Cook's Science

The Test Kitchen team at Cook’s Illustrated has spent nearly 25 years learning how to prepare good food at home. Our New York Times bestseller, The Science of Good Cooking, is organized around 50 core principles that our test cooks use to develop foolproof recipes. In our all-new follow-up, Cook’s Science, the test kitchen focuses on 50 essential ingredients and investigates the science of making them taste their very best. Understanding how ingredients work—at the molecular level as well as at the stovetop—allows you to amplify flavor and perfect their structure when you cook. Ingredients range from butter to kale, chicken breasts to pork butt, lobster to garlic.

We include 300+ recipes engineered for success (no overlap with the first book), intriguing test kitchen experiments that tell you what’s really happening when you cook, and full-page illustrations that show you how ingredients get from farm (or sea) to table. This book stands well on its own and makes a great companion to the first book.