Nuggets
Cook pasta in its sauce not water
Banish one note flavors

Foundation - Counterpoint- Embellishment.
Tenderizing greens by massaging with salt

This will definitely change the way I cook now.
You might already be following some of the dos and donts.
For every recipe, there's a suggestion to use the right kind of vegetable - for exa baby spinach vs mature spinach

Coconut Ginger Rice sounds delicious.

Christopher Kimball is a brilliant chef I’ve followed for years.He is a chef who calmly explains recipes makes time in the kitchen a pleasure even for a non gourmet cook like me.
Milk Street is a guide to cooking in today’s world delicious recipes easy common sense directions.This will be a go to cookbook for me and I will be buying it for friends.This is what I look for no stress recipes no fancy expensive equipment understandable recipes & Milk Street delivers.#netgalley#littlebrowb

Even though I’ve heard of Christopher Kimball and Milk Street, I’ve never picked up any of the books or magazines - until now. I was looking for something quick and easy to read; since this advance reader copy was readily available, I decided to go with it.

The cookbook begins with a short introduction about changing the way we cook, followed by a complete listing of the 75 new rules, each with a sentence or two of explanation. In the digital advance reader copy, each rule is hyperlinked to where the corresponding recipes are in the main body of the book. After all the rules, there is a quick primer on the Milk Street Way, which considers dishes to have a foundation, a counterpoint, and an embellishment.

Some of the rules are natural in the way I cook. For example, I always stagger my cooking (rather than add everything to the vessel at once) and I always add my fresh herbs last. I’ll bloom my spices in fat at the start of a recipe, even if the recipe is written otherwise. And my favorite roast chicken recipe requires the yogurt rub to be applied under the skin. Other rules are just plain odd. Carmelizing dry pasta before cooking, for example. Some of the rules in the set seem to be contradictory without context - like “sear on stovetop, finish in the oven,” and “skip the searing.” And some of the rules seem to be duplicative, like having your marinade play double duty as both a marinade before cooking and a sauce after cooking.

The heart of the book is divided into eight chapters of rules and recipes, starting with vegetables and ending with beef. Fruit and dairy are noticeably absent from the list, which also omits sweets such as jams, jellies, and desserts. Curiously enough, there are eight or nine pages of cocktail recipes embedded at the end of the beef chapter. Each rule has at least one corresponding recipe. Each recipe has a hyperlinked title, an estimated preparation time, and a serving quantity in the header. After the ingredients list, there is a short paragraph about the recipe that explains the inspiration for the recipe and offers more tips on how to prepare the recipe. Sometimes certain ingredients are highlighted in the recipe introduction to explain what they are, how to use them, where to find them, how to store them, and so on. The vast majority of the ingredients used in here recipes can be found in the average supermarket. Perhaps the most exotic ingredients used are Aleppo pepper, ground fennel, and blue fenugreek. Before the recipe steps, there are additional tips related to the rule being applied. The recipe steps are written in paragraph form, with the first few words in bold so that it can make sense when skimmed. The recipe steps are rather precisely, including details such as the cooking vessel type and size, temperature/heat level, and timing.

The recipes themselves were of varying interest to me, as I was fascinated by some and aghast at others. The Sicilian caponata recipe, for example, contains zucchini and vinegar, over and above the traditional ingredients. Each vegetable is cooked separately, which seems to result in a dish more like a ratatouille rather than the cohesive caponata that I make. The majority of the recipes in the grains and beans chapter were for beans and for rice, with the occasional lentil recipe. The polenta recipe was the only recipe in the chapter using other grains. Which is very disappointing given the fantastic variety of grains that are currently available in the United States.

Throughout the book were special sections on “The Milk Street Method,” which explained specific techniques and ingredients in greater detail. For example, in the vegetables chapter, there was a special section on blanching and roasting vegetables. Curiously, the section about blooming and toasting spices was in the grains and beans section, sandwiched between a polenta recipe and a fritter recipe. The noodles and breads chapter featured a “Japanese Noodles 101” section to highlight that the Italians don’t have a monopoly on noodle dishes. The seafood chapter had a section on dried chiles that discussed several different types of chiles and how to use them. The discourse on eighteen essential spices appeared in alphabetical order in the chicken chapter. Several oddities appear in the list, including the aforementioned Aleppo pepper as well as Sichuan peppercorns, sumac, and Urfa pepper. The section on six essential spice mixes - Syrian baharat, Ethiopian berbere, Egyptian dukkah, Chinese five spice powder, Japanese shichimi togarahi, Middle Eastern za’atar - is also found in the chicken chapter. One of the final informational sections, a primer on smoke points of various fats, is included in the beef chapter.

Equipment was rarely discussed in this cookbook, just the odd note if a nonstick skillet was definitely required and the random rule about using shallow baking pans rather than deep roasting pans. In general, the equipment required was very basic: a 12-inch skillet, a Dutch oven, the occasional food processor or spice grinder, pots and bowls of varying sizes, a gas or charcoal grill, and the like.

For my purposes and interests, the best parts of the book were the Milk Street Methods sections. I would be willing to add the book to my (extensive) cookbook collection for those charts and recipes alone. However, because of the hyperlinks that permit easy movement through the text, this is probably better as an electronic book rather than a paper book. Especially since, weighing in at 583 pages, the advance reader copy was a veritable tome.

I received this book as a digital advance reader copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I have yet to prepare any of the recipes from this book, although I have marked several of the jams and liqueurs to try in the near future. When I do prepare recipes from this book, I will update this review with the results.

Could not access this book on Kindle or computer. It would not download as epub. Would love to be able to review this as a PDF or available to be sent to the kindle.