The best cooking magazine available!

I wish I had discovered Cooks Illustrated sooner. I just love this magazine. No advertising and a great conversational tone are just two of its great features. The quick tips section is always helpful and I love reading the recipes and how they came up with the correct amounts of each ingredient. It's a very homey magazine and everyone, from a beginning cook, to an experienced cook, will learn something from EVERY issue.

One of my favorite features of the magazine is how they test different products - everything from garlic presses to vanilla extract. After you find out the best gadget for your task, you will find many of these items here on Amazon!

If, like me, you just discovered this magazine, you can subscribe to the website and get access to all 10 years' worth of recipes and product reviews. If you like to cuddle up with your cookbooks, you can do that too - you can buy hardbound books, each of which contain the full year's worth of magazines (6 issues per year).

And don't forget to check out the great selection of Cooks Illustrated books here on Amazon! Look for "The Best Recipe Series", "Best Kitchen Quick Tips", and "Here in America's Test Kitchen". Did you know that Christopher Kimball, founder and editor of Cooks Illustrated, has a TV show on PBS? It's called America's Test Kitchen and in my area, it's on Saturday afternoon. Check your local listings!

Happy cooking!

The Consumer's Reports of Cooking Magazine

I was turned onto this magazine a few yrs. ago by a couple of friends; and it's grown to be one of my favorites! The magazine does not take advertising, so each issue is cooking tips from cover-to-cover.

The bulk of the magazine is made up of recipes devoted to different dishes; with the test kitchens testing different ingredients and equipment to determine the best recipe, (ie 'best chocolate chip cookies'). There are also sections devoted to rating cookware and appliances. My favorite guilty pleasure is the front of each issue where readers write in describing an unknown kitchen gadget, and the editors tell them what the item is, and frequently the foreign culture that uses it.

All the techniques are illustrated with easy to follow sketches; so with the exception of the back page, there aren't the shiny, glossy, 'food-porn' photographs that are in other magazines. You can decide for yourself if this is a good or bad thing. Regardless, these are magazines you should love. You can also buy annual bound issues of the magazine.

If you love cooking and eating good food this is a must

When CI does a cookbook review, one of their chief criteria is the rate of "success" of a solid sampling of recipes from the cookbook. This is strangely missing from many cookbook reviews from other sources. My wife and I have collected the hardbound volumes of the magazine. We have cooked over 100 different recipes from this source. Based on their own criteria I would consider them to have better than a 95% success rate on recipes, with a greater than 30% of those ending up on our "favorites" list. This is probably one of the highest rates I have seen from any of the cookbooks in our fairly large collection.

The recipes are focused on American traditional cooking. Many are "meat and potatoes" dishes and desserts. It is not limited to these but if you are looking for traditional recipes from other cultures this is not the best source. The recipes maximize taste. This frequently leads them to be higher in fat and/or calories than a source like Cooking Light. It is done in B&W with photos and line drawings. Those looking for great color photos of prepared dishes in exotic locales should avoid also. The recipes are roughly in the middle of the road in terms of complexity, rarity of ingredients, and time to prepare. They happily avoid the pitfall of some cookbooks from famous chefs that attempt to adapt restaurant recipes to home cooks with lists of 20+ ingredients. On the other hand there are not that many 30 minutes quickie meals from obviously on-hand ingredients.

You will probably either love or hate their focus on kitchen science and how to make the best recipe. If you fall into the latter category then just skip the first part of each article and just make the recipe. The product and cookbook reviews are very objective, informative, and appropriately critical.