Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I love the show, the recipes are great and this book has many. However, it does not contain all of the recipes from the TV show, and the index is poor.
The first thing I looked for in the book was Pepperoni Pan Pizza, Season Eight, Disk three, first show, if you own the DVDs, as I do. It's not in there. Yes, there are pizzas, but not the recipe I wanted to make. The dough for the others is different, as is the sauce. Other than that, I'm all set. For a book which promises every recipe from every show, being 0 for 1 was not a pleasant surprise.
It's conceivable that the Pizza Dish is in there, please flame me in the comments, so long as you specify the page (it's not under Pizza, and it's not in the Italian dish section where the other pizzas are). I say that because the second recipe I wanted, from the same DVD, was a kuchen I plan to make tomorrow. Look up kuchen in the index, no go, look in the table of contents instead and, ah, there it is! They called it New York Style Crumb Cake in the show, so ... you find it under "N" in the index. How convenient!
This is a common flaw with ATk books (e.g. the season 9 recipe book I also have). They give an ordinary recipe a spiced up name, which by itself is all well and good. But then they list the thing only under the fancy name. They'd call an apple pie "xanadu" then list it under "x". The one thing I'd have expected is an episode list with a page reference for each recipe. It would have added 5-10 pages to a very large book. They list only the recipes for season ten. This would have helped find episodes as well, if you locate a recipe you'd like to make. I found Breaded Chicken Cutlets, and cannot find online which season it's from, so although I probably own the DVD, I can't watch it without starting up many disks and plowing through til I see it.
If you plan to flip through recipes, or when you can find what you're looking for, the book is fantastic, and the recipes are wonderful. They certainly didn't leave out many, the book is huge and heavy, with many nice photographs, equipment lists, and grocery lists. But, it does not do what they say it does - include every recipe - and the index is best described as jesuitical.
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The Complete America's Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook: Every Recipe from the Hit TV Show With Product Ratings and a Look Behind the Scenes, 2001-2011
Click here for more information about The Complete America's Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook: Every Recipe from the Hit TV Show With Product Ratings and a Look Behind the Scenes, 2001-2011
