Customer Reviews

Perfect Vegetables: Part of "The Best Recipe" Series

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I love Cook's Illustrated. I subscribe to their magazine, I subscribe to their website and I own several of their cookbooks. Very rarely have they ever steered me wrong with any of their recipes and tips. This is one book that I was disappointed with, however---not because the recipes aren't great or the layout of the book isn't up to par, but because many of these recipes can be found in their comprehensive cookbook "The New Best Recipe" (a great book, btw. It has just about everything you could ever need). There are only a few different recipes in Perfect Vegetables that cannot be found in the New Best, and the money I spent to get a handful of new veggie recipes was not worth it, in my opinion. If you already own the New Best, than I would be very hesitant to spend any money on this book. I would physically look through the book at a bookstore before buying to see if this is something you would really like to own. If you don't own New Best and are looking for a wonderful veggies cookbook, than this one is for you!

Thus far, I've made several recipes from this book and everything has turned out delicious! I've found it very helpful to use in planning side dishes for dinner parties or for dinner in general. Even if you don't follow the recipe exactly -- like improvising based on the ingredients you have on hand -- they provide enough variations for you to find something you can work with. Because the recipes are arranged alphabetically by vegetable used, it's very easy to browse and find exactly the recipe that sounds best to you. And, it's a great reference for ideas. Roasted Baby Carrots and Sugar Snap Peas with Garlic and Toasted Nuts were both fantastic.

Although we are not vegetarians, we, and our friends love fresh vegetables. This is the most comprehensive compilation of vegetable recipes we've seen, and an asset to anyone's cookbook collection. We have tried at least a dozen recipes, and we have made some of them more than once. Each one works just as described, and the additional information on why the particular method was chosen as the best is very useful. This is a winner!

THIS COOKBOOK IS FANATASTIC!! I don't like cauliflower but I followed a recipe and it turned out fabulous. My husband doesn't like as asparagus and he ate up the roasted asparagus with roasted red pepper vinagerette.
This cookbook makes you like vegetables. It never leaves my kitchen, I cook with it almost everyday.
They perform hundreds of trials in a test kitchen to develop the best way to make, say, glazed carrots. The goal is a tasty dish with the fewest amount of dishes possible.
For the best spinach salad with hot bacon dressing, or the best green beans you must get this cookbook!

Vegetables have always been the Rodney Dangerfield of food: they never get any respect. They are variously beaten, cooked, stewed, molded, mashed, seasoned, sauced, and pureed to death, sometimes more than once in the same recipe. This behavior even includes places that you expect would have more respect for our botanical friends: Indian/Hindu/vegetarian, Oriental/Buddhist/vegetarian, California/vegan. The cookbook aisles are littered with the carnage of bad vegetable recipes. Properly cooking vegetables is neither easy nor fast. Correctly done, the vegetable portion of your meal often takes MORE time and/or effort than, say, the protein centerpiece of your meal.

This book qualifies as a genuine vegetable encyclopedia that you can rely on for accurate information and proper cooking methods. You get 44 vegetables. Each and every one gets several pages and a thorough treatment, including recommended prep methods and recipes. Typically, each vegetable gets a half dozen or so pages (beets and okra get 2 pages, potatoes 50). This book is an alphabetical encyclopedia of the proper way to prep and cook vegetables. It was a real joy to finally see vegetables given the respect they deserve. Be mindful, however, that this means that cooking your vegetables are no longer quick, easy, and simple.

Their prep methods for artichoke and asparagus are very good, but causes you to throw away some edible parts. Do you know the best way to ripen avocados? This and much more about vegetables will be revealed to you. Can you cook a brussel sprout that people will actually eat? Do you have to cut an "x" in the base? Did you know that there are a couple of frozen vegetables that actually pass muster with the authors? The vegetables chosen are all the standard, usual ones you will find in any supermarket. The authors have the integrity to avoid special, rare, hard to find vegetables that might be fabulous, but impossible to get unless you are a celebrity super-chef in Manhattan. A properly prepared vegetable, although just a side-dish, should be good enough, with a glass of wine, to serve as a light supper all by itself. Are the vegetables you typically prepare at home this good? I was rather surprised that squash (winter and summer) got short-shrift in this book. They are so cheap, so plentiful, so easy to get, and so good, why not devote more attention to them? The only answer I can imagine is that the staff of CI are not very fond of squash, regardless of season.

This is a truly brilliant cookbook, but I knock it down a notch for the poorly thought out format. It is designed just like their periodical, Cooks Illustrated. The format might be suitable for a magazine, but it is a serious mistake for a book designed to be a ready reference for the home cook's bookshelf.
1) Problem #1 - Side Bar Mania. Kitchen tool reviews and taste tests are randomly scattered throughout the test. They are listed in the index under `equipment' and `ingredients' respectively, right where the home cook is likely to forget that they even exist in the book. These should be collated right in front along with the TOC.
2) Problem #2 - Where are the `master recipes'? This book uses a concept they call `master recipe' for the main prep/cooking method for a vegetable plus the variations. The TOC only lists the vegetable. This might be OK for a chapter that has only one master recipe, but is a major flaw for chapters that has 15 such `master recipes'. Each and every master recipe should be listed in the TOC. As is, this book is only marginally useful as a reference.
3) Problem #3 - More Side Bar Mania. Important information about the particular vegetable tends to be buried in each chapter. In potatoes, for example, important information about their storage (and that the frig is OK for them) is buried 4/5 of the way through potato chapter in the middle of a section about French potato salads, where you will never find it unless you read the entire chapter. How is this suppose to help the home cook?
4) Problem #4 - OK, now I am just picking nits. The photographs are out of focus and kind of irritating to look at. How could a food stylist permit this to happen? OK, one baby bok choy is in focus, but the other 3 are blurry; and this flaw is true of all except one (grilled corn) of the color photos.

My goodness, they cover almost every vegetable from A-Z and even sometimes tell you which cookware they tested to be the better out of the rest - such as V-slicers, potato mashers, salad spinners...even balsamic vinegar.

A well written, detailed book wherein each chapter brings a new vegetable and great ideas. I was primarily looking to make vegetables play a more central and creative role in my cooking, and this book has been the answer. You'll be carmelizing onions and braising endive in no time.

This is a must have for any home cook. The recipes actually make vegetable taste good. You will no longer fear Kale or Brussel Sprouts after making these recipes. Whether you are a vegetarian or just want to cook side dishes. This book is extremely easy to use and as with all Christopher Kimball books, the recipes are tried and true. Our book is so worn because we use it every night.

This book is a must read (and must have) for anyone who sees vegetables as more than multi-colored decoration on a plate

I feel everyone else has said many of the same things I would say. If you have a child going into college, buy them this book. If you have friends getting married, buy them this book. If you hated your mom's mushy vegetables, buy this book! I have never made a recipe in this book that I didn't love. Even friends who don't like veggies, love when I prepare them this way.