Product Description

Gino D'Acampo is passionate about Italian food. He is equally passionate about how to cook, but also believes that you don't need hundreds of ingredients and complicated haute cuisine techniques to achieve fantastic food. His maxim is minimum effort, maximum food, and if you cook the 100 recipes in his book, following his tips, NOT breaking his 10 rules - such as not mixing onion and garlic - and joining in his enthusiasm and humour, you will soon learn how to make great Italian food. This is a cookbook filled with modern Italian food, infused with Gino's style and encompassing the myriad influences that have pervaded the country's cuisine.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7419 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

About the Author
Gino D'Acampo was born in southern Italy, inheriting his grandfather's love of cooking. He has worked his way through the kitchens of Europe, arriving in England in 1995 and is now the owner of a leading supplier of Italian ingredients to the UK. Gino is also a popular chef on TV shows including Saturday Cooks, Daily Cooks, Good Food Live and Ready Steady Cook. This is his first book.

Customer Reviews

Hit & Miss
Of all the cookery books I've owned, this is possibly the most used so far. This is probably down to some very nice, simple recipes which are in it such as the smoked salmon with peas & pasta bows (we like that one a lot) & the chicken with marsala & dill sauce (I cooked that for my gf & she loved it).

Admittedly there has been a hiccup in the form of the chicken with pizza sauce recipe which my gf made her parents one time, it was a huge disaster & tasted like chicken in chopped tomatoes & nothing else, plus the chicken took much more time to cook than it was said which was a problem as she had limited time. Also I have to agree with another reviewer on Gino's rules, we cook together sometimes & we have fun doing it so sorry Gino for wanting to have fun cooking.

It's a book I like a lot so I'd give it an 8 out of 10, I noticed Gino has another book out around this time so I think I will be getting that too in the near future.

Fantastico!
Gino's book demonstrates how simple it is to produce excellent italian cooking very easily. All the ingredients are easy to get and use. It's good to see that he doesn't just focus on the traditional pasta dishes, but brings a wide variety of mediteranean flavour to your kitchen. I particularly love his endorsemment of tinned tuna & salmon - no filleting or gutting. Great and easy to use with flavoursome recipes. Fantastico!!!

Good recipes but strange rules
I bought the book because it looked very interesting and I particularly like Italian cuisine. When it arrived, I found that it actually contained good recipes, but that D'Acampo claims you've got to follow some quite strange rules to produce good food. While I personally would go along with his rule number five ("Concentrate on the flavour of the dish not on what it looks like") every day, I can only shake my head when I read stuff like "Cook alone. Communal cooking spoils the flavour" (Where's the fun in that? And I produced some of the most brilliant results I ever had when I was not cooking alone!) or "Never cook onion and garlic together". Apparently onions and garlic have such great flavours that they will simply spoil the taste of one another. So he claims that none of his dishes contain both, which isn't actually true as I found out while reading the book. Still, if you're looking for some nice italian recipes, you'll probably like the book. Mind though, that this is the American version but it has got a conversion table at the end of the book - pretty helpful.