Review
Posted in: Books > Cookbooks
24 / 11 / 2007
Many of you would have grown up with those thin 60 page Woman’s Weekly cookbooks in your kitchen. For decades the Australian Woman’s Weekly Test Kitchen has been creating these books with titles like Easy Entertaining, Great Barbeques, Essential Soups and a myriad of others. Then last year they released COOK, which my girlfriend gave me for Christmas. COOK was very different to what the Australian Woman’s Weekly usually published and had over 688 pages. COOK went on to become a best seller, and now the Australian Women’s Weekly has released the long awaited companion book, KITCHEN.
And wow what a cookbook! Packaged in the same iconic striped livery as COOK and with its bold blue colour, KITCHEN also has a whopping 688 pages and over 1000 recipes. KITCHEN’S layout is clear and concise with a great range of recipes to choose from. The superb photography is simple and the food is styled exquisitely. As with many cookbooks KITCHEN offers information on how to prepare a range of foods, distinguish between different cuts of meat and how to decorate food creatively. It was clever to see that the cookbook is divided into the different utensils, pans, dishes or appliances needed to prepare that particular recipe. You can easily work through the book to utilize everything in your kitchen!
A particular point of interest for me was the section called ‘what happened to my cake?’. In this section, The Australian Woman’s Weekly test kitchen provides a resource and picture guide for all the problems that can go wrong when baking a cake. These include crumbly butter cakes, burnt bottoms, when the cake sinks in the middle or sticks to the pan and possible explanations are offered as to why these occurred so you can learn for next time. I also enjoyed the commentary beside each recipe which offers variations, techniques or the history of the dish.
For Men, Barbeque Tips was also an interesting addition to the book, providing the basic on how to marinate or dry marinate foods for barbequing. This is truly a great resource for all cooks at all levels and a must for chefs to have hidden on the shelves in the kitchen when they need to get an essential recipe.
Kitchen by Australian Women’s Weekly
ISBN 9781863967099
ACP Books
Full disclosure: I received a review copy of Kitchen by Australian Women’s Weekly from ACP Books.
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