Product Description

Would you like to cook restaurant recipes at home? Have you ever been tempted to make a restaurant recipe only to be disappointed by the results? The editors of Cook's Illustrated set out to find out how to make restaurant cooking at home a reality. After collecting together hundreds of recipes they selected 150 recipes that excited them most and spent thousands of hours in their test kitchen making those recipes work. They trimmed each recipe to its essentials without compromising on flavour or visual appeal. Restaurants usually prepare huge batches of food, so the recipes were reworked to serve 4 rather than 40. As a result, Restaurant Favourites at Home offers tried and tested recipes for starters, soups, salads, main courses, side dishes and desserts as well as the usual wealth of tips, tastings and equipment tests that are so much a part of all the Cook's Illustrated recipe books.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #80548 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The editor and founder of Cooks Illustrated magazine and his devoted staff turn their culinary skills to the deconstruction of complicated restaurant recipes in this solid cookbook, which captures "the magic of five-star recipes without the madness of their execution." With the intention of simplifying and clarifying restaurant fare, the authors tested and retested complicated instructions and ingredients and pared them down to their essential elements. Thus, Insane Truffle Soup, served at Tru in Chicago, becomes Sane Truffle Soup, a recipe that keeps the essence of truffle flavor without blowing the home cook's budget. And Le Bernardin's Tuna Tartare with Piquillo Peppers, Roasted Tomatoes and Spicy Sweet Potato Tuiles becomes Tuna Tartare with Sweet Potato Crisps, where the roasted tomato garnish is replaced with sweet potato chips, which can even be purchased at a store. Hard-to-find or expensive ingredients and kitchen tools are substituted and replaced with easier to find equipment, and vague instructions are made more precise. Kitchen tips abound: among other suggestions, the editors offer advice on how to shred cheese without making a mess, peel and segment an orange and choose the correct cooking oil for any recipe. The novelty of some of these dishes, such as Green Eggs and Ham, will delight enlightened eaters. A fine addition to Cook's Illustrated's excellent book series, this volume should please cooks of all stripes.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Founded in 1980, Cook's Illustrated has emerged as 'America's Test Kitchen', renowned for its near obsessive dedication to finding the best methods of home cooking. The editors of Cook's Illustrated are also the authors of the range of best-selling cookbooks and they present America's Test Kitchen cooking show on public broadcast TV. The show features editors, test cooks, equipment testers and food tasters and has its own web site www americastestkitchen.com

Customer Reviews

This is my favorite Best Recipe book!
I wasn't expecting to enjoy this book so much. I was anticipating recipes from the kinds of restaurants I eat out in frequently, which are in my price range, and still prepare foods I don't often do at home. But the restaurants represented in THIS book are the extremely pricey, cutting-edge, wait-for-days-for-reservations places that I rarely can afford. These restaurants have incredible food. So I haven't even been able to taste a wide range of dishes in this unique category, let alone prepare them at home. A diverse group of people in the high-end food industry were polled to find the recipes that people ordered again and again. The editors pared 750 suggestions down to 150, with the chefs generously contributing their recipes for inclusion.

These are indeed things you could not cook at home. In this volume it takes more than the average amount of Cook's Illustrated tweaking to make the recipes accessible to the home cook. (Christopher Kimball noted in his preface that this project was more work than he had expected, and it's easy to see why.) But they don't stop until every problem is solved.

And the food!! I have made several of these recipes, and they are sublime. I have dog-eared dozens more pages with additional dishes I want to try. Each dish represents the particular vision of the chef who created it. Sometimes we think food like this it too weired for the average person to enjoy, but this is not the case. Everyone who tried my dishes to loved them, including children.

Uncommon recipes, not what I expected.
I assumed this book would contain recipes for classic dishes commonly found at restaurants. That is not the case. This book contains adaptations of unusual and imaginative dishes by world-class chefs. I was hoping for something simpler, closer to my level. More advanced gourmet cooks will appreciate this book more.

From anyone else this would be a 5-star book, but...
It really hurts giving a weak rating to a Cooks Illustrated book. The America's Test Kitchen crew is one of the most overachieving organizations in the culinary world, turning out magazine, cookbooks, and a TV show at a furious pace, and all the while serving as the oracle of record for all things culinary. By itself, this is an excellent book, with excellent interpretations of normally-inaccessible restaurant dishes for the home cook. But it seems to lie outside what Cooks Illustrated does best; their usual methodical approach is muted here, though not nonexistent.

The selection of recipes is a good one -- lots of New American, kicked-up ethnic (including Anthony Bourdain's Cassoulet from Les Halles), innovative twists like "Green Eggs and Ham" (Seuss-inspired -- eggs in an herb sauce), and some flat-out four-star stuff that nobody would ever think to do in a home kitchen. The usual sidebars with product reviews and food tastings are there, as well (though seemingly in smaller-than-usual quantity), and there's even a short section on restaurant presentation. But... there's something missing.

On the one hand, the ATK crew could have gone even deeper, exploring the basics of restaurant cuisine and how to adapt its techniques to the home kitchen. Complex, yes, but a lot of fun. On the other hand, they could have pulled out a straight Todd Wilbur impression, then going one better and talking with the chefs about the origins of the dishes and the restaurants they come from. But Cooks Illustrated sent this one straight down the middle, creating something that doesn't quite fit either genre of cookbook. It doesn't, after all, feel like a Cooks Illustrated book with its interlocking technical commentary, nor does it satisfy as French Laundry-style food porn.

This doesn't mean I don't recommend it -- if you're bored with the usual, this book still does a good job despite its shortcomings, and the recipes sound truly delicious. But it's a diversion from the usual, and an awkwardly handled one at that. Know what you're getting into beforehand and you won't be disappointed.