Italian Classics [Hardcover]

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

What's the best way to prevent ricotta cheesecake from becoming watery? Is there a trick for coaxing more flavor from basil when making pesto? Does bread flour or all-purpose 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 cookbook packed with recipes, food tastings, equipment testings, and cooking tips straight from the Cook's test kitchen. Designed with the American 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 braciole, 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--center-cut or rib--is best for cooking and what the difference is between pancetta and American bacon.

Cook's Illustrated, Home of America's Test Kitchen producesthe very popular America's Test Kitchen Public Television series that is seen inboth the US and Canada by over 1 million viewers. Additionally, it is associatedwith Cooks Illustrated Magazine, a leading and highly respected foodpublication that is available throughout Canada.

Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen titles includingThe New Best Recipe - revised and expanded from the classic, The BestRecipe, which has sold over 350,000 copies, companions to the America's TestKitchen Public Television series, and many other bestselling and award-winningcookbooks such as Baking Illustrated, Cover and Bake and TheBest Kitchen Quick Tips.