Program teaches how to cook anything

BOSTON -- It's every cook's dream: the picture-perfect test kitchen at Cook's Illustrated, the advertisement-free magazine aimed at people who really want to cook.

The kitchen is usually busy, too. When it isn't being used by the magazine staff to prepare the perfect pot roast or spaghetti puttanesca in 11 minutes flat, it serves as the set where the magazine's companion TV show, the PBS series "America's Test Kitchen," is taped.

In either case, you will find Christopher Kimball in the middle of it all, up to his elbows in kitchen equipment, slicing, dicing and demonstrating the best way to cook anything and everything.

Kimball is the magazine's publisher and editor, and is host of the TV series.

He's a far cry from his counterparts on other television cooking shows. Sharply intelligent and quick-witted, Kimball focuses on the basics. Julia Child described it well when she said "America's Test Kitchen" is "not a program for fluffies."

"Instead of being pure entertainment, our TV show offers information that home cooks can really use," Kimball recently explained on set between tapings.

Making better cooks

"Cooking is like music. You have to learn the basics before you can improvise. 'America's Test Kitchen' is about the basics of cooking with an eye toward understanding why things work and why they sometimes fail. This is the culinary equivalent of learning your scales and your basic chord progressions."

Located on the third floor of a warehouse in Brookline Village, just outside Boston, the dual-purpose test kitchen has plenty of storage for the wide range of kitchen equipment that Kimball and his staff put to good use on a regular basis.

Cook's Illustrated and now "America's Test Kitchen" are both known for doggedly pursuing the best ways of preparing home-cooked foods. The magazine and the TV program show what works -- and what doesn't work -- in the kitchen. Under Kimball's direction, staff members painstakingly carry out taste tests, try out cookware, and perform science experiments.

To develop a recipe for fudgy and moist brownies, the staff baked more than three dozen batches.

"We just want to make American home cooking better, to get people back into the kitchen where they belong," the bespectacled Kimball explains. "If all they do is make a batch of chocolate chip cookies, that's OK with me. It's the act of cooking that's most important."

Good cooking, according to Kimball, is "simple foods simply prepared."

He points out there's a huge difference between restaurant and home cooking, one that is often confused by TV cooking shows.

"The very best home cooks I know would rather make a few things very well rather than try to reinvent the culinary wheel at every turn," Kimball says.

An entire year of shows are to be wrapped up in 3 1/2 weeks of taping.