What even is a ‘conventional method’ today? We have more kitchen tool options than ever before, but at the same time, many folks are downsizing and decluttering. Do you melt chocolate in the microwave, or a double boiler (who under 50 even owns one?) or in a bowl over a pan of boiling water (the poor version of a double boiler or bain marie)? Do you purée a soup or sauce with a stick blender or a regular blender or food processor (either can be messy and potentially dangerous with a hot soup or sauce) or do you press it through successively finer sieves? Do you grind something in a coffee grinder or in your food processor or blender or mortar and pestle? I understand the frustration, but what’s a cookbook author to do? And how much should a cookbook author explain how to do something as opposed to just telling you what to do? I don’t know what the answer is, but I think that reading a cookbook you have to be prepared to have the author tell you how to do something you already know how to do, and to be left scratching your head and doing an internet search.
It does feel like there is room in the market for a pure technique and ingredient tome; a place where you can look up ALL the ways to melt chocolate or purée a sauce or what potatoes you can use to replace Yukon Golds. The Food Lab and The Professional Chef both fill this niche to a degree, but both suffer from inadequate indexes in that regard. As an example, The Professional Chef explains how to cut a mango, but you won’t find it in the index, it’s buried inside the section on fruit salads, so good luck finding it when you need it, even when you do remember which book it was in.