Book Description
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.
