Supermarket Shopping: Magazine Leads to Eating Better and Saving Money

"Cook’s Illustrated" sticks to a simple mission of perfecting recipes and rating products on value and performance.

I never used to be much of a cook. Up until a few years ago, most of my dishes consisted of boxed noodle kits mixed with canned chicken or maybe meat and a vegetable on the grill. My wife, bless her, was no more ambitious a chef than I, although she often did me a step better with a flair for a baked chicken/rice/mushroom-soup combo. We ordered a lot of pizza.

Our unrefined palates, combined with a certain frugality, made trips to the grocery store easy. My wife drifted to products that were on sale and could be made quickly, whereas I gravitated toward whatever was heavily discounted due to a rapidly approaching expiration date (edibility optional).

But then about four years ago, some of our friends (those particularly culinary-inclined friends, anyway) started buying $100 Japanese cook’s knives and immersion circulators for sous-vide. So my wife and I decided to upgrade our epicurean stylings a bit.

We were in a high-end supermarket one day when we stumbled upon Cook’s Illustrated magazine. Its content strategy follows writers and editors on a quest to find the absolute best way to make a dish, extensively testing recipes and describing the process in detail. For example, a writer in a past issue baked hundreds of chocolate chip cookies with subtle variations on ingredients and baking methods to arrive at the recipe for “The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie.”

This obsessive devotion to getting it right appealed to us, and we started subscribing to the magazine. Not only has it made us better cooks—it’s made us better grocery shoppers.

We discovered that cooking well doesn’t involve as much work as we thought. Many of the recipes from the magazine rely on about five or six simple, high-quality ingredients and take no longer than 30 minutes to prepare. As we picked up on basic techniques, we also learned shortcuts that didn’t affect the final results, at least to our taste. For example, we could use canned beans instead of dried beans in a recipe to save on preparation time.

Surprisingly, we found that, even though we were spending more on individual ingredients at the supermarket, our overall food bills decreased. How? For one, we didn’t order out as much. Also, by being more conscious of what we were buying, and sometimes paying a premium to get a specific item, we tended to buy only what we needed and consumed all of what we purchased. We were buying more fresh products and stocking up for only a few days at a time, and we returned to the supermarket to get more of what we needed, as we needed it.

I still wouldn’t describe my wife and I as gourmets; I’m not one to turn down a nice tater-tot casserole. But we’re better cooks than we used to be, and I give Cook’s Illustrated the credit for getting us started—and for helping us become smarter and more adventurous supermarket shoppers. I respect the magazine’s reader-driven content and adherence to the publisher’s clear mission of testing recipes, kitchen equipment and supermarket ingredients to find out what works best.

Like Cook’s Illustrated founder and editor Christopher Kimball’s nostalgic editorials about life in small-town Vermont, I suppose it illustrates that the simple ways are often better.

Posted By: Matt Mullen