Customer Reviews

Best of the Best Vol. 10: The Best Recipes from the 25 Best Cookbooks of the Year (Best of the Best: Best Recipes from the 25 Best Cookbooks of the Year)

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Volume 10 is as good as its predecessors, if not better. As with the other volumes, this one covers the best 25 cookbooks of the year. They selected a rather nice mix of cookbooks from desserts to ethnic dishes, beginner to slightly advanced, and tv chefs to unknown authors.

Highlighted cookbooks include the Cake Book, Heirloom Baking with the Brass Sisters, the Essence of Chocolate, the Lee Bros. Southern Kitchen, Biba's Italy, Jamie's Italy, Giada's Family Dinners, the Food of France, New Greek Cuisine, the Food of Northern Spain, Lobel's Meat and Wine, the Good Home Cookbook, Barefoot Contessa at Home, How to Boil Water, Braise, the Red Cat Cookbook, A Ligurian Kitchen, On Top of Spaghetti, Stonewall Kitchen Favorites, Big Small Plates, Baja! Cooking on the Edge, the Kitchen Diaries, Spice, Sparks in the Kitchen, and Cucina of Le Marche.

Each selection includes a brief introduction; several recipes, with notes on how to find or prepare ingredients and other tips; an exclusive recipe from the author; and beautiful full-page color photos of the finished dish. Not all recipes include pictures, however.

This is a must-read for anyone who loves cookbooks. Once again, I will seek out a handful of the chosen cookbooks to add to my collection. My only complaint that there seemed to be too much ethnic food (featuring somewhat exotic ingredients that may be hard to track down). I would have liked to have seen a few more books on more mainstream "American" dishes (with less exotic ethnic ingredients) and perhaps another book on desserts.

I've alerted Amazon twice to the fact that the photo they posted of the cover is from Volume 9 but they still haven't fixed it. You can see the correct cover photo at the Food & Wine magazine website (http://www.foodandwine.com/books) but their price is significantly higher so come back to Amazon to order it.

I bought this as a Christmas gift for my mum, who only cooks four fork rated dished from epicurious.com. She loves this book, because all the searching for the best recipes has been done for you, and they give you a little info about the cookbook and people the recipe comes from. A great book to read through with nice photos and good personal tips, and the recipes tried so far have been great.

I really like the "Best of the Best" volumes. It's a great series and it gets better and better every year. The book offers a variety of recipes and contains lots of photos. I usually wait and purchase the books used the year following its original published date. It's a better deal.