LA Times: 10 of the best new cookbooks of 2017

Featuring Sean Sherman's 'The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen.'

The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen (Sean Sherman)The chef’s first book is a kind of manifesto as well as a cookbook. Sherman, a South Dakota-born member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, has translated his years of professional experience, cooking in restaurants in Minnesota, South Dakota and Montana, and catering and teaching, into a compelling book about indigenous cooking. These are recipes using the techniques and ingredients of the Dakota, Lakota and Ojibwe tribes, based on heirloom fruits and vegetables, wild and foraged ingredients — which is to say, bison tartare and wild rice cakes rather than fry bread. Sherman, who wrote the book with Dooley, fills the pages with interesting and helpful notes and asides — a tutorial on beans, “the backbone of Native cuisine”; instructions on how to cook rabbit; a list of indigenous stocks; sourcing information for Native suppliers; seasonal feast menus. This is a pretty good time for Native cuisine to get attention, as Sherman himself points out in his introduction: “It’s hyperlocal, ultraseasonal, uberhealthy,” as well as gluten- and dairy-free. Maybe with Sherman’s excellent book, which includes recipes for things like duck egg aioli, wild rice sorbet and Native granola bars, it will finally start getting its due.

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Published in: Los Angeles Times
By: Amy Scattergood