America’s Test Kitchen Cooking Tricks Is Cooking for Productive Nerds
In their new book Kitchen Hacks: How Clever Cooks Get Things Done, Kimball and company strive to show you how to cook, cook and clean in the most efficient way. In short: This is a helpful, practical guide on how to make the best use of your kitchen.
This is part of the Lifehacker book review series . Not all life hacks can be described on a blog, so we decided to look at some of our favorite life changing books to dive deeper into the most important topics in life.
Cook’s Illustrated has long prided itself on being one of the popular resources for home chefs hoping to buy and cook the best of the best, and is known for their selfless, almost intrusive, empirical approach to everything when it comes to cuisine, and this book is the quintessence of their clever kitchen knowledge. …
Who is this book for?
This book is for the home chef who regrets disposable kitchen utensils and loves good (or not so good) puns. This is for those who just know they can organize their kitchen more efficiently, but don’t know how to do it. This is for the independent woman who doesn’t need a man to open the can (because she found out it can be done with a mouse pad or Livestrong bracelet). This is for those who drink a lot of boxed wine and the pine trees are a way to relax. reuse the bags in the box.
Kitchen Hacks: How Clever Cooks Get Things Done is a comprehensive, well-indexed tome with tips and tricks to help you clean, cook, store and transport food in more efficient and smart ways, all without using fancy techniques. It will take a few forceps, though; the people at Cook’s Illustrated seem to be obsessed with tongs. America’s Test Kitchen, a twelve-chapter book on tricks, provides many ways to solve common (and less common) problems that the home chef faces in the kitchen. Some of them are so simple that you will feel embarrassed that you have not thought about them, and some are so stupid that you will be a little ashamed of ATK, but most of them are, above all, very useful.
What do you get
The book is indexed in two different ways. First, you have twelve main chapters with fairly self-explanatory titles, such as Hacks for Storing Food and Warming Up and Resurrecting Hacking Products. There are also ‘recipes’ scattered all over the place because Cook’s Illustrated can’t help showcasing their tried and true recipes. The alternate table of contents “Hack This Book” divides everything by personality. There are Tricks for the Coffee Villains, Tricks for the Forgetful, and something like the lonely Tricks for One. Both TOCs are helpful, but the back pointer really shines. He divides everything into products and tools. Let’s say you want to know about all Kimball-approved muffin molds, just flip back where you will find all thirteen. Below you will find a quick rundown of each chapter, as well as a few of our favorite (and not so favorite) techniques.