tesseract's Full Review: Cook's Illustrated Magazine
My boyfriend and I could be considered “foodies” from some perspectives. My boss and coworkers are always teasing me that I’m a food snob, and it's true that Food TV, along with Tech TV, is one of the most popular channels at our house. But for food snobs, we sure eat at Chili’s a lot. I won’t touch pre-ground pepper, but it never occurred to me that fresh-grinding other spices might be a good idea, too. So I guess you could say we’re mid-level foodies— we’re not at that highest tier that revels in the gustatory pleasures of truffles and caviar and $300 dinners and whatnot, but we’re well-bred enough to turn our noses up at Hamburger Helper and canned vegetables.
Foodie or not, I had never heard of Cook’s Illustrated until my mother got us a gift subscription for Christmas 2002. She figured it would be the perfect gift for a couple of budding young food snobs, and she was right. Our first issue was like a treasure trove of great cooking tips and recipes. I sat and read it from cover to cover, and I regularly do the same every other month when my new issue arrives.
What is it? A news article I referenced called it "the no-frills magazine for serious chefs." That description is accurate as far as it goes, but it makes it sound too exclusive, like something that's only for people who are already great cooks. Cook's Illustrated contains mostly recipes and tips that are designed for regular workaday cooks, and it has many features which explain basic techniques, although it's advanced enough for seasoned chefs to enjoy, too.
Like Consumer Reports, Cook’s Illustrated accepts no advertising. Also like Consumer Reports, it’s loaded with comprehensive, unbiased articles based on exhaustive research and testing. Many of their equipment tests are done in the Consumer Reports testing labs, so it may actually be owned by Consumer Reports.
What’s Inside
The magazine itself is bare-bones in style. It’s printed in black and white on good-quality heavy stock, except for the overleaf, which is in color on even heavier stock. Every article in the issue is listed on the front cover, which is helpful for reference purposes. The back cover of every issue features a beautiful watercolor rendition of a certain group of foods, such as Root Vegetables, Nuts, or Edible Flowers, with a single color theme emphasized. I’m seriously thinking of making color copies of some of the back covers and framing them to turn them into a coordinated set of instant kitchen art. The inside back cover features a small color photo of each recipe, as a supplement to the larger black and white photos inside. The inside front cover contains the table of contents and a comment on the back art.
Kitchen-Tested Recipes
If you’ve ever enjoyed Good Eats and its nerdy host Alton Brown on Food TV, you’ll love Cook’s Illustrated. Like Good Eats, Cook’s Illustrated is as much about the “Why should I?” as about the “How do I?” While it doesn’t lean as much toward hardcore food science as Good Eats does, it does explain things like why flambeing really does improve the flavor of a pan sauce, why non-stick pans make inferior sauces, and how brining makes meat juicier. Before we started getting Cook’s Illustrated, Alton Brown was pretty much the last word on everything in our kitchen. Now, Do we do it AB’s way, or the Cook’s Illustrated way? can be a tough call. Fortunately, they most often agree, which makes me trust them both all the more.
Food articles range from the basic (Juicy Weeknight Pork Chops, Pan-Roasted Chicken Breasts, Sauteing 101) to the extravagant (Perfecting Baklava, Chicken alla Diavola, Rescuing Steak Diane), to the miscellaneous (Mulled Wine Worth Drinking, Pasta and Broccoli, Improving Lemon Ice). I call them food articles because each one is far more than just a recipe. Each feature article is the result of extensive experimenting and blind taste testing by the staff of the Cook’s Illustrated test kitchen. It’s actually shocking to think how many batches of food the test kitchen goes through for each perfected recipe they print. The articles are nearly always well-written and a joy to read, and chronicle the author’s quest for the perfect dish. Many of the articles focus either on ways to make a complicated recipe easier without sacrificing flavor, or ways to improve a simple but often overlooked or unsuccessful recipe. It contains a nice blend of basic techniques and recipes for the workaday cook and more grandiose options for impressing guests. A sample article intro goes something like this:
Garlic-Rosemary Roast Chicken What is the secret to moist, tender roast chicken with robust-- not raucous-- garlic and rosemary flavor?
“A perfectly roasted chicken is winsome: rich, flavorful, simple, and satisfying. It is a rarity, however, and worthy of a standing ovation because, despite its uncomplicated nature, it requires skill to accomplish, a deft coordination of the white and dark meat... An exceptional garlic and rosemary roast chicken is even more of a rarity than a plain one... The recipes I tried yielded, for the most part, overroasted chicken with tough, parched breast meat, and just one bite filled the mouth with the astringent, resinous flavor of rosemary and a vaguely raw and very sharp garlickiness that could be tasted for days. The task at hand was to harness the flavors of garlic and rosemary and unite them with a perfectly roasted chicken with tender and moist breast and thigh meat.”
The article then goes on to chronicle the journey from ideation to realization. Every step is tested and tasted, and the losing method rejected. To brine or not to brine? Roast breast side up or down? 375 or 450 degrees? Turn partway? Add liquid partway? Apply a garlic and rosemary paste under the skin? How much garlic and how much rosemary? Should the paste contain olive oil or butter? Does it need a sauce? She must have gone through 50 chickens to hit upon the perfect recipe, and the results are worth it. And this is just one article in one issue. This may seem like too much detail, but not to worry— after the introduction, the text is fairly succinct, and each article, complete with recipe, photo, and detailed drawings, rarely takes up more than two pages. The detail is important because it explains exactly WHY the recipe is the way it is. Every step has been tested and the results of doing it wrong chronicled. Helpful photos and drawings compare the good and bad results and illustrate techniques.
Unbiased Product Reviews
Product reviews are just as thorough and well done. Every issue includes one or two product review articles, such as Tasting Bittersweet Chocolates: Ghirardelli Wins, Hershey Scores and Rating Baking Pans: $9 Pan Beats $95 Model. Equipment testing is brutal and done by professional abusers— for example, they did drop tests with a dozen food storage containers filled with chili to replicate the rigors of everyday use, and told us which brands failed. Additional product test results are often included as a sidebar to a particular recipe, and even more often pop up in the other parts of the magazine.
Notes and Tips
Like most magazines, Cook’s Illustrated contains a Notes from Readers section at the front in which readers send in questions or relate their own experiences. In response, the editors often conduct additional tests and explain the answer to the question in detail. Every Notes from Readers section also includes the What Is It? feature, in which someone sends in an arcane kitchen tool and asks for it to be identified. Every Issue also has a Quick Tips section, kind of a cooking version of Hints from Heloise, if you’re familiar with that, where readers send in their ideas. Tips range from pure genius to a bit silly.
At the back, you’ll find Kitchen Notes, with even more product reviews and tips directly from the test kitchen. Finally, there’s Resources, which contains the test kitchen’s suggestions for equipment you’ll need to make the recipes in that issue, and where you can get them. Not all of their suggestions jibe with Alton Brown’s. For example, Cook’s Illustrated recommends a $34.95 baking stone, whereas the shrewd and thrifty AB figured out that a set of 9 unglazed ceramic tiles from the local flooring store will do the same job at a fraction of the cost.
The table of contents from a single recent issue (October 2003) samples the range of subjects inside:
Quick Raw Tomato Sauces for Pasta
Rating Food Storage Containers: Traditional Models Dominate
Foolproof Ricotta Calzones: No More Soggy Crusts
Ultimate Vegetable Soup
Better Beef and Broccoli: Secrets to Successful Stir-Frying
Canned Tomato Tasting: Organic Brand Earns Top Marks
Quick Apple Strudel: Easy Recipe Yields Flakiest Crust
German Potato Salad Done Right
Memorable Mushroom Risotto
Rescuing Oatmeal Scones
Refurbishing Chicken Provencal
Baking Basics
But Wait, There’s More!
If you haven’t had enough by the time you reach the back cover, you have two options—you can watch their TV show, America’s Test Kitchen, on PBS, or you can visit their website at www.cooksillustrated.com. The website seems to be absolutely packed with great stuff— unfortunately, it’s a separate membership to access most features. There are free recipes, usually variations of the ones in the magazine, linked to codes printed in the magazine, which appears to be designed as a way to lure you to website so you’ll subscribe and pay the extra money.
Update: In February 2005, I went vegetarian, and a good two-thirds of the content of my archived Cook's Illustrated magazines instantly became useless. However, I still get some mileage out of them. Although they don't feature hearty vegetarian main dishes or vegetarian foods like tofu or TVP, they contain helpful articles with new and interesting ways to prepare vegetables either by themselves, with pasta, with rice or risotto, or occasionally in other ways. They also feature quite a few baked goods and other dishes that are on ovo-lacto vegetarians' menus. As you can see from the sample table of contents above, each issue usually has several veggie-friendly features. A sampling of veg-friendly recipes pulled from several issues includes:
Foolproof Brown Rice
Skillet Green Beans
Best Oven Fries - As Good As French Fries
Marinated Mushrooms
Four-Cheese Pasta
German Apple Pancake
Spinach Lasagna - Presoak Noodles and Quick-Bake
No-Bake Summer Berry Pie
Easy Tomato Tart
Pan-Roasted Asparagus
Pasta and Summer Squash
Glazed Winter Vegetables
Better Orange Salads
Microwaving Acorn Squash
The brown rice and acorn squash in particular were real gems for me, because they address trouble foods that often come out awful, and show you the secret to success. Some of the other non-veggie recipes can be easily adapted. However, the fact that the authors would even put meat in otherwise perfectly good vegetarian recipes like Hearty Lentil Soup and Black Bean Soup tells us all we need to know about their mindset. Don't expect any advice on vegetarian adaptations or substitutions.
When I was a meat-eater, I heartily recommended Cook's Illustrated. Now that I'm a vegetarian, I would only recommend for meat-eaters. I don't think I could recommend it to a vegetarian friend because the vegetarian content, while highly worthwhile on its own, is too sparse to be worth the cost of a subscription. But I do appreciate that the vegetarian recipes inside are always good ones that make the most of their ingredients. If your local library has it, or you have a friend with a subscription, it's still worth a look.
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