Green Fire Cookbook Review

Green Fire: Extraordinary Ways to Grill Fruits and Vegetables, from the Master of Live-Fire Cooking

This week's cookbook review is for all of you who love to cook with live fire as much as we do. We are very excited to share with you the review of the Green Fire Cookbook.

Francis Mallmann, the celebrated Patagonian chef known for his mastery of flame and meat, the chef who romanced the food world with an iconic image of a whole cow dressed and splayed out over licking flames, is returning to the place where his storied career began — the garden and all its bounty. It’s his new truth: the transformation wrought by flame, coals, and smoke on a carrot or peach is nothing short of alchemy.

And just as he’s discovered that a smoky, crackling-crusted potato cooked on the plancha is as sublime as the rib-eye he used to serve it next to, Francis’s also inspired by another truth: we all need to cut down on consuming animals to ensure a healthier future for both people and the planet. Time to turn the fire “green.”

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A Journey of Rediscovery

Green Fire is a journey of rediscovery for the chef known for cooking meat. Rooted in his childhood passion for vegetable gardening, underpinned by decades of experience and innovation with live-fire cooking, Green Fire celebrates the magic that happens when flames, coals, and smoke transform vegetables and fruits.

This latest book from Francis is driven by the belief that we must all cut down on consuming animals to ensure a healthier future for both people and the planet.

Green Fire is far from being an ordinary vegetarian cookbook. In this book, Francis brings his techniques, creativity, instinct for bold flavors, and decades of experience to the idea of cooking vegetables and fruits over live fire.

Cooking with fire demands both simplicity and perfection. But the results are pure magic. Using this oldest cooking technique, you'll discover fruits and vegetables pushed to such a peak of flavor it's as if they'd never been truly tasted before.

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New Ways of Cooking Vegetables

Throughout Green Fire, you'll discover new ways of cooking vegetables. Blistered tomatoes reinvigorate a classic Caprese salad. Eggplants are buried whole in the coals until they yield an ineffable creaminess made irresistible with a slather of parsley, chile, and aioli. Brussels sprout leaves are scorched and served with walnuts; whole cabbages are sliced thick, grilled like steaks, and rubbed with spice for a mustard-fennel crust.

Organized by ingredients, this book has everything from Potatoes, Tomatoes, Eggplants, Beets, Cabbages, Corn, and a lot more. Green Fire even has a dedicated chapter to Fruits, where cherries are charred on the plancha, served over ice cream, and whole pineapples are roasted and served with blueberries. Just before the book ends, there is a cocktail chapter with time-tested favorites, with a touch of smoke and fire.

The recipes in the book are relatively easy to do even though they are cooked with live fire. For those who can't build a fire, you can use a Weber kettle grill or another grill to do the recipes in this book.

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Final Thoughts

Green Fire is a vegetarian cookbook like no other. It's pure alchemy, using the oldest of cooking techniques to push fruits and vegetables to such a peak of flavor it's as if they'd never been truly tasted before.