Sharpen Your Kitchen Skills With These 7 Cookbooks

I'm a recipe loyalist. This means I always try to cook a recipe as written before I attempt any freestyling. But even with a longtime favorite recipe, I'll eventually wonder how I could make it better, easier, or more flavorful. Could I brine those pork chops? How could I sear all that lamb shoulder faster? What if I replaced the cooking water with a broth, or vice versa? Nik Sharma seems like a guy who asks himself these kinds of questions over and over again. Look, for example, at his recipe for crispy carrots with garlic and mint tahini, where young carrots are cut in half lengthwise. This creates a flat surface for you to cook, giving you more browning per carrot, and more area for crunchy rice crumbs to cling to. Along with that tasty tahini, the carrots are dusted with amchur powder—dehydrated unripe mango—a wonderfully puckery counterpoint to the sweetness of the carrots. If you're at the point where you're looking for a cookbook where the author has already asked themselves how to make their recipes better again and again, The Flavor Equation provides the answers.

The titular recipe neither disappoints nor turns out to be a “regular” roast bird. To keep it moist and encourage crispy skin, you use your hands to slather a stick's worth of softened butter all over it, something Julia Child—who once cooked a rotisserie chicken almost entirely covered with bacon to keep it juicy—would almost certainly endorse. A celebrated London chef, Hopkinson has a gift for translating what he knows into useful information for home cooks in ways that are somehow chummy, encouraging, pedagogic, and infectious. I became a green-sauce addict thanks to him—try his cream of coconut, cilantro, mint and cumin combo he calls “green paste.” (My margin notes for that one just read, "bonkers good.") Or try his anchovy studded take on its cousin, salsa verde. Speaking of anchovies, this is the book where I learned about turning bits of anchovy fillet into little umami bombs in non-fish foods. In his roast lamb, slivers of garlic, anchovy halves, and little rosemary sprigs go into a dozen two-inch incisions in the leg. Just “push all of them right in with your little your little finger.” (NB: You're better off buying a used copy of this title. Both the paperback and hardcover versions are easy to find used, while “new” copies of this older book are sometimes oddly inflated.)

I always like joking about the cute way the illustrative overhead photos in this book draw attention to Jacques Pépin's hairy forearms, but I really love the way this cookbook combines the best bare-bones cooking methods (which you could teleport into someone else's recipe) and has a whole Basics section for common tasks like peeling tomatoes, cleaning leeks (a personal struggle), holding a knife or mincing an onion, teachings most cookbooks skip right past. Trimming a tenderloin? Its in there. Carving that roast chicken? Here's how. There's certainly an old-school French lilt to the book, but many of the techniques in Techniques are in there because they're the best way we know to do it. As he says, “creation in the kitchen follows your mood. Some days are clear and sunny, some dark and cloudy. The only constant is technique.”

For all the cookbooks about barbecue out there, up until March 16, 2021, none of them were written by Black pitmasters, a horrible omission. Yet Scott's motto is “every day is a good day,” and this is a book full of optimism and technique. I'm a big fan of page 95, where a lifetime of grilling knowledge is summed up in nine precise paragraphs. He is a fan of a clean grate; vent management; and temperature control, especially in the low 200s Fahrenheit for long sessions and between 400 and 450 for quicker cooks. Scott is a whole-hog specialist and the centerpiece of the book is about 20 pages devoted to instructions for building a pit with cinder blocks, rebar, and 14-gauge welded wire mesh, then cooking the pig. After that, he swaps to recipes that can be done in home grills and smokers. There's a nice restraint to his cooking which favors a small list of good ingredients, rubs, and sauces over showy excess. (For more from Black pitmasters, and check out writer Kevin Miller’s Black Smoke, and keep an eye open for Bludso's BBQ Cookbook slated for release in early 2022.)

As someone who embraces the nerdier, more esoteric side of making cocktails, renowned barman Jeffrey Morgenthaler is no stranger to WIRED. His The Bar Book is my go-to for simpler reasons: it's practical and I learn when I use it. The back cover gives a great sense of what you're in for as the three biggest words on it are, “That's Right: Techniques.” Those techniques start off each chapter, and are followed by a few drinks to put that new knowledge to use. Photos by Alanna Hale are employed in a perfect ratio between how-to and whistle whetting. The Book gives details without getting so bogged down that you want to put it on the nightstand and close your eyes. In a defense of using metric measurements in some circumstances, Morgenthaler leavens the learning with a tale of James Bond's enormous Vesper cocktail from the Casino Royale novel, which he reckons has more than 2.5 times the amount of booze as most modern cocktails. This book hits the sweet spot for people like me who make cocktails for special occasions and appreciate a bit of coaching so it comes out just right.