Kitchen Hacks: How Clever Cooks Get Things Done

Product Description

Innovative solutions to everyday cooking challenges from our team of test kitchen MacGyvers—the test cooks at Cook’s Illustrated magazine

A kitchen hack is an unusual, easier, and/or better way of performing a task that often saves money and time or improves the quality of the outcome. In this wacky but eminently useful collection of kitchen hacks, you will learn how to outsmart tricky tasks and face down kitchen challenges (big and small) with innovative and clever ideas from Quick Tips, the most popular feature in Cook’s Illustrated magazine (900,000 circulation). Kitchen Hacks is a beautifully designed guidebook to hacking your kitchen . . . and beyond!

Top Reviews

Book construction makes it difficult to read the content.
by Chris223 (2 out of 5 stars)
November 22, 2015

Dear Cook's Illustrated fans, I am one of Cook's Illustrated's biggest fans. My two star rating has nothing to do with the excellent content. The reason I have rated this book two stars is because the actual book size and binding make the book unusable. The book pages are five inches wide and parts of some illustrations disappear into the middle of the book where the pages are held together. The binding is a glued binding which causes the book to close immediately when you move one hand from the right or left side of the book. To keep the book open you need a very heavy pot which ends up covering the top half or bottom half of both left and right pages. When the weight is lifted, the book snaps shut. To keep the book open without a weight, a person would likely need to break the glued binding which would result in pages falling out over time. Also, the font is too small!!! If I had seen this book in a bookstore first, I would not have purchased the book. And do not think of giving it as a gift unless you want to torment the recipient! I would have given the book one star except the content is Cook's which is the best. Please look at this book in a bookstore before you buy it.
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Nice content, not so good format
by Hearth (4 out of 5 stars)
December 26, 2015

Fun to read - if only for the instant hard shell chocolate coating recipe for ice cream. Remember when that was the best thing at the ice cream store?

Would be a five star but the binding is hard to use. Won't lie flat, have to squint to see some of the features. Would have been much better with a magazine style format.
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Another reason to consider the kindle version of a book
by JustMy2Cents (5 out of 5 stars)
July 22, 2017

Nice reference book. Many "Why didn't I think of that?" moments.

For those who purchased a paper copy and passed along comments about the format, thank you for your comments. The comments made me realize that I should get the Kindle version. The images in the Kindle version are centered on the page and easy to read.

If it is an option for you, go for the electronic version of the book.
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Uncomfortable to hold and read.
by a reader (2 out of 5 stars)
March 13, 2016

The content is very good, but it is actually uncomfortable to hold the book open. The pages are glued so tightly that you can't open the book all the way.
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On the good end, I'd never used a spoon to peel ...
by Catosixtails (2 out of 5 stars)
April 25, 2017

There are a handful of really innovative tricks and suggestions in this book. Unfortunately, you have to read through a lot of not-so-helpful suggestions to get to them. On the good end, I'd never used a spoon to peel a hard boiled egg, and that works well if you forget to cook them a la Zakarian and the shells don't want to come off easily. But on the other hand, the book contains a number of "work arounds" that use several different utensils/tasks instead of the one that it's substituting for. In some cases, that might be helpful if the utensil or task you are working around is unusual, but most of the time I'm more likely to have the one utensil I need than all of the other stuff needed for the work around. It is helpfully organized in alphabetical order, and I'm not throwing it away, but I seldom refer to it.
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Difficult to read
by Ziggy (1 out of 5 stars)
October 11, 2016

Im sure the content is great but the format is horrible. The book is simply unmanageable -- difficult to even hold, almost impossible to flip thru -- the font is small and the print is almost too light to read. I'm super disappointed.
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Good tips and tricks
by Evan M. (3 out of 5 stars)
April 7, 2016

I agree with others, this book should be spiral bound or something. It is hard to read. Good tips and tricks.
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Don't expect to use it as a reference tool.
by Kim (3 out of 5 stars)
December 6, 2017

I had hoped to be able to use this as a reference guide when I ran into a problem in the kitchen, but it really isn't that. It is meant to be "read". I've skimmed through most of it at this point, and have found just a few truly "wow, that's a great idea!" items. Others I already knew about or were such common sense they were silly. It is a very HEAVY book (thick paper) and quite pretty.

I'll finish skimming through it, and will probably pass it on to someone else.
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Useful Book!
by Christine S (5 out of 5 stars)
September 26, 2016

After decades of cooking for my family (from childhood to the "golden years") I downsized from an extremely well equipped kitchen to the bare minimum of tools necessary to produce good food. With this liberation from things comes the reality that I don't always have that specialized piece of culinary magic for a specific task. That's where this small volume comes in, showing how to improvise to get the job done. Many of the hacks are familiar, more are, for me, EUREKA! moments and why didn't I think of that common sense solutions. I agree with many other reviewers that the design of the book is awkward to use, but I usually throw it in my purse to peruse while killing time somewhere and it hasn't deterred me from trying to glean every time saving, smart trick to streamline my cooking while producing results I can be proud of. I wish I had known these kitchen hacks a long time ago!
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Fun to read - even without a full kitchen!
by Susan Jane (5 out of 5 stars)
May 30, 2018

This book was a treat to read, even though I live in a retirement home without a full kitchen in my apartment! I have given several of these as gifts and each recipient lives in this retirement facility. None of us has a full kitchen and all loved the book! The ideas are creative and most use materials that would probably be found in most homes. We talk about our favorite hacks every time we meet!

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