Secrets of the Best Chefs

Learn to cook from the best chefs in America

Some people say you can only learn to cook by doing. So Adam Roberts, creator of the award-winning blog The Amateur Gourmet, set out to cook in 50 of America's best kitchens to figure out how any average Joe or Jane can cook like a seasoned pro. From Alice Waters's garden to José Andrés's home kitchen, it was a journey peppered with rock-star chefs and dedicated home cooks unified by a common passion, one that Roberts understands deeply and transfers to the reader with flair, thoughtfulness, and good humor: a love and appreciation of cooking. Roberts adapts recipes from Hugh Acheson, Lidia Bastianich, Roy Choi, Harold Dieterle, Sara Moulton, and more.

The culmination of that journey is a cookbook filled with lessons, tips, and tricks from the most admired chefs in America, including how to properly dress a salad, bake a no-fail piecrust, make light and airy pasta, and stir-fry in a wok, plus how to improve your knife skills, eliminate wasteful food practices, and create recipes of your very own. Most important, Roberts has adapted 150 of the chefs' signature recipes into totally doable dishes for the home cook. Now anyone can learn to cook like a pro!

Adam Roberts is the creator of The Amateur Gourmet, called one of the "World's Best Food Blogs" by The Times of London and a "food world must-read" by The Denver Post. Since he began his blog in 2004, Roberts has been featured on CNN and hosted several shows for Food Network online, and in addition to writing his own blog, he writes for Food & Wine, Salon, Serious Eats, The Huffington Post, and Epicurious. He is currently discovering places to eat in his new hometown: Los Angeles, California.