The A.O.C. Cookbook

A welcomed reprieve to cookbooks from blogsites and regurgitated photos of friands. Suzanne's combinations and flavours continue to surprise and please the palate. Citrus fruit with a sticky toffee pudding - thank you! I owned all of the French Laundry cookbooks and sold them. But with Suzanne's cookbooks - I use them - and it exudes the same demand for high quality but approachable. The dessert section is worth the price of the cookbook and reminds me of Claudia Fleming's The Last Course. And the wood-burning oven recipes and cheese glossary are much appreciated. If there is a downside, the wine comments were forgettable. This cookbook is an excellent gift for fresh inspiration. For 2013, this cookbook is the one I recommend to people who are serious about good food.

What a splendid book this is. I've been cooking for more than 50 years, have taken classes in Paris and have worked my way through some excellent cookbooks but I still learn something whenever I delve into Suzanne Goin's recipes. Her first book, "Sunday Suppers at Lucques," is one of my favorite cookbooks (in a just world I would own a helicopter so I could visit Lucques more than a couple times a year) and this new work is just as wonderful.Goin's use of ingredients is imaginative without being silly and her explanations of techniques are impeccable. Her partner's wine pairing advice is equally clear and enticing.I bought this book both in hardcover and for my Kindle so I'll have the recipes wherever I may end up cooking and plan to buy a half dozen more to give as Christmas gifts. I can't imagine anyone who loves to cook not adoring this book,

I am a big fan of Suzanne's and have cooked my way through much of Sunday at Lucques. I haven't done that much with this one yet but the recipes might perhaps be a bit easier to execute. there is a lovely roasted cauliflower that is really straightforward.Living in Los Angeles, her emphasis is on fresh local ingredients.Excellent design and photos as you would expect.Bon apetit

A lovely companion to Sunday Supper at Luques (my current favorite cookbook). Suzanne Goins taste combinations are wonderful, and she has a lively engaging writing style. The short ribs in Sunday Supper… have become the favorite of everyone who has eaten at my home, and are now a holiday staple.

Well written and easy to follow recipes. Just love her ingredients and how she puts them together to make a luscious dish. Looking forward to our Farmers Markets to return after a hot summer so I can get going in trying to duplicate her amazing dishes !! I find it helps to read thru her recipes from start to finish before you get started, that way you may feel more comfortable with the recipe. Thank you Suzanne for the References and Sources in the back of the book !!!

Having stained my way through Sunday Supper at Luques, it was time for a second set of Suzanne Goin's well thought out and well explained recipes. The A.O.C. cookbook fills the void well, although does seem focused on more elegant dishes than "Lucques".

i wish i'd written this book. but only suzanne goin could have written it. it's so personal and lush--there are recipe headnotes that run two pages long! worth the long wait between books. i will be cooking from this one for such a long time. i gave up on the "sticky flag" method i usually employ, marking recipes in a new cookbook. there was a flag on nearly every page. goin doesn't take shortcuts here--she lavishes attention on beans and slow cooks meats to coax the flavor and texture to their highest possibilities. this book will inspire many meals with family and friends.

I hesitated writing this review because there is truly no bigger fan of Suzanne Goin than I. Sunday Suppers is probably the most used cookbook on my shelf, and while challenging, I found that the recipes made me a better chef. They were time consuming for sure, but at the end of the day, they were almost foolproof. That has not been my experience with A.O.C. so far. I have made 4 recipes in the book - bacon-wrapped dates with parmesan (straightforward and delicious), coq au vin (errors), potato puree (flawed) and long-cooked cavolo negro (errors). These recipes do not seem to have been edited. Specifically, the coq au vin calls for cipollini onions as well as diced onions. It is clear that the cipollinis are to be roasted, but then the rest of the recipe never differentiates the diced onions from the roasted cipollinis. Eventually, you can figure it out, but honestly, it takes a lot of deciphering. Then, the long-cooked cavolo negro calls for "2 chilis de arbol, crumbled", but in the body of the recipe you are only told to add 1 chili. Plus, at the end of the recipe it says "remove the rosemary and chile before serving" - that makes no sense with crumbled chiles. Am I supposed to pick out little pieces of chile from the kale? These errors certainly do not ruin the recipes, but they do make the recipes unnecessarily complicated. I will continue cooking out of this cookbook, but *so far* it does not hold a candle to it's predecessor.

Chose this based on our local paper book reviewer and I agree....beautiful laid out and tasty looking recipes..proud to give it.

I really love a lot of things about this book. It is beautiful, the recipes are incredible, and I love the wine pairing suggestions. If you're a foodie looking to marvel at the culinary creations of an extremely talented chef, then I'd highly recommend this.As a cookbook though, it's a tough one to cook from. Most recipes are quite long with one or more "sub-recipes", and almost every recipe contains one or more ingredients that are very difficult to find where I live. Probably best suited to home cooks in dense urban areas with good access to rarer ingredients.That said, the couple dishes I have been able to make from here have been absolutely incredible, so if you do have the time and can find the ingredients, it's worth it.