Master a Lifetime of Cooking Skills, from Basic to Bucket List
March 13, 2020
This latest guide (The Complete America's Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook: 2001-2021, The Best of America's Test Kitchen, The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs) from the chefs behind the popular, long-running PBS show is based on the guiding philosophy: "We make mistakes so you don't have to." Framed around techniques rather than meals or ingredients, the recipes included run the gamut of flavor and cuisine, making this a great tool to develop cooking skills in new home chefs. Divided into three parts, the sections include: "Essentials Every Home Cook Should Know," featuring techniques such as seasoning with salt, making vinaigrettes, prepping vegetables, prepping rice, and roasting; "Techniques You Didn't Know You Couldn't Live Without," such as using aquafaba, brining beans, caramelizing onions, and cooking pasta in sauce; and "The Bucket List," complex and aspirational techniques such as fermenting pickles the traditional way, smoking ribs with tea leaves, and baking and assembling a layer cake. VERDICT Multiple recipes illustrating each technique allow for experimentation and different options to master each method. Perfect for newbies who want to impress or experienced cooks looking to level up.--Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib., Miami
Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
April 6, 2020
The America’s Test Kitchen cooks bring their collective knowledge to bear on this diverse collection of tips and illustrate their points with more than 200 recipes. The first and lengthiest chapter, “Essentials Every Home Cook Should Know” includes helpful tips: flavorings should be applied when and where they are most effective (salt chicken breasts under the skin before baking and sprinkle the salt from a height of 12 inches to achieve even distribution); attention should be paid to textures (lumpy batter, for example, results in fluffier pancakes and muffins). The “Techniques You Didn’t Know You Couldn’t Live Without” chapter is full of ways to simplify kitchen chores: using a blender is the key to foolproof hollandaise and béarnaise sauces; freezing live lobster before putting them in the pot is the best form of sedation, and an instant-read thermometer provides a no-fail way of knowing when items are done cooking. The bucket list chapter includes fun projects, such as concocting homemade cocktail bitters and smoking ribs indoors in an oven preheated to 500 degrees before lowering to 250 after 30 minutes (and using tea leaves instead of wood chips for the smoke). Time-tested wisdom proves to be the most important ingredient in this eclectic and engaging tome.