Bitter

How to make bitter ingredients taste beautifully balanced.

Bitterness is often treated as something to disguise. Alexina Anatole shows how to work with it instead, using flavour balance to create food with greater depth, contrast and complexity.

Across eighty recipes, Bitter explores ten ingredients that express bitterness in different ways, including grapefruit and bitter oranges, greens, tahini, beer, walnuts, cranberries, tea, coffee, cocoa and liquorice. Each becomes a route into understanding how sweet, sour, salty, rich and bitter flavours can sharpen one another.

The recipes cover everyday cooking as well as food for entertaining. There are Seared Salmon Tacos with Grapefruit & Avocado, Roasted Aubergines with Whipped Feta, Ancho Coffee Beef Short Ribs, Negroni Pavlova and Matcha Basque Cheesecake.

For confident home cooks who want to understand flavour rather than simply follow instructions, this is both a collection of inventive dishes and a practical lesson in making bitterness delicious.

‘DELECTABLE’ Nigella Lawson

‘A GEM’ Rukmini Iyer

‘LOVELY RECIPES’ Georgina Hayden

’STUNNING AND INVENTIVE’ Ixta Belfrage

‘A CRACKING BOOK’ Olly Smith

‘DELIGHTFUL’ Marc Diacono

‘EXTREMELY ACCOMPLISHED’ Jay Rayner (on MasterChef)