The 20 Best Cookbooks For Men
“Every man should know how to cook 10 recipes by heart.” Who said that? We don’t know. But it sounds pretty good. To get you to that place of mastery in the kitchen (and behind the grill and in front of the smoker) we offer these 20 best cookbooks for men.
Take a master course in the art of barbecue, for less coin than dinner and a movie. Learn how to put beer in more than just a glass. Get ideas for what to cook when you camp. Make it spicy, make it with Jack Daniel’s, make it with weed. We’re pretty sure at least a few of these 20 cookbooks will awaken the chef, the pitmaster and even the foodie within you and get you excited to get cooking.
Because what’s gonna make you happier, picking up the phone and ordering Thai takeout (again), or sauteing, braising, steaming and basting something until it’s good enough to eat? We’re betting it’s that second option. Pick up one of these specially-curated cookbooks and start working on your next culinary masterpiece today. You tastebuds will thank you.
Cooking With Beer
Eat: Sour Beer Ceviche… Lager and Lime Chicken Tacos
This isn’t some novelty “let’s add beer to that!” cookbook. It starts off with a pretty reliable beer pairing and beer style guide and gets better from there. Each recipe covers a page, with the facing page featuring a full-color photo of what your food is supposed to look like when you’re done. Breakfast, main courses, appetizers and desserts are all covered, and all contain beer — selected for qualities that contribute flavor, depth and complexity to already solid recipes. – Buy It
The Hungover Cookbook
Eat: The Elvis Presley Peanut Butter, Banana and Bacon Sandwich… Lemon Lassi
Using English author/humorist P.G. Wodehouse’s 6 hangover types as a foundation, you first answer questions about the particular brand of hangover you’re experiencing then head to that section of the book for a set of tailored breakfast items and (virgin or not) drink recipes. With funny stories, brain exercises, quizzes and suggested activities, this is a cookbook interested in getting you over your hangover, getting you fed and hopefully making you laugh — just not too loudly. – Buy It
Pickles, Pigs, and Whiskey
Eat: Pickled Watermelon Rind… Mustard Crusted Pork Tenderloin with Apple Cider Reduction
Owner of a number of acclaimed restaurants in Oxford, Mississippi, chef John Currence wrote this book to help you pickle, can, roast, braise, brine, smoke, muddle and stir your way to southern culinary euphoria. The James Beard Award winner has put a lot of himself and a lot of irreverence in his first book, but his love of good food is genuine. With a recommended song for each recipe and great looking photography, this is the book for you if you like your food down-home and unfussy, but uncompromisingly delicious. – Buy It
Eat What You Watch: A Cookbook For Movie Lovers
Eat: Pasta with Prison Gravy and Meatballs (from Goodfellas)… New York Style Pastrami (from When Harry Met Sally)
Andrew Rea, the guy behind the refreshingly not-annoying YouTube cooking show, “Binging with Babbish” has come out with his first cookbook and it’s worth a look. It features 40 recipes from classic and cult films, with a recreated image of the iconic food scene for each celluloid-inspired recipe. Eat What You Watch is a cookbook for movie lovers who also happen to like to eat. We could see this turning “dinner and a movie night” into “dinner from a movie and a movie night.” – Buy It
Pitmaster: Recipes, Techniques, and Barbecue Wisdom
Eat: Memphis Style Dry-Rub Baby Back Ribs… Caveman T-Bones with Hellfire Hot Sauce
As a man, it is sometimes tacitly assumed you know your way around a grill. While it’s fine if you don’t, here’s a good place to start should you want to learn. This book covers everything from using a chimney starter to 2-zone barbecue cooking and how to use different styles of smokers. A guest pitmaster shows up in each chapter to deliver expertise on their particular region or style (North Carolina, Kansas City, Texas, the North, and styles like backyard and competition barbecue). – Buy It
HERB: Mastering the Art of Cooking with Cannabis
Eat: Wild Mushroom Pappardelle with Peas and Goat Cheese… Triple Chocolate Espresso Cookies.
Currently Alaska, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, Washington (and DC) let you legally and happily enjoy marijuana in just about any form you’d like. Smoked, vaporized, in a lip balm, or in your morning muffins. This cookbook teaches you the best way to make extractions for cooking (cannabutter and cannaoil). After that, you get a pretty respectable number of recipes for employing your extractions. Even if you don’t live in one of those 8 states, pick this up now and be ready when sanity hits the other 42. – Buy It
The NFL Gameday Cookbook
Eat: Dr. BBQ’s Tailgate Gumbo… Bratwurst with Beer, Butter and Onions
A case of Coors and a call to Domino’s is fine for many a football fan. But if you want to get a little more involved, here’s a cookbook specifically for the NFL set. Most of the recipes have tailgating and grilling in mind, but you also get ideas for sides, desserts and game day drinks. There’s 150 recipes to take you from pre-season to Super Bowl and to get you inspired, the book also comes with photos of notable moments from the NFL. – Buy It
The Hot Sauce Cookbook
Eat: Homemade Sriracha… “Son of Suchilquitongo” Salsa Verde
True, there are some very good hot sauces out there, all bottled up and ready to go. But if you want to get really serious in your quest for fire, try making some of your own. Part history book, part how-to, The Hot Sauce Cookbook takes you from Mesoamerican to Island style, Louisiana to international, and then takes a tour of some top chefs’ hot sauce specialties. There’s also 50 or so food recipes for you to make with your newly minted pepper sauces so go ahead, get saucy. – Buy It
The American Craft Beer Cookbook
Eat: Arrogant Bastard Ale Avocado Tacos… Pineapple Brown Sugar Pale Ale Cupcakes
The second beer-centered book on our list, but this one isn’t about cooking with your brew, it’s about recreating some of the better dishes made at brew-pubs across the country. Every recipe has a short profile of the brewery from whence it came, along with an ideal beer to pair with it. Featuring 155 recipes from breakfast to lunch to dinner to dessert, this beer book is for those who think good food is just as important as what you drink with it. – Buy It
Jack Daniel’s Spirit Of Tennessee Cookbook
Eat: Old no.7 Flank Steak… Traditional Southern Fried Chicken
Nearly 30 years old and filled with lore and history about Jack, his whiskey and Lynchburg, Tennessee, this cookbook is as fun to read as it is to cook from. It’s filled with vintage photography, stories about pieces of Tennessee history — such as the essay about Miss Mary Bobo’s Boarding House — plus plenty of cocktail recipes and dishes that feature or just go really well with Jack Daniel’s whiskey. No cookbook from the South would be complete without a few recipes for pie, so this one has 27. – Buy It
The How Not To Die Cookbook
Eat: Stuffed Portabellos with Herbed Mushroom Gravy… Chickpea and Cauliflower Curry
It’s possible the title lead you to believe this book would teach how to catch and cook squirrel should you ever be lost in the wild. Not so. This is the more mundane, though more practical, prevention of death, achieved through eating less crap so you live longer. Based on Dr. Greger’s wildly popular health book, this is full of plant-based recipes that taste good enough to actually eat. It also comes with a 14-day meal plan and shopping guide to help you leave the grocery store with more than corn dogs and frozen burritos. – Buy It
The Truck Food Cookbook
Eat: High Noon Quesadilla… Portland Poutine
Say you’re a really good cook. All your friends say, “You should open a restaurant!” but when you ask to borrow $200k so you can do so, all lips are mum. So what do you do? You get ahold of a food truck for a fraction of the cost, park it somewhere cool and now everyone gets to taste your food. That’s a story that keeps playing out across the cities of the US. This cookbook tours the land in search of good food, made by good chefs, in tiny kitchens on wheels. – Buy It
America: The Cookbook
Eat: Korean Pancakes…Portuguese Clams with Linguiça and Kale
If you thought a cookbook that claims to encompass American cuisine would seem like a big undertaking, you’d be very correct. This 750+ page book covers each of the 50 states through 800 recipes with regional classics, fusion dishes, traditional fare and more. A Section of the book features essays and recipes from food experts and chefs from all over this food-loving country. – Buy It
The New Camp Cookbook: Gourmet Grub for Campers, Road Trippers, and Adventurers
Eat: Egg in a Hole Grilled Cheese… Applelicious Dutch Baby
What’s your idea of camp food? If your answer contains the words “beans” or “can” let us introduce you to something better. The New Camp Cookbook offers up recipes that would taste pretty darn good if you cooked them at home. But cooking them over a campfire in the middle of a forest is going to make them taste somewhere in the neighborhood of amazing. You’ll learn how to set up your camp kitchen, what to bring and how to pack. Then just build your fire (or fire up the camp stove) and get cooking. – Buy It
Commissary Kitchen: My Prison Cookbook
Eat: P’s Don’t Try This at Home Prison Surprise… P’s Prison Sangria
The point here is, if a guy can make a decent meal out of prison commissary ingredients, you’ll certainly be able to with your non-incarcerated kitchen and access to real food. Prodigy, the late rapper from the hip-hop duo Mobb Deep served 3 years in prison on a gun possession charge. While there, he learned to make the best from what he had available: food from the commissary and a limited kitchen setup. Cook up a recipe, and enjoy it knowing you’re not currently locked up. – Buy It
Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto
Eat: Brisket… Beef ribs
Reading this book is akin to taking a master class in barbecue. The science, the history, the whys and the hows of choosing, seasoning, smoking and cooking meat are spelled out here in detail by the owner of the insanely popular (and newly re-open for business after a pit room fire) restaurant in Austin, Texas called Franklin Barbecue. If you can’t get out to the restaurant (or can’t get in the door before they run out of meat) consider this book the next best thing. – Buy It
The Sriracha Cookbook
Eat: Sesame-Sriracha Crusted Ahi Tuna… Sriracha Kimchee
Sriracha. Rooster sauce. It used to just be the stuff that made your 29¢ instant ramen taste a lot better. But now it’s everywhere, finally getting its due. Here are 50 recipes, starting with instructions on how to make sriracha spiced condiments, followed by a comprehensive run-down of sriracha breakfasts, sides and dinners. Then, when you think the book has done about all it can with hot cock sauce, it offers up a few desserts. Peach-Sriracha Sorbet? Why not. – Buy It
The NoMad Cookbook
Eat: Salmon Rillettes with Fines Herbes Bavarois… Chicken, Fried with Chile Lime Yogurt
Sitting somewhere between ultra-fancy and casual-elegant is the restaurant inside the NoMad Hotel in Manhattan. It’s a slightly more accessible take on Chef Daniel Humm and Restaurateur Will Guidara’s first endeavor, Eleven Madison Park. These are the recipes you make at home when you want to experience fine dining but don’t want to have to put on a tie. As a bonus, nested in cut-out pages at the back of the book is another, smaller book full of cocktails from the bar. – Buy It
Make It Spicy: More than 50 Recipes that Pack a Punch
Eat: Mac ‘n’ Cheese with Jalapeño Cream… Spicy Red Shrimp
If you like it hot, you can flip straight to the back for the “Fiery” section where Scotch bonnets and Thai chiles make their way into recipes. If you like the idea of hot but don’t yet have the palate, there’s a mild section where dishes are given hints of heat, but aren’t making anyone sweat. No matter the section, all the recipes can be made hotter or milder, though the authors recommend starting mild and working your way up from there. – Buy It
A Super Upsetting Cookbook About Sandwiches
Eat: Chutzpah Express… Broccoli Classic Sub
This is part cookbook, part hilarious essay collection from the owner/chef Tyler Kord of No.7 Restaurant and No. 7 Sub in New York City. Yes, he puts broccoli on his sandwiches. All we can say is, you can’t knock it til you try it. There’s a sandwich theory section in the back of the book that will help you become your own adventurous sandwich inventor, but the combinations in the book that have made his sandwich shops so celebrated will serve you well too. – Buy It
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