Choosing the Right Cookbooks

Bookstores are flooded with thousands of new cookbooks each year; how does a budding chef select books worthy of taking up kitchen space? Try these ideas.

Check Out the Chef

One excellent way to choose recipe books is to first check out the author-chef online. Impressive credits may do much to bolster your confidence in a chef’s cookbook, but it’s better still if you can try out some free recipe videos or printed recipes from the chef. If you try a couple and love them, then a cookbook by the chef is probably a great choice for you.

Read Some Recipes

Cookbook covers are enticing – but they can also be misleading. Be sure to read the titles of the recipes to ensure the cookbook has the sort of food you like to cook and eat. Then go a step further and read at least a handful of recipes. Are the instructions clear? Do the recipes seem overly-time consuming? Are the recipes designed for beginners, intermediate, or advanced cooks?

It’s About Technique

Often cooking technique is as important – sometimes more so – than the recipes themselves. Any cookbook that takes the time to offer instructional techniques, then, is an excellent addition to a recipe collection. A really great cookbook will also offer ideas on varying the recipes, how to eat the food, and will perhaps offer a bit of history about the featured food.

Style

There’s little point in purchasing a recipe book if you’ll never cook from it. So be sure to consider whether you can find and afford the ingredients, whether the recipes can be cooked up in a reasonable amount of time for your lifestyle, and whether your family will be as excited about the food as you are.

Illustrations

If you’re the type of person who needs to see what the food is supposed to look like in order to cook it, by all means choose cookbooks with lots of color photographs. On the other hand, if you like to read cookbooks – truly sit down and study them – this may not be an important factor at all.

Alternative Cookbooks

The Internet is chock full of free recipes. Not all are created equal, however, so look for sources with recipes by credible chefs or recipes rated by readers. Clearly written instructions are also a must. Recipe videos alongside print recipes is a helpful bonus.

To keep track of the recipes you like, nothing beats printing them out. So make your own cookbook by purchasing a fat binder and plastic page protectors. Slip the recipes inside the page protectors (to keep the ink from running when they inevitably get sloshed with cooking ingredients) and put the page protectors in the binder. As your collection grows, purchase binder dividers and divide recipes up by categories. For example, you could put all poultry recipes in one section, all vegetable recipes in another, and so on. You may just create the best recipe book ever!