Customer Reviews

La Cucina Siciliana di Gangivecchio/Gangivecchio's Sicilian Kitchen: Recipes from Gangivecchio's Sicilian Kitchen

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book contains straightforward, easy recipes that let good ingredients shine through. It's a good reference for recipes suitable for every day home cooking. But the binding is atrocious! Clumps of pages started falling out after my first use of the book. That shouldn't happen with a book [of this price]. As a result, I wouldn't bother buying the book unless it came at a VERY steep discount.

If you like to cook and you want authentic Southern Italian cooking (compared to the Tuscany inspired cooking that has been all the rage), then this is absolutely the best cookbook you can buy...with the possible exception of the Tornabene's new cookbook,which I am just about to buy. The recipes are pretty easy to follow, but most require either a fair amount of prep or some time to stir the pot. The pasta dishes are fantastic. My family loves the fava bean recipes (I cooked one as a joke in honor of Silence of the Lambs, but it was a hit, so I've been making them ever since) and the anchovy tomato sauce. I love this cookbook so much that I actually made the trip to the restaurant. It's not a place you get to by accident, you really have to want to go because it is way way out in the middle of Sicily. But the food there is excellent, and I was lucky enough to eat things familiar to me from the cookbook, as well as some new dishes. I'm not sure I'll ever try any of the desserts in this cookbook (too much work) but I've eaten some of them at their restaurant - and I can recommend them highly!

P.S. If you decide to make the trek, I recommend that you stay at their hotel. The grounds of Gangivechio are lovely and worth enjoying on their own.

This is one of my most frequently used cookbooks (and I have a lot of them) just for the pasta section. The recipes are simple enough to use for everyday, and good enough to use for company. The ditali with spinach, the rigatoni daniela, the arugula and fresh tomato sauces, the zucchini pasta sauce---all are easy, draw raves from guests, require no special ingredients, and taste like the wonderful pastas I had in trattorias in Sicily. The risotto recipe is the best I've ever used; the salads are also good; the desserts and main dishes are mostly too complicated for daily use, or for any but the experienced cook.

The recipes in this cookbook use exciting, distinctive ingredients. But if you look to the recipe instructions to tell you how to cook them, you will be in the dark. The instructions are misleading, confusing, and incomplete. However, if you know how to cook, that is, if you are an experienced chef, you will be able to make wonderful dishes from the recipes.

This book is as enjoyable to read as it is to cook from. The stories from this world class restaurant alone are enough to keep you turning the pages in anticipation. The recipes are easy to follow and at the same time hard to screw up. I have found that almost every one of them can be subject to artistic liberty and still turn out magnificent. Gangivecchio is ahead of Saint Peters Basillica on my list of things to do the next time I am in the Mediterranean. I'm quite sure the Cannoli alone are worth the air fare.

This is a wonderful book, full of very interesting
background into the cooking of the region and to
the personalities of the proprietors of the
restaurant. While not all recipes are ones that
you will make on the spur of the moment, many are
worth the effort. I have thrown several dinners
of recipes from this book and they have won raves
from all attendees.