Andy

Matuschak.

square signals

• 2009-10-09

  Cooks Illustrated vs. The Internet

  mrgan:

  Christopher Kimball, founder and editor of Cooks Illustrated, defends his dismissal of recipes and cooking advice found on the Internet:

  In terms of recipes, no, I do not believe in a Wiki website, with a community opining on recipes as a means of creating a valuable database. Making a recipe 75 times in a test kitchen under controlled circumstances … is vastly better than the voices of millions under less the ideal circumstances

  […] We need trusted editors, and we need people with strong opinions. For me, what stands out about Cooks is that they’re committed to challenging their own subjective tastes. Their authority derives from repeat performance and comparative taste tests. Their recipes are not lists of instructions; they’re stories that tell the whole process, from the idea to the finished dish.

  When I started learning to cook, I just Googled things and used the first reasonable-looking result. “marinara recipe.” “bread recipe.”

  I made one of the biggest leaps in quality of my food when I simply started using trusted sources. My strategy now is mostly to buy cookbooks from chefs with restaurants that impress me. Then I can guess how good the final product will be—provided I don’t mess it up.

  One example: I make great ice cream. I learned from Mr. Keller; he prescribes 10–12 egg yolks per quart and aging the custard overnight so the fat droplets agglomerate. Googling for “ice cream recipe”, I find largely no-egg recipes, recommendations for arrowroot (a thickening agent), and a generally terrible signal-to-noise ratio.

  As for Cooks Illustrated, it has good advice, but you have to pick and choose. I’m getting increasingly leery in the face of points like “put mayonnaise in your vinaigrette to help it emulsify” and “your roasted chicken is done when it’s 175°F in the thigh”.