Best known as the host of Tasty’s irresistibly quirky video series “Chef Out of Water,” with viral hits like “Can This Chef Make A 3-Course Meal In A Coffee Maker?” and “Can This Chef Make A 3-Course Meal With Power Tools?” Alexis deBoschnek is set to release her first cookbook, To the Last Bite (Simon & Schuster), on April 19.
Despite gaining fame turning out unlikely meals with improbable equipment, deBoschnek, who lives in the Catskills, was classically trained at the International Culinary Center in Manhattan and worked for years as a recipe tester. Her forthcoming cookbook promises recipes that let you take advantage of the full kitchen and pantry. Written for home chefs of every skill level, To the Last Bite includes 100 recipes, broken into approachable, self-explanatory categories like “Snacks and Spreads,” “Vegetables,” and “Pasta, Beans, and Grains.”
The “Chef Out of Water” series was born out of the idea that a good chef can make a meal with whatever ingredients and equipment is on hand, and some of this MacGyver resourcefulness is definitely still at play in To the Last Bite. DeBoschnek sets out to teach her readers not only how to use each part of an ingredient but also how to repurpose any leftover bits and bobs.
Each recipe includes a postscript recommending other recipes in the book that take advantage of leftover ingredients. The tomato and caramelized onion galette recipe suggests using any excess dough to make cheesy pie dough crackers. Leftover thousand island dressing from the smash burger can be used in the poached shrimp dish, which in turn leaves shrimp shells can be used to prepare a seafood stock. And so the cookbook goes, a recursive loop of leftovers.
Beyond just a collection of recipes, To the Last Bite is in the increasingly popular genre of lifestyle cookbook. In the “Return of the Victory Garden” chapter, deBoschnek shares everything she learned from her mother about veggie gardening, from how to start a kitchen garden to how to tell when vegetables are ripe for picking and how to compost your kitchen scraps back into the garden’s soil. The final chapter, “To the Last Bite: Stocks, Quick Pickles, Syrups, and More” offers flexible and versatile recipes on how to transform leftover scraps into other pantry staples and flavor boosters for future dishes and drinks.
In this way, the cookbook paints a picture of a lifestyle that is in touch with the land, that minimizes waste, and, chiefly, that sees food not as a static centerpiece, but as part of a cycle that goes from soil back to soil.
To the Last Bite will be released on April 19 and is available for preorder on a range of platforms.
