The Recipes Andrew Rea Was Nervous To Include In His Cookbook – Exclusive

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Andrew Rea is the first to admit that he's not a formally trained chef in any capacity. Instead, he credits his expansive culinary knowledge to trial and error. In a recent, exclusive Mashed interview, he told us, "I...am a perpetual beginner. I specifically don't rehearse dishes before I do them on camera so that I can catch my screw-ups. I like to show them as learning experiences, and it's therapeutic for me, as someone who's beaten up on themselves for making mistakes their entire life. It's nice to reclaim [those mistakes] as learning experiences, and it's where the sum total of my cooking knowledge has come from."

This fact heavily informed Rea's new cookbook, "Basics with Babish." The cookbook, which was released in late October, is all about making mistakes and learning from them. The text features more than a hundred recipes that all contain ample details about what mistakes might occur during the cooking or baking process, how to troubleshoot them, and what mistakes Rea himself made while writing the recipe. However, while Rea has years of experience cooking on camera, most famously recreating famous dishes from movie and TV shows, as well as, in his estimation, a lifetime of trial and error-based experience, there were still a few recipes he was nervous to include in his cookbook — or rather, an entire chapter that he was nervous to include in the cookbook: the pizza section.