Review: Joy of Cooking

To be honest this is not a non-biased opinion.  This is one of my favorite books.  I use it all of the time.  The book is sectioned by type of food to make it easy for you to find the perfect recipes. The recipes in each section start with easy simple recipes and proceed gradually to harder more elaborate recipes toward the end of each chapter.  The organization is the key to this book becoming a must have in every home and kitchen.

The book starts out with lifestyle chapters regarding diet, health, entertaining, and menus.  Then it moves on to drinks, stocks, condiments, soups, eggs, hors d’Oeuvres and little dishes.  The middle of the book focuses on main courses from sandwiches to pasta to seafood and meats.  The last part of the book contains my favorite part of the book, breads, quickbreads, cookies, candies, custards and dessert sauces.  The book contains a recipe for any ingredient that you could imagine.

I am quite fond of the bread, dessert and pastry section.  The recipes go through each of the steps and with detailed instructions. As noted earlier the beginning of each chapter has easier recipes and the end of the chapter has harder recipes.  In the yeast bread section it starts out with recipes for fast white bread and the end of the chapter discusses the process and ingredients to make Panettone. 

I have made a ton of recipes from this book.  The last one that I made was creme brulee.  It came out perfect.  I wish that I had some pics of the brulees.  They were awesome.  Every single recipe that I have used from this book has been awesome.

As you can see Tucker also likes the book.

My copy of the book is in bad shape.  Tucker as a pup got a hold of it.  He found that the recipes were so good that he just wanted to eat the words as he has no thumbs and is unable to make the recipes.  I have reassured him that I would make the recipes and let him try them so he has decided to stop eating the book.