Review
Product Description
Since its debut in 1999, America's Test Kitchen has been public television's most-watched cooking show. This new comprehensive cookbook captures ten seasons of the show in a lively collection featuring more than 500 foolproof recipes and dozens of tips and techniques. You'll learn the secret to rich-tasting Weeknight Bolognese and Cheesey Garlic Bread in Bringing Home Italian Favorites. Prepare a platter of the best-tasting nachos you've ever had in Tex-Mex tonight. And discover a new way to cook the Thanksgiving turkey in Talking Turkey and All the Trimmings--choose among nine different recipes for the holiday bird--from Classic Roast Stuffed Turkey and Crisp-Skinned Butterflied Turkey to Herbed Roast Turkey, Grill-Roasted Turkey, and more.
Want to learn how to be a better cook? Throughout the book you'll find a special behind-the-scenes feature highlighting the most important test kitchen techniques from the past decade. In addition, we take you behind the scenes of the show for a fascinating look at how recipes are developed, why our equipment and ingredient ratings are different, what's involved in putting together an episode, and more. And assembled just for this collection, The America's Test Kitchen Guide to Recommended Ingredients and Equipment unites all our important tastings and testings into an easy-to-navigate buyer's guide so you can be a savvy consumer whether you're investing in a new gas grill or picking up a can of tomatoes. This new volume gives you a decade of great cooking and expertise from America's most trusted test kitchen.
Biography
America's Test Kitchen is a 2,500 square foot kitchen located outside of Boston. It is the home of Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country magazines and is the workday destination for over 3 dozen test cooks, editors and cookware specialists. Our mission is to test recipes until we understand how and why they work and arrive at the best version. We also test kitchen equipment and supermarket ingredients in search of brands that offer the best value and performance. You can watch us work by tuning in to our public television show, America's Test Kitchen.
I love the show, the recipes are great and this book has many. However, it does not contain all of the recipes from the TV show, and the index is poor.
The first thing I looked for in the book was Pepperoni Pan Pizza, Season Eight, Disk three, first show, if you own the DVDs, as I do. It's not in there. Yes, there are pizzas, but not the recipe I wanted to make. The dough for the others is different, as is the sauce. Other than that, I'm all set. For a book which promises every recipe from every show, being 0 for 1 was not a pleasant surprise.
It's conceivable that the Pizza Dish is in there, please flame me in the comments, so long as you specify the page (it's not under Pizza, and it's not in the Italian dish section where the other pizzas are). I say that because the second recipe I wanted, from the same DVD, was a kuchen I plan to make tomorrow. Look up kuchen in the index, no go, look in the table of contents instead and, ah, there it is! They called it New York Style Crumb Cake in the show, so ... you find it under "N" in the index. How convenient!
This is a common flaw with ATk books (e.g. the season 9 recipe book I also have). They give an ordinary recipe a spiced up name, which by itself is all well and good. But then they list the thing only under the fancy name. They'd call an apple pie "xanadu" then list it under "x". The one thing I'd have expected is an episode list with a page reference for each recipe. It would have added 5-10 pages to a very large book. They list only the recipes for season ten. This would have helped find episodes as well, if you locate a recipe you'd like to make. I found Breaded Chicken Cutlets, and cannot find online which season it's from, so although I probably own the DVD, I can't watch it without starting up many disks and plowing through til I see it.
If you plan to flip through recipes, or when you can find what you're looking for, the book is fantastic, and the recipes are wonderful. They certainly didn't leave out many, the book is huge and heavy, with many nice photographs, equipment lists, and grocery lists. But, it does not do what they say it does - include every recipe - and the index is best described as jesuitical.
While I generally enjoy everything about America's Test Kitchen and its related publications, this book came up short. This book is billed as containing "every recipe from 10 years" of the ATK TV show. Unfortunately, that is not true.
The recipe for my favorite "Triple Chocolate Cookie" (which feature melted bittersweet chocolate chips) is not included. Ironically, these cookies were featured in the ATK episode entitled "Cookie Jar Favorites"--the title of the cookie chapter of this book. The previous poster mentioned a pan pizza recipe featured in Season 8 which was also not included. That's at least two recipes missing--who knows how many others?
One of the other flaws of this book is that it is missing an index of all of the recipes for each show by season. However, if the publishers were leaving out recipes, then I can understand why they would leave out such a list. Including an episode-by-episode list would surely draw attention to the fact that this book is not nearly as complete as promised.
This book does not contain every recipe from every show. If that's what you are looking for, as I was, then you will be sorely disappointed.
If you like America's Test kitchen, you might like this book. It is, as usual a great resource, but after looking through the pages of this book, I can see many repetitions of recipes from other books of the Test Kitchen. I do notice that despite the claim of having all of its' recipes, 650 from 10 years of the show, some seem to be missing.
What you can love about this is how America's Test Kitchen covers almost any question you might have on how to cook their recipes and their advice on types of kitchen equipment and helpful hints just can't be beat; as are their explanations on how they come up with their versions of their recipes
This volume covers: soups and salads, skillet suppers and one pot dinners to chicken, turkey, specific meats and fish, diner dinners, pasta, tex mex, French, take out, grill, sides, brunch, bread, cookies, cake, desserts are all included. There is also a kitchen shopping guide, conversions and equivalents, a 2010 TV episode guide as well as the adequately done index with recipe names and main ingredients. There are colour pictures for about every 3rd or 4th recipe and why the recipe works. There are not as many of the small diagrams in this book as in previous ones that show how to roll and cut cinnamon rolls for example.
The print is good and easy to read. It would make a good basic cookbook or an addition to a collection, as long as you know there will be some duplications from other Test Kitchen books
Also just know if you will be making pies or biscuits, they will be made from scratch, this is not a book for you to expect them to tell you to pop open a can of refrigerated biscuits. The bread section is mostly quick dough, if you are looking for long rising bread recipes, they are not here.
I also wish that the Test Kitchen would give charts for cooking times of different sizes of meats and roasts, after all some of us need to cook a 20 pound turkey for Thanksgiving, a 12 pound bird will just not cut it. However their grill instructions are some of the best around. It's a good book, but I wish it was the comprehensive one that I thought was coming.
http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Americas-Kitchen-Cookbook-2001-2012/dp/1933615966/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1326459662&sr=8-1
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