276879 Sun Mar 06 13:27:13 -0800 2005 4 31 Home Cooking 0 1461877 Do 'Baking Illustrated' and 'The Dessert Bible' have a lot of repeats? Does anyone have both? Sun Mar 06 13:27:13 -0800 2005 0 quest 1 1461886 I don't have both, but if you don't hear back from anybody else, I have two thoughts. You could try checking them out from local library for the side by side comparison. The other thought is that I know the Cooks Illustrated folks are often criticized on these boards for doing just that--repeating recipes in their different books. So, I would assume there are (possibly many) repeats unless you read otherwise. Smokey Sun Mar 06 16:07:02 -0800 2005 1461877 0 Smokey 2 1461902 There will likely be a LOT of overlap between the two books, since many desserts are baked. A good number of the recipes in the various Cook's Illustrated books are found in multiple books, but it's not too much of a problem. If I want to make chocolate chip cookies, I'd go straight to Baking Illustrated, but if they never repeated I would have to use either The Best Recipe or American Classics, depending on which recipe I want to use, since both of those came out first. If they went this route, the very same people complaining that there are too many repeats would be whining about how a certain recipe isn't in a certain book, and that Cook's is just trying to get them to buy every book in the series. Sun Mar 06 18:02:51 -0800 2005 1461886 0 JK Grence (the Cosmic Jester) 1 1461914 Which one should I get? Sun Mar 06 20:20:18 -0800 2005 1461877 0 quest 1 1461965 There is a difference between the "Cook's Illustrated" books and the books that Christopher Kimball puts out under his own name only. "Cook's Bible", "The Dessert Bible", "Yello Farmhouse Cookbook" and, I think, "Kitchen Detective" are all books that Kimball has written himself and the recipes have more of his own signature. The "Cooks Illustrated" books are the recipes that his company comes up with by consensus. They try different ingredient and technique variations, the staff sniffs and tastes and they publilsh the recipe that gets the highest score (At leas that's the way I see it). Kimballs books are more his own home cooking recipes. I've cross referenced these books and the recipes really don'toverlap. There might be apple pie recipes in both books, but they are different recipes with different proportions and slightly different methods. Mon Mar 07 11:32:58 -0800 2005 1461877 0 poopytrail