The Best Cookbooks of 2025: Soju Party, Fat and Flour, Salsa Daddy, Italo Punk, and More

I've always had a soft spot for offbeat or accidental travel guides that help you understand a place in a different and usually more interesting way than something like Tripadvisor can offer. These books are like secret keys to understanding a culture. I love Fernando Pessoa's Lisbon—What the Tourist Should See, pulled from his unpublished papers in 1992, and journalist and historian András Török's quirky and loving Budapest: A Critical Guide. In the 2000s, Barcelona-based Le Cool's cloth-bound books lived up to their names and didn't make you look like a dork tourist with your Lonely Planet beside your wine glass.

If a good guide is your jam, add Soju Party to your list. Food writer Irene Yoo owns Brooklyn's Orion Bar and grew up in the US while spending summers with family in Seoul. While her book is loaded with information about soju, Korea's most consumed alcohol, and its cousins like beer and makgeolli, it is also a cultural guide, decrypting boozy, fun rituals that take place over the course of a multistage night.

Of course, it's full of recipes for drinks and drinking food, but the book may be most valuable for the way it opens up this specific and important sector of Korean life to the reader. There is basic information like how to pour for others in a group, which is often deferential to elders and respect based, and how to receive a pour. (Never pour for yourself.) There’s fun stuff like creating a soju tornado, or playing the drinking game created by twisting and flicking off the metal ring on a Soju cap. We also learn how to make haejung guk, the "hangover soup" of beef chuck, Korean radish, cabbage, and soy beans. There's even a "ode to Pocari Sweat," the electrolyte-rich drink she loves because it's neither carbonated nor too sweet, making it chuggable relief.

I made dubu kimchi, where slabs of tofu and pork belly each get a side of the plate. The pork belly, seared on its own, then bubbled with kimchi, gochugaru, garlic, and sesame oil, may briefly and wildly overwhelm your sinuses at the stove, but it provides whopping amounts of flavor, especially when paired with a belly-filling wodge of tofu. It's classic Korean drinking fare, but there's no need for the drinkers to hog all the fun.

Like Yoo's inviting tone, Heami Lee's photos cast a wonderful spell. You might be a little intimidated at first, but the book is too fun and beautiful to resist.

This book wasted no time introducing itself as my new best friend in the kitchen. Covid, explained baker-author Nicole Rucker, changed her relationship with baking, forcing a short hiatus. When she returned to her own recipes, she found them fussy and found herself wondering if some of the high-maintenance aspects of the baking craft were really necessary, especially at home.

"Why wasn't I using a stand mixer to mix my pie dough? Why does every cookie recipe in my recipe binder start with "cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy"? Why can't every recipe be as simple to put together as a good banana-bread recipe?"

She kept asking herself these questions and paring things down as she realized that a lot of what she was making could be simplified and still taste wonderful. As she did this, she found her love for baking again.

"There I was, 40 years old, back in the kitchen, finding myself in a bowl of smashed banana guts," she says. "I realized that, as I moved forward, a core value of my baking life would be to not fuck around with fussiness unless it's 100 percent necessary."

Her key innovation is applying what she calls the Cold-Butter Method, aka the “CBM,” which combines methods used for cakes (reverse creaming) and biscuits (cut in or short crust), to simplify things like cookies and pie dough.

I started with her lemony Greek yogurt pound cake, which gave me an appreciation for her encouraging and economical recipe-writing style, which gives plenty of signs of doneness so you don't get lost. The sour cream, she explains, creates a "sturdy but tender crumb" while tucking in clever techniques like starting the cake in a cold oven to give it that lovely golden brown exterior. I followed up with her "classic 1980s mom banana bread," which was nostalgic, sure, but ripping good, getting molasses flavors from both dark brown and Demerara sugar, and a bit of tang from the sour cream. I dropped off a few slices with a neighbor and bumped into her a few days later in the grocery store, where she was so effusive about it that I turned bright red, right there in the dairy section.

Rick Martinez' first book, Mi Cocina, floated right past me, and his follow-up with its curious, arcade-game graphics almost did, too. One night I brought it to bed, fired up my headlamp, and started chuckling at his funny anecdotes, including one about a bunch of dudes running around in glittering Speedos at a party. I paid attention to the way he cleverly builds flavor in a recipe, like the way he uses powdered chicken bullion—which uses MSG—as a way to bring out flavor in cooked sauces. Combine that with heaps of fun and good looking photos, and there I was, dog-earing pages at 1 am while plotting a trip to the Mexican grocery store down the street.

I made his salsa verde tatemada, a charred green salsa where the tomatillos, jalapeños, and serranos seared in my grill skillet. In the blender, those met up with sautéed poblanos, onion, and garlic, before having any remaining raw edges cooked off in a sauce pan. I was supposed to be testing other recipes and other cookbooks but I made this a couple times instead. I even brought a big batch to my friend Kristen's annual pig roast, where fans of the pig sought me out to ask about the recipe. I also made his breakfast tacos on a Saturday morning to accompany his mañanera (look it up) salsa and soft scrambled eggs with chorizo. Later, I slung up a fantastic picadillo (hash) of Mexican chorizo and shrimp, where the star ingredients absorb each other's flavors and the whole thing makes for a fun and easy dinner.

In a way, I've always kept Mexican cuisine on a pedestal, and been a little afraid to dive in and cook it. Yet here was this nonchalant, but expert cookbook, kicking the door open. There, on the inside was Martinez offering up a plate full of chilaquiles, saying "hey man, grab a Speedo!"

It might feel a little weird, sitting in the United States and reading an Italian cookbook written by a Dutch lady. But open to just about any page here, and that trepidation will dissolve. Coming at the book like a fellow food and travel writer and former cook allows van der Leeden to create something that feels like snapshots of the culinary tour of Italy of your dreams. Look at the photo of the old lady in a sundress, holding a child's drawing while taking a drag of a cigarette through her orange lipstick, or read the pull quote from Abruzzo's Sarah Cicolini, chef at Rome's Santo Palato restaurant, "if my grandmother had killed 10 chickens and was left with the entrails, she would make a kind of scrambled eggs with them." Van der Leeden, with a long history in Italy, tries to break through the country's "culinary dogmatism" where many "restaurant menus seem like state menus." If any type of cookbook is in need of a reboot, it's Italian.*

I made her puttanesca integrale, the OG umami bomb. This version uses whole wheat pasta, a natural accompaniment to anchovies, olives, garlic, and capers. Hers gets a splash of whipping cream at the end, creating flavor-lengthening luxury. I also made spezzatino, a stew usually made with veal, but made here with lamb—her spin—along with mint labneh (gasp!), and fava beans. Two of us made short work of a pot's worth in less than 24 hours. This is not a book for beginners, but if you have your culinary wits about you, you'll be fine.

Special praise should be heaped upon photographer Remko Kraaijeveld, the author's husband, whose photos bring the food to life, of course, but really make Italy seem like a place where real-feeling hungry and beautiful people live to eat. He has a stunning knack for making pictures where you feel like you are peering into peoples' souls.

Van der Leeden's Book isn't a rallying cry against culinary dogma. It's really a love letter to Italians and their cuisine, with a few reasonable-feeling changes. Sometimes she makes (and signals) these gentle tweaks, sometimes she leaves a classic alone. Sometimes, she doesn't tell you if she's changed anything or not. How punk is that?

*(OK, maybe French too.)

I'm a fan of big swings from the heart, which can be helpful for readers who pick up a single-subject cookbook. Those can get really boring without that go-for-broke chutzpah, but when they get it right, it's insane; Think back to the bonkers bliss induced by last year's Big Dip Energy. That level of intensity, with a very different style, is now being channeled into instant ramen noodles.

Peter J. Kim, founding director of Brooklyn's Museum of Food and Drink, podcaster, and Pinterest dude, has just the right approach. Instant ramen has inexpensively fed billions—stoners and college kids, of course, but really, everybody. Kim gives a nice dose of history, including how inventor Momofuku Ando "developed a technique for deep frying noodles that simultaneously made them slow to spoil and fast to cook." He also notes that a Fuji Research Institute poll of 2,000 Kanto region region residents concluded that instant ramen was the greatest Japanese invention of the 20th century.

Kim and the folks at Chronicle clearly put a lot of thought into the book with a noodle-themed design and font, that compact and enjoyable history, some philosophy, a bit of filler, and a fun "field guide" to highlight many of the great brands around the world. I'm currently trying Sapporo Ichiban, which Kim likes for its "springier noodles due to the addition of tapioca starch" and 15 percent larger-than-normal portion size.

There are plenty of inventive and traditional recipes in the book, all of them designed to go from start to slurp in under 20 minutes. My favorite so far is the kimchi jjigae ramen, where sizzled cabbage and bacon are combined with half the seasoning packet, kimchi, and water in which the noodle cake (as it's called) and cubed tofu cook. Moments later, you pour it into your bowl, and add a splash of kimchi juice and a shower of thin-sliced scallions. Uncharacteristically classy for instant ramen? Perhaps, but still fast.