Cookbooks to Take You From Rookie Chef to Grillmaster
Summertime means lazy days at the beach, corralling the kids for day trips to the park or the zoo, tending to a garden in the prime of life…and grilling season! Barbecues are a time-honored way to celebrate holidays, enjoy the warm weather, and bring families together. You can make this season one to remember by upgrading your grilling skills with these sensational cookbooks. By the time you are finally ready to break out the BBQ grills, you will be amply prepared for whatever this summer throws your way!
Chicken on a beer can? You bet! When Steven Raichlen, America’s barbecue guru, says it’s the best grilled chicken he’s ever tasted, cooks stop and listen. An essential addition to every grill jockey’s library, Beer-Can Chicken presents foolproof recipes for the ultimate poultry grilling technique, plus the perfect sides and desserts—more than 50 recipes in all. The results? The perfect bird, crackly crisp, succulent within—the most flavorful chicken you’ve ever tasted. Beer-Can Tandoori with yogurt, warming spices, and of course, India’s Kingfisher Lager. Sake Chicken with a wasabi-sesame rub. Truffled Chicken and Cousin Rob’s Cajun Chicken. Other birds on the can: Root Beer Game Hens and Beer-Can Turkey (perched on a 32-ounce can of Foster’s). ”Beerless birds” (Ginger Ale Chicken, Black Cherry Soda Chicken), and birds cooked off the can in clever ways—like Stoned Chicken (grilled under a brick) and Welder’s Chicken (wrapped in foil and turned with welder’s gloves). Whether on a can, under a brick, or in the embers, each grilling technique is explained in easy-to-follow steps, with recipes that guarantee no matter how wild the process, the results are always outstanding. Includes sides, desserts, and all new instructions for beer-canning on a pellet grill—with full-color step-by-step and beauty photography throughout.
STELLAR COOKOUT SIDES
Move the meat from the center of the table and let these innovative side dishes steal the spotlight. Written by celebrated pitmaster Adam Perry Lang, Barbecue Sides includes a dozen-plus recipes for melting, creamy, and crispy dishes like Bubbling Bacon Butter Beans, Smoked-Corn Flan, and Scruffed Carbonara Potatoes that temper the strength of brawny barbecue mains without getting in the way of flavor. The menu is rounded out with a dozen additional recipes for fresh, sprightly, and green sides, like Mango Cilantro Salad and Green Apple, Cabbage, and Caraway Slaw, as well as pickled vegetables that add refreshing high notes and contrast to a plate. These first-rate side dishes will elevate your barbecue.
A root-to-leaf guide to vegetable butchery, with 150 recipes. Winner, IACP Cookbook Awards for Single Subject and People's Choice.
Applying the skills of butchery to the unique anatomy of vegetables—leafy, lumpy, stalky, gnarly, thin-skinned, or softly yielding—Cara Mangini shows, slice by slice, how to break down more than 100 vegetables for their very best use in the kitchen. Here's how to peel a tomato, butcher a butternut squash, cut cauliflower steaks, and chiffonade kale. How to find the tender, meaty heart of an artichoke and transform satellite-shaped kohlrabi into paper-thin rounds, to be served as a refreshing carpaccio.
And then, more than 150 recipes that will forever change the dutiful notion of "eat your veggies"—Grilled Asparagus, Taleggio, and Fried Egg Panini in the spring; summery Zucchini, Sweet Corn, and Basil Penne with Pine Nuts and Mozzarella; and Parsnip-Ginger Layer Cake with Browned Buttercream Frosting to sweeten a winter meal. Plus everything else you need to know to enjoy modern, sexy, and extraordinarily delicious vegetables—and make the the center of the meal.
Eileen Gonzalez is a freelance writer from Connecticut. She has a Master’s degree in communications and years of experience writing about pop culture. She contributes to Book Riot and Foreword Reviews, and she occasionally tweets at @eileen2thestars.