Cookbooks, Food Books, And Magazine Reviews (2 Pages)
Every year there is a new trunkload of books stuffed with knowledge and recipes. We read a lot of them and I have more than 100 books on barbecue and grilling alone, and at least 200 other cookbooks. Here are some of our favorites.
Also included are more of our favorite food books, magazines, newsletters, and periodicals.
Also be sure to click here for a complete list of all of the cooking books on Amazon.com. They also offer many books in audio form and they gift wrap. If you have others to recommend, please share in the comments on these pages.
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By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
With 400 pages and more than 400 of my photographs plus color illustrations, there is new material and new recipes not on this website, and the whole thing is organized so that you can sit down in an easy chair and flow from start to finish.
By:
Dave Joachim, AmazingRibs.com Contributing Author
AmazingRibs.com is run by some of the best BBQ experts in the business. Between us, we have written and collaborated on dozens of books, mostly on barbecue and grilling, but also on things like food science and wood oven cooking. Click to read brief reviews and check prices on these expert BBQ books.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Brigit Binns, AmazingRibs.com Culinary Content Contributor
Create the best turkey of your life and side dishes for Thanksgiving (or basically any time of the year) with this downloadable e-book containing countless recipes, tips, and techniques.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Clint Cantwell, AmazingRibs.com President And BBQ Personality
By marriage of water and fire, sous vide with the grill and smoker, we can achieve extraordinary results, in some cases, better than with either cooking method on its own. You can get extraordinarily tender, juicy, safe, and flavorful foods. With this exclusive book you will learn all the basics of sous vide que.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Clint Cantwell, AmazingRibs.com President And BBQ Personality
Discover everything you need to know for preparing America's favorite food, pork ribs, with this comprehensive book. In it you'll find several tasty recipes, a glossary of rib terminology, a guide to prepping ribs including how to remove the membrane and trim them, recommended smokers and grills, and so much more.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Brigit Binns, AmazingRibs.com Culinary Content Contributor
With โBarbecue Chicken Made Easy: Everything You Need To Know About Amazing Chicken On the Grill & Smokerโ by Meathead and Brigit Binns, you can master the art of perfectly grilled and smoked chicken. Say goodbye forever to charred skin, burnt sauce and undercooked meat. Explore chicken recipes, tips, and so much more.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Peace, Love, and Barbecue, published in 2005, not only contains the expected count of excellent recipes and cooking tips, but includes interviews with the legends of barbecue, and visits to the "shrines, shacks, joints, and right respectable restaurants."
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
This book has 175 sauces, marinades, dry rubs, wet rubs, mops, and salsas. Nothing fancy, no long-winded tales and stories, just tried and true recipes, mostly from his buddies on the competition circuit.
The Barbecue! Bible was Raichlen's first book on the subject. Published in 1998, this 556 page tome with 500 recipes covers everything from hamburgers to bread.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Barbecue! Bible Sauces, Rubs, and Marinades, Bastes, Butters, and Glazes is a comprehensive collection of creative flavors from around the world.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Beautifully photographed in color, this book won a Julia Child Cookbook Award. Raichlen's most recent book, it is the best of his five barbecue books.
With several other books on barbecue and grilling, a cooking school, two television series, a lecture tour, and a line of outdoor cooking tools, Raichlen has had the kind of influence on men who cook, that Julia Child had on women who cook.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
The recipes are creative, insightful, and beautifully photographed.
Franklin Barbecue in Austin is widely considered the best in the world and people stand in line for hours to get in.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Pure fun. Founded in 1986, the Kansas City Barbeque Society (KCBS) is an international association with thousands of members.
Chris Lilly is the Executive Chef of one of the nation's classic old joints, Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q, in Decatur, AL. Lilly is a fine story teller, and in this book he shares with us what it is like to work at a small town barbecue joint, the legend of Big Bob and countless amazing recipes.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Very few people know barbecue and grilling like Ray Lampe and he's got a room full of trophies to prove it.
This book is meant as a cookbook, as described in the subtitle "100 Recipes from America's Best Smokehouses, Pits, Shacks, Rib Joints, Roadhouses, and Restaurants". But its much more. Davis and Kirk probably have visited more barbecue joints than anyone I know, and they have picked some of their favorites with recipes.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
This book is great story telling as we follow an inquisitive writer on his quest for great steak.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Moore is a youngish Southern Gentleman from Nashville (and author of A Southern Gentleman's Kitchen), the son of a cattleman and grandson of a butcher, takes his small plane all over the South visiting a dozen BBQ joints in as many states from Texas to North Carolina.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
A fun, beautifully photographed cross country visit with some of the top grillers in the nation including Meathead
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
As the title says, this book is all about the recipes, and they look wonderful.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
A big, heavy, beautifully photographed book that feels authoritative. The intro material is short, but high quality.
Chef Purviance has another winner for Weber. This one has the 200 plus recipes divided into two categories, "Easy" and "Adventurous", pretty much 50/50, and you don't need a Weber to cook them.
Purviance begins this beautiful book with managing the grill, and although Weber's grills are featured, the advice is broad enough to cover most charcoal and gas grills.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Shewchuk is a Vancouver based competitor who really knows his stuff. This is a good beginner's guide to serious barbecue with many of his competition recipes.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
If you have a new Weber Smoky Mountain smoker you absolutely positively must buy Gary Wiviott's book.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
So you're asking yourself "how many steak recipes are there?" Well, far more than even I dreamed. In this case, about 50 steaks and 50 cakes, each paired. This is the definition of indulgent.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Check out our review of Thin Blue Smoke by Doug Worgul. It's the first novel we've ever reviewed on this site. If you're a fan of good writing, good barbecue, and good stories, we highly recommend pulling up a chair, pouring a couple fingers of your favorite libation, and settling into this book.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
In the book "Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human" (Basic Books, 2010), Richard Wrangham describes how cooking changes the chemistry of food and how that made it easier for proto humans to chew, digest, and extract energy and nutrients. It also includes insight for us who love to hang out at the grill.
Daniel Vaughn knows Texas barbecue so well that in 2013 Texas Monthly magazine hired the Dallas architect to write about the subject full time.
This book is a wonderful piece of scholarly research that is also a great read. Walsh has delved into the history and lore of Texas barbecue, it origins, its ingredients, its personalities, and its tall tales.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
A 46 minute DVD narrated by the late Governor Ann Richards and directed by Chris Elley.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
George Hensler is the captain of a barbecue team, and he has written a very helpful short book on what you need to know before entering your first Kansas City Barbecue Society (KCBS) contest.
A cleverly written, well researched, fun tale of the history of the hamburger and how it has evolved in step with American culture.
A well regarded culinary historian and Professor Emeritus of History and Humanities at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
This definitive little book unwraps the mystery of the origin of the hamburger and its name, and traces its spread across the globe.
This book follows him cross country as he seeks regional styles and historical techniques that will help him unravel the story of the All-American hamburger.
If you're a fan of chili in its various forms then this is the book for you! Discover recipes for such dishes as classic Texas chili, Cincinnati chili, four alarm chili, and so much more.
George Motz has traveled the four corners of the nation to find the best and most interesting burger joints.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
A short paperback that you can easily swallow on a short airplane trip, Pollan, the author of such important books as the Ominvore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and The Botany of Desire, summarizes what he has learned about good eating habits in the form of "rules" which he describes in a few sentences.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
From the country's foremost expert on the science of cooking, Harold McGee, Keys to Good Cooking is a concise and authoritative guide designed to help home cooks navigate the ever-expanding universe of ingredients, recipes, food safety, and appliances, and arrive at the promised land of a satisfying dish.
The best teachers can address the novice and still educate the expert, and that is exactly what Kari Underly does in this fine guide.
Four chapters: Beef, Pork, Lamb, Veal. A lifetime of incredible recipes for cooks who are bored with the same old same old.
Bruce Aidells has been a working butcher. He founded a sausage company and I'll bet you've seen Aidells Sausages on your grocery shelves.
Farr is a classically trained chef, butcher, and butchery instructor, at his 4505 Meats in San Francisco. In three chapters, Beef, Pork, and Lamb, he demonstrates his craft in hundreds of photographs.
Edited by NAMI (formerly NAMP), this is the definitive reference on all the different cuts of meat, with charts, excellent photos, a glossary, and nutritional info.
This may be the most important book about food since Upton Sinclair's The Jungle drew back the curtain on the Chicago stockyards in 1906. Both books take an analytical and critical look at how food gets to our table. The New York Times named The Omnivore's Dilemma one of the 10 best books of 2006.
This is the best cookbook I own. It has also won the Cookbook of the Year from the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and a James Beard Award.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
The authors explain what ingredients are made of, how they behave when cooked, and how various methods work. A very thorough A to Z encyclopedia of food science.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
If you want to know why we do what we do in the kitchen, not just what to do or how to do it, this fat tome is a must have.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
The standards such as quiche, carbonarra, BLT, are there among 168 intriguing recipes by an experienced cookbook author.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
This pretty, little, inexpensive, spiral bound cookbook explains the simple guidelines for grilling seafood beautifully.
This beautiful book whisks readers back to a lyrical time when California was a simpler place?? before it overflowed with too many people seeking Paradise?? to a fertile region nestled between Monterey and Santa Barbara.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
A quality cocktail recipe book is a must for any home bar and one of our favorites is "DIY Cocktails: A Simple Guide to Creating Your Own Signature Drinks" by Marcia Simmons and Jonas Halpren. DIY Cocktails is based on categories and ratios so we can understand the concepts of what the elements of a balanced mix.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
The Tummy Trilogy is actually three books in one, all long out of print, but occasionally available used.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Rich, complex, not like any other liver, more akin to eating a stick of the richest buttery cream cheese imaginable. This book outlines how a 5,000-year-old delicacy inspired the world's fiercest food fight.
This is a great cooking magazine. The authors have grown from a really good magazine that people in the know swore by, to a great website, to a TV show, and have recently added another magazine.
A big, sumptuous feast of recipes and ideas, drool inducing photos, probing interviews, memoirs, travel, tips on technique, culinaria, restaurant guides, product reviews, what to drink, trends, pop culture, and eternal culture.
Easily the leading beer magazine, each of the six issues per year contains features about different beer types, breweries, the interesting characters who make it, places to drink it, beer and food matching, the politics influencing the marketplace and more.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
Robert Parker is the most influential individual in the wine world. He and his associates taste thousands of wines each year, and that's pretty much all you'll find in this newsletter.
There is a special issue devoted to their Restaurant Grand Award Winners, another on the Top 100 wines of the Year, and another on Great Wine Values.
A classic trade publication, this glossy color tabloid comes out 50 times per year and is fat with trends and much more.
By:
Meathead, AmazingRibs.com Founder And BBQ Hall of Famer
In the comprehensive book, Real Food/Fake Food, acclaimed author and reporter Larry Olmsted tells a sordid tale of fraud, mislabeling, illegal ingredients, imposters, and government malfeasance in our food supply.
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