I first heard of Salt & Straw in 2017, when I passed a very long line of people stretching around the corner at its newly opened shop in San Francisco town.  But Salt & Straw is a product of Portland, and it wasn’t until Ellie moved there that I became a regular.  Our standard order was a double with a scoop of honey lavender for her and a school of salted malted chocolate chip cookie dough for me, but we always hoped that the monthly specials would have something new we’d want to try.  That was actually rarely the case, because this is one of those hipster ice cream shops that glories in grody flavors like “cricket and meal­worm”, “turkey and cranberry”, and “dinner roll”.  Still, when I discovered that the chain had its own cookbook, the idea that I could make the flavor I did like in my very own kitchen got me to check the book out of the library posthaste.

I already had an ice cream maker.  I had hoped to be able to re-create what was quite possibly the best ice cream I’d ever had, that from New York’s Gramercy Tavern; however, when I got the Gramercy Tavern cookbook, I was startled to discover that a quart of its ice cream required no fewer than twelve egg yolks.  And I never did really get the hang of making the custard base for the ice cream⁠—I always wound up with little bits of scram­bled egg in the strainer.  So while I did have a few successes⁠—the burnt caramel ice cream came out well, for instance⁠—the texture never stacked up to Ben & Jerry’s, let alone Gramercy Tavern.  The other contender for the best ice cream I’ve ever had, that from Sketch Ice Cream on Fourth Street in Berkeley, stood at the other extreme: no egg yolks at all.  No cream, either.  Just milk, natural flavors… and a soft-serve machine.  So much for trying to replicate that.  But a flip through the Salt & Straw book revealed that its ice cream also eschewed egg yolks⁠—it was stabilized with a pinch of xanthan gum.  The base actually looked really simple to make.  The question was whether it would come close to approximating the ice cream from the shop.

I tried to start simple, with the double fold vanilla, and the re­sults were not promising: it had the icy texture all too typical of homemade ice cream.  The second time around, I tried to free­lance a bit and make my own flavor by adding the caramel ribbon from one recipe to the freckled chocolate base used in another, spiking that caramel with pecans and coconut to make a sort of German chocolate cake ice cream.  It still had textural issues, but the flavor was amazing⁠—and I got a little kick out of knowing that no one else in the world was eating the exact flavor I had just made.  And then attempt number three was the best of all.  I made one of the shop’s now discontinued flavors, almond brittle with salted ganache, and this time not only was the flavor sensa­tional but the texture matched the storebought version.  I had been chastened to find that making ice cream at home wouldn’t actually save me much money: even before adding any flavorings, three cups of ice cream base cost about six bucks to make, and even after the post-pandemic inflation I can generally find a pint of decent supermarket ice cream (with flavorings) for under five.  But to look at it another way: after making that third batch, I had an ice cream cone that was indistinguishable from what I’d get after a trip to Salt & Straw every day for a week.  That many trips would cost over forty dollars.  And no need to wait in line!

So all in all I’m calling this a winner.  I’ve made a couple more flavors since then, though they’ve been pretty simple: ice cream base, butterscotch or caramel, chunks of candy.  The next level up will be actually flavoring the ice cream with things like fruit and nuts.  And maybe at some point I’ll try to figure out how to make the salted malted chocolate chip cookie dough, because it turns out that that’s the one flavor on their menu that isn’t in the book!

While I was at the library picking up the Salt & Straw cookbook, I saw this right there on the same shelf and snapped it up.  Magnolia Bakery is a New York City institution, but that’s not where I know it from⁠—I know it from its lone Los An­geles outpost, which just so happened to be very close to where I used to work back during my short sojourn in the movie biz.  Since then, I have stopped by on nearly every trip I’ve taken to Southern California, always in the hope that it will just so happen to be a day that they have German chocolate cake on offer.  The texture of that cake is phenomenal.  As a backup plan, I will get the banana pudding, which is the shop’s signature.  So the idea of being able to turn out these treats in my kitchen was just as enticing as the idea of having a Salt & Straw shop in my own apartment.

However, this was a bust.  The recipes did not work.  I started with the banana pudding, and was somewhat put off to find that it was not made from scratch but from Jell‑O pudding mix… and then the recipe said not to boil the mix after adding it to water but to keep it cold.  Result: it didn’t set.  I tried again, boiling it this time, and that way it worked, but I still couldn’t bring myself to eat all of the resulting pudding⁠—it jes warn’t great.  I tried the cake next, remembering how wonderfully light and moist the cake at the shop is… and it came out dense and dry.  Scones with almond, cherries, and chocolate chunks came out weirdly rub­bery and took over twice the stated time to bake.  Chocolate chip cookies came out worse than 90% of the recipes I’ve randomly ganked off the internets.  (The cookbook also indicates that the shop’s best-selling cookies also have caramel in them… and the caramel recipe is “put storebought Kraft caramel squares into the dough”.)  Before returning this book to the library I tried making some coconut bars and they were somehow worse than the sum of their ingredients.  All in all, the best thing about this cookbook is that the cover is pretty.

So back in the ’00s I got the cookbook from Vij’s, an acclaimed Indian restau­rant in Vancouver, British Columbia, and some of its recipes have been major parts of my repertoire for closing in on twenty years now.  A few years later I got the sequel, Vij’s at Home, and while I should give that one another go, my first time through it I only found a couple of recipes that I would go on to make again.  Much more recently I got the cookbook from Prashad, an acclaimed Indian restaurant in Bradford, England, and was very impressed by its renditions of classic Indian rest­aurant dishes.  And now here is the sequel, Prashad at Home.  And it’s… a bit closer in quality to its predecessor than its Can­adian counterpart was?  I may be jumping the gun a bit here, since I haven’t made every recipe I would like to try, but there are some real winners (e.g., the potato and zucchini soup, the smoked eggplant curry, and the green bean dish with tomatoes and carom seeds) and some recipes that are a bit more pedes­trian.  Probably the weak link is the chapter on fusion dishes: the enchiladas were actually better before the specifically Indian elements were added, and the “Indo-Italian macaroni cheese” [sic] was pretty boring, the Indian elements barely noticeable.  But even here there are some hits: the Indo-Chinese paneer stir-fry was great.  So, all in all, a thumbs-up for this one as well.

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