Great book for beginners to intermediate chefs. It is an essential guide to working a kitchen, grill, wok, stove, rotisserie, dutch oven, an oven, you name it! Leads you through all the ingredients you can imagine and what you should imagine as kitchen staples.
A must have, read, keep and pass on. :)

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Don’t be intimidated by the size of this book, a shade under 1,000 pages. It certainly lives up to its name, telling you how to cook hundreds of recipes quite easily and effortlessly.
This is the twentieth anniversary edition of the popular cookbook, first created before the turn of the 21st century. Mark Bittman has written thirteen books, all receiving national acclaim.
HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING VEGETARIAN, HOW TO COOK EVERYTHING FAST, and THE BEST RECIPES IN THE WORLD, is just a sampling of his past titles.
If you are seeking out a quick dish or something never tried before, simply open to any page of the book, the recipes practically jumping right off the page. Accompanying the recipes are dozens of photos that give you even more incentive to try them. But you really don’t need your arm twisted to race to the kitchen.
The book offers other helpful hints for the kitchen, such as rolling and cutting sushi rolls, scaling fish, butchering chicken, folding an omelette in thirds, preparing a pineapple two ways, and preparing leeks, among others. And then of course there are the recipes that steal the show. It is like having three or four books in one, right at your fingertips.
If you have made a pledge to own only one cookbook during your lifetime, then this is one of the first books to consider. With this book, the sky is the limit recipe wise. The book truly does not disappoint.

On page xi, Mark Bittman lays things out: "Anyone can cook, and most everyone should. It's a sorry sign that many people consider cooking 'from scratch' an unusual and even rare talent. In fact, cooking is a simple and rewarding craft, one that anyone can learn and even succeed at from the get-go."

There are the usual features in this cookbook (and welcome for all that): ingredients that ought to be in your kitchen (page xiii),equipment, techniques (such as grilling, broiling, roasting, sauteing, etc.).

Then, to the recipes. . . . The first section here focuses (as one might guess) on appetizers. One of these is stuffed mushrooms, which provides a recipe close to that of my wife's family. I can say that the end result is delicious (the key: making sure that it does not get too dry when being cooked). Next, soups. The section starts out nicely with a description of how to make stock. You use bouillon cubes? Bittman says (page 44): "As for bouillon cubes, forget it. You're better off with water and a few extra vegetables." Late on, he addresses meats.

He begins by nicely identifying where the different cuts of beef and pork are, and the characteristics of each (with beef, from chuck to round, from brisket to loin). The recipes for beef are straightforward. This is not Emeril Lagasse or Martha Stewart (each of whom plays a useful role in providing information on cooking). The recipes are "everyday" stuff. For example, his "Grilled steak, American-style" could not be easier to make. Pork chops? On page 457 and after, he describes how to sautee pork chops eight different ways. With apples or with sherry and garlic or with dried fruit or. . . . He discusses stir frying and how to make it work.

Vegetables? He describes the different ways of cooking them and then provides recipes. I have come to really enjoy veggies, after spending my first two decades resisting eating them. There are a series of nice recipes for, to illustrate, asparagus, which is one of my favorites.

All in all, then, a nice cookbook for people who want to cook for themselves and may not be interested in more complicated recipes and cooking.

There is a need, in the kitchen of users of this massive go-to cooking reference, for a lectern as well as a stove! It certainly lives up to its name as giving directions on how to cook everything, and I have enjoyed dipping into it, but for this elderly cook the sheer size of the book makes it almost physically too much. I think I'll stick to magazines - quite up to the minute, and much lighter to handle! Back to the library with this one.

Slow to start, but worth sticking with. The initial chapters felt a bit heavy, but once the plot picked up, I was completely engrossed. The twists were unexpected, and the emotional payoff was both satisfying and bittersweet.

Breakfast is important because can be source of energy and make you always in a good mood. So, this is a delicious & instant menu recommendation that you can make at home! https://hubstler.com/4-resep-menu-sar...

This book was useful back when I really didn't know how to cook anything. I bought it based on the recipe for alfredo sauce.

Now that I know how to cook (and enjoy food), I've upgraded to the Best Recipes books and find myself being offended by what Mark Bittman thinks of some of my favorite foods. (Pasta and cheese don't go together? Muffins shouldn't be sweet? Brownies shouldn't be too fudgey?)

I donated this one to the library after 8 years of oftentimes frustrating reference.

A beautifully written book that will be a staple in the kitchen. It is divided into sections according to what you will be cooking - so meats, pastas and so on. While not the most original collection of recipes, there are many that are simple to make and delicious. It’s a big book, there’s a few illustrations (no pictures, but that just gives extra space for more writing), and I’m using tags and underlining to make note of recipes I like. I encourage you to do the same. :) Useful purchase, I look forward to trying new recipes.

Thiiiis was written by a M A N and men better not be telling me how to cook. I am da cook a M A N bought this for me and I should have hit him right there this book is useless and how dare M E N have the nerve to say something like that to me.

This book has a purpose: to introduce home cooks to the most basic cooking techniques for a wide variety of ingredients through simple recipes. It accomplishes this goal handily. The cooking techniques in this book are well explained and largely foolproof, and give a great starting point for situations like the one I'm finding myself in today, a classic case of "WTF do I do with these sunchokes I impulse-bought at the farmer's market?!"

However, the recipes in this book are almost totally uninspiring to me as someone with above-average cooking skill and interest. In my kitchen, this book functions as a reference textbook. Let's stick with sunchokes as an example. Today, I looked them up in How to Cook Everything and, lo and behold, there's an entry for them. Bittman recommends scrubbing instead of peeling for better yield, and suggests sauteeing or braising as cooking techniques. Great info! However, the recipe suggested is simply sauteeing them with salt, pepper and garlic or onion. GOOD GOD SO BORING TASTEBUDS DYING. No interesting pairings with other ingredients, no suggestions for herbs/spices, basically just an explanation of how to sautee anything with "sunchoke" copy-pasted in to replace "[insert vegetable here]". Yikes.

So my next step is to go to the New York Times Cooking website or Epicurious and find a recipe that's actually inspiring. Today's winner is Sunchoke Soup with Pumpkin Seeds (thanks Epicurious!). Now there's a pairing I wouldn't necessarily of thought of myself - still a simple recipe, but with so much more interest! However, the soup recipe instructs me to peel the sunchokes, something that I now know that I can skip thanks to Bittman's instructions in HTCE.

This is the crux of HTCE's usefulness. Generally, the recipes are not so much recipes as basic cooking techniques. This is useful too! But it's not what inspires me to get my ass off the internet and turn on my stove. I think this book is a fantastic starting point for basic ingredient information, but for food that will actually move you, take the information Bittman offers and then apply it to recipes from other sources.

Eminently usable, wonderfully thorough, deeply enjoyable. Bittman leaves no doubt of his own expertise while not transferring shame for any ignorance on your part. He makes the learning process fabulously enjoyable. I never do singular favorites, but this would have been a wonderful place to start if I could inform my younger self and only pick one

There are many different types of cookbooks. The most basic type is a collection of recipes, presumably built around some theme. Another type is the picture book, filled with pages of pictures of beautiful gourmet dishes. Then there are the celebrity chefs, with books that promise something akin to what you can get from their restaurants, or results like their TV shows. I have one cookbook that is basically a travelogue, beckoning the reader to distant exotic lands. But the one that every household is supposed to have, is the big, basic cookbook. The one that has a general range and, more importantly, general instructions on cooking technique and everything that has to do with a kitchen, without assuming that the reader has learned everything at her grandmother's knee (especially the readers that are not a 'her'). This latter type includes classics like The Joy of Cooking and the Betty Crocker's Cookbook. And Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (HTCE): Simple Recipes for Great Food.

Mark Bittman opens the book with a general statement of philosophy which identifies his audience. In this case, his audience are precisely those who are starting from nothing, new households of people who did not grow up learning from their mothers and grandmothers on how to cook. Second, it is aimed at those who desire to cook, not necessarily gourmet, but food that is good, and not complicated. And because his readers are assumed to be starting from no base, Bittman takes on the role of teacher, not just a publisher. And as a professor (lit. one who professes) he has opinions that he shares, based on his philosophy that cooking can be done, and there is no value in making things harder, more complicated, more fancy, then necessary. The assumption is that people who want something like this, will also know how to find it elsewhere. The first section is basically a tour through the kitchen, equipment, basic ingredients, and basic techniques. All this with advice on what was necessary, and what was optional. No doubt there is room for disagreement. But for someone starting from nothing, the opinions given are useful. And once people learn more and gain more skills, they can form their own opinions starting from what he gives.

So, how are the recipes? There are many cookbooks that I avoid because their too complicated, many due to the shear number of ingredients required. HTCE does not have this problem. It does not go as far as a 5 ingredient list, but the ingredients are constrained to a number that someone without a full spice rack could conceivably have. Throughout the book, there are tips on how to work with various ingredients. In addition, there would be a small essay for major meat and vegetables.

So far, I've probably done a couple dozen recipes over the past couple years. Some for myself, some just me and my fiancee, some for a group. I have found the recipes to be complex enough to be interesting and worthy of something nice, but easy enough so I can gauge difficulty and effort from reading alone, (I only have limited background in cooking). In contrast, I find most cookbooks on the market to be way to simple (and just a list of recipes) or overly complicated and impractical (especially for someone who lives alone and would end up throwing out most of the purchased ingredients as they spoiled.)

I think HTCE a very good baseline cookbook. For the starter, Bittman teaches without intimidation, the recipes are complex enough to impress (if that is the goal), but basic enough to be achievable. The advice and options given are enough that the reader can understand how to adapt and experiment, and thus learn how to cook to a level that should satisfy anyone, and a jumping off point to learn in the future.