Bitter
‘A gem of a cookbook... delightful' – Rukmini Iyer
'Stunning and inventive recipes' – Ixta Belfrage
It's time to embrace the beauty of bitter flavours.
Fearlessly bringing together the best flavours and culinary strategies from around the world, Alexina Anatole will help you befriend bitterness - one flavour-balancing technique at a time. Using ten ingredients to walk you through every type of bitterness and how to tame it – from grapefruit and bitter oranges, bitter greens, tahini, beer, walnuts, cranberries, tea, coffee, cocoa and liquorice – each recipe will expand your repertoire and open the door to new worlds of deliciousness, using bitterness in both savoury and sweet dishes to elevate the taste of everything you make.
These 80 recipes include something to suit every taste and occasion. Start with bold breakfasts recipes, like Coffee Pecan Banana Bread, Malted Crepes with Lime & Sugar, and Winter Citrus Fruit Salad, then fill your day with light lunches and weeknight dinners like Roasted Aubergines with Whipped Feta, Grapefruit & Hot Honey, delicious Seared Salmon Tacos with Grapefruit & Avocado and Allspice Lamb Chops with Pickled Walnut Ketchup. Then, impress your guests with Ancho Coffee Beef Short Ribs, Duck Confit with Bitter Orange Salsa Verde and Jerk Pork Belly with Grapefruit Hot Sauce, plus decadent desserts such as Negroni Pavlova, Bitter Chocolate Torte with Passionfruit Sauce and Tiramisu Tres Leches cake.
Alexina Anatole is a cook who researches, writes and talks about flavour: the science of it, how it appears across different cultures and how to translate this into delicious food in the kitchen. Alexina reached the final of MasterChef in 2021 and this led her to take a risk, making a brave career change from the City of London to food.
She is herself of mixed heritage: the granddaughter of chicken farmers from Cambridgeshire and Saint Lucian grandparents who arrived in London during the Windrush movement.