The New Best Recipe: All-New Edition

Customer Rating:
Summary: Truly the Best Cookbook Ever!
Comment: I love this cookbook. I have had it for several years and reach for it again and again. The Butterscotch Cream Pie recipe is worth the $ all by itself. It is one of my favorite books to give as a gift.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Favorite recipes removed!!
Comment: I purchased the "New" version to replace the original Best Recipe release that I no longer have. Unfortunately, I discovered that the recipes are not the same and in fact two of my favorites have been removed altogether. I have only opened the book up three times so I have yet to determine how many of my favorite recipes have been drastically altered or deleted altogether. The mac and cheese is now much more time-consuming to create and not as good, and the wonderful butterflied roast chicken with mustard tarragon pan sauce has been excluded. If you think that you can replace your old cookbook with the new one and expect it to be inclusive of your recipes--forget it. I called Cook's Illustrated and after having just bought the new cookbook, they were indifferent about telling me that I'd have to buy an online subscription ($30!!) in order to retrieve the deleted recipes. A more responsible company would have had the original recipes available for free for those who are disappointed that the new book doesn't have them. I'd also like to add, that the recipes seem much more overly complicated (i.e. time consuming) for nearly imperceptible better results than the recipes in the original version. Dig up the original, it is still the Best Recipe.

Customer Rating:
Summary: The first one I reach for
Comment: I have had this book for a few months and have made several recipes: black beans, bread pudding, meatloaf, a caramel sauce for a flan, chicken stock and oh, I can't even remember what else. Bottom line: this cookbook ROCKS!!! The details on HOW and WHY make for great bedtime reading (and yes, I DO have a life) and I am far more willing to try a recipe that has lots of ingredients and takes a while to make because I have a very high level of confidence that the results will be worth the effort.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent cookbook
Comment: The best thing about this cookbook is that the editors explain what they've tried and why it did or did not work, so you get not only great recipes but also insight into how to better your cooking. There are numerous tips on the best ingredients and tools as well.

Customer Rating:
Summary: One of my very favorite cookbooks
Comment: I'm now a fan of the America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Illustrated Magazine, and it was this book that did it! I'm the type of person that likes to know *why* to do things a certain way, and not just read a set of instructions and this cookbook is just so full of great information on how and why to cook things they way they are instructing, along with various illustrated tidbits all the way through, like how to section a chicken or butterfly it, etc. But of course the real test is the recipes...and so far, my results with the ones in this book have been excellent. I can't say everything turned out perfectly (some burned potatoes in the pan when I did the high roast chicken come to mind) but none have been a total disaster or a recipe I wouldn't try again. Even better, I find that the ingredients used are usually not ones that are hard to find and in many cases, ones I already have on hand. I get frustrated with books that use all these crazy ingredients that I will use once for that meal and then have to throw out the rest eventually. That is not the case with Best Recipe.

This is not the book for everyone. If you are a really busy person and not interested in reading several pages of information that go along with the recipe, but just want something quick and fast, there are probably better books for you. Also keep in mind that Cook's Illustrated and ATK do tend to use the same recipes over and over a lot, so if you have any number of their other books, or the magazines, you may find many recipes in here that you've seen before. But for someone who really loves to understand the how and why of cooking, and was fairly new to the Cook's Illustrated family of products, this was one of my favorite cookbooks purchased.