Bon Appetit: Keep It Simple

Filed in archive Reviews on September 24, 2005

Whether you're a seasoned chef or a novice in the kitchen, this cookbook is for you. It covers everything from scrambled eggs to four-layer cakes and keeps it simple every time.

One of the leading resources for gourmet cooking, Bon Appetit Magazine, has put together a cookbook that gets right down to basics. Keep It Simple is a great reference tool for every level of cook, from beginner to experienced.

Covering everything from soups and salads to breads and pies, this cookbook begins each section by reminding the reader of how to make basic recipes then builds up to more challenging recipes from there. For example, the seafood chapter begins with a standard recipe for sauteed fish using a minimum of steps and only four ingredients. Once a chef is familiar with the cooking technique, he or she can try subsequent recipes that add more skills and ingredients and work their way up to the final recipe of the chapter, a shellfish cioppino that uses 27 ingredients. Since the book walks readers through ever-increasingly ambitious cooking skills, by the time one reaches the cioppino recipe, it seems like a fun challenge and not a daunting task.

Keep It Simple peppers the book with hints, tips and advice along the way so readers get a well-rounded education in food preparation and cooking. Suggestions on picking the freshest produce, how to devein shrimp and how to freeze pie dough are interspersed throughout each chapter. Adding to the visual appeal of the book are loads of mouthwatering photos of finished recipes as well as step by step pictures of cooking techniques like how to properly grill vegetables.

Keep It Simple lives up to it's name, appealing to a wide cross section of readers while making the recipes approachable enough for cooks at any level of expertise.