The best Thanksgiving Cooking books: Reddit reviews

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Perfect!! This looks like a great cookbook. Vegan Vegetarian Omnivore: Dinner for Everyone at the Table: Thomas, Anna: 9780393083019: AmazonSmile: Books Thank you so much!

Hey everyone, this is my video part 1 to making biscuits and gravy- Making the biscuits. Now look, I'm going to take a second to say that these may not be as good as your insert significant other title's biscuits... But remember, these are a vehicle for gravy and in my opinion perfect for the task. Different biscuit types are good for different things. This is a recipe straight out of Kenji Lopez-Alt's book, The Food Lab, which I would highly highly recommend for beginner home cooks.

A couple notes about the recipe:

1. If you want to give these biscuits a fresh kick put some chives or green onion greens into them before you start folding. Unfortunately, I didn't have any or I would have done this. (You can also add cheddar cheese... But do you really need that much richness to cover these in gravy?)
2. If you want to make buttermilk biscuits there are plenty of recipes online but Serious Eats/Kenji's recipes are great so here you go. Maybe you have leftover buttermilk from following my butter recipe a week or two ago?
3. These biscuits would also be good for other uses, but I specifically made them pretty giant because I wanted one to be a meal for the gravy. Take the pepper out and they'd be delicious with butter and jam.

Let me know if you have any questions! I'd love to see your family members secret recipe if you think they're delicious.

Download Kenji's <em>The Food Lab</em>, just out this week. It really is inspiring. He's got a whole chapter on ground meat, including his smashburger and a pub burger. There's also a chapter on fried foods and a few recipes for fries.

You can't out-Burger-King Burger King. You want to find a niche Burger king can't touch, and that shouldn't be too hard.

Try seasoning on the surface with:

3 Tb smoked salt 2 Tb black pepper 2 Tb New Mexico red chile powder, mild 2 Tb finely minced fresh rosemary 1 Tb garlic powder 1/4 tsp ground cumin 1/4 tsp Madras curry powder

Yeah, I have the Cookbook that /u/wot106 is talking about (I think it might be out of print now and its prices can do some wild spiraling), and mine is full of underlines for where I've found something that for me was a "gotcha" - usually just something like the ingredients list 2 cups of sugar, but the first sugar instruction says "Add all but 2 T of the sugar, reserving the 2T for later" -

Every cookbook that contains 900+ recipes is going to contain some real stinkers and this one is no exception - I'm probably never going to try to make a custard pie out of that book again; I have no idea what they're doing differently than me but - but I've cooked out of this book hundreds of times a year since I got it; for me it's been an excellent "textbook" for how to cook 101. The average recipe quality from it is spectacular.

Other good Cooks cookbooks are the Mediterranean one and the Vegetarian one.

Cook's Illustrated Cookbook: 2,000 Recipes from 20 Years of America's Most Trusted Cooking Magazine - part of the Cook's Illustrated 4 book series.

I am! I’ve been loving a toasted English muffin with peanut butter, topped with raspberries and blueberries. I could eat that for every meal :) Look up “fuss free vegan” by Sam Turnbull. Her blog is called “it doesn’t taste like chicken”. The recipes are easy, and super tasty. Highly recommended.

I love Cooks Illustrated Magazine. The recipes are good, and each article explains the process of developing the recipe through trial and error which helps you learn WHY things work or not.

I don't subscribe to the magazine; I prefer to collect the bound annuals. Managed to snag most years cheap on Amazon.

Their cookbook is also a good place to start. (I balked at the current price on Amazon, but used sellers are reasonable.)

Cook's Illustrated Cookbook https://www.amazon.com/dp/1933615893/

This is a good cookbook. Cook's Illustrated.

Their cooking show is good as well because they explain why their recipe works. They have tested many ways of doing it before arriving at doing it just that way. They also do equipment testing. You know if they recommend a kitchen gadget, it's probably the best one.

The best advice is to make a list of what you will be cooking every night for dinner for the week. Plan that out. Do the grocery shopping for it all. Then STICK TO IT. Easier said than done, sometimes. But it will save you money.

I don't know if this would be helpful for you, but Anna Thomas did a "vegan/vegetarian/omnivores" cookbook that was intended for blended families (in the dietary sense). The menus are all adaptable to include or exclude meat.

https://www.amazon.ca/Vegan-Vegetarian-Omnivore-Dinner-Everyone/dp/0393083012

I had this book but ended up giving it away because I actually disliked the format (not the recipes), as I found all the menus weren't connected with page numbers to the recipes - you had to constantly hunt around for where the recipe was for each dish. Weird editing/structuring IMO, but it may be worth a look for you anyway!

I can't really imagine cooking for someone who won't eat vegetables because whatever you make for yourself she won't eat, so "adding" the meat on won't really work... Like, my parents will often have whatever I'm having and add a piece of grilled chicken or fish if they feel like it, but that's being added to a salad, or a pasta dish with veggies, or a traybake of roasted veg, etc.

I thought it was ridiculous too until I bought The Food Lab . Reading Kenji’s experiments on when to salt and reverse searing gave me the idea - but making his air fryer wings once and I knew he was onto something.

It’s important to note here that seasoning burns quickly in the air fryer. I have found best results using only salt and pepper (sometimes I use lawrys garlic pepper) in the air fryer and then adding other seasonings as you flip the steak and drop it in the searing pan.

Er hat auch ein Kochbuch speziell für festliche Gerichte

You should look into purchasing The Book on Pie by Erin Jean McDowell!! Her book has changed my pie life. The first quarter of it is dedicated to teaching about all the different pie crust techniques and she has a TON of crust and pie recipes to pick from. Her book is also great because she makes it so easy to understand how to customize the pies if you want. It’s so worth it.

The Book

She has has a series on Youtube called Bake It Up a Notch that you should check out. She has a whole episode on pies.

It’s really not that cut and dried though. Let’s say for chicken you get the same 7-log reduction in bacteria with 2 hours at 130F, 3 minutes at 150F, or 1 second at 165F. Do you really need to cook the chicken breast to a shoe leathery 165F? Probably not. source

It’s really not that cut and dried though. Let’s say for chicken you get the same 7-log reduction in bacteria with 2 hours at 130F, 3 minutes at 150F, or 1 second at 165F. Do you really need to cook the chicken breast to a shoe leathery 165F? Probably not. source

I have a bookshelf full of cookbooks, but I use some many times more than others. I use my Cook's Illustrated Cookbook a solid 80% of the time I cook; it's a really solid, 900-page tome with a recipe for darn near everything. The recipes aren't perfect, but what's important is that I have a relationship with the cookbook by now; I know how to find what's important in it; I know what it means if it says a certain thing; I've written notes to self like "Make 1/3 as much streusel as this!" or "Add pecans" wherever my opinions differ from the authors'. It's basically my wizard spellbook.

I have a Four & Twenty Blackbirds Pie Book that taught me how to make pies; I've made 12 or 14 of the pies out of that book and I still use it at least every month or so; maybe less often during coronatimes.

I have a classic King Arthur Flour baking cookbook, and I use it every month or so for brainstorming or for quick go-tos. To be honest the King Arthur web site has a spectacularly curated collection of recipes which have been updated over the course of decades, so I tend to just use that instead.

I have an America's Test Kitchen (parent company of Cook's Illustrated) vegetarian cookbook that I use quite often, let's say once every 2-3 months, too, that's really reliable as well and full of nice vegetarian dishes.

I own a shelf full of wonderful cookbooks, but those four are the ones I really use.

Hey everyone, this is my video part 1 to making biscuits and gravy- Making the biscuits. Now look, I'm going to take a second to say that these may not be as good as your insert significant other title's biscuits... But remember, these are a vehicle for gravy and in my opinion perfect for the task. Different biscuit types are good for different things. This is a recipe straight out of Kenji Lopez-Alt's book, The Food Lab, which I would highly highly recommend for beginner home cooks.

A couple notes about the recipe:

1. If you want to give these biscuits a fresh kick put some chives or green onion greens into them before you start folding. Unfortunately, I didn't have any or I would have done this. (You can also add cheddar cheese... But do you really need that much richness to cover these in gravy?)
2. If you want to make buttermilk biscuits there are plenty of recipes online but Serious Eats/Kenji's recipes are great so here you go. Maybe you have leftover buttermilk from following my butter recipe a week or two ago.
3. These biscuits would also be good for other uses, but I specifically made them pretty giant because I wanted one to be a meal for the gravy. Take the pepper out and they'd be delicious with butter and jam.

Let me know if you have any questions! I'd love to see your family members secret recipe if you think they're delicious.

Crust is the chocolate variation of the press in cookie crust from Erin Jeanne McDowell's Book on Pie:

4oz room temp butter

50g sugar

1 large egg yolk

1tsp vanilla

180g ap flour

28g natural cocoa (sifted together with the flour)

1/2tsp salt

1tbsp water

Cream butter and sugar, add egg and vanilla, mix, add flour and salt, mix, add water

Press into a 10 inch tart ring

Bake blind (without weights) at 350F for 20-22 minutes

Layer of ganache:

113g chocolate

78g cream

heat together

Orange curd:

equal weights egg yolk, sugar, and juice (mostly orange, a bit of lemon)

edit: also lots of red and yellow gel food coloring

Combine, heat over low/med until 185, stir in some butter off heat (I used 1/2 stick of cold cubed butter to 500g curd)

Have you seen the new book by Erin Jeanne McDowel? She just wrote the pie bible and it’s amazing. Also check out her pie making videos for Food52 on you tube. I leaned so much from her even before I had the book!

Looks delish! If I may be so bold, I highly recommend the Avant Garde Vegan Xmas book. All the food in there is amazing. a little extra effort than I would usually put in but top notch and blows tofurkey out of the park. My non vegan family likes the recipes in here also!

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https://www.amazon.com/Vegan-Christmas-Amazing-Recipes-Festive/dp/1787132676/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&amp;keywords=avant+garde+vegan+holiday&amp;qid=1601765441&amp;sr=8-1

Pie baker alert! Erin Jeanne McDowell has a new pie cookbook coming in November. https://www.amazon.com/Book-Pie-Everything-Need-Perfect/dp/0358229286/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&amp;keywords=erin+jeanne+mcdowell&amp;qid=1596383174&amp;sprefix=erin+je&amp;sr=8-1

She writes for the New York Times and does a lot of food styling, writes for magazines and does cookbook work for other people like Rose Levy Berenbaum. If you haven’t watched this NYT video of her home kitchen tour, she’s hilarious and you’re in for a treat! https://youtu.be/Hwb24ZswXUo

America's Test Kitchen 100 Essentials https://smile.amazon.com/dp/1940352010/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_7L5dFbWAM3VJT

If you liked Good Eats you'll like this. It goes through the recipe and tells why they choose a given technique and ways to apply it to other recipes and the recipes are fantastic

You need a lot more protein to satisfy a crowd of 15, and a roasted cauliflower , mashed potatoes , gravy , brussel sprouts, cranberry sauce, stuffing, etc isn't going to cut it. They may be full from eating a lot of volume but WILL be hungry later . Also 1-2 roasted cauliflower would not be enough for 15+ people.

Check out Avante Garde Vegan Christmas recipe book for some Amazing ideas . He does some awesome things with food! If you don't feel like getting his book he has some great YouTube videos .

https://www.amazon.com/Vegan-Christmas-Amazing-Recipes-Festive/dp/1787132676

Gaz Oakley has an awesome holiday cookbook all vegan ��

https://www.amazon.com/Vegan-Christmas-Amazing-Recipes-Festive/dp/1787132676/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_2/146-0860802-9339141?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_i=1787132676&amp;pd_rd_r=7675afcc-8685-4e5f-9043-deffe3e4d94f&amp;pd_rd_w=pV7Ci&amp;pd_rd_wg=WJ25U&amp...

Actually, you're partially incorrect.

Per J Kenji Lopez Alt's book The Food Lab. Pasteurization is a product of temperature and time. The higher the temperature the lower time you need to pastureize. However it's possible to achieve the same results through maintaining lower temperatures over a longer period of time.

So most people are familiar with J. Kenji López-Alt as he's such an interesting and talented chef. If you haven't heard of him you should definitely look at his book The Food Lab and take a look at his YouTube channel. This is the video for his 3-ingredient stovetop mac and cheese. It's super simple and skips the roux, which is sure to appeal to people who want quick and hassle-free meals. I've taken the ingredients list and directions straight from the website. I plan on cooking this tonight so might update with a photo!

Ingredients

• 6oz/170g elbow macaroni (let's be honest, any pasta works)
• Salt
• 6oz/180ml evaporated milk
• 6 oz/170g grated mild or medium cheddar (or any good melting cheese)

Directions

1. Place macaroni in a medium saucepan or skillet and add just enough cold water to cover.
2. Add a pinch of salt and bring to a boil over high heat, stirring frequently.
3. Continue to cook, stirring, until water has been almost completely absorbed and macaroni is just shy of al dente, about 6 minutes.
4. Immediately add evaporated milk and bring to a boil and then add the cheese.
5. Reduce heat to low and cook, stirring continuously, until cheese is melted and liquid has reduced to a creamy sauce, about 2 minutes longer.
6. Season to taste with more salt and serve immediately.

As a cook myself, check out The Food Lab

https://www.amazon.com/Food-Lab-Cooking-Through-Science-ebook/dp/B00TG24C34

Hands down one of the best first cookbooks when starting out. Everything is explained and expanded upon on www.seriouseats.com

If you need, shoot me a msg and I will be happy to help you out with anything

I think investing in a copy of The Cake Bible would be a good idea for you. You'll get extremely detailed instruction and a variety of recipes for cakes, icings, and fillings in varying difficulties. At the back of the book, you'll find instructions and a few different recipes for wedding cakes.

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The instruction in this book just can't be beat. You will learn so much.

Recommendation: https://www.amazon.com/Cake-Bible-Rose-Levy-Beranbaum/dp/0688044026/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1522036236&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+cake+bible

Seriously, couple bucks, clear instructions, AWESOME cakes.

At 10, most budding cooks are into pastry (AKA dessert type dishes). Given that you have a new kitchen toy - a KitchenAid - I would give a gift of time and play. Buy her The Cake Bible, a classic and pair it with some shelf stable cake baking ingredients/pans/bowls as needed and "coupons" redeemable for the required ingredients and the parental assistance time to make 2 cakes of her choosing from the book. Kids really just want time with their attentive parents, so you can hit all the bases with one gift.

See if they have this book at your local library.

https://www.amazon.com/Cooks-Illustrated-Cookbook-Americas-Magazine/dp/1933615893

Has a great section explaining all of the ingredients and how to cook each. Start easy and get more complex. Canned beans have a ton of salt in them. Carne burritos are easier to cook than chicken because you can eat it rare. To get the taste of take out spot just look up mexican recipes online. It's all in the seasoning.