“You know we're an independent company - we're not part of a large media conglomerate - but that also means we need to be nimble, and so those things are going to remain the same.”Ī mover loading shelves of various ingredients from America's Test Kitchen onto a moving truck in Brookline Village on Oct. If we're in a bigger space, we're still going to be that way,” he said. The cooks, designers, photographers, writers and editors have been working on top of each other - three to four per office - and use every nook and cranny for publications and programs.īishop said they needed a new home with room to grow and found it in Boston's Seaport at the Innovation and Design building. Tastings and storage have bubbled over into the adjacent research library.
It doubles as the set for filming and still photography. The magazine still stands out, delivering that simple aesthetic in the age of food porn and glossy magazines like Bon Appétit that are filled with shots of beautifully styled dishes.īut Bishop says ATK's staff has grown with the brand - from 20 to 200 - and they’ve crammed into the 2,500-square-foot kitchen we’ve seen on TV, online, in cookbooks and magazines. “And so it basically breaks every rule of food publishing.” “Cook's Illustrated magazine is a 32-page, black-and-white magazine with no advertising and with an oil painting of a still life that looks like it came from, you know, the Netherlands in the 18th century - with some radishes on the cover,” he described. The cover of September/October 2017's Cook's Illustrated. Bishop said this rigorous methodology was born on the pages of their austere, technical food magazine more than two decades ago. “So our job every day is to come here and develop recipes that we know will work.”ĪTK’s 50 cooks will make the same recipe 30, even 50 times to get it just right. “We think a happy life includes some time spent in the kitchen - but the biggest deterrent to cooking is not time, it's lack of success,” Bishop explained. These days Bishop says the team tests 1,000 recipes a year, along with hundreds of ingredients and pieces of culinary equipment to demystify home cooking.
A test chef uses a microplane to grate parmesan into a bowl. Twenty-five years ago he helped develop what would become ATK on the second floor of a funky, former broom factory in Brookline.
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For going on 18 seasons, its cast of chefs have long been digging deep to uncover not just the “hows” of making delicious dishes, but also the chemical “whys” behind fool-proofing your sticky buns or choosing which almond butter or pungent fish sauce you should use.Ĭhief Creative Officer Jack Bishop is one of the longtime personalities on the company's flagship TV program. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)īefore foodie culture became cool and went bonkers viral there was America’s Test Kitchen - a science-infused, research-and-development-style TV show geared toward the home cook. Test cooks Steve Dunn and Katherine Perry are hard at work in the old test kitchen at Brookline Village. We visited both locations to find out more about its evolution and how it plans to hold on to its old-school, geeky identity. The multimedia company started in Brookline Village 25 years ago as the no-frills magazine Cook's Illustrated and later branched into TV, radio and publishing.īut all that uses space, and now ATK is moving from its quirky, cramped old home to a vast, snazzy new spot in Boston’s booming Seaport. The recipe for happiness includes cooking at home, according to America’s Test Kitchen (ATK). (Jesse Costa/WBUR) This article is more than 4 years old. In the new Tasting and Testing kitchen, Brianna Palma and Kate Shannon review a test on chef knives for kids.