Cook This Book Review

Cook This Book: Techniques That Teach and Recipes to Repeat: A Cookbook

Our Cook This Book Review is finally here! It is with great excitement that we share with you our opinion about one of the most anticipated books of the year, at least for us!

In Cook This Book, Molly Baz breaks the essentials of cooking down to clear and uncomplicated recipes that deliver big flavor with little effort and a side of education. More than a collection of recipes, Cook This Book teaches you the invaluable superpower of improvisation through visually compelling lessons on such topics as the importance of salt and how to balance flavor, giving you all the tools necessary to make food taste great every time.

#1 New York Times Bestseller - A thoroughly modern guide to becoming a better, faster, more creative cook, featuring fun, flavorful recipes anyone can make.
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Created With The Home Cook in Mind

If you seek out, celebrate, and obsess over good food but lack the skills and confidence necessary to make it at home, you’ve just won a ticket to a life filled with supreme deliciousness. Cook This Book is a new kind of foundational cookbook from Molly, who’s here to teach you absolutely everything she knows and equip you with the tools to become a better, more efficient cook.

For us, this book has everything a home cook needs. Like most cookbooks, this one is full of recipes. But these are recipes that actually teach. They are packed with useful information that will answer all your questions. As Molly says, "I've tried to anticipate what those questions will be and provide answers to them within the recipes". From top to bottom, from start to finish, the recipes in this book were created with the home cook in mind.

As you cook through this book you will start to notice all its small details, that in our opinion, make this book one of a kind. Molly has done the heavy lifting for you and planned out all of the prep work in advance, meaning you can jump right into a recipe and rest assured that the time management aspect of things has already been considered. She'll be right there with you to tell you when to start chopping your onions and at what point you should get the rice going in order to make the most efficient use of your time.

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Become a Better, Faster, More Creative Cook

As we already said, Cook This Book is packed with details that will make your life in the kitchen easier and more fun. For example, the ingredient quantities are listed in the ingredient lists and reiterated in the procedure text. This way, you can use the ingredient lists as a shopping guide, without having to go back and reference them every time an ingredient is called upon. Besides this, the ingredients are organized by where they're most likely to be found in a grocery store or in your home kitchen, saving you time and energy in your shopping trips and movement around your kitchen.

Throughout this book, you'll encounter lots of different techniques that are fundamental to modern home cooking. Each chapter will cover an essential cooking category and teach you the core techniques you'll need to know. If you cook your way through the chicken chapter, for example, you'll have learned the quintessential techniques for cooking chicken at home. This will happen not only in the chicken chapter but in all the other chapters.

Besides all the techniques and information that you'll find in each recipe, Cook This Book has a very useful section that will help you to become a better cook. In this section, How to Make Food Taste Great (page 32), that you should read before diving into the rest of the book, you'll find all the tools you need to start thinking about flavor.

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Getting Dialed

Another feature that we love in this cookbook are the QR codes. Yes, QR codes in a cookbook! Throughout the book, you’ll encounter dozens of QR codes, accessed through the camera app on your smartphone, that link to short technique-driven videos hosted by Molly to help illuminate some of the trickier skills. Instead of making you suffer through a long explanation, Molly decided to shot 20 super-quick video tutorials for each of these hard-to-explain techniques.

To access these codes you simply need to open your camera app on your smartphone and hover it over the QR code, and you'll be automatically directed to the corresponding video. Although we used this feature just for fun, we are sure that it will be very useful for less experienced cooks. And to be honest, we hope this becomes a trend in the cookbook industry. Having the possibility to watch short videos explaining advanced techniques is something that can save a lot of frustrations.

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At The End of Cook This Book Review

Cook This Book is without any doubt one of the best home cooking books we ever reviewed. Its accessible and delicious recipes combined with useful information and the QR codes make this book a must-have for anyone who wants to take the first steps to become a better home cook.