I gave it some thought and decided that Bridey and Julia would make a terrific co-host team. Unlike Kimball, at no point in fifteen years did I want to stuff them into an oven. But can they be so cheerfully bitchy with each other as they are with him?
I never thought he added anything to the TV show and I never made it through his letters from Vermont in the magazine.
Yeah, Cooks Illustrated, ATK and Cook’s Country are all the same outfit- I think the division is that Cooks Illustrated is the original magazine, ATK is the TV show and associated magazine (not sure how they differ from CI), and Cook’s Country seems to be the American home cooking version of the other two.
I agree that some recipes can be fiddly; oddly enough, it seems that they simplify really involved foreign recipes, and complicate otherwise simple common ones. Usually in the name of science and getting a better result than the traditional recipe.
Kimball will continue to host the ATK radio show/podcast, and he apparently has a “new project” that will be announced in January.
It isn’t just spicy foods Chris didn’t like. He really seemed adverse to anything with any kind of strong flavor. Which was mostly hilariously borne out on the taste test segments.
I have now seen a couple of shows of America’s Test Kitchen in the new format. For those who liked the show before, it’s not that different. The two main cooks Brigitte and Julia are now the hosts, either one or the other is performing the Chris Kimball roles, including serving as the foil while someone else cooks, or doing the taste test. It looks like they intend to have a wider range of the Test Kitchen cooks on camera, as there have already been several new faces.
Brigitte especially I think needs to work on her stage presence. She was always fine as a cook but as a host she is a little wooden and over-scripted. Julia is pretty much just always herself. The gadget guru is still there and the guy who runs the taste tests. I can’t remember now if they have had any equipment tests on the shows that I have seen.
So, on the whole, more of the same. I find, though, that I miss Kimball a little, he brought some personality to the show that is now lacking. I know some people found him annoying, but some people find me annoying too, so maybe that’s why I bonded a little with his persona on the show.
After posting the above, I noticed my earlier post that Kimball was going to announce a new project in January. This would have been January 2016 apparently. Anyway, he has done so, it’s called Milk Street, and his former company are suing him for “literally and conceptually” ripping them off. Ironically (to me), he says that his new approach to cooking goes beyond New England cooking by using “spices, textures, fermented sauces, chiles, and fresh herbs.” This doesn’t sound like the Christopher Kimball I remember.
Story here; it was posted in November 2016.
Maybe he heard and read all the criticism about himself, thought about what brought about his ouster from his very own company and decided he was going to address it in his new venture.
Judging by his palate and his recipes, he’s pretty clearly a supertaster and would be likely to create recipes that would seem bland to normal tasters.
I always thought Kimball is a food snob.
He needs to remember that he does this for a living and the rest us don’t.
Nice to know he’s gone.
He reminded me of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory but Kimball isn’t as well socialized as Sheldon.
Plus the quasi-racist attitude he has (especially in the first 8 seasons or so) where every “ethnic” dish they cooked had to be dumbed down to the blandest of flavors to accommodate his broken palate*.
And he really, really does remind me of Sheldon.
*I don’t think he’s a super-taster, I just think he’s a crybaby. I’ve heard supertasters talk on podcasts and (I think) on NPR and they say it’s not that flavors are unbareably intense for them, it’s that they’re more sensitive to subtle flavors. One guy said he loved hot peppers (habenaros, etc) because he tasted all sorts of weird fruit flavors under the heat.
I’ve only ever seen him a couple of times, but, yeah, he does remind me of Sheldon a bit.
Mostly, though, I miss his editor’s notes at the beginning of Cook’s Illustrated. As my, uh, bathroom reader his folksy, old-fashioned Vermont stories were quite a break versus what I read in other situations.
“supertaster” seems to be a really poorly-understood thing. supposedly, “supertasters” are like 15-20% of the population as a whole, but 95% of the people on the internet claim to be one.
like your example. I’m not a “supertaster” (that I know of) but I can easily taste differences in flavors of various hot chiles. the capsaicin doesn’t “block” anything from your taste buds, it’s a soft tissue irritant. all the heat does is make me want to stop eating them after a certain point.
and besides, all of those “weird fruit flavors” are more likely smell than taste.
I used to read Cook’s Illustrated. not really for any recipes, but I liked how they got into the “whys” of cooking, not just the “hows.” Alton Brown helped popularize that approach, and the crew at Serious Eats has picked up that ball and carried it.
It’s interesting that people here think that cooking without hot spices immediately makes things bland. I actually enjoy the taste of the meat itself and don’t need to have it always hidden by being “spicy” – which usually means you can only taste the spice. I think the issue isn’t that he’s a supertaster, but too many people don’t taste things all that well and need spices to replace what they can’t detect.
The show has had some excellent recipes because not all food needs hot pepper. :rolleyes:
I don’t think you need to be a super taster for detecting fruit flavors in hot peppers, you just need to be used to the heat. Habaneros especially (along with other capsicum chinense cultivars like Scotch Bonnets, fataliis, ghost peppers) have a distinct tropical fruitiness to them–it’s kind of their signature flavor.
As do most cooking shows. Hot pepper isn’t really featured prominently except in shows that focus on cuisines where hot pepper is typical or by a chef from a region where hot pepper is typical.
I agree that food doesn’t need to be spiced to heck and back for it taste good – that’s one of the things that annoy me, even though I am someone who likes spicy food. I like my steak with just salt and pepper. I like my pizza sauce just crushed tomatoes, salt, and perhaps a sprinkle of oregano. But Kimball did seem to have an aversion to stronger flavors and a tendency to make foods with more distinct flavor profiles middle-of-the-road. That’s one of my issues with CI and ATK is that whole “recipe by committee”/“focus group” approach. I feel it tends to mute some of the distinctive flavors of a particular recipe. I like it for learning cooking techniques and for “safe” recipes that will please a crowd that may include picky eaters.
I like his editorials at the beginning of Cook’s Illustrated. Always gives you a sense of the down-East life. And that magazine’s best selling point is the way everything is explained, even if you don’t feel like you have to do all the fussy things they end up doing to make it “just right.” I hope they don’t change it much.
That second one was the real issue; he’d take something relatively intense like a chili or gumbo, and de-intensify it somewhat. That seems… wrong to me. More so than taking something traditionally mild and intensifying it like most TV cooks do anyway.
Having watched a couple more episodes without him, I can say that the show, at least, seems more bland than it was before. There was an undertone of conflict between him and some of the cooks, maybe it was put on or maybe it was real, but you could feel it. Also you knew what his values were (you shouldn’t have to pay a lot of money for good cooking tools, for example). Now it’s just a lot of bland people joshing with each other and making really stupid bland joke-like remarks, which when one says a good one the other one immediately repeats it. I suppose the cooking is still good, but the show has gone down a couple of notches in my estimation. After finding themselves without Kimball, they should either re-vamp the show’s format entirely, or else get a different distinct personality person to do what he used to do.
I recall one of the earlier episodes, where Bridget was explaining about potato care to Kimball, she snarkily told him “… store them in a cold, dark place like your soul.”
He seemed to take it in stride, so I figured they actually got along, but it was kind of on the nose.