Customer Reviews

How To Cook Everything: Simple Recipes for Great Food

5 star:		(166)
4 star:		(34)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

About 6 months ago I wrote a negative review of this book, and since I can't seem to access it to delete it, I need to write a rather sheepish follow up.

I was a very reluctant beginner, and I was initially discouraged with this work, because I found the author's suggestions on doing everything from scratch overwhelming. But another purchase, "How to Cook Without a Book," got me on my feet, and after a few good results, I found myself turning more and more often to this one. I now use it every day.

From it I have learned everything, from the basic to the mysterious, and after months of use I can honestly say I have never had a bad result. My family doesn't know what hit them, and their compliments have grown in stature until yesterday my husband announced that I am a better cook than his mother, a small, round Italian woman dedicated to her craft, and someone I hope never reads this. (: I have had so much success from every recipe I have used that I, um, well, I actually kind of like to cook now, which is a minor miracle considering how I felt about it before.

This book with the other I mentioned have changed my family and even social life. My family is delighted and eating far better than they were, and I am much more willing now to have people over, knowing I can serve up something warm and delicious, elegant or comforting, without panic and apprehension.

So it's 5 stars to my former 3, and a "thank you" to the author to boot.

Whether or not this book is worth the money for you depends on what your goal as a cook is. I am a mom who recently gave up my career to stay at home with my daughter. I have never really had an interest in cooking, but I wanted my family to gather together at the table around something more than takeout boxes every night, so I bought a couple cookbooks to get me started. But honestly, this one really discouraged me. The recipes are more long and involved than the title suggests (the preparation times listed are often deceiving, as they include time consuming, pre-made ingredients), and the author's condescending attitude towards anything not started from scratch is kind of disheartening for someone who just wants to serve up something healthy and tasty, not impressive and gourmet. He rolls his eyes at precut vegetables, coughs delicately over store bought curry powder, and downright sneers at bullion cubes ("as for bullion cubes, forget it. You're better off with water and a few extra vegetables"). I'm sure homemade stock or his recipe for "vastly improved canned stock" really is much better, and all in all his recipes and methods seem to be rich and varied, but, though Bittman would probably consider me a culinary lowbrow, cooking just isn't something I want to take up a major part of my. I was much happier with my other purchase, "How to Cook Without a Book" by Pam Anderson. It offers a completely different philosophy on cooking that I found much more doable. So if your goal is to become a master cook and you have the time and inclination to make every meal from scratch, I think this is the book for you. But if your heart or schedule is not devoted to much more beyond the preparation of good but simple food, you probably want to look elsewhere.

I haven't done a lot of cooking in my life, and only recently I started cooking regularly for family. How to Cook Everything has been the only cookbook I've used in eons. Therefore, I don't have a good basis for comparison to other cookbooks. I can, however, compare the food I cook to what I eat and enjoy in restaurants. I've made about 40-50 recipes from this book.

Some advantages of the book:

- It assumes you know virtually nothing about cooking. There are sections on how to mince garlic, dice an onion, core a bell pepper... For me, and for many others, it's great. Experienced chefs can easily skip these parts.

- It's huge. It has an example of just about every (Western) food you might want to cook. Certainly, one could go much further in each area by buying specialty cookbooks.

- The philosophy of the book is ideal for home cooking. Pick good ingredients, add minimal flavorings, cook, and serve. Most of the recipes are fairly quick.

Disadvantages:

- The prep time of many recipes seems significantly underestimated, and often needs to be doubled. Maybe the time printed in the book is amount of time Bittman takes, but as more of a beginning chef, I can't fathom it.

- Ingredients can be a pain to find, and what Bittman says is easily available in supermarkets often doesn't seem to be available anywhere around Harrisburg, PA (not exactly an out-of-the-way place), without checking dozens of specialty markets. What this and the previous statement mean is that cooking these recipes becomes significantly less easy to do after work.

- My biggest problem is that the results, while generally good for home cooking, have been a bit hit-or-miss. I enjoy good restaurant food, and I'd like to think that I could cook the same quality food at home. Bittman's best recipes are excellent, food that I would praise in a restaurant, and it's a treat to find one of them. His worst recipes are purely average, or even a bit below.

What I've surmised so far, although I've only cooked a small percentage of the book's recipes, is that Bittman is at his worst with foods that need a lot of added flavor or spice. I've noticed this in his Italian, Chinese, and Thai recipes - all of them seem to be clearly missing some crucial element of flavor. If I were more experienced as a cook, I'm sure I could identify what it was, but I'm not.

Generally I think this is more a problem with quality control and scope than anything else - with 700 recipes, it's hard for Bittman to wholeheartedly recommend and repeatedly test all of them. I still have no problem recommending this book to everyone as a base cookbook, with the caveats above.

Well, my binding just wore out after six years! But I'm ordering another copy right away.

This book literally has workable recipes for almost everything. Everyone will find nits to pick (mine is sate, which is served with some peanut sauce, NOT marinated in it! It's marinated in coconut milk!) but in general it is just fabulous, especially for encouraging you to get into the kitchen and check it out for yourself.

My two examples, from this evening alone, are POPCORN and MUFFINS. I spent some years eating microwave popcorn, and then I stumbled across the "recipe" for cooking your own popcorn, just the way my mother used to do it. "Recipe??" Put some oil in a pan, throw in three popcorns seeds, cover, and wait. When they pop, put in the rest of the popcorn and cook, covered, shaking the pan occasionally. It'll all be done in five minutes or less, and it's really, really good! The cost of the popcorn could hardly be more than five or ten cents...maybe add another dime for the melted butter, if you want it!

More than that, not one piece was even close to being burned, or excessively hot!

Muffins... I recently got an oven, here in Thailand, and have been playing around with it. Lately I started making muffins, from an Australian muffin mix which costs around $4 imported. Now, I look at the actual recipe for muffins (flour, sugar, baking powder, milk, oil or butter, etc.) and then I look at the box of "muffin mix." Well, the mix contains (surprise!) flour, sugar, baking powder, and powdered milk.

When I prepare the mix, I have to add an egg, some oil, and some water. If I make the muffins from scratch, I just mix together flour, sugar, baking powder -- and proceed as with the mix!

Duh!! :-)

My other favorite cookbook is the James Beard cookbook, which is still a classic in its third edition.

Both of these books have one incredibly important feature for the cook living overseas: they will NEVER, EVER say something like "add one packet of Betty Crocker smorgasbord mix." When you're overseas, you can never buy this sort of pre-packaged Americana; all recipes have to deal with basic ingredients understood everywhere on the planet. Beef, flour, milk, rice, pepper, salt, chili, and so forth!

Overall, this is just a great cookbook!

Highest possible recommendation!

what sold me on this book is how he's included recipes even for the simplist things - like how to make popcorn from scratch. How many people under 35 know how to do that?

I agree that the binding leaves much to be desired, though.

I picked up this book today second hand for 5$, in that particular regard, it's a bargain. At full price, I do not believe this is quite worth the money. My biggest peeve with it so far flipping through is the lack of "why" things are the way they are. In a book aimed towards novice cooks, "why" is usually the difference between a recipe bombing vs. turning out.

So, I flipped it open and landed on fried chicken.

First, let me note that I have yet to try any of the recipes. It sounds like folks here have liked them for the most part, with various opinions on Bittmen's creativity and/or lack of.

However, it doesn't take too much to know a bad idea when you see it. Case in point, and example of the moment, the fried chicken recipe:

Where's the concern for user safety or a quick frying 101 (did I miss it elsewhere in the book?)? Why is there no run down on oils and smoke points? Or reference to another page in the book containing something of the sort?

A novice cook with a craving for fried chicken, flipping the book open to the fried chicken recipe, would not know that oil deteriorates quickly after each use at high temperature, nor would they know that there is a vast difference between olive oil and extra virgin olive oil's smoke points. Nor would they also realize, I suspect, that if they are using a cast iron skillet to fry their chicken, that it holds heat extremely well and does not just "drop" in temperature right away (or that an aluminum skillet conducts heat better & therefore heats faster than thicker heavy duty stainless steal). He recommends getting the oil to 350 (which, if you have any experiance frying food on the stovetop, you know that the oil doesn't get to 350 and just stay there), then cranking the heat to high before putting in the dredged chicken. Granted, yes, temperatures do drop when you add food to hot oil, however, high is overkill. Shortly after this, you cover the pan, turn it down to medium and fry for 7 minutes. Do you just walk away during this time? Go have a cigarette? Or, are we supposed to be monitering temperatures here? There is nothing quite like taking the lid off of a frying pan, only to have the oil burst into flame, to break in the nervous beginner cook. Yipe! Yet, I noticed no words of caution to this effect.

Not only this, but frying at 350 for seven minutes on one side in a covered pot, yet at the same time saying you don't want to steam the coating is ridiculous. After 7 minutes in a covered pan, believe me, the side not in the oil will be steamed.

If you are learning from scratch & want to understand why things happen in the kitchen, this is not the book for you. Try Shirley O'Corriher's "Cookwise" or the Cook's Illustrated series, or, as someone else recommended, Alton Brown -who is not only usefully informative, but amusing as well. You may not get as many recipes, but the knowledge you'll gain will allow you to improvise on your own. A much more valuable skill, in my opinion.

If you want an open it up, follow the recipe, do what the illustrations say book... this is it. It is apparantly a bit more extensive/exotic (subjectively speaking) than Better Homes & Garden's cookbooks, but not that much, nor more informative by way of identifying veggies/meat cuts, etc.

From what I'm seeing, I'm sure this is one book on my shelf that will end up having plenty of penciled in notes in the margins.

As someone who was banished from the kitchen by my mother (except for dish-washing chores), I have always had lots of questions about what to do and when for the kinds of dishes I like. My wife was similarly banished so we are like the blind leading the blind. Our mothers' culinary skills caused us to appreciate great home-cooked food, but unable to provide it for ourselves. As a result, we are fond of cookbooks where you toss a few ingredients together and get something tasty in a few minutes. We also look forward to restaurant meals where great flavors are experienced beyond what our mothers gave us.

That seemed to me like where we would stay until I found the Completely Revised Tenth Anniversary Edition of How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. With this book, I can create almost anything I used to enjoy at my mom's house or in a restaurant. I also feel confident about achieving those results because this book answers my unanswered questions.

I was astonished to see how many flavors I like in sauces can be created very easily. Wow!

In addition, I can now look forward to healthier eating by knowing what ingredients are being used rather than relying on so many prepared ingredients.

Thank you!

If you already know how to make great recipes from scratch, you won't be as impressed by this book as I am. In fact, you probably won't need it.

To use a metaphor, this book isn't the ultimate cook book. It's the step-up cookbook for those who have mastered the simplest kitchen preparations but want to learn how to do more and create the kind of results that you don't experience in 90 percent of American kitchens.

Enjoy!

First of all, let me say this is the BEST cooking reference around, but if I have to replace it every year due to the bibding breaking, I will stick to the Betty Crocker Cook Book I stole from my mom. That book is from 1961 and still in great shape!

I had learned to do basic cooking for myself in college and had even tried a few relatively complex recipes, but not until I bought "How To Cook Everything" did I really ramp up my cooking skills. It is great to have a book with such a wide variety of recipes, well-indexed, and basic preparation instructions to boot. For instance, if I decide on a whim that I want to make an eggplant dish, I can find a variety of eggplant recipes in the book along with instructions on what the best sizes and shapes are and how to peel and prepare them. It really encourages experimentation when the book helps you out with the basics of a new food or style of dish.

The author has a conversational style that I enjoy. He is the opposite of intimidating -- he seems genuinely eager for people to just hunker down and cook good food for themselves. I have made several of the recipes in the book and almost always found the instructions to be simple but detailed enough to be useful. It is rare to find a recipe that is overwhelmingly complicated and he also helpfully suggests substitutes for ingredients that might be a pain in the butt to find. Some of the recipes took some practicing to perfect, but it is worth it -- there is no scrummier lasagna than the batch you make yourself with homemade noodles and sauce, no banana bread sweeter than that baked in your own oven. I have become the Duke of Dough: bagels and pizza are my humble minions. My most-made recipe from the book however is the Cream Cheese Chocolate Brownies. My first batch was an epiphany. God lives in those creamy swirls. Subsequent batches have joyously fattened my friends and co-workers. (I should note that I roughly double the amount of chocolate in my brownies to get excessive darkness and richess.)

And if for no other reason, "How To Cook Everything" is an entertaining book to have around the house when people come over, because visitors take the title as a personal challenge and look up the most obscure dishes they can think of. (Only person who has stumped the book so far was one who knew lots of traditional Mexican dishes.) The title is catchy but a more apt one would have been "Awesome Food is Easy to Make". Seriously, store-bought meals may save you some time but even as a novice cook you can definitely make yummier versions on your own using this book, tailored to your own tastes, and of course you get the satisfaction of making something with your own hands that will please your and your loved ones' palates. Unfortunately I have not used many other cookbooks so I cannot objectively rank "How To Cook Everything" against its peers; all I can say is that I am quite pleased with the book and its wrinkled and sticky pages hold a revered spot in my kitchen.

What I dislike most about most of the cookbooks I have on my shelves is that I can spend a few hours looking at amazing glossy photos of mouth watering foods that include ingredients that are near impossible to find, that any deviation from the recipe seems like a terrible hazard, that you are doomed to merely replicating a dish rather than 'creating' a dish. Perhaps it is Mark Bittman's thorough introductions on each topic - breads, soups, poultry... or the inset boxes that offer multiple alternatives for recipes, but "How to Cook Everything" encourages you to make adaptations, skew recipes to your own taste and styles. For example, yesterday I used his recipe for "Rich/Cream Muffins" which Bittman explains he uses for sweeter muffins as opposed to the previous recipe which he has reduced the amount of sugar (and because of that, the egg and milk content). These recipes are "the base" for what you can then add in: blueberries, chocolate chips, banana and walnut... etc. In this sense, Bittman does give you the tools on how to cook Anything and Everything.
Some people complain in these reviews that the book doesn't quite include Everything. I believe the point of the book is to educate you so that you'll have little trouble adapting the recipe so that you CAN cook everything.
Alan Witschonke's illustrations are also fantastic. How to julienne carrots, or take a part a chicken, or filet a fish... Mr. Witschonke will show you in the clearest terms possible.
Lastly, the first 100 or so pages of the book describe the bare essentials for a kitchen, proper techniques, and the explanation of some of the culinary terms you may come across in the book -- all fantastic assets to the book.
Buy this book, it should be the cornerstone of every home-cook hopeful's kitchen.