I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say “the lead in most dishes where it’s used at all,” but freshly ground black pepper is a welcome addition of scent, spice, and fruity-earthy flavor that is welcome on many dishes.
Are they seriously dissing it? I haven’t actually watched any of the new episodes yet.
ETA: Oh, I see you’re saying the posters in this thread. Well, no, I don’t think we’re dissing black pepper per se so much as spicy dishes requiring more of the capsicum variety of peppers (or even other spices) being underspiced in this regard. I doubt any of the commenters on black pepper think black pepper is bad. I certainly don’t, and I agree with their comments on the show.
Preach it, brother. I always have to laugh when TV chefs make a big deal of using ONLY fresh-ground black pepper, then give the food a measly 5 or 6 grinds. It ain’t made of gold, use it! Nothing less than 20 or so for a serving of SOS. I have 3 mills in my kitchen, one each for white, black and mixed peppercorns. Also have one I take with me when going out for a meal. It’s frustrating that many restaurants don’t have a mill for customer use, so I solved that problem myself. Sometimes a fellow diner will see me using mine, and ask if I’d be so kind…
Always glad to meet another pepper enthusiast.
Here’s My favorite black pepper recipe. Well, not so much a recipe as a video of the guy making black pepper beef. Basically marinated beef, fried, and then tossed with a butter, garlic, oyster sauce, and black pepper sauce. Unfortunately, this restaurant isn’t around anymore, but I can make my own version thanks to watching the video.
Mrs. C and I watched a few episodes of the new ATK, and in our opinion the show is now better than ever. We were always mildly put off by Chris K, but it’s only since he’s left that we realize just how obnoxious he really was. Julia and Bridget are great together, and a long-standing palpable tension on the program is no longer evident. The program is better without the testosterone poisoning.
I agree- it showed a side of Bridget and Julia that they’d kept under wraps. I mean, who knew Bridget would joke around like that and that Julia would just about be incapacitated by laughing (and turning bright red at the same time!)
If they can keep that up, they’ll have a winner on their hands.
Wanted to give this a bump. Bridget and Julia continue to do well on ATK by themselves. I liked the banter between Chris Kimball and whichever one of them he was on with, but they’re also fine without him.
I’ve watched Kimball’s new show, “Milk Street,” and without the chemistry he had on ATK, he comes across as a horse’s ass. His assistant cooks on that show are very young and, I dunno, *bland *or something. He tries to banter and joke with them, but they don’t get it. I mean, he was always a curmudgeonly skeptic, but interacting with Bridget, Julia, and Jack softened him a bit.
I never liked Dan, who matched Chris in the horse’s ass department, and Bryan always seemed afraid of Chris. In the new ATK without Chris, Bryan has come out of himself.
I’m not sure which of the two ladies does it (they both look so similar), but the fake laugh is really irritating. But they do a good job of explaining exactly how to make the dish, so that to me is the most important thing. Milk Street is OK. It seems like it would be real easy to find someone more interesting than Kimball, though. He is totally “meh”.
I have to say, the print magazines (America’s Test Kitchen & Cook’s Country) are much better without Kimball’s snooty editorials about how perfect Olde Timey Vermont is. I swear, Martha Stewart would find that man too much of a pretentious ass.
I don’t know, I still miss Chris and enjoy the reruns of ATK with him more than the new episodes with Bridget and Julia. When those two attempt to banter it’s always awkward and I think of Margaret Jo and Terri in those SNL skits with the fake NPR show The Delicious Dish. (You know, of “Schweddy Balls” fame.)
The new ATK with Bridget (ponytail) & Julia (shorter hair) explaining recipes to each other bugs me. Kimball wasn’t a cook, he is/was a writer with some knowledge of cooking. Anyone explaining to him how to do something felt sincere. Kimball never bugged me but I was raised on sarcasm.
I agree. I liked it better with Kimball. Bridget and Julia are getting better, but it still seems forced and unnatural. The third (larger) woman is even worse. I don’t like her segments at all.
Apropros of nothing, I recently finished a book authored by Kimball about remaking/reinacting the very last dinner menu in the original Fannie Farmer cookbook. There’s a couple of chapters in there where he insists on authenticity as much as possible, which included installing a modernized wood fireplace in the basement of his Victoria-era row house (where the kitchen originally was back then) and replicating as many of the ingredients as possible. His plan even went so far to replicate the dinner party itself down to the most Downton Abbey-like detail including what the “servants” (mostly interns from ATK) wore.
Silly me, I thought it’d be a homage to Farmer and how she brought cooking to the masses. Instead it was a painful slog of every single recipe, what in Kimball’s opinion was wrong with each, and here’s how to make it better. I read with wanting to slap his smug face. Overall he thought Farmer’s cooking style was quite bland and “no wonder why the American diet has always been thought horrible”.
To be fair, he is a decent historian, though. At the time of Farmer’s popularity the notion of having cooks or servants was beginning to go out of vogue and there were many “ladies of the house” who had absolutely no idea how to cook anything. They all flocked to Farmer’s school in Boston for the basics. Farmer never claimed herself to be haute cuisine. I don’t know what Kimball must’ve been thinking :rolleyes:
I know nothing about Kimball other than watching Cook’s Country and ATK for several years, but his willingness to improve Farmer’s recipes shouldn’t be surprising. That was his schtick all along–his intros were always about how to take any given recipe and make it better, or easier, or more convenient, or in some other way improve it.
That’s not to say he wasn’t smug about it, I’m just saying he seemed to be honest about his smugness.
As for Bridget and Julia, they make an okay team. Dan and Bryan are all right, but the other side cooks don’t impress me at all. One thing I always liked about both shows was they were more about cooking than entertainment (as opposed to the Food Network), but I’m not sure if they’re going in the entertainment direction a little more or not.
TV shows are about entertainment; they have to make the audience say, “What’s going to happen next?” so that’s fine. I just don’t want ATK to become a talk show with the sideline of cooking.
OK, and I’m the first to say that if your ingredients are good you don’t need to hide them. But if you’re making pimientos rellenos, they should taste like pimientos and like whatever went into the filling. If someone is making a dish that says “hot” in the name and it isn’t hot, it’s not really that dish.
My brother Jay can tell I’ve “done something new” to a recipe just smelling it from the other end of the house. The more he learns about cooking (he’s his family’s main cook), the more he can appreciate the difference between “this has too much [whatever]”, “this has been mistreated” and “I don’t happen to like it, but it is cooked correctly.” Many people never learn that difference.
If anyone is curious about Kimball the man, here’s a long, revealing, *interesting *articlefrom the NYTimes magazine from 2012.
I own many of the ATK cookbooks, and I appreciate their relentless testing and documentation of recipes–both ingredients and methods–to come up with the best-tasting versions. And they explain WHY their tweaks work. I love that.