How to Cook Everything
From Wikipedia: How To Cook Everything (John Wiley & Sons, 1998, ISBN 0-02-861010-5) is a general cooking reference written by New York Times food writer Mark Bittman and aimed at United States home cooks. It is the flagship volume of a series of books that include several narrow-subject books about matters such as convenience cooking and vegetarian cuisine, as well as a second volume, How To Cook Everything: Vegetarian, published in 2007, and a second edition with a reduced emphasis on professional techniques in October 2008.
Stats for nerds
29recommend
39mentions
35people
2007–2026years
79% recommend18% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Would also add Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: The Basics to this list
- - Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat
- Ruhlman's 20 by Michael Ruhlman
- How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
- I have great respect for Mark Bittman and regularly turn to How to Cook Everything for its solid recipes, but sometimes he gets it spectacularly wrong. Case in point was his spatchcocked turkey recipe. Quoting the NYT Cooking App:
In 2002, Mark Bittman published this revolutionary approach to roasting the Thanksgiving turkey, which allows you to cut the cooking time of the average turkey by about 75 percent while still presenting an attractive bird. Simply cut out the backbone — or ask your butcher to do it for you — and spread the bird out flat before roasting, a technique known as spatchcocking that is commonly used with chickens. Roasted at 450 degrees, a 10-pound bird will be done in about 45 minutes.
I tried the recipe last Thanksgiving, following the video exactly and extending the time based on many reader comments, and it still came out underdone. It ended up taking 2 hours; we had Thanksgiving dinner at 9pm. A very experienced home cook and scientist I know believes that temperature and timing are thrown off by writers like Bittman who use professional ovens which have far better temperature regulation than the crappy decades-old ovens used by most home cooks.
As for unfailingly good and simple recipes, I can't recommend Jacques Pepin short "Cooking at Home" videos on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_PgxS3FkP7ATPveBQ1ya...) highly enough. He often takes whatever he has lying around to make some variation of a famous dish - canned tomatoes instead of fresh, a half-empty jar of olives, once even a hot dog to substitute for a sausage in his Sausage Cassoulet (https://youtu.be/Uuli3So6Oo4).
- How to Cook Everything would be a more modern alternative that's just as good IMO.
- How to Cook Everything, I'm Just Here For the Food, and On Food and Cooking are my big three. The first one for the breadth of recipes, the second to learn a bit more about the physics and chemistry of cooking, and the third for the truly deep dive into everything we know about food.
Then Modernist Cuisine just for the pictures. Actually I learned a bunch when Mhyrvold spoke at my company- we talked about how to make BBQ ribs. His suggestion: sous vide, then immerse in liquid nitrogen, then deep fry.
- "How to cook everything" by Mark Bittman was a book I found very useful. It has a whole bunch of recipes but it also does a great job of explaining the logic and overall structure behind each recipe. So you learn not just how to make a specific soup, but what the basic concepts behind making a soup are, as well as tons of alternatives for each recipe. It helped me quickly move from following recipes to being able to look at what I have in my kitchen and whip something up.
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