Christopher Kimball On Holiday Cooking, Fake Milk, And Instant Pot Ribs – The Federalist
In what has become an annual tradition, this week I interviewed Christopher Kimball of Milk Street on food trends and his advice for the holiday season. The podcast is here. The transcript is below:
Domenech:
All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I’m Ben Domenech. Happy to join you once more for what has become an annual tradition this time of year, our conversation with Christopher Kimball.
He is formerly the founder of America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Illustrated, and is now at Milk Street. He has a new cookbook out, that is something I would recommend that you order now if you have been struggling to find something for a home chef in your life, on vegetables, which we started out our conversation about, and then we turned to a number of different elements of not just holiday cooking, but other questions, gifts, and potential ideas for the cooks in your life, and new things that you can try in the new year when it comes to cooking. Christopher Kimball coming up next.
Kimball:
Since vegetables you raised had to be, because they were inexpensive and available, had to be at the center of the plate, they had to come up with ways of making them interesting, so they char the food directly over fire, for example, or in a skillet. They use chilies or fermented sauces, or spices or herbs. So they found ways to infuse or add big flavors to things that, from a Western perspective, you’d say doesn’t pack a big punch. A steak, everyone thinks of as a big umami delivery system, but if you do vegetables the right way, they also have big flavor.
Domenech:
I think pretty much everyone is familiar with a combination of olive oil and salt and garlic and pepper and an oven, that work great on a lot of different vegetables. How do you stretch yourself, or what’s the first thing you should maybe think about for a side dish, either this holiday season or just as a goal for the new year, to try to get out beyond that normal combination of things where, “Let’s just toss them in those things and throw them in an oven, and that’ll make it better”?
Kimball:
Well, it does make it better, and I still do that. But you can, for example, for some strange reason, cauliflower is now… You cannot publish a recipe today on cauliflower and not have an A+ success with it. It’s …….