What Andrew Rea Likes Most About His New Cookbook - Exclusive

Andrew Rea's new cookbook, "Basics with Babish" — based on his popular YouTube series "Binging with Babish" — offers a lot to love. The book is packed with more than 100 recipes, all impressive for being so focused on the basics. It's chock-full of gorgeous food photography, tips, tricks, and notes from Rea detailing how recipes work, where they can go wrong, and everything else a beginner in the kitchen might need to know. But for Rea, there's one element of the book that he likes most.

In an exclusive interview with Mashed, he told us, "One of the features of the book that I'm proudest of is that every recipe comes with a description of how I've personally screwed up, because there's not a recipe in that book that I haven't messed up at one point or another, especially the first time making it. By describing in detail how the person who wrote the recipe has messed it up, that makes it more accessible and a little less scary to try for the first timer."

Accessibility is at the heart of this new cookbook, the full title of which is "Basics with Babish: Recipes for Screwing Up, Trying Again, and Hitting It Out of the Park." The book is definitely all about making mistakes, with the idea that your cooking experience, especially as a beginner, doesn't have to be perfect. You can make mistakes and it will be okay; you can try again. To drive that point home, Andrew Rea is completely open about his own cooking mistakes. 

The vibe and voice-y approach make each recipe feel, as he noted, a little more accessible — even if the recipe is for something that normally might not feel accessible at all, like pain au chocolat. Rea explained of writing the recipe: "A croissant is one of the more difficult things you could possibly attempt in the kitchen, much less without a specific machine designed for laminating bread. I wrote the headnote [for that recipe] in the voice of one's inner monologue, which is usually discouraging — at least mine is, telling me all the reasons why I can't make pain au chocolat and why I shouldn't even try. My hope with that one is to hold up a mirror to the ridiculous, negative self-talk that can prevent you from even trying a recipe."

"Basics with Babish" by Andrew Rea is out now wherever books are sold.