7 minute read
Harnessing Flavor
Christopher Kimball on a new approach to cooking
BY TARA Q. THOMAS
When Christopher Kimball graduated from Columbia University in the late 1980s, he could have done anything. Raised in Westchester County, New York, and schooled at Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire, he had smarts and connections; an art degree from Columbia left the choices wide open. What’s surprising is that he decided to join the food-magazine fray, scraping together $110,000 from friends and family, and launching Cook’s magazine next to Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, and Cuisine.
“They were all lifestyle magazines. They weren’t about cooking; they were about eating. I had a bunch of questions and couldn’t get them answered,” Kimball reflects. “And I loved to cook. I thought it’d be kinda cool to try to figure it out.”
He turned that little magazine—a simple-bound collection of black-and-white pages, with drawings of food rather than photographs and not a celebrity to be seen—into a major multimedia company within 15 years. Cook’s would morph into Cook’s Illustrated in 1993, and then came Cook’s Country as well as the television shows, Cook’s Country and America’s Test Kitchen; a radio show and podcast; and an array of cookbooks under his brand. By the time Kimball left in 2015, his cooking show was the most popular on public television, and his bow-tied visage was famous.
After an acrimonious breakup with his former empire in 2015, Kimball has opened a new chapter of his life, launching Milk Street in an old building on Milk Street in Boston. The new company looks a bit like the old in structure. There are test kitchens and offices, a magazine, cooking show, radio program and podcast. There is also an online retail store and a cooking school for recreational cooking classes as well as nonprofit educational programs for children and adults.
But his latest book, “Milk Street Tuesday Nights,” shows a massive shift in philosophy. Gone are the restrained line drawings, replaced by a glossy, full-page color photograph for every recipe, and the notes are short and to the point, rather than detailing all the trials and discoveries made in the test kitchen.
And, most notably, the recipes pull from all over the globe: Tortilla española comes between kofta, a Middle Eastern meatball, and Pao Fan, a Chinese dish of brothy rice with bok choy and chicken. Asia might be the most frequent influence among the recipes, but the book makes stops in Africa, South America, the Mediterranean and more. Meanwhile, the recipes are categorized by the time it takes to get them on the table (“Fast,” “Faster” and “Fastest”) with two others (“One Pot” and “Roast and Simmer”) dedicated to dishes that take longer to cook but require little active time in the kitchen.
What changed? I caught him between stops on his book tour to find out. “If you go around the world, you realize that what I’ve been doing for 30 or 40 years—which is essentially Northern European cooking—is great, but it’s only a tiny percentage of how the world cooks,” Kimball says. “And most of the people around the world have much better ideas!”
KIMBALL AND CREW ON THE STEPS OF THE MILK STREET BUILDING IN BOSTON
By “better ideas,” he explains, he means faster, fresher and more flavorful, qualities that have become increasingly important as our lives become busier.
“The Northern European philosophy was take good ingredients, apply heat, time and technique to develop flavor,” he says, offering beef bourgignon as an example. It’s a stew that requires very few ingredients, so success depends on the quality of your ingredients, the perfection of your technique and the time to let it all come together in the pot. “That’s not at all how the rest of the world cooks,” he says. “The rest of the world goes, ‘Hey, let’s take a bunch of really flavorful ingredients and put them together.’ It’s not about the cooking, and it’s not about the technique. It’s about the combination of flavors and textures, and you pretty quickly end up with something that’s got a lot of flavor because you started with lots of flavor.”
Packing flavor into every dish is especially important, he finds, in a world where the quality of the raw ingredients isn’t as good as it might be. The classical French cooking that forms the core of Northern European cooking—and, by extension, North American cooking—developed in a time before chickens were raised in factories, vegetables were bred for hardiness and fruit was picked unripe for ease of shipping.
“If the chicken has no flavor, the tomatoes have no flavor and the thyme has no flavor, and you’re applying French technique, that’s pretty hard because you’re not starting with flavor,” Kimball says. “Now you have to have really good technique to develop flavor.”
You could take the time to develop that technique, working up ways to concentrate what flavor you can—Kimball’s former approach— but Kimball suggests just moving on and finding techniques that work well now, and fast.
He calls out stir-fried rice as an example: “Stir-fried rice takes five minutes and you can’t lose,” Kimball says. “You’ve got a little bit of meat in there, you’ve got onion, garlic, shallot, fish sauce, you might have soy sauce, an egg; you have a bunch of stuff. No matter how badly you screw it up, it’s still going to have a lot of flavor.”
He’s also big on the Italian trick of boiling pasta until it is barely al dente and then letting it finish in the sauce so it absorbs extra flavor. He has a recipe in “Milk Street Tuesday Nights” for rigatoni par-cooked in the same water that cooked the broccoli, and then finished in a sauce made from pureed broccoli stems. The result isn’t just packed with flavor—the starch from the pasta also combines with the sauce to make it creamy and rich-tasting without any butter or cream.
The plethora of condiments available today also make it easy to supercharge your cooking, he says, whether it’s kimchi to add effortless zing to your fried rice, or smoked paprika to give a meaty savor to a vegetarian chickpeaand-spinach stew. “Gochuang sauce from Korea—that’s going to be ubiquitous in another three or four years,” Kimball predicts, noting that he recently discovered potato chips flavored with the chili paste in the supermarket. He uses the condiment in his new cookbook to jazz up chicken salad and to make a spicy glaze for potatoes.
He’s also big on zaatar, a Middle Eastern spice blend based on wild thyme and sesame seeds. “If you’re going to buy a spice blend, zaatar would be by far the most useful one, because you can put in on virtually anything, from your eggs in the morning to your chicken at night,” he says.
And tahini, the Middle Eastern sesame paste, has many more possibilities than just enriching hummus. Flip through “Milk Street Tuesday Nights,” and you can find it added in a creamy pasta sauce—an option that gets some protein into dinner without the addition of meat as well as a nutty complement to chocolate in a sumptuous pudding.
Other ingredients he recommends every home cook have on hand are whole cumin and coriander plus a pepper other than black pepper or crushed red pepper flakes. Stock your pantry with good soy sauce, fish sauce and pomegranate molasses, an item that although new for many, is found at many supermarkets.
The very fact that these ingredients are stocked next to the ketchups and oyster sauce in the grocery store, or are at the very least available by mail order, is evidence of a shift in how we cook as a country. “This book wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago,” Kimball reflects. “Restaurants have really led the way; even in smaller towns you can probably get some decent Mexican food, versus when I grew up, you had strip-mall Chinese [food]. People now are more familiar with the good stuff, and you can get it.”
“I really do think that we are really at the tipping point of how we cook at home,” he says. “If you think about how people cook in this country, it’s very Fannie Farmer,” he says, referring to the seminal American cookbook that was published in 1896. “We’ve stuck to an oldfashioned way of cooking that doesn’t really make that much sense anymore.” Now, thanks to chefs across the country pulling from a wide world of flavors and techniques, we’re exposed to more and different cuisines than ever before. So, to Kimball’s point, why not cook at home the sort of food that we like to eat out? There’s no reason to wait for Saturday night for your favorite Vietnamese ginger beef-and-rice-noodle salad or chicken tacos when the ingredients aren’t hard to find, the dishes are faster and fresher than tuna-noodle casserole, and it’s just as easy to pull off.
Besides, he adds, there may be advantages that extend beyond the dinner plate. Expanding the home meal beyond the American staples fosters connections, too.
He relates a story about filming an episode of his television show in Beijing with a woman who was making scallion pancakes. “She started laughing at me because I was doing it all wrong. I asked her how long it took her to learn to do it right. She said five years. I showed her how to make pie crust, and she messed it all up. We didn’t speak the same language, but we laughed—we could understand each other, because we were cooking.”
Because of this, Kimball bristles at the term “ethnic food”—"Ethnic implies looking from outside in. If you live there, you’re not making ethnic food; you are just making food, the same thing I’m doing here, just differently.”
Kimball’s quest these days is to open our eyes to all the different ways people around the world have learned to harness flavor and to bring the best of those techniques into our kitchens to make us better, happier cooks. To him, it’s not about ingredients or about assigning dishes a particular ethnicity. It’s about finding methods that capitalize on the ingredients and time we have available (for better or worse).
“The best is when you come up with a technique that’s not about having a particular ingredient,” he says. “It’s about how you cook, about making changes that make cooking simpler and better. That’s the home run.”
