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| Publisher: Boston Common Press
List Price: $35.70
Buy New: $26.95
You Save: $8.75 (25%)
Rating:  83 reviews
Sales Rank: 91
Format: Magazine Subscription
Type: Consumer magazine
Subscription Issues: 6
Subscription Length: 12 Months
Issues Per Year: 6
First Issue Lead Time: 12-16 Weeks
ASIN: B000069YW9
Release Date: June 28, 2002
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 2 to 4 months
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 16-20 of 83
 The only cooking magazine you'll need February 13, 2004
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
Cook's Illustrated takes the work out of finding the best recipe for a particular dish. They test out many versions of a dish to come up with a great, fool-proof version. When I had a chef friend over I tried their stuffed chicken breast recipe, my friend was really impressed, and he kept asking me how I made it and what was in it. Their chocolate chip cookie recipe is the best! As good as or better than anything you would buy in a specialty shop. I have subscribed for over 6 years and it is the first place I turn for a recipe. I get frustrated when I cook from other magazines because many times the end product isn't worth the time or effort. CI's extensive recipe testing and well-written steps make all the difference. If you're going to subscribe to one magazine, this is it. Their website (fee based) is great too, well-worth the price! People are always complimenting my cooking when it comes from CI. It makes me look like a great cook. Buy a glossy magazine for the pretty pictures; buy Cooks Illustrated if you want to cook some pretty fabulous food!
The Best Cooking Magazine out there October 12, 2004
Cheffie33 (Palatine, IL United States)
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Some people don't care why the food came out great or why it came out horrible. I do, and that's why I love this magazine. I enjoy reading what the author/cook went through to arrive at the printed recipe. I also enjoy the colorful covers and the back page with beautiful drawings of a "topic" food, such as a variety of tomotoes, hams, etc. Great magazine. However, I'm not crazy about their website.
 Irritating, Indispensable Ladle-Full of Wisdom December 2, 2005
Stephen Foster (Seattle, WA United States, via Scotland)
11 out of 24 found this review helpful
Quite simply, this is the only cooking magazine worth subscribing to. An absolute treasure-trove of meticulously-researched, exhaustively-tested, straightforwardly-explained, usefully-illustrated recipes. Throw in their no-sacred-cows-here equipment reviews and their wonderful comparison articles on commercial ingredients, and the result is 32 pages that pack more useful, trustworthy, culinary education than an entire rack of ad-bloated, fluffy-articled "cooking" magazines. Quite the ladle-full indeed.
You would never catch Keller, Vongerichten, or Kunz with his nose in "Cooking Light" (or, for that matter, "Gourmet"), but they all have a subscription to "Cook's Illustrated."
How could I presume to dare disturb this universe?
(...)Then, to find all this deathless information in future, you need to buy the exact same magazines all over again, poorly-bound up in an annual, with a useful index attached - same price. No, the index is not available separately - don't be silly. Give the original magazines away to friends and thus spread the virus. Brilliant marketing. They explain several good ways to skin a chicken, but do they EVER also know how to skin a cat.
You're the cat.
And there are just too many ads! Not too obvious to the casual magazine-rack browser, especially when someone has browsed it before you and pulled out all the annoying self-promoting inserts, but when you shell out for the subscription, what gets delivered is the actual magazine firmly stapled inside an 8-page, heavy-paper section that touts their endless (and excellent) cookbook offerings. Be VERY careful when you remove it, because the staples are the same ones that hold the magazine together. If you also give them your E-mail address, they make good use of it indeed.
And even though they have a diverse staff, they all speak with one identical voice, cleaving to a rigid format that never varies: They try making their assigned dish a few times, blindly following dreadful, supposedly-popular recipes. They have disastrous results that they describe at great length. Do they actually start this way every time? Why? They're CIA graduates! I suspect that they often just make this section up.
'Nuff bitching. What then follows is pure motherlode gold. I like to play with recipes, endlessly improving them. I've endlessly played with many of these recipes, but after 15 years of experimentation, my crowning achievement seems to be that I prefer to blanch the cauliflower for three minutes, not four, and bake the assembled gratin for two minutes longer and 25 F lower. Go me. Tomorrow, the world!
 Beautiful illustrations, handy tips, complicated recipes November 12, 2006
K.C. (USA)
11 out of 16 found this review helpful
I like to read Cook's Illustrated at the library. Their magazine is much too expensive for the small amount of recipes included within. I like the tips sent in by readers, and some of the product reviews.
I have found that most of their recipes are very involved--nitpicky, to be kind. The lemon meringue pie recipe--which I tried from their "America's Test Kitchen" cookbook--calls for cooking cornstarch in water, cooling it, and then beating the solution into the meringue. Supposedly this keeps the meringue from destabilizing. All that happened in my kitchen was I found little lumps of cornstarch glue at the bottom of my mixing bowl while scraping out the meringue. I have made meringue before without cornstarch, and can't help thinking this is an extra step that isn't neccessary. Their "best" brownies are good, but I can make equally good brownies without all the extra steps involved in melting chocolate and cooling it, etc.
If you're looking for easy, fool proof recipes, that don't take a gazillion steps and aren't fussy about exactly what ingredients you use, this isn't the magazine for you.
Wonderful... each magazine is a *keeper* May 10, 2003
T. Reinhardt (east coast)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful magazine albeit a little expensive (especially the news stand price). Each issue has a few great, totally reasearched recipes instead of tons of so-so recipes. The recipes are written as articles, which i love. It tells the story of how this *ultimate* recipe came about in their test kitchens.. as well as what worked and what didn't (One cooking method over another... differing amounts of liquid... etc. ) In a recent chile article there was discussion of meat vs. beans and one kind of meat vs. another... As well as why some ingredients worked and some didn't. I like this feature alot as I tend to play around with recipes so it's nice to know what didnt work (and why) right off.I love the product comparisons... anything from knives to mayo. It reminds me of the way consumer reports compares things..complete and unbiased. There are also very good tips and hints in every issue. I think what I like most is that its a very serious cooking magazine but it isnt stuffy.. its *tone* is conersational and friendly. Its a real winner for people who love cooking and cookbooks
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