The Fried Chicken Recipe Is Not Good
589719
I am reviewing and discussing the fried chicken recipe which I am sure was designed to be one of the flagship recipes of the book. It is not good. The cornmeal overpowers any other flavors and not in a positive way. Here in the Southwest, we commonly use a blend of cornmeal and flour as a batter for fried fish and when you add just enough cornmeal to the flour to get a nice crunch, it is pure deliciousness. But in the case of this recipe, it is too much. The cornmeal component gives the dish a sawdust mouthfeel that I found to be very unpleasant. There are some flaws in the format of the recipe. The cornmeal is supposed to be a fine grind but this not indicated up front in the list of ingredients.  It would have been so easy for them to state that comment in the recipe proper instead of referring you to another page for their discussion on the type and grind of cornmeal to use, assuming you would read the comments on that page. Additionally, we noticed that the salt to be added to the dry mix shows up in the body of the instructions but not in the ingredients list itself. But the real issue is that this recipe just isn't tasty. Now here comes my disclaimer. I have been experimenting with fried chicken recipes for awhile now and documenting my experiments at my website,  [...]. One of the recipes that I was working on was to reverse engineer was the Gus's Fried Chicken recipe of Memphis, Tennessee. I came close when I determined that a thick slurry of cornstarch and buttermilk worked great and I documented my experiments and subsequent recipe on my blog. I have also experimented using masa harina as part of my dry mix experiments without positive results. Additionally I refer you to Kenji Lopez Alt's excellent fried chicken blogs on his experiments at Serious Eats Food Lab, in which he investigates the value of brining and various batters as well. The Cook's Illustrated recipe is just too fussy. It is a classic example of their working too hard to be able to come up with an "aha moment" where they claim to have figured out a perfect, master recipe for a dish. And in this case they went too far. The cornmeal just doesn't work. And they should have realized this.
3689189
I was disappointed.

The braised little gems...did anyone have that work out well?  Is that something you would ever make again?  It was a tasteless & useless side dish.

The honey semi-freddo was a total mess and even if it had come out perfect it tasted awful.  The moroccan rice & chicken was tasteless and created another mess that took me 3 pans to cook because the yogurt immediately sticks & burns, regardless of temperature.  The roast chicken w/garlic--seemingly foolproof--never came together from a consistency or taste standpoint.  The chocolate Pavlova recipe with raspberries was another failed attempt...

My husband and I live in Chicago, a town with fabulous restaurants, and we consider ourselves above average cooks and foodies.  I really wanted to like this book, but at the end of the day, I would only make one thing over again, the Hasselback potatoes.  Unfortunately those were only good because of technique, not because of her recipe.

Am I missing something?  Should I try a different book of hers?
3678087
You can not trust all of the cooking times for some of the recipes in this book unless you like to eat raw chicken.
2931643
I have a family of five with busy schedules of sports, scouts, church activities, etc., etc.  I was excited to get this cookbook so we'd stop eating on the go so much.  Sound familiar?

I started trying a new recipe week after week.  Every recipe was awful!  Most of the recipes were bland or mushy.  Which reminds me...

Beware of any of the recipes that call for rice.  It will be overcooked.  I guess I should have known that, but yuck!  Just in case you're like me and didn't know:  Rice turns to mush in a crockpot!

I hate to bad mouth this book so bad, but I wasted money buying the book and money buying the food for the recipes that I just ended up throwing out....several times.  I tried mostly shrimp or chicken recipes.

Maybe I chose the wrong recipes?  But after a couple of months, you would think I'd hit a winner.
1344507
Disappointing! I made the sweet and sour chicken, It was was very bland. I will try other recipes, but I don't think we are off to a good start.
3087802
Sorry, I rarely write reviews but felt this cookbook was so lacking in clarity a review needed to be posted.  What shows up in the ingredients list doesn't appear in the cooking directions & visa versa.  One recipes on "duck" laters directs you for "chicken" in the instructions.  One recipe calls for chicken breast, drumsticks & thighs then in the instructions talks about ingredients never mentioned into the "cavity" of the chicken.  This is so much more than being grammatically incorrect and it happens over & over again on multiple recipes.  I love cookbooks & was so excited for this one to arrive, but just a complete disappointment.  It doesn't look like it was complied professionally b/c editors couldn't have let these glaring mistakes get by.  Sorry.  I wanted to like this but the directions, content, instructions & recipes just aren't clear.
2038398
Because your insides are a mess.  More errors than I've ever seen in a cookbook, strange ingredients in common dishes, repeated recipes with slight variations (they couldn't decide?), quantity conversion errors, pictures that don't actually show what the finished recipe would look like, odd regions...the list just goes on and on.  At least the big brick in my house will be a pretty shade of pink.  So very disappointed.
2440995
Don't bother.  I used it once, following the directions to a T.  It took 2 cycles to get French fries CLOSE to done.  I also used it, same meal, to heat fully cooked chicken, 12 minutes at full power did not do the trick.  It might be healthier than frying, but I will never use it again.  I wasted my money.
102815
As with the other Chi-Chi meals, this dish serves-up an ample portion of good quality chicken. The salsa and rice mixture, however, left a lot to be desired. The rice was way overcooked and mushy. The salsa sauce was bland, watery, and lacking in flavor. Collectively, it was a big pile of yuck! Two thumbs down here...
1495371
I cooked a beer butt chicken on the mat. While it did distribute the heat well and the chicken cooked evenly with only one turn, the mat was literally ruined with the globs of baked on chicken fat. I scraped it carefully with a plastic spatula and got some of the worst off, then soaked it over night immersed in Dawn-water. I still had to work hard at it the next day and finally gave up and placed in the top of the dishwasher as advised by the directions and it still wouldn't come clean. It may be ruined at this time, though I'll give it one more go by burning off the excess right on the grill.
2888168
The first recipe I made in this book was an absolute disaster. My first clue that it was not going to turn out well was when I mixed all the ingredients together and it made a powder. The next step on the list was "pour batter." Are you kidding me? I double and triple checked the recipe and had to conclude that there must be a typo with the amount of rice flour. Trying to salvage the recipe, I added three times as much lemonade. This then made some sort of grainy paste. Never one to give up, I baked it anyway. The result was a gritty and near tasteless cake that actually made me physically ill after eating a small amount. I'm not sure if this was just lazy publishing, editing, or if the recipe is just truly horrible. Either way, it's unacceptable and I won't be trusting a single one of these recipes. The most disappointing thing is that I LOVE the Enjoy Life brand of foods. That they would put their name and stamp of approval on such a shoddy product is very disheartening. Those of us with multiple and severe food allergies don't have many options when it comes to desserts and snack foods. You would think that a company that claims to cater to those needs would take more care and pride in a book like this.
4522303
I have another New Orleans cookbook but John Besh's recipes of the same recipes from one book to another seems easier and fast to put together. But leave it to me to start off with a recipe in this book that was not right, either printed wrong or proofread wrong, whatever.  It was for BamBam Shrimp.  I always halve a recipe when doing it for the first time to conserve ingredients 'just in case' it goes awry...as this one did.  A half recipe was 1/2 cup of cornstarch and a 1/2 cup of rice flour and 1 1/4 cup of club soda. Well, once I put it all together fast I immediately knew something was wrong. The 'batter' was non-existent, it was white soup.  Not even a light tempura batter, it was really really thin, like milk. I had no choice but to add in more rice flour and cornstarch which I wanted to avoid in the first place, bc now I had to save the 'batter.'  So beware of BamBam Shrimp recipe bc the measurements are off.  Until you cut waaaay back on the club soda, you will have a recipe that rhymes with BamBam but isn't as nice to say! Once I got the batter to a heavy cream consistency where it held onto the shrimp, it was crispy as i'm sure it should have been.  I hope my next recipe choice will work better.
2986400
I admit, I've only tried one recipe so I was generous in giving it TWO stars instead of the one my recipe deserved.  But my husband, 9 yr old, and 3 yr old say it is the worst thing I've EVER made so that doesn't really inspire me to try another one.  I cooked the udon with edamame and chicken dish....it was flavorless--unless you count tasting vegetable oil, which is something I don't really enjoy.  Common sense should have told me that salt, pepper, rice vinegar, and 2 TBS of soy sauce were not going to make this a tasty dish.

One thing I will say is that it has some good ideas for recipes and the next time I try cooking something out of it (if I ever do) I will take Emeril's advice and "kick it up a notch" or two or three!  :)
3616608
It doesn't taste very good.  It doesn't taste bad either, just very bland.  I was hoping for something a little different.
I have a family member who makes white chicken chili (and I love it), the base is different and the overall it has more flavor and is spicier (this has no spice or kick).  I've also had homemade/restaurant styles that were all similar in taste/style, but different from all of them..  I think the beans used were also different, and is part of it.  I won't buy this again.
2336194
I purchased this cookbook after carefully reading the reviews posted on Amazon.  They had never let me down. . . until this purchase.  I had recently received a slow cooker for my wedding and was looking for a cookbook with healthy, tasty recipes that I could make before work.  Thus far I have tried three recipes including the adobe chicken and korean short ribs.  Ick.  The chicken ended up in the garbage.  I consider myself a good cook (and my husband does too!), but these recipes produce bland, tasteless food, certainly not gourmet cooking by any stretch of the imagination.  I wouldn't even call it edible cooking!  Certainly would not repurchase.  This one will be sitting on the bookshelf.
1970884
I was so excited to get this book, but it sucks and I'm not keeping it.  The recipes use a disgusting amount of oil - up to 1 cup!! And then after cooking you are supposed to let your food drain through a drive to "allow excess oil to drain".  The pictures are dated photography - they look like they were taken in the 80's, and there's only one picture every 30 pages.  Lame book, bad layout, too much oil.. Total turn-off.
3420891
Nothing new in this one.  I guess there are only so many ways you can prepare chicken.  Maybe you can't have healthy and exciting in the same pan.