America's Test Kitchen Live!: The All-New Companion to America's Favorite Public Television Cooking Series (America's Test Kitchen)

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Companion to The PBS Series.
Review: America's Test Kitchen Live is up to the franchise's usual standards. If you are a fan of the PBS series you will want these faithfully produced scripts for the TV version. The recipes are well perfected to make sure the home chef can produce consistent mouth watering results for family and friends. If you have ever tweaked a recipe until you got it just right, you will love the approach of Chris Kimball and company. They save the home cooking enthusiast a lot of time and energy by doing the tweaking for them.

The products tested in this volume range from infomercial gadgets to common necessary kitchen tools used under a range of conditions. The pretty well detailed test results not only offer the best and worst culinary utensils in any category but a lot of the near misses along with their costs. In many ways the text version of these product exams are better than their video counter parts.

The Kitchen's taste tests cover a wide rang of products, many of which are available in most supermarkets. The same care that goes into product testing is apparent in their taste tests.

The subscribers to the publisher's bi-monthly "Cooks Illustrated" magazine will be a little disappointed in this volume. I found many of the recipes, product tests, and taste testes were previously available in that bi-monthly periodical on my shelf in much greater detail.

If you want to skip all the gloss and are only interested in a few of the recipes, product test results, and taste test results outlined on the small screen then you would do best to log onto the America's Test Kitchen web page and download the few bits and pieces that peaked your interest.


Rating:
Summary: ATK Does it again
Review: There is a reason that "America's Test Kitchen" is the highest-rated cooking series on PBS today. It does so well because it presents ways of preparing favorite foods that maximize the experience of eating them.

In this, the companion to the 2005 season of the show, Cooks Illustrated editor Christopher Kimball and his test kitchen chefs once again get down to the basics of making everyday food fun and delicious.

As the books for the previous seasons have been, AMERICA'S TEST KITCHEN LIVE presents the recipes for each of the dishes prepared on the series divided by each episode, along with the instructions on how to prepare exactly what you see on television. Each chapter also covers the complete results of the equipment and on-screen food tastings from each specific episode (and I wouldn't want to taste test fish sauce straight either, Chris...thank you for doing it for me...).

This season's book is also filled with great photos from the production of the popular series, and a look behind the scenes at what it takes to put "America's Test Kitchen" on the air each season.

My one complaint, and it's a small one, is that the show is a bit obsessed with pasta this season - 13 recipes in the space of just five episodes. And they've also revisited chili for the third season in a row, this time preparing "Cincinnati Chili" (Texas Chili and what Kimball called "Wussy Chili" on the air, a northern variation of the basic chili recipe, were included in past seasons).

But those quibbles are minor. Once again, America's Test Kitchen has shown everyday cooks the way to making some really delicious meals, and unique ones as well - where else but ATK will you find a recipe for "Chicken Under A Brick"?

Kudos to America's Test Kitchen for another kitchen library staple. Having experienced making many of the dishes from the first three books in the series, I cannot wait to try the ones from the newest edition. AMERICA'S TEST KITCHEN LIVE is a MUST HAVE for any home cookbook collection.