The team at America's Test Kitchen is serious about meat: buying, butchering, cooking and serving it. The 500 pages of The Cook's Illustrated Meat Book are a testament to this. The editors start with the basics: how to pick the right cut, how to shop and how to store, season and prepare meat for cooking. From there, the fun begins with 425 recipes organized by type (beef, pork, lamb and veal, poultry). There are classic dishes (beef stroganoff) and less typical entrées (tandoori lamb chops), as well as a definitive approach to the best roast chicken and a how-to on home-cured bacon.
For its print magazines (Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country) and TV shows, America's Test Kitchen builds recipes by trial and error, testing dozens of methods, tools and ingredients to establish the best approach. Here, the editors introduce each recipe with a narrative of how it was created and why it works. This scientific process offers a serious--but never inaccessible--study of meat. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm