Good Meat – Cookbook & Recipe Review

A book review of Good Meat: The Complete Guide to Sourcing and Cooking Sustainable Meat by Deborah Krasner

I’ve finally tried out a few recipes and the results are in. Good Meat is a Good Read, but I’m not so sure it has my favorite recipes.

Krasner, A James Beard Award-Winning Chef, tackles the ethics and health related issues related to eating meat in this cookbook. She’s quite knowledgeable about what makes quality meat, what the animals should be eating, how their diet affects your health and is able to frame the conversation well by talking about her husband’s let’s just say, less than favorable, cholesterol numbers. She helped bring those  numbers back to where they should be, not by eating less meat, but by eating the right kind of meat. Good quality, pasture raised beef and other meats that are actually good for you.

So, the content is good, but the recipes are a bit over the top. Unless you regularly have access to heart, tripe, liver, and other offal items, the recipes are a bit limiting. I recently tried a recipe for Garlic and Cardamom Chicken that, unless I made it wrong, left huge chunks of cardamom to crunch on your palate with their pungent citrus burst that is really quite overwhelming in the quantity indicated in the recipe.

So, I don’t know. It’s worth perusing, but I’m not sure it will be a stable go-to tool in my cookbook arsenal any time soon.