NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A thoroughly modern guide to becoming a better, faster, more creative cook, featuring fun, flavorful recipes anyone can make. ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, Food52, Taste of Home “Surprising no one, Molly has written a book as smart, stylish, and entertaining as she is.”—Carla Lalli Music, author of Where Cooking Begins 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 Baz, who’s here to teach you absolutely everything she knows and equip you with the tools to become a better, more efficient cook. Molly breaks the essentials of cooking down to clear and uncomplicated recipes that deliver big flavor with little effort and a side of education, including dishes like Pastrami Roast Chicken with Schmaltzy Onions and Dill, Chorizo and Chickpea Carbonara, and of course, her signature Cae Sal. But this is not your average cookbook. More than a collection of recipes, Cook This Book teaches you the invaluable superpower of improvisation though 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. Throughout, 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. As Molly says, “Cooking is really fun, I swear. You simply need to set yourself up for success to truly enjoy it.” Cook This Book will help you do just that, inspiring a new generation to find joy in the kitchen and take pride in putting a home-cooked meal on the table, all with the unbridled fun and spirit that only Molly could inspire.
Reviews with the most likes.
I don't usually leave reviews for cookbooks, but I feel like the truth about this one needs to be put out there. The graphics are interesting and appealing... and that's about all that is appealing about this cookbook.
The cutesy titles, the wet and messy food photos, the strange combinations of ingredients... some of them actually made my stomach churn. (Chicken soup with six stalks of celery and prunes? Tomato soup loaded up with soggy bread? Soft-boiled eggs over greek yogurt topped with browned butter? What!?)
Not to mention, this cookbook claims to be a guide for the beginner home cook, but the recipes call for many expensive and (where I live) hard to find ingredients. For example: salmon roe, broccolini, burrata, mortadella, scallops, and more. If I had and could afford these lovely ingredients, I wouldn't dare waste them on these recipes. Mortadella used to flavor a pot of beans? I don't think so.
I suspect also this cookbook may have been sponsored by the Celery Council, because the author uses celery often in her recipes—and in large quantities. Most of the recipes center on meat and bread, but if there's going to be a vegetable, it's celery. If you love celery and think, “Why not make Ants on a Log into a salad?”, then this may be the book you've been waiting for.
For the record, I knew nothing about the author going in. I saw a review that said someone had cooked a ton of the recipes and loved them, which is always a good sign, but I now find that doubtful. (Or else we must have very different tastes.) It feels like the author said, “Let's take a basic recipe and add one ingredient that makes it strange and unaccessible” for almost every recipe in this cookbook.
