Even if you're a beginning cook, this book will help you perfect your skills.
If your attempts at culinary genius have been scarred with gloopy pasta dishes, fallen soufflés and molar-breaking brownies, you’ve probably converted your oven into extra shoe storage and resigned yourself to a lifetime of TV dinners and take-out pizza.
So what if you can barely boil water? Don’t throw in the apron yet — there’s still hope for you, thanks to The New Best Recipe cookbook
Each of the 1,000 recipes in this weighty tome has been tested with minor variations in ingredients and cooking procedures — 20, 30, sometimes hundreds of times —until the obsessive kitchen crew comes to a consensus on culinary perfection. The result is an encyclopedia of all things edible, featuring a three-page treatise on homemade mac ‘n cheese, a taste test for store-bought pickles, and a step-by-step diagram for planning out Thanksgiving dinner, just to name a few.
The truth is, there’s no such thing as a culinary wizard — it all comes down to science. These cookbook authors got straight A’s in high-school chemistry and thankfully they’re willing to share their notes with you. The Cook’s Illustrated team may be geeks, but they’re geeks with a purpose: teaching the world to cook.
And if you already know your way around the kitchen, The New Best Recipe is all you need for a proper ace up your sleeve. Though come to think of it, the book weighs more than five pounds — so you may just want to leave it on the counter instead.
It’s $23.10 from Amazon, marked down from $35. Buy it here.