The A.O.C. Cookbook by Suzanne Goin

The A.O.C. Cookbook Reviews

• 
  Caroline

  I'm debating whether to rate this 3 or 4 stars. Like her previous book, Sunday Suppers at Lucques, The A.O.C. Cookbook has recipes from Goin's restaurant. The book is wonderfully crafted, photographed, and organized (by season). There is also the lovely benefit of having wine suggestions, which her previous book did not. However, this book seems to be intended more for the restaurateur and home cooks (with fancy kitchens, large wallets, and lots of time on their hands). Even though I couldn't cook much from her previous book, I loved it. I loved the organization, the stories behind the recipes, and the premise of the book (spending a Sunday to cook a beautiful meal). With The A.O.C. cookbook, I just can't see myself making anything from it, despite knowing that whatever I did cook would be fantastic.
• 
  Naomi

  Pros-
  very unusual recipes
  I would do some recipes for entertainment. She had some beef recipes that looked fantastic.
  beautifully photographed
  dynamic vegetable section. I would be all over that!!! I wish that she would have done a "vegetarian" meal/main course section. It def. would have flown in this book.
  some pretty tasty looking desserts, I must admit! I will need to make a couple of them.
  
  Cons-
  
  Difficult to make dishes, so this cookbook would not be for the novice chef
  Most foods I would not eat, such as halibut, pork cheeks, lamb, duck and veal
  Not family friendly, AT ALL...not even the desserts
  A chunk of expensive and difficult to get ingredients
  Almost too much "back story"...although the little girl's lemonade stand teared me up.
  
  
  
• 
  Dawn

  I haven't eaten at AOC. Maybe if I had I would have liked this a bit better. I did find a few things that look interesting to make mostly in the salad and desert sections.
• 
  Megan

  review solely based on her creme fraiche plum cake with plum caramel. i used yogurt instead of creme fraiche and screwed up the caramel and still it was a super fruity, moist, amazing cake.
• 
  Anne Brockhoff

  This book is as well written as it is gorgeous. I loved author Suzanne Goin's easy recollections of past meals, farmers and friends, techniques and tastes, and the photos alone made me hungry for dozens of dishes. That said, I'd probably rather eat them at her restaurant than make them at home. As delicious as 'Beef Brisket with Slow-Roasted Romano Beans and Black Olive Aioli' surely is, I just can't bring myself to swap the four pages of instructions for the simple brisket recipe I've used for years. That said, I generally cook gluten- and dairy-free, and there are certainly recipes in here that I bypassed because of that. It's worth a read, and if you have the time and tolerance, probably well worth cooking from. Buy or borrow? Borrow.
• 
  Pixie

  The stories; the thoughts behind why she puts together those dishes; the seasonal, local ingredients; the thoughtful wine paring notes from her restaurant partner; the clear and detailed recipes that are a cooking class in themselves; some lovely food photos; all combine to make this a top-notch cookbook.
  
  Sometimes I copy a recipe or two out of a book that I think I might want to try (due to ingredients or techniques that I like, for instance), but if I were to try and copy all the worthy recipes out of this book, I would be copying the whole thing! The focus is on farm-direct (through CSAs or good farmer's markets) and artisanal ingredients, which is exactly what I want to use as well as read about.
• 
  Tim

  the title says it all. this is a cookbook filled with recipes her kitchen prepares, and you likely won't be able to duplicate at home. she mixes many unique ingredients, which would be a struggle to find from just one store, so i've concluded that these are simply restaurant recipes, and the cookbook is for her line chefs.
  
  that being said, the fish dishes in particular look delightful. there are a number of creative salad recipes. but given this book's focus on seasonal ingredients, it's not a book you'd turn to regularly, and it's organized both by recipe type and then internally by season, so it's not easy to use. the author is very wordy and the recipes can drone on for pages.
• 
  Beverly

  The food sounds tasty and there are good instructions, but I just wasn't dying to make anything in particular in here.
  Our cooking group made 7 things from the book. They were all quite good, though there were mistakes in the text of the book that required throwing out ruined ingredients - eg 4 cups water to 1 cup black rice.
  Also, this is truly restaurant cooking. I made the coq au vin, undoubtedly a truly tasty recipe, but it called for cooking the chicken 3 different ways. I will keep 3 of the recipes we tried, but I won't try anything else. Glad I used a library copy of the book.
• 
  Kate

  Definitely going to buy this when I can. Made the spicy tomato sauce and bookmarked a bunch of other recipes. Many of them I've seen altered and then published on food blogs, but it would be great to have the full collection.
• 
  Scott

  People seem to love this cookbook, but it wasn't my style at all. The recipes didn't sound that interesting. Stuff that sounded interesting seemed to be more complicated than the dish was worth.
• 
  Caren

  Some interesting recipes. Many expensive and hard to get ingredients.
  I have liked every recipe that I have made from it.
• 
  Cherie

  Some lovely sounding recipes (though mainly not vegetarian) and the veg recipes sounded good. But nothing that I'm in a huge rush to make.