Well tested delicious keto recipe book

(Rob T) #1

A bad recipe can be really expensive. Bad recipes waste time and money (ingredients). So I’m looking for a cookbook with thoroughly tested and approved recipes.

I’ve always been a picky eater and how food tastes matters to me a lot. I lean towards flavorful Mexican and Asian cuisines that rely heavily on spices. I’m trying to adapt the keto diet and I need a recommendation for a cookbook that is thoroughly tested/tasted. I don’t want to rely on Amazon ratings.

I have used a variety of cookbooks in the past (not keto). What I found was most cookbooks have a few good recipes and combine them with a lot of not so great recipes just so that they can create and sell a book. many of the recipes are not even tested so they have wrong proportions. And the vast majority of people tend to rate cookbooks highly based on a single recipe or two. Most don’t make more than a few recipes so as a result buying a book based on Amazon reviews is not advisable.

I’m wondering if people have any recommendations on cookbooks that they have used. Especially if you have made multiple recipes from that book and many of them were fabulous.

I also prefer a hard copy as that is easier while cooking and planning so I don’t want to rely on recipes posted by amateurs online. Yes, I’m sure some amateurs post good recipes but many are terrible so I don’t want to find a needle in a haystack. I prefer paying for certain things over getting them free.

(Rob T) #3

Thanks Karen.

I found two that might have some keto friendly recipes:
Paleo Perfected

The Complete Diabetes Cookbook

I’ll give them a shot.

(Full Metal KETO AF) #4

@OgreZed has a thread that posts free Amazon Kindle downloads of keto cookbooks that’s updated regularly. I would suggest that even with Mexican and Asian cuisines one persons view of what constitutes good is quite variable. I have found the internet to be a far more education oriented way to cook than cookbooks. I will compare several versions of the same dish and figure out which I like best or take elements from several and get my own bent on how I like it. Sometimes you find one that uses stuff you have. After all I have to eat it and what’s good to me is different than what others might think. I know how much chili powder is right for me. Cooking is a life skill so explore it and find your favorites. There’s lot’s of great recipes here on the forum. I have as thread myself, I worked in Chinese restaurants most of adult life. I have a large cookbook collection that I don’t often get into anymore since the internet.

You asked for Full Metal Keto Recipes

There’s lots of stuff in the recipes thread on the forum. Try Matthead Pizza.

:cowboy_hat_face:

(bulkbiker) #5

If you don’t mind online recipes www.dietdoctor.com has lots for free.

#6

I really like George Stella’s Quick & Easy Keto cookbook - excellent recipes and lots of photos. It’s the most easy to use/well organized of the several keto cookbooks I have - plus he’s a living legend of keto success!

(Rob T) #7

Thanks for the recommendation. I will take a look.

(Rob T) #8

Another interesting one I found is that greenchef has all their keto recipes online. Since they are in the mealkit business, I’m assuming they have an incentive to only send well tested recipes. I’m going to try a few of them.

(Bob M) #9

My wife bought me this one, and everything we have tried so far has been great:

Most of America’s Test Kitchen’s recipes are high carb. Some of them are good, and their techniques are good, but the vast majority of their recipes you have to modify or cannot eat.

#10

The only drawback about Stella is that he’s a fan of cooking spray (olive oil spray) - but I ignore that as I think Nina Teichholz’s expose on bad or adulterated veg fats sets that all straight. I just use my usual 1-2 tablespoons of good fat in the skillet.

(Rob T) #11

I read about some of the books listed here. None of the keto books are from any real chefs. America’s test kitchen seems like the only legitimate cookbook with people with some formal training in culinary arts.

Maria’s books are considered to have very complex recipes. And she publishes a cookbook every year. It seems like a commercial pursuit more than a passion. Recipes need to be revised and perfected.

Many of the recipes on diet doctor have 4 * or lower rating. Not sure I would want to spend my time and money on a low quality recipe.

(Andi loves space, bacon and fasting. ) #12

I’ve made several recipes from Nicole Downs’s Keto For Foodies and they are all excellent and really tasty. It’s so good that after I had made a few dishes for my mom, she bought a copy of the cookbook for herself.


Ditto for Dietdoctor.com

(Bob M) #13

I don’t think Maria’s recipes are complex, and if you want complex, by far the most complex recipes come from America’s Test Kitchen. By far.

But if you get a normal America’s Test Kitchen book, you’ll be able to make maybe 1/20 of the recipes without modification and maybe 1/5 with modification. For instance, made green pepper pork chops, and they used sugar to brine the pork and flour to dredge the pork before searing. Two modifications right there.

If you absolutely must have a chef writing the book, there are very few books like that.

(Mario) #14

dont get me wrong, but when you are capable of „reading“ the quality of a recipe even before trying in real, you are already lost. because you know, what you want - but sadly there is no book for it.

why not to write one for your own?

(Rob T) #15

Over time, I will collect good recipes the way I have done for Mexican and Asian cuisines but I wanted to see if I could speed up the process. What I was looking for is a cookbook from someone like Diana Kennedy.

Her cookbooks are distinctive because they are based on her fifty years of traveling Mexico, interviewing and learning from cooks of all kinds in the country, and from just about every region.

(Rob T) #16

Thanks. Good to know. I will focus my efforts on building my preferred set of recipes from the existing cookbooks and websites.

(PJ) #17

@rob_t, there have been some legit chefs writing lowcarb books, but that was in the earlier days (Karen Barnaby for example). She was the one who invented ‘cauliflower rice’ (which tastes astoundingly like fried rice the way she makes it). But her recipes were mostly for formal dinners (most weren’t real simple), and the biggest thing is, they were in the earlier days of low carb.

The reason this matters is that today, a ton of stuff that is totally normal in lowcarb, nobody had ever thought of back then. We had never heard of using nut and seed meals, or half the produce that’s now common in recipes. Many ingredients commonly used now (like say, the prebiotic fibers, or xanthan gum, coconut flour, modern sweeteners like swerve or stevia) did not even exist commercially for the home user (some existed at restaurant wholesale level).

So unless something was just ‘real food’ (you know… pork chops and asparagus with a nice sauce or something), it either didn’t exist in LC-land or it was made with some bizarre, since-then-vastly-improved-upon alternative ingredient.

Don’t even start me on ‘pork rind pancakes’ (NOT one of Karen’s! lol). We made pizza as a sort of funky quiche with toppings. (Still good.) If you are just coming to keto now – now that fathead dough exists and every kind of nut and seed meal and carbless fiber is available online – you just have no idea how good you’ve got it. :wink:

She put lots of them online. I had her book… I don’t think I ever used it. It’s very dated (see above explanation). But I bet there’s some of them in the online collection that you might like. Keto’s always a matter of “experiment around the edges” with what works for you.

http://www.lowcarb.ca/low-carb-recipes.html

PJ

#18

George Stella was a chef for 20 years prior to keto, and he’s had his own low carb cooking show on the Food Network fwiw.

(Rob T) #19

Thanks. Great recommendation. I don’t mind just using the classic ingredients. I have been mostly doing classic food recently like eggs & bacon, garlic broccoli, tuna, salmon, pork loin, etc.

Yes. Very interesting. I will get his latest book: The Complete Low-Carb Cookbook