‘The Complete American’s Test Kitchen Cookbook’ Is a Seriously Reliable Recipe Resource
Welcome to “Cookbook of the Week.” In this series, I highlight cookbooks that are particularly unique, easy to use, or just special to me. While finding a particular recipe online serves a quick purpose, flipping through a truly excellent cookbook has a magic all its own.
I spend most of the year casually browsing blogs for dinner ideas, quick recipes, and inspiration, but when the holiday season approaches, I simply have no time to dilly-dally. Frankly, the internet is replete with trash cooking content, and it takes time to sift through the muck of AI and other untested recipes to find the good stuff. A girl needs a reliable resource for holiday cooking. For me, that is The Complete America’s Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook (2001-2019).
The name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so I’ll refer to it as The ATK Cookbook from here on. My dad got me this beast of a cookbook a few years ago. Like true ungrateful offspring, I at first brushed it off because it lacks cutesy cover art and seemingly any theme. But I am also obsessed with cookbooks (clearly), so I kept returning to it anyway. With 26 chapters and a seemingly endless supply of recipes, I soon noticed it seemingly has everything I’ve ever wanted a proper, solid recipe for, from New York Cheesecake, to sticky toffee pudding, to Philly cheesesteak, to easy handmade pasta. There's even an entire Thanksgiving section.
I decided to give the cookbook a test run. My yearly Christmas party was on the horizon, so I settled on the Spiced Pumpkin Cheesecake. I followed the directions, which can be tough for me since I love to experiment. Trusting the process, I blotted the pumpkin, just like the notes advised. I filled the water bath. I even used heavy cream, though my boyfriend is lactose intolerant. After baking, the cheesecake un-molded perfectly, with nary a crack in sight. Unfortunately, I couldn’t sample it—one risk of baking a new recipe for a party is that tasting it has to wait until show time. Come evening, I sliced into the cheesecake while folks were still milling about the party. If it was a fail, I figured, I could probably throw it back into the fridge before anyone noticed.
There was no need: After tasting it, I actually started telling everyone they needed to try it immediately. I may have started parading it around on my shoulders like a little pumpkin MVP. Creamy, dense, but not globby; slightly tart and boasting real pumpkin flavor, it is, and always will be, my go-to recipe for pumpkin cheesecake.
And that's just one of the recipes in The ATK Cookbook.
A bit about the book
My favorite thing about this cookbook is that each recipe starts with a small but important blurb: “Why this recipe works.” Every single recipe, especially the classics, has an inherent difficulty or problem—a common something that plagues us all, from soggy schnitzel to cracked cheesecake. America’s Test Kitchen stands on a pillar of testing, and testing again. This rigorous process means that when I follow their recipes, I don’t end up with flavorless bread, or spend extra time on a technique proven to have no impact on the finished dish.
The next best thing about The ATK Cookbook is that I don’t have to look anywhere else if I want a good recipe right now. Everything is in here—there are simple preparations for chicken breast, how-tos for the perfect omelette, and a section on roasting and carving a turkey. Some recipes also include a sidebar with pictures of a particular process, like stuffing a chicken breast.
A great cookbook for the recipe creative
Since this cookbook has every popular recipe and then some (from the classic to the lesser known) it’s ideal for a cook who doesn’t want to spend an hour online or jumping from cookbook to cookbook to find a foolproof chicken milanese. Essentially, it’s for the cook who doesn’t want a bunch of opinions, they just want to start cooking.
It’s also great for a person interested in food science. While ATK does a good job of not getting too cerebral, the notes and “why this recipe works” sections offers thoughtful analysis and assessment of recipe problems. It’s good mental stretching for anyone who wants to start experimenting with their own originals.
The recipes you can expect
Don’t look for sweet personal anecdotes preceding each of the recipes, nor close-up glamour shots of a mystery hand sprinkling almonds on cake. This is a no-bones-about-it cooking resource. There are nice pictures, but they’re small, and sometimes in black and white. There are notes before the recipe, but they are about temperature, timing, or other practical matters. You won’t get a sneak peek into the lives of the brilliant folks in the test kitchen. Instead, you’ll get a damn good recipe that will never let you down.
The dish I chose this week
I fell down a rabbit hole trying to choose a recipe from this book. I wanted to show off something a little bit complex, but when I couldn’t decide on one, I realized I was going about it all wrong. I decided to make something I wanted to eat. So I chose the lemon pound cake.
I’ve tried making pound cakes before and they always turn out either too dense, or too much like a regular cake in a loaf shape. The note at the top of the recipe essentially lamented the same things, and explained what they did to fix it. Instead of keeping it classic with “a pound of every ingredient” and no leavening agent, they embrace a bit of baking powder to keep the cake from feeling heavy, but not to the point where the cake loses that quintessential pound cake texture.
I had never made this recipe before, but I will be making it again. Finally, a pound cake that met my standards: a tall rise, browned outer ring, and a melt-in-your-mouth close crumb. The cake is finished with a lemon syrup that soaks in, adding a bit of snap, but you could forgo it if you wanted just the aroma from the lemon zest in the batter.
How to buy it
My edition is old, but now there is the updated version from 2024, while the America’s Test Kitchen 25th Anniversary Cookbook also just dropped this month. You can buy it at a brick and mortar bookshop, but know it is quite a heavy baby, so I hope you have a car or bike basket to transport it home. (It’s worth popping over to the ATK store to browse their other cookbooks too; they often offer discounted prices.)
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