Kitchen Detective

Synopsis:

Provides 150 recipes for soups, stews, vegetables, salads, main dishes, and desserts along with information on cooking techniques and recipe variations.

Review:

You have probably run into Christopher Kimball before, as founder/publisher/editor of Cook's Illustrated magazine, or host of public television's America's Test Kitchen, or maybe as author of The Dessert Bible, The Cook's Bible, or The Yellow Farmhouse Cookbook. Kimball probably grew up spending all of Christmas morning taking apart his presents to see how they worked. And he's never stopped.

Now he does it with food, sometimes with a big support staff and test kitchens, and sometimes at home. The Kitchen Detective is Kimball's home version of taking standard recipes apart and putting them back together again, often over and over and over again, until he gets to where he wants to be, or gets to what he wants to eat. In 125 recipes and 290 or so well-illustrated pages you will learn why all salt is not the same; why that $80 cake pan isn't any better than its $4 cousin; why various ways of measuring flour can yield results that differ by as much as 25%. Kimball's the guy in the back of the class asking the cooking teacher why she's adding cream of tartar to egg whites, and making her a little nuts because, truth be told, she doesn't know. The man takes no prisoners.

This book is about getting good, familiar food on the table fast for a family. There are chapters on "Soups and Stews"; "Vegetable and Salads"; "Pasta and Grains"; "Chicken"; "Meat and Fish"; "Eggs and Morning Baking"; and "Desserts". How about Minestrone with Flavor, or Really Good Blue Cheese Dressing, or Faster, Easier Fried Chicken, or Pork Chili for Sissies, or The Best Bran Muffin? Kimball touches all the bases and hits all the high notes with The Kitchen Detective. You'll not only achieve the results you are looking for, you'll know why. --Schuyler Ingle