{"id":2536,"date":"2012-06-02T10:56:10","date_gmt":"2012-06-02T09:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mostlyfood.co.uk\/wp\/?p=2536"},"modified":"2024-09-03T09:00:17","modified_gmt":"2024-09-03T08:00:17","slug":"chris-kimball-americas-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mostlyfood.co.uk\/index.php\/chris-kimball-americas-test\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Kimball \u2013 Britain discovers America\u2019s Test Kitchen – interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

The majority of readers based in the UK will have no notion of who Christopher Kimball might be, and to mention that he is the host of America\u2019s Test Kitchen will hardly be enlightening. It\u2019s a programme new to UK satellite and cable TV although it\u2019s into its 13th season on the US PBS network, which offers quality broadcasting in a sea of mediocrity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chris visited London to promote his show. Dressed in a formal black suit and looking taller than he does on TV, this New England lad wasn\u2019t out of place in the classic wood-panelled Old England library where we met \u2013 a sartorial change from his habitual red pinnie when in front of the camera (although he has been known to dress as a pumpkin). America\u2019s Test Kitchen seriously educates in a light-hearted fashion. Recipes, products and kitchen equipment all have their regular slots in the show.<\/p>\n

\"Chris Christopher Kimball has never been a professional chef but started his career in the publishing industry. \u2018I\u2019ve always been interested in cooking \u2013 I started baking when I was 7 or 8, and I remember the joy of cooking. My mother was not much of a cook, and my father, I think, didn\u2019t have tastebuds. I spent summers and weekends in Vermont, and in the town there was a baker, Marie: she sold bread and cookies and pies. I spent a lot of time at her house. When I went into town I would stop by and she always had a slice of bread and a cup of tea for me \u2013 she fed everybody.<\/p>\n

\u2018She had the \u2018Vermont\u2019 technique of teaching \u2013 never tell<\/i> people what to do, just show<\/i> them what to do. My sister cooked with her more than I did, but I helped out, and if I was doing something wrong, I\u2019d suddenly notice her next to me doing it the right way, without saying anything. The charm of that, if you\u2019re a kid, is that you\u2019re treated like an adult \u2013 and you find that you can cook, this huge \u2018adult\u2019 thing. That\u2019s part of the pleasure of cooking, you\u2019re developing a skill, and even if you are 10 years old you can bake a cake.\u2019<\/p>\n

Chris describes the impact of America\u2019s Test Kitchen on the general American public: \u2018I\u2019ve had so many people come up to me almost in tears and say, \u201cI can\u2019t tell you what this did for me. I used to go to the kitchen and nothing ever turned out right, I thought it was me; then I started using your recipes, most of them work for me, and now I\u2019m a cook!\u201d That\u2019s a transformative thing for people psychologically, not just that the food\u2019s good, but now they can cook! In this day and age, you can\u2019t even fix your car with your hands, and there are so few things you can create for yourself; cooking is the last vestige of that. If people can go into the kitchen and cook for family and friends \u2013 it sounds corny, but it\u2019s true \u2013 it\u2019s a huge thing for people. And it doesn\u2019t have to be fancy, in fact the simpler the better.\u2019<\/p>\n

I asked about the state of food television in the US. \u2018The Food Network is about entertainment, not about teaching people to cook. But they made a lot of money, and now everyone else has caught on. I think the problem is, as in Hollywood, the \u2018star\u2019 system. Those shows depend entirely on the \u2018celebrity chef\u2019 model, which is doable if you have a system for finding the next Rachael Ray! That\u2019s what the Food Network is about \u2013 they are always looking for the next potential star.<\/p>\n

\u2018But that\u2019s not what we do. So for the first season I asked the director if I should get acting lessons, and after he had picked himself up off the floor laughing, he said, \u201cListen, pal, you\u2019re not an actor. You guys are just going to stand up and do what you do. That\u2019s all you know how to do, and either people will show up or they won\u2019t. You are who you are, you don\u2019t have the skillset to be somebody else, so just go do the show, and we\u2019ll keep our fingers crossed that someone wants to see it!\u201d\u2019 Well, evidently viewers liked what they saw and have remained faithful to America\u2019s Test Kitchen down the years. It has very real appeal for people who actually want to learn to cook or to improve their skills. \u2018So there\u2019s an authenticity to it, because it is a real place with real people, and we\u2019ve been working together forever. We are just doing what we like to do, and that\u2019s the charm of the show \u2013 it\u2019s not trying to be a contest or a cook-off.\u2019<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just a cookery lesson, though. America\u2019s Test Kitchen has blind tastings. A panel evaluates, say, half a dozen orange liqueurs. They will mark the products and then shroud those bottles in brown paper bags and invite Chris to offer his opinion as to his favourite. He is rather proud of the fact that he does not always agree with those panel \u2018experts\u2019. \u2018Those taste tests are for-real. Once in a while we disagree, though about 80% of the time we do agree. I did a cocoa tasting last week, and I picked Droste, and everyone else picked Hershey\u2019s cocoa, and I just said, \u201cWe should fire them, they don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing!\u201d\u2019 he laughs.<\/p>\n

Chris has his focus on American food, so how about other cuisines and their impact in the US? \u2018I think having the basic techniques of French cooking at your disposal is hugely important, but now there are so many things you can do that are more interesting, that can be done in a short time on a Tuesday night to create something really tasty, using ideas from other countries. I interviewed a Turkish chef in Boston, and she introduced me to some of the spice blends they use in Turkey \u2013 zatar and other things \u2013 and I put it on everything now: eggs, pizza, chicken, and it tastes great.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"Chris Perhaps the secret to the success of America\u2019s Test Kitchen is that it\u2019s practical and has a realistic appreciation of what its viewers want: good food in a timely fashion. \u2018When I\u2019ve had an opportunity to work with people who cook a lot, they cook simply. There was once a couple who invited us over for Sunday brunch, and they had made 20 dishes \u2013 I suppose they had wanted to impress me. The first time I ate with Julia Child, it was Oyster Stew: she heated it up in the oven, bought a baguette, a bottle of wine, and some fruit for dessert. She made that one thing, oyster stew, and it was fabulous. I\u2019ll never forget that lesson \u2013 make one thing, maybe two. So I say if you want to be a good cook, pick twenty-five recipes that represent a range of cooking styles, and cook them so many times you don\u2019t need the recipe. You only need twenty-five \u2013 a braise, a stew, a saut\u00e9, a basic quick bread, a yeast bread, an egg dish, a skillet-to-oven meal, a basic vegetable preparation, a mash of some kind, a roast… you can list them off. You can probably cook for the rest of your life with just those twenty-five recipes. Ultimately you need a repertoire that makes sense for you, for where you live and for the seasons. So if you\u2019re cooking in Vermont where you have a lot of meat and potatoes \u2013 those are the only two things that grow in Vermont \u2013 those ingredients make sense for that place. If you lived in Sicily it would be a very different repertoire.\u2019<\/p>\n

How do Chris and his team choose the recipes for the shows? \u2018One of the rules for our recipes is that all the ingredients have to be found in supermarkets. It takes weeks to develop our recipes, which all come from Cooks Illustrated magazine. We\u2019ll make it 40, 50, up to 100 times, and then we send them out to some viewers and readers who have agreed to cook them for free. We get 100 to 300 responses, and unless 80% say they will cook it again we don\u2019t publish it. So the hurdle for us is not \u2018This is the best chicken pot pie ever\u2019 or \u2018This is the best chocolate tart ever\u2019, but it\u2019s that the amount of effort you put into it is worth it. We are not trying to create \u2018the best\u2019, because there is always a trade-off. Sure, you can create the best recipe, but it might take 10 hours of work; if you can get something 80% as good in an hour, I\u2019ll take the 80% one! It\u2019s about the practical notion of putting food on the table.\u2019<\/p>\n

Is there an \u2018American\u2019 cuisine? \u2018I think there are 400-500 recipes that really define American cooking, a lot of which were English, as well as Italian and others. We started on the show with those 500 recipes: the basic chicken, basic mashed potatoes, basic fruit pie, basic soda bread, corned beef, beef stew, the simplified version of things from other places, and they still exist, but American cuisine is changing. I think there have been more changes in home cooking in the last three years than in the previous thirty. In the magazine we ask people what they want us to present: it always was that if it\u2019s got potatoes in it, they\u2019d want it; beef, they\u2019d want it; chocolate, they\u2019d want it. If you had put an ethnic dish in, like a chicken dish from South America, nobody was interested. But we\u2019ve just done Saag Paneer (spinach and home-made cheese) and our readers now want that kind of thing, and that\u2019s never happened before. Almost all our major initiatives this year are ethnic foods. Of course, \u2018Italian\u2019 was the first real ethnic food after the Second World War, and then there was the Chinese stir-fry, then it was Mediterranean. Now Mediterranean is too general \u2013 there\u2019s Moroccan, Turkish… and the Far East other than China, like Vietnamese; Thai is very big now. The proliferation of ethnic restaurants has a lot to do with this broadening of horizons.<\/p>\n

\u2018At the same time we look at regional cooking in America. The South has changed a lot less than the North of the USA. In the North they had a railroad system and access to Europe, so a lot of diverse ingredients were easily available in, say, Boston; but that wasn\u2019t true of the South; they didn\u2019t have the transportation, they didn\u2019t get the flour from the Mid-West that was shipped to the East, that\u2019s why they stuck with cornmeal for longer. The South was much more a country unto itself from the culinary point of view so they didn\u2019t change as much. They were more \u2018regional\u2019 because they naturally had a greater choice of local foods than we did in the North, and they\u2019ve kept those traditions. And as you get closer to New Orleans there were the French and the Caribbean influences, the slaves from the West Indies brought barbecuing, so it\u2019s a more interesting place in terms of food than the North.\u2019<\/p>\n

Julia Child is, unsurprisingly, a culinary inspiration for Christopher Kimball. \u2018It was not what she chose to cook but the fact that she had great curiosity, always investigating things \u2013 it wasn\u2019t her repertoire, it was her approach \u2013 she tested recipes over and over again, she was a very inquiring person. Then there\u2019s James Beard, with his American Cookery \u2013 it\u2019s not so much his recipes as his stories. In the 1980s there were people like Alice Waters, Rick Bayless, and everything changed; but Julia was an intellectual, she always asked \u201cWhy?\u201d\u2019 So Chris asks \u2018Why?\u2019 on behalf of his viewers in every episode of America\u2019s Test Kitchen, and he seems to have found many of the answers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read more articles about the USA here<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Interview by Chrissie Walker \u00a9 2018<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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