Despite really, really enjoying food, I don't really like to cook. It's just so time consuming, what with all the shopping and chopping and rushing to the emergency room for stitches.
Oddly enough, though, I love cooking shows. I don't have cable, but if I did, rest assured I'd watch the Food Network pretty much all the time (when "What Not To Wear" isn't on, that is). Lucky for me, good ol' PBS shows plenty of cooking shows, and the best of them is America's Test Kitchen.
The people on America's Test Kitchen do more than just cook amazing recipes. They also taste-test products (which store-bought white bread is the best? Answer: Pepperidge Farm), rate cooking gadgets (that All-Clad slow-cooker is awesome, but a featureless, inexpensive crock-pot works just as well), and explain the science behind some techniques (room temperature butter really does create a flakier pie crust).
Once, my mom walked past the television when I was watching it and asked what infomercial I had stopped on. I quickly explained that America's Test Kitchen isn't an infomercial. They're not trying to sell you anything (except maybe their cookbooks). Their tests are all completely fair and unbiased. They'll give you reasoning behind their choices, and if they determine that a gadget or food item is overpriced or useless, they'll tell you so.
Sure, it's hosted by a bow-tied, um, geek. But you get used to him. And then gawk at the amazing looking food. And should you want to try it yourself, you can! America's Test Kitchen has a huge line of cookbooks featuring their tried and true recipes, from desserts to thirty-minute recipes to light recipes (which is pretty amazing, as their chefs are huge fans of heavy cream). The cookbooks I've seen have explanations of how they arrived at this particular recipe and include buying guides for ingredients (Newman's Own lemonade is good, Snapple is not). You can even buy DVDs of the show.
If you like to cook, you really need to check out America's Test Kitchen. If you don't like to cook, you can still drool over that triple layer strawberry cream cake.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Mmmm... *drool*
Posted by Kiersten at 3:38 PM
Labels: books, food, television
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2 comments:
You should'a' included a link to their website and explained how it works.
Yo, I know this post is way old but I LOVED it. I am a huge of the ATK. Mary and I have two of the cookbooks (the Family cookbook and the International cookbook) and we LOVE them. They are packed full of sweet tips (like, if you need to fish out a piece of eggshell, it is way easy to use the empty eggshell half as a cup) and we really like the recipes. They are tasty and as easy as possible. Often, in their explanations of why they went a certain way with the recipe, they'll say something like, "You could do it this way, but this other way saves a step and two ingredients and doesn't taste any different." Awesome!
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