I was provided by the publisher with a free copy of this book to facilitate my review.  As always all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

DIY-ing with Recipes

I rarely make a “found” recipe exactly as it’s written.  I don’t know; maybe I’m just a maverick, but I always seem to have to tweak something to make it “just right.” Of course, now there’s a lot of reworking for the sake of being able to eat, it, too, with the food sensitivity issues.

But whether you’re making a tweak here or there, replacing unhealthy ingredients with healthier ones or allergenic ones with ones you aren’t allergic to, or mixing-and-matching recipes to make something all your own, you’ll need to substitute one ingredient for another somewhere along the way.  It’s really helpful having a reference at your fingertips for that!

The internet has a lot of this information, but depending on what you’re looking for, it can take some digging.  So I’ve been relying for years on a book intended for that purpose.  Well, I just found this new(-to-me): The Food Substitutions Bible (second edition), and it’s so much bigger than what I’d been using.  There is a ton of information here!

What’s in The Food Substitutions Bible?

You’d expect it to have substitutions for a variety of ingredients, and it most certainly does.  But it’s more than that.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as a truly exhaustive list of ingredients, but this comes close.  There’s stuff in here I’ve never even heard of — a wide variety of ethnic condiments, exotic produce, and the like, in addition to all the more familiar items.  And each entry starts with a brief description of the ingredient, so in addition to being something of a “thesaurus” of foods — offering up substitutions — it’s also something of a “glossary” of foods, helping identify strange ingredients you might find listed in a recipe (and offering alternative names, in case perhaps you know the ingredient by a different one).

I’d guess this book is about 1-3/4″ thick, so that’s a lot of foods it talks about!  In many cases, one of the substitutions offered will actually be a recipe to make it yourself.  For example, there are recipes in here for peanut butter, Chaat Masala, and soy milk.

And there are substitutions for some things that aren’t foods, too, like the entries for “tandoor oven” and “tart pan.”

But Wait — There’s More!

Once you get past the main section (which is most of the book), there’s still more information at the back.

First, there’s a section with information about different varieties of certain foods and what they’re good for.  Varieties of:

• apples
• dried beans
• chiles (fresh & dried)
• clams
• coffee
• crabs
• wheat flours
• non-wheat flours
• edible flowers
• honey
• lentils
• mushrooms
• Asian noodles
• oils
• olives
• pears
• potatoes
• rice
• roe
• salt
• tea, and
• vinegar

…each have their own little sections.

Finally, there are measurement equivalents, with information about such things as pan sizes, temperature equivalents, and how to convert to metric.

The Food Substitutions Bible is definitely a useful addition to the kitchen library!