Book review - This is Camino by Russell Moore & Allison Hopelain

I set out upon the new cookbook This is Camino with eager anticipation and excitement. After all the award-winning restaurant critic Jonathan Gold had proclaimed that chef Russell Moore is "the ninja of California live-fire cooking." The cover depicting the chef prepping his mise en place in front of a vast cook top, a roaring fire the centerpiece. I was instantly intrigued.

Camino is a restaurant in Oakland, California. It specializes in elegant, Northern Californian style food, heavy on locally and responsibly sourced produce and meats. There are also some recipes that transcend the Bay-area-centric fare, with Old World favorites such as the home cured Sauerkraut, and the Roast Duck Consomme. The authors provide plenty of insight into the development and execution of the restaurant's recipes. I will definitely be trying the Herb Jam recipe, and I was pleased that the majority of the recipes are not out of reach for the home cook. Sure there is some snobbishness, and a bit of hipster-dogma amongst the pages, but it does not take away from the text. I did find a few things on the pretentious side, such as the author describing his love of preserved lemons, even adding them to dishes wherein you cannot taste them. Adding an ingredient should have always have a purpose, I believe. Also in description of the Grilled Chicken Ballotine, the author says that they "needed to make our chicken main-course a little fancier, so that we could charge enough for the pricey Riverdog chickens." 

There is an excellent part in the middle of the book that describes in glorious detail what it is like to work and run the restaurant for one day. It gives the reader an idea of the large number of moving parts a restaurant has, and how one innocent mistake can cause a complete shift's worth of stress. There are recipes for starters and main dishes, as well as a small section on dessert and cocktails. The latter seemed to be an afterthought though, and that is fine with me. If I wanted a book on mixology, I would get one. The book notes that the recipe for Doughnuts was taken from another book entirely, albeit with several small changes. It made me wonder if they were just reaching to fill pages. There are about 75 recipes total in the book, which is not a lot. However it is enough to give you an idea of the chef's focus on hyper-fresh, local ingredients. I did enjoy the discussions on using everything you possibly can from your ingredients with ideas for utilizing the "waste."

Overall, this was an enjoyable read and I am certainly going to attempt a few of the recipes. Visiting this restaurant in the near future is on my list as well, as it is only about a 90 minute drive for me. Bottom line, if you are at all interested in Bay-area cuisine with an emphasis on seasonal ingredients prepared with an open fire, as well as some time-tested favorites with a California flare, this book will prove satisfying. 

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my review.