Corndog | Boneyard

Cookbook Guide

This is an ever growing and evolving list, but there are a few books that have helped me grow and and reimagine the act of cooking in ways that I believe are as important as they are accessible.

Salt Fat Acid Heat is an elemental understanding of all kinds of food. It takes you around the world to see the pillars of flavor and through lines between different ingredients.

Books like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat help break down the essence of flavor to its core pillars, and from there allows you to think about every dish with that lens. Something you’re cooking tastes off. Too much fat? Add some acid. Too much salt? Add some spice.

Heartwood is great for the opposite reason. It takes you one place, the Yucatán. And it takes you to the town of Tulum, which until recently was way off the beaten track. By diving into the the ecology and history of the Yucatán it opens the door to a kind of food that people dream of and trying and

I went to Tulum a couple years before the Heartwood restaurant opened but got to see what that region of the world was like and experience the food 

On Vegetables 

Books like “On Vegetables” and “Heartwood” helped me reimagine the rustic, place-driven, and elemental aspects of cooking, as well as the principle of seasonality and how these things can complement the cooking.

Seasonality is a framework for approaching sourcing and shopping as a task to maximize flavor, sustainability and . We live in a global economy where you can buy produce from around the globe no matter the season, and yet the farmers market always seems to have the best produce. It’s not rocket science that the quest for convenience sacrificed quality, but most of us grew up under the regime of hyper-availability, so deprogramming that understanding takes time.