The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen

October 2, 2017
Sherman introduces readers to the healthy food of the Dakota and Minnesota territories, with surprising and tasty results. Sherman grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and later started a Minneapolis catering company called the Sioux Chef, which focuses on Native American cuisine and serves as the inspiration for this delightful cookbook. Recipes include wild-rice cakes, white-bean and winter-squash soup, rabbit braised with apples and mint, and a simple sweet-corn sorbet. Ingredients are all indigenous to North America and are easily sourced, and Sherman’s instructions are clear and to the point. One dish commonly associated with Native Americans—fry bread—is omitted by design (Sherman notes that the dish came about “150 years ago when the U.S. government forced our ancestors from the homelands”). Interestingly, none of his recipes call for flour or sugar (maple syrup is his sweetener of choice). This is an illuminating guide to Native American food that will enthrall home cooks and food historians alike.

January 1, 2018

Oglala Lakota chef Sherman is the founder of the Sioux Chef (sioux-chef.com), a Minneapolis-based business committed to revitalizing Native American cuisine and food culture. Writing with noted cookbook author Dooley (Savory Sweet), the author interweaves recipes, menus, and personal stories with the research that has informed his vision of the modern indigenous kitchen. Many recipes are simple, including old-fashioned cornmeal mush with poached eggs, sage and rose-hip roasted duck, and hazelnut maple sorbet. The more complex recipes are not so much technically challenging as time-consuming, requiring readers to pre-prepare stocks, sauces, flours, rendered fats, or other components. As a result of Sherman's emphasis on authentic ingredients and the precolonial diet, the recipes are wheat-, dairy-, and sugar-free. VERDICT Readers willing to venture beyond the bounds of convenience cooking can learn much from this thoughtful title. Highly recommended for food history collections.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2017
Few Americans have a sound grasp of what constitutes genuine Native American cooking, yet a host of culinary gifts from Native Americans can be found in kitchens across the country and beyond: corn, wild rice, and maple syrup, to name only a few of the best known. Oglala Lakota chef Sherman has set out to educate the U.S. about its indigenous fruits and vegetables. Starting from his base in the northern Midwest and Great Plains and extending into Navajo lands, he ably demonstrates just how tasty and sophisticated the produce of the nation's heartland can be. With the current trend in the world's finest and most expensive restaurants to present novel flavors from locally foraged foods, Sherman appears less a culinary historian than an avant-garde chef. He succeeds in making authentic Native American cuisine approachable for the home cook. Menus based on lunar seasons encourage his readers to open up to new eating and celebrating opportunities.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)