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Recommendation: Cooks Illustrated
Apr. 15th, 2010 08:57 pmCooks Illustrated is a magazine for, well, cooks. It's difficult to describe, because there are a hundred cooking magazines, and Cooks Illustrated isn't like any of them. And I am totally not an objective person to talk about it, because I love it unreasonably.
First thing: Cooks Illustrated doesn't have any advertisements. This results in a somewhat higher per-issue price than other cooking magazines... but it also means that their reviews of ingredients and kitchen tools are pretty reliable. While I don't always agree with their opinions on what makes for a good can of diced tomatoes or brand of whole-wheat spaghetti, I often do; and I have not once been disappointed by a gadget I bought based on their review.
But the biggest draw of this or any cooking magazine is the recipes, and this is where I think my geeky friends would be particularly impressed. Cooks Illustrated takes a recipe or topic (pot roast! inexpensive steaks! marinated tomato salad! spaghetti carbonara! chewy brownies!) and researches and tests it exhaustively. They make dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of variations, controlling for one element while modifying another. If you keep all other ingredients constant, is it better to include tomato juice in your pot roast braising sauce, or not? Should you roast the garlic before you include it, or leave it raw? What about vegetables? Does adding carrots and celery to the braise improve it, or water it down? They try each variant and report on the effects, in addition to providing their final, best-variant recipe.
It's an impressive magazine, because there's evidence of long testing and experimentation for each of the score of recipes in each issue. And so it's a great magazine for people like me who don't follow recipes strictly. For instance, I just made a butterflied-and-roasted herbed chicken recipe... and I made a lot of adjustments to the recipe: thyme instead of tarragon, shallots instead of chives, four times the lemon because I really like lemon, and so on. And it still came out beautifully, because the long article describing all their trials and errors gave me a good idea of what techniques to use when cooking the chicken and making the pan sauce... and so I was able to execute it well despite having meddled with half the ingredients.
Anyway. If you like cooking, and have an analytical mind, I highly recommend Cooks Illustrated. I've found it to be a delightful read, and worth its price for sure in terms of what I've learned and applied to my cooking.
(I should add that it may not be a great value for vegetarians, since it does lean more toward meat-based main dishes. But it might be worth picking up a few newsstand issues and seeing what you think.)
First thing: Cooks Illustrated doesn't have any advertisements. This results in a somewhat higher per-issue price than other cooking magazines... but it also means that their reviews of ingredients and kitchen tools are pretty reliable. While I don't always agree with their opinions on what makes for a good can of diced tomatoes or brand of whole-wheat spaghetti, I often do; and I have not once been disappointed by a gadget I bought based on their review.
But the biggest draw of this or any cooking magazine is the recipes, and this is where I think my geeky friends would be particularly impressed. Cooks Illustrated takes a recipe or topic (pot roast! inexpensive steaks! marinated tomato salad! spaghetti carbonara! chewy brownies!) and researches and tests it exhaustively. They make dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of variations, controlling for one element while modifying another. If you keep all other ingredients constant, is it better to include tomato juice in your pot roast braising sauce, or not? Should you roast the garlic before you include it, or leave it raw? What about vegetables? Does adding carrots and celery to the braise improve it, or water it down? They try each variant and report on the effects, in addition to providing their final, best-variant recipe.
It's an impressive magazine, because there's evidence of long testing and experimentation for each of the score of recipes in each issue. And so it's a great magazine for people like me who don't follow recipes strictly. For instance, I just made a butterflied-and-roasted herbed chicken recipe... and I made a lot of adjustments to the recipe: thyme instead of tarragon, shallots instead of chives, four times the lemon because I really like lemon, and so on. And it still came out beautifully, because the long article describing all their trials and errors gave me a good idea of what techniques to use when cooking the chicken and making the pan sauce... and so I was able to execute it well despite having meddled with half the ingredients.
Anyway. If you like cooking, and have an analytical mind, I highly recommend Cooks Illustrated. I've found it to be a delightful read, and worth its price for sure in terms of what I've learned and applied to my cooking.
(I should add that it may not be a great value for vegetarians, since it does lean more toward meat-based main dishes. But it might be worth picking up a few newsstand issues and seeing what you think.)
