Hi, I’m looking for some cookbook recommendations. AI and SEO slop have kinda killed my trust for most things on the internet, and I figure it might be handy to have some physical books in case it gets even worse. Also would be nice to have at least one book for low-carb recipes (my roommate is diabetic) and a book for vegetarian recipes. If any of you have cookbooks you love, I’d appreciate your recommendations!
Edit:
Thank you all, I ended up ordering:
- Food Lab
- Joy of Cooking
- Complete Mediterranean Cookbook
- Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook
If I could have ordered one more, it probably would have been Night + Market. :)
The cookbook I reach for most is the 1970s Betty Crocker with the pie wedges design on the front, like:
https://www.amazon.com/CROCKERS-COOKBOOK-Golden-Binder-Printing/dp/B088HC115P
Though it can be found much cheaper on ABEBooks or Fleabay.
My recommendation is J. Kenji Lopez-Alts “Food Lab”. It’s amazing for all skill levels, delicious recipes and explains why you should and how to do advanced cooking methods easily. It single handily took my cooking to the next level.
https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science/dp/0393081087
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My suggestion is The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. While it has recipes, there’s also a lot of discussion about why the recipes work- which translates into other recipes very well
I already seen lots of recommendations for the Food Lab which I love. My favorite and the one that made me love cooking is Salt Fat Acid Heat. It’s both specific recipes and general cooking advice
Joy of Cooking.
Julia Child used it to learn to cook. My grandma used it to teach me to cook. It’ll teach you how to cook.
Not so much the low carb or veggie recipes though. These are mostly traditional dishes. The newest version might have some recipes like that though.
This is going to be pretty basic, but I like having a classic plaid Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. It provides a solid but basic version of most recipes, then flesh out with a few more books that meet your preferences and requirements.
I’ve read through quite a few cookbooks and these are my favorites per use-case:
General Purpose: The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America
Culinary Basics: Basics with Babish by Andrew Rea
Food Science & Ingredients: On Food & Cooking by Harold McGee
Equipment: Gear by Alton Brown
Baking: Professional Baking by Wayne Gilssen
Flavor Combinations: The Flavor Matrix by Nik Sharma
Grilling: Arnie Tex by Arnie Segovia
Chinese: The Breath of a Wok by Grace Young
Indian: The Best Ever Indian Cookbook by Mridula Baljekar and others
Thai: Sabai by Pailin Chongchitnant
Vintage: The Settlemennt Cook Book
YouTuber Cookbook: Binging with Babish by Andrew Rea
Celebrity Cookbook: From Crook to Cook by Snoop Dogg (it actually has really good recipes believe it or not)Seconding Professional Baking, I found it for $10 at a used book store several years ago and it has legitimately saved my life.
I had it as a textbook in culinary school, as do many people, and it’s the one I still routinely use. The recipes are rock solid. I use it mostly for very basic things, but I routinely get requests for those recipes, sometimes even from other chefs.
I also have a copy of an old King Arthur’s cookbook from the 80s that I find similarly useful and robust. Very seldom do I need a staple baking recipe that I can’t find from those two.
My only complaint about the textbook is needing to scale every recipe down to half or even a quarter. While I would love to bake a whole sheet of brownies my roommates and girlfriend already complain about the amount of delicious carbs I throw their way!
I would highly recommend Night Market by Kris Yenbamroong. It’s a Thai cookbook and everything I’ve made from it has been spot on. It’s also very entertainingly written, with instructions like “fry it for a little longer than you’re comfortable with” (he was right).
My wife and I use The Food Lab all the time. It’s more of a techniques book, and explains a lot of the science behind why the techniques work.
Another go to of ours is Six Seasons, which is heavily geared towards farmers market shopping. The recipes are kick ass.
Your mileage may vary, but we love them both.
I am a RecipeTinEats advocate. The recipes that I have tried have never turned out wrong - even my kitchen-anxious partner can follow her recipes just fine. Her books go for $20 at Target/KMart/Big W.
I also have a book called Africola, after a restaurant in Adelaide, South Australia.
I also like The Mediterranean Dish. I don’t think it’s AI, but I could be wrong. I hope not.
I like seeing other people’s recommendations for books I need to get!
My mom’s cookbook of choice was “The Joy of Cooking,” so that’s what I bought when I moved across the country. It has explanations of how and why it makes decisions, and mistakes one might make.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/joy-of-cooking-fully-revised-and-updated-ethan-becker/fd5f6c238b71f467
(Link tracking removed manually, so it might not work)
Thank you so much! This has actually been a big help. Now I just need to figure how many of these I can really afford, haha.
I’m also worried about online recipes. Decent cookbooks routinely have recipes that benefit from adjustments or lack good instructions. Online recipes are already worse than that and AI is going to make them much worse. Sometimes you want a known good recipe.
In my experience the recipes in these seven books are particularly trustworthy. They deliver what they say on the tin, the listed quantities are good, and they’re well written.
- The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer
- Bravetart by Stella Parks
- Essentials of Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan
- Land of Plenty by Fuchsia Dunlop
- Victuals by Ronni Lundy
- Mooncakes and Milkbread by Kristina Cho
- Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji
I wish I could add Mexican and maybe regional Indian cookbooks of this caliber, but I haven’t read any I liked this much. All the classic French books are also excellent and very reliable (Larousse, Bocuse, etc.), that’s kind of their thing. Joy of Cooking does cover similar ground.
I recommend two plant focused books, both deeper cuts.
- Vedge by Richard Landau and Kate Jacoby
- From the Earth by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo
I cooked through Vedge with a few skips during COVID and it’s haymaker after haymaker, I can’t heap enough praise on it. From the Earth is pretty dated, and sometimes that shows in the ingredients, but also shockingly solid.
To learn to cook from the ground up, I’d favor YouTube over books. The books work, but video simply conveys more information. And as lists of recipes I don’t find those books particularly useful.
Ruhlman’s Ratios is an extremely versatile cookbook for soups, sauces, batters, and doughs that walks through a mindset that will let someone easily overhaul recipes to fit their vision or what’s on hand. You can find it very cheap and I think it can help most okay to even amazing cooks improve.
I recommend looking for many of these used, online or in person, or skimming them in a library. The Joy of Cooking in particular is practically falling out of trees they’ve printed so many of them.
A couple of decades ago, a chef friend of mine bought me this book when I first moved out of my own.
I think the best part of this book was explaining how various spices could be combined with various foods
The “Complete Mediterranean Cookbook” has become my bible. It comes in both physical and digital editions. Can’t recommend it enough!
