America's Test Kitchen: Season 8

The (real) Food Network
Season 8 is one of the very best seasons of ATK. You will never make a bad dinner or get a useless recipe from ATK. Some of my favorite Season 8 recipes include: Kansas City BBQ (a lot of work but it's well worth it), Asian Take-Out at Home (this includes 2 easy recipes) and Pepperoni Pizza (this is also a lot of work, but very well worth it). You can find all of these recipes on their Site as well. Often what I do is print up the recipe and read it as I watch the DVD and then pause it for extra time (they're so fast). The only recipes I wasn't crazy about were the Indian dishes, but that's more because of personal preference. Everything else was as usual excellent. I recommend this set to anyone who is either expanding their kitchen library or to anyone who is starting to get acclimated in domestic culinary arts for the first time.

Great Show Cheap Package
If you like the show you will like this DVD. The menu lets you pick the receipe or reveiw you want without having to fast forward through the show (an improvment from previous DVD's). Why not 5 stars? The DVD package is cheap compared to the previous DVD's.

Good show, but Non-anamorphic
Lots to like here in a cooking show that is highly instructive and blends its entertainment value thru the food and the cooking technique process. There are no catch phrases or in-your-face personalities; rather the food takes center stage with second billing going to the efforts to design and create the recipes. Even if the recipe itself is not to your tastes, there is always some very good instruction and some interesting techniques that may very well find themselves into your repertoire.

It's not perfect. I feel like many of the ethnic foods tend to be watered down, in particular, the Mexican/Tex-mex tend to be pretty blase.

By biggest gripe about this DVD set (and not the TV show) is that it is not anamorphic. So on an HD TV, this dvd shows up with bars on the top as well as the sides unless you mess with the zoom (in which case you get a muddy image). Shame on PBS for releasing a DVD like this. I haven't seen a non-anamorphic DVD in about 10 years, I...

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