The Best 30-Minute Recipe (Hardcover)

by Cook's Illustrated Magazine (Author), John Burgoyne (Illustrator), Daniel J. Van Ackere (Photographer), Carl Tremblay (Photographer)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
300 Fast and Flavorful Recipes from America’s Most Trusted Test Kitchen

Tired of quick recipes that aren’t really quick or don’t taste very good? While some cookbooks promise 30-minute meals, America’s Test Kitchen delivers. The Best 30-Minute Recipe is packed with more than 300 great-tasting recipes, along with time-saving techniques that will help you become more efficient in the kitchen. You’ll also find honest evaluations of ingredients important to quick cooking, such as chicken broth, preshredded cheese, instant rice, and more. And because the type of equipment you use is important to the success of any recipe—made in 30 minutes or not—we tell you which brands are worth buying.

The Best 30-Minute Recipe features a surprisingly wide range of recipes. You get not only the very best versions of naturally quick dishes like salads and stir-fries, but also quick and easy recipes for typically long-cooking dishes that you’d never even think of making on a weeknight—including meatloaf, lasagna, beef pot pie, and a pad thai so easy that you may never call for takeout again. With efficiency and good taste, The Best 30-Minute Recipe is the time-pressed cook’s guide to getting dinner on the table, night after night.

From the Inside Flap
Most quick recipes deliver speed but not flavor. They often rely on silly shortcuts (no, you can’t stuff bell peppers with raw ground beef and onions) and second-rate convenience -products (think canned soup). No wonder most "quick" recipes are fast but forgettable. In The Best 30-Minute Recipe, America’s Test Kitchen turns its crew of test cooks loose on the world of quick cooking in an effort to find flavor, not just convenience.

Many dishes are naturally quick—stir-fries, hearty salads, skillet sautés, and simple pasta dishes—but they also need to be full-flavored and foolproof. We have streamlined these -dishes, subtracting an ingredient or shortcutting a cooking method, to make them memorable and dependable.

But some recipes seem impossible to make in a mere 30 minutes. How about a richly flavored chicken stew that typically takes more than an hour at best? Parcook chicken thighs in the microwave to jump start the cooking. Meatloaf? Downsize one large meatloaf into four individual servings and brown them in a skillet. Baked ziti? Make the entire dish in a skillet, where the pasta cooks in a richly seasoned tomato sauce instead of a big pot of boiling water. And forget about second-rate supermarket shortcuts. Once you try our Quick and Crunchy Breaded Pork Chops, you’ll never be tempted by a store-bought breading mix again. Our recipe has all the convenience of the shake-and-bake version, but it tastes worlds better.

We also discovered that many "quick" recipes fail to include prep times. In The Best 30-Minute Recipe, every test cook used a timer to be sure every recipe really can be prepared, cooked, and on the table in 30 minutes or less. And if a recipe was cutting it close, we looked for acceptable shortcuts. When we couldn’t make a creamy chicken and rice casserole in 30 minutes, we turned to instant rice (sautéed in butter to improve the rice’s texture and flavor) with excellent results.

Special features include "Got Extra Time?" which provides suggestions and recipe alterations that will make a good dish even better if you have a few extra minutes to spend in the kitchen. Other features like "Making the Minutes Count" and "Kitchen Shortcuts" help you prep and cook more efficiently, -giving you skills you can use for a lifetime of cooking.

Organized around the most logical ways to think about quick cooking, The Best 30-Minute Recipe will lead you right to the type of dish you feel like making. Want to make an entire meal in a skillet? Turn to "Skillet Suppers" for dishes like -Skillet Steak Fajitas and Skillet Paella. Feel like preparing a simple, flavorful sauce while your pasta boils? Choose from dozens of options in "While the Pasta Cooks." You can also check out "Skillet Pasta," recipes that cook the pasta right in the -skillet with the sauce, saving you time and leaving you with just one pot to wash. -Another chapter, "Starting with Leftovers," offers -appealing ideas for turning last night’s dinner into a -completely new meal, such as Asian Spicy Noodles with Beef and Spinach or Curry in a Hurry.

The test kitchen also evaluated dozens of popular -convenience foods important to quick cooking, from ready-to-use minced garlic and jarred tomato sauce to preshredded cheese, precooked bacon, and more. If a product didn’t make the cut, you won’t find it in our recipes.

Put disappointing quick recipes behind you. The Best 30-Minute Recipe will help you get dinner on the table -quickly—a dinner that you can really enjoy! Fast food isn’t good food -unless you use just the right ingredients and the right combination of techniques. So don’t sacrifice flavor. Don’t sacrifice the pleasures of the table. Let America’s most trusted test kitchen show you how to cook both quickly and well. With The Best 30-Minute Recipe, satisfying, home-cooked meals really are just minutes away.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 278 pages
• Publisher: America's Test Kitchen; 1st edition (September 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0936184981
• ISBN-13: 978-0936184982
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #10,170 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

210 of 212 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great as a standalone cookbook, problematic for anyone with other ATK material, February 4, 2007

By	Lemon Magic (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews

If this is your first cookbook from the ATK/Cook's Illustrated crew, I can almost guarantee you will be very happy with it. It's a very thorough and accessible approach to some cracking good recipes. The prose style is entertaining and informative and helps a less experienced cook get some insight into the tastes and textures that make a "good" recipe.

But if you want to learn more or get further into the style, you may find that you get less geniunely new material with each subsequent purchase. While any one of their books is very much worth having, they tend to endlessly repackage and reissue their recipes in various formats. That's a little problematic for someone who is a fan of the ATK approach, but also is in no way a collector of cook books. If a cook book has 3 or 4 recipes that I haven't seen before and genuinely want to try, I'll be satisfied, and each new ATK issue just barely satisfies that criterion. But the relatively high cost of acquiring these new recipes along with the 5th iteration of, say, mashed potatoes, Chicken Parmesan and skillet tamale pie, may irritate and exasperate some buyers.

One reviewer called these folks "A cottage industry gone amok". That has some truth to it, but it may be a little harsh. A more sympathetic reframing might be that they are simply trying to package their recipes in convenient ways so as to meet the demands of a particular segment of the cookbook market: "Best Recipe" vs "America's Test Kitchen companion series" vs "Cook's Illustrated compilation". And "Quick Meals" vs "Light Meals" vs "Vegetables" and "Soups and Stews". But at some point, the typical cook will probably decide that he or she is being rather cynically exploited by some shrewd entrepeneurs determined to squeeze every possible cent out of about 350 really good recipes, supplemented with some helpful product reviews. I haven't reached that point yet, but I may soon.

So in summary: excellent cookbook, but docked a star for my purposes because I am paying "all new recipe" prices for a "20% (or less)new material" format.

58 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Great Cookbook By Cook's Illustrated!, April 21, 2007

By	Renee Gleason (New York) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is my eighth book in my Cook's Illustrated (CI) collection and I have really enjoyed it. While it is true that many of CI's cookbooks are packed with repeat and/or repackaged recipes as other reviewers have pointed out, this book stands out from the pack in that it offers techniques in streamlining recipes so that you can get a delicious meal on the table in 30 minutes or less. And yes, every recipe I have tried has lived up to that promise (unlike other famed 30 minute cookbooks!). For people familiar with CI, this is quite a change in pace. My only real complaint with other CI books has been that the recipes can be involved and time consuming and leave your kitchen looking like a disaster area when you're finished. The good people at America's Test Kitchen didn't seem to be aware with how much kitchen equipment they had you dirtying with their recipes! This hardly made CI recipes very appealing on those weekdays when you needed a fast and easy meal on the table. This book changes all that! I can finally have delicious CI recipes even on high-stress, fast-paced days!

It is clear that CI had two very distinct goals when they put this book together...(1)every meal truly must take the average home cook 30 minutes or less to prepare, and (2)every meal must taste great. While this may sound like a given, most other 30 minute/quick meal books do not always deliver on those counts. Not only do they usually take the average cook WAY longer to prepare (do they even take prep time into consideration when they are putting together the recipes?) but even more importantly, all too often the shortcuts they take compromise the overall quality of the dishes, leaving them flat and unexciting. This is not so with CI's 30 Minute Recipe. They truly have found ways to shave time and effort off of so many of their recipes without compromising the overall flavor. How exciting to be able to deliver delicious meals even on the most stressed days! I do also love the "Got Extra Time" feature that some of the recipes come with, which gives you the option of making the meals even better if you have a few extra minutes (like using long grain rice instead of instant or adding a few other components to enhance the overall flavor) but the recipes as written are still perfectly delicious on their own. It's just nice to have that option on days that you have a little extra time to put into the recipes.

While the techniques are different than other CI cookbooks, you can still count on all the features that you come to expect from America's Test Kitchen...the product and equipment ratings, illustrations of techniques, quick tips, and detailed explanations as to how they arrived at their recipes can all be found in this book as well. Even the most seasoned CI veteran can still feel comfortable with this book--the techniques may be different but the governing principles of CI are still front and center!

In short, I love this cookbook! While I'm an avid cook and very often enjoy spending extra time in the kitchen putting together delicious and in-depth meals for my family and friends, even I need a quick, low-maintenance meal from time to time. Thanks to CI, I now have techniques to streamline my cooking processes while still delivering fabulous meals!

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulously fast fantastic food!, March 25, 2007

By	Amy Y. "Tell me, what is it you plan to do wi... (FREMONT, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

I love all my cookbooks from the Cook's Illustrated line. This one is great, too! The recipes truly are doable in under 30 minutes. And when they say 30 minutes, they mean thirty minutes from start to finish- NOT 30 minutes of prep time and another hour of cooking!

My family loves the teriyaki recipes! I've never had better teriyaki- fast, light and fresh. We also have made some of the braised chicken dishes and they were very good.

This book is in a similar format to many of their others: there is a discussion of ingredients and methods leading up to the recipe and then usually several variations on the actual recipe itself. I like this because it allows for some flexibility if you don;t have certain ingredients on hand. This cookbook gives tips for how to prepare the recipes in the most efficient manner (for example, it says "While meat is browning, chop the onions"). I usually find that when I've cooked a recipe several times, I'm much faster at it becase I figure out what steps to do in what order- these 'quick tips' help me get there sooner.

The resulting food is fab! This cookbok isn't just for rushed weeknight dinners, the recipes are good enough to warrant including in your regular repetoire of things to prepare for guests and special occasions. Quick doesn't have to mean lower quality, the folk from Cook's Illustrated have proven that here with this book!