Announcing a New Bakers Dozen Special Interest Group to Discuss “Cook’s Illustrated” Magazine
Are you an avid reader of this bi-monthly magazine? Perhaps you’re a subscriber. Or maybe you occasionally pick up an issue when the spirit—or the cover—moves you.
Do its recipes make your heart (and belly) sing? Or does reading “Cook’s Illustrated” sometimes make you feel like rolling your eyes—or writing a letter to its editor? We hear you!
Because Bakers Dozen can’t consistently meet and share ideas together in person, we’ve decided to launch a new pilot program, a Special Interest Group designed to support the continuing education of our members who read and bake from “Cook’s Illustrated” magazine.
In this Special Interest Group, every other month, members will get together on Zoom to compare notes about the current issue of the magazine. We’ll discuss the delights—and any landmines—encountered when preparing the current issue’s baking-related recipes. If a participant has recently prepared a recipe from the current issue and wants to hold it up in front of the camera and tell us about it, that would be welcome, but not expected. This will be a moderated discussion group along the lines of a book group, and not a hands-on activity.
Open to Bakers Dozen members only, the group will meet for 90 minutes every other month, on the second Thursday, from 10:00 to 11:30 AM PT, on these dates:
• October 13, 2022, to discuss the September/October 2022 issue
• December 8, 2022, to discuss the November/December 2022 issue
• February 9, 2023, to discuss the January/February 2023 issue
Serving as the moderator of these Zoom gatherings will be veteran Bakers Dozen member, cookbook author, and culinary instructor Linda Carucci. Linda has had a love-hate relationship with “Cook’s Illustrated” since reading its very first issue, cover to cover, back in 1993. She hasn’t missed reading every word of every issue ever since and she’s always managed to find something compelling in its pages, whether it’s a food scientist’s explanation of why boiling an egg creates a blueish ring around the hard-cooked yolk, or a sidebar about how to prevent kitchen tongs from getting tangled up in storage. She’s reproduced many scrumptious baked goods from the magazine’s well-tested recipes. And she’s even written a letter to the editor of the magazine—and seen its impact.
RSVP by Monday, October 10. The Zoom link for the meeting will be sent to all who register. These pilot program meetings will not be recorded.
We hope you’ll join us on Thursday, October 13 for our first lively discussion. Copies of the current (September/October 2022) issue are on newsstands now.
About our Moderator
The French Laundry’s Thomas Keller has called Linda Carucci “the consummate teacher, cook, and coach all rolled into one.” (She promises she didn’t pay him to say that.) The granddaughter of an Italian cheesemaker, Linda has dedicated the past 30+ years to teaching cooking, both in professional chef training schools and to home cooks across the U.S. and beyond.
Linda is the author of “Cooking School Secrets for Real World Cooks” (Chronicle Books, 2005), honored as a finalist for both James Beard and IACP Julia Child First Book awards. An updated, larger-format second edition of “Cooking School Secrets” was named a “Washington Post” Best Cookbook of 2016.
The former dean of the California Culinary Academy (her alma mater), Linda also served as the inaugural Julia Child Curator of Food Arts at COPIA in Napa. She has worked as a live-in private chef for a prominent San Francisco family and has cooked at and managed restaurants and culinary operations in several San Francisco Bay Area kitchens including Greens restaurant, UCSF Medical Center’s Department of Nutrition and Dietetics, and Paula LeDuc Fine Catering.
In 2002, Linda ’s peers in the International Association of Culinary Professionals voted her Cooking Teacher of the Year. She has since been honored with several awards including Educator of the Year from Women Chefs & Restaurateurs and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the San Francisco Professional Food Society.
Since the early months of the COVID lockdown, Linda has been teaching Zoom cooking classes from her Oakland home kitchen including a regular series, Cooking with Seasonal Produce, for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at UC Berkeley. Along with Marlene Sorosky, Linda presented our first Bakers Dozen Zoom cooking class featuring Focaccia Barese. She teaches monthly Healthy Cooking on a Budget classes for the Cancer Support Community of the Bay Area. Linda is a Bakers Dozen member of longstanding and is excited about discussing the baking-related pleasures and pitfalls of “Cook’s Illustrated” with other Bakers Dozen members near and far.
