Voltaggio goes “home” in his latest cookbook

Brothers Bryan and Michael Voltaggio rocketed to fame by taking the top two places in season six of Top Chef, and Bryan also appeared on Top Chef Masters, becoming the first person to compete on both shows. The brothers collaborated on the cookbook VOLT ink.: Recipes, Stories, Brothers, which included recipes that featured exciting and novel flavor combinations.

Bryan is going solo with his a new cookbook, Home: Recipes to Cook with Family and Friends. Unlike the far-reaching recipes of VOLT ink. that may be more aspirational than practical, Voltaggio wants this cookbook to be used. “It’s not a coffee-table book. It’s not a collector’s piece. It’s a book you can cook from every day,” Voltaggio told the Baltimore Sun. “I want people to use it, get it dirty, make it part of their kitchen life.”

Voltaggio’s family provided inspiration for Home. He based the book on “meals that he cooks for his wife and three young children, as well as dishes for holidays and dinner parties.” While the food is family-friendly, this is not a health-food cookbook: Voltaggio embraces rich ingredients like cream and butter to create sophisticated comfort foods. You can expect recipes like the Christmas-morning casserole that Voltaggio created for Food & Wine Magazine (pictured above). Some of the book’s dishes, like the chicken pot pie fritters, might be familiar to fans of Voltaggio’s Baltimore-area restaurants.

While many of Home’s recipes are straightforward, a few are more challenging. To make grits, for example, you are expected “to prepare a Parmesan cheese stock – for an hour, in the pressure cooker – to boil them in.” Some of the recipes suggest using tools not all home cooks will have, like a food mill and meat grinder for the tomato gazpacho with a watermelon granita.

If you’re ready to get started, Home: Recipes to Cook with Family and Friends is available tomorrow in the US and in late May in the UK. It is already the #1 Best Seller in U.S. Regional Middle Atlantic Cooking on Amazon in the US.