The Complete Meat Cookbook

Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly give home cooks the definitive guide to choosing, cooking, and carving meat.

Whether it’s a perfectly grilled steak, a slow-cooked roast, fork-tender ribs, or a robustly flavored stew, there’s nothing like the satisfying savor of meat. Praised as the book “for the new meat world order” by the Los Angeles Times, this authoritative cookbook ensures that you’ll get superb results every time—particularly when you're working with leaner cuts, which need a little extra attention to turn out juicy and flavorful. Everything you need to know is here, including • how to choose the right cut for every occasion: a great steak, a pork roast for a weeknight, or a leg of lamb that’s easy to carve • simple seasoning techniques, such as dry rubs, wet marinades, flavor brines, herb pastes, and fast sauces • advice on how to cook each cut to just the right temperature • more than 230 recipes, ranging from the ethnic and eclectic to everyday classics • hundreds of tips on meat cookery that will enlighten even expert cooks.


Amazon.com Review
"Frankly, we love meat." Thus spake Bruce Aidells and Denis Kelly, their first words in The Complete Meat Cookbook. "This book," these well-informed authors tell us, "is written for those who share this carnivorous inclination." As the authors of Hot Links and Country Flavors, Real Beer and Good Eats, and Flying Sausages, these guys know meat. And their mission in life is to share what they know. With gusto.

The divisions are obvious: beef, pork, lamb, veal. But packed into each chapter is more information than any single reader might think possible. There's history and anthropology; there's anatomy and kitchen chemistry. And all of it is aimed at what the authors call the "new meat." It's a leaner product--less fat than ever before. So to get the succulence and the flavor that resides in memory (coming from a time of fattier cuts) sliced and onto the plate, today's cook has to use a different, more informed approach. You will find that guidance in this book. How to select and buy, how to prep, how to intensify the flavor, how to cook, how to store: it's all here. There is no other book like it.

Heavily illustrated, The Complete Meat Cookbook opens with a section on meat basics, including a little meat eating history and a terrific doneness chart. Then there's a long section covering all the basic cooking techniques and which cuts of which meat work best with each technique. Once the book breaks out into sections by kind of meat--beef, pork, lamb, veal--the depth of information focuses and intensifies, and the recipes roll right along for more than 600 pages.

Myth busting (like, don't salt meat before cooking, it will dry it out: wrong) is highlighted throughout the book. And each recipe is labeled for ease, speed, budget consciousness, serve to company, etc. The recipes take into account the world of meat eating. This is no Eurocentric text--it is, as the title proclaims, complete. If you are going to eat meat, do it right. This is the book to show you how. No cookbook bookshelf is complete without a copy of The Complete Meat Cookbook. --Schuyler Ingle