Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Cooks' Illustrated, surely, is many things to many people. I like to think of them as cooking for the hard-core geeks; they slice and dice recipes as well as vegetables, and work the kinks out of them to make what is at least their idea of the best possible version of a meal. To the geek chef, their books are the technical flip side of the theoretical work of Alton Brown, Shirley Corriher, and Harold McGee.
Don't pick this book up thinking that you're going to get someone's Italian nonna's sunday gravy recipe; that's what the Sopranos Family Cookbook is for. This is very technical stuff that involves stripping the great recipes down to their bare essentials and rebuilding them from the ground up. Sacred cows of Italian cuisine, as in everything else they do, are scrutinized very carefully, and slaughtered as often as not. Only the most basic definition of the dish is taken for granted. The end result is sometimes minimalist; the Baked Ziti recipe, for example, has no ricotta in it and is almost vegetarian. The end result is a dizzying book that should be on the shelf of anyone who likes to cook Italian. Finally, the frequent sidebars on cooking equipment, a Cooks Illustrated staple, offer deep background on the techniques in the recipes.
Now with raves like that, why only 4 stars, you might be asking? Well, it's not perfect. The Best Recipe series presents itself as a bible of cooking, and it's not; glaring omissions in this book include meat lasagna (though the big bragging point on the dust jacket is the vegetable lasagna recipe) and cannoli. There is also a tendency to repeat articles from earlier books, an understandable but occasionally annoying situation that tends to leave the reader feeling as though the magazine people are trying to cut corners. And the appeal of this book isn't universal; the Cooks Illustrated style is, as I said, very technical, and a bit chatty at times. If you just want the recipes and don't care about the particulars, this book will bore you. Me, I like cookbooks I can read, so this isn't a problem.
So, in conclusion, I say this: if you like chomping data as much as you like chomping food, this book will rock your world. If not, the recipes are still pretty good.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Italian Classics (Best Recipe)
What's the best way to prevent ricotta cheesecake from becoming watery? Is there a trick for coaxing more flavour from basil when making pesto? Does bread flour self-raising flour make better pizza dough? In an exhaustive effort to answer these questions and hundreds more, the editors of "Cook's Illustrated" magazine have conducted hundreds of kitchen tests. The result is "Italian Classics", a 496-page award-winning cookbook packed with recipes, food tastings, equipment testings, and cooking tips straight from the Cook's test kitchen. Designed with the home cook in mind, this collection of classic Italian recipes has been stripped to the bone and then reworked, updated, and improved so that each recipe is as close to foolproof as we can make it. More than 300 recipes cover the wide range of Italian home cooking, from Tuscan pork roast, and risotto, to tomato and bread soup, vegetable lasagne, and strawberries with balsamic vinegar. Learn to cook less well-known regional recipes such as steak Fiorentina, baked peaches stuffed with amaretti, and stracotto, an Italian pot roast."Italian Classics" also contains more than 225 illustrations that will show you techniques such as how to peel garlic cloves quickly, how to roll out pasta dough, and how to assemble tiramisu. The book also includes dozens of no-nonsense equipment ratings and taste tests of supermarket ingredients. Find out why American pastas are every bit as good as Italian brands, which grater makes quick work of Parmesan cheese, and which electronic scale is our "best buy". You will also learn which type of pork chop - centre-cut or rib - is best for cooking and what the difference is between pancetta and bacon.
Get 35% OFF
Click here for more information about Italian Classics (Best Recipe)
0 comments:
Post a Comment