Cookbook Club: 4 Cookbooks to Start Your 2025 Off Right
Is 2025 your year to become a total pro in the kitchen? It can be! With a little determination, patience, and the right cookbooks, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a true culinary connoisseur. Whether you’re looking to improve your overall cooking skills, discover some healthy new menu options, or perfect your bread-baking techniques, I’ve hand-selected these cookbooks to get you chopping and kneading in the right direction for the new year.
Cook This Book: Techniques that Teach and Recipes to Repeat by Molly Baz
Perfect for kitchen newbies or someone who desires more finesse in their cooking, this fun and informative book aims to teach you a new culinary skill with each recipe. As Molly Baz shares some of her insider tips and tricks on how to be a more efficient and proficient at-home chef, you’ll gain more confidence in your cooking skills while having a little fun.
This cookbook not only fills your table with delicious meals but teaches you that cooking doesn’t have to be so buttoned up. Feel free to be yourself and express yourself with the new techniques under your belt.
Everyone’s Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health by Gregory Gourdet
If you’re serious about your health and throwing down in the kitchen, this cookbook is for you. It’s filled with tongue-tingling, comforting, nutrient-dense food that masquerades as the not-so-healthy stuff you know and love—and maybe even opens your mind to some new and surprising flavor combinations along the way.
Gregory Gourfet puts his Haitian heritage and many years of impressive cooking experience on full display in his first cookbook. Each page delivers flavors from the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America, and beyond with techniques that will take your cooking to the next level. Whether it’s making a complex sauce from scratch (like his 30-ingredient mole sauce) or investing in healthy essentials (like almond flour and coconut sugar), Everyone’s Table is a culinary commitment you’ll want to keep.
The Weekday Vegetarians: 100 Recipes and a Real-Life Plan for Eating Less Meat by Jenny Rosenstrach
This cookbook has been in constant rotation in my kitchen for the last year. If you’re skeptical about eating less meat, Jenny Rosenstrach offers a hearty, mouthwatering, and approachable take on a more plant-based lifestyle. Instead of hippy-dippy-trippy recipes that might be a little too far out of the average carnivore’s comfort zone, she explores creative vegetarian recipes that are filled with familiar flavors—even her kids have approved of every recipe.
My favorite part? She includes a chart in the back that shows where ingredients overlap so that you can plan your grocery list appropriately and reduce waste by getting items you’ll actually use again. Another handy tool for anyone who might not be ready to ditch meat for good!
The Perfect Loaf: The Craft and Science of Sourdough Breads, Sweets, and More by Maurizio Leo
Mastering the perfect bread is on a lot of our New Year’s Resolution lists and this cookbook will help you get there—seriously. I’ve tried diving into many different bread cookbooks (because I’m determined to get it right!) but have often failed or fallen off the wagon because it’s just too much, too soon. What I love about this book is that it truly gives you a step-by-step guide to making the perfect sourdough before you can graduate to other sourdough goodies. I’m talking sourdough cinnamon rolls, pancakes, you name it.
But before you can get there, Maurizio Leo gently guides you with each recipe, encouraging you to perfect it before moving on to the next. He gives you just enough science and chemistry so you can build on your knowledge, rather than feeling like you’re drowning in an avalanche of temperatures, measurements, ratios, and techniques. This way, you can fully digest each concept before learning a new one. It’s a surefire way to become the sourdough bread guru of your dreams.