masterful cook.
About the Author
Naomi Pomeroy Bio Naomi Pomeroy was born and raised in Corvallis, Oregon. She spent her childhood hanging around the stove and in backyard gardens with her mother, who spent her early years in Rouen, France, and with grandmother Vivian, who hailed from New Orleans. Before opening Beast, Naomi and Michael Hebb started up Ripe Catering in 1999 (when Naomi was 24) and soon thereafter launched an underground supper club in their Northeast Portland bungalow called "Family Supper." After a couple years of dodging authorities, using salvaged doors rigged as tabletops, and defrosting shrimp in the bathtub, they decided to go legit. In rapid succession, they opened the Gotham Coffee Shop (2002) , Clarklewis (2004) , and the Gotham Tavern (2005) . In the summer of 2007, after the Gotham Coffee Shop and Tavern had closed and Clarklewis had been sold, Naomi grabbed a former pantry cook (Mika Paredes) and started up with small family-style suppers again. The intimacy of these suppers is preserved at Beast, a 24-seat restaurant where people can chat freely with each other at communal tables. Beast serves a six-course prix-fixe menu twice nightly Wednesday through Saturday as well as two four-course brunch services and one dinner service Sunday.Beast opened September 27, 2007. The opening team was comprised of just two cooks, Naomi and Mika, and two servers, Daniel and Lisa. There was no dishwasher, nor were there prep cooks. For the first three years of the restaurant, there also was no hood or open flame. Everything at that time was cooked on two electric induction burners. Despite these early hurdles, accolades and awards followed: Naomi was featured in Gourmet and Elle Magazine; Bon Appètit named her one of the top six of a new generation of female chefs in September 2008; and Food & Wine Magazine recognized her as one of the 10 Best New Chefs in America for 2009. In 2010, Oprah magazine named her one of the Top 10 Women to Watch in the Next Decade, and Marie Claire named her one of the top 16 Women in Business. She has given several lectures on creativity, including a TedX talk given in 2013. Naomi appeared as a contestant on Top Chef Masters in 2011. Naomi also appears as a recurring judge on Knife Fight on the Esquire Network.Locally, Portland Monthly voted Naomi Chef of the Year in 2008. Beast was honored as Restaurant of the Year in 2008 by the Oregonian and chosen as best Brunch by the Willamette Weekly. Naomi has been the sole owner of Beast since 2009 when she paid back her investors. In 2010, 2012, and 2013, she was selected as a finalist for the James Beard Awards in the category Best Chef Pacific Northwest. In 2014, she was selected as the recipient for this prestigious award. With her husband Kyle Webster, Naomi opened Expatriate in July of 2013 across the street from Beast. Expatriate features cocktails overseen by Webster and Southeast Asian drinking snacks created by Naomi.In 2016, Naomi's first cookbook, Taste & Technique:
