What do you think?
Rate this book
How to Break an Egg: 1,453 Kitchen Tips, Food Fixes, Emergency Substit
Need a cool way to handle hot chiles? Looking to cut down on kitchen clean-up? Let the readers, contributors, and editors of "Fine Cooking" magazine show you the way. "How to Break an Egg" is a one-of-a-kind resource of more than 1,400 kitchen-tested tips, shortcuts, and ingenious solutions to culinary emergencies, all organized in an easy-to-access format for quick reference or more leisurely reading. Look under Basil in the Ingredients chapter and you'll find tips for drying it, keeping its bright green color, and making your pesto go further. Look under Cookies in the Cooking chapter for clever ways to roll out cookie dough without it sticking, or to form perfectly shaped cookies, or to get just the right texture you want in your chocolate chip. You'll also discover tips on cookware and utensils, serving, storage, clean-up, and kitchen safety.
If disaster strikes, flip immediately to When Things Go Wrong, an invaluable chapter of troubleshooting charts, whether your souffle is falling, your cheese sauce is curdling, or you've just discovered you don't have the right size pan for the cake you're in the middle of mixing up. In Handy Kitchen Techniques, you'll find 42 basic prep techniques, from trussing a chicken to clarifying butter, illustrated step-by-step in full color.
The perfect reference for cooks at any level, "How to Break an Egg" will be your indispensable go-to kitchen resource.
"In my cooking classes and on my radio show, I get those thorny questions regarding recipe disasters. Phew! Now I won't hve to make up 'creative answers' anymore. For the solution to every culinary dilemma, run out right now and pick up a copy of, "How to Break an Egg,""
--TomDouglas, restaurateur and author of "Tom's Big Dinners"
"No kitchen is totally complete unless this book is on the shelf. It's a wealth of information, and I personally could not do without it!"
--Paula Deen, author of "Paula Deen&Friends: Living it Up, Southern Style"
"How do you create a warm place to proof bread or make a quick cup of buttermilk? Ever think of cutting cheesecake with a fishing line or defatting stock with ice cubes? The answers to these and hundreds of other practical questions rarely addressed in even the most sophisticated cookbooks are provided in this revolutionary new reference manual no serious cook can do without. I've waited a lifetime for an authoritative, sensible, reliable kitchen companion such as "How to Break an Egg" and cannot recommend the book highly enough. Just reading through it is an invaluable class in itself."
--James Villas, author of "Crazy for Casseroles" and "Biscuit Bliss"
"This is a terrific resource reference book and one that I think every cook, whether just beginning or old pro, will find helpful on a regular basis. "Fine Cooking" has been one of my favorite culinary magazines for a long time and "How to Break an Egg" reflects their friendly, researched, and illustrated approach that I look forward to reading every month."
--John Ash, restaurateur and author of "John Ash Cooking One on One"
"A good chef never serves his or her mistakes. Now you don't have to. Finally a fix-it manual for your kitchen."
--Tom Colicchio, Chef/Owner of Craft restaurants and Gramercy Tavern
If disaster strikes, flip immediately to When Things Go Wrong, an invaluable chapter of troubleshooting charts, whether your souffle is falling, your cheese sauce is curdling, or you've just discovered you don't have the right size pan for the cake you're in the middle of mixing up. In Handy Kitchen Techniques, you'll find 42 basic prep techniques, from trussing a chicken to clarifying butter, illustrated step-by-step in full color.
The perfect reference for cooks at any level, "How to Break an Egg" will be your indispensable go-to kitchen resource.
"In my cooking classes and on my radio show, I get those thorny questions regarding recipe disasters. Phew! Now I won't hve to make up 'creative answers' anymore. For the solution to every culinary dilemma, run out right now and pick up a copy of, "How to Break an Egg,""
--TomDouglas, restaurateur and author of "Tom's Big Dinners"
"No kitchen is totally complete unless this book is on the shelf. It's a wealth of information, and I personally could not do without it!"
--Paula Deen, author of "Paula Deen&Friends: Living it Up, Southern Style"
"How do you create a warm place to proof bread or make a quick cup of buttermilk? Ever think of cutting cheesecake with a fishing line or defatting stock with ice cubes? The answers to these and hundreds of other practical questions rarely addressed in even the most sophisticated cookbooks are provided in this revolutionary new reference manual no serious cook can do without. I've waited a lifetime for an authoritative, sensible, reliable kitchen companion such as "How to Break an Egg" and cannot recommend the book highly enough. Just reading through it is an invaluable class in itself."
--James Villas, author of "Crazy for Casseroles" and "Biscuit Bliss"
"This is a terrific resource reference book and one that I think every cook, whether just beginning or old pro, will find helpful on a regular basis. "Fine Cooking" has been one of my favorite culinary magazines for a long time and "How to Break an Egg" reflects their friendly, researched, and illustrated approach that I look forward to reading every month."
--John Ash, restaurateur and author of "John Ash Cooking One on One"
"A good chef never serves his or her mistakes. Now you don't have to. Finally a fix-it manual for your kitchen."
--Tom Colicchio, Chef/Owner of Craft restaurants and Gramercy Tavern
400 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
3 people are currently reading
314 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
February 13, 2018
This is a useful reference for cooks with all levels of skill. It contains tips on how to correct problems regarding food as well as tips to make the kitchen more effective. There are also substitutions for many ingredients. A must have.
September 6, 2017
This book does have a lot of tips and they are categorized decently well. If I am doing something I can go check for tips, but there isn't a real flow. I was hoping for a basic cookbook that would give me an overall better idea of how to cook and work with food in general. The title is "How to Break an Egg" I figured you couldn't get a more basic education than that. But really all the tips are just one or two sentence blurbs with no real overall 'how to cook' theme. I honestly feel like someone went to the Fine Cooking Blog and just printed out every entry and stuck it in a book. I could just have gone and read a blog myself and saved some cash.
For me one of the hardest parts is that sometimes it felt like tips from different users contradicted each other. So this book is good for what it is. I just feel like it wasn't clear to me that it was literally a bunch of tips from a bunch of random people.
For me one of the hardest parts is that sometimes it felt like tips from different users contradicted each other. So this book is good for what it is. I just feel like it wasn't clear to me that it was literally a bunch of tips from a bunch of random people.
June 22, 2023
It may seem strange that I read this cover to cover, but I did. I found this book very informative, more like 3.5 stars, if only because it can get a bit tiresome since it’s just little snippets of tips. I will say that it needed an editor in a few places when one tip directly contradicted the tip before or after it. On the whole, this was very instructive and I have already used some of the tips! I think this would be a good purchase to have in the kitchen when things go wrong.
April 16, 2018
Most of the tips seemed more like hacks. While there were some gems most of the tips either seemed like common sense or weren't particularly useful. The organization here was much more useful than most cooking tip books in that it broke up the tips by category (e.g. grilling) and didn't bury them in recipes
January 27, 2015
This book will be of interest to sociologists and anthropologists as well as cooks, dealing as it does with over 1,400 insights into the lives of the everyday job / chore (depending on your point of view) of cooking. I started at the beginning and read this volume as a book, tip by tip, page by page, every so often taking a few days / weeks off.
What I have learnt is not so much a mine of hints, tips, and ideas to make cooking easier and more successful, but more of an appreciation that in the event there can be very many different ways of executing a task (a recipe step): it really all depends on how the contributor’s and reader’s kitchens (and homes) are equipped. So some tips in this book received a lashing as I smugly thought ‘my way is better’, others received a ‘Hmm, curiously interesting, I must remember to try that’ type response… as I turned the page.
Overall I came to four conclusions:
1. When shopping, especially in kitchenware shops, learn to distinguish what is sold on appearance, and what is sold based on sound, effective, engineering.
2. Look at how your kitchen is equipped. Discard anything that is redundant to a charity (thrift) shop & don’t feel redundant. I may not need an asparagus steamer (because I use a microwave oven), but someone else may find it very handy not only for steaming their asparagus, but also their sweetcorn on the cob (p.30).
3. Always keep an open mind for other uses for materials and equipment (turn a large Swiss roll sponge cake out onto a sugared old pillowcase, p.42).
4. Keep an eye open for the propagated old wives tales. Despite the advice given in this book, modern varieties of aubergine do NOT need salting and pressing!
UK readers will need to keep a watchful eye on some Americanisms within this book. Temperatures are given in degrees Celsius, which IS helpful. However cream is described as ‘heavy’ (US) in the body of the text but ‘double’ (UK) replaceable by ‘whipping’ under ‘Emergency Substitutions. All in all, I’d recommend that the reader begin reading at the back of this book “When Things Go Wrong: Substitutions and Equivalents.”
What I have learnt is not so much a mine of hints, tips, and ideas to make cooking easier and more successful, but more of an appreciation that in the event there can be very many different ways of executing a task (a recipe step): it really all depends on how the contributor’s and reader’s kitchens (and homes) are equipped. So some tips in this book received a lashing as I smugly thought ‘my way is better’, others received a ‘Hmm, curiously interesting, I must remember to try that’ type response… as I turned the page.
Overall I came to four conclusions:
1. When shopping, especially in kitchenware shops, learn to distinguish what is sold on appearance, and what is sold based on sound, effective, engineering.
2. Look at how your kitchen is equipped. Discard anything that is redundant to a charity (thrift) shop & don’t feel redundant. I may not need an asparagus steamer (because I use a microwave oven), but someone else may find it very handy not only for steaming their asparagus, but also their sweetcorn on the cob (p.30).
3. Always keep an open mind for other uses for materials and equipment (turn a large Swiss roll sponge cake out onto a sugared old pillowcase, p.42).
4. Keep an eye open for the propagated old wives tales. Despite the advice given in this book, modern varieties of aubergine do NOT need salting and pressing!
UK readers will need to keep a watchful eye on some Americanisms within this book. Temperatures are given in degrees Celsius, which IS helpful. However cream is described as ‘heavy’ (US) in the body of the text but ‘double’ (UK) replaceable by ‘whipping’ under ‘Emergency Substitutions. All in all, I’d recommend that the reader begin reading at the back of this book “When Things Go Wrong: Substitutions and Equivalents.”
March 28, 2016
It has a number of decent tips and it's also good to be reminded of tips/tricks that we've heard before (or even tried) and forgotten about.
For instance:
1) Boiling a cup of water in the microwave before cleaning the microwave - the steam from the hot water loosens the cooked-on splatters, And likewise "steam-cleaning" Pyrex dishes in a similar way
2) Calcium and sugar hinder pectin conversion, that's why Boston beans which have molasses added can cook for hours without turning into mush. And cooking beans in hard water, which contains calcium, prevents softening.
3) When making kebabs, using two skewers to pierce food in parallel - this allows the vegetables or meat to turn properly rather than spinning around the axis of a single skewer.
4) Store saffron in a airtight container in the freezer, which allows you to crumble the strand into dishes! (I'm yet to try this)
5)Use the garlic press for things other than garlic - chilli peppers for instance.
This book is just one tip after collected from submissions to Fine Cooking magazine so one has to be quite interested in cooking to work through the book. Although some of the tips have not worked for me or were not helpful for my style (which is almost inevitable for anyone since we have such different kitchens and preferences), I found this to be a helpful book in general.
It's US-centric (as I expected it to be) but there's enough in there that is universal to make it useful.
For instance:
1) Boiling a cup of water in the microwave before cleaning the microwave - the steam from the hot water loosens the cooked-on splatters, And likewise "steam-cleaning" Pyrex dishes in a similar way
2) Calcium and sugar hinder pectin conversion, that's why Boston beans which have molasses added can cook for hours without turning into mush. And cooking beans in hard water, which contains calcium, prevents softening.
3) When making kebabs, using two skewers to pierce food in parallel - this allows the vegetables or meat to turn properly rather than spinning around the axis of a single skewer.
4) Store saffron in a airtight container in the freezer, which allows you to crumble the strand into dishes! (I'm yet to try this)
5)Use the garlic press for things other than garlic - chilli peppers for instance.
This book is just one tip after collected from submissions to Fine Cooking magazine so one has to be quite interested in cooking to work through the book. Although some of the tips have not worked for me or were not helpful for my style (which is almost inevitable for anyone since we have such different kitchens and preferences), I found this to be a helpful book in general.
It's US-centric (as I expected it to be) but there's enough in there that is universal to make it useful.
May 10, 2012
This is an excellent resource when you have an emergency. If you are missing a crucial ingredient you can find an acceptable substitute. Or if something is going wrong with a recipe, this book can help you remedy the problem. In addition I have learned some tricks on how to avoid some problems and make things easier when cooking. It is a great book for anyone who likes to cook, you don't have to be a gourmet to utilize this one!
Read
February 9, 2010Lots of good tips and tricks. Although I think the title is kind of silly, for two reasons. One, who doesn't know how to break an egg? Even the whole one-hand breaking thing is just practice, right? Second, and mostly, of all the tips in here, none related to breaking an egg. But I guess "How to Clarify Butter" just doesn't sound as good.
December 23, 2013
This isn't the kind of book that one necessarily reads cover to cover. Its a collection of tips, techniques and handy kitchen wisdom. I read several of the articles, which were well written and offered insights into their respective topic.
I already returned this to the library but I may get it again if there are other topics I want to learn about or skills to hone.
I already returned this to the library but I may get it again if there are other topics I want to learn about or skills to hone.
August 3, 2013
This is a good reference to have around. I think you will find, depending on your experience, things that you know and some that are new. I found the part on choosing fruit to be useful. I have plenty of experience with baking, so most of that is old hat. I would recomend this book for novice and intermediate cooks.
March 15, 2009
Not intended for bedtime reading unless you are obsessed with troubleshooting in the kitchen like me. I recommend it for anyone who enjoys cooking and/or baking and is always looking to improve their technique.
March 8, 2011
This was a book seriously filled with tip, after tip, after tip. The book has an index to it which is really nice. If you can't remember the tip having to do with eggs, you can look in the back under "eggs".
January 25, 2008
Another absolute must for the kitchen of anybody who cooks on a regular basis. It is simply the best reference book on actual cooking I have come across.
March 12, 2008
Answers every question I have. Now, if it could give me a hug like my Mom I'd be all set.
April 14, 2008
I like eggs. :-)
August 26, 2016
Good reference book for kitchen tips and shortcuts. I don't read many cookbooks cover to cover, but I did read this one!
Read
May 11, 2009This is so useful and kind of interesting.
February 20, 2010
Lots of good tips and tricks for the kitchen.
September 13, 2011
No boring long-winded crap, just straight tips. Unbelievable!
December 26, 2011
This would be a great gift for anyone who cooks. It is a great reference book to have around. After checking it out at the library, I knew I had to own a copy.
April 22, 2012
good cookbook
September 25, 2008
Super all inclusive tip book, read it cover to cover---Marian
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews