How we choose the cookbooks we recommend

Updated: September 15, 2026

CookbooksPro publishes reviews, rankings and buying guides for cookbooks in English. This page explains who writes them, what we look for in a book before recommending it, and how this site makes money. It is deliberately short and specific, because the value of a recommendation depends on the reader being able to check the criteria behind it.

Who writes this

CookbooksPro is written and maintained by Chef John Guerrero, a working chef, food consultant and author. He runs professional kitchens and consults for hospitality businesses, and he has published cookbooks and training material of his own — which is, among other things, why this site is careful about the difference between a book that photographs well and a book that works in a kitchen.

You can find his professional profile and the rest of his work at johnguerrero.es.

What we look for in a book

Every recommendation on this site is measured against the same four questions:

1. Does it work in a real kitchen? A book earns its place by producing food that tastes good and comes out reliably, not by the quality of its photography. Recipes that assume equipment, ingredients or a level of technique that the target reader does not have are a defect, not a detail.
2. Is it honest about who it is for? A beginner’s book that quietly assumes knife skills, a professional book that never says so in the title, a “complete” guide that covers a single cuisine: the mismatch between the promise and the content is the most common reason we do not recommend a book.
3. Is the information trustworthy? We favour authors who explain why a technique works instead of only listing steps, and we say so when a book leans on tradition or authority rather than on explanation. Where a book is a reference work, we check that the edition we cite is the current one.
4. Is it worth the money at its current price? A good book at the wrong price is a different recommendation from the same book on offer. This is why our rankings name a best overall pick and the cheaper alternative rather than pretending the most expensive book always wins.

How we rank

Rankings are ordered by fitness for the reader described in the article, not by sales figures or commission rates. When we compare two books that are close, we say so and explain which reader each one suits. Where a book has a known weakness — a fragile binding, a translation that reads badly, a chapter that repeats material from an earlier edition — we mention it next to the recommendation instead of burying it.

Titles, prices and editions change. When a book is replaced by a new edition or goes out of print, we update the article or drop the pick rather than leave a stale recommendation standing.

Amazon Associates program

CookbooksPro is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and its international equivalents. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

This means that when you follow a link from this site to Amazon and buy something, we may earn a commission. It does not change the price you pay, and it does not affect which books we recommend or where they place in a ranking: the criteria are the ones described above, and they are applied before a link is added.

• We link out to Amazon stores in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The storefront we highlight is the one that matches your region where we can detect it, and you can switch stores at any time.
• Affiliate links on this site open in a new tab and carry the sponsored attribute.
• We do not publish prices as if they were ours: prices and availability on Amazon change constantly, so the live price is always the one shown on Amazon at checkout.

Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

Corrections

If you spot a mistake — a book described incorrectly, an edition that has been superseded, a link that no longer works — please tell us at hello@cookbookspro.com. Corrections are welcome and are applied to the article itself, not to an errata page nobody reads.