This Is Camino: [A Cookbook]

This Is Camino: [A Cookbook]

This Is Camino: [A Cookbook]

This Is Camino: [A Cookbook]

Hardcover

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Overview

A cookbook about the unique, fire-based cooking approach and ingredient-focused philosophy of Camino restaurant in Oakland, CA, with approximately 100 recipes.

Russ and Allison first opened the doors to Camino restaurant in Oakland, California, just as recession forced would-be diners home. Faced with a walk-in refrigerator full of uneaten food and an idling staff, they got industrious—canning, preserving, brining. This efficiency borne out of necessity soon became the driver of innovation for Camino’s cooking and the marker of a truly waste-free kitchen. But Camino is not all prudence and grandmotherly frugality. There’s the smoldering fire at the heart of the restaurant, which likely has a whole lamb leg dangling from a string, turning as it roasts perfectly, its fat seasoning a pot of fresh garbanzo beans underneath. Or, eggplants grilling for a smoky and complex ratatouille. Or, fresh fig leaves browning over the hot embers for a surprising and unforgettable grilled fig leaf ice cream. The pared down approach to ingredients at Camino opens up a world of layered flavors and ingenuity—sophisticated but direct, revelatory and, in its own way, revolutionary. This Is Camino is an extension of the brilliance of the restaurant, full of deep knowledge, good humor, and delicious food.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781607747284
Publisher: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date: 10/13/2015
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 1,102,249
Product dimensions: 8.40(w) x 10.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Russell Moore and Allison Hopelain are husband and wife and co-owners of Camino. Together they stand at the center of the Bay Area's vibrant food scene. Russell cooked at Chez Panisse for twenty-one years. His recipes from Camino have been featured in the New York Times Magazine, the Art of Eating, and Food & Wine, and on the Cooking Channel and the Today show. Allison is general manager of Camino. They live in Richmond, California.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction
When we first started talking about a Camino book, the obvious question was how to show people the way we cook at Camino when we know that people do not have giant fireplaces in their homes. Our first solution was to not make a cookbook—to not have any recipes! To make a flip book! Or an art book! Or a zine! 
After a little more thought, it seemed clear that the essence of our cooking isn’t ultimately the fire. The fire’s simply a (huge, roaring) means to an end. At its heart, Camino is about an approach to food, one that can happen anywhere. Neither Russ nor I are grandmothers, but fundamentally ours is grandmotherly cooking. Specifically, a frugal grandmother who grew up in the Depression, had plenty of style, kept a sweet vegetable garden, and could shake a good cocktail.
Grandmotherly cooking requires no special equipment. At our own home, we don’t have a fireplace. We don’t even have much of a functional kitchen. It’s tiny, and our stove has a huge crack on the top that makes the burners too slanty to cook anything evenly. Our oven door doesn’t even close all the way. Which is all to say this: Whatever you’ve got at home? Fine. 
There was a time when what Russ and I had at home was all I wanted. 
Back when Russ worked at Chez Panisse, he had a pretty great situation. Wonderfully talented coworkers. Six weeks vacation. And blissfully humane hours; he surfed four days a week. So when, after twenty-one years, he started to imagine something new,
I wasn’t sure so sure.
It wasn’t the perks I feared we’d miss. It’s that I don’t like compromise and restaurants are full of small compromises. What if our restaurant said no to compromise? No non-organic produce, sure—but also no traditional waiter-busser hierarchies.
No tablecloths. No martini glasses. No machismo. No pizza or burgers or pasta. No pigs from Iowa, even though they’re great, and cheaper. There’d be no flowers on the table, no art on the walls. No bar stools, no Beefeater gin, no kids’ menu. No alcohol with food coloring. (So long, Campari.) No alcohol from the “big two” distributors, for that matter. No encroachment on serendipity. 
So what would it be? It’d be us: me, a landscaper whose restaurant experience consisted of eating at restaurants, and Russ, the guy who cooked our dinner over a backyard fire, atop that old rebar we lifted from a vacant lot. All those fancy Chez Panisse meals, but then at home he’d be out in the dirt, cinderblocks blocking the wind and neighbors wondering about the guy roasting goat over a fire.
Camino would be an extension of Russ bent over that fire—and, in a sense, of the Russ from way back, this half-Korean punk rock kid working the Texaco in Southern California. At sixteen he was hitching rides in the old Minutemen van, this barely-a-teen coughing up gas money for passage to whatever punk show was playing that night. What was playing, I suspect, was an escape from the stifling suburban jocks-and-cheerleaders tar pit of high school. 
Why am I telling you about my husband’s adolescence? Because you can draw a line from those years straight to the menu at Camino, three-and-a-half decades later. In his sweet and reserved way, he’s the most defiant and strident person I know. (I stopped letting him read Yelp after someone referred to him as Stalin. He’s wanted to top that ever since—Idi Amin maybe.) Restaurants are full of compromises and artifices, and Russ can’t stand those things any more than his teenage self could’ve.
When Russ wasn’t pumping gas and skipping prom, he was learning to cook at a nearby Italian restaurant. So when he decided to move to the Bay Area at twenty-two, a family friend suggested he reach out to some local eateries, including one with a name he couldn’t spell—Chez something. He cold-called, got an interview with David Tanis and talked his way into a 6 a.m. tryout the next morning. He put his head down and cooked a staff breakfast for twenty people in ten minutes. This earned him seven hours of peeling garlic the next day. 
It went on like this—two days a week, then a little more. Six bucks an hour. Each night he went home and researched all he’d encountered that day (what in the world did “corked” mean?). He was around grownups—film talk, art talk, wine talk, plus the cracking open of goat heads. He was hooked.
Me? This was not my path. I had not worked in a restaurant. So really my only exposure to restaurants was as the girlfriend of the chef at Chez Panisse. Not the strongest resume, maybe, but it was exposure to a restaurant as a beautiful lifestyle, one where you decide how you want to live and then make the restaurant around that.
Where Russ and I overlapped was simplicity. As talk of this theoretical Camino gathered steam, we envisioned a place that was real and comprehensible and beautiful and honest and good. We’d be that little Italian house in the countryside, with one light on and a little old lady cooking over one pot. She invites you to dinner, you take a seat—and you don’t ask for grilled cheese and a Coke. 
So, okay, we’d be a little Stalin-like, too, if Stalin offered a limited, strictly organic menu, cooked over a massive fire.
Most of all, though, we’d be a restaurant more theoretical than fixed. I mean, the food isn’t theoretical—I promise it’s real. But it changes every night. The essence of Camino isn’t some signature dish, or stone tablet of perfected recipes. Camino is the thinking that led to those recipes, which will probably change again tomorrow night. 
That last aspect—sort of funny when you’re putting together a cookbook. Until now we’ve had nothing written down, even dishes we make repeatedly. Every year, rather than simply whip out the nocino recipe, we start from scratch, feel what the right amount of walnuts is. For Russ, everything lives in the strange, swirling cloud that is his head, and improbably that’s a highly effective system. 
The nocino thing? Sure, there are moments when I see it from the outside and it looks totally nutty. But there’s a philosophy behind the nuttiness. At some level, every meal here needs to feel like it’s being made for the first time. For Russ and for all our cooks, that wards off a certain rigidity that can creep into a kitchen. It ensures full engagement with ingredients and technique, and prevents autopilot. It keeps you loose and honest, if that makes sense.
For you, the reader, all this adds up to a cookbook that might feel unconventional at times. The recipes might not look like recipes you’re accustomed to. You’ll find Very Specific Feelings About How to Cook interspersed with instructions to go off and improvise. There are recipes that are suggested and then more suggestions on how to rearrange all the components into something else entirely. And in the middle of the book, you’ll encounter something decidedly unorthodox—an intimate and highly candid look at how all this comes together at Camino over the course of a week.
Most of all, you will encounter hints for how to think about food like we do at Camino—to be dogmatically flexible in your cooking, to think ahead to your next meal, to take that little extra step to make your food the tiniest bit better, to enjoy yourself, and to not compromise. 
—Allison Hopelain

Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction  1
Camino Basics  6
Vegetables  36
A Week at Camino  85
Fish  106
Fire  126 
Chicken and Egg  154
Duck  172
Lamb  186
Pork  202
Dessert  216
Cocktails  234
Acknowledgments  250
About the Authors  251 
Measurement
Conversion Charts  253
Index  254
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