The New Best Recipe by the staff of Cook's Illustrated

The New Best Recipe is the updated edition of The Best Recipe, a collection of recipes from Cook's Illustrated magazine. This magazine is the basis for the popular PBS cooking show "America's Test Kitchen." The mission of the authors is to find the "best recipe" for each type of dish by documenting exactly what they want out of the dish, and then tweaking the ingredients and techniques to find out exactly what works and what doesn't.

The result is a marvelously comprehensive and detailed guide to cooking. Following a recipe from The New Best Recipe will yield a great dish almost without fail. A typical recipe starts with a goal (eg. a thick, chewy chocolate chip cookie, not crispy or cakey). The authors then explain the different experiments and the results (eg. creaming the butter makes for a cakey cookie). They end with the final recipe with complete instructions.

The emphasis here is on basics and classics. If you're looking for a perfect pot roast or fruit cobbler, this is the book to get. That said, the beauty of the book is that it makes an excellent springboard for further experimentation. From their explanations, you can often figure out what approaches and changes are the most promising. Once you figure out how the editors play with ingredients, you can follow their philosophy to perfect your own creations.

I'm Just Here for the Food by Alton Brown

I'm Just Here for the Food brings Alton Brown's unique blend of humor, science, and love for food to the printed page. Like The New Best Recipe, it emphasizes the "why" of cooking as much as the "how". I love this approach because, with cooking, knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do. So many cookbooks have vague instructions that present dozens of opportunities to make catastrophic mistakes.

Alton gives you the science behind making great food, and, more impressively, he makes it fun. Few coookbooks make for good reading outside of the kitchen, but Alton's book definitely qualifies. It's filled with cool food facts, unconventional techniques (eg. he uses a terra cotta planter to make prime rib), and, of course, recipes that actually work and taste great. Again the emphasis here is on basics, but, like The Best New Recipe, it should provide a good, solid background for branching out.

Also Recommended

The Way to Cook by Julia Child

How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman