From America's Test Kitchen
When the editors of Cook’s Illustrated magazine publish a lower fat cookbook, you can be sure that every one of its recipes has undergone hours if not days of rigorous testing in the 2,500 square-foot kitchen, that’s home to America’s Test Kitchen, a popular, no-frills public-television show that features Christopher Kimball, editor of Cook’s Illustrated. Supported by a large team of test cooks, food scientists, food and equipment testers from the magazine, producing The Best Light Recipe was no small undertaking. Even those unfamiliar with the mission of Cook’s Illustrated will get the general idea from the question asked on The Best Light Recipe’s front cover: "Would you make 28 light cheesecakes to find the one you’d actually want to eat?" (read more below)Quest for the Best
Since 1980, Cook’s Illustrated magazine has dedicated itself to finding the best way to cook all manner of foods, regardless of fat content, with nary a nutrition fact in sight. Among many other cookbooks and How To books, the Cook’s Illustrated editors published The Best Recipe in 1999, and The New Best Recipe in 2004, offering 1,000 recipes tested to a fault. For those of us looking to understand what ingredients work or don’t work together, which techniques work best, and what equipment to use, Cook’s Illustrated magazine is essential reading. Learn from their trials and errors, and go on to make the best brownies, pot pie, or beef brisket, without tears or tantrums.
Creating light versions of some of America’s favorite dishes presented much more of a challenge. Unimpressed by most "light" recipes because of bad-tasting low-fat or fat-free ingredients, or flawed techniques, the Cook’s Illustrated team was going to be hard to please.
Going Light
Two things led to The Best Light Recipe: the increasing demand of Cook’s Illustrated readers for lighter fare, a demand that the editorial staff could no longer ignore; and the successful quest to produce a decent light cheesecake that tasters could mistake for the "real thing." This success led the editors to embrace the wider challenge of finding the best light recipe for many more of America’s favorite dishes, such as meat and cheese lasagna, chicken pot pie, macaroni and cheese, fudgy brownies, and of course, cheesecake, which adorns the The Best Light Recipe's front cover.
As much as The Best Light Recipe is a cookbook, it’s also a fascinating study of what goes on behind the scenes in professional test kitchens. For those who regularly read Cook’s Illustrated, this is what we’re used to: a detailed account of how a certain balance of ingredients was achieved to get just the right mouth feel, crunchiness, springiness, fluffiness or whatever the sought-after quality was for a given recipe.
Not every attempt to lighten a recipe succeeded. A lower fat pie crust simply didn’t work, so didn’t make it into the book. Sometimes only the real, unadulterated thing will do.
The Best Light Recipe’s Key Features
- 300 lower fat recipes
- Sparing use of photographs. The Best Light Recipe makes use of black-and-white illustrations that Cook’s Illustrated readers are familiar with, to demonstrate techniques, such as de-fatting stock, mincing basil, poaching salmon, cleaning greens and making cinnamon rolls
- Makeover-at-a-Glance boxes comparing key nutritional data of lightened dishes to the classic ones, with a summary of how they managed to make the lighter version
- Testing Notes offering opinions on the best kind of reduced or low fat ingredient for a particular recipe—which kind of dairy to use for tender muffins, what kind of coating for oven-fried chicken, and so on
- Core Techniques such as how to maximize the minimal amount of oil for roasting vegetables, getting the best flavor from ground poultry, and how to create a crunchy crust for oven frying
- General instructions on cooking and food preparation: grilling lean cuts of meat 101, cooking beans 101 and steaming fish 101
- Basic nutrition facts for each recipe
If you truly love to cook, anything from the Cook’s Illustrated stable is worth adding to your bookshelves. If you love to cook but want to lower the fat in your cooking, this book is essential.
ISBN 0-936184-97-3
