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Learn to COOK - Restaurant Favorites at Home: A Best Recipe Classic (The Best Recipe)
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List Price: $29.95
Our Price: $23.96
Your Save: $ 5.99 ( 20% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: America's Test Kitchen
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5
EAN: 9780936184678
ISBN: 0936184671
Label: America's Test Kitchen
Manufacturer: America's Test Kitchen
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: 2003-09
Publisher: America's Test Kitchen
Studio: America's Test Kitchen
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Editorial Reviews:
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Would you like to cook restaurant recipes at home? Have you ever been tempted to make a restaurant recipe only to be disappointed by the results? The editors of Cook's Illustrated set out to find out how to make restaurant cooking at home a reality. After collecting together hundreds of recipes they selected 150 recipes that excited them most and spent thousands of hours in their test kitchen making those recipes work. They trimmed each recipe to its essentials without compromising on flavour or visual appeal. Restaurants usually prepare huge batches of food, so the recipes were reworked to serve 4 rather than 40. As a result, Restaurant Favourites at Home offers tried and tested recipes for starters, soups, salads, main courses, side dishes and desserts as well as the usual wealth of tips, tastings and equipment tests that are so much a part of all the Cook's Illustrated recipe books.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Simplistic, Uninspired Recipes
Comment: I'ved always liked Cook's Illustrated Magazine and had high hopes for this recipe book. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I found the recipes to be heavy on fat, light on taste, and uninspired. I didn't even think this was a good enough book to give to a beginning cook who might need more basic recipes. I'll be selling my copy on one of the used book sites as soon as I find a buyer. Don't waste your money on this one!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Helping the Home Chef Take It to the Next Level
Comment: This book fills an important niche. My rating is predicated on understanding just what that niche is. If you don't understand the niche, then you may not like the book.
There is a genre of "gourmet cookbooks" by the likes of Charlie Trotter, Craig von Foerester, Thomas Keller, etc. that discuss how to make the food that is actually served in their world-class restaurants, using the finest ingredients and having a fully-equipped restaurant kitchen at one's disposal. These books appeal to what I would call "chef hobbyists" -- people with an extraordinary interest in cooking, and have the equipment and access to ingredients that this kind of cooking requires.
Then there is the niche filled by the Cooks Illustrated series of cookbooks, focusing on more-or-less everyday meals, but analyzing all the ingredients and techniques in depth, and explaining to the reader what works, what does not, and why.
This book fits squarely in the middle of these two genres - the book gives clear explanations of ingredients and techniques, and discusses how the recipe differs from the original restaurant recipe and why, but the focus is clearly on the fine dining experience rather than everyday dinner preparation. It is essentially a bridge between ordinary food preparation, and the vastly more ambitious preparations of the celeberty chefs.
The clear explanations enable the aspiring chef to move the recipes back in the restaurant direction when availability of ingredients so inspires. This book might recommend substituting canned diced tomatoes for the original tomato concasse, and this substitution is certainly reasonable if all you have is off-season supermarket tomatoes, but if you have fresh tomatoes in your garden, hey, start choppin'. If you understand why the substitutions were made you can also understand when to substitute the other way.
All the recipes are thoroughly researched and edited, and there are few if any mistakes. Therefore, you don't need a huge experience base to spot things that just won't work, like sometimes happens with the celeberty chef gourmet books. If you just follow the recipe, you'll get good results, and because things are very well explained, you'll start building up that experience base.
Most of the celeberty gourmet cookbooks have extensive high-quality professional photography to help you get the presentation ideas right. This book does not have very much in that area, and leaves you more to your own devices. This is probably OK, since I think most chef hobbyists get interested in fancy presentation when they reach more advanced levels.
Just as you would expect from Cooks Illustrated, there are frequent sidebars discussing things like "what's the best brand of truffle oil" or tests of different mandolines.
Like all the Cook's Illustrated books, this book offers the opportunity for a great learning experience. If you want to start moving up from just making dinner to impressing your friends and family with a fine dining experience, this book is definitely the reference that you're looking for.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Almost perfect
Comment: I waited a long time for this book. I toyed with the thought that I'd never want to make restaurant dishes because they were too complicated. I read some of the reviews and figured I didn't need the book. In the end, I'm glad I own it.
This book does a great job of adapting a wide range of upscale (I live in Chicago and I'm praying a media rep will take me to Tru so I won't have to pay for it) recipes for home use. This book gives you less of the classic Cooks Illustrated methodology. However, the pre-recipe info is dedicated to how great the original recipe is and how the new recipe was adapted from the original.
Devotees of CI are used to in-depth explanations of the problems with a particular dish, why those problems occur and the food science of a perfect solution. I think the former is a valid approach for a restaurant book. I guess the thought is that if you're tackling this book, you're more than a novice cook and have an understanding of the food science basics.
The range of recipes in this book is fantastic! Kudos to the team for the effort. There are 150 recipes divided among:
-appetizers, soups & salads
-main courses (my complaint here is that the poultry section is very light -- only four recipes. However there is a decent number of vegetarian, fish and seafood recipes.)
-side dishes (divided into stand-alone sides and those that accompany the main courses)
-desserts
My second complaint, and truly why I'm giving this four instead of five stars, is the small number of photos. To be fair, this is characteristic of Cooks Illustrated. With presentation being integral to a good restaurant experience, I expected more color photos of the finished dishes. Including the cover, there are 17 color photos. To be honest, I wanted a photo of every dish.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great for upscale recipes
Comment: I was really hoping this book would have recipes that would be restaurant classics that I enjoy. I was hoping for how to make a fabulous French Dip, how to make baked potatoes incased in salt. This book contains recipes from high end restaurants that I do not typically visit on a daily basis.
While high end restaurant recipes is not all bad, it really doesn't cover the dining that we typically do everyday. Now, with that being said, the recipes that are in the book are good, and very original. These aren't the type of recipes that you are going to cook when you are coming home from work, but these are the recipes that you want to spend time with on the weekend and serve with a bottle of wine.
Some additional benefits of this book is that is shows you how to make perfect pan-seared tuna steaks. Cook's Illustrated also spends time talking about ingredients, and helps you make better choices. I do appreciate these tips, because if I am purchasing higher end ingredients, I want my results to turn out well. Overall I found this book to be a bit disappointing in the direction that was chosen, I was hoping for a book that had more accessible and familiar recipes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Bring out your inner chef
Comment: Somehow, I feel this book has not received its due credit or attention. As someone who is very familiar with Cook's Illustrated, I am very surprised that this book did not become one of their top sellers. Perhaps because it is somewhat of a departure from what Cook's Illustrated normally does that people have not been able to truly embrace its concept? I must say that even I was surprised that they set out on such an undertaking with this book, especially since their founder, Christopher Kimball, is a self-proclaimed loather of all foods fancy. But after the tremendous success I have had with the amazing recipes from this book, I am so thankful they ventured into restaurant quality territory.
Before I go on, let me first say that this is probably not a book for the uninitiated. If you are a beginner cook, I strongly urge you to start out with Cook's Illustrated "The New Best Recipe" cookbook. There is a wealth of information and techniques to be learned from this all-encompassing cookbook (the "Bible" to us Cook's Illustrated fans) and you will be better served to learn the fundamentals of cooking and baking before you try most of the recipes from "Restaurant Favorites". However, if you are a seasoned cook looking for delicious, foolproof recipes with the wow factor of a four star restaurant, then you have hit the jackpot with this book!
How CI approached this venture is they contacted scores of food editors from all over the country and asked them what dishes from their favorite restaurants they would most like to recreate at home. They then asked the chefs of those restaurants to share their recipes. In typical CI fashion, they took those recipes into the test kitchen and exhaustively tested them until they came up with a version that would translate into the home kitchen. Most high end restaurants use hard to obtain ingredients, difficult techniques, and have expensive equipment not normally found in home kitchens. They also have sous chefs on hand to help with lengthy preparation and dishwashers to clean their mountains of dishes. We home cooks are not afforded these luxuries. With this in mind, CI set out to transform these recipes into something the home cook could feasibly do at home, while still maintaining the integrity of the original dishes. They substituted expensive, hard to find ingredients with ones available to most home cooks, they simplified techniques, and they streamlined recipes to shorten preparation and cooking times. But all the while, they maintained the genius and drama of four star restaurant cooking. For those of us looking for ways to add new flavors and flair to our dishes without having to take expensive cooking classes, this book is like a gift from heaven!
There is a diverse array of recipes contained within, from the striking beauty and flavor of their "Crab Towers with Avocado and Gazpacho Salsas" to the homey flavors of their "Braised Short Ribs with Creamy Polenta". You will most likely find something to prepare for whichever occasion you choose. The recipes included run the gamut from first courses (appetizers, soups and salads), main courses (vegetarian, poultry, meat and seafood), side dishes and desserts. While this book may be a departure from what Cook's Illustrated normally does, you can still find elements that you have come to expect from them. Like product and equipment ratings, illustrations of techniques, and helpful tidbits that are scattered throughout the book. And like all other CI cookbooks, every recipe comes with a detailed write-up of their experiences in the test kitchen...how they arrived at the final version of the recipes, what lessons were learned in their undertaking, etc. As always, the good people at CI are not only recipe writers, but educators as well.
I cannot recommend this book enough to people who are looking for new and exciting recipes to wow their family and friends. You will be surprised at how doable all these recipes are, and you will be taking your cooking and entertaining to a whole new level. I do admit that I tend to use this cookbook more for entertaining than I do for every day cooking. While there are certainly recipes that you can make for weeknight meals (Tortilla Soup, Greek Salad, Jambalaya, German Pot Roast), more of them have that restaurant flair that seems more appropriate for dinner parties, holidays and special occasions than a Tuesday night in front of the television. But one thing's for certain, every recipe that I tried not only looked beautiful but tasted as good as or better than anything I've ever had in a high end restaurant. I can't thank Cook's Illustrated enough for this book. I've never thought I would be able to cook like this with such minimal effort!
If you are looking to elevate your cooking to an all new high, then you will definitely want this book on your shelf. You owe it to your inner chef to give it a try. :-)
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