November 22, 2024 • 37 mins
On today’s episode, Martha goes on the road to visit America’s Test Kitchen, where she sits down with its Chief Content Officer, Dan Souza. Following the publication of Martha’s 100th book, and America’s Test Kitchen’s 25th anniversary, the culinary experts dive into the science of cooking. How do kitchen mistakes sometime improve a great recipe? Why has America’s Test Kitchen determined that “cold steak” is the right way to cook a steak? What makes delicious gnocchi? Listen to hear all of that and more as Martha and Dan dissect their latest cookbooks and the passions behind them.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
America's Test Kitchen has been studying and deconstructing recipes to
help educate home cooks for twenty five years. Their readers
and viewers rely on the science driven thinking that America's
Test Kitchen provides. Dan Susa has held many roles at
America's Test Kitchen and is currently the chief Content Officer
(00:25):
for the brand. That means he oversees sixty test cooks,
creating four television shows, two magazines, and thousands of recipes
for the website. I'm sitting with Dan now at America's
Test Kitchen headquarters in Boston, and we're discussing his role
at ATK, which is America's Test Kitchen, and how he
(00:46):
hopes the brand will evolve in months and years ahead.
Welcome to my podcast, Dan, thank you for having me
Muche very nice and we've not met before, It's true,
which is weird because we're both in exactly the same
business of creating recipes for the American consumer and teaching
them and publishing stuff for them. And it's very nice
(01:10):
to be here. And this is very reminiscent of my
big kitchen at Star at Lee High, which is where
I started really doing my thing. In New York City. Yeah,
and you do it here in Boston. You have two
hundred employees here.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yes, a little over two hundred employees.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, yep. And how many shows?
Speaker 3 (01:27):
So we have our two flagship shows which are on PBS,
America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country. We also have an
Amazon show called America's Test Kitchen the Next Generation, which
is sort of a competition show to get on our
other shows, a whole slate of YouTube shows and others
on OTT and Fast Networks.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, and you're very rigorous kind of way of choosing recipes.
I'll make it onto your show. So can you describe that?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Sure? Yes, it's definitely quite involved. So it starts with research.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
We have a beautiful cookbook library here with over five
thousand titles.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
We have a great any of my cookbooks in your Life?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
We definitely, we definitely have I'm ready to go check. Yes, well,
we will try to hear this, but we absolutely do.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
And so that we start with research and then we
do what we call five recipe tests. So we'll pull
recipes from cookbooks and online and choose five that we
feel like represent the landscape of that recipe. We try
them in the kitchen. Everyone comes and taste, and we
figure out what works what doesn't work. We learn a
lot from that process. We cobble together what we call
our working recipe, and that's what we'll test true scientific method,
(02:28):
trial and error against over a period about six weeks.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I should have asked you before I came here, because
we recently discovered something weird about pacha shoe. Uh huh?
Now are you you make pacha shoe? Right?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Yeah, Well, what's your recipe? America's Test Kitchen has just
published their new twenty fifth anniversary cookbook called America's Test
Kitchen five hundred favorite recipes, Yes, five hundred recipes that
changed the way America cooks. So let's see what your
pacha shoe recipe says. I'm very curious because I did
(03:02):
not refer to yours when I was testing my recipe.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
You did it?
Speaker 1 (03:05):
No, I didn't. But I did refer to an awful
lot of classic recipes for pata shoe, and I found
a really unusual fact.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
What did you find?
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Well that they're pretty much all exactly the same.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yes, they definitely are.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Goujear is a way of baking the pata shoe dough.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
So we have two large eggs plus one large egg white,
five tablespoons of butter, two tablespoons of milk, six tablespoons
of water, a little bit of salt and sugar, and
then half a cup of all purpose flour.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Oh, so that makes a very few pata shoe twenty
four little foals. Yes. So I had a young man
working in my kitchen and I said, oh, please make
guget four cocktails for tonight. And he made the gujeer
and they were the best guget I have ever tasted.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Did he mess something up?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Well, he didn't mess it up. He actually fixed it.
And he used twelve eggs per cup per cup of flour. Wow,
And it made the lightest, fluffiest, most hollow gouge air
you've ever seen. And he didn't put the cheese in
the dough. He put the cheese on top, very very
finely grated cheese. He used to a rasp, but would
(04:16):
rasp to grate the cheese and it was He put
it on top of the dough and that sat out.
He said for a while it the best. So obviously
the four eggs was somebody's idea that that's really what
it should be. For one cup of flour. Yeah, and
it doesn't have to be I love that and I
loved it. I just loved that, and I thought, I
actually did think of America's Test Kitchen and I was
(04:36):
doing that, yeah, wondering did they ever find that out?
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Well, so, yeah, so it sounds like that's even twice
what we have in this recipe. We use a one
less yolk in our recipe. Fat has that tenderizing effect
on baked goods, so we get less spring out of it,
so we have a dryer, fluffier result from the egg white.
But it makes sense to me that more eggs you're
gonna have more leavening power and more ability to trap back.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
See your lighter, Yeah, more tender it really worse.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Try it, I will I definitely.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
I saw the photo in your book and you can
see like sunlight poking through them.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
It looks so light. Yeah, I will say, I've never
seen the goose that looks.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
It's kind of fun.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
But that just it just makes me think that cooking
is a science, and it is it is a science
that changes according to the Women of.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
The Ship, actually well exactly, and that trial and error
is so key to our process. You know, we we
don't find things out unless we try them and see
if they make it or fail. When we're finally happy
with the recipe in house, we also do this kind
of big in the real world experiment where we send
our recipes to forty thousand home cooks that actually volunteer
to make our recipes before we publish them. We learn
a ton from that process.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Forty thousands yeah wow, yeah, get who's sits through that.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
So we luckily have a survey system that like manages it.
But so we look at a lot of things where
like if someone couldn't find an ingredient, we'd like to
know if something was awkward, But we always look for
an eighty make again score, like would you make the
recipe and add it to your repertoire. That's really our
standard because that's how you change someone's life and actually
incorporate into it.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
So that's that's sort of our process.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
That's been the most successful, that's been the most disastrous
test you've ever done?
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Oh, disaster, We've had some. We have some big disasters here,
I would say. So I worked on a macarone recipe.
So the beautiful little French cookies for a very long time,
probably much longer than six weeks, and I could never.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Get them as good as Lade.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Absolutely not. No, so I I we did, I would
get it. You did.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
So we have a recipe now that is as good
as lottera. But for me, I had so many variable
variables and it would fail sometimes and work other times.
I wasn't happy with it, and so our home testers
never had success. So I put it away for years.
When I took over as editor in chief of Cooks, iilltrated.
I assigned it to someone and he did a much
better job than I did.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
No, it can be done, yes, and it can't. They
can be made at home.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
And and we we found that out, and we we've
we've tried to demystify you know, difficult recipes like the
best brioche. You know, it's hard to hard to do
that brioche the way the way you really wanted to
turn out. And I do little tests. You probably do
the same thing. I mean, I did a cost test
in New York City, who makes the best costal? And
(07:17):
and well at the first the first time I did it,
and this was quite a few years ago, and they
don't exist anymore. Was the Petrosian Bakery? Oh really yep,
right on fifteen ninth Street, I think, And they made
the best costle and then they closed their bakery, so
then I had to search and search again, and then
I found that Laderie made the best according to our
(07:42):
little independent survey, and they were very, very good. And
now so many people are making good class on which
is nice.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
It's true. And people make them at home too.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Oh, of course I make them at home. I when
I was starting, when I started catering, there was no
place to buy costal sure, and so I had to
make them. And I followed Julia Child's recipe and volume two,
that twenty two page recipe, and I don't can't remember
how many pages it were.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I could always tell the challenge of her recipes.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Basically, but they were delicious. My daughter still remembers that
mine were the best costume she has ever tasted of them,
which is nice. They were really Julia's, but they were
I made them. But how interesting that that things have
changed so much?
Speaker 2 (08:25):
It's true, it's true.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
So what motivated you to follow a career in culinary
like this? And what is your background?
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Just briefly, Yeah, so I went to the culinary instead
of America for culinary school.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Actual he graduated first in his class.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
I read that my mom loves that back she loves
She's also a Martha by the way, with a beautiful garden.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
So I worked in restaurants in Boston and New York.
I spent a little time at Lebernon Dan and I
loved restaurants for the sort of repetition and the speed
and how fast you could get. But I've always just
been incredibly curiou this person, and so the test kitchen
really was a good home for me where I could
have a big question about food and go after and
chase it and they would pay for all the food
(09:08):
and pay for my time. And then I love writing,
so it gave me an outlet for that. It really
brought together a lot more so. Food media for me
was an extension of what I could learn in the kitchen,
but just more broadly and not in the science part
of it too is big And.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
You stayed in Boston, which is which has very excellent
restaurant some very excellent developmental chefs up here, but you've
never been tempted to come back to New York.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
So I love New York. My roots are really here.
I have my family.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yeah, my family is either from Maine or Massachusetts, and
so I had my roots side, my friends, and honestly,
the test kitchen. I fell in love with this place
sixteen years ago when I got the job of test cook,
and I haven't left.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I just love it.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
I keep taking on new and fun different jobs. But
it's a really great place.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
And so Cook's Illustrated. It was one of my favorite
magazines for a long time. Yeah, Kimball, he was my
neighbor in Fairfield.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Oh was he really? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:03):
And I've known him for many, many years. And so
how do they first notice you?
Speaker 3 (10:08):
So the application process to be a test cook involves
recipe development. So you actually develop a recipe for a muffin,
and then you submitted it along with a story, kind
of in the style of Cooks Illustrated.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
So I did this.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Even if you don't like muffins, I don't like.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Even if you don't like muffins, you got a muffin
rest me in your book.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Huh, well, blueberry muffins.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
That doesn't count.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
But no, no, I put that in because it is
one of my favorite muffins. But I still don't like I.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Don't even Yeah, well, so I didn't.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
After this, I spent weeks working on a Cranberry U
muffin and I submitted it along with a story, and
I got a call from the editorial director and she said,
we loved your story. Your recipe didn't work. I said,
that's impossible. I had worked on it for weeks. I
had gotten myself so tired of muffins. But she said,
we're going to give you one more shot at fixing it.
And I got this call when I was like driving
home from the supermarket. I parked my car, I got out.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Had you left out an ingredient when you sent it in?
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Well, so I figured out that one of the ratio,
one of the measurements was off in the version that
I sent them.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
But this is the crazy thing.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
So I parked my car, I got out, and I
was walking to my apartment and there's a construction worker
at the building next door and he goes, hey, your car,
And I whip around and my car is cruising down
the driveway at this steep grade and plows into the
garage door of my neighbor. I forgot to put the
car in gear and pull the emergency. It was so
focused on the recipe and then he was looking at
me like I was crazy. But I just turned around
(11:28):
and walked inside and opened my laptop up to like
fix the recipe. I just left the car because I
wanted to do this. I want to do this so bad. Okay,
and it worked, and it worked.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah. I sent the next version and it was fine.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Well, you've held so many roles at America's Test Kitchen,
Test Cook, editor in chief of Cook's Illustrated, on air
science expert, creator of What's Eating Dan, and now chief
content officer of the entire company? What role has been
the most fulfilling?
Speaker 3 (11:56):
So this probably won't come as a surprise to you,
but editor in chief of Cooks Illustrated it has been.
I've been done that for the last seven years, and
it's been so incredibly satisfying. Making a magazine is, as
you know, this all all in sort of proposition, and
I love that we can sweat over every word and
every image and you can just see our fingerprints all
over each issue of it. I work with an incredible
(12:17):
team and we just asked really big questions about food and.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Go and tackle them.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
What's been the most challenging job.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Most challenging job I think is the same I think, yeah,
I think it is editor in cheap I love doing
the stuff on TV.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
It comes pretty naturally to me.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
But the managing a team making something like that, it's
been a big role, very satisfying.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Though, And Cooks Illustrated has really garnered a lot of
attention and an awful lot of fans. How many people
subscribe to Cooks Illustrated.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
We have about seven hundred thousand subscribers right now, and
we actually won a national magazine work for General Excellence
two years ago, the first time in our history.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Yeah, so it's under your tutelage, under my tutelage. Yes,
I'm pretty good, very proud of it.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, yeah, it's really fun. No, I miss having the
printed magazine, and Martha Stuart Living is now you know,
basically online. Sure, we're doing some SIPs special interest publications, yes,
we do for six a year now, which are fun
to do, but it's not the same as doing that
monthly real difficult production of a beautiful magazine. It's true,
(13:21):
and and but people's taste for magazines has really changed,
so we're looking for information in so many different places.
How else does America's Test Kitchen relate information and recipes
to your members?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Yeah, So I love magazines, I love print, I always will,
but our web membership, our digital subscription is really the
sort of you know, it's the highest quality, the most
polished version of our content. And we're imagining really cool
and interesting ways to present recipes. I mean, obviously, when
you have video and you have the ability to really
break down steps for people, it's a much better tool
for teaching and learning. So I love that we're putting
(13:55):
a ton of effort into that moving forward.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Yeah, when I go back to find a recipe, like
I was making stuff peppers this weekend, it's so many
stuff peppers in the garden and I had to pick
them before the frost. Oh sure, And so I made
two giant giant pots of stuffed peppers green peppers and
two red peppers and one yellow pep. But I used
ground turkey, And of course I don't have a recipe
(14:17):
for that particular thing. But I love stuff peppers. I
think it's the polish background. But I go to the website,
I look, and I rarely go to other people's websites
for things that I know I love that I probably
have made in the past sometime and it was just
it's just fun to go back and see and how
(14:37):
easy it is to retrieve a recipe online. And that's
what people are doing now totally so much.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
So, yeah, we have the ability to like save a
recipe and you can come back to build these collections.
It's much higher touch and yeah, yeah, it's the most
kind of premium experience. I got stuff peppers too, I
love them.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
You did. Yeah, And then some friends of mine made
stuff my mother's stuff cabbage over the weekend and they
sent me pictures of their stuff cabbage and they had
gotten that recipe online also, So it's so funny. That's
that's the way people are referencing information so so much
more than ever before. It's true, it's true, And you
(15:13):
have a lot of subscribers to to your information.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
We do, how many, Yes, we have over five hundred
thousand web members, but we're everywhere, right, so we've got
two and a half million on YouTube. Really some amazing
original shows they are, including What's Tone and Techniquely with
my colleague long Lamb, it's like all about technique really
about teaching in that forum, and then you know, we're
all over social media.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
It's Instagram and well the Instagram. Like this morning, I
was in the car coming up to Boston and just
just turned on just the stream, you know, just watching
and watching reels on the way, and you learn so
much in a few minutes of watching a few cooking reels,
you learn so much. And it's you know, learn how
to make a dumpling a different way, or you learn
(15:59):
how to chop it onion in a different way, or
so chase something a different way, and it's and there's
so much information out there from all over the world,
which makes it very interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Very interesting.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I agree, and I think we love writing a lot
about recipes, whether it's a fifteen hundred word article in
the magazine. But I actually am like such an evangelist
for social video because in forty five seconds and sixty seconds,
we can teach you a technique.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
We can teach you how to cook a steak a
certain way or whatever. And it's a cold steak that
the cold steak.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yeah, your cold stake telling the audience what your full
steak is.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
So we have a cold seared steak, which sounds a
little bit crazy, but really it's throwing out everything you
kind of learned about steak cookery. So instead of a
ripping hot skillet and tons of oil, we use a
cold pan and no oil, And instead of flipping one
time halfway through, we flip it frequently, every two minutes.
And so here's what happened to kind of steak. So
(16:51):
we start with either a strip steak.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Or a rabi. You want to good enough marveling.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
That some of that fat will render out right, So
you start it cold and you turn the heat up,
and as is cooking, you flip every two minutes, and
you add browning on the outside the same way you
would paint a house layer after layer. So by the
time the inside is warm to that perfect medium rare,
the outside is gorgeous and brown turns everything kind of
on its head. But it makes sense when you really
think about. You know, what the interior needs and what
the exterior needs, but it's cooking in its own beef fat.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
So it's really wonderful.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, yummy. What dish do most cooks home cooks ask for?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
That's a good question.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
I mean one of the biggest questions is like chicken,
Like what do I do with chicken? How do I
add flavor or salmon or salmon. Salmon is a really
big one.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
What's your favorite way to cook salmon?
Speaker 3 (17:43):
So this whe it's sound like a broken record, but
we have a cold start method for that as well.
You know, farmery salmon nowadays is very fatty, has a
lot of fat in its.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
We're not allowed to have it.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
You're not allowed to have it.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
No, that salmon has to be lined, caught.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Lin caught, line caught wild. Well, even if you get
like king salmon there.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
And a lot of it is not at all fatty.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
If you're in like a sock guy and it's a
little dry.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Yeah, so there, you probably want to use a little
bit wiel But but starting its skin side down with
a little bit of salt on the pan too, and
letting it render out skin gets crispy. I love crispy
fish skin. So not everyone good for you, I know,
all those Omega THREESO. And cook it most of the
way on that side and then just flip it over
for a little kiss.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
On the other side.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
What about chicken? How do you how do you suggest
people cook chickens just pieces of chicken or whole chicken.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
I think people want a lot of different things, but
I'm usually suggesting a roast chicken because it's so much
more economical. You get so much out of it. We
have a wonderful recipe where you uh, you preheat a
twelve inch skill it, drop the chicken in, and then
go into.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
A four hundred degree oven. So you sort of.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Jump it in like skin side, breast side.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Up, breast side down, so dark meat is facing down,
so you get a little jumpstart on that.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Help trust or untrusted, just a little telling anybody anything
you have to.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Buy the it's all about it.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
No, so yeah, so you do a little trust just
on just on the drums to keep them together but
not wrapped around the whole bird. Tuck the wings, season
it all over really well with salt and pepper. Preheat
a twelve inch I'm doing the full recipe now, twelve
inches skillet over over medium high heat and nice and
hot little bit of oil.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Chicken goes in dark.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Kind of oil, dark oil, no using like a neutral
high heat like a canola or vegetable oil. Chicken goes
in and then goes into a four hundred degree oven
and you roast for about thirty minutes and then we
just kill the heat, totally turn it off, and let
that oven slowly decrease down and it finishes really gently
that way.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, it's a beautiful It's like our weeknight roast chicken recipe.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I hear you are a bit of well, I think
you're more than a bit of a science scheek, a
food science skik. What intrigues intrigues you most about the
science of cooking.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
For me science And this isn't like the scary word
science for me, it sort of gives you this X
ray vision into your food that you wouldn't have otherwise.
So I'll give you an example with cooking mushrooms. So
you have a rest in your book form mushroom soup,
and the mushrooms cook for a little over an hour
in the soup, and you have some vegetables in there too.
I'm sure those are like super soft and you know,
(20:11):
almost silky in texture, like the carrots and the onions.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
The mushrooms are beautiful.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
They're tender, they're not overcooked and kind of tough, but
they're not overly tender. And so mushrooms when we look inside,
they don't have the same structure as vegetables and meat.
They're made up of a polymer called kiten that is
really heat resistant, so you can boil them for an hour,
roast them for long periods of time, and they're really
wonderful the whole way. I did an experiment here where
(20:36):
I steamed a piece of zucchini, a piece of beef
tender loin, and a piece of portable mushroom for.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Forty five minutes.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
The beef was as you can imagine leather or zucchini
like look at it and it would fall apart fish,
but the mushroom is like perfectly tender, and so understanding
that you can do really cool. It's called kiten. It
makes up shrimp shells as well, and so it's very
heat resistant. So we have a method for some saying
mushrooms where we actually start them in water first, a
little bit of water, and that helps collapse some of
(21:05):
their cell structure so that they don't have all those
air pockets in there, and those air pockets are what
suck in so.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Much oil when you're cooking them. To cook them, a
little bit of.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Water, evaporate it off, add a little bit of fat
that's going to coat the outside, and then you can
brom up yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
We do finish with Yeah, we finished with a little
bit of butter at the end.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
But yeah, that's just an example of like, if you
could see inside your food a little bit more through science,
then you don't rely on the recipe quite as much
and you can be a little more playful in the kitchen.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
If you were teaching the home cook just one recipe,
which recipe would you choose?
Speaker 3 (21:37):
I think I would actually have them make potato and yoki.
The reason I really like it is it's a simple
ingredient list and you can sort of understand what each
component is doing. There's a little bit of techniques to
technique to it, but the payoff is so grand in
terms of these beautiful little light pillows. And it's something
that you might think only a restaurant can do, but
is actually have you tried ricotta?
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yes, I had a disaster with that.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
You did tell me about it.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
So I was making it for a big dinner party
of the main and I didn't I didn't drain and
it cost a long enough huh, So they completely disintegrate
into the pan.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
What did what did you do?
Speaker 1 (22:13):
I made something else? I made some pasta real fast Okay, yeah,
but it was a disaster. But I describe your yoky
how do you how do you make them? Because there's
different ways there is Yeah, do you use the patashoe? Oh?
Speaker 3 (22:25):
So we do have Parisian recipes, but I like the
potato one.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
I kind of fell in love with that.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
I do with potato, potato and pata shoe. Do you
really Yeah, it's delicious.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
I don't think I've ever done that much.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Oh, it's so good.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
So how do you incorporate the potatoes into that? Do
you make a paste and then the potatoes.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And not well ricet or just parade potato. Huh, it's
really good.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
I would love to try that. A lot of cheese too, Yeah,
I know of cheese.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
So we start with rusted potatoes, which are naturally drier,
so you're not gonna have to use much flour and
I jumped start them, roast them in the oven until
they're nice and tender. I rice them. You know, you
could use a food meal too, but you want ice
and smooth. And then the key to the recipe in
my mind, is weighing the mashed potatoes the rice potatoes
(23:10):
before you combine them with the rest of the ingredients.
That's where the flower, Yeah, and then and then flower
and egg. But if you measure your potatoes, then you
can use an exact amount of flour, so you're not
constantly adding it in the process and making them a
little bit tough.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
So is that recipe in your nude?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Try that?
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah, but I want to try you or we gotta
we gotta trade yolky.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Resume and I just I love New York. I think
it's so fun. I do not like them fried though. Yeah,
a lot of recipes online now I've just been seeing
them on Instagram. They're browning them so much. I don't
like that.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
I know it kind of defeats the purpose. Like perfect little.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Pillow Right, what's your favorite food site on? Like Instagram?
Speaker 3 (23:47):
A creator that I really like his His Instagram name
is Another Day in Paradise is an American who lives
in London and his videos are gorgeous. He's just making
like the most appealing food and he and every single
one totally.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
I feel like him or the food.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
I like his sort of esthetic, but the food looks incredible. Same.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I haven't read Another Day in Paradise.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Yeah, Another Day in Paradise. I think his name is Jesse.
But that's I have not.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Looked at that. And if you were going to write
your own cookbook apart from your work here, what would
the subject be.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
I don't know that it would sell very well. But
this is the one that's like in my heart that
I want to do. Is I'm like a huge seafood
lover growing up here in the New England area. My
mom's from Maine. We're in Maine, so my mom was
born in like Rangely area, Rangely Lakes area.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
But I have a lot of family in Bangor as well.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Oh so your neighbors to me, I'm in Sale Harbor.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah, you're in stil Harbor.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Right, No, right, where all the best fishes, the best fish.
I love it up there so much. Yeah. Well, my
dad squid we went, he went jigging for squid last year.
Is really Oh and then my granddaughter who's who at
the time was you see, she was about ten when
she she learned how to perfectly clean squid. That's so
and they love to eat it too. I made them
(25:01):
beautiful temp for us.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Well, and there's nothing like fresh squid like that thing.
They got dirty squid that still has all the purple
and yeah, but you've that all out. Yeah, but it's
so fresh. And then my dad's side is from the Azors,
the Portuguese Islands, so I come. I come to it
honestly from the different directions. But I think like it
would be a ton of clam recipes and just all.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
The fish that I love.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
I'd like that. I'd like that cookbook.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Well, as long as you buy it, I'll make it.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I will. I will definitely buy it. And so back
to real work. What's some of your goals here at
at America's Test Kitchen as the chief content Officer.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yes, which a big title, very big title.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
So one of my big goals is to really sort
of open the doors. We've been established here for over
twenty five years. We have a beautiful test kitchen, and
a lot of times were like heads down testing recipes developing.
But I really want to open the doors and bring
more folks in. I think we have so much to
learn from creators all over the place. So that's gonna
happen in a few different ways. So I say about that,
and then also really our digital product, our digital all
(26:02):
access web membership, being able to tailor it to folks
to help them cook incredible food is really where I
want to put a lot of focus. But we've got
some cool keep shows in development, really just expanding.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Out and meeting people where they are. It's some angle.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
What do you think is the future of food on television?
Is it going to stay on television, Is it going
to be streaming, is it going to be only online?
What do you think?
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah, I think it's going to maintain kind of its
footing in a lot of these different places. I think
the distinction between TV and video is so blurred now
if we look at like YouTube, for instance, which is
the largest streamer on television, So you're you're whether you're
watching it on a computer screen or your phone or
on TV. It's how you want to consume it. But
I don't think it's going anywhere on any of these platforms.
(26:48):
Our take is that we still always want to be teaching,
and so our PBA shows are instructional cooking. And you
know my YouTube show is it's a YouTube show. It's fun,
it's a little bit of reverent, but it's still all
about teaching you something. If you nition episode, you won't
think about that ingredient the same way you did at
the beginning, but with a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yeah. And what are you most proud of since you
took over here at America's Stess Kitchen.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
My whole time here. Wow, that's a big one.
Speaker 3 (27:14):
I would say winning the Magazine Award for Cooks Illustrated
was a was a real point of pride. You know,
growing up with magazines and food magazines, it's always been
so near and near to my heart that to get
that recognition from outside was really really wonderful. Also, getting
that macaron recipe in the magazine.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Some of the small challenges that we faced, Yeah, so fun.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Can I ask you some questions about your book?
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Oh, that would be why have you Okay? Why not?
Speaker 2 (27:47):
So it's one hundred recipes?
Speaker 3 (27:48):
So our rec our book is a five hundred recipes
is very hard to call it down to that. You've
done one hundred cookbooks and you've been.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Doing no, no, no, forty eight cook forty eight cookbooks. Yeah,
the rest of the there are other books I write,
I write on through subjects, all other subjects.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
So you're you're you're one hundredth books. Yes, yes, and
you've been doing this for so long. How did you
nail it down to one hundred recipes. Was it painful
process or it's hard?
Speaker 1 (28:09):
I had? I had reams of realms of pages of recipes,
and and I worked with a woman called Suzanne Rupert
who kept saying, you can't have that many. It's one hundred. Yeah,
you know, it's one hundred. So I kept crossing all
recipes and thinking, oh, then I would add a couple more,
and I finally got it down to one hundred.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, and there are a.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Few that I miss that should have been in the book,
but then I didn't know what to take out. So sure,
but it's a nice number. And the backstories that go
with each recipe are fun, and they were so much
fun to write. I think I wrote all the essays
in a couple of days. Really, yeah, I just sat
down and wrote them.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
What I love about your your essays and your sort
of head notes is you're able to be both very
practical and sharp in terms of the feedback, and you
know what you should be doing, but then also wrap
a story around it so nicely in a very short
amount of space.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Yeah. Yeah, it's and that's fun for me. I like
doing that. And it also keeps your memory very sharp
because you can't if somebody in my family reads something
and it's not accurate, Oh boy, do I have to pay?
Speaker 2 (29:15):
You'll hear about that?
Speaker 1 (29:16):
I do indeed.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Yeah, you have a pumpkin pie recipe.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
I say you made it over here.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
We have made over here that I am. I am
so fascinated with. Can you can you talk a little
bit about what makes it?
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Well, it's a philo crust, so you do not have
to master the art of patrese. And many people still
have trouble with pepreez a. I know, even after I
wrote my Pies and Tarts book and made that the
easiest recipe on earth and showed that if you use
a food processor you can do it in about thirteen seconds.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
And I had a contest with one of my nieces
who wanted to make it by hand with a pastry cutter,
and I kept saying, so much easier in the food
processor and just as good. Yeah, if the butter's cold enough,
the flower is cold. And I have a rule for
pastry making. Make it cold, bake it hot.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Oh, I love that, that's my rule. Yeah. Easy to manage.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah, it's very easy. And if you do that, you
usually get a good crust. But anyway to make a
crust like this, I love filo, and to incorporate philo
as a crust with a delicious, flavorful pumpkin puree. It
just turned out perfectly. We worked on the recipe for
quite a while at the magazine before before it was perfected.
(30:30):
And the crust is not wet and it's not soggy,
and it doesn't fall apart. Look, you can unmold it.
Look out nice.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
It's so cordious.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
You can mold it out of the out of the
spring form pan. Yep. And it's a it's a gorgeous pie.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
What I love about it, and it was mentioned to
you is tart tart. It's more like a tar, more
like a tart. But like pumpkin pie is one of
those things like if you don't have it for Thanksgiving,
people are upset.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
But it's never a looker. It's never a crowd pleaser
in that way.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
But this is stunning. Oh yeah. The edges of the filo, Yeah,
it turns it into a set.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
And you have to make it thick enough enough layers
of filo, enough really good butter to make sure that
it's crunchy and nice. But The filling is very important too,
and this has a very flavorful filling in it.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Do you have a little bit of five spice powers?
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Oh yes, right, ye, a little bit of the Asian influence.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
I love that because it's it's hitting on all those
warm spices that are traditional, but you have a little
more interest.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Than an intrigue.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
I love it. I love that vibe. Yeah, and I
see you made my turkey.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yes, we made your turkey deparchment.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Yes, what'd you think?
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I think it's wonderful. Oh good, I'm amazed that. I
wish people could see this as a podcast. But the
color on it is absolutely orgeous color.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Yeah, and it's clean. Didn't did your kitchen say that?
Nice and clean? It is a bake and.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Parchment, Yes, yeah it is.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
I was shocked. You know, I'm been doing the one
oh one turkey or one on one that we I
think we did something like eighty two turkeys when we
were developing turkey one on one with cheese cloth soaked
in butter and white wine and you know, just wrapped
the turkey. Then you pull that off and you're just
brown for a few minutes in the oven at the
very end, and it's a mess because of the cheese cloth,
(32:07):
the cheese clad and the liquid the butter, so much
butter and so much wine, and you know it's just
and it splatters all over your oven. And wrapping that
buttered turkey in parchment with a big clips, I use
a staple gun.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
You do, okay, Yeah, I use yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
And you have to get the big sheets of parchment,
so make sure you get the big sheets, so big
professional boxes. It just is so neat and so clean
and and renders that I think the juicy is turkey.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Yeah, really juicy.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
Well, so it's so well protected during that initial cook No,
I really, I really love it.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
So I was happy. I was happy and that turned out.
That turned out well, and I had to include it
in the book New Recipe, but it was included.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
It feels like seminol and important having there. We also
have your your mashed potatoes, which are big Martha's mashed potatoes.
So my mom is also a Martha and she makes
with potatoes that I love that always she.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Whips them with what and the like the like chen
eideah in a kitchen aid. I confess my mom did too,
and I just don't like.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Them with you don't like them.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
For me, it's like a taste memory that I'll always
always be connected to. But these have cream cheese in them,
which I don't think I've really seen in many mashed patatos.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Mom. Mom loved cream cheese or cream cheese, heavy cream, milk,
and butter. And they are really four kinds of dairs.
Oh yeah, so good and so fattening and delicious.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
That's what they should be though, and good potatoes.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
She always used Idahos, but I've I have a house
in Maine, so I use Maine potatoes. But I growed
my own potatoes.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
Now.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
We just harvested so many bushels of potatoes in my garden.
Really yeah, and Bedford, New York, and I've been cooking them.
We had one potato that I weighed, its two point
two pounds, what yeah, and you know what, it was
horrible because it was too big.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
It was too big, yeah, didn't have like bad spots.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
And oh no, no, it's a perfect It looks like
a giant Idaho potato. So I put it in on
a steamer basket in a pot of boiling water to
see After two hours, it still wasn't cooked in the middle,
and it was too big. So forget those big potatoes.
Dig the potatoes on time. If you're growing potatoes, we
left them a little long.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
You did so on Instagram. I'm friends with Ryan your
hell you are? Yes? Was it his fault that we
didn't dig the potatoes?
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Really? Definitely Ryan's Anything that goes wrong in the garden
is Ryan.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
And any successes, of course, are yours.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Of course.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Yeah. He said for me to ask you how the
maze is coming.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
The maze is so beautiful. Yeah, oh my gosh, wait
should you see it? Next year it will be unveiled.
I think we're about I would say about three quarters done. Okay,
and that's only in three years.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
It's two and a half acres. What. Yeah, it's too big.
And it's looking so good. I saw an aerial shot
of it on just the other day. It looks amazing. Really,
that's what it amaze is supposed to amaze.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yes, it should where that comes from?
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Right? And so it's it's looking good.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Oh that's awesome. I love that.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
I feel like I connect with you obviously on food,
but on the on nature and plants and trees so much.
I brought something a little bit funny that if you
if you're game for it. So I lived next to
this huge arboretom that's owned by Harvard.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
I're been there many time, Yes, yes.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
So there's a very special tree there that drops these leaves.
And I think they're a little bit like three weeks
ago they would have smelled perfect. But I have them
in a little bag here, and I'm wonder if you
could take a big sniff and see what they smell.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Like to you.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Not much.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
I think a month ago they would have smelled even more. Yeah, Wow,
you're so good. I was like, I wonder if I
could teach Martha something. This is it's cut Well.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
I have weeping cutsuras right outside my back doors. I
have two giant ones that I planted twenty years ago
and they have grown as tall as my house in
twenty years. Really, they were little when I planed. Yeah,
and I have one on the other side of the house.
They're the most beautiful tree.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, they are, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
And they look like rain just falling down.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Oh, these are beautiful.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Thank you for bringing me cut early.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Yeah, I just love when it is the right time.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Do not have any scent nothing, So they're they're.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
Supposed to be like cotton candy, like right when, and
it's amazing, But I wish we were talking.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Like a month ago would have been like of course
you know it though.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Well, thank you so much for joining me today on
my podcast, man, thank you and letting me record it
here at your kitchen anytimes. So much fun. And please
let our listeners know where they can follow you at
America's Test Kitchen.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Yeah, so you can follow me personally at Test cook everywhere,
but come visit us at America's Test Kitchen dot com
for all of our fourteen thousand recipes and you know,
all of our equipment reviews.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
And Instagram addresses at Test Kitchen. Yes, yeah, you know
you look for America's Test Kitchen. It's not there.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Yes, come find us at Test Kitchen and that's on
Instagram and we're kind of.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Across all the platforms there.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
And good luck with your book. It's a beautiful book,
encyclopedic and in us in size and nature and I
can't wait to peruse it.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
It is and try your yakee
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Yah h m hmmmmh mh
America's Test Kitchen has been studying and deconstructing recipes to
help educate home cooks for twenty five years. Their readers
and viewers rely on the science driven thinking that America's
Test Kitchen provides. Dan Susa has held many roles at
America's Test Kitchen and is currently the chief Content Officer
(00:25):
for the brand. That means he oversees sixty test cooks,
creating four television shows, two magazines, and thousands of recipes
for the website. I'm sitting with Dan now at America's
Test Kitchen headquarters in Boston, and we're discussing his role
at ATK, which is America's Test Kitchen, and how he
(00:46):
hopes the brand will evolve in months and years ahead.
Welcome to my podcast, Dan, thank you for having me
Muche very nice and we've not met before, It's true,
which is weird because we're both in exactly the same
business of creating recipes for the American consumer and teaching
them and publishing stuff for them. And it's very nice
(01:10):
to be here. And this is very reminiscent of my
big kitchen at Star at Lee High, which is where
I started really doing my thing. In New York City. Yeah,
and you do it here in Boston. You have two
hundred employees here.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Yes, a little over two hundred employees.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, yep. And how many shows?
Speaker 3 (01:27):
So we have our two flagship shows which are on PBS,
America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country. We also have an
Amazon show called America's Test Kitchen the Next Generation, which
is sort of a competition show to get on our
other shows, a whole slate of YouTube shows and others
on OTT and Fast Networks.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, and you're very rigorous kind of way of choosing recipes.
I'll make it onto your show. So can you describe that?
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Sure? Yes, it's definitely quite involved. So it starts with research.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
We have a beautiful cookbook library here with over five
thousand titles.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
We have a great any of my cookbooks in your Life?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
We definitely, we definitely have I'm ready to go check. Yes, well,
we will try to hear this, but we absolutely do.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
And so that we start with research and then we
do what we call five recipe tests. So we'll pull
recipes from cookbooks and online and choose five that we
feel like represent the landscape of that recipe. We try
them in the kitchen. Everyone comes and taste, and we
figure out what works what doesn't work. We learn a
lot from that process. We cobble together what we call
our working recipe, and that's what we'll test true scientific method,
(02:28):
trial and error against over a period about six weeks.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I should have asked you before I came here, because
we recently discovered something weird about pacha shoe. Uh huh?
Now are you you make pacha shoe? Right?
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Yeah, Well, what's your recipe? America's Test Kitchen has just
published their new twenty fifth anniversary cookbook called America's Test
Kitchen five hundred favorite recipes, Yes, five hundred recipes that
changed the way America cooks. So let's see what your
pacha shoe recipe says. I'm very curious because I did
(03:02):
not refer to yours when I was testing my recipe.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
You did it?
Speaker 1 (03:05):
No, I didn't. But I did refer to an awful
lot of classic recipes for pata shoe, and I found
a really unusual fact.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
What did you find?
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Well that they're pretty much all exactly the same.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yes, they definitely are.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Goujear is a way of baking the pata shoe dough.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
So we have two large eggs plus one large egg white,
five tablespoons of butter, two tablespoons of milk, six tablespoons
of water, a little bit of salt and sugar, and
then half a cup of all purpose flour.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Oh, so that makes a very few pata shoe twenty
four little foals. Yes. So I had a young man
working in my kitchen and I said, oh, please make
guget four cocktails for tonight. And he made the gujeer
and they were the best guget I have ever tasted.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Did he mess something up?
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Well, he didn't mess it up. He actually fixed it.
And he used twelve eggs per cup per cup of flour. Wow,
And it made the lightest, fluffiest, most hollow gouge air
you've ever seen. And he didn't put the cheese in
the dough. He put the cheese on top, very very
finely grated cheese. He used to a rasp, but would
(04:16):
rasp to grate the cheese and it was He put
it on top of the dough and that sat out.
He said for a while it the best. So obviously
the four eggs was somebody's idea that that's really what
it should be. For one cup of flour. Yeah, and
it doesn't have to be I love that and I
loved it. I just loved that, and I thought, I
actually did think of America's Test Kitchen and I was
(04:36):
doing that, yeah, wondering did they ever find that out?
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Well, so, yeah, so it sounds like that's even twice
what we have in this recipe. We use a one
less yolk in our recipe. Fat has that tenderizing effect
on baked goods, so we get less spring out of it,
so we have a dryer, fluffier result from the egg white.
But it makes sense to me that more eggs you're
gonna have more leavening power and more ability to trap back.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
See your lighter, Yeah, more tender it really worse.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Try it, I will I definitely.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
I saw the photo in your book and you can
see like sunlight poking through them.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
It looks so light. Yeah, I will say, I've never
seen the goose that looks.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
It's kind of fun.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
But that just it just makes me think that cooking
is a science, and it is it is a science
that changes according to the Women of.
Speaker 3 (05:24):
The Ship, actually well exactly, and that trial and error
is so key to our process. You know, we we
don't find things out unless we try them and see
if they make it or fail. When we're finally happy
with the recipe in house, we also do this kind
of big in the real world experiment where we send
our recipes to forty thousand home cooks that actually volunteer
to make our recipes before we publish them. We learn
a ton from that process.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Forty thousands yeah wow, yeah, get who's sits through that.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
So we luckily have a survey system that like manages it.
But so we look at a lot of things where
like if someone couldn't find an ingredient, we'd like to
know if something was awkward, But we always look for
an eighty make again score, like would you make the
recipe and add it to your repertoire. That's really our
standard because that's how you change someone's life and actually
incorporate into it.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
So that's that's sort of our process.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
That's been the most successful, that's been the most disastrous
test you've ever done?
Speaker 3 (06:13):
Oh, disaster, We've had some. We have some big disasters here,
I would say. So I worked on a macarone recipe.
So the beautiful little French cookies for a very long time,
probably much longer than six weeks, and I could never.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Get them as good as Lade.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Absolutely not. No, so I I we did, I would
get it. You did.
Speaker 3 (06:33):
So we have a recipe now that is as good
as lottera. But for me, I had so many variable
variables and it would fail sometimes and work other times.
I wasn't happy with it, and so our home testers
never had success. So I put it away for years.
When I took over as editor in chief of Cooks, iilltrated.
I assigned it to someone and he did a much
better job than I did.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
No, it can be done, yes, and it can't. They
can be made at home.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
And and we we found that out, and we we've
we've tried to demystify you know, difficult recipes like the
best brioche. You know, it's hard to hard to do
that brioche the way the way you really wanted to
turn out. And I do little tests. You probably do
the same thing. I mean, I did a cost test
in New York City, who makes the best costal? And
(07:17):
and well at the first the first time I did it,
and this was quite a few years ago, and they
don't exist anymore. Was the Petrosian Bakery? Oh really yep,
right on fifteen ninth Street, I think, And they made
the best costle and then they closed their bakery, so
then I had to search and search again, and then
I found that Laderie made the best according to our
(07:42):
little independent survey, and they were very, very good. And
now so many people are making good class on which
is nice.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
It's true. And people make them at home too.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Oh, of course I make them at home. I when
I was starting, when I started catering, there was no
place to buy costal sure, and so I had to
make them. And I followed Julia Child's recipe and volume two,
that twenty two page recipe, and I don't can't remember
how many pages it were.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
I could always tell the challenge of her recipes.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Basically, but they were delicious. My daughter still remembers that
mine were the best costume she has ever tasted of them,
which is nice. They were really Julia's, but they were
I made them. But how interesting that that things have
changed so much?
Speaker 2 (08:25):
It's true, it's true.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
So what motivated you to follow a career in culinary
like this? And what is your background?
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Just briefly, Yeah, so I went to the culinary instead
of America for culinary school.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Actual he graduated first in his class.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
I read that my mom loves that back she loves
She's also a Martha by the way, with a beautiful garden.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
So I worked in restaurants in Boston and New York.
I spent a little time at Lebernon Dan and I
loved restaurants for the sort of repetition and the speed
and how fast you could get. But I've always just
been incredibly curiou this person, and so the test kitchen
really was a good home for me where I could
have a big question about food and go after and
chase it and they would pay for all the food
(09:08):
and pay for my time. And then I love writing,
so it gave me an outlet for that. It really
brought together a lot more so. Food media for me
was an extension of what I could learn in the kitchen,
but just more broadly and not in the science part
of it too is big And.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
You stayed in Boston, which is which has very excellent
restaurant some very excellent developmental chefs up here, but you've
never been tempted to come back to New York.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
So I love New York. My roots are really here.
I have my family.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yeah, my family is either from Maine or Massachusetts, and
so I had my roots side, my friends, and honestly,
the test kitchen. I fell in love with this place
sixteen years ago when I got the job of test cook,
and I haven't left.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I just love it.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
I keep taking on new and fun different jobs. But
it's a really great place.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
And so Cook's Illustrated. It was one of my favorite
magazines for a long time. Yeah, Kimball, he was my
neighbor in Fairfield.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Oh was he really? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:03):
And I've known him for many, many years. And so
how do they first notice you?
Speaker 3 (10:08):
So the application process to be a test cook involves
recipe development. So you actually develop a recipe for a muffin,
and then you submitted it along with a story, kind
of in the style of Cooks Illustrated.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
So I did this.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Even if you don't like muffins, I don't like.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Even if you don't like muffins, you got a muffin
rest me in your book.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Huh, well, blueberry muffins.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
That doesn't count.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
But no, no, I put that in because it is
one of my favorite muffins. But I still don't like I.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Don't even Yeah, well, so I didn't.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
After this, I spent weeks working on a Cranberry U
muffin and I submitted it along with a story, and
I got a call from the editorial director and she said,
we loved your story. Your recipe didn't work. I said,
that's impossible. I had worked on it for weeks. I
had gotten myself so tired of muffins. But she said,
we're going to give you one more shot at fixing it.
And I got this call when I was like driving
home from the supermarket. I parked my car, I got out.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Had you left out an ingredient when you sent it in?
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Well, so I figured out that one of the ratio,
one of the measurements was off in the version that
I sent them.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
But this is the crazy thing.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
So I parked my car, I got out, and I
was walking to my apartment and there's a construction worker
at the building next door and he goes, hey, your car,
And I whip around and my car is cruising down
the driveway at this steep grade and plows into the
garage door of my neighbor. I forgot to put the
car in gear and pull the emergency. It was so
focused on the recipe and then he was looking at
me like I was crazy. But I just turned around
(11:28):
and walked inside and opened my laptop up to like
fix the recipe. I just left the car because I
wanted to do this. I want to do this so bad. Okay,
and it worked, and it worked.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah. I sent the next version and it was fine.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
Well, you've held so many roles at America's Test Kitchen,
Test Cook, editor in chief of Cook's Illustrated, on air
science expert, creator of What's Eating Dan, and now chief
content officer of the entire company? What role has been
the most fulfilling?
Speaker 3 (11:56):
So this probably won't come as a surprise to you,
but editor in chief of Cooks Illustrated it has been.
I've been done that for the last seven years, and
it's been so incredibly satisfying. Making a magazine is, as
you know, this all all in sort of proposition, and
I love that we can sweat over every word and
every image and you can just see our fingerprints all
over each issue of it. I work with an incredible
(12:17):
team and we just asked really big questions about food and.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Go and tackle them.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
What's been the most challenging job.
Speaker 3 (12:22):
Most challenging job I think is the same I think, yeah,
I think it is editor in cheap I love doing
the stuff on TV.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
It comes pretty naturally to me.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
But the managing a team making something like that, it's
been a big role, very satisfying.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Though, And Cooks Illustrated has really garnered a lot of
attention and an awful lot of fans. How many people
subscribe to Cooks Illustrated.
Speaker 3 (12:43):
We have about seven hundred thousand subscribers right now, and
we actually won a national magazine work for General Excellence
two years ago, the first time in our history.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Yeah, so it's under your tutelage, under my tutelage. Yes,
I'm pretty good, very proud of it.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Yeah, yeah, it's really fun. No, I miss having the
printed magazine, and Martha Stuart Living is now you know,
basically online. Sure, we're doing some SIPs special interest publications, yes,
we do for six a year now, which are fun
to do, but it's not the same as doing that
monthly real difficult production of a beautiful magazine. It's true,
(13:21):
and and but people's taste for magazines has really changed,
so we're looking for information in so many different places.
How else does America's Test Kitchen relate information and recipes
to your members?
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Yeah, So I love magazines, I love print, I always will,
but our web membership, our digital subscription is really the
sort of you know, it's the highest quality, the most
polished version of our content. And we're imagining really cool
and interesting ways to present recipes. I mean, obviously, when
you have video and you have the ability to really
break down steps for people, it's a much better tool
for teaching and learning. So I love that we're putting
(13:55):
a ton of effort into that moving forward.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Yeah, when I go back to find a recipe, like
I was making stuff peppers this weekend, it's so many
stuff peppers in the garden and I had to pick
them before the frost. Oh sure, And so I made
two giant giant pots of stuffed peppers green peppers and
two red peppers and one yellow pep. But I used
ground turkey, And of course I don't have a recipe
(14:17):
for that particular thing. But I love stuff peppers. I
think it's the polish background. But I go to the website,
I look, and I rarely go to other people's websites
for things that I know I love that I probably
have made in the past sometime and it was just
it's just fun to go back and see and how
(14:37):
easy it is to retrieve a recipe online. And that's
what people are doing now totally so much.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
So, yeah, we have the ability to like save a
recipe and you can come back to build these collections.
It's much higher touch and yeah, yeah, it's the most
kind of premium experience. I got stuff peppers too, I
love them.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
You did. Yeah, And then some friends of mine made
stuff my mother's stuff cabbage over the weekend and they
sent me pictures of their stuff cabbage and they had
gotten that recipe online also, So it's so funny. That's
that's the way people are referencing information so so much
more than ever before. It's true, it's true, And you
(15:13):
have a lot of subscribers to to your information.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
We do, how many, Yes, we have over five hundred
thousand web members, but we're everywhere, right, so we've got
two and a half million on YouTube. Really some amazing
original shows they are, including What's Tone and Techniquely with
my colleague long Lamb, it's like all about technique really
about teaching in that forum, and then you know, we're
all over social media.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
It's Instagram and well the Instagram. Like this morning, I
was in the car coming up to Boston and just
just turned on just the stream, you know, just watching
and watching reels on the way, and you learn so
much in a few minutes of watching a few cooking reels,
you learn so much. And it's you know, learn how
to make a dumpling a different way, or you learn
(15:59):
how to chop it onion in a different way, or
so chase something a different way, and it's and there's
so much information out there from all over the world,
which makes it very interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Very interesting.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
I agree, and I think we love writing a lot
about recipes, whether it's a fifteen hundred word article in
the magazine. But I actually am like such an evangelist
for social video because in forty five seconds and sixty seconds,
we can teach you a technique.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
We can teach you how to cook a steak a
certain way or whatever. And it's a cold steak that
the cold steak.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yeah, your cold stake telling the audience what your full
steak is.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
So we have a cold seared steak, which sounds a
little bit crazy, but really it's throwing out everything you
kind of learned about steak cookery. So instead of a
ripping hot skillet and tons of oil, we use a
cold pan and no oil, And instead of flipping one
time halfway through, we flip it frequently, every two minutes.
And so here's what happened to kind of steak. So
(16:51):
we start with either a strip steak.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
Or a rabi. You want to good enough marveling.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
That some of that fat will render out right, So
you start it cold and you turn the heat up,
and as is cooking, you flip every two minutes, and
you add browning on the outside the same way you
would paint a house layer after layer. So by the
time the inside is warm to that perfect medium rare,
the outside is gorgeous and brown turns everything kind of
on its head. But it makes sense when you really
think about. You know, what the interior needs and what
the exterior needs, but it's cooking in its own beef fat.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
So it's really wonderful.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Yeah, yummy. What dish do most cooks home cooks ask for?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
That's a good question.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
I mean one of the biggest questions is like chicken,
Like what do I do with chicken? How do I
add flavor or salmon or salmon. Salmon is a really
big one.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
What's your favorite way to cook salmon?
Speaker 3 (17:43):
So this whe it's sound like a broken record, but
we have a cold start method for that as well.
You know, farmery salmon nowadays is very fatty, has a
lot of fat in its.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
We're not allowed to have it.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
You're not allowed to have it.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
No, that salmon has to be lined, caught.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Lin caught, line caught wild. Well, even if you get
like king salmon there.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
And a lot of it is not at all fatty.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
If you're in like a sock guy and it's a
little dry.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Yeah, so there, you probably want to use a little
bit wiel But but starting its skin side down with
a little bit of salt on the pan too, and
letting it render out skin gets crispy. I love crispy
fish skin. So not everyone good for you, I know,
all those Omega THREESO. And cook it most of the
way on that side and then just flip it over
for a little kiss.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
On the other side.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
What about chicken? How do you how do you suggest
people cook chickens just pieces of chicken or whole chicken.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
I think people want a lot of different things, but
I'm usually suggesting a roast chicken because it's so much
more economical. You get so much out of it. We
have a wonderful recipe where you uh, you preheat a
twelve inch skill it, drop the chicken in, and then
go into.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
A four hundred degree oven. So you sort of.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Jump it in like skin side, breast side.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Up, breast side down, so dark meat is facing down,
so you get a little jumpstart on that.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
Help trust or untrusted, just a little telling anybody anything
you have to.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
Buy the it's all about it.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
No, so yeah, so you do a little trust just
on just on the drums to keep them together but
not wrapped around the whole bird. Tuck the wings, season
it all over really well with salt and pepper. Preheat
a twelve inch I'm doing the full recipe now, twelve
inches skillet over over medium high heat and nice and
hot little bit of oil.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Chicken goes in dark.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
Kind of oil, dark oil, no using like a neutral
high heat like a canola or vegetable oil. Chicken goes
in and then goes into a four hundred degree oven
and you roast for about thirty minutes and then we
just kill the heat, totally turn it off, and let
that oven slowly decrease down and it finishes really gently
that way.
Speaker 2 (19:36):
Yeah, it's a beautiful It's like our weeknight roast chicken recipe.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
I hear you are a bit of well, I think
you're more than a bit of a science scheek, a
food science skik. What intrigues intrigues you most about the
science of cooking.
Speaker 3 (19:50):
For me science And this isn't like the scary word
science for me, it sort of gives you this X
ray vision into your food that you wouldn't have otherwise.
So I'll give you an example with cooking mushrooms. So
you have a rest in your book form mushroom soup,
and the mushrooms cook for a little over an hour
in the soup, and you have some vegetables in there too.
I'm sure those are like super soft and you know,
(20:11):
almost silky in texture, like the carrots and the onions.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
The mushrooms are beautiful.
Speaker 3 (20:16):
They're tender, they're not overcooked and kind of tough, but
they're not overly tender. And so mushrooms when we look inside,
they don't have the same structure as vegetables and meat.
They're made up of a polymer called kiten that is
really heat resistant, so you can boil them for an hour,
roast them for long periods of time, and they're really
wonderful the whole way. I did an experiment here where
(20:36):
I steamed a piece of zucchini, a piece of beef
tender loin, and a piece of portable mushroom for.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Forty five minutes.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
The beef was as you can imagine leather or zucchini
like look at it and it would fall apart fish,
but the mushroom is like perfectly tender, and so understanding
that you can do really cool. It's called kiten. It
makes up shrimp shells as well, and so it's very
heat resistant. So we have a method for some saying
mushrooms where we actually start them in water first, a
little bit of water, and that helps collapse some of
(21:05):
their cell structure so that they don't have all those
air pockets in there, and those air pockets are what
suck in so.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
Much oil when you're cooking them. To cook them, a
little bit of.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
Water, evaporate it off, add a little bit of fat
that's going to coat the outside, and then you can
brom up yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
We do finish with Yeah, we finished with a little
bit of butter at the end.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
But yeah, that's just an example of like, if you
could see inside your food a little bit more through science,
then you don't rely on the recipe quite as much
and you can be a little more playful in the kitchen.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
If you were teaching the home cook just one recipe,
which recipe would you choose?
Speaker 3 (21:37):
I think I would actually have them make potato and yoki.
The reason I really like it is it's a simple
ingredient list and you can sort of understand what each
component is doing. There's a little bit of techniques to
technique to it, but the payoff is so grand in
terms of these beautiful little light pillows. And it's something
that you might think only a restaurant can do, but
is actually have you tried ricotta?
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yes, I had a disaster with that.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
You did tell me about it.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
So I was making it for a big dinner party
of the main and I didn't I didn't drain and
it cost a long enough huh, So they completely disintegrate
into the pan.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
What did what did you do?
Speaker 1 (22:13):
I made something else? I made some pasta real fast Okay, yeah,
but it was a disaster. But I describe your yoky
how do you how do you make them? Because there's
different ways there is Yeah, do you use the patashoe? Oh?
Speaker 3 (22:25):
So we do have Parisian recipes, but I like the
potato one.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
I kind of fell in love with that.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
I do with potato, potato and pata shoe. Do you
really Yeah, it's delicious.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
I don't think I've ever done that much.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Oh, it's so good.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
So how do you incorporate the potatoes into that? Do
you make a paste and then the potatoes.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And not well ricet or just parade potato. Huh, it's
really good.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
I would love to try that. A lot of cheese too, Yeah,
I know of cheese.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
So we start with rusted potatoes, which are naturally drier,
so you're not gonna have to use much flour and
I jumped start them, roast them in the oven until
they're nice and tender. I rice them. You know, you
could use a food meal too, but you want ice
and smooth. And then the key to the recipe in
my mind, is weighing the mashed potatoes the rice potatoes
(23:10):
before you combine them with the rest of the ingredients.
That's where the flower, Yeah, and then and then flower
and egg. But if you measure your potatoes, then you
can use an exact amount of flour, so you're not
constantly adding it in the process and making them a
little bit tough.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
So is that recipe in your nude?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (23:26):
Try that?
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yeah, but I want to try you or we gotta
we gotta trade yolky.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
Resume and I just I love New York. I think
it's so fun. I do not like them fried though. Yeah,
a lot of recipes online now I've just been seeing
them on Instagram. They're browning them so much. I don't
like that.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
I know it kind of defeats the purpose. Like perfect little.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Pillow Right, what's your favorite food site on? Like Instagram?
Speaker 3 (23:47):
A creator that I really like his His Instagram name
is Another Day in Paradise is an American who lives
in London and his videos are gorgeous. He's just making
like the most appealing food and he and every single
one totally.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
I feel like him or the food.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
I like his sort of esthetic, but the food looks incredible. Same.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I haven't read Another Day in Paradise.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Yeah, Another Day in Paradise. I think his name is Jesse.
But that's I have not.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Looked at that. And if you were going to write
your own cookbook apart from your work here, what would
the subject be.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
I don't know that it would sell very well. But
this is the one that's like in my heart that
I want to do. Is I'm like a huge seafood
lover growing up here in the New England area. My
mom's from Maine. We're in Maine, so my mom was
born in like Rangely area, Rangely Lakes area.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
But I have a lot of family in Bangor as well.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Oh so your neighbors to me, I'm in Sale Harbor.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Yeah, you're in stil Harbor.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Right, No, right, where all the best fishes, the best fish.
I love it up there so much. Yeah. Well, my
dad squid we went, he went jigging for squid last year.
Is really Oh and then my granddaughter who's who at
the time was you see, she was about ten when
she she learned how to perfectly clean squid. That's so
and they love to eat it too. I made them
(25:01):
beautiful temp for us.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Well, and there's nothing like fresh squid like that thing.
They got dirty squid that still has all the purple
and yeah, but you've that all out. Yeah, but it's
so fresh. And then my dad's side is from the Azors,
the Portuguese Islands, so I come. I come to it
honestly from the different directions. But I think like it
would be a ton of clam recipes and just all.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
The fish that I love.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
I'd like that. I'd like that cookbook.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
Well, as long as you buy it, I'll make it.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I will. I will definitely buy it. And so back
to real work. What's some of your goals here at
at America's Test Kitchen as the chief content Officer.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
Yes, which a big title, very big title.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:39):
So one of my big goals is to really sort
of open the doors. We've been established here for over
twenty five years. We have a beautiful test kitchen, and
a lot of times were like heads down testing recipes developing.
But I really want to open the doors and bring
more folks in. I think we have so much to
learn from creators all over the place. So that's gonna
happen in a few different ways. So I say about that,
and then also really our digital product, our digital all
(26:02):
access web membership, being able to tailor it to folks
to help them cook incredible food is really where I
want to put a lot of focus. But we've got
some cool keep shows in development, really just expanding.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Out and meeting people where they are. It's some angle.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
What do you think is the future of food on television?
Is it going to stay on television, Is it going
to be streaming, is it going to be only online?
What do you think?
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah, I think it's going to maintain kind of its
footing in a lot of these different places. I think
the distinction between TV and video is so blurred now
if we look at like YouTube, for instance, which is
the largest streamer on television, So you're you're whether you're
watching it on a computer screen or your phone or
on TV. It's how you want to consume it. But
I don't think it's going anywhere on any of these platforms.
(26:48):
Our take is that we still always want to be teaching,
and so our PBA shows are instructional cooking. And you
know my YouTube show is it's a YouTube show. It's fun,
it's a little bit of reverent, but it's still all
about teaching you something. If you nition episode, you won't
think about that ingredient the same way you did at
the beginning, but with a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yeah. And what are you most proud of since you
took over here at America's Stess Kitchen.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
My whole time here. Wow, that's a big one.
Speaker 3 (27:14):
I would say winning the Magazine Award for Cooks Illustrated
was a was a real point of pride. You know,
growing up with magazines and food magazines, it's always been
so near and near to my heart that to get
that recognition from outside was really really wonderful. Also, getting
that macaron recipe in the magazine.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
Some of the small challenges that we faced, Yeah, so fun.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
Can I ask you some questions about your book?
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Oh, that would be why have you Okay? Why not?
Speaker 2 (27:47):
So it's one hundred recipes?
Speaker 3 (27:48):
So our rec our book is a five hundred recipes
is very hard to call it down to that. You've
done one hundred cookbooks and you've been.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Doing no, no, no, forty eight cook forty eight cookbooks. Yeah,
the rest of the there are other books I write,
I write on through subjects, all other subjects.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
So you're you're you're one hundredth books. Yes, yes, and
you've been doing this for so long. How did you
nail it down to one hundred recipes. Was it painful
process or it's hard?
Speaker 1 (28:09):
I had? I had reams of realms of pages of recipes,
and and I worked with a woman called Suzanne Rupert
who kept saying, you can't have that many. It's one hundred. Yeah,
you know, it's one hundred. So I kept crossing all
recipes and thinking, oh, then I would add a couple more,
and I finally got it down to one hundred.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, and there are a.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Few that I miss that should have been in the book,
but then I didn't know what to take out. So sure,
but it's a nice number. And the backstories that go
with each recipe are fun, and they were so much
fun to write. I think I wrote all the essays
in a couple of days. Really, yeah, I just sat
down and wrote them.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
What I love about your your essays and your sort
of head notes is you're able to be both very
practical and sharp in terms of the feedback, and you
know what you should be doing, but then also wrap
a story around it so nicely in a very short
amount of space.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Yeah. Yeah, it's and that's fun for me. I like
doing that. And it also keeps your memory very sharp
because you can't if somebody in my family reads something
and it's not accurate, Oh boy, do I have to pay?
Speaker 2 (29:15):
You'll hear about that?
Speaker 1 (29:16):
I do indeed.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Yeah, you have a pumpkin pie recipe.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
I say you made it over here.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
We have made over here that I am. I am
so fascinated with. Can you can you talk a little
bit about what makes it?
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Well, it's a philo crust, so you do not have
to master the art of patrese. And many people still
have trouble with pepreez a. I know, even after I
wrote my Pies and Tarts book and made that the
easiest recipe on earth and showed that if you use
a food processor you can do it in about thirteen seconds.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
And I had a contest with one of my nieces
who wanted to make it by hand with a pastry cutter,
and I kept saying, so much easier in the food
processor and just as good. Yeah, if the butter's cold enough,
the flower is cold. And I have a rule for
pastry making. Make it cold, bake it hot.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Oh, I love that, that's my rule. Yeah. Easy to manage.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah, it's very easy. And if you do that, you
usually get a good crust. But anyway to make a
crust like this, I love filo, and to incorporate philo
as a crust with a delicious, flavorful pumpkin puree. It
just turned out perfectly. We worked on the recipe for
quite a while at the magazine before before it was perfected.
(30:30):
And the crust is not wet and it's not soggy,
and it doesn't fall apart. Look, you can unmold it.
Look out nice.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
It's so cordious.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
You can mold it out of the out of the
spring form pan. Yep. And it's a it's a gorgeous pie.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
What I love about it, and it was mentioned to
you is tart tart. It's more like a tar, more
like a tart. But like pumpkin pie is one of
those things like if you don't have it for Thanksgiving,
people are upset.
Speaker 2 (30:49):
But it's never a looker. It's never a crowd pleaser
in that way.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
But this is stunning. Oh yeah. The edges of the filo, Yeah,
it turns it into a set.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
And you have to make it thick enough enough layers
of filo, enough really good butter to make sure that
it's crunchy and nice. But The filling is very important too,
and this has a very flavorful filling in it.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Do you have a little bit of five spice powers?
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Oh yes, right, ye, a little bit of the Asian influence.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
I love that because it's it's hitting on all those
warm spices that are traditional, but you have a little
more interest.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Than an intrigue.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
I love it. I love that vibe. Yeah, and I
see you made my turkey.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Yes, we made your turkey deparchment.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Yes, what'd you think?
Speaker 3 (31:28):
I think it's wonderful. Oh good, I'm amazed that. I
wish people could see this as a podcast. But the
color on it is absolutely orgeous color.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
Yeah, and it's clean. Didn't did your kitchen say that?
Nice and clean? It is a bake and.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Parchment, Yes, yeah it is.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
I was shocked. You know, I'm been doing the one
oh one turkey or one on one that we I
think we did something like eighty two turkeys when we
were developing turkey one on one with cheese cloth soaked
in butter and white wine and you know, just wrapped
the turkey. Then you pull that off and you're just
brown for a few minutes in the oven at the
very end, and it's a mess because of the cheese cloth,
(32:07):
the cheese clad and the liquid the butter, so much
butter and so much wine, and you know it's just
and it splatters all over your oven. And wrapping that
buttered turkey in parchment with a big clips, I use
a staple gun.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
You do, okay, Yeah, I use yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
And you have to get the big sheets of parchment,
so make sure you get the big sheets, so big
professional boxes. It just is so neat and so clean
and and renders that I think the juicy is turkey.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
Yeah, really juicy.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
Well, so it's so well protected during that initial cook No,
I really, I really love it.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
So I was happy. I was happy and that turned out.
That turned out well, and I had to include it
in the book New Recipe, but it was included.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
It feels like seminol and important having there. We also
have your your mashed potatoes, which are big Martha's mashed potatoes.
So my mom is also a Martha and she makes
with potatoes that I love that always she.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Whips them with what and the like the like chen
eideah in a kitchen aid. I confess my mom did too,
and I just don't like.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Them with you don't like them.
Speaker 3 (33:09):
For me, it's like a taste memory that I'll always
always be connected to. But these have cream cheese in them,
which I don't think I've really seen in many mashed patatos.
Speaker 1 (33:16):
Mom. Mom loved cream cheese or cream cheese, heavy cream, milk,
and butter. And they are really four kinds of dairs.
Oh yeah, so good and so fattening and delicious.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
That's what they should be though, and good potatoes.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
She always used Idahos, but I've I have a house
in Maine, so I use Maine potatoes. But I growed
my own potatoes.
Speaker 3 (33:36):
Now.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
We just harvested so many bushels of potatoes in my garden.
Really yeah, and Bedford, New York, and I've been cooking them.
We had one potato that I weighed, its two point
two pounds, what yeah, and you know what, it was
horrible because it was too big.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
It was too big, yeah, didn't have like bad spots.
Speaker 1 (33:52):
And oh no, no, it's a perfect It looks like
a giant Idaho potato. So I put it in on
a steamer basket in a pot of boiling water to
see After two hours, it still wasn't cooked in the middle,
and it was too big. So forget those big potatoes.
Dig the potatoes on time. If you're growing potatoes, we
left them a little long.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
You did so on Instagram. I'm friends with Ryan your
hell you are? Yes? Was it his fault that we
didn't dig the potatoes?
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Really? Definitely Ryan's Anything that goes wrong in the garden
is Ryan.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
And any successes, of course, are yours.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Of course.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Yeah. He said for me to ask you how the
maze is coming.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
The maze is so beautiful. Yeah, oh my gosh, wait
should you see it? Next year it will be unveiled.
I think we're about I would say about three quarters done. Okay,
and that's only in three years.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
It's two and a half acres. What. Yeah, it's too big.
And it's looking so good. I saw an aerial shot
of it on just the other day. It looks amazing. Really,
that's what it amaze is supposed to amaze.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yes, it should where that comes from?
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Right? And so it's it's looking good.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
Oh that's awesome. I love that.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
I feel like I connect with you obviously on food,
but on the on nature and plants and trees so much.
I brought something a little bit funny that if you
if you're game for it. So I lived next to
this huge arboretom that's owned by Harvard.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
I're been there many time, Yes, yes.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
So there's a very special tree there that drops these leaves.
And I think they're a little bit like three weeks
ago they would have smelled perfect. But I have them
in a little bag here, and I'm wonder if you
could take a big sniff and see what they smell.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Like to you.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Not much.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
I think a month ago they would have smelled even more. Yeah, Wow,
you're so good. I was like, I wonder if I
could teach Martha something. This is it's cut Well.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
I have weeping cutsuras right outside my back doors. I
have two giant ones that I planted twenty years ago
and they have grown as tall as my house in
twenty years. Really, they were little when I planed. Yeah,
and I have one on the other side of the house.
They're the most beautiful tree.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, they are, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
And they look like rain just falling down.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Oh, these are beautiful.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
Thank you for bringing me cut early.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Yeah, I just love when it is the right time.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Do not have any scent nothing, So they're they're.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
Supposed to be like cotton candy, like right when, and
it's amazing, But I wish we were talking.
Speaker 2 (36:20):
Like a month ago would have been like of course
you know it though.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Well, thank you so much for joining me today on
my podcast, man, thank you and letting me record it
here at your kitchen anytimes. So much fun. And please
let our listeners know where they can follow you at
America's Test Kitchen.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Yeah, so you can follow me personally at Test cook everywhere,
but come visit us at America's Test Kitchen dot com
for all of our fourteen thousand recipes and you know,
all of our equipment reviews.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
And Instagram addresses at Test Kitchen. Yes, yeah, you know
you look for America's Test Kitchen. It's not there.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Yes, come find us at Test Kitchen and that's on
Instagram and we're kind of.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Across all the platforms there.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
And good luck with your book. It's a beautiful book,
encyclopedic and in us in size and nature and I
can't wait to peruse it.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
It is and try your yakee
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Yah h m hmmmmh mh
Host
Martha Stewart
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