Whether you can simply boil water with the best of them or concoct a culinary masterpiece that could contend for a spot on the cover of Bon Appetit, you can learn a thing or two about cooking from Cook's Illustrated.

The team over at Cook's, headed up by founder and editor Christopher Kimball, puts a scientific, unbiased slant on cooking and related subjects like equipment testing, kitchen tips, and taste tests.  Kimball has built upon the idea that: you never know until you test it.  Each recipe closer resembles an article out of a science fair project log you did back in high school than something out of a cookbook.  The typical recipe takes up a couple of pages and starts off with the dish's history and identifies the quintessential attributes of a perfect version ... which they then set out to accomplish through trial and error ... oh, and pictures ... lots of pictures!  There is no limit to what lengths they will go to in search of a better dish.  That might mean baking over a hundred different pans of lasagna, frying up a thousand sacrificial chickens, or using a flamethrower to get just the right hue of golden brown on top of the creme brulee (okay that one might be an exaggeration).  Nonetheless, there is a method to their madness in Kimball's words:

"Cooking is not subjective. There is a science to it. There is a right way and a wrong way. There are certain things we know that are very clear.  Most cookbooks tell you what to do. That's a terrible way to teach anything. What you want to do is explain it and show it and together pursue it so readers feel like they've learned along with you." (powells)

They also have a TV show called America's Test Kitchen to log video of tall the cooking craziness.  Check out the schedule to find channels and times in your area.

(the above post from www.bettergetter.com has been modified to fit your blogcritics page)