The Great Salsa Book by Mark Miller Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Great Salsa Book
Book Review: Simple, low-fat, delicious salsas. Makes food taste great.
Summary: 4 Stars
Great pictures and easy to follow recipes that take about 10-20 minutes. Full of all different varieties of salsas (veggie, corn, bean, nut, seafood, & exotic). The most helpful part is list after the recipe telling you what type of food your salsa would go well with. I bought the book last week and have made 3 different salsas already. I even bought a second copy to give to a friend.Book Review: Some wonderful salsa recipes!
Summary: 5 Stars
I have loved this book for a decade. The two that I keep coming back to are Avocado-Serrano (page 38) and Tejas Sunflower Seed (page 116), each of which is worth the price of the book many times over for me. I have won prizes in salsa-making competitions with both! I have also tried a number of other recipes from this book with success, though I will admit there are many recipes in the book I haven't tried. On many occasions I've used some recipe in this book as a template to make something with slightly different ingredients, rather than trying to create from scratch, and I've usually had great results.
I will agree with some other reviewers that this is not a book containing 100 variations of the standard pico de gallo that you would find at a Mexican restaurant, but instead casts the net wide for "salsas" you might eat with chips, meat, fish, poultry, etc. To me that is a benefit, not a downside. I also have tried a couple of recipes from the book where the result didn't excite me, so you might want to try a recipe before you plan to serve it for an important dinner party. Another caveat is that (as other reviewers have pointed out) the physical format of the book can make it hard to leave the book open to follow a recipe; I use one of those plastic cookbook protectors that is weighted on both ends with marbles and that has worked well for me with this and other books.
The reason I give the book 5 stars is that I tend to review based on the best I get out of the product, not on how it might have been improved; the high points of this book (the 2 recipes above, the overall breadth of recipes, and the creativity I have managed to get from using and elaborating on these recipes) make me give it 5 stars. I wish I had more cookbooks that I consulted as much as this one!
Book Review: Unique and delicious recipes.
Summary: 4 Stars
This has some excellent salsa recipes. I have tried several and have been very pleased with the results. The instructions are clear and there are color photographs of each of the dishes. However, if you're expecting recipes for traditional, tomato-based salsas, like you find in the stores and restaurants, you may be a little disappointed. Most of the book describes "salsas" that are fruit, meat, seafood, or vegetable based. I do have a complaint about the book format. It is tall and not very wide, the cover is thick and the binding is very tight. It's not the kind of book that you can lay flat to refer to while you're preparing the dish. Luckily, most of the recipes are very short and simple so you won't be referring back to the book very often. One final nitpick - I wish they had included more information on the various ingredients. They provide some, but I had not heard of some of them and it would have been nice to read about them. Other salsa books I have read provide this information. Despite these negative comments, I can recommend this book to anyone looking for some unique recipes to spice up the meals and parties.
Book Review: Wasn't what I was hoping for...
Summary: 2 Stars
I was looking for a book that would show some really good red salsa recipes. This one has I think 2 total. The rest are not what I would call 'salsa'. But maybe that's because I'm just a hick from Missouri. If you call just about anything mixed up in a bowl 'salsa' then you might like this book, personally I didn't think it was worth the shipping cost.Book Review: Worth a Try
Summary: 4 Stars
I have only tried 3-4 recipes to date, as I wait for my pepper crop to come in. Each recipe so far was very good, particularly the avacadoe and serrano pepper dip. I will be tweaking to my own taste, but this is a great headstart.