ckbk's Best of 2025: Your favorite books and recipes

It’s a wrap for 2025! Another year of milestones for ckbk, including adding the 1,000th cookbook to our ever-growing online collection. Thanks to all the ckbk users, authors and publishers who have helped us along the way. Below we present a list of the books and recipes which have been used most through the year via the ckbk website and app. It’s a mouthwatering selection—please do try some of these top hits yourself, and here’s looking forward to what 2026 will bring!

Your top 20 books of 2025

1. Professional Cooking by Wayne Gisslen

2. World's Best Cakes by Roger Pizey

3. Baking & Pastry: Mastering the Art and Craft by Culinary Institute of America

4. Better Than Nonna: Modernised Italian Recipes by Danilo Cortellini

5. Professional Baking by Wayne Gisslen

6. The Flavor Equation by Nik Sharma

7. The Baking Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum

8. The Professional Pastry Chef by Bo Friberg

9. Seasons of Greens by Katie Reicher

10. Patisserie by William Curley and Suzue Curley

11. Sauces by James Peterson

12. Life's Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom by Prue Leith

13. Slurp: Simple Recipes to Elevate Your Noodles by Dennis Yen

14. The Italian Regional Cookbook by Valentina Harris

15. The Good Chicken Cookbook by Marcus Bean

16. French Pastries and Desserts by Lenôtre by Chefs at Lenôtre

17. Le Guide Culinaire by Auguste Escoffier

18. Rose's Heavenly Cakes by Rose Levy Beranbaum

19. Changing Tides by Roberta Hall McCarron

20. The Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson

Baking is clearly a passion for many ckbk users, and World’s Best Cakes from Fortnum & Mason executive pastry chef Roger Pizey shot straight to to the top of the charts, with recipes such as Turkish Tahini Cake receiving glowing reviews from ckbk users.

Chicken is another ever-popular area, and Marcus Bean’s The Good Chicken Cookbook, added this year to our Chicken bookshelf, was also an instant hit.

Trusted names such as Prue Leith and Rose Levy Beranbaum continue to provide comfort and confidence in the kitchen, but we also saw that ckbk users are an adventurous bunch, keen to try out the approachable recipes from top chefs in newly published books from Danilo Cortellini, Katie Reicher and Roberta Hall-McCarron.

The use of ckbk in culinary education is reflected in the strong showing of professional titles such as those from the CIA and Wayne Gisslen. Gisslen’s monumental Professional Cooking (8th edition) was the most heavily used title on ckbk by some margin, and so we’re very pleased to just added the new and comprehensively revised 10th edition of this standard reference work to the ckbk platform. The new edition is expanded and enhanced to include hundreds of technique videos—do check it out!

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