Heston Blumenthal At Home

• Home cook

  Gets a little better every year

  5/5Fit 5 out of 5

  Eight stocks before a single soup, a page of mayonnaises, a run of compound butters and sauces — this is a book built from the building blocks you already love making, and each one carries over into your own cooking. Brown chicken stock is the one to make first because so much of the savoury cooking will lean on it, and Triple-cooked chips and Pommes purées will show you why the extra stages matter rather than just telling you to do them. It will not teach you plating, which suits you fine, and the only real cost is freezer space and the patience to work the long way round.

  Start with Brown chicken stock

• Restaurant lover

  Wants to eat out at home

  5/5Fit 5 out of 5

  Scallop tartare with white chocolate gives you the provocative pairing you want from a chef’s book, not another dependable Tuesday supper. Cod with mustard and caper vinaigrette offers a less theatrical route to a dinner-party fish course where the sauce matters. You will find everyday dishes here too, but Salted butter caramels wrapped in edible cellophane supplies exactly the extravagant finishing touch that makes cooking for guests feel like an event.

  Start with Scallop tartare with white chocolate

• Old-school meat lover

  Meat, fire and patience

  4/5Fit 4 out of 5

  44 of 177 recipes have meat, 18 fish

  Oxtail faggots with celeriac purée and Slow-roasted rib of beef with bone-marrow sauce are the kind of patient, cut-respecting cooking you came for, and the meat pages run from offal to crackling without apology. The stocks at the front are proper butcher's-bench stuff too, and Pork scratchings tucked in among the biscuits shows where the author's heart really lies. You will skip the lollies, the granitas and the salads, but the roasts and braises alone earn the shelf space.

  Start with Slow-roasted rib of beef with bone-marrow sauce

• Flavour maximalist

  Chilli, anchovy and lemon on everything

  4/5Fit 4 out of 5

  Bagna cauda, Marmite consommé and Roast leg of lamb with anchovy, rosemary and garlic prove this author understands that umami, salt and pungency are the point, and there is brown butter, pickled lemon, ponzu and five-spice scattered through the back pages for you to raid. The misses are the pastel end of the book — chamomile panna cottas, vanilla butter, a long run of gentle sorbets — where restraint tips into politeness. Pour chilli oil over the broccoli anyway and you will still find more pages here that make your mouth water than in most home cookbooks.

  Start with Bagna cauda

• New-flavour explorer

  Something unfamiliar on every page

  4/5Fit 4 out of 5

  Few home books will stretch you this gently and this often: Konbu-cured halibut teaches you a cure, Scallop tartare with white chocolate rewires what you think a starter can be, and Mustard ice-cream is a dare you will actually serve. Go in with eyes open, though, because konbu, smoked water, liquorice and edible cellophane arrive in quick succession and some of them you will buy once and shelve. Begin with the halibut, because it asks for a single unfamiliar ingredient and hands you a technique you will keep.

  Start with Konbu-cured halibut

• Light and healthy

  Light, colourful, balanced

  3/5Fit 3 out of 5

  Crab and pink grapefruit salad and Peach and parma ham salad are exactly the bright, shareable plates you would photograph for a table of friends, and the sorbets and granitas give you a dessert that is not cream on cream. The trouble is that most of the book is cream on cream — butters, parfaits, crème brûlées and pies — so you will be cherry-picking rather than cooking through it. Keep it as a treat book for weekends and finish a dinner with Mango terrine with green peppercorns rather than anything from the chocolate pages.

  Start with Crab and pink grapefruit salad

• Parent of young kids

  Has to survive a toddler and a late dinner

  3/5Fit 3 out of 5

  Shepherd’s pie, Fish pie and Cauliflower macaroni cheese are the familiar shapes your children will actually eat, and all three can be assembled in a quiet moment and reheated after the chaos. The catch is the method: the book wants home-made stock under nearly everything, and that is hours you may not have, so make the stocks in one big weekend batch or quietly use the carton. For after bedtime there is a cocktail chapter and a chicken liver parfait, which is more than most family-friendly books bother with.

  Start with Shepherd’s pie

• Low carb

  Few carbs, lots of flavour

  3/5Fit 3 out of 5

  Of 177 recipes, 115 are vegetarian (35 vegan), 18 have fish and 44 have meat

  Lamb steaks with tapenade and Scrambled eggs with brown butter are promising starting points for you, with meat and eggs taking the lead rather than an obligatory starch. The separate butters, dressings and vegetable dishes give you useful options for building meals, although titles alone cannot establish their carbohydrate content. You will have to pass over plenty of potatoes, pasta and sugary treats, and Triple-cooked chips is emphatically not a project for your way of eating.

  Start with Lamb steaks with tapenade

• Wine lover and Italophile

  Every page calls for a bottle

  2/5Fit 2 out of 5

  The Italian moments here are real but scattered: Beef tagliata and My carbonara will sit happily beside a Barbera or a Frascati, and Tiramisu closes an evening properly. But there is not a word about wine on these pages, and much of the book chases novelty — white chocolate on scallops, bacon in ice-cream — rather than the regional honesty you want from a long dinner at the table. Cook the tagliata, open something Piedmontese, and borrow from the rest sparingly.

  Start with Beef tagliata

• Quick weeknight cook

  Thirty minutes, one pan

  2/5Fit 2 out of 5

  Be warned that this book opens with eight stocks and expects you to have them in the freezer before you reach dinner, and a title like Triple-cooked chips tells you honestly how many stages are involved. On a weeknight you can still get away with Lamb steaks with tapenade or Cod with mustard and caper vinaigrette, where the sauce is a jar you make once and the protein takes minutes. Treat it as a weekend book that lends you a handful of fast suppers, not the other way round.

  Start with Lamb steaks with tapenade

• Fitness-minded

  Protein, meal prep, no excuses

  2/5Fit 2 out of 5

  Macros-wise this book is stacked against you: roughly the back third is ice-cream, caramels, biscuits and pastry, and even the sides lean on butter and frying. What survives for a Sunday prep is Chilli con carne, which will hold in the fridge all week, plus Umami broth with poached mackerel for lean protein with real flavour. Plan a cheat day around Triple-cooked chips and leave the sweet chapters closed.

  Start with Chilli con carne

• Beginner

  Has never fried anything

  2/5Fit 2 out of 5

  There are gentle entry points here — Scrambled eggs with brown butter, Glazed carrots, Chocolate chip cookies — and the opening stock pages explain a foundation you will use forever. But the book assumes you will happily cure fish in seaweed, wrap sweets in edible cellophane and cook chips three times, and much of it reads as a chef setting homework rather than holding your hand. Start with the eggs, cook the carrots alongside something simple, and leave the parfaits and tarte tatins until you have more confidence.

  Start with Scrambled eggs with brown butter

• Student on a budget

  One pan, little money

  2/5Fit 2 out of 5

  On one ring and a budget, your friends here are Leek and potato soup, Onion soup and Chilli con carne, all big-batch, cheap-staple cooking that feeds you for days. Everything else quickly asks for crab, truffle, rib of beef, an ice-cream machine or a pantry item you will use exactly once, and the stock pages alone want bones, hours and freezer space a shared kitchen does not have. Borrow it from the library for the soups and the chilli rather than buying it.

  Start with Chilli con carne

• Traveller

  Tastes the city before arriving

  2/5Fit 2 out of 5

  This is a book of a chef's imagination, not of a place: ponzu sits beside bois boudran, sushi beside a pie, and nobody tells you about a market or a neighbourhood. Where it does root itself it is quietly, stubbornly English — Eccles cakes with potted stilton, Lardy cake with butterscotch sauce, a jug of Pimm’s — and those pages will carry you to a damp English afternoon better than anything else here. If you want to travel through your pots, look elsewhere; if you want to understand one Englishman's kitchen, this does that well.

  Start with Eccles cakes with potted stilton

• Flexitarian

  Mostly vegetarian, most of the time

  2/5Fit 2 out of 5

  Of 177 recipes, 115 are vegetarian (35 vegan), 18 have fish and 44 have meat

  Mushroom spelt risotto and Tomato tart with basil mascarpone give you credible meat-free centrepieces rather than asking you to make dinner out of garnishes. You also have plenty of choice when an occasional meat or fish meal feels worthwhile, but that is not where you need the most help. Too much of the vegetable offering reads as accompaniments, so you would be buying this for selected projects rather than a strong rotation of vegetarian dinners.

  Start with Mushroom spelt risotto

• Vegan health foodie

  Plant-based, fresh and fuss-free

  1/5Fit 1 out of 5

  35 of 177 recipes are vegan, another 115 vegetarian

  Count the butters, creams, parfaits and ice-creams and you will see this is a book built on exactly what you avoid, with no plant-based labelling to help you find the exceptions. The exceptions do exist: Quinoa sushi with the Cucumber, mango and avocado filling is wholefood and ready as written, and Broccoli with chilli needs no swap at all. The spelt risottos and vegetable soups could be adapted by dropping the dairy, but adapting is the most this book will ever do for you.

  Start with Quinoa sushi

Written by CookCook with AI from the titles of all 177 recipes in this book and the publisher's description; the numbers come from our own analysis of the recipes, not from the AI.