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Review: ATC Best Recipes and Reviews 2010

I got the magazine version of The Best of America’s Test Kitchen Kitchen: Best Recipes and Reviews 2010 (that’s a mouthful) a few months ago. I have been working my way through the recipes and have tried about ten of the 64 recipes so far.   If you aren’t familiar with America’s Test Kitchen, I would describe them as a Consumer Reports for cooks, but with a few extra side businesses.  First, they have an excellent cooking show on PBS that performs food product taste tests, product reviews, as well as recipes and cooking techniques.   They are also known for Cook’s Illustrated magazine.

The greatest thing about America’s Test Kitchen is that they take every recipe and experiment with different techniques and ingredients, testing each one until they find the best recipe possible.   They say they will try a recipe 30, 40, or even 70 times before they publish it.  As a result, a number of the recipes have some very unique ingredients or techniques that can provide surprisingly good results.  For example, their Creamless Creamy Tomato Soup uses white bread blended into the soup instead of cream to provide a creamy and thick consistency.  I never would have thought to try bread in the soup, but it was quite good.

The Ultimate Cinnamon Buns are outstanding, although they were almost too rich.  They are made with a cream cheese glaze that is very good, and the filling uses brown sugar instead of regular sugar with lots of butter.   Since they freeze very well, we would eat them two at a time with a week or so in between.

The Baked Ziti uses cottage cheese instead of ricotta, fresh basil instead of dried, and fresh mozzarella cut into cubes instead of shredded.  All of these ingredient choices make a big difference over the usual recipe.  It is definitely the best Baked Ziti I have ever had, and they also solve the usual problem of soggy pasta by having you undercook the pasta before the baking portion of the recipe.

There are a few things I would like to see changed in the recipes.  First, they don’t give you a very good idea what the total prep and cook time is for the recipe.  I usually like to know how much time I’m going to have to set aside without having to read through the recipe and add up all the time periods.  This is especially annoying for bread recipes that have multiple rise times.  The second thing that is missing is nutritional information.  This can be added up pretty easily, but for the more complicated recipes with many ingredients, this is a hassle.

This magazine has been a great source of recipes.  I will have to think about whether the entire book is worth getting.  It appears that the full book is 352 pages with about 133 recipes and a number of pages of tips, techniques, and reviews, but the magazine is 64 pages with 64 recipes.   I think maybe an online membership might be the way to go, since it provides access to all their content, including historical recipes.