Inside the Test Kitchen: 120 New Recipes

Here is a gorgeous book, beautifully produced but a bit disappointing. Paging through this book is like watching a Food Channel show. Enjoy the production but don’t bother with the recipes. Tyler Florence’s test kitchen is above his high-end restaurant. He and his team test recipe after recipe for the restaurant kitchen. Inside the Test Kitchen lists a hundred and twenty of these. If you are a basic home cook, this book is far more than you want. If you are on a diet, beware of the superrich restaurant-style foods. You’ll find some reasonably simple recipes but many are complex (twenty ingredients for fried chicken) and many call for preparations elsewhere in the book—generally time-consuming kitchen work like four distinct steps to prepare french fries. You also need some healthy kitchen budget: several recipes call for one cup dried porcini mushrooms, for example, and for some ingredients you’ll scramble to find (dried hibiscus flower), and professional equipment not likely on your shelf (iSi siphon, CO2 cartridges, sous-vide cooker). Some instructions are unclear. These recipes are written for a professional kitchen and they should stay there. But the book is beautiful with much hand-written script and nice photography.