The best recipe...hands down...

Got up this morning and took my semi-weekly turn at Sunday morning breakfast. Karlen's a wonderufl dinner cook, but for some reason any sort of pancake, waffle, french toast breakfast comes down to me. This morning, instead of simply cracking the couple of eggs and dropping in a modicum of milk, I turned to the most amazing cookbook out there to see what they had to say about things. Probably half an hour later, I was trying what has to be the best french toast I've ever had. Absolutely amazing stuff...perfect...as the cookbook says, "custardlike center surrounded by crisp, light egg wash fried to a perfect golden brown." No syrup necessary for this one, perfect as they were.

And I always like using the America's Test Kitchen staff's cookbook because I so love the style in which they develop their recipes. It's the most incredible application and explanation of the scientific method at work. First, they define what they want - a good roast has to be crunchy on the outside but favorful and moist inside and shouldn't take more than two hours to prepare, for example - so they can judge their attempts against perfection. Second, they research their prey, finding dozens of recipes from all sorts of sources - cookbooks, family histories, childhood memories - and find the commonalities and variables. Third, they make the recipe changing one variable at a time - in the french toast recipe, for example, they began with a standard cooking method and bread, first varrying the egg/milk ratio to get that perfect, then moving on to the flavorings, changing one at a time until they find the perfect procedure.

With each recipe comes a tale of how the recipe came about, retelling their process of searching for perfection - and there's always the bonus that the recipes are darn near perfect. I haven't yet found a recipe in thier cookbook that didn't work amazingly well, and they typically tell you what substitutions can be made and why each substitution works.

And they've got a bi-monthly magazine that it looks like we'll be getting (cheap second subscription for us after ordering a gift subscription for somebody else's birthday present.