Kristen Miglore - Food52 Genius Recipes: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook

Copyright 2015 by Food52 Inc.
Photographs copyright 2015 by James Ransom
All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miglore, Kristen.
Food52 genius recipes: 100 recipes that will change the way you cook / Kristen Miglore; photography by James Ransom.
pages cm
1. Cooking. I. Food52. II. Title. III. Title: Genius recipes.
TX714.M535 2015
641.5dc23
2014034413

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-60774-797-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60774-798-7

v3.1

Weve cooked thousands of recipes together, and when you cook that much, you begin to develop an eye for the crucial distinctions that make a standout recipean exemplar. These are the recipes that inspire you to change how you make a standard dish, that become the recipes you cook for the rest of your life. Nigella Lawsons dense chocolate loaf cake was greater than all the other versions we tried because of the logic-defying amount of water you add to the batterwhich makes the cake luxuriously moist, and even better the next day.

These special recipes would crop up from time to time, and after a while we could see they belonged in a category all their own: genius recipes.

And we knew just the person to uncover these gems. We hired Kristen as our first team member when Food52.com was a wee upstart, and her extraordinary talents as a writer, editor, and cook quickly became apparent. More recently, as our executive editor, she has shaped our sites voice and look, recruited other excellent editors, and helped make Food52 a hub for passionate cooks.

In 2011, Kristen debuted her first Genius Recipes post on Food52. It featured the , into which you blend a whole lemon, skin and all. The column immediately became a hit. With tireless curiosity and sly wit, Kristen has introduced us to some of the best recipes from such cooking luminaries as Marcella Hazan, Eric Ripert, Alice Waters, Nigella Lawson, James Beard, Patricia Wells, Craig Claiborne, Martha Stewart, Fergus Henderson, April Bloomfield, Yotam Ottolenghi, and Julia Child, to name just a few.

She has discovered genius recipes from many lesser-known authors and chefs, as well. For Kristen, no stone goes unturned. Shes an indefatigable researcher and perfectionist who will test and retest recipes not only to make sure they work exactly as written, but to assess whether or not theyre truly genius. She rejected many a recipe that we couldnt find fault with.

Along the way, Kristen has added her own touches of genius. With a strange but delicious , she discovered that you can use it as an ice cream topping in the vein of Magic Shell. (She also styled the recipes for all of the photos in this book.)

Weve become avid fans of her column ourselves. After Kristen wrote about from his book Truly Mexican for which you crush white onion, cilantro, and salt to a paste and very gently fold in the avocado so as not to smush it, an approach that produces a guacamole thats brighter, more aromatic, and somehow more delicate than any other. The recipes tiny details have a huge payoff. And that is the brilliant and rewarding principle behind all of the genius recipes in this book.

Genius recipes surprise us and make us rethink cooking tropes. Theyre handed down by luminaries of the food world and become their legacies. They get us talking and change the way we cook. And, once weve folded them into our repertoires, they make us feel pretty genius too.

This is how I framed Genius Recipes when I launched it as a weekly column on Food52 in June 2011. In the years since, the definition really hasnt changed: These recipes are about reworking what weve been taught and skipping past all the canonical versions to a smarter way.

For example, if you were to look to a classical text or cooking class, youd probably think youd need to truss and flip and baste a chicken as youre roasting it. And theres nothing necessarily wrong with any of thatyou will probably get a good dinner out of the exercise. But Barbara Kafka, in writing the cookbook Roasting: A Simple Art in 1995, perfected roasting everything , from mackerel to turkeys to cucumbers. She puts chicken in the oven, legs akimbo, at a raging 500F (260C), then hardly touches it. Hers is the juiciest roast chicken Ive tasted, and has the crispiest skin, without fussingso why would you?

This book is full of happy discoveries like this , drawn from the experience of the best cookbook authors, chefs, and bloggers around. No one cook could have taught us so much. From historic voices in food like Marcella Hazan, Julia Child, and James Beard to modern giants like Ignacio Mattos and Kim Boyce, weve learned that making something better doesnt mean doing more workand oftentimes, it means doing less. If you look to the people whove spent their careers tinkering with these dishes, theyll often show you a better way to make them.

Here in this collection are more than one hundred of the most surprising and essential genius recipes. Some are greatest hits from the column that keep inspiring new conversations and winning new fans. I also dug up a bunch more recipes, like and keep us cooking and talking. Youll also find new tips and variations and a good number of mini-recipes alongside the full-length ones. These genius ideas were simple enough to distill into a paragraph or two and made the collection whole. My hope is that this book, held all together, can act as an alternative kitchen education of sorts.

Some of the recipes are already legends: If youve been reading about food for a while, youve probably already heard of the . I love sharing these on Food52, because it seems everyone has an opinion and a good story to tell.

A handful of others are tricks I stumbled across myself: The served at the James Beard Awards that Melissa Clark posted on Instagramwatch out, world: Im paying attention!