Milk Street Radio (and other media)

Driving in Wisconsin this weekend and listening to a non-WBEZ NPR station, I caught an episode of Chris Kimball's Milk Street Radio, and thoroughly enjoyed it. He mixed interviews with chefs with people calling in to ask some pretty cook cooking questions. While I enjoy America's Test Kitchen in TV, I sometimes find Kimball trying way to hard to be funny, but on radio, at least for that one show, he was more serious and intelligent and knowledgeable to listen to.

Link: https://www.177milkstreet.com/radio

I've listened to several episodes of the podcast and I really enjoy how it mixes in different segments throughout and sometimes comes back to the "call-in session" which can be interesting.

My favorite segment, which occurs in just about every episode, is when he says to the chef that he is interviewing "OK, it's tuesday night and you've got 25 minutes to make dinner. What are you cooking?". The answers are useful and sometimes surprising.

I haven't heard a Milk Street Radio show yet, but I was a regular listener of the ATK radio podcasts and always enjoyed them. I would not be surprised or displeased if he followed the same format with his new show --- with the exception of time set aside for Adam Gopnick's musings, which I considered to be time wasted.

Katie wrote:I would not be surprised or displeased if he followed the same format with his new show --- with the exception of time set aside for Adam Gopnick's musings, which I considered to be time wasted.

Interesting. I had the opposite reaction, where I enjoyed Gopnik's ramblings, and quickly tired of the call-in questions about how to measure flour, make crispy/chewy cookies, or how to slice onions. Perhaps it's because I would sometimes listen to more than one in succession.

I thought the interviews were the best part of the ATK radio podcasts. I didn't mind the call-in Q&A segments, not that I would save any of them to listen to again. I thought Chris Kimball and Bridget Lancaster performed well together in those segments -- both knowledgeable, respectful to each other, and polite and friendly to those who called in. I think what tired me about Adam Gopnik was his elaborate straw-man setups justifying (not convincingly, for me) things he wanted to ramble about.

I think what tired me about Adam Gopnik was his elaborate straw-man setups justifying (not convincingly, for me) things he wanted to ramble about.

In a very recent episode he starts off saying that he's never understood "celery or parsley" and then describes two recent meals he has made - black beans and a salsa verde, IIRC, where he subbed the parsley instead of a more traditional cilantro and/or mint (??) and found that celery, in the former, and parsley, in the latter, were now indisputably worthwhile.

I wasn't listening too intently but I had no idea which salsa verde he was talking about, certainly not Mexican - as he didn't mention tomatillos - and it didn't seem Spanish, since parsley would be the main player there, as far as I know. But, in general, I'd say it fits neatly into your characterization above. That said, I wasn't too bothered by the diversion since it was brief, even if it left me scratching my head a bit.

I find the PBS television show unbearable and pretty much unwatchable, though I've tried. It's soulless, overly-styled and just sickeningly precious. Very little of the food on the show is appealing. Many of the recipes and techniques presented seem unnecessarily complicated, and incorporate flavor-stripping steps that would leave experienced cooks scratching their heads. Basically, this thing is a train wreck . . . and I actually like Christopher Kimball!

=R=

I find the PBS television show unbearable and pretty much unwatchable, though I've tried. It's soulless, overly-styled and just sickeningly precious.

I had the same reaction. The addition of a studio audience during cooking segments was a really bad idea. I get a wave of anxiety whenever they pan the audience to capture their blank-stare reactions. What are they supposed to be? amused? awestruck? furiously taking notes?

On the other hand, the new episodes of America's Test Kitchen helmed by Bridget Lancaster and Julia Davidson are a revelation. They work perfectly together. They're down-to-earth, hilariously sarcastic, and a bit bawdy when describing the pleasures of eating. It is a real shame that they weren't given the keys to the kingdom years ago.

Anko wrote:

I find the PBS television show unbearable and pretty much unwatchable, though I've tried. It's soulless, overly-styled and just sickeningly precious.

I had the same reaction. The addition of a studio audience during cooking segments was a really bad idea. I get a wave of anxiety whenever they pan the audience to capture their blank-stare reactions. What are they supposed to be? amused? awestruck? furiously taking notes?

On the other hand, the new episodes of America's Test Kitchen helmed by Bridget Lancaster and Julia Davidson are a revelation. They work perfectly together. They're down-to-earth, hilariously sarcastic, and a bit bawdy when describing the pleasures of eating. It is a real shame that they weren't given the keys to the kingdom years ago.

I am going to treat both of these as "new" shows and give them a little more time. I think they both need a little time to refine what they are trying to do. Both have issues in my mind, though slightly different.

Milk Street seems like it trying too hard to be "not ATK". While we all know and understand that with Kimball there the focus will ultimately be similar, as ATK was his vision (depending on which view of it's history you take). While they state that Milk Street is about "THE NEW STYLE OF COOKING IS MORE ABOUT LAYERS OF FLAVOR, CONTRAST, AND COMBINING INGREDIENTS IN NEW WAYS, the show so far seems to promote the opposite. I think the description of soulless is accurate, time will tell if it can develop a soul.

In terms of ATK, I think that Bridget and Julia are both likable on camera and in explaining/demoing recipes, but IMO they just do not work as hosts yet. Maybe because of they way we have seen them on the show in previous seasons with Kimball as the host/moderator/straight man, but something is just slightly "off". Maybe they grow into the roles and or it becomes more comfortable to see them as co-hosts, but right now I am not fully digging it. I still like the show overall, and like the recipes, reviews and tasting segments, but something about their segments together just don't always work for me, and I can't quite place why yet.

thetrob wrote:I still like the show overall, and like the recipes, reviews and tasting segments, but something about their segments together just don't always work for me, and I can't quite place why yet.

To me it seems like they're delivering lines in a play, with Kimball it came off more like a conversation. I do think they've gotten much better as hosts since the first episode of the season.

S1E8 of Milk Street TV was the absolute end of the line for me. At first I was encouraged to see Jose Andres making a guest appearance, from his home kitchen, to start the show. After providing a heartfelt account of his childhood -- and a very personal explanation about why certain dishes he grew up with had stayed with him all these years -- he cooked one of them: Sopa De Ajo. It was as simple as it could get and it was a really meaningful culinary moment.

The segment ended and up next we're in the dreaded studio (sans Mr. Andres, of course), where one of Kimball's underlings set out to re-make the dish . . . with some revisions. Wait, what the H?! I'm not really sure what the point of this exercise was because, naturally (for this show), it involved more ingredients and more steps than the very personal and austere version that Mr. Andres had already shared. So, since the Milk Street-ified version was clearly not easier to produce than the original, was the implication that it was superior?

A top-tier, world-class chef comes on your show, shares personal stories of his impoverished youth and demo's a dish born out of his family's history and hardship . . . and you immediately follow it up by trotting out some made-for-tv, hair-do cook to present a mucked up, bastardized version of the same dish?!

I'm not really sure what the intent was but on no level did presenting this "gussied up" appropriation of the dish make any sense. In fact, it was quite possibly the most unhelpful, unnecessary, self-indugent exercise I'd ever seen on a culinary show. And it was the quintessence of soullessness. On top of all that, it felt like a big F-U to Mr. Andres, too.

Sorry CK but Milk Steet is clearly a culinary dead-end.

=R=

I've really tried, because I've enjoyed these shows for years, but I just don't enjoy the Cooks Country or ATK TV shows much anymore without Christopher Kimball. I could go into the several reasons why, but I don't want to argue about it. I get that some people like the shows as much as or more than when he was on them. I'm just not one of those people.

Yesterday I watched an episode in which fried potato patties were made, starting from scratch with boiling the potatoes rather than with leftover mashed potatoes. And why is this important, asks one of the hosts? Because, says the chef, with leftover mashed potatoes, you never know how much milk or butter or salt someone put in them.

I couldn't help thinking, if Christopher Kimball were there (assuming he couldn't have kept this segment from being aired), he would have said, Does this happen a lot? Do people break into your home at night and leave leftover mashed potatoes in your kitchen and, against what I hope is your better judgment, you decide to shape them into patties and cook them and eat them?