Stacks: The Art of Verticle Food by Deborah Fabricant
Review by Carole (craftnut)
For beginners and experienced cooks, this book shows you how to wow your company and your family with little effort. These are familiar ingredients and recipes, just a different way of presenting the dish. The recipes cover salads, starters, seafood, savory and sweet. No special equipment is necessary, although the stacks will be easier to make in some of the recipes if you own a set of stacking cylinders. These can be purchased, or for the truly frugal, save your soup cans to use (the book tells you how). A couple of the recipes show how to use other things for shaping the stack, like a pyramid mold. Many recipes are ‘freeform’, just layering the ingredients without using a mold at all.
So much of a meal is in the presentation, and I always get rave reviews when I start the dinner party with a stacked salad course. My favorite is to use heirloom tomatoes in yellow and purple-red, layered with goat cheese and fresh basil leaves, dressed with a little balsamic vinaigrette. The idea came from the charts in the beginning chapter that give you a mix of ideas, simple as choosing one ingredient from each column that best suits your taste or what you have on hand.
My favorite recipe for a brunch from Stacks is the Grilled Salmon and Corn Pancake Stack. The pancakes can be made an hour ahead, so you just have to assemble the stacks right before serving. Place a little Crème Fraiche to hold the layers together with some watercress for crunch, and you have a winner.
The Enchilada Stacks are yummy, and I made them with full size tortillas and didn’t use the stacking cylinders. Tortillas are layered with meat mixture and cheeses, baked briefly and garnished with lettuce, tomato, avocado, scallions and sour cream. Just cut the stack into quarters for serving.
The Seafood Risotto Stacks are elegant and tasty, and not that hard to do using the shortcut method at the end of the recipe.
The recipes lend themselves easily to substitutions. The Raspberry Lemon Meringue Stacks were wonderful made with in-season blueberries instead. Some of the recipes give suggestions for substitutions, like putting grilled chicken in the recipe for the corn pancake stacks instead of salmon.
Stacks: The Art of Vertical Food has neat ideas, and lovely full color photographs of most of the recipes. Each recipe gives tips to plan ahead and most have shortcuts too. Next up for me to try will be the Death By Chocolate dessert stack, yum!!
Sounds wonderful! I’ll check it out, Carole.
Here’s a stack I use as a vegetarian main dish:
slice up an eggplant into rounds and fry them lightly in olive oil and garlic;
go out into the garden and find a large ripe tomato
slice up some gruyere or mozzarella (or your favorite cheese)
slice some portobello mushroom caps into rounds — you’ll get two or three per mushroom.
pull the eggplant out of the pan and put the mushrooms in.
slice the tomato into rounds.
go back out to the garden and get some basil, which was right near the tomato, but I just wasn’t thinking
Stack it up, eggplant, tomato, basil, cheese, mushroom, repeat, and skewer it boldly with a toothpick.
Bake at, oh, maybe 350, for around 20 minutes, or until the rest of your dinner is done.
Great review Carole! Your descriptions of all that yummy sounding food, makes me want to…come over to your house the next time you’re experimenting! Bet you thought I was gonna say, “makes me want to try a few recipes”, huh? “L!”
Seriously, I agree that presentation is very important. If it looks good, i’m more likely to try something new. This looks like a fun, pretty way to present food, not only to your guests, but, to your family. Maybe this idea could get a few “picky” eaters to try something new.