Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great, But Pages Don't Hold Up
Comment: I love this cookbook. Maybe it is a ripoff of their magazines and other books, I don't know. However, the pages are weak and rip out easily. Treat it gently.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Combination cookbook & textbook!
Comment: I've always wondered why sometimes you use baking powder and sometimes you use baking soda, and sometimes both. Now I know! This book explains cooking theory in little side articles that are easy to find (and easy to ignore if you don't care about them). It has lots of recommendations, for things like cooking equipment (I bought a new grater & love it) as well as ingredients. And there are a couple of recipes that have become classics at my house. Try the chocolate cream pie; it's to DIE for! The ingredient that they investigated in that one was baking chocolates. You'll be surprised which one ended up being used! One of my favorite cookbooks; it stays on the counter rather than getting filed away.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Shop carefully
Comment: These books are great! I love my Cooks' Illustrated Books and use them all the time. My one and only complaint is that they have now published the Best Recipe series and now the Test Kitchen books and they don't have enough recipes to fill them each one with enough unique recipes to distinguish one book from another.A few repetitions is understandable, but they have gone way over the top. If you buy more than two of these books, the third is bound to be composed of a third the recipes from each of the first two. Same test info, everything. This only leaves 1/3 of the recipes as original.
Because of this, I say look carefully before deciding which one from this series you purchase unless you want multiple copies of the same testing articles and recipes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: More than just recipes
Comment: If you are interested in the chemistry of cooking, you'll love this book. The recipes are good but the reasons behind why certain ingredients work better than others, which brands are better tasting than others, etc. is so interesting if you really want to cook well.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Think of it as a sample size...
Comment: This was the first Cooks Illustrated cookbook I bought (I now have three) and it's... well, limited. It's meant to accompany the TV series, though in actuality it's really only a small part of what the TV show is about. Like other Best Recipe books, it occasionally nicks material from the other books (a frequent Cooks Illustrated annoyance) but it still manages to work nicely, and the recipes in it are still enough to get the reader going. It's the odd one out of the series, limited as it is to a fairly narrow selection of items, and it has a rather strange but appetizing Southern accent (strange because of the show's basis in New England). It also has plenty of pictures that give it a playfulness that the bigger books lack.
I do recommend this book, with some reservations (though the recipe that teaches how to butterfly a turkey is not something you're going to find anywhere else, and might be worth it if it saves someone some frustration on Thanksgiving). I really wanted to give it 3 1/2 stars, and rounded up because I don't like being cheap with praise. Just understand that it's a sample of what Cooks Illustrated is all about, and really just a cleverly done ad for their bigger books, and you will definitely not be disappointed.
