Recipes
From the year’s fresh batch of cookbooks, these dishes are the most delicious.
By
Dan Kois
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Perhaps it was when my daughter’s friend asked if the rice bowl was, like, the official meal of the Kois family that I realized I was in a little bit of a cooking rut. Sure, rice bowls are delicious and easy to make at scale, and endlessly customizable—vaguely Latin American rice bowl! Vaguely North African rice bowl! Vaguely Japanese rice bowl!—but maybe I could stand to expand my horizons a bit.
Researching Slate’s 25 Most Important Recipes project last year reminded me just how transformative a great cookbook can be. Works like The Silver Palate Cookbook and The Vegetarian Epicure introduced new methods, new ingredients, and new flavors to American home chefs of their eras, helping them think about cooking and eating in ways that felt revolutionary. My kitchen could sure use a revolution, I realized. So I decided to spend 2025 cooking new recipes from new cookbooks and chronicling the results. I cooked from dozens of new releases over the course of the year, and these are the 10 recipes I loved the most, in no particular order, from the cookbooks that will stick around my house for years to come.
Caponata Con Tocco Indonesiano
Italopunk by Vanja van der Leeden (pg. 187)
I cooked this sweet-and-sour tweak on Sicilian vegetable stew at the end of November, long past tomato and eggplant season. But Vanja van der Leeden’s addition of lemongrass and lime leaf vivifies a dish that’s often a bit lifeless when cooked with vegetables not picked at the peak of ripeness. The result: a cross-cultural burst of summer flavor at a time I really needed it. These bold additions epitomize the cheerful, in-your-face attitude of this stylish, borderline ridiculous Italian cookbook by a Dutch-Indonesian chef. Surely no cookbook published this year features more photos of its author holding a giant zucchini up to her crotch.
Chicken Kitchri
Third Culture Cooking by Zaynab Issa (pg. 105)
In contrast to the brashness of Italopunk’s design is the serene elegance of Zaynab Issa’s first cookbook, but don’t be fooled—Issa is just as devoted to big flavors as any cookbook author around. The book is inspired not only by her East African and South Asian roots but by the suburban American chain restaurants (Baskin-Robbins, TGI Fridays) she grew up eating in. But for me, the standout recipe in Third Culture Cooking isn’t her Cinnabon-to-the-max cinnamon rolls; it’s her version of the lentil-and-rice porridge ubiquitous on the subcontinent—perfectly spiced, hearty and heartening, with crispy chicken skin festooning the bowl, as a treat.
Fruit Chaat
Heartland Masala by Jyoti & Auyon Mukharji (pg. 235)
Sometimes, all a cookbook needs to do is to give home chefs permission to try something simple that they might otherwise have never thought of. Such is the power of this barely-a-recipe from Heartland Masala, “an Indian cookbook from an American kitchen,” written and illustrated by a mother-and-son team from Kansas City. Basically, the recipe is: Why not try adding chaat masala, the spice mix that enlivens fried dough treats across South Asia, to fruit salad? I suspect that this technique has appeared in other cookbooks before, but surely never written so engagingly or illustrated, by Olivier Kugler, with a flying unicorn trailing a rainbow of fruit.
Herby Roasted Cinnamon Delicata Squash and Quinoa
Linger by Hetty Lui McKinnon (pg. 246)
The previous cookbook by Australian-born writer Hetty Lui McKinnon, Tenderheart, increased our family’s vegetable consumption by 200 to 300 percent, such was McKinnon’s devotion to finding clever ways to make humble kale, broccoli, and bok choy astonishingly delicious. I was a little anxious when I opened up Linger—surely there were no great vegetable recipes left?! I needn’t have worried. Like its predecessor, Linger is abundant with creativity, organized this time around “the salad” as a category so broad it can encompass greens, dandan noodles, cold tofu, and Buffalo dip. The star of the show is this autumnal flavor bomb—sweet, tart, and earthy. How good is it? The morning after I brought it to a dinner party, I fielded texts requesting the recipe from every other guest.
Lao Gan Ma Cheese Crackers
Baking and the Meaning of Life by Helen Goh (pg. 88)
I am forever in search of new snacks to serve with drinks, and these sharp little numbers—which add chili crisp to Parmesan crackers, creating an appealingly red-tinged, crunchy treat—have been gobbled up by friends and family alike. It’s just one of scores of appealing baking recipes in this fancy-but-accessible collection by Helen Goh (the co-author of Yotam Ottolenghi’s dessert book Sweet), ranging from savory pies to breadsticks to an ambitious rhubarb upside-down cake that sort of looks like a tasty patchwork quilt.
Marbled Egg Omelet With Nam Pla
Dinner by Meera Sodha (pg. 88)
“As simple as it is, for me it is the beating heart of this book,” Meera Sodha writes of this beautiful Thai-accented omelet, inspired by one she ate at a neighborhood restaurant outside Bangkok. Technique and ingredient combine here to make something that feels just perfect in about five minutes, and as I was eating it, I had to agree that it perfectly represented Sodha’s welcoming book in miniature. A collection of vegetarian and vegan dinners inspired by cuisines across Asia, Dinner is the 2025 cookbook I’m most likely to cook through completely.
Mapo Tofu Ramen
Instant Ramen Kitchen by Peter J. Kim (pg. 211)
Gimmicky? You bet. But I cooked no other recipe as often this year as I did this addictive instant-ramen kludge, which transforms a packet of Maruchan into a convincing simulacrum of restaurant mapo tofu. Pretty much any night the rest of my family left the house, there I was, searing ground pork and tearing open my seasoning sachet, then scarfing down the tingly, spicy results. Not all of mad scientist Peter J. Kim’s ramen Frankensteins are as successful as this one, but for a certain kind of curious cook, they’re all irresistibly fun to try out.
Ocracoke Island Fig Cake With Buttermilk Glaze
Recipes From the American South by Michael W. Twitty (pg. 37)
Food historian Michael W. Twitty has spent his career exploring and explaining Southern cooking, and this authoritative collection of recipes feels like a landmark. Like any such author aiming to be definitive, Twitty presents standards like dirty rice, potato salad, and, yes, fried chicken, often accompanied by short essays that acknowledge the impossibility of encompassing centuries of tradition and debate in one simple recipe. (The recipes are good, though!) But his wide-ranging curiosity also brings him to dishes that capture the long history and multitudinous cultures influencing contemporary Southern life, from an ancestral African-inspired cornbread kush to Chinese Mississippi collards flavored with oyster sauce. Throughout, Twitty finds ways to help even those who think they know Southern cooking see the region anew—as with this beautiful cake, which harks back to the long-ago cuisine of the Outer Banks, an enclave off the coast of North Carolina more recently known for upscale seafood, touristy pancake houses, and ubiquitous Brew-Thrus.
One Condiment to Cure What Ails You
Hot Date! by Rawaan Alkhatib (pg. 242)
An entire cookbook devoted to … dates? Unexpectedly, this bright and lively tome, featuring hot-pink page trim and author-illustrator Rawaan Alkhatib’s gorgeous paintings and textiles, is not only the best-looking cookbook of the year—it’s very cookable, packed with playful recipes featuring this humble Middle Eastern fruit. While I enjoyed the book’s big main dishes and (of course) desserts, I found myself particularly charmed by Alkhatib’s spin on Sicilian Foriana sauce, combining pistachios, garlic, oregano, and chopped dates. I tossed it with pasta, I layered it onto egg toast, I ate it with labneh … I’m still discovering ways to use this new-to-me condiment, a real gift of a recipe from a real delight of a cookbook.
Seeded Barbari
What Can I Bring? by Casey Elsass (pg. 137)
I have a long and tortured history with breadmaking—it’s my kitchen kryptonite, the culinary method that leaves me powerless and despairing, brooding over yet another fallen, dense, flavorless loaf. So thank heaven for this quick Persian flatbread recipe from Casey Elsass’ wonderful cookbook, which did everything a great recipe should do: It offered a new technique to try out, talked me through the technique with clear and friendly writing, and delivered spectacular results—in this case two giant loaves of salty, seedy bread, crunchy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, perfect for serving alongside creamy dips at Thanksgiving. A confidence boost, a hosting success, and a carby treat? What more can a home cook desire?
See all 10 recipes here. And read more in Slate about the best of 2025.
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