The best new cookbooks offer so much more than recipes, they tell stories, provide history and context, and share culinary traditions, rituals and memories, inviting readers into the lives of their authors. Great cookbooks like great recipes provide so much more than instructions to making delicious dishes. They offer opportunities to get a taste of a place and an insight into the culture and lives of the people of that place. Many of the best new cookbooks of 2025 did just that. The best cookbooks of 2026 look just as promising.
If you’re looking for cooking inspiration, seek out some of my picks of the best new cookbooks of 2025. These are the cookbooks that inspired me so much I read them cover to cover, cooked many of their recipes, continue to cook from them, and would gift them if I had friends who adored cookbooks as much as Terence and I do. Browsing cookbook sections of bookshops is one of our favourite things to do when we travel.
I grew up with cookbooks. Sorting through stuff at Mum’s before moving her last year I was continually finding old cookbooks, from Margaret Fulton tomes with torn jackets and dog-eared pages, and an Encyclopedia of Creative Cooking series, to the same soft-cover Bay Books cookbooks Terence and I have in storage in Sydney. Sadly, the Joy of Cooking and Larousse Gastronomique that Dad and I gifted Mum for Mother’s Day when I was a child didn’t turn up.
Then there were the cookbooks that weighed down luggage Terence and I left at Mum’s over the years. Cookbooks gifted to us from chefs filled most of one of Terence’s suitcases, including an inscribed copy of David Thompson’s Thai Street Food (a birthday gift for Terence when we lived in Bangkok) and the cookbook of the Four Seasons Hotel restaurants on Cyprus, which I was thrilled to find: their pan-fried mullet remains one of the finest pieces of fish I’ve ever eaten.
I’m lucky to occasionally get sent cookbooks by publishers, although I can’t recommend all I receive. I donated a couple of bestsellers to charity shops, where I’ve also picked up new cookbooks. It’s surprising what people give away ;) And if you are looking for cooking inspiration, do browse our round-up of 25 most popular recipes of 2025 if you missed it.
Before you scroll down to the best new cookbooks of 2025, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-supported. If you’ve enjoyed our stories and recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo by buying something on Amazon, such as one the books below, or one of these cookbooks for culinary travellers or classic cookbooks for serious cooks; or buy a handcrafted KROK, the best mortar and pestle ever; or book a cooking class or a meal with locals on EatWith.
Looking for more cooking inspo? Our archives are brimming with thousands of recipes from around the world from places we’ve lived, worked, travelled, and loved. And you can save your favourites in a private account by clicking on the heart on the right of any post. Now let me tell you all about the best new cookbooks of 2025 that I loved.
Best New Cookbooks of 2025 Offer So Much More Than Recipes
These are my picks of the best new cookbooks that I read and cooked from. By no means a comprehensive list of cookbooks published in 2025, these are simply the cookbooks I loved. You can take it for granted that the recipes work, that they’re easy to follow, and they result in delicious dishes. All the cookbooks below get a big tick on the practical side. But I look for so much more in a cookbook.
I’m not a fan of cookbooks (or blogs) that are just about the recipes with no introduction to the cuisine, the dish and its context. I don’t need to be told about a “game-changing” or “groundbreaking” technique that my grandmother was using, nor see step-by-step photos showing something being stirred in a bowl, and I definitely never need to see an image of labelled ingredients laid out on a white marble kitchen counter. Please.
I prefer cookbooks where the author has a personal connection to the cuisine they’re writing about. Love family recipes, but they don’t have to be family recipes. It could be that like London-based Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi, the author is revisiting the cuisine of their homeland, or, like Ella Mittas, documenting a cooking journey of discovery and connection. I want a cookbook that inspires as much as it sates.
If You Only Buy One Cookbook
This is my top recommendation of the best new cookbooks of 2025.
Boustany, A Celebration of Vegetables from my Palestine by Sami Tamimi
If you only buy one book, make it Boustany, A Celebration of Vegetables from my Palestine, an exquisite cookbook by Jerusalem-born, Palestinian chef Sami Tamimi. If you’ve travelled the Middle East, adore the region, and love to cook and eat Middle Eastern food as much as we do, you’ll adore Sami Tamimi’s book – even if you’re not vegetarian and, like me, still occasionally eat meat and have what I’d call a vegetable-driven diet.
But first, a confession: I’m probably one of the few food writers in the world who had never even seen let alone cooked from a cookbook by the Ottolenghi ‘family’ until I opened Boustany. So forgive me if I gush a little. Of course I was familiar with Sami Tamimi’s and Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipes published in The Guardian, as both a regular reader and infrequent contributor. But I’d never even held one of their cookbooks.
While Terence and I lived in the Middle East for the best part of a decade and authored loads of guidebooks to the region, unfortunately when we lived in the UAE there was only one good bookshop in Dubai. We also remember the days when Dubai had only one good restaurant!
We then moved to Southeast Asia, where we only had access to great bookshops with good cookbook sections during our year living in Bangkok. And I don’t ever recall seeing an Ottolenghi cookbook in a Southeast Asian bookshop. But since receiving Boustany, I finally get it. I’ll be checking the library for Tamimi and Ottolenghi’s other cookbooks.
If the names are new to you, Sami Tamimi’s career began in Tel Aviv where he cooked at Lilith restaurant for five years. Funnily enough, Terence and I dined there on our one and only trip to Israel and Occupied Palestine, but by then Tamimi had moved to the UK, in 1997.
In London, Tamimi quickly made his name at Baker & Spice for injecting creativity into their deli and catering, before partnering with Yotam Ottolenghi whom he’d worked with there to open the first Ottolenghi deli. Tamimi and Ottolenghi would go on to open five delis, a catering business, two restaurants, and write two cookbooks together, Ottolenghi and Jerusalem. Tamimi co-authored a third cookbook, Falastin, with Tara Wigley.
While Tamimi is from Jerusalem, Boustany (which means ‘my garden’ in Arabic) is a tribute to his grandparents, the love they injected into their flourishing garden in a village near Hebron, and the flavours of his childhood. It’s also a homage to Palestinians, to Palestinian food, culinary traditions and culture, and to Palestine itself, his “spiritual home”.
Tamimi “weaves together stories, memories and emotions” that encapsulate the dishes, as he writes in his intro, providing insights into the specialties of Palestine, and the stories and context behind them. The recipes are a reflection of his roots, telling the story of the food of his homeland. And what a story it is.
Although we’ve been cooking Middle Eastern food for a couple of decades, eating it for even longer, and I’m familiar with the food of the region – I had Palestinian friends, students and colleagues when we worked in the UAE, and we’ve been to Jerusalem and Occupied Palestine – I’ve learnt so much from Boustany.
Of course, as Tamimi acknowledges, this is his take on Palestinian food. While the book includes traditional Palestinian dishes that he grew up with, like fattoush and mujadara, there are also recreations of classics that are fresh and new while still staying loyal to their origins, as well as entirely new inventions using Palestinian ingredients and flavours.
For instance, Tamimi explains that on a trip to Mexico, his first taste of migas con huevos or heuvos con tortilla* inspired a recipe for braised eggs with pita, tomatoes and za’atar, which I haven’t tried yet, but looks like a cross between migas, fatteh and shakshouka. (*Terence also got creative with migas: his ‘migas tortilla’ here).
I was thrilled to see Tamimi’s takes on recipes from Gaza, including his vivid green rendition of Falafel Ghazawi, which he says is often made with a mixture of chickpeas, fava beans, green chillies, spring onions, and coriander seeds, but which he makes with broad beans, leeks, herbs, and spices. He also has a fairly traditional Salata Ghazawiya chopped salad, which is wonderful. I’m a fan of a good village salad or garden salad.
One of my biggest travel regrets was never having got to Gaza. But visiting Occupied Palestine was challenging enough. Despite travelling to Israel to do a feel-good story on a trip supported by Israeli Tourism, Terence and I were held in a cage crossing a Ramallah checkpoint, interrogated twice (one experience was particularly surreal), and had our laptops and phones confiscated and searched. It wasn’t something we wanted to repeat.
Tamimi also has a recipe for a dry Gazan dukkah, the Middle Eastern seed, nut and spice mix that’s enjoyed by dipping bread into olive oil, then into the dukkah. (I’m a dukkah lover and have a few dukkah recipes on the site). Tamimi writes that Duqqa Ghazawiya is known “as the ‘soil of the Gazans’, for its earthy shade”, which brought me to tears.
Because tragically, there’s little soil left healthy enough to grow anything in Gaza. Most of the land has been so contaminated by intensive bombardment it’s been described as an “ecocide” and “environmental apocalypse” and could take decades to recover. Indeed, most of Gaza has been pulverised. Not only have homes, hospitals, schools, universities, and businesses been flattened, but orchards, olive groves, farmland, and greenhouses have been destroyed by Israeli forces to create a ‘buffer zone’.
A heartwrenching account in The Guardian of the return to Gaza by a Palestinian doctor held for 665 days in an Israeli prison, where he was cut off entirely from news from home, describes arriving in Gaza, his chest tightening and tears flowing upon seeing the scale of destruction and finding “every place he had returned to in his memories had been obliterated”. He lamented that there was no future in Gaza, nowhere to go. “No green spaces,” he says. “Gaza used to have life; restaurants, beaches. Now there is nothing left.”
Being the granddaughter of World War Two refugees who started a new life in Australia from nothing, enriching their family with lovingly prepared meals and stories around their dining table for many years, I thought: but you have the food, the wonderful, comforting, nourishing Palestinian food, imbued with so many memories, and you can take that with you wherever you go – just as Sami Tamimi did. I’m so grateful he’s given us a taste of Gaza and greater Palestine through Boustany.
More of the Best New Cookbooks I Loved
In no particular order, these are more of the best new cookbooks of 2025 that I loved and have been cooking from.
Ela! Ela! To Turkey and Greece, a Journey Home Through Food by Ella Mittas
We’ve spent a lot of time in Turkey and Greece over the years and it’s not uncommon to be in Turkey and hear someone say the Greeks stole such and such a dish from them. And vice versa, to hear the same in Greece about a Turkish specialty. The histories of Greece and Turkey are so intertwined, it’s easy to find culinary remnants of one culture within the other.
I love a cookbook that makes connections between cuisines and cultures, because in these divisive times we’ve never needed to connect more with eachother. And as a travel writer, I love a cookbook that evokes a sense of place and, even better, takes me on a journey of discovery as the author explores the food of that place, or places, as Ella Mittas does in Ela! Ela! To Turkey and Greece, a Journey Home Through Food.
Ella Mittas is an Australian chef-writer of Greek heritage who, while learning to cook Turkish food in Melbourne, recognised connections. She sets off to work in Greece, but while waiting for her visa heads to Istanbul, where she gets work in a Turkish restaurant. Things don’t go as planned, so she moves on to the Aegean coast near Izmir, where the food of the two cultures meet. From the beach she can see the Greek island of Chios.
Ella gets work in a restaurant called Babushka ran by a Russian called Olga who fell in love with Turkish food. Things don’t turn out as well as she’d hoped there either. Ella’s journey will take her to Greece eventually, to Crete, and a slow food restaurant in a village on a mountain in a landscape that reminds her of Australia, before she returns home to Melbourne and her Greek family and community.
This very personal cookbook has an endearingly homemade quality about it, featuring family photos, images Ella shot on her travels, images of Ella herself, and her own beautiful woodcuts. Dishes look as if they’ve really been photographed on restaurant terraces and on family dining tables, instead of mimicking that natural look, and it’s so refreshing after the familiar slick styling of most contemporary cookbooks and food blogs.
Recipes follow short essays on each place – which are as much about Ella’s experiences working in the kitchens and learning to cook the food, as they are her struggles to learn the languages, fit in culturally, make connections, and belong. Some recipes, such as a zucchini fritters recipe, are based on dishes she made at the restaurants; others, such as a chicken pilaf recipe for an Istanbul street food specialty, are her takes on local dishes she loved.
While Ella confesses that she felt she failed in her quest due to a combination of naivety, language barriers and culture shock, look at the collection of recipes and book as a whole – even better, cook a recipe from each chapter to serve as a spread – and you will see and taste the connections that Ella desperately wanted to make.
Adriatico, From Puglia to Venice and Trieste, Recipes from Italy’s Adriatic Coast by Paola Bacchia
As food and travel writers who worked as a guidebook author-photographer team for years, Terence and I criss-crossed Italy for a dozen guidebooks, both first editions and updates. We’d spend months at a time settling into cities like Milan and road-tripping Italy, criss-crossing Northern Italy, from the Aosta Valley in the northwest, around the Italian Lakes across to Udine and Trieste, and right down to Calabria in the South.
But before that, when we worked in the UAE, we travelled the length and breadth of Italy on holidays, from Cortina d’Ampezzo in the north for snowboarding and fireplaces to Sicily in the south for the Roman temples and street food. One summer we rented an apartment in Venice. And we spent a month in Italy, again in Venice, and Alberobello and Sardinia, on the yearlong grand tour that launched this site.
All of that’s to explain our depth of knowledge, intimate experience, and deep affection for Italy, the Italians, and Italian food. My cookbook collection includes everything from Artusi to The de Medici Kitchen, so I ask a lot of Italian cookbooks, and Paola Bacchia’s Adriatico, From Puglia to Venice and Trieste, Recipes from Italy’s Adriatic Coast delivers.
Having been travel writers before we became food writers, we also love a cookbook that takes a deep dive into a place, and that’s exactly what Paola’s book does. If you’ve travelled Italy’s Adriatic and eaten your way along the coast, I guarantee you that recipes for dishes such as bigoli in salsa with onion and anchovy sauce and orecchiette with sausage and broccoli will transport you back to Venice and Puglia respectively.
And if you haven’t explored the Adriatic coast, Paola’s postcard-like photography of Trieste’s elegant piazzas, a hilltop town in Abruzzo, artichokes at Venice’s Rialto Markets, the Belltower at Venissa Winery on Mazzorbo, and the turquoise waters of Le Marche, will have you booking a flight to Italy.
Like Ella Mittas, who takes us with her on her learning journey through the kitchens, villages and mountains of the Turkish and Greek Mediterranean in the personal essays that introduce recipe chapters, Paola Bacchia brings us along on her Adriatic travels through her insightful introductions to each region and personal anecdotes.
If Paola’s account of shopping the markets on the Venetian lagoon and cooking with our mutual acquaintance Enrica Rocca in her Dorsoduro apartment in Venice, doesn’t have you signing up for a cooking class with the countess, one of the best cooking experiences we’ve ever had, I’ll buy you an Aperol Spritz when we meet.
Sofra, Lebanese Recipes to Share by Karima Hazim Chatila and Sivine Tabbouch
Lebanon was the first country that Terence and I travelled to after moving to Abu Dhabi to work way back in 1998. And we subsequently authored a first edition Lonely Planet Lebanon and Syria travel guidebook, which we’d update not long before the Syrian civil war. So Lebanon and the Lebanese people have a very special place in our heart and we absolutely love Lebanese food. You, too? Then you’ll love Sofra, Lebanese Recipes to Share.
This beautiful cookbook is authored by Lebanese-Australian mother-daughter team, Sivine Tabbouch and Karima Hazim Chatila, and like the other cookbooks above it’s a very personal endeavour, brimming with family recipes, stories and images that give us an intimate look into their lives, as well as insights into everyday life in Lebanon and the Lebanese diaspora in Australia.
It’s a real delight to read about Karima’s childhood, her grandfather’s sweet business, and Sivine’s memories of the street vendors in Tripoli, one of our favourite places in Lebanon. Once again, the recollections and anecdotes transported me back to the Levant, to the bustling souks, aromatic bakeries, and atmospheric alleyways.
But what Sofra does best is provide a comprehensive course in cooking Lebanese food. Whether you’ve been making Middle Eastern food your whole life, or you’re completely new to the cuisine, you could cook your way through the book and when you’re done feel confident enough to host your own Lebanese feast, or at least a picnic. There’s a whole section on that!
There are also chapters on the Lebanese pantry, village breakfasts, an Eid lamb feast, and traditional Lebanese barbecue, with loads of detailed tips, recipes that essentially form menus, and step-by-step prep plans. This is also a cookbook that teaches you new skills and not just recipes, from pickling to making yoghurt and cheese.
And if Sofra has you wishing you could cook alongside Sivine and Karima, you can! You can sign up for a cooking experience in their Sunday Kitchen in Sydney. It’s on my to-do list for when I can next get back to my hometown.
The Greek Islands Cookbook, Simple Sun-Kissed Recipes by Carolina Doriti
As you’d expect from an Athens-born Greek chef, writer, producer, and culinary tour guide, with a masters degree, and enthusiasm for culinary history, The Greek Islands Cookbook provides a deep dive into the cuisine, culture, specialties, produce, and ingredients of the Greek islands. Like Sofra above, cook this book from cover to cover and you’ll feel like you’ve completed a comprehensive Greek Islands cooking course.
Terence and I were lucky to update two editions of Lonely Planet’s Greece guidebook many years ago, and extensively travelled Greece for holidays as well as work, both the mainland and Greek islands. I so wish we’d had Carolina’s cookbook at the time. If you’re a cook and food lover heading to Greece, take this cookbook with you!
While chapters are organised by meals and dishes – Breakfast and Brunch, Small Plates to Share, Fish and Seafood, Pies and Pasties, Salads, etc – every recipe has a detailed introduction (which I love!) that gives an insight into its provenance (thank you!), cultural context (yes!), and ingredients, as well as sharing a little about the island, and providing the cooking tips we expect from recipe intros.
For example, Carolina tells us that the cheesecakes with cinnamon called Lychnarakia are part of a family of pies and pastries filled with the creamy cheeses abundant during spring that are made for Easter, and she introduces us to the the many different types from across the islands, such as melopita from Sifnos and patiniotiki from Patmos. At the top of the ingredients list, Carolina also gives us the island where the recipe originated.
There are also fascinating sections on Greek Island Honeys, Island Goats and Pigs, the Sponge Divers of Kalymnos, Foraged Greens and Herbs, Island Windmills, Greek Island Cheeses, Sweet Preserves, and more. And there’s an introduction to the Greek islands at the start of the book and maps of the Greek island archipelagos on the inside covers. Who needs a guidebook?! ;)
Please do let us know in the comments below if you’ve got any of our best new cookbooks of 2025 and share your thoughts. I’d also love to get your recommendations for cookbooks you’ve used and loved.
