Which Food Magazine Do You Love???

[whoalilponie]

Want to treat myself to a food magazine, looking at either Bon Appetit or Gourmet, what are your favorites????

[Agent 99]

My favorite hands down is Saveur. It's the only one that gives me information on food, it's origin and how to use it in a multitude of ways. All the others are filled with the same regurjatated recipes.
Go to the new Saveur.com because they changed their website to pull recipes and stories from all over the web including other magazines. Absolutely incredible! and all the surfing is done for you,

[Sam Fujisaka]

Fine Cooking

[mels]

Eating Well is one of my favs. Once in a while I'll pick up Fine Cooking if the news stand issue strikes me. I like Eating Well, as mentioned above, because they stay away from the junky processed stuff and steer me towards healthier meals for everyday fare.

I too have been put off by Gourmet. I still use Epicurious.com for recipes so I have access to their recipes as well as Bon Apetit without having to have a subscription. CI drives me nuts. Their recipes are usually fairly boring and I refuse to deal with their subscription nazis.

[AMFM]

i like eating well. i had heard such bad things about food and wine but got a free subscription and have really enjoyed it. lovely recipes and some great wine tips. i just am not a cook's illustrated girl. i have gotten it for 2 years and have never been inspired by any of it. i love the idea but not the reality or the topics of choice.

[Shrinkrap]

Saveur. I have also loved Gourmet, especially the summer reading, I but almost cancelled after 16 years, because I couldn't throw them away and I couldn't keep them. I renewed because I could read, throw away, and still find recipes on the internet, if I'm so inclined. It's just not about the recipes anymore. I also get CI on line and in print. In print is not reading for pleasure, and is next to go, but I like on line for referrence. I canceled Fine Cooking a few years ago. I've kept all the Thanksgiving ones, but they were getting redundant,

[HillJ]

http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Eating/dp...

Has anyone given the magazine, Clean Eating, a try? Review?

[pikawicca]

Over the years, my best recipes online, hands-down, have come from Food and Wine. There's a recipe for a superb version of Pimiento Cheese in the current edition, using goat cheese and smoked cheddar -- it's terrific.

[bnemes3343]

Hands down it's Cook's Illustrated.

[grantham]

In a contest between Bon Appetit or Gourmet, I would choose Gourmet.

More satisfactory, in my mind, these days are Saveur and The Art of Eating by
Edward Behr.

[shaebones]

CI and Fine Cooking

[nofunlatte]

Saveur--love the articles and the gastroporn. I never renewed my Gourment subscription (it was a freebie anyway) because it just seemed too contrived; I did enjoy reading it a couple of decades ago, though.

I also like Eating Well, because the recipes focus on healthy, but not ascetic, cooking. Great recipes--they tend not to fall into the processed food camp, like so many "diet" recipes do. I enjoy the articles as well (have long admired Peter Jaret's work).

Though I subscribe to neither, Fine Cooking and Cuisine at Home are occasionally purchased from newsstands. These are probably some of the best in terms of cooking instruction.

[SDGourmand]

Love Saveur, Food Arts, and Art Culinare. Art Culinare only comes out 4 times a year but it's a hard cover with the best food photos I've seen in any magazine or cookbook. It's the only one that I get excited about when I see it in the mailbox.

[TomSwift]

Food Arts is great, a trade publication that avoids the hype of the others.

[buttertart]

Thanks for reminding me of this, I used to subscribe. It's free to industry or associated (my company is involved with food imports).

[Miss Needle]

Yes, Art Culinaire has the best food porn. But I didn't find myself cooking from it very often because most of the recipes are really meant for restaurant kitchens. So I stopped my subscription. It was also kind of pricey. I believe it was like $80 a year for 4 issues.

[Karl S]

Well, it's a very irregular newsletter, but Simple Cooking by John & Mattie Thorne is the among the best food writing in the USA.

I think the Conde Nast publications have been wading water for some time. The BBC's Good Food Magazine is better.

Saveur is interesting from time to time.

Cooks Illustrated has practical value but was stuck for a while in a fairly narrow and therefore eventually predictable range of menu items, but in recent months maybe one sees glimmers of awakening? I've subscribed to half the current 100 issues (that's since 2001), and the recipes for animal flesh that are NOT beef, pork or chicken are relatively rare (1 for veal, 4 for lamb, none for rabbit/duck/goose/game, dried cereal grains other than wheat (mostly in paste form) or rice are rare, et cetera.). When they started Cook's Country, I had hoped that narrowness would be confined to it, and give CI room to roam, but no. Memo to any Cooks Illustrated staffer reading this: I've done a spreadsheet index of your recipes since Issue 49, and the repetitive nature of your topics is not as dissimilar from Bon Appetit and Gourmet as you might like to think.

[LJBTampa]

I prefer Bon Appetit over Gourmet.

[LJBTampa]

I guess I'm not the only one to prefer Bon Appetit over Gourmet. Conde Nast is closing down Gourmet at the end of the year.

[farmersdaughter]

I love Fine Cooking. Nice combination of easy stuff, challenging stuff and trends and not overly full of ads.

[Beach Chick]

Love Love Love Fine Cooking Magazine..

[buttertart]

Saveur and Cook's Illustrated, followed by Gourmet. Not fond of Ruth Reichl (the editor of Gourmet) or what she's done to the magazine.

[sbp]

Same here on all counts.

[TomSwift]

Agree - Saveur now reads much the same way that Gourmet did until Reichl took over the helm. I've got a complete set of Gourmet dating from the mid 60's but stopped saving them when Reichl changed the format. I don't save Saveur either but it does not offend me the way Gourmet does now.

[buttertart]

Some of the Saveur contributors are reminiscent of Lillian Langseth Christensen and the other jewels of the glory days of the 60's/70's. It was an event to receive an issue then.

[TomSwift]

Bravo! Before I had a brain, when my mother died I threw away a bunch of stuff including a complete set of Gourmet from issue No. 1 in the 40's through the early 60's. I didn't even have the good sense to read them first.

[buttertart]

Oh no...I once also picked up a bunch of really old issues at an apartment building I used to live in (not sure where you are, but here in NY people often leave books and magazines they're through with in the lobbies of apt bldgs for other people to pick up, it's really quite nice) - looked through them and got rid of them in the next move. Silly me. What a look at mid 20th C luxury living. It would be wonderful if they could publish the archive somehow (like the full run of the New Yorker), although it is probably difficult since they were not always owned by Condé Nast.

[TomSwift]

I'm here in Los Angeles and you've given me the idea (which I should have thought of earlier) of going to the LA Public Library (which incidently has one of the most extensive collections of LA restaurant menus, and on line) and seeing if they have the back issues. It'll be a project to read 20+ years of Gourmet. Undoubtedly the magazine itself can direct us to sources for a complete set. "What a look at mid 20th C luxury living" - that's why the magazine is captioned "the magazine of good living." Maybe we were born in the wrong century.

[buttertart]

Right century, wrong income bracket in my case! It was wonderful to read about exotic (and at the time unattainable) destinations - many of which I have been fortunate to visit.

[TomSwift]

Agree about the income bracket - there was an article (earlyl 70's?) about the QE2 that made it sound so wonderful. Now, it's going to be a floating hotel in the middle east. I've got a book on caviar that states that 40% of the world's production of Beluga is (was) consumed in the Queen's Grill of the QE2. Although I've crused a lot (but never on QE2) that article still conjurs up images of the good life. It's a shame that the Gourmet editorial staff today doesn't write with the same flair as is days past.

[buttertart]

There are no Joseph Wechsbergs, George Langs, etc. any more.

[Miss Needle]

While I was a huge fan of Reichl when she was writing for the NYT, I have to admit that I didn't like Gourmet after she took over. I stopped renewing my subscription about a year ago.

Actually, I stopped all of my food magazine subscriptions (not exactly sure why -- perhaps food magazine overload?) and have been pretty content which just surfing the web to get my fix. But if I had to pick one, I would choose Saveur.

[dmd_kc]

I love Ruth Reichl, and simultaneously don't like what she's done to Gourmet -- particularly the politics. I find them patrician and annoying, though I very often agree with the positions. Her choice, I know. And mine to discontinue my many-year subscription.

[iluvcookies]

Agree on Gourmet. The writing seems more distant than in the past. And I'm not a fan of the new layout.
I am, however, hooked on Lettie Teague's Wine Matters in Food and Wine, as well as Ray Isle's musings.

[southernitalian]

Love Gourment. But love Saveur even more.

[bayoucook]

Me, too. I'm also enjoying Cuisine At Home.

[iluvcookies]

Food and Wine or Cook's illustrated

[Dinsdale45]

Chile Pepper magazine speaks to me.

[h2Bn]

Gotta be Gourmet. I just got a stack of back issues through Freecycle. Really, really nice publication. I like their website too.

[shaogo]

Gourmet, hands down.

That's a classy, classy magazine. I've taken a subscription for over 20 years.