The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

Why it's worth it

J. Kenji López-Alt's food-science tome runs 958 pages and won both the James Beard Award for General Cooking and IACP Cookbook of the Year. It explains why techniques work, which means it improves recipes it doesn't even contain.

It teaches reasoning instead of rules. The premise is that if you understand what's happening to the food, you never have to memorize anything. What an egg does at one temperature versus another. Why dry-brining a steak beats wet-brining it. Once you've read a few of those chapters, you start making better calls on recipes from every other book you own.

The credentials here are as strong as cookbooks get. Both a James Beard Award and IACP Cookbook of the Year, judged by working chefs and food writers rather than sales figures. It also came out of years of controlled recipe development at Serious Eats, which is about as close to an industrial test kitchen as home cooking gets.

From our review of 8 cookbooks for home chefs, by Genevieve Dubois, Home & Living Expert

What we like

• +It teaches reasoning instead of rules
• +The credentials here are as strong as cookbooks get
• +The coverage is enormous
• +It's the book to buy alongside a principles book, not instead of one

What to know

• –It's dense and text-heavy, which makes it awkward mid-cook
• –The cuisine scope skews heavily American
• –It's physically huge