Food52 Genius Recipes: 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook

There isn’t yet a single cookbook where you’ll be able to find Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter, Jim Lahey’s No-Knead Bread, and Nigella Lawson’s Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake—plus dozens more of the most talked about, just-crazy-enough-to-work recipes of our time. Until now.

These are what Food52 Executive Editor Kristen Miglore calls genius recipes. Passed down from the cookbook authors, chefs, and bloggers who made them legendary, these foolproof recipes rethink cooking tropes, solve problems, get us talking, and make cooking more fun. Each and every week, Kristen features one such recipe and explains just what’s so brilliant about it in the James Beard Award-nominated Genius Recipes column on Food52. Here, in this book, she compiles 100 of the most essential ones—nearly half of which have never been featured in the column—with tips, riffs, mini-recipes, and stunning photographs from James Ransom, to create a cooking canon so they can stand the test of time.

Once you try Michael Ruhlman’s fried chicken or Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s hummus, you’ll never need to go back to other versions. But there’s also a surprising ginger juice you didn’t realize you were missing and will need to put on everything—and a way to cook white chocolate that (in the end) exposes its hidden glory. A few of these recipes you’ll follow to a T, but others will be jumping-off points so that you can experiment with and make your own. Either way, with Kristen at the helm, revealing and explaining the genius of every recipe, Genius Recipes is destined to turn into Each and every home cook’s go-to resource for smart, memorable cooking—because no one cook could have taught us such a lot.