👩‍🍳 Cook like a pro + make the most of Seville orange season 🍊

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Let’s be professional about this

It is a joy to us at ckbk that our resource—now over 1,000 cookbooks—is helping both home cooks to discover great recipes to enjoy, and professional chefs and culinary students in their ongoing development and careers. Looking at our most popular books of 2025, we found several of our extensive collection of professional books in your top 20. Two of these are by chef, culinary consultant, and expert in the field of culinary education, bestselling author Wayne Gisslen. We are delighted to kick off 2026 with the new 10th edition of Wayne’s classic Professional Cooking.

‘Like the previous editions, the Tenth Edition of Professional Cooking reflects the changing nature of our understanding of cooking and related fields such as food safety, nutrition, and dietary practices, as well as new thinking about how best to teach this material. What has not changed is the core material that focuses on the essentials—the comprehensive understanding of ingredients and basic cooking techniques that are the foundation of success in the kitchen, and the development of manual skills to apply this knowledge.’

The updates in the new edition—all recipes reviewed and refreshed, clearer signposting for special diets, simplified metric to Imperial conversion—are good news for chefs.

But you don’t have to be a chef to learn from and enjoy the wealth of good food in Professional Cooking. It is rooted in basic techniques, core recipes, and using those to develop your repertoire and confidence—an approach useful for all. With its 587 recipes this is a gastronomic epic, with ideas and guidance for every occasion.

Plan a meal starting with a Shrimp Bisque, followed by Chicken Fricassee, with some Roman-Style Spinach, and then wow them with this Vanilla Soufflé for dessert.

You will also find links to over 200 videos demonstrating key techniques—see for example, the video at the end of the recipe for Éclair Paste.

All recipes from the new 10th edition of Professional Cooking

Pictured above: Grilled Marinated Pork Tenderloin with Sweet Potato Purée and Warm Chipotle Salsa from Professional Cooking: 10th Edition by Wayne Gisslen

A delicious homage to chicken

Chicken is a perennial favorite, with so many of us reaching for it as a versatile, nutritious, and popular staple.

Multi-accoladed chef, Matt Horn, is the creative drive behind Horn Hospitality, a restaurant group including the chicken-centred Kowbird restaurants in Oakland, California and Las Vegas.

In his recent book Kowbird: Amazing Chicken Recipes from Chef Matt Horn’s Restaurant and Home Kitchen, he leaves us in no doubt of his love of the bird, and its role in his food. As he puts it: ‘The traditions—agricultural, culinary, familial, and cultural—that inform my cooking, at Kowbird and my other restaurants, and at home, originate primarily from one place: the South.

While the South is celebrated for many signature foods—from collards, okra, and mustard greens to pork shoulder, beef brisket, and all kinds of ribs—I’ve come to believe that the unheralded heart of Southern cooking is, quite simply, chicken. Relatively easy to grow in one’s own backyard or a small plot of land, relatively inexpensive to buy from a neighboring farmer or the grocery store, chicken is core food, the main-dish protein, that has sustained many generations of Southerners, right up to the present. This book is an homage to that tradition and a celebration of its stories and its flavors.’

Matt’s book contains in-depth understanding of his ingredient and cuisine; from Chicken Breeds to Preserving Southern Culinary Traditions. The recipes are gorgeously photographed, and include classics and the less well-known, as well as sides and something for dessert. Try Nashville Hot Chicken, or Chicken and Dumplings, with Southern Green Beans with Bacon, and then a Mississippi Mud Pie.

Find all 66 recipes from Kowbird

Ingredient focus: Seville oranges

Oranges are a universally popular citrus fruit, many sweet varieties of which are juiced and eaten raw. Seville oranges come from a different species to the majority of sweet oranges, and have an arid flesh and juice, too intense to be consumed raw. The juice is used in many dishes, particularly in the Caribbean—such as this Glazed Pork from Haiti—and the fruit is an essential for marmalade.

Seville orange season is December to February, so the time to source fruit and get out the preserving pan if you can. But it is worth knowing that you can freeze the fruit when in season, and cook later when you have time.

To find a recipe for a classic Seville Orange Marmalade explore our collection of 12 Ways with Seville Oranges. Try this Seville Chicken Salad; the meat benefitting from a marmalade glaze, or this 18th Century: Jaune Mange (pictured above), a gorgeously yellow, Seville orange juice flavored version of a blancmange.

6 of the best hot & spicy dishes

January 16 is International Hot & Spicy Food Day, and in honor of the day we celebrate food that gets our blood pumping and our tastebuds tingling. Here are six hot-spicy treats for you.