Eight Twin Cities chefs share their current favorite cookbooks

The last time Tim McKee counted, his cookbook collection hovered somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 titles.

"And it never stops growing," he said. "I'm eventually going to have to get a bigger house."

The James Beard award-winning chef/owner of Octo Fishbar in St. Paul started what he calls his "obsession" during his early 1990s tenure at Azur in downtown Minneapolis. That's where McKee's mentor Jay Sparks would assign his kitchen staff the weekly task of presenting new menu items rooted in Mediterranean culinary traditions.

"It was a real challenge," said McKee. "Now, you can go on Google, and you can get a book in two days from Amazon. But then you'd have to go to the library and hope they had that one book on, say, Portuguese cooking. That kind of research direction from Jay forced us to have a sort of anthropological approach to learning about cooking."

He's been amassing cookbooks ever since. A favorite cookbook trend of McKee's is the increased illumination of previously little-explored world cuisines.

"Ten years ago, you wouldn't have seen many books on Middle Eastern cooking, period," he said. "Now, it's one of the hottest segments in cookbooks, and that's a pretty cool thing to see. Along those same lines, Paula Wolfert was the only one who ever wrote about Moroccan cuisine. Now, I'm looking and seeing that I have 14 — no, 15 — books on Moroccan cuisine, and that's pretty amazing to me."

Since his restaurant went dark in mid-March (he's also furloughed from his vice president position at the Fish Guys, a major Twin Cities seafood supplier), McKee has been spending a lot of time at home, cooking. And reading.

"There are always a couple of books that I keep revisiting," he said. "'The Whole Fish Cookbook' is maybe the best cookbook from last year, in my opinion. It's pretty technical, and maybe not something that the average cook can pick up and do anything with. I've been butchering fish for 30 years, and after this book I found out that I don't know anything about it. It's an amazing book."

We asked seven other Twin Cities chefs and restaurateurs for the cookbooks that are currently capturing their imaginations.

"Flavorwalla" (2016) by Floyd Cardoz

"Because it was Passover, I was going through lots of old Jewish cookbooks. But this is another one that I've been going through and playing around with. I pulled it out because he just died of COVID-19, and that broke my heart. He was at Cooks of Crocus Hill four years ago and I took his class. It was in April, and I know that because I wrote that in the book. In the class, he was super-charming, he talked about his family, and how he felt like a failure because he was in the restaurant business and his parents wanted him to be something else. There's a recipe that I love that's for beets and fresh ricotta with I want to say orange. It's really great, and it feels like spring. I'm pretending that it's spring, whether it actually is or not." — Patti Soskin, Yum! Kitchen and Bakery in St. Louis Park and Minnetonka

"The Vanilla Bean Baking Book" (2016) by Sarah Kieffer

"Flour Water Salt Yeast" (2012) by Ken Forkish

"I have been cooking a ton. We had a lamb loin roast in the freezer from Hidden Stream Farm, so that's what we had last night. We all suffer quarantine in our own way. And like everybody else, I've been reading a lot about bread. I'm learning a lot. It's fun to take a deep dive into it, to take some time and educate myself about something that's maybe a little bit of a hole in my culinary repertoire. It's been years since I've made anything other than brioche. [Forkish, who owns Ken's Artisan Bakery in Portland, Ore.] has interesting techniques for baking at home, which is so different from commercial baking. I've got two different sourdough mothers going on my countertop, and I'm going to start with a levain that he's got in the book. I've also been making a lot of pizza lately because I have this craving for it, and as an unemployed person, I don't feel like I should be doing a lot of takeout." — Russell Klein, Meritage in St. Paul

"When French Women Cook" (2010) by Madeleine Kamman and "The Cook and the Gardener" (2000) by Amanda Hesser

"I've got a million cookbooks, and because I don't have a lot of experience baking bread, I've been getting into that, like everyone else. We've been making a lot of dinners and that has been fun. Nothing groundbreaking, but my kids love it. Everyone's at home, and we're having risotto, or fresh pasta, and that's something we used to only do on Sundays. I dug out 'When French Women Cook' because it has solid recipes. They're not groundbreaking, but they have techniques that you might not know about. It's a great book. There's a pork roast with a pistachio filling that has just six ingredients, and I love it. I also like 'The Cook and the Gardener' for the same reasons. It's all about seasonal cooking and focusing on the flavor of the ingredients. She has this whole duck recipe that has just a few ingredients, including Calvados and pears, and you really have to follow the technique, you have to baby it, but then it's so great. These are the kinds of books that make me like food, and cooking. It's the kind of cooking that inspires me." — Isaac Becker, 112 Eatery, Bar La Grassa, Burch Restaurant and Snack Bar, all in Minneapolis

"97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in one New York Tenement" (2010) by Jane Ziegelman

"The Greens Cookbook" (1987) by Deborah Madison

"I'm really trying to focus on healthy, nutrient-dense food. For us, it's been looking for additional vegetable dishes beyond roasting cauliflower or carrots or parsnips. That brings me to my guilty pleasure: I love Goop [Gwyenth Paltrow's lifestyle brand]. A girlfriend got me 'The Clean Plate' last year, and it's pretty good. But in that same vegetarian vein, that's why I also pulled out 'Greens.' I went to Greens in 1997. It was my first trip to San Francisco, and the restaurant just made an imprint on me. I remember coming back and making some of the items at the Highland Grill, like a wilted spinach salad with red onion, kalamata olives, garlic and mint. The olive oil is hot — it's in the style of a warm bacon salad — and the kalamatas give it meatiness. It's good. That feels like it was so long ago, but the book is still relevant today." — Stephanie Shimp, the Blue Plate Restaurant Co., operators of Highland Grill and Groveland Tap in St. Paul, Edina Grill in Edina, 3 Squares Restaurant in Maple Grove and Longfellow Grill, the Lowry, the Freehouse and Mercury Dining Room and Rail in Minneapolis

"On Food and Cooking" (Scribner, 1984, revised 2004) by Harold McGee

It's almost more of a book about cooking than an actual cookbook. There are no real recipes in it, and it's one of the best books about cooking ever written. It helps you understand, from a scientific perspective, what's actually going on. I've been doing a lot of testing and menu development lately, and when I'm trying to get something to do what I want it to do, it's a really great resource. It's probably the most picked-up cooking book that I have. It's not an easy read; it's more like a textbook. It was one of the two main texts that we would reference in almost every class at the Culinary Institute of America, and I've loved it ever since. I love science and chemistry and physics — that's what I was studying in college — and this just kind of fits in with that. I think this is my fifth copy, because sometimes they get damaged, or I've given it away and got a new one. It's one of the books that I like to give away to young cooks." — Remy Pettus, Bardo, Minneapolis

Rick Nelson • @RickNelsonStrib