Recipes are great, but the blows chunks | Pocket Chef: Soups (Pocket Chef) ...

The canonical source for REAL cooking | Pocket Chef: Soups (Pocket Chef)

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	• Pocket Chef: Soups (Pocket Chef) Cooks Illustrated, 2005 - 48 pages average customer review:based on 261 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Beginner cook here!

I'm still learning how to cook. I can follow a recipe pretty well. I have gotten lots of compliments on all the stuff that I'm making. Granted, none of it is original. I find stuff online and in books like this one.

The one thing that I like is LOADS of pictures. I'm never sure if what I'm making is turning out correctly. Perhaps this confidence will come in time. Right now, I would like more of a step by step approach.

I enjoy all of the background information that they give you in this book. I find that really interesting and helpful. I'm looking forward to trying out alot of this stuff.

I don't get the tv show out here. Perhaps that will change. But I do enjoy the clips that are on the internet.

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Recipes are great, but the blows chunks

No real table of contents. An insufficient index. No distinct chapters (by page separation). New recipes start wherever, usually at the bottom right side of the left page. Half the food products they recommend in the back of the book comes with the caveat: "Not sold west of the Mississippi River," yet they claim their recipes are for ordinary kitchens and ordinary home cooks. Their "field research" on some things does not stand up to real world experience.

I could go go on, but you get the drift: the layout of this book is awful, and its ATK authors should be embarrassed by it. One example, they claim that a 12" skillet works better than a wok on a stove, but obviously they don't know how to cook with a wok. Their method is more akin to Paula Deen's cheeto-fixins' with extra twangy syrup on the side rather than cooking in one. Hilariously, they claimed they could only get their wok up to 335-degrees. I presume they were using a cheap Wal-Mart brand flat aluminum or thin carbon wok, which no self-respecting cook would even consider. The chicken chapter is the book's worst. ATK doesn't like chicken because "it dries out." Their solution is to buy the super-expensive Kosher chicken or spend a day brining it yourself. Because when it comes to cooking, MONEY is no object to these people!

However, this is the book you want in their set. Why? Because if you peruse them, more than 90% of all the recipes in every other ATK book is found here. Anything you miss you can get online at their site. It's a fine recipe book, but don't take their "advice and tips" without doing your own testing or research. You'll find that people in Boston don't know as much as they claim to know.

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The canonical source for REAL cooking

I'm a fair cook, of the country meat and potatoes and apple pie variety. Well, include Italian dishes in that. And Tex-Mex. And catfish, and a few other things. I was a charter subscriber nearly thirty years ago to Cook's Illustrated and there's seldom an issue goes by that I don't find one of two things I immediately want to fix. And I always enjoy the methodological and sidebar discussions even for dishes that are not to my taste. When the first edition of this now-hefty volume was published in 1999, I bought a copy immediately and began filling it with post-its. It quickly became my kitchen Bible and its tried and true renditions of all the classic American recipes became the canon. But it contained only ("only"!) 500 recipes. The second edition is twice the size of the first, more than 1,000 recipes, all following the same test-to-destruction methods Christopher Kimball and his staff have made famous. (I should note that some have been reworked and revised/improved, and a few deleted, mostly for updated nutritional reasons.) And "best" is right. It's not just hyperbole. As he says in the Introduction, "We mean simply the best version of a particular recipe (in a particular style) that we can develop in our kitchen through our testing process." Put their version of anything up against one from any other book or magazine, and the CI version will nearly always prove superior. And they'll always tell you why, so the magazine and this book are also an ongoing educational process. Open the volume at random and you'll probably see at least one title on any given page that will start you salivating: Home-Corned Beef Brisket and Cabbage, New England Style. Pozole Rojo. Buttermilk Pancakes. Spicy Sichuan Noodles with Pork. Boston Baked Beans. Breakfast Strata with Spinach and Gruyere. Cinnamon-Raisin Bagels. Blueberry Pie. And on and on and on. And nowhere will you find weird ingredients or expensive single-tasker utensils. There are thirty-two chapters, from Appetizers to Puddings and Custards, and there are frequent illustrated mini-lessons on such topics as slicing an onion, rolling out pizza dough, deglazing, and slicing a T-bone steak. And for all this, the price is rather less than two best-selling novels. It's the perfect wedding or Christmas gift for the cooking (or eating) enthusiast; I've given away at least half a dozen copies in the past five years. I own three shelves of cookbooks -- but this is the one I would take to a desert island.

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