Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, the site where we cock up so you don’t have to. I’m your Gourmand Guinea-Pig, Jon O’Guin. Today we’re reviewing Umami Bomb, a new cookbook that we already referenced briefly in Monday’s post. Why? Because that’s a thing we do sometime, and because, in all honesty, I’ve been quite busy this week with a lot of planning and paperwork, so I didn’t have time to unwind with a new cooking show, or other facet of food culture. I assure you, I will have more rigorous standards of media consumption soon. IN the mean-time, let’s talk Tofurkey, a word I definitely misspelled with a C or first time I tried to write it.  

Hello Dad, Hello Mom!

I have been consuming a weird amount of partial Marvel content over the last couple days, so I assure you, that IS a reference to Guardians of the Galaxy. If you can count “quoting the same song as is playing in a scene” as a reference. I don’t know. I’m not a referencologist.

I’m just some kind of…suicide squad?
Shit, messed it up. This is why I failed the referencologist exam.

Anywhoodles, let’s just push on and talk about the book, before I get any loopier from trying to push through a lack of motivation. (No idea what happened, I just started the post, and lost all will to continue putting in effort, so I’m just riffing until I fill enough space that I can go to bed and not have a bad time tomorrow making up for today’s issuess) UMAMI BOMB is a mostly vegetarian cookbook, with 8(.5) distinct chapters, each focused on an umami-rich ingredient, with multiple recipes devoted to exploring interesting ways to use or base a meal on that ingredient.

If you know what umami is, then you probably already have some good guesses about what the ingredients in questions are. If you DON’T know what umami is, then I take it as a personal assault that you haven’t read my entire back-catalog of posts, where I explain it thoroughly. But, let me set aside your brutish incivility in order to feed my martyr complex, and graciously explain in brief: Umami is the “fifth flavor” of modern cooking parlance and theory, with the base flavors of salty, sweet, sour, and (holy-crap-I-can’t-remember-the-last-one-wait-no-it’s) bitter. First proven to exist by Japanese food scientists (hence its Japanese name), the flavor can be expressed in English as something akin to “savory” or “depth”. It’s derived from glutamates, compounds found in hard cheeses, tomatoes, mushrooms, soy products such as soy sauce and miso, and other sources. With that explanation, it should not surprise you that the chapters of Umami Bomb are: Hard Cheeses, Tomatoes, Soy Sauce, Mushrooms, Miso, and some others. (Alright, the “others” are Caramelized Onions, Smoke, and Nutritional Yeast, a vegan cheese replacement.)  

Seen here, looking very much like fish food.

Nutritional Yeast, by the way, is a good way to really explore the idea of umami, since seasoned batches of it are pretty hard to distinguish, flavor-wise from cheese. (Visually it takes a lot more work to make it LOOK like cheese, but taste-wise, there’s something there.) BUT THAT’S NOT WHY WE’RE HERE! We’re here to talk about the book, and grade it on our established cookbook review procedures: Production Value, Unity of Theme, Voice, Catapult Effect, and There’s Never Been A Fifth Criteria. So how does it stack up? Let’s start with Voice.

Not The Raquel You Want While Tunnelling

Umami Bomb’s author is Raquel Pelzel, a pretty fun name to say, and an accomplished cookbook author, with 24 cookbooks to her name, and that expertise is very evident in her voice, for good and for…less-good. By which I mean that Raquel’s voice in this book feels polished to the point where it reflects the recipes like a chrome finish…but that’s also slightly distancing when, like me, you’ve read a LOT of cookbooks. Her summaries of food are that half-a-hair too smooth to feel “real”. Let me give a very small example, here’s her personal breakdown of Sick Day Tomato Soup :

“I make tomato soup whenever I crave an extra helping of comfort. Here I make it with roasted tomatoes, cashew cream (just cashews briefly soaked in water and then blended) for richness, and a little miso for depth and extra umami for my soul. This plus a grilled cheese (like the miso and caramelized onion grilled cheese on page 149), is a stellar combo.”  - Umami Bomb, page 94

That’s a perfectly well-made introduction in a professional setting. It gives some basic ingredients, gives you an impression of the flavors (roasted, comforting, rich, and deep), it cross-promotes itself with another recipe. It’s flawless, technically. But…it’s also kind of empty, narratively. Like, of course the tomato soup would go well with grilled cheese. That’s one of the better known food combos in American cuisine. And look at that first line again: “I make tomato soup whenever I crave an extra helping of comfort.” There’s so much room for CONTEXT in that line. Like, in the very beginning of the book, she brings up that she almost never eats beef, pork, or poultry. Calling out this recipe as her replacement for Chicken Noodle Soup would make it more emotionally connective. Using direct examples like “Whenever me or my boys get the sniffles, or Brooklyn’s just too wet and dreary” would give us tangible things in her life to connect with. And yes, I get that by leaving it unrealized, she lets me fill in whatever moments I think are appropriate. But that’s kind of what I mean: it’s reflecting, not revealing.

It’s not a bad experience, it’s just that one millimeter too clean and generalized that, given the Dozens of cookbooks I own, I noticed. I honestly feel like it’s almost inappropriate to mention it, since it’s kind of a classic “only a problem for the critics” issue: If you DON’T own and read a new cookbook every month for work, it’ll probably be fine. And there are plenty of sections that DO have those connective points, where she mentions a specific restaurant for an inspiration, references a previous cookbook she wrote, or tells a brief personal story, like with her vegan friend and the Nduja. But I feel like there’s just more of these kind of pristine platonic blurbs. It’s like…Siri, from the other direction: she’s doing such a great job of being useful and relatable to everyone that it feels a little off.

It’s a tired reference, but I haven’t seen most of the newer “robot women” stories to know if they’re applicable.

I feel like, weirdly, one of the better points in the book is where, apropos of very little, she jumps into a long spiel about the physical, molecular science of glutamates and umami, and how it’s created by protein break-down due to heat or fermentation, which is why old hard cheeses have more of it than fresh ones, and roasted tomatoes have more of it than raw. And sure, maybe that’s because that sounds exactly like the kind of tangent I would go on, but it’s even a step beyond me. In one sentence, she drops “disodium guanylate” “disodium inosinate” and calls them “the ribonucleotide components of amino acids”. Like, I would have left it at “are components of amino acids”. THAT section struck me as weird and connective. Like for a moment she got to really lean into the chemistry like she WANTS to, having studied and written about this stuff for years now, but doesn’t get to in order to keep things accessible.

This was a weird thing to get wrapped up on, but let’s move on.

We need a new UV Scale: Umami Value

For production value, it’s hard to say anything bad about the book. It has a nice firm (but not sharp-edged) hard cover, semi-gloss pages, and plenty of pictures. I think a small detail that really carries through the level of attention and production in the book, however, is its use of colors.

The book is bright and cheerful, with bright pastels being its primary palette. But every color has a purpose: when you come to a new chapter, there’s a break in the flow of the book. Each chapter starts with 4 pages of set-up. You get a page that is just “CHAPTER X”, a SECOND page that is the chapter’s focal ingredient, over a solid background color, a third page that is just a picture of the ingredient, or something connected to it, and finally, a one-page summary of Raquel’s thoughts and the basics of the ingredient. And each time, there’s a new color: the chapter number, the background behind the ingredient name, the first letter of the summary, and EVERY title of every recipe in that chapter will all be the same color. All the green recipes are about Tomatoes, all the red ones are Soy Sauce, the blue ones Mushrooms, etc. It’s a beautiful through-line for each chapter.

It’s a nice dividing line.

The one weird thing, and I can’t tell if I like it or not, is that sidebar pages, where she isn’t discussing a specific recipe, but instead some broader connected point, use a different color than the chapter they’re found in, but not one that seems to connect them to anything: partway through the Soy Sauce chapter, she interjects to discuss different varieties of soy sauce, and the difference between “light soy sauce” and “dark soy sauce”…and it uses the Mushroom color. I presume that, with the 8.5 chapters, they just ran out of other bright pastels to give sidebars their own color, but why not just use the chapter color?

Still, it’s a very good looking book, in my opinion.  

Unified And it Feels So Good

Not how that song goes, but okay Title Jon. So how’s the book’s unity of theme? I gotta say, it’s pretty on-point. This is kind of what I was referencing with the earlier comment about how Raquel’s voice has strong elements as well. While her personal voice is a little over-polished for me, it perfectly matches with the polished production value and attention to details, and what she does explain connects the themes of the book solidly.

This is a minor issue for ME, not for her, because it leaves me with so little to critique/comment on. It’s just well-done, in that “you never think to question it” sort of smooth experience. She even includes a nice page of conversion tables just before the index, which was an amazingly robust little page, since it matches US measurements to Imperial ones, to metric ones (Ie, how to get 7 oz with just cups and tablespoons, and how much that is in milliliters) as well as temperatures in Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Gas Mark (a UK system that removed temperatures from oven knobs for a generic “Gas 1, Gas 2, etc.”)

I’ve just realized that, legally, I don’t know if it’s okay to post pictures that I personally take of the book without crediting them. I THINK I’m fine under Fair Use, but I don’t know.

The book feels like itself, matching the tone, production value, art and more in a clean way.

The Final Measure: Arm the Catapults

The Catapult Effect is, as I’ve mentioned before, a very subjective measure of how much a cookbook makes we want to make things from it. And I have to say, given the bright colors, simple layout, and smooth presentation, this book is higher on that scale than many other cookbooks that I’ve read, though I have to confess that, to a degree, it’s something of a grapeshot blast; by which I mean while there are several recipes I find interesting, there are more recipe components that interest me.

An Iceberg salad that replaces bacon with smoked-paprika crisped caramelized onions? That onion trick sounds interesting. A miso butterscotch sundae? Don’t really care about the sundae portion of that. Using soy sauce for the salt in a salted-chocolate frosting? That sounds interesting. A bunch of stuff like that.

These tacos are more interesting for the fact that they use grated smoked tofu as a pulled chicken substitute than any interest I have for tacos that use asparagus tips.

But that’s better than some cookbooks. I’m interested, and engaged, and debating when and how to make some of these.

The Verdict

IN short, while I have one or two nit-picky little complaints, I’d definitely recommend the book, especially if you have vegan or vegetarian friends and family, as a pretty solid book with some exciting ideas. It’s $20, it’s not a big book, so it’s something you can have on hand to help out your friends.

MONDAY: JON STRIVES TO MAKE MEAT TUBES WITH MEAT SAUCE, FOR A SPINY MENACE.

THURSDAY: DUNNO. MAYBE I’LL HAVE TIME THIS WEEKEND TO WATCH SOMETHING, OR SOMETHING WILL SPUR ME WITH MONDAY’S POST.