Secrets of the Best Chefs by Adam Roberts

It’s difficult to fully explain how fantastic this book is without just putting it into your hands and pushing you into a comfy chair for the afternoon. Adam Roberts has spent the past year traveling from kitchen to kitchen, gleaning secrets, tips, and recipes from the best chefs in the country. This is the result: a tome of collective culinary know-how that simultaneously entertains, engages, and educates. Clear your schedule and make a cup of tea; you’ll want to spend some time with this one.

• Who wrote it: Adam Roberts of The Amateur Gourmet

• Who published it: Artisan

• Number of recipes: 150 recipes

• Recipes for right now: Vegetarian Collard Greens, Ziti with Broccoli Raab and Sausage, Chocolate Cherry Clafoutis, Butternut Squash Tortellini, Lamb Shanks Roasted with Root Vegetables, Plum Dumplings, Mushroom-Crusted Chicken Breasts, Jamaican Rum Cake

• Other highlights: This is a very hard cookbook to put down. It starts with nodding along to Adam’s “Ten Essential Rules for Cooking like a Chef,” continues with the AHA! moment of Chef Waxman’s tip for chopping roly-poly vegetables on the next page, and then bookmarking his recipe for gnocchi with eggplant.

And that only takes you up to page 10. By the time you make it to Elizabeth Falkner’s recipe for Red Velvet Cupcakes on page 368, hours have gone by and you realize you are very very hungry.

Adam Roberts (a.k.a. The Amateur Gourmet!) has really put together something special here. He has managed to translate his year of visiting and learning from top-notch chefs into a truly useful and engaging cookbook. Each mini-chapter focuses on a different chef, starting with an essay about that chef, tips Adam learned in their kitchen, and then a few original recipes. In this way, Secrets of the Best Chefs combines our voyeuristic love for celebrity chefs, our craving for practical culinary knowledge, and of course, our never-ending quest for really great recipes.

• Who would enjoy this book? New cooks, old cooks, and everyone in between.

Find the book at your local library, independent bookstore, or Amazon: Secrets of the Best Chefs: Recipes, Techniques, and Tricks from America’s Greatest Cooks by Adam Roberts

• Visit Adam Roberts’ website: The Amateur Gourmet

Apartment Therapy Media makes every effort to test and review products fairly and transparently. The views expressed in this review are the personal views of the reviewer and this particular product review was not sponsored or paid for in any way by the manufacturer or an agent working on their behalf. However, the manufacturer did give us the product for testing and review purposes.

(Images: Emma Christensen)