New York Times food columnist and cookbook author Mark Bittman has joined the world of food blogging. I don’t know why someone with a regular column in the NYT needs a blog, too, but these days everybody in the professional media world has to have one whether they really want to or not.
Bittman has been writng at the Times for a decade, but has only crossed over into the realm of Celebrity Chefs in the last couple of years, mainly based upon the success of his cookbook “How To Cook Everything”. Now he’s got a TV show on PBS based on that book and is rapidly being transformed into a brand name like every other Celebrity Chef. On the plus side, he’s more chef than celebrity, unlike some people I could name, although he’s not a professional chef either. This was, in fact, his initial shtick in his column, called “The Minimalist”, that he could come up with great food without having to rely on the chef’s bag of culinary tricks to do it. Now, his “minimalist” approach is all trendy and what-have-you all on its own.
It was probably inevitable that the wider realm of dedicated home cooks would give up on trying to pull off “molecular gastronomy” or sous-vide cooking, or preparing fugu and retrench back into territory that can be handled by the proficient home chef without backsliding all the way to “semi-homemade” dishes. Bittman borrows from the simple-but-elegant cuisine that Jacques Pepin advocates, and makes it a bit more accessible to an audience that might be a little intimidated by Pepin’s pedigree.
His food blog, he says, will feature a recipe a day from his column, and today, for example, he offers a recipe for a basic vinaigrette salad dressing. I don’t know if many serious foodies will pay a lot of attention if the recipes stay that basic, but he’ll probably draw a crowd anyway. Most of the food bloggers I follow are plowing the fertile fields of French country cuisine or some other traditional, but certainly not minimalist, vein.
I like Bittman’s writing, but I find that his recipes don’t always work…which leads me to wonder how rigorously he tests them. “How to Cook Everything” has some great recipes in it, but there are lots of clinkers in it too.