The Side Dish Bible: 1001 Perfect Recipes for Every Vegetable, Rice, Grain, and Bean Dish You Will Ever Need

I own the Cooks Illustrated Vegetables Illustrated book and loved it so much I purchased The Side Dish Bible as soon as it was released.You may be interested in my Vegetables Illustrated review (currently the top review on that page) which I rated as a five star book. This book will not get a five star rating. I will explain why, but first, before we get down to the nitty gritty, lets do a sweep through this book to see what it does have to offer.Firstly, it contains 1001 recipes compared to the Vegetables illustrated book at 700+The chapter headings are as follows:Basics You Can Count OnRoast Your VegetablesPotatoes Every WayUp Your Vegetable GameFries and Crispy SidesPerfect Rice and Great GrainsBest Beans and LentilsSlice up a Salad or SlawDinner Party WinnersPotluck FavoritesNot Your Mothers CasserolesGet Fired UpUse Your Slow Cooker or Pressure CookerAlmost A mealHoliday ClassicsThe Bread BasketAs with Vegetables Illustrated, each recipe begins with a short paragraph “Why this recipe works” As I mentioned in my review for Vegetables Illustrated, I don’t find the “why this recipe works” paragraph to be particularly useful. It basically provides the obvious “we did this to make it creamier and then we drizzled it with that to enhance the dish with some acidity” One can simply read the recipe to see what they did. Of much more use to me would have been a short paragraph at the end of each recipe saying how one might switch the recipe up a bit with different vegetables using the same technique or the same vegetable using different seasonings. Additionally, in each recipe that is duplicated between these two books, the “Why This Works” paragraph is identical.Which leads me to my Gripe Number One with this book. The duplication of recipes between Vegetables Illustrated and The Side Dish Bible.GRIPE NUMBER ONE:Many, many of the recipes included in The Side Dish Bible, are also in Vegetables Illustrated. If you already have Vegetables Illustrated, this might be a deal breaker for you, as you decide whether to purchase The Side Dish Bible. If you don’t have either of these books, and only want to purchase one of them, this run down may help you decide which one to buy if you are tossing up between the two.Lets cross reference the index for a couple of ingredients and see how The Side Dish Bible stacks up against Vegetables Illustrated:Artichokes:In Vegetables Illustrated (or VI as I will reference it from here on) there are 12 recipes for artichokes. 5 of these are unique to that book and are not reproduced in The Side Dish Bible (referenced as TSDB in the rest of this review)In TSDB there are also 12 recipes for Artichokes, 6 of these are unique to this book. So 6 out of the 12 artichoke recipes in TSDB are also in VI. 50% duplication rate is high if you ask me!The five artichoke recipes in VI that are not in TSDB are Roasted Artichoke Dip, Marinated Artichokes, Artichoke Hearts with Parmesan Bruschetta, Artichoke and Parmesan Tagliatelle, Soup a la Barigoule.The 6 recipes that are in TSDB that are not in VI are Green Salad with Artichokes and Olives, Artichoke and Potato Gratin, Pressure Cooker Braised Spring Vegetables, Roasted with Fennel, Mustard and Tarragon, Roasted with Lemon Basil, Roasted with Olives, Bell Pepper and Lemon.The artichoke recipes in both books: Braised Stuffed Roman Style, Braised with Tomato and Thyme, Grilled with Lemon Butter, Fried Jewish Style, Roasted with Lemon Vinaigrette, Braised with Garlic ButterI have a lot of recipe books and therefore space is getting to be at a bit of a premium. After I buy that new huge bookcase I have my eye on, and that fills up, it will be a case of buy one, toss one, or buy a new house (or turn every room into a recipe book library) In short, do I need to buy a huge book, where I already have 50% of the recipes in another huge book? I guess that comes down to the quality of the recipes….I mean they are good…but do I need both?Ok lets take a quick look at another ingredient:Kale:In the VI kale chapter there are 15 recipes.In TSDB there are 17 kale recipes. 7 of the kale recipes in TSDB are unique (one recipe is slightly adapted from VI, adding one extra ingredient so I am not including that in the unique count) So 10 of them are in both books!!Only you can decide if the duplication is worth it to you. I am still deciding.Cooks Illustrated/Americas Test Kitchen recipes are dependable but how many of these books does one need where the duplications are so pervasive across their books? I wouldn’t mind paying a bit more if the recipes were unique to each book, but in all honesty, no one, simply no one, is going to make every single recipe. I mean, we could – but there are a lot of recipes out there, and I for one, have a lot of books to work through, so am I going to need a book where so many of the recipes are redundant?I wondered if the bread chapter in TSDB would be totally unique because VI is after all a vegetable book. But when I compared TSDB to VI there were also many, many breads that were duplicated ie. Cheddar and Scallion, Rosemary, and Sweet Potato biscuits, and the Garlic Bread and more. Sure there are many breads and rolls that are unique to TDSB, ie Challah, Rosemary Foccacia, Brown Soda Bread etc, but there are many dough recipes in VI that are also unique to that book, such as Fresh Corn Cornbread, Potato Dinner Rolls, Zucchini Bread, Cornish Pasties and Calzones.It was a bit hard to search for breads in VI as they are divided up into the vegetable chapter headings (more on that later) but during my search I uncovered 10 different bread, roll, pastie recipes that are not in TSDB, and found 15 unique recipes in TSDB that are not in VI.But then, if you are really wanting a plethora of dough recipes maybe just buy Americas Test Kitchen Bread Illustrated? I am quite sure that all of the dough recipes in both TSDB and VI are duplicated in that, plus it has 432 pages in total.If all that has just served to confuse you as to which book to buy, or whether to own both - one other factor which is a huge issue for me, is the format of TDSB.Which brings me to GRIPE NUMBER TWO:I spoke in my VI review about how much I LOVED the format of that book, which is alphabetical and sorted by vegetable. I love nothing more than to be able to easily flip through a vegetable book when I have a surplus, straight to A for Artichoke for example and all the artichoke recipes are right there and easy to browse through quickly.In TSDB however, the recipes are divided up by occasion, with the exception of the potato and the grain chapters.I hate having to go to the index and flick back and forth between the index and the chapters to locate each Artichoke recipe for instance. In TSDB the artichoke recipes are spread between 7 different chapters! To make it worse, this is also quite arbitrary. For example, there are roasted artichoke recipes in both the Roast Your Vegetables chapter and also in the Basics You Can Count On chapter. There are Artichoke recipes in Dinner Party Winners and Up Your Vegetable Game – but both of the recipes in Up Your Vegetable Game would be suitable for dinner parties so why did someone arbitrarily decide to put them in Up Your Vegetable Game?I can decide for myself which recipes would be best for my dinner party! Just give me all the recipes sorted by main ingredient and let me decide!The format in TSDB is clumsy, and the only reason I can think of that they would dismantle the excellent formatting from VI for this new book, is to make it a lot more difficult for people to compare recipes from book to book quickly and easily to see what is duplicated. Alas, they can’t get away from me! I am an obsessive recipe book collector but each purchase is carefully considered and sent back if not up to scratch, and I am strongly considering sending TSDB back. But, then again, there are those 300 plus additional recipes, and at first glance it seems that perhaps 50% of the book is unique (at least when stacked up against VI (note that I haven’t compared it to any of their other books, but I expect there are duplications here from their other books too)But then, they have corrected the font issue that many readers complained about with VI. The font is darker and heavier and the recipe titles are in bold black in TSDB instead of the dark olive of VI.In short. TSDB is easier to read, but harder to navigate, 50% of the recipes you may already have (based on my kale and artichoke and bread comparisons) but that still provides hundreds of recipes that you don’t already have in VI, plus it’s 36 pages longer and 300 recipes heavier.For my money however, if I could only keep one it would be VI. The font might be a bit lighter but I have to use reading glasses anyway, so that isn’t a deal breaker for me. It has 300 less recipes but I’m probably not cooking all 1000 recipes in TSDB anyhow, despite the fact that I cook probably 8-10 unique recipes a week. There are too many books and I am too old to cook every recipe in every book plus I do keep on buying them!The fact that I can quickly turn to K for Kale in VI and see all the kale recipes at my fingertips is perfect for me. It is also rare as most recipe books are not formatted in this way and because of this, I find myself turning to VI regularly as I suddenly decide mid-cook, as I so often do, that I need a recipe for one more quick vegetable dish to round out my meal. Last night I did just that. Turning to the VI kale chapter and finding a Quick Garlicky Braised Kale recipe which I whipped up (it was great with my roast chicken and corn on the cob and this morning it was terrific on toast with eggs) Today I checked, and yes, that recipe plus its two variations plus every other recipe on that particular page (5 in total) are also in TSDB.I’m more than happy with my Vegetables Illustrated book, and despite the better font and the additional recipes, for me the formatting issue in TSDB is disappointing especially considering how arbitrary it is, so I’m taking a star off for that. It is still deserving of four stars as alone it’s an excellent book. But, if I was writing this review solely for those of you who already have VI, I would take an additional star from TSDB for the shameless duplication of so many of the recipes between these two books which would then bring it down to a 3 star rating. That’s not good, Americas Test Kitchen!Americas Test Kitchen should consider putting out smaller books (1000 recipes is great but kinda gratuitous anyhow) of totally unique recipes. It would mean that their fans would buy multiple books (I would probably buy every book if no recipes were duplicated) but as it stands currently, there is little incentive to buy new titles for readers who already have a few of their books. They are missing the bandwagon in my opinion and letting down their true fans.The Side Dish Bible is a terrific addition to your cook book library- if you don’t have Vegetables Illustrated. But if you don’t have Vegetables Illustrated perhaps read my five star review for that first, and start with that. After using it for a while come back and reread this review to decide if you really need The Side Dish Bible as well. The jury is still out on whether I do.If this review has been useful to you, please click the helpful button. I spend a lot of time on my reviews because I get a huge kick out of seeing that one of my reviews helped a like-minded shopper filter through all the crap out there. If you enjoyed this review, you can also go to my profile to read more of my cookbook reviews, or on my profile page click to follow me so you are notified when I post another review.Happy cooking!

Yeah, I'm disappointed. I don't know why I had high hopes that this ATK book would contain new and different recipes. (Maybe because I fully appreciated their compilation of recipes in their cook book about braising, which came out last year. Maybe because I was enthused about their 20th Anniversary book, which came out a month or so ago.) But really, these side dish recipes are just same-old, same-old, with some tweaks. I found nothing to wow me.What did I expect from 1001 "perfect" recipes crammed into one huge volume? I shouldn't have expected anything other than ho-hum....and I should have known it would be quite a hassle trying to pick out the "perfect" recipe to make. You know, and I should have known, there is a much better option, a much better tool to find the exact right side dish for a particular situation: The internet! And it's so, so, much easier and exact, and expeditious, to run a simple query on your preferred search engine and be rewarded with exactly what you're looking for. Free. And it does not take up any book case shelf space.There is so many recipes, that nothing stands out. I know that a lot of people love this type of listing, and a lot of people love ATK. And it seems there are quite a few people out there with a compulsion to buy all ATK books, so that they don't miss a single recipe released by them. I'm not in that cult, and I should have known better......The book is hard to keep open, it's hard to follow a recipe because there are several recipes on each page, pictures are small or non-existent.But, hey, if quantity is important to you, this one is loaded with possibilities and you should indulge your habit. If new, different, innovative is more your style--take a pass on this book.

Okay. I’ve tried a few recipes. They actually didn’t go well. Normally cooks delivers. This was a sad day. I’m sure some of the recipes work. But I wouldn’t eat 50% of the stuff in here and 25% of the recipes are DUH (your child could make it without any training or recipe). I’d stick with one of their other books.

Lots of recipes for food the average person does not eat. Almost every recipe would require you to purchase something you. Most likely don’t have on hand.Sorry there’s no free shipping on this one!

I cook once a week for Group A, a family group of five people which includes veggie haters of various persuasions, and once a week for Group B, myself and my daughter, who are veggie lovers and largely follow a meatless diet. When I received this book, I read through it twice because I was so excited about the many recipes that would appeal to either or both groups.For Group B, my daughter and I, I recently made a meal of Egyptian Barley Salad and Asparagus Salad with Grapes, Goat Cheese and Almonds. For Group A, which unfortunately has been on hold due to the pandemic but is soon going to resume getting together, I look forward to making Roasted Baby Carrots with Browned Butter and Green Beans with Bacon and Onion. There are numerous other recipes which I'm eager to try.I saw the review by the person who also owns Vegetables Illustrated who pointed out that a number of those recipes were duplicated in this book. I do not own Vegetables Illustrated, but in my experience that is probably a valid critique since America's Test Kitchen does tend to publish books which repeat previously published recipes.So if you do not already own Vegetables Illustrated, I highly recommend this book.

This book is a bonanza for vegetarians although sadly it means we eat mainly side dishes in America. ATK does a good of experimenting and coming up with the great recipes that pop.

So many recipes, includes multiple variations of nearly every dish. Have only made a few so far, but they’ve always been a hit. Wish there were more photos but still good.Great book for doing apps when you’re entertaining.

The America’s test kitchen people know how to cook.great side dishes lots of vegetarian fare .The recipes can be a little complex but the tastes are 5 star restaurants

Another great book. Easy to follow instructions, beautiful photos, usable recipes. Perfect gift

Utilísimo libro, de una editorial con amplia experiencia en recetas super probadas, muy creativo

A great book. Lots of little tips and tricks to make your sides stand out. Really like this book.

Awesome recipes from the best!Couldn’t live with out this book.