Eat with Your Hands

Book excerpt: From Zakary Pelaccio, founder and owner of Fatty Crab and Fatty 'Cue, comes a gorgeous, groundbreaking cookbook of Southeast Asian—inspired, French— and Italian—inflected food that celebrates getting your hands dirty in—and out of—the kitchen. Eat with Your Hands takes readers on a tour of the outrageously flavorful and wholly original food that has made Pelaccio a star, in a cookbook that's as irreverent, high-spirited, and deeply iconoclastic as the chef himself. Combining a punk rock ethos with a commitment to producing exquisitely imagined and executed food, Eat with Your Hands brings together Pelaccio's eclectic influences in wildly inventive recipes that showcase his innovative blending of Asian flavors, sustainable local ingredients, and American gusto. Full of highly opinionated suggestions for both what to drink and what to listen to in the kitchen, paeans to the joys of the mortar and pestle and fermented condiments, charming sidebars on kitchen techniques, and an unbridled love for real food, Eat with Your Hands is a celebration of no-holds-barred cooking from a chef who is redefining the American culinary landscape.