6 Things I Learned While Trying to Make Only the Absolute Best Recipes
Ella Quittner’s new cookbook asks a big question that most home cooks have quietly wondered: Can a recipe actually be the best?
Courtesy of HarperCollins
Ella Quittner will be the first to tell you that she can’t cook something without wondering if there’s a better way to do it. It’s the kind of question that leads a person to conduct 24 head-to-head cooking tests, go on trips to Tokyo to find the secret to the juiciest meatballs and adventure to Alabama to study biscuit techniques – and then write a book about it all.
Obsessed with the Best: 100+ Methodically Perfected Recipes Based on 20+ Head-to-Head Tests is equal parts practical kitchen companion and philosophical inquiry. Why do people care so much about optimization in the first place? Here are some of the biggest things Quittner learned while trying to answer that question.
1. “The Best” Is a moving target – and that’s kind of the whole point.
Before she started writing the book, Quittner had already suspected that “the best” wasn’t exactly a fixed destination. “It’s absolutely a moving target and an extremely subjective one,” she said. “I was so curious, intellectually, to explore why we’re still all so obsessed with knowing what the best is, even though, on some level, we all understand that what’s best to you isn’t going to be the best to me.” The book isn’t a definitive proclamation, but rather, a deeply informed, rigorously tested perspective, which Quittner calls “a book of my own best.”
2. But... you know you're curious what Ella's "Best” is anyway.
We’re all hardwired to want the superlative, whether we realize it or not. Even if we intellectually understand that the best chocolate chip cookie is a matter of personal preference, we’ll still click on the “best” headline every single time. “I was curious to sort of interrogate why you’re going to click anyway,” she said. And there’s a reason why “the best” is such a powerful phrase in food. It’s not that we all believe there’s a single correct answer. It’s that we want to believe that someone already did the work of figuring it out for us.
PS: We've done our own "best" interrogation at Food Network Kitchen as well; our collection of "bests" were rigorously tested and represent the years of culinary experience and expertise on our team. And our fans (like you!) have rated and reviewed them highly.
Our Official List of the Best Food Network Kitchen Recipes 102 Photos
We tinkered. We tested. We tested again. We tweaked these recipes until they were absolutely perfect—tried-and-true dishes that are sure to stand the test of time. We feel 100% confident in calling them our "Bests." Try them, and we bet you'll agree.
3. Perfectionism and pleasure are in constant tension.
At what point does the quest for the best start to undermine the joy of just making a meal? “Almost immediately,” Quittner says. And that honesty is part of what makes the book so unique. She’s not pretending the process was all bliss. Obsessive testing and methodical comparison is a lot of work. The gift of the book is that Quittner did it so the reader doesn’t have to. “My goal was for people to buy the book and laugh at how much time and effort I put into it and have the answers very easily,” she said.
Courtesy of HarperCollins
4. The cooks having the most fun eventually ditch the recipe.
The beautiful paradox of the book is that the person who wrote it doesn’t actually cook from recipes herself. When she cooks for pleasure, Quittner doesn’t whip out her phone or open up a cookbook. She compares the experience to painting or drawing and doesn’t even like to keep her computer in the kitchen. Instead, she reads about technique, internalizes the principles and then plays. “Cooking for deep pleasure and joy is a very abstract and unstructured thing,” she said. It’s a reminder that recipes are tools for learning, not permanent instruction manuals.
5. The real obsession is with understanding, not perfection.
Quittner’s approach is different from your average “best-ever” recipe roundup because she’s not just chasing results. Instead, she’s chasing comprehension. Her head-to-head tests aren’t gimmicks. They’re a methodology for understanding why a technique actually works. They raise questions like: Why does this biscuit method produce flakier layers? What’s actually happening when you cold-poach shrimp in lemon butter? The recipes are the output, but the real product is the knowledge that’s gained from the experience. Once you understand the why behind a particular cooking method, you can adapt it, mess with it and make it yours.
6. Someone has to do the obsessing!
Quittner wrote this book so you didn’t have to do all the work. She tested every method she could get her hands on, traveled across continents and logged countless hours in the kitchen so you can skip straight to the good part. It’s a book built on the understanding that most of us don’t have the time, energy or even desire to conduct our own head-to-head tests in our kitchens. But we’re all a little curious about what we’d find out if we did.
Whether you follow Quittner's recipes to the letter or use them as a jumping-off point to trust your own instincts, the book makes a compelling case that the search for "the best" has always been about paying closer attention along the way.
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