Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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52 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Greatly appreciated, August 31, 2008
I would like to take issue with the previous reviewer concerning the fact that the recipes are taken from previous magazines. I for one am delighted to have these excellent and thoroughly tested recipes and product reviews and commentary finaly assembled into a single well organized cookbook. I greatly value these recipes and use them often, but found it tedious to have to thumb through the magazine issues looking for ideas for cooking pork chops for example. All similar recipes are grouped together. If one uses the monthly magazines and then reads the book description and reviews (above), it should be obvious that the magazine recipes would appear in " Cook's Country's" first ever cookbook! Why wouldn't they? I would be dissapointed if I looked for my favorite recipes from the magazine in the cookbook and couldn't find them. Especially for tried and true classics.
For example, If the people at "Cook's Illustrated/ Cook's Country" test recipes for fried chicken and after much tweeking (as is their custom) offer up a recipe that is the "best recipe", I would expect to see that recipe in any of their cookbooks in which it would be pertinent. How many BEST recipes for a single dish can their be. I assume ONE. Therefore whether I reach for their "American Classics" volume or one of their more comprehensive cookbooks, I would expect to find THE best recipe for fried chicken in all of them, unless of course they've further developed that recipe.
I've repeatedly seen this kind of complaint , that they repeat recipes (as if this was a flaw or a rip off, which it's not) and/or they never add new recipes. Cook's Illustrated is constantly testing and publishing new recipes and sometimes updating older ones.
I've been an avid professional and home cook for about 40 years now and own thousands of cookbooks and nothing comes close to the cookbooks offered by "Cook's Illustrated'" (I own them all). I'm not alone in this opinion. Read the reviews for their other cookbooks.
I would highly recommend any thing they publish to any one who enjoys cooking and wants thoroughly tested, fool-proof, and delicious recipes with one caveat. Read the descriptions and reviews of the book(s) you intend to purchase and make certain it's something you want.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A classic comfort food cookbook, October 12, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
If you are searching for fancy-schmancy, this will not be the book for you. However, if you are looking for a cookbook that covers the basics of comfort cooking with good pictures of finished recipes and "how-to" pictures with text this is an excellent cookbook for the beginner and beyond.
America's Test kitchen goes through many variations of a recipe in order to get to the one that they believe is the best of the best, and that is what they bring to you in this book. I tried the beer bread and used the smoked gouda cheese variation (sans the bacon, but that would have been good too). The bread came out great and I liked the explanation before the recipe of some of the other variations that they tried before coming to the final recipe-why they suggest a lighter beer, how much butter they thought should be used and why it seemed to work better.
As you thumb through the book there are old favorites, chicken soup, macaroni and cheese, snickerdoodles, red velvet cake and regional cooking from the South etc.
I think this cookbook will make a great addition to my kitchen library that I will turn to again and again for their clear, concise instruction and reliable recipes.
This would be a nice cookbook for a beginner to have as many of the recipes are basic and the instruction on technique is very good.
It would also make a nice gift for a newlywed, along with some of the kitchen basics.
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65 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good recipes, terrible format and fonts... details, September 23, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
First, allow me to say what I particularly like about this cookbook. For background purposes, I'm a very experienced home cook so I have a good sense of what works in day-to-day cooking and what does not.
1. There are 500 "hybridized" popular recipes in here, most of which will interest the average home cook. It's a "generalized cookbook," a little of this, a little of that.
2. These recipes will yield a good-quality end product (but not necessarily "the best" -- more on this later).
3. These recipes are generally uncomplicated (good for newbies) and rarely call for exotic or hard-to-find ingredients. Most ingredient lists are fairly short and cooking/preparation times are equally brief.
Here are the technical details of the work: As I have mentioned, there are 500 recipes found in the 17 chapters. There is also a table of contents, an index, and a helpful two-page section on conversions. This cookbook is pretty hefty at 3 1/4 pounds (about the same as either of the two most recent hardcover translations of "War and Peace") and 598 pages -- the outside dimensions are 8 1/4" x 10 1/4".
Edited by Christopher Kimball, host of PBS's popular "America's Test Kitchen," Kimball states his credo, "We make the mistakes so you don't have to". It's relevant to note that on that excellent television program Kimball and his staff frequently engage in a form of consumer reports of various types of kitchen equipment and gadgetry. This is relevant because a cookbook is the most basic form of kitchen equipment and this one, unfortunately, fails the test simply because of its format.
Here are my three chief complaints and they are significant ones:
1. The fonts in this cookbook are so small that you have to squint to read the text! Experienced home chefs such as myself (I cook meals from scratch every day) view this incongruity as a big problem. Most of us own a device for holding cookbooks flat so that you can read the recipe while your hands are covered in gooey flour or chicken fat -- and the fonts need to be large enough to read easily as you hurry back and forth between the recipe and the range.
2. The fonts are so small because Kimball could not relent in giving us every detail of how his staff arrived at each of the finalized recipes. I checked closely and there are 13 recipes (e.g., "Classic Shrimp Cocktail" [p.22], "Gingerbread" [p. 196], "Salmon Cakes" [p. 381], etc.) which are precluded by an entire page of text about how the staff generated the final recipe! One really tires of all the redundant, "We tried..." and "We decided..." facets of this lugubrious text. Almost every recipe has at least a half-page of this nonsense. It would have made infinitely more sense to simply lay out "the process" at the outset of the work (which was, in fact, done) and leave it at that. Had they done so, there would have been plenty of space to radically increase the font size to a readable form.
3. My third issue is that the recipes get "split" from one page to the next. The best cookbooks display an entire recipe on a single page or, at least, on facing pages. When the cookbook is in the holder and your hands are covered with whatever you're cooking, it's a real pain to have to remove the book from the holder and turn the page to finish the recipe.
An organization which engages in consumer utility should have surely recognized these three critical shortcomings prior to publication. If my critiques seem a little harsh, I would point out that Kimball himself is even more assertive and much more blunt in his own critiques of many recipes (of other people) and of products which he reviews on his television program.
I have some smaller issues with this book as well. Kimball lauds his recipes as "the best" -- this is clearly not the case. In Kimball's world, "fast, easy, and tasty" appear to be his criteria for "the best". In my world, (as well as in the written opinions of people like the late, great James Beard, whom I have read extensively), the only criteria for this test is the dish which tastes better than all other recipes for similar dishes, regardless of cooking ease and/or lengthy ingredient lists. Obviously, "the best" is probably different for everyone and, at least, it's a very subjective measurement. And even though these recipes taste very good, they do not meet Kimball's ultimate boast in many cases.
For example, the "Simple Pizza Sauce" (p. 148) is indeed simple -- three ingredients. But I can assure anyone that this is far from the best pizza sauce that I've ever tasted. Their recipe for Waldorf Salad is good -- but mine is much better (not only my opinion). Their recipe for Cincinnati Chili will get by... but my own recipe (and those of my Cincy Chili fan peers) is by far superior to this one. And so on. And this leads me into my next point.
I was surprised to see Kimball take on regional/local recipes such as Cajun dishes and Cincinnati Chili in particular, keeping in mind that he implies that his recipes are "the best". People are very discriminating about their local dishes and one does not become a Cincy Chili expert overnight! I knew that Kimball's staff was off-base when they selected Empress Chili as their favorite, (from Empress Chili, Gold Star Chili, and Skyline Chili restaurants). Empress Chili is the LEAST popular of those three restaurants locally (in and around Cincinnati) and Kimball doesn't even mention the Dixie Chili chain, my personal preference of them all.
So what I'm saying is that it was notably presumptuous to assert that America's Test Kitchen has developed a superior Cincinnati Chili which features an astonishing 20-minute cooking time! Real, high-quality, Cincinnati Chili takes HOURS to prepare (my own recipe takes seven hours cooking time). I will give them credit for omitting chocolate from the recipe which has ruined more Cincy Chili than any other ingredient -- but while Christopher Kimball may think that his chili is tops, he would clearly be taken to task by those who have been savoring this dish for many years. I suspect that this very caveat may apply equally to his other featured regional dishes such as North Carolina Pulled Pork.
I also ran across a rather strange feature of this cookbook, albeit it's not especially a hateful one: in regard to chicken and chili recipes, respectively, they are found in different sections of the cookbook. In other words, there are chili recipes from pages 77-82 and more chili recipes from pages 418-423. I just thought this was odd organization and I could determine no plausible reason for it.
And finally, even though there are four "groupings" of color photos of a number of the dishes, they are not displayed alongside the recipes. So while the photos are nice if you're just flipping through the cookbook, they are not especially helpful in preparing the dishes.
Christopher Kimball obliquely compares his cookbook to such works as The Fannie Farmer cookbook, Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition - 2006, and James Beard's American Cookery. I must disappoint him by saying outright that, as an owner/user of these three fine works, Kimball is significantly outclassed.
In summary, if you're looking for good, solid recipes which are uncomplicated and pretty fast, this cookbook will probably work for you; however, there are other (if smaller) superior, comparable choices which are much less pricey such as: Mr. Food Cooks Like Mama.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
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by Editors of Cook's Country Magazine
by America's Test Kitchen
by Editors at America's Test Kitchen
