Cookbook Review: The Blue Zones Kitchen by Dan Buettner
Photographs by David McLain
Washington DC: National Geographic, 2019
A Cookbook Collab Review
My Quick Take: This is a cookbook with an admirable message, but most of the recipes that we tried had major issues.
***
My frequent Cookbook Collab partners Dawn and Dave joined my spouse Alan and I for a dinner party recently, where we chose to prepare a few recipes from Dan Buettner’s The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100 in order to expand our healthy cooking knowledge and test out the cookbook. Dawn and I decided on this book because we do have a keen interest in good-for-you cooking and baking, enjoy focusing on vegetarian dishes, and also love exploring regional cuisines.
This 2019 book is one of a suite of books authored by Buettner, as he’s the founder of Blue Zones, an organisation that aims to improve the health of Americans, and takes its name from the “blue zones” of the world where people are especially long-lived. In this book, the recipes are grouped by blue zone, and include: Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California.
I enjoyed reading the introduction sections, which included tips “for eating to 100,” hints like eating more fibre and olive oil, and adding herbs and spices. There are the Blue Zone food guidelines, too, which emphasise eating a mostly plant-based diet, very little meat if any, and also very small portions of fish. I was interested to see that fish is not recommended or necessary in these Blue Zone recommendations. Dawn and I already eat by these guidelines, not exclusively of course, but we’ve made good inroads, so these sections were gratifying, as they reinforced what we already know.
After looking over the recipes, we noted that they tended to the simpler side of things, which makes sense given that the book emphases local and simple foods. It wasn’t the sort of cookbook where recipes were jumping out at me right and left; rather, there were just a few that really captured my attention. Both Dawn and I were drawn to the recipes from Ikaria, Greece, so we decided to focus our dinner party on an Ikarian feast.
Dawn chose two dips, sourdough bread, and a bean salad. I chose ratatouille, a bean casserole, and cookies. Read on to see what happened. It was a very hit and mostly miss cooking experience.
Hummus with Parsley:
Dawn started with one pound of dried chickpeas, which yielded so many cooked chickpeas that she was overrun with them! In the end, she used about a third of the cooked chickpeas and saved the rest for other uses, and added the garlic, vinegar, parsley and olive oil as per the recipe. In the end, it was very garlicky and tasty.
Ingenious Garlic Spread:
For this dip, one soaks bread in water to start, then adds tarragon vinegar, garlic and olive oil before blending. Dawn found the recipe vague, as there was no indication of how much water to use, which was frustrating. Again, we all liked the taste of this dip very much (it was my favourite!) but the confusing recipe was annoying.
Eleni’s Sourdough Bread:
Dawn has a sourdough starter (there are instructions on how to make your own if you don’t have one), but knew as soon as she started that the ratio of water to flour was absolutely not going to work. The “pinch” of salt called for was also disconcertingly low, so Dawn added more liquid and salt to the preparation. Fortunately, she’s an experienced sourdough maker, so she could see the recipe issues and compensate, and in the end the bread was a success, if still lacking a bit of salt.
Black-Eyed Pea Salad with Mint and Onions:
This was a great idea for a salad, but the ingredient proportions seemed sub-optimal. Again with the pound of beans, and what felt like too few vegetables. Dawn added more greens, which helped, and made the dressing faithfully to the recipe, with red wine vinegar and olive oil. However, we all felt that this salad tasted healthy but bland, and could have used much more of the dressing. Also, a minor quibble, but the recipe’s accompanying photograph was inaccurate, with lovely looking chunks of potato...and no potato to be had in the salad.
Spiced Beans:
For this navy bean casserole with butternut squash, I did use almost all the beans called for: about 40 oz, rather than the 45 oz called for. These are mixed with some basic diced vegetables, chili peppers and olive oil. The recipe calls for a pound of butternut squash cut in two inch squares. The cooking time is 20 min at 350 degrees F. Anyone see the issue? I did immediately. Two inch squares are huge! I cut them in about 1 inch squares, as I refused to truly dice them, since I was testing out the cookbook. The squash took an hour and forty minutes to cook, and that was with the heat cranked up to 400 degrees for the last third of the cooking time. It’s a good thing I started early, or this would not have been ready in time for dinner. But like most of these recipes, once it was cooked, it was a “healthy delicious” type of dish, pleasant to eat.
Ikarian Winter Ratatouille:
Another simple, appealing dish, where I diced various veg–zucchini, potato, green pepper, tomato–smothered them in olive oil and a bit of oregano, and baked for 25 minutes “until tender.” Another example of unrealistic cooking times, because of the potato. This also stayed in the oven for an hour and a half. Seasoned with salt and pepper, it was another healthy-tasting dish, though not overly spiced. Also, the accompanying photo had really nothing to do with the recipe.
Honey Cookies (Finikia):
Finally a recipe that worked as written! Woohoo! These are a simple, healthier treat that uses citrus for flavour and olive oil as its fat. They were straightforward to mix up and they held their shape in the oven. I shared them with some friends, and then at our dinner party. They were perfectly adequate, if not exciting. They had a cake-like texture rather than a chew or crunch, and I felt like they needed some lemon glaze…but that would probably not fit into the Blue Zone eating framework :)
***
When all the dishes were cooked and we sat down to eat, our overall sense of this cookbook was one of frustration at the recipes and the cooking process. We identified problematic issues with six out of seven of the recipes we made, some minor–though no less annoying–like vague instructions; and some major, like a bread that was not going to come together, or a casserole that took five times longer to cook in the oven than advertised.
Both of us came to these conclusions about the book independently, as we cooked our dishes at separate houses then met for dinner. We felt lucky that we are experienced cooks, who could recognise when something was not going to work, and adjust accordingly. But for beginner cooks, this book might lead to disasters in the kitchen!
Also, there’s no index, which is a quibble but it’s a nice feature to have.
Despite all of this, there was some pleasure to be had in cooking from The Blue Zones Kitchen. We felt pretty accomplished knowing that we’d made decent food from flawed recipes, and the truth is that when we sat down to a table of healthy, whole-food vegan dishes, things tasted pretty good! When the beans with veg and olive oil mingled with the dips on the plate; when the sourdough bread was dipped in garlicky spread; and when we finished it off with some cakey cookies, we had a really great meal. It just wasn’t good enough to recommend the cookbook.
A Cookbook Collab Review
My Quick Take: This is a cookbook with an admirable message, but most of the recipes that we tried had major issues.
***
My frequent Cookbook Collab partners Dawn and Dave joined my spouse Alan and I for a dinner party recently, where we chose to prepare a few recipes from Dan Buettner’s The Blue Zones Kitchen: 100 Recipes to Live to 100 in order to expand our healthy cooking knowledge and test out the cookbook. Dawn and I decided on this book because we do have a keen interest in good-for-you cooking and baking, enjoy focusing on vegetarian dishes, and also love exploring regional cuisines.
This 2019 book is one of a suite of books authored by Buettner, as he’s the founder of Blue Zones, an organisation that aims to improve the health of Americans, and takes its name from the “blue zones” of the world where people are especially long-lived. In this book, the recipes are grouped by blue zone, and include: Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California.
I enjoyed reading the introduction sections, which included tips “for eating to 100,” hints like eating more fibre and olive oil, and adding herbs and spices. There are the Blue Zone food guidelines, too, which emphasise eating a mostly plant-based diet, very little meat if any, and also very small portions of fish. I was interested to see that fish is not recommended or necessary in these Blue Zone recommendations. Dawn and I already eat by these guidelines, not exclusively of course, but we’ve made good inroads, so these sections were gratifying, as they reinforced what we already know.
After looking over the recipes, we noted that they tended to the simpler side of things, which makes sense given that the book emphases local and simple foods. It wasn’t the sort of cookbook where recipes were jumping out at me right and left; rather, there were just a few that really captured my attention. Both Dawn and I were drawn to the recipes from Ikaria, Greece, so we decided to focus our dinner party on an Ikarian feast.
Dawn chose two dips, sourdough bread, and a bean salad. I chose ratatouille, a bean casserole, and cookies. Read on to see what happened. It was a very hit and mostly miss cooking experience.
Hummus with Parsley:
Dawn started with one pound of dried chickpeas, which yielded so many cooked chickpeas that she was overrun with them! In the end, she used about a third of the cooked chickpeas and saved the rest for other uses, and added the garlic, vinegar, parsley and olive oil as per the recipe. In the end, it was very garlicky and tasty.
Ingenious Garlic Spread:
For this dip, one soaks bread in water to start, then adds tarragon vinegar, garlic and olive oil before blending. Dawn found the recipe vague, as there was no indication of how much water to use, which was frustrating. Again, we all liked the taste of this dip very much (it was my favourite!) but the confusing recipe was annoying.
Eleni’s Sourdough Bread:
Dawn has a sourdough starter (there are instructions on how to make your own if you don’t have one), but knew as soon as she started that the ratio of water to flour was absolutely not going to work. The “pinch” of salt called for was also disconcertingly low, so Dawn added more liquid and salt to the preparation. Fortunately, she’s an experienced sourdough maker, so she could see the recipe issues and compensate, and in the end the bread was a success, if still lacking a bit of salt.
Black-Eyed Pea Salad with Mint and Onions:
This was a great idea for a salad, but the ingredient proportions seemed sub-optimal. Again with the pound of beans, and what felt like too few vegetables. Dawn added more greens, which helped, and made the dressing faithfully to the recipe, with red wine vinegar and olive oil. However, we all felt that this salad tasted healthy but bland, and could have used much more of the dressing. Also, a minor quibble, but the recipe’s accompanying photograph was inaccurate, with lovely looking chunks of potato...and no potato to be had in the salad.
Spiced Beans:
For this navy bean casserole with butternut squash, I did use almost all the beans called for: about 40 oz, rather than the 45 oz called for. These are mixed with some basic diced vegetables, chili peppers and olive oil. The recipe calls for a pound of butternut squash cut in two inch squares. The cooking time is 20 min at 350 degrees F. Anyone see the issue? I did immediately. Two inch squares are huge! I cut them in about 1 inch squares, as I refused to truly dice them, since I was testing out the cookbook. The squash took an hour and forty minutes to cook, and that was with the heat cranked up to 400 degrees for the last third of the cooking time. It’s a good thing I started early, or this would not have been ready in time for dinner. But like most of these recipes, once it was cooked, it was a “healthy delicious” type of dish, pleasant to eat.
Ikarian Winter Ratatouille:
Another simple, appealing dish, where I diced various veg–zucchini, potato, green pepper, tomato–smothered them in olive oil and a bit of oregano, and baked for 25 minutes “until tender.” Another example of unrealistic cooking times, because of the potato. This also stayed in the oven for an hour and a half. Seasoned with salt and pepper, it was another healthy-tasting dish, though not overly spiced. Also, the accompanying photo had really nothing to do with the recipe.
Honey Cookies (Finikia):
Finally a recipe that worked as written! Woohoo! These are a simple, healthier treat that uses citrus for flavour and olive oil as its fat. They were straightforward to mix up and they held their shape in the oven. I shared them with some friends, and then at our dinner party. They were perfectly adequate, if not exciting. They had a cake-like texture rather than a chew or crunch, and I felt like they needed some lemon glaze…but that would probably not fit into the Blue Zone eating framework :)
***
When all the dishes were cooked and we sat down to eat, our overall sense of this cookbook was one of frustration at the recipes and the cooking process. We identified problematic issues with six out of seven of the recipes we made, some minor–though no less annoying–like vague instructions; and some major, like a bread that was not going to come together, or a casserole that took five times longer to cook in the oven than advertised.
Both of us came to these conclusions about the book independently, as we cooked our dishes at separate houses then met for dinner. We felt lucky that we are experienced cooks, who could recognise when something was not going to work, and adjust accordingly. But for beginner cooks, this book might lead to disasters in the kitchen!
Also, there’s no index, which is a quibble but it’s a nice feature to have.
Despite all of this, there was some pleasure to be had in cooking from The Blue Zones Kitchen. We felt pretty accomplished knowing that we’d made decent food from flawed recipes, and the truth is that when we sat down to a table of healthy, whole-food vegan dishes, things tasted pretty good! When the beans with veg and olive oil mingled with the dips on the plate; when the sourdough bread was dipped in garlicky spread; and when we finished it off with some cakey cookies, we had a really great meal. It just wasn’t good enough to recommend the cookbook.
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