Genius Recipes

Have you ever wished that you could have professional chefs right beside you in the kitchen, giving you their secret tips to ensure the dish you're working on turns out better than ever? Now you can!

Food52's Genius Recipes serves up 100 recipes from top chefs with genius tips, easy to follow directions, and extra help in note form--all designed to ensure your success in the kitchen. Along the way, you are sure to discover and adopt some new techniques which will change the way you cook other dishes too!

What's a great way to add creaminess to soups, purees and sauces without using cream or butter? Look to the Genius Tip on page 194 which is included with Julia Child's Gratin of Zucchini, Rice, & Onions with Cheese for the surprising answer.

Want a great way to simultaneously prepare both a first course and a vegetable course that everyone will be talking about for days to come? Don't miss the Genius Tip that goes with Alon Shaya's Whole Roasted Cauliflower with Whipped Goat Cheese on page 174.

The book is beautifully put together with introductory explanations, clear layouts, and gorgeous, full-paged photographs guaranteed to make your mouth water. Sections include: Breakfast, Snacks & Drinks, Soups & Salads, Meaty Mains, Meatless Mains, Vegetables, and Desserts. If you can't find at least a dozen recipes to try from this generous offering, I'll be surprised! (Did I mention that some of the recipes include secondary recipes that ride alongside? Cheater Soft Served Ice Cream anyone?)

I am thankful to the folks at Blogging For Books for the free copy I received in exchange for this review. I will be putting this one to good use for many years to come!

From the Publisher . . .

There are good recipes and there are great ones—and then, there are genius recipes.

Genius recipes surprise us and make us rethink the way we cook. They might involve an unexpectedly simple technique, debunk a kitchen myth, or apply a familiar ingredient in a new way. They’re handed down by luminaries of the food world and become their legacies. And, once we’ve folded them into our repertoires, they make us feel pretty genius too. In this collection are 100 of the smartest and most remarkable ones.

There isn’t yet a single cookbook where you can find Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter, Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread, and Nigella Lawson’s Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake—plus dozens more of the most talked about, just-crazy-enough-to-work recipes of our time. Until now.

These are what Food52 Executive Editor Kristen Miglore calls genius recipes. Passed down from the cookbook authors, chefs, and bloggers who made them legendary, these foolproof recipes rethink cooking tropes, solve problems, get us talking, and make cooking more fun. Every week, Kristen features one such recipe and explains just what’s so brilliant about it in the James Beard Award-nominated Genius Recipes column on Food52. Here, in this book, she compiles 100 of the most essential ones—nearly half of which have never been featured in the column—with tips, riffs, mini-recipes, and stunning photographs from James Ransom, to create a cooking canon that will stand the test of time.

Once you try Michael Ruhlman’s fried chicken or Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s hummus, you’ll never want to go back to other versions. But there’s also a surprising ginger juice you didn’t realize you were missing and will want to put on everything—and a way to cook white chocolate that (finally) exposes its hidden glory. Some of these recipes you’ll follow to a T, but others will be jumping-off points for you to experiment with and make your own. Either way, with Kristen at the helm, revealing and explaining the genius of each recipe, Genius Recipes is destined to become every home cook’s go-to resource for smart, memorable cooking—because no one cook could have taught us so much.

About the Author . . .

Kristen Miglore is a food writer who blogs at Food52.