About Cooks Without Borders
Welcome to Cooks Without Borders! Our mission is to make your life more delightful and delicious by exploring food and food culture from around the world — and bringing you the best of it. The site, which consists of stories, recipes, cookbook reviews, video interviews with fascinating people in the food world and more, was founded in 2016 by Leslie Brenner, who is Cooks Without Borders’ editor in chief.
What interests us is the story behind the dish, or the ingredient, or the technique. We mine origins and dive into traditions, and then use what we learn to find or develop the best possible expression of the dishes that captivate us.
As a result, and because our recipe testing and development is so rigorous, you can be sure that the recipes you’ll find at Cooks Without Borders are outstanding — and that they work brilliantly.
Where do our recipes come from?
Many are original. We develop them respecting and honoring the dish’s roots, while seeking to find a balance between historic fidelity, deliciousness, practicability, healthfulness, sustainability and ease.
Others are adapted — from cookbooks (new and old), from outstanding home cooks from around the world and from chefs and other professional cooks. Some of the chefs and culinary professionals, such as Olivia Lopez (from Mexico) and Monish Gujral (from India), serve as Cooks Without Borders experts in their various culinary cultures.
For recipes that are inspired by other recipes, or adapted from them, we link back to the original source (if possible), and always acknowledge provenance. Because we only feature recipes we consider to be outstanding, when recipes are curated from outside sources, we frequently tweak or edit them to meet our standards. For instance, if a recipe calls for 1 tablespoon of salt, but the result is a dish that is oversalted, we will change the amount of salt to the amount that results in a better dish.
Leslie Brenner, Cooks Without Borders’ founder and editor in chief / Photo by Manny Rodriguez
Quality Curation, Recipe Testing and Editing
What makes us so adept at creating recipes and curating and adapting what’s delicious? Leslie is an award-winning writer, editor and cook who has devoted her life to it.
An Inspiring Destination for Serious Cooks
Cooks Without Borders is for people who geek out on cooking, who can think of nothing more delightful than spending a whole day in the kitchen — for chefs and cookbook authors and and passionate home cooks, as well as for young people who are starting to fall in love with cooking.
If that sounds like you, we hope you’ll make yourself at home here. Pour yourself a glass of wine or a cup of tea, sharpen your knives, and come cook with us.
We want the experience to be nice, so we don’t have ads. (You’re welcome!) And we’re hoping to keep it that way. All the recipes and stories on the site are free and accessible to anyone who wants them.
Our Offerings
Take a spin around our Home Page, where you’ll find ways in to every part of Cooks Without Borders — including Makers, Shakers & Mavens. This live online Q &A event takes a deep dive into some aspect of cooking and cooking culture with a fascinating expert in the food world. On the Makers, Shakers & Mavens page, you can sign up for upcoming events or watch past events. You can also find past events on our Cooks Without Borders YouTube channel (please subscribe for free, and support CWB!)
You’ll also find our new CUISINE GUIDES (in development) on our home page — as well as recipes organized by CULTURES and by COURSE. You can SEARCH for recipes, ingredients or anything else (the magnifying glass icon at the top right on desktop, or in the upper right hamburger menu on mobile). You can shop for cool ingredients, cookware and more at our COOKSHOP, browse for COOKBOOKS, read our STORIES, and sign up for FREE RECIPES sent to your inbox.
“I especially love Cooks Without Borders for its well vetted international recipes. It allows me to be fearless trying seemingly complicated dishes for the first time — from gougères to gazpacho and Pavlovas to a beautiful pissaladière. The cooking techniques in each recipe are so well explained that you get delicious results right from the start!”
— Marilyn Bishkin, Dallas, Texas
Cooks Without Borders is grateful for the generous support of:
A NOTE ABOUT AFFILIATE COMMISSIONS — UPDATED Dec. 1, 2020
We offer, when practical and possible, links to purchase books on Bookshop.org — an online bookstore whose stated mission is to financially support independent bookstores. As we are in complete alignment with bookshop.org’s mission, we will use its links whenever a book is available through its site. Because some of our readers may prefer to purchase from Amazon, we will usually offer a choice. In rare cases, when a book is out of stock or otherwise not available through Bookshop, we may use only an Amazon affiliate link. We also may earn commissions from qualifying purchases from Amazon.com for cookware, cooking tools, kitchen equipment and ingredients, and from Thermo-works for thermometers. At Cooks Without Borders we believe that eating well means eating locally and that living in a healthy community engaging with and supporting small, locally owned providers and business owners. However, we realize that is not always practical or possible, and so we offer these affiliate links for our users’ convenience.