COOK THIS: Bestia by Ori Menashe & Genevieve Gergis, with Lesley Suter
Twice a month our writer cooks from the book and decides if these farm-to-table recipes are worth the investment.
Restaurants like Los Angeles’ Bestia seduce diners with a rustically-enhanced version of comfort food. In their case, it’s Italian cuisine, with charred meats, handmade pastas, lots of seasonal heirloom vegetables, and pizzas with crispy, chewy crusts. You walk away impressed with your meal, but in the back of your mind you’re also thinking, “If I tried, I could probably make that at home.” Turns out, you’re probably wrong. In their cookbook, Bestia: Italian Recipes in Created in the Heart of L.A. (Ten Speed Press; $35), Ori Menashe & Genevieve Gergis (with Lesley Suter) lay out recipe after recipe from their menu in beautiful detail, disabusing you of any notion that these are simple dishes. Most of the recipes involve sub-recipes (dressings, pickles, charcuterie, pasta, etc.) and others require special equipment such as a dehydrator, smoker or a vacuum sealer. Many fall under the heading of “mouth-watering weekend project.”
I took the easy way out and made one of the simplest dishes in the book, saffron corn with dried shrimp—mainly because Menashe and Gergis didn’t insist on me drying my own shrimp. Fresh ears of corn are grilled until charred, cooled and stripped of their kernels. To make the dressing, warm buttermilk is infused with saffron before being whizzed in a food processor with garlic, lemon juice, butter and shallot powder. The kernels are then sautéed in this sauce and served topped with chopped dried shrimp and chives. The result is an umami-bomb of flavor: buttery, salty, smoky with a little sweetness.
Bestia is not a book for the beginner chef, nor will you cook from it on a weeknight. But if you’re a fan of the restaurant, and the sort of person that gets a kick out of creating professional-level recipes at home, you will love it. For the rest of us, it provides some beautiful inspiration for our own cooking and a new-found appreciation for the work that goes into those “simple” restaurant dishes.
Excerpted from Bestia: Italian Recipes Created in the Heart of L.A. by Ori Menashe, Genevieve Gergis and Lesley Suter. Text Copyright © 2018 by Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis. Photographs copyright © 2018 by Nicole Franzen. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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