{"id":595405,"date":"2023-01-07T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-07T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/07\/via-carotas-cookbook-makes-restaurant-food-doable-at-home\/"},"modified":"2023-01-07T05:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-01-07T11:00:00","slug":"via-carotas-cookbook-makes-restaurant-food-doable-at-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/07\/via-carotas-cookbook-makes-restaurant-food-doable-at-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Via Carota’s Cookbook Makes Restaurant Food Doable at Home"},"content":{"rendered":"
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All products featured on Bon App\u00e9tit are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Elazar Sontag is Bon App\u00e9tit’s restaurant editor, but he eats at home too, sometimes. Here, he shares one of his new favorite cookbooks, which\u2014surprise, surprise\u2014comes from one of his favorite restaurants.<\/em><\/p>\n

So much of what I love about Via Carota, an Italian restaurant tucked into New York\u2019s Greenwich Village, is how unlike my home it is. There are shiny pomegranates and chestnuts in brass bowls at the bar. Some fresh almonds or leafy mandarins depending on the season; a cast-iron bucket of just-picked garlic. The wooden tables are old and weathered. It feels like home. Just not\u00a0my<\/em>\u00a0home.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This platonic ideal of a neighborhood restaurant has been reliably packed since it opened in 2014. The food here, the work of owners and partners Rita Sodi and Jody Williams, is the best of old-world Italian cooking, but it\u2019s also precise and delicate. As I\u2019m tucking into a whole branzino baked in salt, I do not think to myself, \u201cI could totally make this.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, when I heard Via Carota was coming out with a cookbook, I squealed with excitement, but I was also a little skeptical. How much of the magic that makes this restaurant so special, so quintessentially New York, could be distilled into a cookbook? Quite a lot, it turns out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Via Carota: A Celebration of Seasonal Cooking<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Via Carota: A Celebration of Seasonal Cooking from the Beloved Greenwich Village Restaurant<\/em><\/a> boasts the same simple elegance that defines the restaurant itself. There\u2019s no extravagant food styling\u2014dishes are shot plain and beautiful, more point of reference than conceptual art. Those honest depictions guided me as I cooked my way through the book and realized that Williams and Sodi, with co-writer Anna Kovel, had imbued its pages with the same magic that floats through their restaurant. My food looked like their food.<\/p>\n

My first goal was to hunt down robiola\u2014a mild cheese of sheep\u2019s and cow\u2019s milk\u2014spurred by a deep desire to recreate the Insalata Di Piselli. The salad of leafy greens, sweet peas, and prosciutto is only on the menu at Via Carota in the spring when peas are in season but I, for one, felt comfortable boiling frozen peas, closing my eyes, and imagining. That robiola was to be mixed into the Via Carota Vinaigrette, a sherry vinegar and shallot-heavy revelation that acts as a sort of mother sauce in the restaurant\u2019s kitchen. The closest I ever got to finding robiola in my neighborhood was a mild blue cheese, which is to say, not very close.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, my bastardized Robiola Vinaigrette is still mind-bendingly good, and goes on pretty much every salad I make. A prosciutto-less version of it landed on the kosher-ish Thanksgiving table of my boyfriend\u2019s family. I keep a jar of the original vinaigrette in my fridge at all times.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While there\u2019s plenty of meat in this book, the stars here are vegetables, as is the case at Via Carota. Carrots, which have about as much flavor as plywood during New York winters, take an oven bath in a sugar water solution. When soft, they\u2019re toasted, then laid in a pool of spiced yogurt. Whether I\u2019m making this recipe or not, my carrots now always start their journey in a little sugar water.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Fennel, which plays a supporting role in my kitchen at best, is also transformed by Sodi and Williams: boiled til tender, charred to hell, and coated in a warm glaze of orange juice, honey, bay leaf, and olive oil. The burnished bulbs that return from the pot sit somewhere between dinner and dessert, and I never want to eat fennel any other way.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just the combination of flavors that make these recipes shine. Yes, fancy mushrooms and seared smoked cheese go well together, but that\u2019s not breaking news. It\u2019s the way Sodi and Williams use simple recipes (many of them demanding less than a dozen ingredients) to teach techniques I would never have come around to on my own. Whether it\u2019s steaming carrots in sugar water or taking the harshness out of shallots with a rinse under cold water, I feel like I\u2019ve been let in on the secrets that make my favorite restaurant my favorite restaurant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been back to Via Carota a few times since I got the cookbook, and at first I wondered if knowing how the magic happens would rub away some of the shine. It\u2019s true that I can recreate the most divine burger in New York, and make my own towering salads. I don\u2019t need to trek to Greenwich Village to eat my favorite meal when it\u2019s early February and below freezing\u2014though really, nothing can replace the charm of sitting in that dining room.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Elazar Sontag<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All products featured on Bon App\u00e9tit are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Elazar Sontag is Bon App\u00e9tit’s restaurant editor, but he eats at home too, sometimes. Here, he shares one of his new favorite cookbooks, which\u2014surprise, surprise\u2014comes from one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":595406,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[117778,25319,534],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-595405","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-carotas","8":"category-cookbook","9":"category-financial"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/595406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}