I have ATK’s red cookbook and their blue “baking book”. Have tried many recipes from each and the vast majority have been great. I especially like the chicken and dumplings recipe. All basic stuff; if you want to make pate en croute get Julia Child’s book.
ATK tells you at least a little about why certain things work and certain things don’t. They don’t just say “do this because people in France do.”
Not everything from ATK is perfect, but it’s a far sight better than the average recipe you get from cooks.com or many books. For my money it’s one of my top three cookbooks, the other two being “The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Italian” and the other being “Marcella Cucina”.
Christopher Kimball does bug me a little. He made a big deal once about how it makes no sense to cook marinara sauce all day; it only takes 20 minutes. But what he made would be called a “salsa cruda” or fresh tomato sauce, not what most people think of as spaghetti sauce. It’s a totally different dish. I don’t know what it is about him that makes me say this, but if he were to be involved in some sort of Frugal Gourmet-style scandal I wouldn’t be shocked.
More like a young man-fiddler. I think as part of a deal to settle a lawsuit, he basically had to disappear around 1998. For a while you couldn’t even find his books, and his TV show tapes must be locked deep in a PBS vault along with Bob Vila’s beard conditioner. He was way ahead of his time as far as the show, and his books are all high-quality. All foodies who aren’t Anthony Bourdain-type gluttons are heirs to the Frugal Gourmet ethos.
Well, as stated before, his “big deal” is more about making a quick tomato sauce (salsa cruda if you will) accessible to all cooks, even ones who are trying to plate a meal after work. Elsewhere they have tomato sauces that will cook all day, including at least one from fresh plum tomatoes. It was more of a “you can do it” rather than a “this is the only way”. Personally, what I learned most from that recipe that I know incorporate in all my tomato gravies is to grate the onion on the large holes of a box grater.
“Conventional Wisdom” received from my grandmother was that soaking beans in salt water made them tough and slow to cook. Actually, it’s the only way to get the salt into the beans rather than on the beans, and doesn’t negatively affect cooking or texture at all. What you don’t want is acid around the beans while they are hydrating. Adding tomatoes to beans before they are totally hydrated and actually pretty well cooked is a bad idea. Tomatoes go in last, if at all.
He has two excellent chefs, a very cute blonde one with a pony-tale, and a cute (but less cute) blonde one who’s funny (and describes food by gender: “I’ll just take him out of the oven and let him rest”). Both are consummate professionals. His skeevey innuendos (especially towards the one with the pony-tail) of the (not a real quote–I can’t think of a specific one) “You obviously have…practice holding that long hard bratwurst juuust right! :leer:” comments and occasional “standing to close and sometimes touching” thing is just…very vaguely creepy. He doesn’t do it very often–once a season, maybe twice, and the two chefs seem to take it with good humor, but eeew.
I don’t know if it’s him, or if it’s his on-air personna and is supposed to be amusing, but either way, ick–just…ick.
Soaking the beans in salt water, or cooking them with salt in the water? I’m with you on the need for salt and avoiding acid, but I’ve never heard of soaking them in salt water.
I just add the salt as I cook the beans, and it works just fine. And, for the record, I rarely soak the beans at all. When I do, it’s only to speed up the cooking time. And heck, if I remember to put them on to soak, I can just as easily put 'em on to cook and they’ll be done faster than the soaking first method.
I find the recipes at America’s Test Kitchen a bit too Yankee bland. But their basic techniques are excellent & I know enough to add some spices.
However, here in Texas, we don’t figure that that homophobia improves the flavor of our barbecue (not “BBQ”). Nor would your cooking method win any cookoffs. (Grilling is fine but is not barbecue.)
I think it is how friends would communicate. Occasional double entendres with people you know well and wouldn’t be offended (like someone who calls your soul black) are fine. There are some other female chefs who have appeared on camera, and the “gadget guru” is female, but they don’t rib each other. They also make jokes about prodigious consumption when they use alcohol in cooking. And he also jokes with both about their carnivorous tastes (they consider parsley to be the vegetable in a well-rounded meal).
The following is just trivia, not a comment pro/con ATK/CI:
The basic go-to tomato sauce as prepared by every Italian I know (that is, in their small italian kitchens in Rome or Orvieto or Spoleto) has 3 ingredients (garlic, olive oil, and canned tomatoes) and takes 10 minutes to prepare. It’s delish, and doesn’t suffer from its lack of a long ingredient list or time on the stove. The only trick is that your canned tomatoes have to be high quality, without a bunch of added crap. IME canned tomatoes with ingredient lists like “tomatoes, crushed tomatoes” yield a similar result in my kitchen, but you have to look for them.
I’ve been making tomato sauce this way for years and always assumed that I was being a noob and doing it wrong because it’s too ridiculously easy to be “the right way”.
There’s a lot of different kinds of tomato sauces, but I think most Americans think of those long-simmering ragus that take entire afternoons to cook. When you have good fresh tomatoes from the garden or a good can of real San Marzanos (or I like Muir Glen’s products, as well), a quick cook is all you need. You don’t even need garlic. Onion works fine (and a lot of Italians do it with only onion. Depending on what part of Italy you’re from, there’s a tendency not to combine garlic and onion together in the same sauce–it’s one or the other.) And add a little fresh basil upon serving.
Nothing wrong with that sauce. Of course, when you are making a tomato gravy with sausages, meatballs, pork ribs, and whatever else you can (almost literally) throw in the pot (the way my born-in-Sicily grandmother and aunts would make), that is an all-day affair. However, that is a braise, which is very different.
I whole-heartedly agree on using the purest, best canned tomatoes, preferably crushed, that one can find. That said, in my family, they always used onion, crushed red pepper, and fresh basil in addition to the tomato, garlic, and olive oil. When my grandmother moved from Manhattan (Little Italy, where else?) to a house with a yard in Canarsie, Brooklyn, these ingredients were all grown in their yard, though the growing season was shorter than in Sicily.
I’m now ravenous. a little bit of spice in the basic sauce is a splendid thing. FTR: in my stomping ground onion and garlic are used separately, but I tend to use whatever I have on hand.
