Customer Reviews

Kitchen Answer Book: 5,000 Answers to All of Your Kitchen and Cooking Questions (Capital Ideas)

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I found this book while desperately searching for something to save me from causing my 25 family members at a reunion to be ill. As a cooking novice, I was looking for a simple guide that would not give me recipes, but would tell me how to do the things in a recipe, like browning meat and creating a soup broth.

Boy, did this book save my life. It had the answer to every question I had - and I had many. Because of The Kitchen Answer Book, I came off looking like a cooking pro, instead of the cooking dunce that I am. This book is very interesting as well because it tells you how to maintain your utensils and tools and gives you the history behind food.

My family went away well fed and not poisoned. Thank God for Hank Rubin and his wonderful book!

No home cook can know everything about food and I, like many home cooks, constantly look for ways to broaden my knowledge and increase my skills. Hank Rubin packs a lot into this book by his economical use of language in covering broadly and deeply common and less common ingredients.

Perhaps the strongest recommendation I can give this book is that, after years of preparing mediocre to flat out terrible pot roast, Rubin has given me the knowledge to be a pot roast QUEEN. I thank him, my family thanks him, our guests... You get the drift.

In addition to cooking methods, you'll find useful tricks such as a simple way of improving the flavor of canned shrimp -- before you open the can! There is interesting and, frankly, compelling information about the nutritional value of quinoa, compelling because the information is contrasted to values of other foods. The information about cheese, including a recommendation about the best place in the fridge to store it, has also been helpful. But there are too many hints and useful bits to describe. For me, this book's utility in my kitchen is right behind that of my favorite wooden spoon's.

Here's another kitchen answer 'bible' which also excels in an organization lending to speedy referencing: The Kitchen Answerbook: Answers To All Of Your Kitchen And Cooking Questions. Hank Rubin has several decades of experience as an executive chef, restaurant owner and food writer: it's these years of experience which lend to basic answers to common cook's problems; from how to tell if a melon is ripe to what kinds of woods are good for smoking meats, and how to quickly thaw a chicken. An organization by type of food - eggs, dairy, seafood, poultry - makes these answers easy to uncover in a crisis.

I bought this book without really taking a good look at it. While it's a great book for a quick reference or just out of curiousity, if you are looking for something a little more in depth I would suggest "Cookwise" by Shirley Corriher, or "I'm just here for the food" by Alton Brown.