The Chicken Bible: Say Goodbye to Boring Chicken with 500 Recipes for Easy Dinners, Braises, Wings, Stir-Fries, and So Much More

by America's Test Kitchen

Cook chicken like never before. Get and stay inspired with 500 recipes that go beyond the breast to deliver easy dinners, braises, wings, stir-fries, and so much more.

Many cooks fall into a chicken recipe rut and make the same thing over and over again. Stay out of that rut with The Chicken Bible. The test cooks at America's Test Kitchen have cooked chicken almost every day for the last 25 years and so have discovered not only the very best way to cook every kind of chicken but they have also developed hundreds of great recipes. And the basics are only the beginning. Liven up a weeknight with One-Pan Peruvian Chicken with Cauliflower and Sweet Potatoes, impress dinner guests with a streamlined Cassoulet, or deploy your Instant Pot to make Chicken Bouillabaisse. Like fried chicken? We've developed 14 different kinds (so far), including Jack's current favorite, Japanese Fried Chicken Thighs, where marinating, dredging, then frying turns strips of chicken savory and succulent. Also like wings? We have 8 recipes for those, including our game-changing Korean-Style Fried Chicken Wings. We double-fry them so they stay extra-crispy under their blanket of spicy-sweet-salty sauce.

Learn the test kitchen's go-to methods, secrets, and proprietary techniques throughout this expansive resource: when to salt and when to brine; how to add flavor under the skin and over it; cooking in a sealed pot; and high-roasting versus low and slow. Discover the recipe that finally sealed the deal as Julia's, and the company's, all-time favorite way to roast chicken (and we've roasted a lot of chickens). Every cook needs recipes like these in their arsenal.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Reference, Nonfiction, Food, Ebooks, Food and Drink

544 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 2, 2021

About the author

America's Test Kitchen, based in a brand new state-of-the-art 60,000 sq. ft. facility with over 15,000 sq. ft. of test kitchens and studio space, in Boston's Seaport District, is dedicated to finding the very best recipes for home cooks. Over 50 full-time (admittedly obsessive) test cooks spend their days testing recipes 30, 40, up to 100 times, tweaking every variable until they understand how and why recipes work. They also test cookware and supermarket ingredients so viewers can bypass marketing hype and buy the best quality products. As the home of Cook's Illustrated and Cook's Country magazines, and publisher of more than one dozen cookbooks each year, America's Test Kitchen has earned the respect of the publishing industry, the culinary world, and millions of home cooks. America's Test Kitchen the television show launched in 2001, and the company added a second television program, Cook's Country, in 2008.

Discover, learn, and expand your cooking repertoire with Julia Collin Davison, Bridget Lancaster, Jack Bishop, Dan Souza, Lisa McManus, Tucker Shaw, Bryan Roof, and our fabulous team of test cooks!

Learn more at https://www.americastestkitchen.com/.

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book. If you like to cook (and eat) chicken, and you appreciate having a lot of recipes and options for dishes that show evidence of and provide plenty of encouragement for trial and experimentation, this is a book that deserves to be in ones library. Alas, I have to return this one to the library, but it's well worth getting for oneself. The authors manage to perform a difficult task in both encouraging people who appreciate basic and straightforward (but not boring) recipes while also containing a lot of recipes for hipsters and those who have more daring tastes. My own tastes are fairly basic, admittedly, but I have to admit that there are a lot of dishes here that I would be very interested in trying that I have somehow not managed to try. The authors even manage to do something in their recipes and explain why the recipe works, and how it works, and what about it wouldn't work, giving some important guidance not only to the ingredients of a dish but also preparation. This is excellent work and it deserves to be appreciated. This is a large book and a complex one, but it is one whose size is warranted and whose importance is pretty clear if you have adventurous tastes and simultaneously love eating chicken.

This book is a large one at nearly 500 pages and it consists of 500 recipes for easy chicken dishes, sometimes even including bonus recipes for foods to make alongside the chicken, which is definitely appreciated as those recipes (such as for brussels sprouts and asparagus, to give two examples) are solid themselves. The book begins with an introduction to America's Test Kitchens as well as an introduction to the book as a whole and how to prepare chicken well. This is then followed by a variety of chapters. The book begins with a set of chapters that looks at chicken in easy dinners, salads, sandwiches and related dishes, soups, and stews/curries. These chapters give a lot of basic (and some not very basic) recipes that are useful for many circumstances. After that comes another set of chapters that deal with chicken dishes that are classic braises, simple sautes and stir-fries, roasted dishes, baked and broiled dishes, breaded and fried dishes, as well as savory pies and casseroles.

One of the more notable aspects of this book that deserves appreciation is the way that the authors provide variety through variation. This variation is done in multiple ways. For one, there are a great many cases where there are a lot of similar dishes that are cooked in slightly different ways to end up with different results. So there are quite a few chicken noodle soup recipes and chicken pot pie and fried chicken and chicken wing recipes and the like, each of them that is different depending on what someone wants. Similarly, the authors deal with variety by providing a lot of different rubs and sauces and the like to spice up dishes and make them more interesting. This is very good thinking. The variation in this book helps keep the reader aware of how one might be able to make dishes for people who have different preferences--or in the case of quite a few gluten-free recipes--have different dietary restrictions. And if not every dish in this book is something that I would appreciate for one reason or another, there are still hundreds of dishes in this book that I either have enjoyed or would definitely enjoy, and that is enough to give this book a warm recommendation.

[Amos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looks like I'll be cooking HELLA chicken this year....but I'll still not have to have the same meal twice as this bad boy is packed with deliciousness on every level. Oh joy!!

4 1/2 Feather-Plucked Stars

[Yaaresse · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's fine. It's more than fine, really. I'm just not a fan of America's Test Kitchen's condescending writing style or "our way or it's completely wrong" attitude. It's cooking, not rocket science.
If I ignore their annoying, smug, self-congratulatory preambles and insultingly simplistic descriptions (such as tell the reader that a boneless, skinless chicken thigh is a chicken thigh with the skin and bones removed...duh!), the recipes look pretty good and offer a wide range of flavors and cooking methods. It would be a good resource for when one feels stuck in a flavor rut.

When I finally can taste food again, I've earmarked the following to try:
-- Roasted chicken with harissa and warm bulgar salad
-- Poached chicken with quinoa and tomato-ginger vinaigrette
-- Circassian chicken (I'll eat anything with walnut sauce on it)
-- Grilled Cuban Mojo chicken

None of the recipes look difficult. Some are a little time-consuming, but mostly because they have to marinate or are done in a slow cooker. The appliance (or the fridge) is going to do all the work, so it's just a matter of planning ahead. Then again, there's plenty of other recipes included that are fairly quick as long as one's pantry is well-stocked with basic herbs/spices and grains.

I'm not sure I'd buy the book because I've had to self-impose a pretty strict criteria for cookbooks lest they take over my house (again), but I will keep it on my library's quick-pick list.

[Honest Mabel · Rating 4 out of 5]

it’s good

But there is far more turkey than I appreciate. Make a turkey Bible if you want to discuss turkey but I am expecting chicken recipes

[Gina Zappa · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you know me, you know I am (all caps) OBSESSED with cookbooks. Can't get enough of them. Give them all to me! I love to cook, but let's be honest, even if I didn't I would still love drooling over all the glorious foods in my beloved cookbooks. I'm a sucker for an America's Test Kitchen cookbook, so I immediately snatched this one up when I saw it at work. As someone who has leaned in to the meatless meats movement (that has only gotten tastier over the years) chicken is one of the only real meats that I still cook semi-regularly. This book has pretty much every chicken recipe you could imagine. They are not playing around folks! This may be the year I finally teach myself (with my Dad's assistance of course) to use the grill (I am in my 30's! This is sad!) for the "Grilled Chicken Wings" (pg. 359). Some other sure-to-be-favorites I can't wait to try are the "Filipino Chicken Adobo" (pg. 186), the "Chicken Arrabbiata" (pg. 175), the "Braised Chicken with Mustard and Herbs" (pg. 163), and the "Chicken Salad with Thai Basil and Mango" (pg. 64). If you even kind of like chicken, I'm sure there's a recipe (or 20) in here for you.

[June Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! This volume covers absolutely everything I ever wanted to know about cooking chicken and turkey and then some.

The recipes are varied and user-friendly. The photography is colorful and up-close.

I borrowed a copy of this book from our local public library.

##################

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are many good recipes I'd like to try like foil wrapped meals for camping and the two servings meals.

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice cook’s notes and recipe/ingredient variations given. Pressure cooker, air fryer, and slow cooker all have their own sections. There’s something for everybody’s palate here, unless, of course, you don’t like chicken (in which case, why are you looking at “The Chicken Bible”?!?). And you can burn off all your recipe’s calories by simply lifting the cookbook a few times- this thing is a beast at 576 pages!

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always loved America test kitchen. Their content is beautiful and easy to follow. But most of the recipes didn't seem to make me excited to cook. Like I didn't wrote down any recipe I REALLY wanted to make besides one or two

[False · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a great collection of recipes. I’ve made only a handful of them so far, but they turned out perfectly delicious which is really the most important thing. Although not every recipe has a picture, enough do to make the book fun to go through cover-to-cover, and they are gorgeous pictures. There is a ton of variety for every taste, and I was happy to see a good number of turkey recipes. I had been a little concerned about the reviews mentioning small/light print, but my copy is perfectly fine.

Cons:
I wasn’t able to find every recipe I liked on the ATK app, which would’ve been helpful to me (and worth the fairly pricey subscription price) if I would’ve been able to meal plan & create a grocery list with my favorite recipes. But I have to point out that this is only a con because I already have way too many of the recipes in the book bookmarked with post-its for that method to be very workable!

Also, yet another book/video/anything failed to help me butcher a whole chicken. That’s not the con though- the real con is that the already butchered, packaged chicken parts in my grocery store are HUGE - often one boneless, skinless chicken breast half weighs a full pound or more! I am able to get the sizes of chicken parts in this book from whole chickens (with bonus parts for stock-making, of which this book has several recipes/methods for), but what takes a real chef 5 minutes to do takes me a half hour. So, it can be a challenge getting the right sizes (and often the gigantor chicken pieces are tougher). If you, too, can only get appropriately sized chickens by buying whole, have an expert teach you how to take them apart (and have the right tools for doing so). Otherwise, pay close attention to weights and don’t count on the chicken piece weight ranges given in the book will correspond to what you find at your local supermarket. Honestly my supermarket makes me terrified of coming across a monster chicken in the wild.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fabulous book with a little something for everyone who even has a passing fancy with chicken (there are some turkey recipes, as well)!

At the start of this cookbook, in the introductory chapter, are pages on "Parts," Shopping, Storing, Prepping, Salting & Brining, More Seasoning, Serving, and Essential Equipment.

As far as recipes, there are sections on Easy Dinners; Salads; Sandwiches, Burgers, Tacos, & More; Soups; Stews, Chilis, & Curries; Classic Braises; Simple Sautes & Stir-Fries; Roasted; Baked & Broiled; Breaded & Fried; Pasta & Noodles; Savory Pies & Casseroles; On the Grill; Instant Pot, Air Fryer, & Sous Vide; Slow Cooker, and something that made this reader ecstatic ... Cooking for Two! The only thing better would have been Cooking for One, but beggars cannot be choosers.

Included are color photos of most of the main recipes.

At the end of this book are several pages on Nutritional Information, which makes this book a gem for anyone who is on any diet. There are also Conversion & Equivalents charts, as well as an Index.

I photocopied a number of recipes, as this belongs to my local public library. Still, this might result in a future purchase for my personal collection.

Outstanding!

[Debbie Collarin · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I have said “finished” I’ll be going back to this book over and over again. Recipes are varied some are quite easy with ingredients you probably haven’t in cupboard others would need to do pre-planning

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

You'll never eat a boring chicken dinner again.

[Aasinathena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I need this !

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

We love ATK and adding this to the “want to buy” list.

[Tanya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of recipe, but not enough time to try them out. Nothing really stood out as something I would want to try.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I look through it all the time. I have been trying to branch out in what I eat and this has helped me a lot in that!

[Beka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would be a good starter book for a college student or newlywed. For myself, none of the recipes stood out.

[Jeanette Durkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing cookbook with lots of fantastic recipes! There are a lot of pictures too. All recipes are easy to follow with simple ingredients!

[aaliyah · Rating 4 out of 5]

chipotle chicken skewers: 8/10
chicken stew: 6.5/10