14 best pbs cookbooks

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Every Recipe from the Hit TV Show with Product Ratings and a Look Behind the Scenes

The Complete America's Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook is back after a year-long 20th anniversary party. Find every recipe prepared on 21 seasons of public television's top-rated cooking show all in a single compendium, including the new season that debuts in January 2021. You'll also get the latest equipment and ingredient ratings drawn from the show's equipment testing and taste testing segments.

Back By Popular Demand

Every recipe from every episode is included with recipes from the 2019, 2020, and 2021 seasons integrated into this new edition. There are also bonus recipe variations included in the book that did not appear on TV.

Up-to-Date Shopping Guide

The 60-page shopping guide at the back of the book contains all of the buying recommendations from ATK’s tasting and testing experts so that readers will have our winning ingredients and kitchen equipment at their fingertips.

Chopped Carrot Salad with Fennel, Orange, and Hazelnuts

This salad is inspired by a recipe by Joan Nathan and delivers the vegetable's juicy, earthy sweetness while offering a texture that's more like grains, with a pleasant crunch.

Cast Iron Baked Ziti

Baked ziti, a hearty combination of pasta, tomato sauce, and gooey cheese, can be time-consuming and fussy between making the sauce, boiling the pasta, and then assembling. This recipe streamlines the dish, achieving the same delicious results in less time and without watching over, and dirtying, a multitude of pots.

Chicken Schnitzel

Chicken schnitzel is defined by thin, tender, juicy cutlets coated in a fine, wrinkly crust that puffs away from the meat during frying. We like to serve the schnitzel with a bright creamy salad such as Cucumber-Dill Salad.

Buttermilk Panna Cotta

This silky-smooth, delicately textured buttermilk panna cotta is an elegant dessert that requires some waiting but hardly any work.

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Twenty Years of Rule-Breaking Cooking

America's Test Kitchen Twentieth Anniversary TV Show Cookbook is a must-have for fans old and new! This commemorative keepsake shines a spotlight on ATK's most essential and trusted recipes as never before-- with engaging personal comments from the cast and insights into why they love a particular recipe or what they learned while developing it in the test kitchen. Featuring more than 580 must-have recipes from the show's 500+ episodes, each dish has a different story, purpose, and background.

Ultimate Shrimp Scampi

"This recipe holds a special place in my heart because it was the first one I ever cooked after I joined the ATK family. It's also a menu item that my mother and i enjoy ordering when we treat ourselves to dine-out nights. None of the scampi dishes we had in the past ever lived up to the ATK version; they often lacked any depth of flavor and, once the shrimp was out of the butter, the taste was gone. Our recipe offers an abundance of flavor that you don't leave behind on the plate; it also utilizes all the parts of the shrimp so nothing goes to waste. Delicious and Sustainable!" - Elle Simone Scott

Sous Vide Rosemary-Mustard Seed Crusted Roast Beef

Hands-off roast reigns supreme

If you have a sous vide machine, you're always on the lookout for the next great sous vide recipe. If you don't have one, this recipe just may be your tipping point. The sealed meat cooks to your desired temperature in a gentle water bath--meaning it fits your definition of perfectly done--and you finish it with a quick sear on the stove.

Vegan Buffalo Cauliflower Bites

The next best thing to actual chicken

These crunchy, tangy, spicy, and just plain addictive cauliflower bites will be the new star of your game day table. The key to this recipe is the crunchy coating that can hold its own under the buffalo sauce, resulting in a bite that never becomes soggy. There is no doubt that these are sure to impress vegans, non-vegans and even the biggest cauliflower critics!

Lemon Olive Oil Tart

Bye bye butter!

"Ditch the butter for better flavor" is something you'll rarely hear, but in this case it's true. Using extra-virgin olive oil makes the press-in-pan crust snap and allows lemons' acidity to shine in the rich, firm filling.

Found Her True Passion in the Kitchen

Julia has done just about every job at ATK--from developing recipes and leading the kitchen books team to 20 years of showing America how to cook on camera.

Music I Play While Cooking: Reggae

Secret Food Craving: Sour cream and onion potato chips

Ingredient I Cannot Live Without Scallions

Hates Winter, Loves Her Job

"I still despise the long new England winters and fantasize about moving down South... But I also still love walking through the doors at ATK and seeing the people I work with."

Food I Will Not Eat: Beets (they taste like dirt)

When I'm Not Cooking You'll Find me: Brewing beer or watching old movies

Favorite Food Destination: Rome

From Behind the Scenes to On the Screen

Elle's culinary road has taken lots of twists and turns, but she's found her niche on camera and in the photo studio at ATK.

Secret Food Craving: Butter-pecan ice cream

Favorite Cuisine: Caribbean

Music I Play While Cooking: Jazz

Can Do More than Just Talk

For 20 years, our taste-test expert has been helping home cooks figure out which supermarket ingredients are best--and which one's don't measure up.

First Recipe Developed at ATK: Vanilla Ice Cream

Favorite Cuisine: Italian

Ingredient I Cannot Live Without: Maldon Salt

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Hit the road with top-rated Cook's Country TV and devour another year of great American recipes.

Discover new recipes from across the U.S. and cook them along with the cast of the hit TV show Cook's Country. The homegrown recipes cover both classic and regional favorites from small-town America to the big city. This cookbook has it all, from fluffy omelets, pancakes, biscuits, and muffins to plenty of desserts, cakes, cookies, pies, and more.

As Good As Grandma's

One-Batch Fried Chicken

Inspired by the covered pressure-frying machine in which Colonel Sanders created his famous fried chicken, this recipe allows you to get full cup-up chicken on the table in one batch.

Fork In The Road Favorites

North Carolina Cheese Biscuits

These buttermilk biscuits found around Rocky Mount, North Carolina, are big, golden, and stuffed with gooey cheese.

Everybody Loves Italian

Eggplant Pecorino

For a more refined take on eggplant Parmesan that showcases the eggplant paired with a rich, bright sauce, we took inspiration for La Campagna, in Westlake, Ohio. For our version, we skipped bread crumbs and instead fried the eggplant in a thin flour and egg coating which created a light, fluffy shell around each thin eggplant slice.

Save Room for Pie

Pennsylvania Dutch Apple Pie

The hallmark of Dutch apple pie is its creamy apple and vanilla-flavored filling, but we didn't rely on cream to achieve it. Instead we added melted vanilla ice cream to the apple filling for extra creaminess and rich flavor that complimented the apples.

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My first cookbook, Deep Run Roots, is a love letter to Eastern North Carolina, the place I’ve lived my whole life.

But it really doesn’t represent the way I cook at home most days. At home and at my home-away-from-home office (a place we affectionately call VHQ), I’m a modern day domestic engineer who calls on a roster of flavor heroes to make simple food fantastic food. These things, my kitchen MVPs, are what this book is about.

If you come on this journey with me, if you go to the mat and make a hero or two, and then make a recipe or three that builds on that hero, I promise with every ounce of my highly accomplished self that you will be inspired.

This book will change the way you cook, the way you think about what’s in your fridge, the way you see yourself in an apron. I swear on my dog Gracie’s grave that you will be empowered, confident, dare I say even nimble, in your kitchen. Your journey to make your cooking taste good will shatter the chains of recipes you’ve struggled to follow. It will reshape, even streamline, the time you spend feeding yourself and the ones you love.

Roast Chicken Toast

To all the toast I’ve cooked before—I’m sorry you don’t hold a candle to this guy. Basically a piece of bread transformed into a crouton under roasting chicken legs, the bread itself is squishy and rich with chicken schmaltz in some spots and astonishingly crisp for the same reason in others. It’s stupid easy to do, makes use of not-fresh bread, and is a revelation to eat. I seriously can’t understand why we haven’t been doing it for centuries. So while I’m probably not the first person to roast chicken over bread, I want to be the one who takes the technique mainstream.

Cherry Tomato Baked Feta…Surprise!

I’ve taken to the habit of calling something a “Surprise” when I don’t know how to classify it. But if you think about the Mediterranean tradition of dipping bread into seasoned olive oil, then you add cherry tomatoes and feta and then you bake it, you have the gist of what’s happening here. Not technically a dip, but perhaps more of a broken spoon-able sauce or spread, LGD stands in for the “seasoned” part of the olive oil and brings more pizzazz with it than dried oregano ever did. Surprise! While the gateway vehicle for this dip is toast, I love it over grits, pureed cauliflower, couscous, fish, or chicken. I’ve paired it with swordfish here because swordfish is meaty enough to balance the action—but let’s be clear, this recipe is about the Surprise, not its companion.

Collards Break Character

I stumble around the question of how I find inspiration for new dishes because generally the process is more research than revelation. But when my friend Von Diaz made her collards braised in coconut milk on an episode of my show Somewhere South, I was blown away by the idea of collards braised in anything other than porky pot liquor. Von’s collards landed in my bowl dark green, earthy, and a little bit bitter against a white backdrop of mellow, comforting coconut milk. They were familiar but different and I was totally inspired.