It's that time of year again. The time when legacy brands mark up their prices so they can pretend things are on sale at a massive markdown!

Most of these brands are lying — at least a little bit — but that doesn't mean there aren't still some good deals in the mix. We'll also compare them to their actual historic prices rather than the fake prices listed on product pages.

We'll be scoping out all the sales to find the best products at the best prices through Monday. If you think we're missing something, drop us a comment or a message on TikTok or Instagram!

Oops, All Smashes: Black Friday 2022 Edition

Over the course of 10 weekdays, we're pitting as many as we can of the internet's favorite Thanksgiving recipes against each other to come up with Cult Flav's first-ever Ultimate Thanksgiving Menu.

We're rating each recipe based on 4 metrics:

 How good does it taste? Will it play nice with the rest of the meal?

 Do you need to know lots of techniques or track down hard-to-find ingredients? Does it require extra equipment?

 Is it a showstopper or just another plate on the table? Is it an update to the formula or just another take on the same-old?

 Is it worth the time and money spent to make it?

We'll both score every dish from 1-10 (secretly, so we don't influence each other) then average all of the scores out to calculate our final Cult Score. The highest score in each category is our winner.

Every weekday from Monday, November 7th until Friday, November 18th, we'll update this page with our winners, so you'll have all the info just in time to plan out your Thanksgiving meal.

Building the Best GD TG Menu on the Internet

While the ingredients are easy to find, the recipes read like they were written by a confident hand who's made the dishes a hundred times. Like a true kitchen veteran wrote these recipes and doesn't have time or patience for a beginner.

In preparation for this cookbook review, I watched “The Big Night”: the film that this book’s existence is largely credited to. The concept of a film centered around a struggling, fledgling restaurant, especially one where the star of the show is really just a giant meal centerpiece — a pastry-wrapped, baked pasta dish called a Timpano — was right up my alley. The drama of unveiling that dish alone had me on the edge of my seat, and the movie gave me a huge spike of energy going into my week.

The whole premise of this book is inspiring: Stanley uses his experience and time working on “Big Night” to not only document and encapsulate the recipes that his mother and grandmothers made living in southern Italy, but also to share the spotlight with a friend from the north of Italy and showcase some of what makes those regions so special.

With unbridled optimism, I walked into the kitchen that first day ready to make Stanley’s grandmother, Concetta’s stuffed artichokes and maybe learn a thing or two from a true Italian nonna. That optimism quickly deteriorated when I realized that the recipe was written as if said grandmother were guiding you over the phone — while the instructions were written with the confident hand of someone who'd made the dish a hundred times, there were very few details to be found that would help a newcomer to the dish. Needless to say, my artichokes did not turn out well.

I wish I could tell you that the artichokes were the only dish like this, but day after day, I kept getting this feeling that the recipes were missing something, or at the very least, that I needed a Tucci matron standing over my shoulder offering pearls of wisdom to help me reach my goal.

By day three, I abandoned Stanley's timing estimates altogether, and focused on any visual indicators offered (which weren’t a lot) and it didn’t help that photos are few and far between. Again, I kept getting the feeling that in my nonna-less condition, there was simply no way I could achieve the intended outcome.

By the end of my week, I was left questioning everything I thought I understood about cooking after so few wins. Seriously, of the whole week, the wine pairings were the best part.

I don’t think I’ll be opening "The Tucci Cookbook” up again anytime soon but, after a solid week with it, I can confidently say that if you are a particularly huge fan of Stanley’s work in “Big Night” — or just a member of the Tucci family — then I think you’d enjoy having this book on your shelf.

Amazon

The recipe layout for this book is simple and to the point. There are very few pictures to go along with the recipes, and serving sizes, wine pairing and any variations are all listed at the end of the recipe. 

If Stanley Tucci made me any of these dishes I would be so grateful. That being said, there wasn't one day when I didn't either have the urge to amend a time estimate or flavor profile. Especially those eggs in the Timpano. 

The Tucci Cookbook

If you are a member of the Tucci family or a massive fan of the movie "Big Night" which inspired this book, then I think you'd enjoy having this book on your shelf. However, because the audience is so narrow, I'm not sure that most home cooks would have the value they're looking for from "The Tucci Cookbook." 

Being a collection of Stanley Tucci family recipes, this book is riddled with anecdotes from his upbringing, and honestly this is one of the best parts of the book.

A handful of ingredients can be tricky to find locally, but everything was easily available online within a couple of days. The recipes are super approachable — even when they seem tricky, the steps are explained so clearly that they're easy to reproduce.

As someone who is decidedly not vegan (and carries a longstanding disdain for vegan butters), I can confirm that Mission Vegan is something entirely different and a book meant for flavor-lovers of all stripes.

Not only did Danny avoid most of the “alternatives” that are commonly found in vegan dishes; he managed to make his dishes stand out by adding colors and flavors that would make any carnivore question where that meaty flavor is coming from? (Spoiler: It's probably mushrooms.)

The directions keep the home cook in mind by breaking everything down into easy-to-follow steps. He doesn't always define every culinary term (and honestly, not every book should do that ad infinitum), but he's not using anything so complex that a quick Google wouldn't get you where you need to be.

Pro tip: don’t skip out on making a few of Danny’s kimchi recipes! He’s put a lot of thought into making these recipes approachable and safe for beginners and several of the recipes are super fun takes on classics that will impress your friends for very little effort. Definitely make the watermelon kimchi and be prepared to have your mind blown by how amazing that rind is. (Seriously, wtf Danny.)

Dishes like the Matcha Pho, Buckwheat Noodles with Dragonfruit Ice (the most interesting thing we've eaten in months), Tiger Salad, and the Smashed Cucumbers with Tingly Granola (easily the best example of its ever-popular category) will all be going into regular rotation for us. 

Several of these, we immediately turned around and served to friends and they were all shocked that A) they were vegan dishes, and B) that they were so damn interesting to eat. 

In fact, the only dishes that were a slight miss for us were the Chilled Tofu in Peanut Milk and the Pineapple Kimchi Fried Rice. But these dishes are so simple and minimal that it was easy to see which variables to tweak and bring them up to their full potential.

The hardest part of the week was in tracking down a couple of less-common ingredients like pink peppercorns, Sichuan peppercorn oil, and freeze-dried dragon fruit powder in stores. Pro tip: they're super easy to find online. If in question, start there.

If you’re a cook who expects your finished dish to turn out exactly like the photos, you may need to add some edible flowers to your shopping cart too. Most of our dishes turned out pretty damn close to the super vibe-y inspirational photos, but he definitely does touch up his photos with a couple of embellishments. We left the week extremely jealous of his translucent dish collection.

So, who is this for? If you're even a little interested in getting into some moderately experimental Korean- and Chinese-inspired food (vegan or otherwise), and you don’t mind throwing together a handful of simple prep ingredients from scratch like his Whipped Garlic Sauce or Umami Salt + Pepper, then I think you’ll really love this book.

Not doing a ton creatively here, but the photos are gorgeous, accurate to the finished dishes, and the information is laid out cleanly and logically.

Our biggest issue was the number of dependencies that maybe didn't need to be included ("Umami Salt + Pepper" for example). Sure they were additive and we can't argue with the outcomes, but it seemed to be optimized for avoiding repetition in the book at the expense of cooking ergonomics.

Danny's flavors blew us away. We weren't too optimistic going in because we've had so many vegan versions of dishes that were lacking, but we were so damn wrong.

Several times we called out dishes as being the best thing we've eaten all year.

Mission Vegan

Absolutely. No book has been more worth its cover price so far this year.

Don't hesitate on this one. It's a complete gem.

The writing is super smooth: flowing from idea to idea clearly and really focusing on the recipes and why they're present in the book.

Every recipe intro was worth reading and blended personal anecdote with pro tips on how to get the best out of the recipe that followed.

All of the ingredients in this book are easily found at a local grocery store. The recipes are short, sweet and to the point, and they even offer QR codes so if you're new to cooking or need a refresher on how to slice fennel, Molly's got you covered. However, we dropped some points for the suggested 2.5-3hours cook time on the Piri-Piri(ish) chicken recipe. That's just too long.

This is one of the more personality-forward cookbooks I’ve reviewed, and I think you definitely have to be into Molly’s whole shtick to fully appreciate it. Abbrevs abound with “k-bas” standing in for “kielbasa”, “potato c’s” replacing “potato chips” (Editor’s note: this does not reduce the number of syllables), and, of course, the obligatory “cae sal”. Et tu, Bru?

The book is meant to provide “techniques that teach and recipes to repeat”, and I think this book has a lot of good qualities about it. Her direction on how to re-balance a dish that’s too salty, sweet, or sour is great advice (we'll get back to the irony of this shortly)! I also agree whole-heartedly with her golden rules — especially tips like cooking to the visual indicator. That kind of advice firmly plants this book into the “Beginner Cookbook” category for us, so we turned off our intuition and cooked it explicitly as-written (like a beginner would) and judged it within that context.

One great trick is the clever QR codes sprinkled through the intro to help if it’s your first time slicing a fennel bulb or making mayonnaise. That thoughtful detail set my expectations high with this book — I was honestly hoping to see more of those little tricks sprinkled throughout, but what I got from the recipes themselves was underwhelming and mostly focused on plating aesthetics.

Most of the recipes were middling, but some just flat out didn’t work as written. The Piri Piri(-ish) Chicken sounded great in theory, but due to its lack of internal seasoning and extremely long recommended cook time was dry and mostly flavorless. Dishes like the Grapefruit and Burrata Salad with Chili Crisp also leaned too much on a single flavor profile (in this case, bitter) or non-complementary textures in the case of Shrimp with 20 Cloves of Garlic which made them a little tiring to eat.

We did have some hits alongside the misses though, and there were a few little touches we loved, such as Molly's use of sambal oelek in the Linguine and Clams recipe and the heavenly Master Beans to add ferment-y depth and a little bit of kick where things could otherwise be boring. That was where this book really excelled for us — making tiny, thoughtful improvements to basic dishes.

After 5 intensive days with this book, I can confidently say that if you are someone who loves Molly Baz (and aren't afraid of a little salt) you’ll really enjoy this cookbook.

Molly has really invested in photos for almost every recipe, ingredients broken down into sections, and cooking steps laid out for efficiency.

There were a couple of dishes that simply fell flat for us out of this week. The grapefruit and burrata salad and Piri Piri(ish) chicken being the big two. Aside from those dishes, the rest were decent weeknight meals.

Cook This Book

There is some great advice in this book that I think a beginner to cooking would get value from, but I deducted points because the actual recipes fail to call back to the lessons taught in the beginning of the book.

Everything but the recipes in this book are written well. Molly's advice to cook to the visual indicator or how to re-balance a dish that's too salty, sweet or sour is great advice. However, she fails to revisit that information within the recipes. If she wanted a beginner friendly cookbook, I would have expected more of a call-back to some of those pearls of wisdom. 

Hear me out. The ingredients are hard to find for those of us who are new to Sichuan food. BUT, Fuchsia goes above and beyond describing techniques and offering photos of ingredients that may be tough to find.

I knew I wanted to review a Chinese cookbook this year, and Bryn's been in love with this book for years now (full disclosure: our 

 are both inspired by dishes we first tried making from this book). While I've eaten a ton of excellent Chinese food, I haven’t cooked much Chinese food at all — let alone specific regional cuisines like those from the famous Sichuan province.

I cracked this book open and started reading about Fuchsia’s journey into Sichuanese cuisine. Her passion for the food and culture of the region jumped out of the page and instantly got me hooked. 

The next thing I knew I was ordering chile bean paste (

), and learning the difference between light soy sauce (

). I dove into prep for this review by producing enough beef and chicken stock to last a year and failing in an attempt to make a fermented glutinous rice wine (though I think my rice wine was doomed from the beginning due to an intense heat wave). 

With my pantry stocked, I was ready for Monday, and rolled up my sleeves to fry some pork belly. Unfortunately, I was unable to find the ideal cut (skin-on pork rump) and used one of the backup recommendations (skin-on pork belly) which made the end result similar to the texture of bacon with a tire wrapped around it. Not great.

The hard thing about writing recipes — 

 — is that measurements are usually correlated to something that the author is experiencing. A recipe might say "Carefully pour off all but 3 tbsp oil from the wok", but what they often mean is "leave enough to cover the bottom" which is sometimes not specific enough for new cooks. Recipes are often at their best when the reader can infer what the author meant, rather than following a recipe to the letter (which, let me tell you, makes reviewing cookbooks... interesting).

The flavors in these recipes are complex, spicy, rich, and inviting. Nearly every dish we made was perfectly balanced between spicy and numbing or sour and sweet. The only recipe that needed a little adjustment was the hot pot: it called for 75 grams of dried chilies and 200 grams of beef tallow (making oil nearly 10% of the contents of the pot). 

Again, I think this comes down to inference. We've had Sichuanese hot pot many times, but I've never encountered one with that much oil — and it made consuming the dish quite difficult at first. After doing a little math and introducing some extra broth and skimming about 120g of oil off the top, that hot pot was to die for.

With my first week of Sichuanese cookery under my belt thanks to "The Food of Sichuan", I can honestly say that if you’re interested in getting started with Sichuanese cuisine (or learning about Chinese regional cuisines in general), I highly recommend getting this book for your shelf. Not only does Fuchsia take the time to break down everything from common tools to pantry staples found in traditional Sichuanese cooking, she also includes unique and entertaining anecdotes about each recipe. I highly recommend reading the sidebars before starting to cook. Fuchsia usually peppers in tips and tricks for the recipe that I have found very helpful, but are easily missed.

I'm a big fan of books that offer photo representations wherever possible. This is most important as someone who is new to Sichuan cooking. Not only did Fuchsia make it easy to follow her directions, but the photos she includes for each dish helped me better match my outcome.

95% of the dishes I made were balanced, and delightful. The only serious issue we had was with the Hot Pot recipe, but after we skimmed off some oil and diluted the chilies it was killer.

The Food of Sichuan

Fuchsia's passion for Chinese food shines through in this book. Between her expert advice for western cooks, and the brilliantly detailed anecdotes from her time living in Sichuan, this book is perfect for anyone interested in cooking or learning about Chinese regional cuisines in general.

Fuchsia will transport you to the Land of Plenty with her anecdotes and experiences living in the Sichuan region. 