John Burgoyne (1)

I really like this book. If you're a fan of the Cook's Illustrated process of exhaustive testing and reduction of a recipe to its basic elements, and a fan of vegetables, you'll be in heaven.

It covers 53 different vegetables, and is organized by vegetable, not by recipe type. So you look up the veggie you are interested in and find general preparation and cooking instructions, followed by a 'master recipe' and several variations.

This organization rewards discovery and experimentation - I intend to work my way through it systematically.… (mais)

America's Test Kitchen comes from the folks of Cook's Illustrated magazine (THE best cooking mag on the market), and part of what makes them so great is that they start out with the product they want to achieve (chewy chocolate chip cookies, for example) and fiddle around until they get it perfect. They also detail what they tried and why it did (or didn't) work. About 4 pages are spent on each recipe, a great thing if you want to understand WHY you should use certain techniques. And if you don't, you can skip all that and get right to making perfect food. My suggestion is to leaf through each book in this series to find the recipes that most appeal to you. While I refer to some of my more techinical cookbooks when I need to fix recipes, it's the America's Test Kitchen series I turn to for new ideas.
… (mais)