Food 52 Genius Recipes ─ 100 Recipes That Will Change the Way You Cook

There are good recipes and there are great ones—and then, there are genius recipes.

Genius recipes surprise us and make us rethink the way we cook. They might involve an unexpectedly simple technique, debunk a kitchen myth, or apply a familiar ingredient in a new way. They’re handed down by luminaries of the food world and become their legacies. And, once we’ve folded them into our repertoires, they make us feel pretty genius too. In this collection are 100 of the smartest and most remarkable ones.

There isn’t yet a single cookbook where you can 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. 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 that will stand the test of time.

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

KRISTEN MIGLORE is the Executive Editor at Food52.com. She has a master's degree in Food Studies from New York University and a culinary degree from the Institute of Culinary Education. Her writing has been published in TheWall Street Journal, Saveur, and The Atlantic, and she was nominated for the James Beard Award for Best Food-Focused Column in 2014.

AMANDA HESSER is the co-founder and CEO of Food52.com and has been named one of the fifty most influential women in food byGourmet. She has written the award-winning books Cooking for Mr. Latte and The Cook and the Gardener. Her book The Essential New York Times Cookbook was aNew York Times bestseller and the winner of a James Beard Award.

MERRILL STUBBS is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Food52.com and has worked in the food industry for more than a decade. A graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, she has written for theNew York Times, Edible Brooklyn, and Body+Soul.

FOOD52.com, which has more than 25,000 recipes and 3.2 million unique monthly visits, was named Best Food Publication at the 2012 James Beard Awards and Best Culinary Website at the 2013 IACP Awards.