The Best Recipe [Hardcover]

Editors of Cook's Illustrated Magazine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 1999

Founded in 1980, Cook's Illustrated (formerly Cook's Magazine) has emerged as "America's Test Kitchen," renowned for its near-obsessive dedication to finding the best methods of American home cooking. Over the years, we've tested 80 recipes for chocolate chip cookies, more than 70 recipes for gumbo, 40 versions of the peanut butter cookie, and more than 20 versions of such simple recipes as coleslaw, roast chicken, and hash brown potatoes. The Best Recipe is a collection of the editors' picks from the pages of Cook's Illustrated. The recipes have been edited, organized, and annotated with in-depth descriptions of how we developed the "best" recipe. And they appear alongside dozens of equipment ratings and taste tests of supermarket foods, as well as more than 200 illustrations demonstrating the most efficient food preparation methods.

In The Best Recipe, we invite you into our test kitchen, where you will stand at our elbow as we try to develop the best macaroni and cheese or the best split pea soup. You'll discover how to make a foolproof yellow cake, a perfectly cooked prime rib roast, and homemade bread in under two hours. You'll find out how to solve the problem of watery coleslaw, overcooked turkey breast, acidic salad dressing, dull tomato sauce, sticky white rice, dry turkey burgers, tough scrambled eggs, and sunken birthday cakes. You will also find the secret to bakery-style high-rise muffins and the way to make that restaurant favorite, warm, fallen chocolate cake, at home, with only a few minutes of preparation.

The Best Recipe also gives you useful tips on purchasing cookware (based on extensive test kitchen evaluations), including pie plates, food processors, standing mixers, chef's knives, skillets, vegetable peelers, and Dutch ovens. We also explain the science of cooking (how to cream butter and why, how baking powder works, the difference between semisweet and bittersweet chocolate) and offer tips on purchasing canned chicken stock, canned tomatoes, flour, butter, and dried pasta.

The editors of Cook's Illustrated have performed thousands of hours of kitchen testing to bring you a cookbook that not only provides the best recipes but also tells you how they came to be that way. Let The Best Recipe become your one-stop cooking school and your favorite kitchen reference.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Consider this a companion to 'The Joy of Cooking,' with recipes that run from the basic to creatively unusual. Sidebars on storage and equipment, step-by-step illustrations on more difficult techniques and taste-test results done in the Cook's Illustrated kitchen--it's all here. The information is exact and even scientific, but reader-friendly. For those who want good recipes that work and also want to expand their knowledge of how and why things work, this is a fascinating book. (The Black and White Chocolate Chip Cookies with Pecans tested in The Times kitchen may actually be the best chocolate-chip cookies ever.)" -- The Seattle Times, December 8, 1999

"The folks at Cook's Illustrated magazine have compiled a fine collection of recipes that have been tested not once, not twice, but many more times, to find the absolutely best version....This is a great choice for cooks who want to know the 'whys' of cooking: why you should roast beef at a low temperature, why you should use high heat for eggs, and so forth." -- The New York Daily News, December 8, 1999

"This gastronomic classic belongs on every serious cook's shelf." -- The Christian Science Monitor, December 8, 1999

"This is the perfectionist's 'Joy of Cooking.'" -- The Amherst Bulletin, November 26, 1999

"[T]he more than 700 recipes compiled within The Best Recipe represent a range of culinary strains from a Southern Baked Country Ham to Italian Shrimp Scampi to a Middle Eastern Tabbouleh and French inspired Chilled Lemon Souffle. You'll find basic staples as well as more esoteric ones, dishes that regardless of their pedigree represent how we eat today or better yet the foods we crave these days. The Best Recipe is without question one of the best cookery books published this year and is the book I'll be giving to my foodie friends this holiday season." -- The Houston Chronicle, November 2, 1999

Product Details

• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Boston Common Pr; 1st edition (September 10, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0936184388
• ISBN-13: 978-0936184388
• Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 8.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (212 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #202,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

219 of 224 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The One Cookbook Anyone Who Loves to Cook Needs, August 13, 2001

By 

Josh Peckler - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Best Recipe (Hardcover)

I've been buying cookbooks for decades. I'll buy cookbooks for just one recipe I'm dying to learn. The funny thing is, I'm really not that good of a cook, but I love working in the kitchen.

This cookbook just blows me away. Just like the Cooks International PBS television series, it explains the why of cooking. Lasagne without ricotta? Beef marinade without acid? How could that be? The explanations are there, and they make total sense.

I sit in my bedroom reading this book at night. I read about the things I already know how to make, looking for the subtle ideas to make them perfect. It's really not a cookbook even though it's got hundreds of recipes. It's more a book about cooking, and it's got me more inspired than all of the scores of books I've bought before.

I'll give these guys the best compliment I can think of: I wish I had written it.

130 of 132 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tradition + Research + Science, June 20, 2000

By 

David Wihowski (Milwaukee, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Best Recipe (Hardcover)

This book makes substantial claims in its title. But the authors have a reason for their claims. This is not a book of recipes from one person's (subjective) viewpoint. Almost all the recipes were "arrived at" by a common process. 1. Collect various, diverse and classic recipes for a given dish. 2. Prepare the various recipes. 3. Test the results (usually results are tested by a substantial panel) 4. If applicable, consult food scientists regarding certain chemical or physical reactions or properties. 5. Produce a recipe which combines everything learned from the process. The result is a recipe which tastes best to most people.

What also results are several benefits to the cook: 1) The recipes are often steamlined (if a traditional or classic technique does not produce flavor it is jettisoned). 2) The recipes usually revolve around a core technique that can be applied to other dishes in a cook's repertoire. 3) If the cook takes time to read all the work done by the editors he will be able to avoid many "mistakes" in his own experimenting.

As to the reviewer's comment about so many meat+salt+pepper recipes, I believe he missed 2 things: 1) nearly all the recipes of that nature have significant seasoning/ingredient variations after the basic recipe, 2) the point of these recipes was the TECHNIQUE. When I was a neophyte "gourmet" I liked long recipes with complex techniques. Now that I'm older (and wiser) I can ALSO appreciate plain chicken or beef which truly have been well-cooked. But this book also gives you variety as well--there are Italian, Mexican, French, Asian, etc. flavors here along with the American standards.

Having tried very many of these recipes I agree that they are usually "best". My family and friends also agree. The chicken brining technique and the hard-boiled egg recipe have become absolute in my own cooking. In the short time I have owned it, this book has seen more use than many of my old favorites because the results are so reliably "the best."

105 of 110 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Keep this one on the kitchen counter!, November 23, 1999

By 

E. Chan (Menlo Park, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Best Recipe (Hardcover)

I'm an avid reader of Cooks Illustrated and several other cooking magazines. The Best Recipe now sits on my kitchen counter as the main cookbook and resource for most of our home cooked meals. Much of the research has been featured in past issues of the magazine, and deliver all the answers to why so many other recipes fail - and why this one, the "best" one, will succeed. I've cooked a lot of these recipes in the last couple of weeks and many throughout the years as a subscriber to Cooks Illustrated Magazine. Some people say there's no such thing as a "sure thing" but if there is, I think you'll find it in this book.