Cooks Illustrated - The Cooks Illustrated Cookbook

THE COOKS ILLUSTRATED COOKBOOK

Copyright 2011 by the Editors at Americas Test Kitchen

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Americas Test Kitchen

17 Station Street, Brookline, MA 02445

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The cooks illustrated cookbook : 2,000 recipes from 20 years of Americas most trusted food magazine/ by the editors at Americas Test Kitchen ; illustrations by John Burgoyne. -- 1st ed.

p. cm.

ePub ISBN: 978-1-936493-13-5

1. Cooking, American. 2. Cookbooks. I. Americas Test Kitchen (Firm)

TX715.C78545 2011

641.5973--dc23

2011025965

Hardcover: $40 US

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Distributed by Americas Test Kitchen

17 Station Street, Brookline, MA 02445

Editorial Director : Jack Bishop

Executive Editor : Elizabeth Carduff

Senior Editor : Lori Galvin

Contributing Editors : Keith Dresser, Louise Emerick,
Elizabeth Emery, Kate Hartke, Rachel Toomey Kelsey, Dawn Yanagihara, and Dan Zuccarello

Editorial Assistant : Alyssa King

Design Director : Amy Klee

Art Director : Greg Galvan

Designers : Beverly Hsu, Tiffani Beckwith, and
Sarah Horwitch Dailey

Front Cover and title page Artwork : Robert Papp

Illustrator : John Burgoyne

Production Director : Guy Rochford

Senior Production Manager : Jessica Quirk

Senior Project Manager : Alice Carpenter

Production and Traffic Coordinator : Kate Hux

Asset and Workflow Manager : Andrew Mannone

Production and Imaging Specialists : Judy Blomquist, Heather Dube, and Lauren Pettapiece

Copyeditor : Cheryl Redmond

Proofreader : Debra Hudak

Indexer : Elizabeth Parson

CONTENTS

By Christopher Kimball

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

WELCOME TO AMERICAS TEST KITCHEN

T his book has been tested, written, and edited by the folks at Americas Test Kitchen, a very real 2,500-square-foot kitchen located just outside of Boston. It is the home of Cooks Illustrated magazine and Cooks Country magazine and is the Monday-through-Friday destination for more than three dozen test cooks, editors, food scientists, tasters, and cookware specialists. Our mission is to test recipes over and over again until we understand how and why they work and until we arrive at the best version.

We start the process of testing a recipe with a complete lack of conviction, which means that we accept no claim, no theory, no technique, and no recipe at face value. We simply assemble as many variations as possible, test a half-dozen of the most promising, and taste the results blind. We then construct our own hybrid recipe and continue to test it, varying ingredients, techniques, and cooking times until we reach a consensus. The result, we hope, is the best version of a particular recipe, but we realize that only you can be the final judge of our success (or failure). As we like to say in the test kitchen, We make the mistakes, so you dont have to.

All of this would not be possible without a belief that good cooking, much like good music, is indeed based on a foundation of objective technique. Some people like spicy foods and others dont, but there is a right way to saut, there is a best way to cook a pot roast, and there are measurable scientific principles involved in producing perfectly beaten, stable egg whites. This is our ultimate goal: to investigate the fundamental principles of cooking so that you become a better cook. It is as simple as that.

You can watch us work (in our actual test kitchen) by tuning in to Americas Test Kitchen ( www.americastestkitchen.com ) or Cooks Country from Americas Test Kitchen ( www.cookscountrytv.com ) on public television, or by subscribing to Cooks Illustrated magazine ( www.cooksillustrated.com ) or Cooks Country magazine ( www.cookscountry.com ), which are each published every other month. We welcome you into our kitchen, where you can stand by our side as we test our way to the best recipes in America.

PREFACE

I started Cooks Illustrated magazine in 1992. The reason? My cooking teachers were unable to answer basic questions about why they scalded milk before making a bchamel, why they recommended whisking egg whites in a copper bowl (hey, this was a long time ago!), or when to use baking soda instead of baking powder. I also noticed that many of the recipes being offered (coulibiac of salmon comes to mind) were hopelessly outdated. And the other food magazines of the era, Gourmet, Food & Wine, Cuisine, and Bon Apptit, were celebrating the dining, not the cooking. Who was going to give me straight answers?

I finally realized that I was going to have to answer my own questions by starting a cooking magazine and building my own test kitchen. At first, we struggled, but today, we have a 2,500-square-foot test kitchen just outside of Boston with 45 test cooks who test everything from Crisp Roast Chicken and Vegetable Lasagna to Triple-Chocolate Mousse Cake and Blueberry Pies.

Many of you know that I grew up in Vermont although I am a flatlander by birth. I worked summers on a small mountain farm, learned to milk cows and pitch hay, shoveled my share of manure (both in the barn and in writing), and learned to cook under the watchful eye of Marie Briggs, the town baker who lived in a small yellow farmhouse next to the town line. This experience has given me the gift of independence of thought, a trait crucial to the ongoing mission of Cooks Illustrated, which is to take an unbiased, no-nonsense approach to the culinary arts in an effort to discover what works and what doesnt in Americas home kitchens.

This reminds me, of course, of a story about the old-timer from Vermonts Northeast Kingdom who sat down one night to fill out his taxes. Now, like any thrifty farmer, he hardly found this a pleasant task, and staring him in the face at the head of a box in the top right-hand corner of the printed form were these words in bold type: DO NOT WRITE HERE.

Before going any further, the old gentleman took a firm grip on his pen and wrote in the box, in equally bold letters: I WRITE WHERE I GODDAMN PLEASE.

I guess that pretty much sums up how we go about recipe testing. If you tell us to scald the milk before making a bchamel, well try it cold, right out of the refrigerator. (It works just fine.) Or tell us to use natural cocoa and well test Dutch-processed. Or make a point of insisting on the use of bread flour and well try all-purpose. Its not just that we are contrary (we are), its that we have spent too much time listening to culinary experts pontificate on the rules and regulations of cooking only to find that they hadnt fully tested their propositions; they were simply passing on conventional wisdom.

We often talk about the best way of making a recipe and many folks argue that there is no such thing. Fair enough. But there are lots of wrong ways to cook a recipe and we consider it our job to ferret out those mistakes before you do. And for the last 20 years we have been eager to share our discoveries with you, our friends and readers.