Despite covering food for years, it wasn’t until this year that I realized I’ve been sleeping on Giada De Laurentiis’s recipes. Her evolution from providing easy takes on Italian food to finding healthy (or healthy-ish) takes on la dolce vita spans 11 cookbooks—at least as of September 2025—not to mention countless recipes shared on her Food Network shows, social media and her website, Giadzy.

But it wasn’t until I had her go-to breakfast—an innocuous bowl of oatmeal, gussied up with extra-virgin olive oil and crushed almonds, instead of your standard maple syrup, cinnamon and/or dried fruit—that I decided to do a deep dive into her cookbooks.

And if you’re thinking about cooking Giada-style, where do you even begin? Her first cookbook, Everyday Italian: 125 Simple and Delicious Recipes? Her latest, Super Italian, because it’s probably got the freshest takes? Somewhere in between?

I hit up my local library network, calling in as many cookbooks as I could get my hands on, poring over recipes and cooking away, to bring you my ranking of the top five.

5. Happy Cooking: Make Every Meal Count…Without Stressing Out

• Best for: Kid-friendly meals and snacks that focus on a variety of cuisines
• Published in: 2015

What Sets It Apart: This cookbook marks a huge shift in Giada’s life, as she notes in the foreward—she launched her Las Vegas restaurant, her digital magazine and ended her marriage of 20 years. There’s a lot of change going on, and in light of that, De Laurentiis says she created this cookbook to reflect on “what’s important to me and how I spend my time, as well as what truly makes me happy.”

You can see Giada’s role as a single mom come into play; there are a lot of simple meals and snacks for every time of the day, and she highlights a variety of cuisines, from riffs on Italian (like Stuffed Chicken Parm, Skinny Chicken Parm and Ricotta and Cinnamon Meatballs) to French (such as savory crepes) to Mediterranean (see: Pressure Cooker Chicken Thighs with Prunes and Olives). There’s also a fun holiday chapter, where she tackles everything from Thanksgiving dinner to an American flag pizza for the Fourth of July.

4. Eat Better, Feel Better

• Best for: Anyone looking to overhaul their diet with healthier meals
• Published in: 2021

What Sets It Apart: De Laurentiis has published a few wellness-related cookbooks over the years, and it’s been a common thread through a lot of her cooking. While I used to own Feel Good Food, her previous foray into a health-driven compendium of recipes, it never really inspired me (I really just remember pages of broths and teas and detox talk). This one, however, features a more balanced approach. She prioritizes recipes with dark, leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, fish and other lean proteins, as well as whole grains and low-glycemic fruits.

You’ll find lightened-up takes on her classics, like two twists on bolognese (one with zucchini noodles and ground chicken, the other with penne and plant-based meat) and several less-expected ways to incorporate more veggies into your diet (like the kale, avocado, Swiss chard and escarole-loaded Green Fried Rice), though—fair warning—there are just as many recipes for various veggies…roasted in the oven. Which aligns with her healthy living meal plan, but just feels pretty basic if you’ve been cooking for a while.

3. Everyday Italian: 125 Simple and Delicious Recipes

• Best for: Anyone new to cooking; Giada superfans
• Published in: 2005

What Sets It Apart: It’s a classic for a reason! Simplicity is key here (as the title suggests), with many recipes featuring less than a dozen ingredients and some using pretty much all pantry staples, so you can whip them up without a trip to the grocery store. There are multiple takes on pesto, a whole chapter for pasta (which is pretty common in De Laurentiis’s books, but still, great to have) and many of her best-known recipes are here, from bolognese to meatballs to chicken piccata.

The one major con though? The photos are lacking. Many of Giada’s cookbooks don’t have a photo for every recipe—which has become a must these days, but early on was incredibly rare, as photo shoots are really expensive, and many publishers didn’t allot the budget for it. Single-ingredient shots add color, sure, but they’re basically filler; seeing a bowl of lemons isn’t enlightening or inspiring. It’s just wallpaper for the written page.

2. Giada’s Italy: My Recipes for La Dolce Vita

• Best for: wanderlusters
• Published in: 2018

What Sets It Apart: Visually, this book is stunning. It’s coffee table-worthy—the design and aesthetic capture a romantic sense of traveling and cooking your way through Italy. It’s Eat, Pray, Love, Giada-style. And that’s fitting, since the cookbook’s entire premise is that it aims to capture la dolce vita, the sweet life, inspired by the two years she spent filming Giada in Italy.

It’s a departure from her lightened-up, Italian-meets-Californian approach, with even the chapters formatted in the way Italians tend to eat: lunch (lighter, simpler meals), in-betweens (midafternoon pick-me-ups, like panini and pizza), weeknights (fast, easy comfort food) and la dolce vita (traditional, longer-to-prepare-but-worth-the-effort meals). The recipes are a vacation at home, though they’ll take a bit more work to source and prepare (like sartu di riso, which is like a giant arancini bundt cake, and barolo-braised short ribs).

As beautiful and transporting as the photography is, this cookbook also sacrifices images of several dishes in favor of lifestyle shots of Giada in Italy, so if you won’t make a dish unless you can see a photo of it, this may not be the book for you. (But give it a shot anyway!)

1. Super Italian: More Than 110 Indulgent Recipes Using Italy’s Healthiest Foods

• Best for: Mastering Italian recipes—with a healthy-ish spin
• Published in: 2025

What Sets It Apart: Can Giada develop another bolognese recipe? Or roast chicken or prepare meatballs another way? Turns out, the limit does not exist—and her riffs don’t get boring (or too bizarre). White bolognese, bison bolognese, Southern Italian Herbed Roast Chicken, beef ricotta meatballs and chicken piccata meatballs are all on the menu in this tome.

Super Italian feels like the best of De Laurentiis’s arsenal of cooking. You’ll learn how to make your own pantry staples that can elevate basic meals (like Giada’s go-to seasoned salt, Parm dressing, green olive relish and Simple Tomato Sauce). And you’ll also gain more advanced skills, like slow-cooking beans and vegetables with a Parmesan rind until it becomes almost porridge-like for her Siena-Style Ribolita, or using a sheet pan and shallow-fry method to make Fritto Misto (featuring shrimp, calamari and red snapper).

Here, there’s a photo for pretty much every dish—in some cases, an overhead shot will highlight multiple recipes at once, with copy pointing out which is which in the pages that follow. It’s less about lifestyle or memoir-esque backstories and more straight cooking, with a strong chapter on sides that can help you bust out of a roast-boil-or-steam rut. So, for Giada fans who want more insights into the chef herself, they may prefer options two or four on this list. If you really want to level up your cooking, though, start here.