female speaker: goodafternoon. i'm delighted to welcome chriskimball to google. i'm sure he needs nointroduction, so i'm going to do a very brief one. he's the founder of "cook'sillustrated" magazine. it was founded back in 1980. and he's the host of "america'stest kitchen," which is the most watchedcooking show on public tv. and he's made so manycontributions to the culinary
industry that i'm not even goingto try to mention them. but he did found who's whoand cooking in america. and at least in my kitchen,"america's test kitchen" cookbooks are a must have. and chris is here today to talkabout "the science of good cooking." if you haven'tpicked up your copy in the back, please do. [applause] chris kimball: it feelslike the "johnny
carson show" or something. so this is a littlebit about-- i won't talk too much about thebook, but about what we do in "the test kitchen." you know,the fundamental precept of science is you sit aroundand think about why things happen, and then you devise anexperiment to either prove or disprove that. so you watch the applefall, whatever. and the ultimate exampleof this--
there's a youtube videoabout this, actually. it's about 40 minutes long. it's great. a called lawrence krauss,cosmologist, and he decided, with a bunch of othercosmologists a few years ago, to figure out whetherwe live in a closed, open, or flat universe. this will have something to dowith cooking, eventually. so in a closed universe, itcollapses, we have a big bang,
we all die. in open universe, it expandsexponentially. in a flat universe, it expands,but the rate of expansion slows. so they were trying tofigure out how to do that relatively simply. and so the first thing theysaid, well, ok, in a flat universe, light travelsin a straight line. in a closed or open universe,light diverges or converges.
which means that if you lookedat something a long way from earth, it would be bigger orsmaller than it actually is. if you live in a flatuniverse, it will be the right size. ok, so the next thingwas what to measure. well, they said, let's go as faraway from earth as we can, because the farther away weare, the more we could see that converging or divergingof the light. let's go back to the big bang,13.72 billion years ago.
the problem with that is, forabout 100,000 years after the big bang, it was like lookingat the center of the sun. it was pea soup. couldn't see anything. so about 100,000 years later,you could start to see things. and so, ok, that'sa good distance. now the question was, whatare you going to measure? and here's where it gota little weird. they said, well, the universeis only 100,000 years old.
nothing travels faster thanthe speed of light. so that includes gravity. gravity can't travel fasterthan the speed of light. so the biggest thing could be100,000 light years, because if you're a lump of matter,you want to attract other matter, you couldn't communicatefarther than that. it's like a little town ingermany 2,000 years ago, a village that maybe people from20 or 30 miles might come in, but if you're 500 miles away,you wouldn't even know the
village existed. same thing. so they said, ok, so theobject would be there. we know where it's goingto be, how far away. and it should be 100,000light years. that's the maximum size, whichturns out to be 1 degree of 360 in the sky. so the other question is,how do you measure it? and they said, well, we'llsend up a balloon.
this is what i like, theseguys sit around trying to figure out what kindof universe. they get this big heliumballoon, they send it up and it has essentially a camera thatmeasures the background microwave radiationfrom that point. light waves as they travel,flatten out, infrared, microwaves have the longestwavelength. so for those of you-- and therearen't many of you here. there's a few of my vintage--
in the days a television stationstopped broadcasting, oddly enough, at 1:00 or 2:00in the morning, you'd get static on your television set. and 1% of that static was, infact, microwave radiation from just after the big bang. so you could actually see it. so they took pictures, and theydeveloped it, and they put it up on the wall. and it turns out that thebiggest things they saw were
exactly 1 degree. and that was exactlywhat was predicted. and so since it was 1 degree,we live in a flat universe. so that's exactly what we do at"america's test kitchen." audience: [laughter] chris kimball: see? on a slightly smaller scale. so we don't have big balloons. but we use scientificprinciples.
equilibrium. this was invented or discovered about 1750 in france. french scientists decided,well, ok, i don't have balloons, but i havepig bladders. i'll fill it with alcohol, putit in a big tub of water, and i'll see what happens. well, of course, what happenedwas water is 100% water, alcohol is 50% water, so some ofthe water from outside went
through the membrane tocreate equilibrium. that's called osmosis. diffusion. but if you're going to brine aturkey next week, there's a little osmosis there. salt. you put salt on the outside ofa turkey, or in a brine, and that's diffusion. the salt from the outside goesto the inside to create
equilibrium. so when you brine, you're usinga very old scientific concept of equilibrium. and what happens is the chickenor the turkey soaks up water, and if there was nobrine, there was no salt, that water would come outduring cooking. but what the salt does is ittakes the proteins, it denatures them, they are ableto now hold onto water, because there's nowroom for water to
get into the proteins. some of the proteins turninto a gelatin, which also absorb water. so what the salt does is helpthe turkey hold onto water, even when heated and roasted. so not all of it leaves. some of it actually stays. and that's all basedon an old premise. some of the things we liketo do is disprove
stupid cooking theories. the world is flat theories. one of them is sear meatto seal in the juices. you still in cookbooks today,and on some cooking shows, will see people say that, andit's just total nonsense. searing meat sears meat. it's the maillardreaction, which we'll get to in a second. amino acids and sugars arecreating flavor compounds.
but it turns out that juicymeat is just a function of internal temperature. about 110 degrees, meat fibersthat sort of look like insulated wires will start toshrink around the diameter and the length. the liquid in those fibersgets pushed out. the more you cook meat, thedryer it gets, and it has nothing to do with whetherit's seared or not. if you pot roast or barbecue,and you start with a piece of
meat that has a lot of collagenin it, like pork butt, for example, well, thatcollagen turns into gelatin, melts, and that will hold ontoliquid, so that does work over a long period of time. another thing people say veryoften is braising turns out moist, succulent meat. and it kind of makes sense,because you have a closed pot, and you have a little bit ofliquid, and you have a pot roast or piece of pork.
in fact, madeleine kamman, in"the making of a cook," which is a great book you should read,says that very thing. she says the steam getsinto the meat. it does this. no. it's the same thing. you can boil a pot roast, orsimmer a pot roast in water. you can roast itin a dry oven. you can braise it ina closed container.
and if you get it to the sameinternal temperature, 185, 190, it will be exactlythe same inside. so it doesn't matter if there'sliquid around it, air around it, a little bit ofliquid on it, steam, it doesn't matter. it's all about the internaltemperature. lots of other things-- recipes say pat meat drybefore you sautee it. and, by the way, i know whatyou all do, even though you
work for google. i know what you do. and that is that youtake our recipes-- and i do the same thing-- and you take them as vaguedirections about what you might do if you actuallyhad the ingredients. chris kimball: and you don't,and you don't have the right cookware, and lotsof other things. so our job is not to createa recipe that
works in our kitchen. it's for us to figureout what you do. and what you do is reallyinteresting. and matter of fact, i thinkbehavioral psychology should spend more time looking at-- they do, like, howpeople vote. now they should dohow people cook. about two years ago, we had achicken breast recipe, and we sent our recipes out.
it takes us five or six weeksto develop a recipe. we sent it out to a bunch of youwho volunteered, and over the course of a week, 200 or 300of you will have made the recipe, and you'llfill out a form. and unless 80% of you say youwould make it again, we go back in the kitchen. well, this particulargentleman-- and this recipe gota great rating. 90% of the people wouldmake it again.
this one gentleman said it wasthe worst chicken breast recipe he'd ever made, whichcaught our attention. and at the bottom, there's alittle place on surveymonkey, which is the software we use-- he had a comment, and this isverbatim, what he said. he said, "well," comma, "ididn't have any chicken." chris kimball: ok. "i substituted shrimp." audience: [gasps]
chris kimball: so if you cookshrimp for 25 minutes, indeed, it would be the worst shrimprecipe you've ever had. but it's my fault, see. so it was my job to say in thehead note, do not substitute shrimp for chicken in thischicken breast recipe. so anyway, to go back to thesteak story, so the problem is, if you put a wet piece ofmeat or poultry in a pan, assuming the pan is the righttemperature, the meat's not going to get above the boilingpoint of water, because the
water has to evaporate first. so your steak is sitting thereat 210 or 212 degrees until that water goes away. so you're steaming the meat,it sticks to the pan. the maillard reaction, which asi said is amino acids and sugars creating flavorcompounds, doesn't happen 'til over 300 degrees, so you're notgoing to get any browning. and that is a reason, by theway, you shouldn't use non-stick cookware-- because70% of cookware sold in the
united states is non-stick. it's good for eggs,it's good for seafood, a few other things. stir fry with a sticky sauce. it's terrible for everythingelse, because you can't create a fond on the bottom of thepan-- that brown stuff that when you're first beginning tocook, you throw away, because it's messy, and then you realizeit has all the flavor. years ago, a friend of minecame over from france--
he was a butcher-- to show us some tricks. and during the morning, he had abunch of onions, like 5 or 6 pounds of onions, a littlewine, little water, little oil. all he did was put it in a bigle creuset dutch oven, and he sauteed it, browned it,caramelized it. and every half hour or so, hedeglazed the bottom of the pot with a little wine.
and he didn't add stock,he didn't add any other ingredients. and by 12:00, 12:30, we hadfrench onion soup, and it was the best french onion soupi had in my life. and all the flavor, 100% of it,came from the fond at the bottom of the pan. and so if that had been anon-stick pan, we would have had the world's worstfrench onion soup. so anyway.
so those are just a few ofthe things that we test. and another one which isrelevant for next week, for those of you who are going tomake pie dough, recipes always say add just enough water 'tilthe dough holds together. yeah, whoever wrote that shouldbe taken out and run over with a truck, becauseyou're all scared to add too much water, so what happens? you create dry pie dough,and it doesn't roll out. it rolls out into pieces, andyou have to do a pat in the
pan crust when nobody'slooking. that's what's going tohappen, because i've done it many times. and the reason you don't wantto add too much water is because in flour, thereare two proteins-- glutinin, which sounds likegluten, but it's different, and gliadin. in the presence of water, theyform gluten, and that's why you could have a no knead breaddough recipe-- because
if you let water and flour sitlong enough, like overnight, gluten will developon its own. you don't have to knead bread. so what's going on with piepastry is, a little too much water, a little bit too muchgluten gets developed. so we sat around, just likelawrence krauss did years ago, and said, we need more liquid,but we can't use water, because water reacts withglutinin and gliadin to produce gluten.
what else could we use? and the obvious answerwas vodka. i mean, really. because alcohol actually doesn'treact with proteins. water does. so we said, we'll use halfwater, half vodka, add a little bit of extra liquid--another tablespoon, so you have a nice, moist dough,rolls out easily. and by the way, alcohol willdissipate at a much lower
temperature than water, so youput in the oven, and you end up with a nice, dry, flakydough, so, vodka pie crust. and thank you to ourfood scientist. one thing i should warn youabout food scientists, because i've worked with themall my life. we have a guy who workswith us, this guy, crosby, who's very good. but remember in fifth grade, youhad those stupid molecular things with the balls?
well, eventually, over time,i kept asking, do molecules really look like this? and some would say,well, not really. it's just, we're trying to-- i paraphrase-- we're giving you as muchinformation as we think you can handle. so great. they think i'm an idiot.
so over all these years, i'mthinking about these red balls and green balls andeverything else. and yes, it talks aboutconnectivity and other things, but it is, in essence,really, molecules don't look like that. so when you talk to a foodscientist, the first time you ask them a question aboutstarchy potatoes, for example, and amylose and amylopectin andeverything else, they'll give you the answer they thinkyou can handle, which is
basically the idiot's answer. and then you come back a coupleweeks later and say, well, you know, it doesn'treally make sense because-- and they say, ok, ok,now i'll tell you. and then they give youthe next layer down. there's like 10 layers, and i'mworking my way down to the 10th layer. i'm at about layer 7 now,because he thinks i can handle layer 7.
but the problem with foodscience is, as einstein, of course, was not a foodscientist-- it was too hard-- there are too many variables. there's too muchstuff going on. so it's very hard toisolate one thing. even if you isolate, let's say,10% protein flour from 12%, you do two cakes or twobiscuits, it could be that you didn't measure somethingproperly, the ovens were slightly off, it was a humidday versus not a humid day.
so there's lots of stuff goingon, so you have to do things over and over and over again tomake sure that your results actually are reproducible,which, of course, is the essence of science. so that's what we do, and thisbook is really a result of 20 years of work in the kitchen. we took 50 scientific principlesin some recipes to illustrate them. and i've been on tour, and oneof the things i do if it's a
morning show or something is wehave a red bliss potato, a non-starchy potato, and wehave a russet potato. the russet potato has morestarch, which has got a higher specific gravity, and shouldsink, and the red bliss potato should float. and i did this on "the todayshow" about a month ago, and they both sank. so sometimes, the resultsare not reproducible. so i just hid it behindthe other thing, and
it just went on. so that's what we do, and i'dlove to take some questions. and by the way, before someonehas the courage to ask a question, lynne rossetto casperfrom "the splendid table," whom i've known fora long time, she had this problem once, and she told theaudience that she would start removing her clothes if shedidn't get a question asked. and they started askingquestions. audience: thank you.
so i was wondering two things. one of them is that youmentioned caramelizing onions. and i know that what einsteintold his cook-- that was one of the author's pet peeves. chris kimball: yeah. audience: that's a side thing. you can talk. but the question ihave is actually about non-stick cookware.
chris kimball: thatwas wolke, yeah. that guy. audience: yes. the question i have is actually there's actually new non-stickcookware coming out. it's ceramic, i guess, base,or something else. can you talk a little bit aboutwhat you think of those? chris kimball: yeah,we've tested a lot of non-stick cookware.
there's low-stick cookware likecalphalon, which, if you look at it under a microscope,it just has fewer craters in it. it's smoother, so the fooddoesn't stick as much. there are ceramic non-stickcookware as well. we basically didn'tlike any of them. they either claimed they weregreener, which they really weren't, or if theyreally were green, they weren't non-stick.
so we went through all of them,and the one that we ended up with is justthe classic. they all use essentially thesame chemical-- slightly different bonding techniques. the problem with non-stickcookware-- there's a number of them-- first of all, there's somethingcalled polymer fume fever, and i actually subjectedmyself to this just to find out what it was like.
so over 500 degrees, you'll seethe smoking, and if you happen to have a parakeet inthe room, you know, the parakeet might not survivethat process. i took a big whiff, and had avicious headache for about five hours. over 600 degrees, that chemicalactually starts to break down, and that'swhy non-stick pans, over a year or two-- i mean, in our kitchen, theydon't last more than a year.
they actually start to breakdown, and that coating actually comes off. so the other thing you can useis cast iron, if you are of the mind to season it properly,which takes a little more time, which i like. but when it comes to doingscrambled eggs, a 10-inch or 8-inch non-stick all-clad orsomething similar actually is fairly essential. but that's about alli use it for.
audience: i'll say in defense ofnon-stick, you guys have a great recipe from a few monthsago for thai stir fried noodles for which you sayspecifically, get this non-stick 12-inch pan. great recipe, i love it. one of the great examples ofi don't do it unless i have exactly what "cook'sillustrated" says i need to have. chris kimball: you're theonly reader who does.
i've finally found him. audience: from bitterexperience, i've learned my lesson. so my question-- you guys testall these recipes over and over again in the "testkitchen." what do you do with all the food that you create? chris kimball: oh, well, firstof all, we're not licensed by the town of brookline justoutside of boston to serve food to the public.
it's a long story. so we wanted to give food to thelocal shelter, food bank. we do give canned food, but wecouldn't give our cooked food. so we have about 140 employees,slightly smaller than you, and the test cooks inthe kitchen-- we have about 45 test cooks, it's about a3,500 square foot kitchen-- the really good food, and thereally expensive food, like the tenderloin, the lobster,et cetera-- that immediately disappears.
we have these big clear plastictakeout containers and big magic markers. so i-- chris, for chris, put the stuffin, and go into our takeout fridge. and at night, theybring it home. the food that's pretty goodbut not great, we call the marketing departmentdown for that. chris kimball: no, i mean,marketing's important, right?
ok. and then the really horriblefood is the finance people. my cfo lives off leftoverhalloween candy until january. that's all she eats. and they're grateful for that,so that's how it works. we're hoping we can get licensedto actually do something else with it. we have 140 employees, so it allgets eaten, and our test cooks never cook during the weekat night, because they've
been cooking all day, and theyjust take the food home, so. audience: you brought up theconcept of brining earlier, and the best thanksgiving turkeyi ever made i brined. and could you go over some ofthe basic principles, since a lot of people are going to beroasting turkeys next week, of what it takes to makea good turkey? chris kimball: yes. the problem with having a foodmagazine is every year, there's thanksgiving,and we have to come
up with a new recipe. so somehow we've comeup with 20 versions. the basic formula is1 cup of table salt per gallon of water. if it's going to be a 12, 14pound turkey, you'd brine it for six to eight hours, something like that, overnight. you got to keep it cool,preferably no more than 40 degrees, which can be a problemif you don't have a
cold cellar somewhereor outside. and then you want to make sureit's dried off very well. you put it in a 375 to 400 oven,breast side down for an hour, then flip it breast sideup and continue cooking it-- maybe even increase thetemperature for the last half hour or so. we've done lots of otherrecipes, one of which i like is you cut it into partsand you braise it. i did that last year.
then you get a great gravy outof it, and then you don't have the problem with the white meat,dark meat, when it's done problem. i just did for "morningedition" next week on wednesday-- we do a segmentevery year on thanksgiving, and we did julia child recipes, all julia child recipes. she's got this great recipewhere she takes the backbone out and takes the whole breastand puts it over a huge amount
of stuffing on a roasting traywith aluminum foil, cooks that, and then she has the thighand the legs together, those two pieces roastedseparately on a rack on a baking sheet. but what she does isreally interesting. she takes the bone outof the thigh, which takes about a minute. it's real easy to do. just use a paring knife.
and then she spreads it open,puts salt, pepper, a little sage, whatever you want, sewedit up, or just wrapped it easily with some stringand roasted that. only took about an hourand a half to cook. and then when you slicethe thigh, there's no bone, which is great. and that really works well. and if you like, she also had apicture of reassembling the bird after it's cooked, so youhave that little norman
rockwell moment or whatever. if anyone does havethat moment. so that's the basic concept. the other way you cando it is butterfly a turkey after brining. you take the backbone out. it's good to have poultryshears for that. flatten it, press down on thebreastbone, and then cook that on a rack over a huge mound ofstuffing, which is also one of
my favorite techniques. so you don't have to worry abouta little bit of stuffing in the cavity, which you shouldnever do, because the stuffing takes a long timeto get up to 160. you don't have much of it, andthe meat will be overcooked. so butterfly it, take thebackbone out, rack over stuffing, and you getmaximum stuffing. so those are four suggestions. audience: did you startas a food writer?
was that what you sort of-- chris kimball: i started asa primitive art major at columbia in 1969. well, actually, no. i had four years of therevolution, so we didn't have finals three out of the fouryears, because the secret was, we only had revolutionswhen it was warm, which was in may, usually. so i started that.
i worked in a small publishingfirm in new york for a couple years, ran a company for afew years in the '70s. it was in and around the wholeissue of magazines and publishing. and then i started "cook's"in 1980-- april 1980. today, if you want to-- i've been grandfatheredinto my own company. i don't think i'd get a jobthere now, probably.
if you wanted to get a job inour kitchen today, you'd have to come in and do a bench test,which means that a bunch of people will stand around youwith clipboards and not talk while you cook all day, tosee if you have the knife skills, you can expedite. but really, we're looking forpeople who are incredibly stubborn, don't mind doing thesame thing constantly, like the same recipe for weeksand weeks on end. you have to develop a recipeon your own and write it up
and submit the article. and then we do three monthinternships, and then usually at the end of that period, we'llkeep one or two of the people to work full timein the kitchen. so what we really dois a group process. we sit down every tuesdaymorning at 9:00 am, editorial table, and whoever's working ona particular recipe talks. we sit down, have ideas. every time there's a tasting,there's a bunch of people in
the kitchen. so it's really very muchabout a group process. it's not quite one man, onevote, but it's almost that. and that's how we developthe process. it comes from-- i went to a high school whichused an oval table, the harkness table. and you'd sit around a table,and the professor or teacher would be standing up in thecorner, and you would have to
come up with a position aboutsomething about russian history, and you'd have todefend your position as your fellow students ripped you toshreds, which is basically what we do now is to sit aroundand argue, which i assume you do a lot here, too. audience: so you're inmagazines, but you must also have been kind of crazyabout food. and then you also seem to havethis scientific bent. chris kimball: well, i've beencooking since i was about
seven, yes. my first recipe was a chocolatecake out of "the joy of cooking" with a seven minuteboiled icing, which turned out like snot. actually, i do stillremember the cake. everyone said it was very good,but i knew it wasn't. and in the '70s, istarted taking a lot of cooking classes. and i realized there was oneguy in particular, who was
actually a great guy,but he put on this fake french accent-- he was from florida. but he talked likethe [fake french] like this, and he would saythings like you have to scald milk to make a bechamel. well, i went home, made it withcold milk, it was fine. he refused to talk about it. and it turns out that you onlyscald milk if it's raw milk,
because pasteurization isscalding milk, and you want to kill off an enzymethat needs to be killed to have it thicken. so it occurred to me, theemperor's new clothes, that a lot of stuff that was beingtaught at the time in the '60s and '70s was just beingpassed down. and probably at the time, itmade sense, like when people had nothing but raw milk. but there was a whole bunch ofthings like that that just
made no sense anymore. and the cookware was changing,the food processor came in from carl sontheimerin the early '70s. french cooking was goingaway, american cooking was coming up. so my interest was actuallystarting a magazine where you could talk about cooking. at the time, there was"cuisine," "food & wine," "bon apetitt," "gourmet," noneof which really
focused on the kitchen. it was all about peoplesmiling at parties, traveling, on yachts. and so i just wanted to focuson fudgy brownies, essentially. audience: so you talked abouttechniques, but i want to ask you about the actual productand ingredients. i made a conscious decision toswitch to grass-fed beef, and most of these techniques nolonger work, because this meat
is so different. there's less fat. what recommendations,what suggestions do you have for me? chris kimball: well, we raiseour own beef and pork, too, and we started out doingpure grass fed. well, i don't know if you'veever had no grain purely grass fed, but it's toughand it's strong. and actually, in the lastthree months, we
grained them, too. so i like mostly grass fed, buti like grain at the end, because i think it's better. but it's like tryingto cook venison, because it's very lean. and the other problem is thebutchers love the round, the thigh, because it's this hugehunk of meat with just one bone in it. it's not complicated.
but the problem is, it's lean. and especially grass-fed beef. so the first thing i would dois get the fattiest cuts. chuck eye roast,shoulder roast, anything from the chuck. i would never touch the roundunder any circumstances. and then, unless you want tolard it, like fannie farmer used to do, you're probablygoing to have to cook it low and slow.
but i would get the fattiest cutfrom grass-fed beef that i possibly could. don't get anything lean,because it's going to be lean anyway. audience: i'm curious what yourtake is on the molecular gastronomy movement, which alsosort of bills itself as a science driven, althoughprobably not as accessible, approach. chris kimball: well, i'm now aninstant expert, because i
went to see nathan myhrvold twodays ago, and his chefs cooked me a 12-course mealone afternoon in seattle. and first of all, ok,let me describe. he has a lab to do a lotof other things. the modernist cuisine isjust a small subset. you walk in. the place is huge. it must have 50 $1 millionmachines in there to do all sorts of weird things, like3d printers and stuff.
so the first thing i walk in isi see this big hd screen, and things are poppingon and off. and i say, what's that? he said, well, a few years ago,we decided to solve the problem of malaria. and one of the guys on the teamwas one of the guys who helped develop the star warsproject, which actually was pretty much a failure,as far as i can tell. and he said, well, i don'tknow, just get a
laser gun and zap them. and then the guy said to me,well, at first we thought that was foolish, comma. i said, what do youmean "at first"? it's like, what, it'snot foolish now? so he claims-- i didn't believe this-- heclaims that this thing was actually showing there'smosquitoes in a glass-- am i losing my voice here?
hello? there we are. he claims that he had this bigglass container, an aquarium of mosquitoes, and they couldsense the mosquitoes individually. that's what was showingup on the screen. then it gets weird. it says, they can tell thedifference between a male mosquito and a femalemosquito.
and i said, how doyou do that? he said, well, female mosquitoesbeat their wings at a different rpm thanmale mosquitoes. female mosquitoes bite,males don't. so i said, then what happens? he said, oh, then the laser gunmelts their wings and they fall down and die. i said, ok, so you're in africa,niger, and you have this $100,000 mosquitokilling laser gun.
now what are you going to do? well, we'd ring thevillage with them. i said, how about like, $1.00for a mosquito net? like, really? anyway, so i was going,like, really? so anyway, the meal wasfabulous, though. chris kimball: and there wereno mosquitoes anywhere. i mean, he's proven if you'reincredibly smart, and you have unlimited capital and time,what you can do to food.
it has no bearing on homecooking at all. but, i mean, for example,the pistachio gelato-- i love pistachio gelato. i've had it in a lot ofdifferent places. and most of the time, it'svanilla ice cream with green food coloring, essentially,because it doesn't taste like pistachio, right? so this pistachio gelatowas amazing. i mean, it's like, amazingpistachio flavor.
and he extracted oil,and guess what. each scoop, which is about thisbig, was $25 worth of pistachios to get one scoopof pistachio gelato. the other thing he showedme-- and they were great french fries-- but in order to get that crunchyoutside, he puts the french fries in water-- am i losing my voice again? i think you have to keep puttingquarters in the thing.
it's a cavitation device,essentially. sonic waves go through the waterand rough up the surface of the potato. and so, yeah, it didwork, but he's extracting maximum flavor. so the answer is, why not? good for him. he's an interesting guy. he's rich.
the food was great. but i don't think anybody hereis going to be making $25 a scoop pistachio ice creamanytime soon. although maybe some of thosetechniques end up in a home kitchen in 10 years. i don't know. but it's not what we do. what we do is, my premise hasbeen, most people most of the time don't have a lot ofsuccess in the kitchen.
it's not necessarily a failure,but it doesn't turn out exactly the way you want. if you were building airplanes,and 80% of the time, they fell out of thesky, you wouldn't be in business too long. recipes, if you think of it asa business, it's the only business in the world where youcan actually have a very high failure rate andstill be around. and so our thought was, we'renot trying to get you to
modernist cuisine orfrench laundry. we're just trying to get peopleto the point where most of the time they go inthe kitchen, if they do follow the recipe-- don't substitute shrimpfor chicken-- it'll turn out well. and that's all. we're not trying tocreate chefs. we're just trying to say, youcan be confident, go in the
kitchen, and get prettygood results. that's about it. audience: hi. for a variety of reasons, mygirlfriend and i only get to cook it once a week or so. do you have any advice forrewarding but efficient occasional cookingat small scale? chris kimball: yeah, the bestthing i can say is, 100 years ago, the italian grandmother hada very limited repertoire.
as i was taught tocook by a baker-- actually, a cook in vermont-- vermont! and i have a recipe card. she has about 50 recipe cards. so i think the secret has beenpeople had a limited repertoire of foods that werelocal with techniques that were all related, and that's whythey didn't need recipes. because your grandmother, ifshe cooked, or grandfather,
they had a baking powder biscuitrecipe, or they had a curry goat recipe. whatever it was, theyknew how to do it. so if you're going to start outin cooking, and you don't have a lot of time, mysuggestion is have 25 recipes. pick 25 recipes that cover abraise, or a tagine, or a stew, or a quick bread, a sodabread, whatever, and just get a range of recipes that covermost of the bases, and get to the point you don'tneed a recipe.
you can make them. then you can do anythingyou want. but if you do that, it's great,because the problem with all of you and the problemwith me is, on tuesday night i'm going oh, i love thatottolenghi recipe from "plenty" or "jerusalem." i wantto make that tonight with the gorgonzola and the lentilsand the caramelized onions. and the next night, i'll say,well, maybe i want something from south america,and then i--
well, you never get anywhere,because you're changing ingredients and techniques. so stick to 25 recipes. the example i liketo give is music. like most aging babyboomers, i have a grateful dead cover band. of course, that's typical. at some point, you all willhave grateful dead cover bands, or something.
aerosmith. i don't know, whatever. so if you've ever seen a50-year-old pick up a guitar, it's a disaster becausehe or she thinks they can just play it-- without "guitar hero--" playit, and they can't, because you actually have to knowsomething, like there are chords and scales, and there aretwo note chords, and three note chords, and the triads.
there's the blues scale, andthe pentatonic scale, blah, blah, blah. jerry garcia, my hero, he playedscales two hours a day. so there is something to know. and so by sticking to 25recipes, you'll actually get the technique down. you'll understand somethingabout cooking, and then you can do whatever youwant from there. i always work jerry garcia intoevery talk, by the way.
audience: question aboutyour turkey recipes. they typically deal withsmaller birds, or medium sized birds. do you have ideas on cookinglarger ones, particularly when you're cooking them upsidedown to start? is there a limit to how big abird you can cook that way? chris kimball: no. we usually like 14 to 16 poundbirds, because they, i think, usually taste better.
but you can get a 22 pounder. the question is, is youroven big enough? and then, of course, you havea bird that's very hot, and you have to flip it overafter an hour. if you do the butterflytechnique, however, you don't have to flip it. and if you braise it in parts,you don't have to flip it. but if you do the hour downand then up, you do. i just use kitchentowels to do it.
some of those orka siliconemitts and stuff, you ever try to use those? your hands get sweaty,and then you drop it anyway, so who cares? so i just use kitchentowels and flip it. my next question is about whenyou write up recipes. it's very clear from anybodywho's read "cook's" how much work you guys put intodeveloping your recipes and trying out every variation.
have you had a chance to dothat with how you actually write up the recipes to presentthe information and help understand what's thebest way to present it to people such that they'reable to follow it? chris kimball: oh, yes. yes. most of the stories, becausewe're dealing with cooks now, not writers-- most of the people who work forus don't have any writing
experience, and so the editingprocess is tortured. and we had made people cryafter reading the-- i used to read everything. i stopped about a year ago. i read it, but notat the beginning. and i used to put comments in. and my comments were usuallysomething like, this is the worst first paragraph i'veever read in my life. so what you get is, i remembermy mother, when she used to
make-- and i'd say, look. unless you can describe yourmother in some detail and paint a picture, nobody caresabout your mother. you have to make us care. so people take a long timeto get to a point. i think the issue is, i alwayssay it's like a sherlock holmes story. there's the one boot is missingin "the hound of the baskervilles," you know?
so when you're telling the storyof how you solved the problem of bad food to get togood food, it's a mystery. it's a narrative. you have to tell a story. a story has ups and downs,it has ins and outs, it has dead ends. so you have to constructthat story. the problem is the test cook hastested in a certain order, and he or she then thinks, it'sa documentary process of
documenting what they did. that has nothingto do with it. it's about creating a story. and so even though it doesn'tseem when you read it that we've done a lot of work, wespend some time, it's like 50 or 60 hours on the story, totell a story, because people have to care about the story. who wants to read 2,000 wordsabout fudgy brownies unless you kind of makeit interesting?
and so a lot of the testswe leave out. it's like editing ahollywood movie. you've got to cut charactersout and scenes. so it's all about storytellingand narrative. and then finally, we call itthe aha moment, when you finally, what's the big thingyou discovered that made the recipe work? and hopefully there's somethinginteresting. audience: when you were talkingabout cooking myths
and how they're not true, youmentioned searing the meat, which we've heard from haroldmcgee a couple times. but you also mentionedpatting the meat try before you sautee it. and i don't think you followedthrough on why that's a myth. chris kimball: well, what isaid was, it's not a myth. it's something that people tellyou to do, but people don't do it, because they don'tunderstand why they should do it.
and the reason is, as i said,if you put the meat in a pan and it's wet, until the waterturns to steam and evaporates, the surface temperature of themeat's not going to go over the boiling point of water. so all that energy's goinginto the water to turn it into steam. the energy is not goinginto the meat. so until that happens, you'resitting there in the pan with a fairly cool pan.
you're not getting any browning,you're not getting any maillard reaction. so that's one of those thingsyou need to do. what i've discovered is peoplewon't do what recipes tell you unless you understand it. and that was my problem, too. so we're just trying to explainin some cases not necessarily a myth, but we'retrying to explain why you should do it, and the odds ofyou doing it will be greater
if we explain it. audience: it's not because thewater will spatter in the oil and get you burned? chris kimball: that wouldbe true, too, and yes. and the other thing is that ifit's wet, the chicken skin will stick irretrievablyto the bottom of the skillet, yes. so among all of the home cooksthat you've interacted with and sampled, what's the singleway in which they've most
tragically underinvested intheir home equipment, whether it's getting something lame thatthey should get a good version of it? chris kimball: three things. the first is an instant readthermometer that really works. the only one we really loveis the thermapen. it's $95. it's obscenely expensive,but it really works. it takes a temperature from theend of the probe, not an
inch or two up, so you knowexactly what you're measuring. it has a big readout display. it's instant. i could cook without it,but it would be hard. i bake bread. american bread is 190 to 195,european bread 205 for custards, et cetera. two, a knife. forschner makes a victorinoxfibrox knife.
it's $25. it beats the $150 knivesall the time. third thing is knifesharpening. jacques pepin would die if isaid, go buy an electric knife sharpener, but go buy anelectric knife sharpener. the chef's choice model130, 140 works great. there's no other way to sharpena knife at home unless you really want to stand therefor 10 minutes with a sharpening stone, which you cando, but most people don't
have the patience for it. one last thing. the european knives have a20 degree angle to them. the combination east west kniveshave a 15 degree angle. so if you sharpen a $200 gyutoknife with a traditional electric sharpener, you'llruin the edge. so chef's choice did come outwith a model that'll do both, which is kind of important. the last thing i would saythat's really important is a
good 12-inch skillet,and you want-- all-clad still makesthe best skillet. i would invest in an all-clad. so those are the three or fourthings you definitely need. audience: thanks, that'sa great answer. so there are some times thati search for recipes on "america's test kitchen" andi'll get results from "cook's country," and realize that idon't have a membership there, and i didn't realize thatrecipe was part of it.
is there any work beingdone to sort of-- audience: --giveme the-- yeah. chris kimball: my head of itwho has a notebook and a pencil promises me by april. we're rebuilding all the infrastructure, all of our sites. the problem is that we havean outside vendor-- it's owned by hearst-- that handles all of oursubscriptions and processing.
and for us to do this entirelyon our own, without some of the things they offer,is almost impossible. so we've been waiting forthem to get up to speed. so we're right in the middleof the project. it should be done by may, atwhich point you can have access to everything. it'll be easier. because right now, if you goto three of our different sites, you have three differentpasswords, three
different credit cards. it's very complicated. audience: and then thelast one, sorry. is there going to be an app forthe android for "america's test kitchen," or anyof the others? i can't part say no. i wouldn't get outof here alive. audience: so america's changedsince you went to university. what have you learned fromoutside of america and brought
in from the scienceperspective? chris kimball: well, notso much from a science perspective, but i think what'sinteresting is there's been a restaurant revolutionin the last 30 years, obviously. and home cooking hasn'tchanged much, really. it's starting to, inthe last two years. nothing goes into our magazinesunless we survey it. we ask you what you want.
it's that old story. in 1985, i was owned in part by"the new yorker." and so i had an office at "thenew yorker's" building, and bill shawn-- william shawn was theeditor back then, as some of you may remember. and si newhouse took mr. shawnout for lunch at the four seasons and said, mr. shawn, howdo you determine what your readers want to read?
and mr. shawn said, i don't. and mr. newhouse said,what do you mean? and he said, well, i just putthings in the magazine that i want to read, and i assumemy readers have the same tastes i do. he was fired fourmonths later. and my answer to that is weonly put things in the magazine that you tell us youwant, because we don't take advertising.
so we found in the last twoyears that what you want is starting to change. that being said, i haveto say two things. the top 10 rated recipes of alltime out of 7,000 recipes we've rated-- we rateevery week-- two of them are greenbean casserole. chris kimball: somebody heremakes green bean casserole. statistically, ithas to be true. i don't know why, but they do.
and so what's starting to happennow is techniques-- not necessarily science,but techniques-- i mean, stir fry used to beethnic at one time, right? which is ridiculous,but it makes sense. small pieces of food cookreally quickly. it's very variable. it got incorporated into theamerican repertoire fast. now all the things coming fromdifferent parts of the world that do make sense for americanhome cooking, and
they are coming in. and i would think in the nextfive to eight years, you'll see a huge change in americanhome cooking. it's just starting, but ithasn't happened yet. people are still making thatdried out lasagna, but that's really changing. i would suggest that my favoritebook currently is ottolenghi's "plenty." i justgot "jeruslaem." i've tried a couple things.
i've cooked about half of therecipes in that, because, you know, the ottoman empire wasin the spice trade, on the spice routes. they had 85 to 90 differentspices. northern europe hada dozen spices. "the joy of cooking" originallyhad 15 spices. so there are ways of combiningflavors, there are techniques that we have never used here,because we're mostly northern european style cooking,mostly.
and there's a lot that'sgoing to come in. so i think it's going to changecompletely, and i think people's experiencewith food through restaurants has also changed. they know what saagpaneer is now. i still don't want to make it athome, but many people in my kitchen do. but no, it's going to change. audience: so at the beginningof your articles, you have
this description of whatyou're going for. we want a tender crustor whatever. so where does that preferencecome from? chris kimball: well, thequestion is, we have to pick a lane for a story. and so we survey and askwhat people want. but at some point, it dependson what we've done before. we have to come to it with adifferent point of view. but you can do chewy chocolatechip cookies, or you can do
crispy chocolate chip cookies,and one's not better than the other. so it's mostly what you say, andit's also our tastes, and whether we think we canadd some value, because it's a new direction. it's something different. sometimes we'll go back and doa story we did 10 years ago, because we found out actuallyit's not as good as it should be, like pumpkin pie,or creme brulee.
but it's mostly just a functionof listening to what you guys want. audience: ok, sorry, one more,since i'm a new cook. so the trouble i always haveis doubling recipes. i always assume that if i needto double it for whatever reason, like a sauce orwhatever, that i literally double every single ingredienti see, which, yeah, ok. so are there certain things,or a key, or something you should use like never doubleyour flour, or only do that
amount and a quarteror something? chris kimball: savoryversus baking. savory, a few thingsto watch out for. don't double the heator the spices. chris kimball: becauseyou hold off and then taste as you go. but that's really a problem. secondly, liquid. sometimes in a stew, if you'regoing to triple a stew, you
don't need triple the liquid. so that's something youshould look at. the other thing is in baking,as you double a recipe, then the pan size doesn'tnecessarily-- you need a different pan size. and you may end up with athicker, or more depth to the cake, or whatever you're doing,so the cooking time's going to be off. if you're going to createsomething bigger, you tend to
lower the oven temperature by25 degrees, so it's going to have to cook a littlelonger, so you don't overcook the outside. in general, baking is tough. and also, when you mix thingstogether, like you're creaming butter or mixing thingstogether, if you quadruple a recipe, when you mix it, you'regoing to over mix it to get everything mixed together. for example, when you makebrownies, it always says, or
should say, streaks of flourleft in the batter? well, i know what you do,because i do the same thing. i'm going like, hey, thereare still streaks of flour in the batter. this can't be right. so you keep goinga couple more. well, what happens is youdevelop gluten as a result. the brownies rise a little bitmore, because there's more structure, but theyturn out cakey.
not that good. so when you have double therecipe or quadruple the recipe, you end up mixing more,there's more agitation, and you end up-- so very often in the testkitchen, we'll just maybe double it, maybe not, and justmake more than one batch. but baking is particularlydifficult. audience: so what aboutcider-braised pork steaks, like a recipe like that?
chris kimball: that'snot a problem. audience: you can double that? audience: in the magazine wherethe people write in with questions, there was oncea question about using california bay laurel leavesinstead of [inaudible]. chris kimball: ohyeah, turkish. audience: yeah. and the answer was that itwasn't worth the price to use california.
but the thing is that we'rehere in california. a lot of people have thosetrees in their yard, so it's free. and so i was wondering, canyou use the bay that grows around here, and do you use adifferent amount, or is it just one for-- chris kimball: i do rememberthat letter. it was a few years ago. i think we decided that wepreferred, actually, the
california, i think. but yeah, sure. you can use them. i mean, my pet peeve is-- andi argue this all the time-- you know recipes, you're doinga stew for 12 people, and it says add a sprig of thyme? are you kidding me? i mean, i don't know, maybe thefrench had particularly pungent thyme.
but i mean, a sprig of thymeisn't going to do anything. you're never going toknow it's there. and sometimes i feel the sameway about bay leaves-- i always add an extra one. so yeah, you can use it, sure. but i think one thing i'velearned is, also, towards the end of cooking, i mean, unlessit's baking, but if it's a stew, a soup, or whatever,taste it. people just assume--
my 22-year-old loves to cook-- and she'll just follow therecipe and won't taste it and serve it. and, you know, it needs salt,it needs something else, a little vinegar. but at the end of cooking, freshherbs are best added at the end, grated or mincedginger, garlic. there's lots of little thingsyou can add at the end of cooking-- vinegar,lemon juice--
to get the balance right. and so that's the most importantpart of cooking, other than cleaning up, isthe last five minutes. and adding those thingsat the end. and there's also secretingredients. years ago, someone in my officementioned pomegranate molasses, and i made fun ofthem, because it's a stupid hard to find ingredient. now it's not hard to find.
that's one of the things i haveat my disposal when i'm cooking, just to getthe balance right. it's a little sweet,a little sour. so it's that last minute that'sreally important. audience: so you mentioned aboutthinking that there's new spices, and that kindof thing, maybe some new techniques coming fromaround the world. what about just new approaches,and i guess more technology in the kitchen?
chris kimball: well,sure, yes. we're doing a pressure cookerbook right now. that's actually going to behuge, because it's fast. it's not a slow cooker,it's a fast cooker. you can make the world's bestchicken stock in 15 minutes. you can make risottoin 15 minutes. and also, a pressure cookerturns out great food. so that's going to be big. everyone's talkingabout sous-vide.
audience: that's gettingto be affordable now. chris kimball: there's a $450one we liked, which is-- i mean, the problem with thatis, money is one issue, but then what do you do with it? i'm sorry, i've gotten down tosmall things now, because these big things, you'vegot to take it out. but yeah, sous-vide is fine. although, i have to say, theproblem with sous-vide for me is i like to chew my food.
and i find, like, if you'veever had a turkey sandwich made with sous-vide turkey,it feels kind of wet. and so as a friend of minesaid about turkey at thanksgiving, he says he likesovercooked white meat, because that's the traditionat his house. and he said that's whygod invented gravy. chris kimball: well, who wantsgravy and a particularly moist piece of white meat? it doesn't work.
so i don't know. yeah, it's a great way ofcooking, but i don't think that's going to be ineverybody's kitchen. but i think the pressure cookeris probably one of those things that will be. so thank you very much.
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