Cook This Book: Techniques That Teach and Recipes to Repeat: A Cookbook

“Molly Baz is rethinking the way we engage with cookbooks” —TASTE “ Cook This Book is for anyone who wants to learn kitchen skills that stick.” —Esquire “[ Cook This Book is] packed with information about the principles of great flavor and instructions on technique.” —Salon “Recipe developer Baz delivers an exciting crash course in cooking fundamentals via 95 recipes that don’t ‘ask too much of the home cook.’” —Publishers Weekly “ Cook This Book is devoted to teaching foundational kitchen info and basics that’ll help you cook efficiently.” —theSkimm “ Cook This Book is a syllabus for how to become a more technically-skilled cook.” —Epicurious “The recipes in this book are dripping with deliciousness.” —Eat Your Books “Whether you’re a novice or a pro, Molly makes you think about cooking in an exciting and modern way that is foolproof and easy to follow. This book will be your guide to mastering the basics, cooking with all the right flavors, and bringing delicious meals to the table every time without the guesswork.” —Bobby Berk, design expert and Emmy-nominated host of Netflix’s Queer Eye “This certainly ain’t your grandma’s cookbook. I mean, I know I used to bake special M-shaped biscuits for Molly when she was a was a little girl, but I never expected it would come to this! With rich recipes and a design that just knock your socks off, this cookbook is simply vibrant. And BOOM . . . don’t even get me started about those innovative QR codes: all my technique-related fears, gone with a vid. The photographs are sooo good they make me want to eat the page! Now I may be a bit biased, but I know I’m not wrong.” —Doug Baz, Molly’s Dad “Surprising no one, Molly has written a book as smart, stylish, and entertaining as she is. The recipes sound as good as they look, but it’s the extras that will make your cooking that much extra: her excellent explanations of how to balance flavors, the deep dive into the crunchy, spicy, and herbaceous condiments that will turn your dishes into taste sensations, and the instructional videos that bring every technique to life. I love this book as much as I love her (which is a lot!).” —Carla Lalli Music, author of Where Cooking Begins “With its DIY approach to culinary expertise, this is a great starting point for home cooks wanting to develop flavor and technique.” — Library Journal Molly Baz is a food editor and recipe developer whose stories and recipes have been featured in Bon Appétit magazine and who has appeared in the brand’s YouTube shows, Making Perfect and Molly Tries .xa0Molly lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Ben, and their teeny-tiny weenie dog, Tuna. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Intro I used to think that cooking from recipes was extremely un-cool. The way I saw it, recipes were for amateurs—those who needed hand-holding and couldn’t think for themselves in the kitchen. I spent the formative years ofxa0my food-and cooking-obsessed life (my early twenties) determined to become the opposite of that. I yearned to be a “profesh.” Recipes were for home cooks, and I was well on my way to becoming a chef (a label thatxa0now makes me cringe with regard to my own title). To rely on a recipe was to acknowledge how much I didn’tknow, and honestly when you’ve still got years and years of expertise to gain and the finish line is barelyxa0visible, there’s nothing more un-fun than that. Fast-forward ten years—I now work as a recipe developer, and my primary responsibility is to teach regular people (read: decidedly UN-profesh chefs) to become great home cooks. Of course, recipes are absolutely core to that education. Recipes now course through my veins. I go to sleep thinking about them, dream about them, occasionally have night terrors about them, and almost always wake up still thinking about them. If that sounds really intense, it is. But mostly in a good way. And, guess what?! Thirty-three-year-old Molly freakin’ loves recipes. Not only do I love to develop and write recipes, I love to cook from recipes—especially those that aren’t myxa0own— because recipes are actually the coolest. The sheer existence of a recipe suggests that the dish you’re about to cook has been highly and repeatedly considered, tested, and tasted before it was even a twinkle in your pantry, which guarantees you’re that much closer to securing yourself a delicious meal. Recipes are the culmination of exactly that free-balling journey I once prided myself on: a fridge full of seemingly random ingredients, which, after much consideration and many rounds of testing, come together to create something even greater than they once were.Like most cookbooks, this one is full of recipes. But these are recipes that actually teach. They are packed with useful information that will answer your burning, never-stupid, always-valid questions (this is a safe space) and will help to shed some light on the mystery of the kitchen. I’ve tried to anticipate what those questions will be and provide answers to them within the recipes. I’ve spent a lot of time observing the way my non-food-industry friends and fam navigate their kitchens, and through my observations I have noticed that time management, ingredient prep, and order of operations can really trip up the home cook. That’s a lot of GD stuff to manage at one time! Take my husband, for example, whom I would not call a novice at this point—he’s been far too exposed to the kitchen by now. Even after everything I’ve taught him and all of the recipe development and testing he’s witnessed in our home kitchen, he willxa0still, on occasion, start assembling a salad, dress it completely, and only then realize that his chicken still needs thirty minutes in the oven and his salad has no chance of surviving. (To his credit, he makes a mean salad, despite its occasional sog factor.)Following a recipe takes an enormous amount of concentration and foresight, and frankly I think most recipes ask too much of the home cook. The recipes in this book were created with YOU, the home cook, in mind. I’ve done the heavy lifting for you and planned out all of the prep work in advance, meaning you can jump right into a recipe and rest assured that the time management aspect of things has already been considered. I’ll be right there with you to tell you when to start chopping your onions and at what point you should get the rice going in order to make the most efficient use of your very valuable time. You’ll also notice that ingredient quantities are listed in the ingredient lists and reiterated in the procedure text. This way, you can use the ingredient lists as a shopping guide, without having to go back and reference them every time an ingredient is called upon. To that end, I’ve organized the ingredients by where they’re most likely to be found in a grocery store or in your home kitchen, to help streamline both your shopping trips and your movement around your kitchen as you gather ingredients and prepare to cook. A great cook is an efficient cook, and these recipes will teach you to be just that. As you cook your way through this book, you’ll encounter all of the techniques, both big and small, that I consider fundamental to modern home cooking. Each recipe chapter will cover an essential cooking category and teach you the core techniques you’ll need to know. In the chicken chapter, for example, you’ll find recipes for a foolproof roast chicken, a braise-y chicken stew, some shatteringly crisp chicken thighs, perfectly poached chicken breasts, and so on. If you cook your way through that entire chapter, you’ll have learned the quintessential techniques for cooking chicken at home. Once you’ve got the basic techniques down, another thing every cook must learn is how to build flavor and make food that tastes not just good but GREAT. So, we’re going to cover that, too. The way I see it, Technique × Flavor = Cooking . You’ll find all the tools you need to start thinking about flavor in How to Make Food Taste Great (page 32), because, after all, that’s why you’re here in the first place. And one more thing . . . COOKING IS REALLY FUN. I SWEAR. I’m in the business of having lots of fun and eating only the most delicious foods, and I would never have committed to a lifetime of cooking if it didn’t deliver on those two promises. You simply need to set yourself up for success in the kitchen in order to truly enjoy it. What I really hope is that you’ll commit to cooking through all of the recipes in this book, frontxa0to back, and by the end of it realize you just took a culinary-school crash course but didn’t notice you were in school because you were having such a ridiculously great time while enrolled. I guarantee you’ll come out the other end a confident, capable, creative, calm, collected, cool-as-f*** cook. So throw on that cross-back apron (or go get one immediately), bust out the kosher salt, and let’sCook This Book! Read more