The Beauty Chef: Delicious Food for Radiant Skin, Gut Health and Wellbeing

by Carla Oates

2018 James Beard Award Nominee

Beauty is more than skin-deep, it comes from within – from the gut, to be precise. Glamorous it may not be, but a well-balanced gut bacteria can be the answer to glowing health and beauty. In The Beauty Chef Carla Oates, founder of the natural beauty company of the same name, combines the joy of cooking with the science of nutrition, offering you glowing skin and optimum gut health.

Find more than 150 delicious and nutritious recipes that are gluten-free and mostly dairy-free to feed both your skin and your gut, alongside practical words of wisdom from the wellbeing authority, who has been researching, writing and teaching on organic beauty for the past 15 years. With The Beauty Chef , every meal you eat, be it breakfast, dinner or a tempting dessert, will leave you feeling and looking better inside and out.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Nonfiction

344 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2017

Reviews

[S · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have not tried the recipes yet, but there are 25 I have marked.

I love these modern life-style/cookbooks that are popular now - big, heavy, well-designed, hardbound tomes with great photos and personable intros... and so I have looked at a lot of them - and this is one of my favorites.

I like the focus on gut health (which I am willing to bet is the new way, and not just a passing fad), and that she is not all superior while communicating about all the good stuff in these foods and how they support your health. I hope in the future all cookbooks will ultimately feature this level of insight into what nutrients are in the recipes and how they benefit you. Not all the ingredients she espouses are common, but this book makes it sound good enough that I am willing to make a trip to Whole Foods! It just makes you want to eat good food.

I also liked that, even though she has a line of products, she was not constantly pushing them in every recipe and making you feel like you can't make this food without buying her formulas. That is such a turn-off.

If you liked this book, then you should definitely check out Food Pharmacy by Lina Aurell and Mia Clase (or the associated blog). And of course, if you can't find this book, you can check out the Beauty Chef blog (though I could not say if every recipe in the book is there).

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Beauty Chef cookbook is a big (334 page) beautiful book of “150 gluten-and dairy-free recipes for radiant skin, gut health and wellbeing”.

The Beauty Nutrients section chart of nutrients/why it’s good for you/where to find them from biotin through vitamins through enzymes alone make this a reference book I know I’ll be turning to often.

To get started, I do what I often do with new cookbooks and went right to the baking section. The Banana Buckwheat Loaf was answering the call of the very ripe bananas sitting on my counter. Sweetened with maple syrup, spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg and a nutty flavor from the buckwheat and almond flours, this was a banana bread that was complex in taste, moist, and designed to have a ‘low GI energy release’. In short, it was an excellent banana bread.

The recipes in the book range from Cauliflower and Oyster Soup to Peruvian-style Ceviche to Cashew Butter Chicken to Matcha and Black Tahini Caramel Ice-Cream Pops. From my reading, a lot of the recipes in the book do have long-ish ingredient lists, so I know that this isn’t a ‘get a meal on the table in thirty minutes' kind of book, but it is one I plan to regularly incorporate recipes from into my cooking.

Hardie Grant provided me with a copy of this cookbook; the opinions shared are my unbiased review.

[Deborah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautiful photos, with unrealistic recipes. I live in a pretty big city, but don't think I could find many of the ingredients, which makes this cookbook pretty useless for me. At least it contains some helpful info about healthy digestion & nutrients.

[LeiLei · Rating 2 out of 5]

I finished this book, and then promptly returned it. I did learn a few interesting health tips and scientific facts that I did not previously know. But, the recipes, however, healthy and virtuous they may be, were not things that I was ever going to actually prepare.

[Britt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a beautiful book to use and flip through! Stunning photos and delicious healthy recipes but as I don’t eat meat I took one star off as it would have been near perfection if it was vegan :)

[Doan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous cookbook. Recipes are good but quite complicated.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

beautiful visually but ingredient lists are hard to find and expensive, unrealistic in terms of time management

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gave this to my sister-in-law and niece.

[Juli Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Trendy as absolutely forgettable.

[Vanessa Ya Lopez · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought more for the photos then the recipes & I have yet to try any, though there are a handful that piqued my interest.