Recipe sources

It can be tough to find reliable sources for recipes. There are a *lot* of bad recipes out there, and it's not always easy to tell a good one from a bad one until you've made it. However, as you become more experienced in the kitchen, you'll start to recognize when a recipe is giving suspect instructions.

## Websites

Great recipes abound on the internet if you know where to look. Not only can you find high-quality stuff for free, but there's a constant stream of new ideas and inspiration being published. However, there are plenty of sites that you should be wary of or steer clear of entirely too.

### Recommended

* **America's Test Kitchen** (aka Cook's Illustrated) has a bit of a cooking empire with magazines, cookbooks, TV shows, and a website. Most of their content is paywalled, but you're paying for quality. They test their recipes extensively and frequently come up with novel techniques to make traditional dishes tastier and/or easier. Recipes are generally accompanied by thorough write-ups about their testing and development process. They make for an interesting read and can be a great way to learn more about the whys of cooking. While their techniques may be cutting edge, they generally aren't on top of the latest ingredient or flavor fads.
* **Serious Eats** is a cooking site especially known for its The Food Lab section written by J. Kenji López-Alt. The whole site (but especially The Food Lab) has well-tested and reliable recipes. They also tend to publish great companion articles for their recipes that talk more about the development process or the history of the dish. These are a great way to educate yourself about culinary history and science.
* **NYT Cooking** has tons of original and republished recipes from beloved sources. A paid subscription is required, but you might find it worth it for their vast library of recipes from people like Mark Bittman, Marcella Hazan, Samin Nosrat, and Alison Roman (if you don't know who they are, keep reading to the Cookbooks section).
* **BBC Good Food** has an extensive catalog of reliable recipes. Fun fact: it's not part of the BBC any more and is actually owned by a German company, so hopefully that makes you feel slightly better if you're worried about taking cooking advice from the Brits.

### Recommended with reservations

* **Bon Appétit** is a cooking magazine known for its entertaining YouTube channel. They can be culinary tastemakers who turn things like chili crisp and 'nduja into household names, but they verge on being more style than substance. Their recipes generally aren't as reliable as the ones above and they perpetuate some iffy food science. You might want to treat them more as inspiration for trendy, Instagrammable food rather than a definitive recipe source.
* **Milk Street Kitchen** is founded by Chris Kimball, who also started America's Test Kitchen. Milk Street is the result of some nastiness between Chris and ATK a couple years ago, which resulted in his departure. Some people think ATK is better off without him, some people think they've gone to hell since he left, and still others are like "Chris who?" Regardless of where you stand on Chris himself, Milk Street offers a similar concept to ATK but with a much smaller catalog of recipes. It also requires a paid subscription and generally represents a worse value except for true Kimball loyalists.

### Not recommended

* **Pinterest** aggregates tons of recipes and can make them easy to discover, but most of the recipes there are low-quality and poorly tested. If you're an avid Pinterest user and tend to learn about recipes there, it still might be worth plugging the dish's name into one of the sites above to find a better recipe.
* **Tasty** (which is part of Buzzfeed) tends to churn out very low-quality recipes. Even worse, they have a history of stealing recipes from other people without crediting them—even after being asked to. (While a recipe itself isn't actually covered by copyright, trying to pass off other peoples' work as your own is still what we in the biz call a dick move).
* **Google** knows all, including the recipe for whatever dish you're dreaming of, but most of the top results probably won't be well-tested or reliable. Instead, try searching the recommended sites above: at least one of them almost certainly has what you want. By the way, you know those long personal essays that tend to precede the actual recipe on lots of cooking blogs? Those are actually Google's fault! Their ranking algorithm rewards blogs for including all that extra text and that's how those recipes end up on the front page.

## Cookbooks

It may feel a bit old-fashioned to flip through a giant book every time you want to make dinner, but cookbooks are fantastic references and primers on specific cuisines. Your local library can be a great resource for cookbooks if you don't want to run out and buy a bunch.

### General

* **Cook's Illustrated** has tons of cookbooks, both general and focused around specific topics and themes. Just like they're website, they're a great resource with rock-solid recipes. You may find that buying one of their broadly-focused books is more economical for you than subscribing to their site.
* **How to Cook Everything** by Mark Bittman is a great modern reference for basic dishes and techniques. The family has also expanded to include versions focused on basic dishes, quick dishes, grilling, baking, and vegetarian food.
* **The Joy of Cooking** is a classic culinary reference with thousands of recipes in it. The most popular editions are actually 30+ years old, so honestly it is starting to feel a little long in the tooth. Don't expect to see a ton of diversity in terms of the cuisines represented.
* **The Food Lab** by J. Kenji López-Alt is the book version of his fantastic Serious Eats column mentioned above. This one is leaner on recipes than the books above but includes tons of information about the science and technique of cooking. If you're starting to get more serious and want to understand more about why we do things the way we do, this is a great one to read cover to cover.
* **Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat** by Samin Nosrat is another that sprinkles in recipes primarily to illustrate the bigger themes it talks about. This is also great to read through if you want to understand more about what makes things delicious (hint: there are spoilers in the title).

### Specific Cuisines

#### French

* **Mastering the Art of French Cooking** by Julia Child

#### Indian

* **An Invitation to Indian Cooking** by Madhur Jaffrey

#### Italian

* **Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking** by Marcella Hazan is the modern bible of Italian cooking. Not only does it have great recipes, it also includes a lot of background on many of them and gives you a thorough education on Italian food in general.

## Videos and shows

* **Food Wishes**' Chef John's diction may be your affliction, but he generally offers solid and easy to follow recipes.