- Hardcover: 496 pages
- Publisher: Best Recipe Series (Aug 1 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0936184582
- ISBN-13: 978-0936184586
- Product Dimensions: 28.3 x 21.9 x 3.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 1.5 Kg
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#156,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #41 in Books > Home & Garden > Entertaining > Holidays
- #71 in Books > Cooking, Food & Wine > Special Occasions > Holidays
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon.com
The Best Recipe series from Cook's Illustrated magazine goes from strength to strength. With its formula of exhaustively tested recipes paired with heavily illustrated techniques, the series makes it easy for even beginning cooks to produce successful dishes almost every time. For the casual home cook, Italian Classics might be the single best Italian cookbook to own. The book is, in classic Best Recipe fashion, a great big beautiful doorstop of a thing. Even so, it's not crammed with arcana. For most Americans--who in survey after survey say that regional Italian is the cuisine they most enjoy cooking at home--the recipes here will be pretty familiar; the space is devoted not to obscure dishes but to exhaustive treatments of favorites. Pesto, for instance, gets about three pages. You end up with a delicious, perfectly prepared basil paste, and along the way you learn how to bruise herb leaves, you get a treatise on why a garlic press isn't such a bad thing (despite what the professionals say), and finally, you are led into the intriguing territory of nonbasil pestos such as Toasted Nut and Parsley, and Arugula and Ricotta. All the classics are here, from red-checkered-tablecloth dishes like Spaghetti and Meatballs to regional dishes like Ribollita. Throughout, there's a nice balance between authenticity and accessibility. The book doesn't call for wildly obscure ingredients that other cookbook authors so often claim can be readily found at "specialty stores," and there's no snobbishly overwrought preparation--another boon for the home cook. --Claire Dederer
Product Description
What's the best way to prevent ricotta cheesecake from becoming watery? Is there a trick for coaxing more flavour from basil when making pesto? Does bread flour self-raising flour make better pizza dough? In an exhaustive effort to answer these questions and hundreds more, the editors of "Cook's Illustrated" magazine have conducted hundreds of kitchen tests. The result is "Italian Classics", a 496-page award-winning cookbook packed with recipes, food tastings, equipment testings, and cooking tips straight from the Cook's test kitchen. Designed with the home cook in mind, this collection of classic Italian recipes has been stripped to the bone and then reworked, updated, and improved so that each recipe is as close to foolproof as we can make it. More than 300 recipes cover the wide range of Italian home cooking, from Tuscan pork roast, and risotto, to tomato and bread soup, vegetable lasagne, and strawberries with balsamic vinegar. Learn to cook less well-known regional recipes such as steak Fiorentina, baked peaches stuffed with amaretti, and stracotto, an Italian pot roast. "Italian Classics" also contains more than 225 illustrations that will show you techniques such as how to peel garlic cloves quickly, how to roll out pasta dough, and how to assemble tiramisu. The book also includes dozens of no-nonsense equipment ratings and taste tests of supermarket ingredients. Find out why American pastas are every bit as good as Italian brands, which grater makes quick work of Parmesan cheese, and which electronic scale is our "best buy". You will also learn which type of pork chop - centre-cut or rib - is best for cooking and what the difference is between pancetta and bacon.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
cucina di geek,
By Brian Connors (Yarmouth, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Italian Classics (Hardcover)
Cooks' Illustrated, surely, is many things to many people. I like to think of them as cooking for the hard-core geeks; they slice and dice recipes as well as vegetables, and work the kinks out of them to make what is at least their idea of the best possible version of a meal. To the geek chef, their books are the technical flip side of the theoretical work of Alton Brown, Shirley Corriher, and Harold McGee. Don't pick this book up thinking that you're going to get someone's Italian nonna's sunday gravy recipe; that's what the Sopranos Family Cookbook is for. This is very technical stuff that involves stripping the great recipes down to their bare essentials and rebuilding them from the ground up. Sacred cows of Italian cuisine, as in everything else they do, are scrutinized very carefully, and slaughtered as often as not. Only the most basic definition of the dish is taken for granted. The end result is sometimes minimalist; the Baked Ziti recipe, for example, has no ricotta in it and is almost vegetarian. The end result is a dizzying book that should be on the shelf of anyone who likes to cook Italian. Finally, the frequent sidebars on cooking equipment, a Cooks Illustrated staple, offer deep background on the techniques in the recipes. Now with raves like that, why only 4 stars, you might be asking? Well, it's not perfect. The Best Recipe series presents itself as a bible of cooking, and it's not; glaring omissions in this book include meat lasagna (though the big bragging point on the dust jacket is the vegetable lasagna recipe) and cannoli. There is also a tendency to repeat articles from earlier books, an understandable but occasionally annoying situation that tends to leave the reader feeling as though the magazine people are trying to cut corners. And the appeal of this book isn't universal; the Cooks Illustrated style is, as I said, very technical, and a bit chatty at times. If you just want the recipes and don't care about the particulars, this book will bore you. Me, I like cookbooks I can read, so this isn't a problem. So, in conclusion, I say this: if you like chomping data as much as you like chomping food, this book will rock your world. If not, the recipes are still pretty good.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Practical Italian Cookbook I've ever used.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Italian Classics (Hardcover)
This cookbook is by far the best Italian Cookbook I have ever used. While many Italian cookbooks require ingrediants that are both expensive and hard to find, Italian Classics' recipes are intended to be made with ingrediants that are easy to find in an American grocery store. The recipes, however, don't sacrifice flavor at all. Every recipe that I have cooked, without exception, has been excellent. I was so surprised by the excellence of the recipes that I am in the process now of asking my family to give me other cook books from the Cook's Illustrated "Best Recipe" series for Christmas. They explain the steps of cooking so novice cookers can use the recipes as well. I recommend this book to anyone who loves Italian cooking.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best of the Best,
By A Customer
This review is from: Italian Classics (Hardcover)
The Best Recipe series have outdone themselves. This is the best one yet.(I am partial to cooking american-italian food at home). This illustrates great recipes that are tasty and user friendly. I especially love the risotto cakes. This book goes beyound recipes and teaches one about techniques and what to do or not to do. THIS IS A GREAT LAST MINUTE GIFT FOR THE NOVICE CHEF TO THE AVID COOK FOR THE HOLIDAYS OR ANY OCCASION. Definately a keeper if you like italian cooking.
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