America's Test Kitchen Serves Up Baking Illustrated

For all those amateur bakers who have wondered why their efforts to produce perfect results succeed only about 20 percent of the time, Baking Illustrated: The Practical Kitchen Companion for the Home Baker With 350 Recipes You Can Trust (America's Test Kitchen) provides welcome reassurance. The new cookbook, by the editors of Cook's Illustrated Magazine, shows that it's not just you -- every baker suffers through the same frustration and failure -- and, better yet, that there can exist "foolproof baking."

That's because Baking Illustrated is a comprehensive baking guide that takes a unique approach to recipe publishing -- it not only serves up mouth-watering recipes for everything from blueberry muffins to mushroom pizza to croissants, the cookbook prefaces each recipe with a description of all the challenges and failures the professional chefs at America's Test Kitchen faced in coming up with the one recipe that worked the best. It also meticulously details the scientific reasons behind the choices the chefs made in choosing a particular recipe and its ingredients.

Not surprisingly, the motivation behind this approach is recipes' high-failure rate. "Eighty percent of the time, recipes don't turn out the way you expect," explained Christopher Kimball, publisher of America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Illustrated Magazine and host of the eponymous television show on PBS. "Everyone's [feels] alone in their kitchen."

The 53-year-old Kimball told BTW that he never cooked professionally, but, like so many home cooks, had experienced the highs and lows of cooking. In the late '70s, "I was taking cooking classes, and I discovered that when, say, the [cooking] teacher told me to do something, [the recipe] didn't always turn out [as expected]," he said, and added that this fact was very frustrating. Fortunately, the seed that would eventually grow into the unique scientific-testing approach taken by Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen was planted.

First, however, Kimball founded the more traditional Cook's, which debuted in 1980, an ad-driven magazine that focused on home cooking -- without the scientific approach. "We didn't pursue [this approach] in the '80s because of the advertising," he said.

In the late '80s, Kimball sold the publication, as reported by The Washington Post. He eventually bought back the rights to Cook's and relaunched the magazine in 1993 as Cook's Illustrated. This time Kimball published a no-frills, bimonthly publication that took a new approach -- describing not only successes in the kitchen, but the numerous trials and errors along the way. The magazine, which is purely circulation-driven, soon attracted an avid following. In 2000, the television version of Cook's Illustrated, America's Test Kitchen, debuted.

Naturally, America's Test Kitchen's cookbooks embrace this same philosophy. Kimball explained that numerous recipes are exhaustively tested -- using 40 burners, 20 ovens --- by 15 to 16 cooks to come up with what America's Test Kitchen feels is the best recipe for the book. "We are trying to eliminate the ways [that do not work]. We always try to explain: Here are the problems, and here is how we overcame them. I am floored by the number of people interested in the process of cooking. People are fascinated by … what we tried and … what failed."

Along the way, Kimball said that he and his staff have encountered countless surprises as they've tested different recipes. For instance, using melted instead of creamed butter often makes a better product. Another surprising find is that there seems to be no difference between pure gourmet-type vanilla extracts and the cheap imitation kind in terms of the final end product -- in fact, the cheap stuff beat out the good stuff in taste tests. "The other big thing is the fact that ovens are all so inaccurate," he said. "Your oven and mine could be 90 degrees off, so, in that sense … you have to think of it as an imprecise tool."

Of course, not everything can be blamed on the ingredients or the tools. According to Kimball, the common mistakes people make when baking, aside from trusting their ovens, are using the wrong pan size and improperly measuring ingredients.

In addition to recipes and cooking tips, Baking Illustrated provides a few tutorials on baking basics, including how to stock the pantry, how to store and measure ingredients, and how to roll out pie dough that doesn't crumble. --David Grogan