0:02 Welcome back to In the Test Kitchen, the podcast where we sit in the test kitchen. I'm joined by one of my favorite people in the world and co-host Lon Lamb. Hey Dan, it's good to have you here. It's nice to be here. So on this show, every time we want to go really deep on what's happening America's Test Kitchen, sort of behind the scenes, behind the beautiful photos, the video, the TV. We're actually sitting in the set kitchen for America's Test Kitchen. Behind us is this glass wall and behind that we've shooting some video. There's food cooking all around us. It smells really good. Yeah. Do you know I spend less time in this space than all of the other spaces around me. Like this is the set for um some of the tasting segments, some of the science segments. But um you know, I'm back there shooting or I'm cooking back there or we're on the A set
0:49 where the TV show gets filmed. Well, I'm glad you get some time to be here. We're spreading out. Yeah. So Lana is usually shooting her show techniquely right behind us. Um, I love that show so much. I tell you that all the time. But Lo's so much here and you spent a lot of time in the test kitchen, the actual test kitchen where we're developing our recipes. I'm curious, what was the last thing that you had in the test kitchen to eat? Um, I had this soup that um I it was just so comforting. It's a little chilly out and um it was like the simplest thing, but uh it had um a spicy pork sausage. The broth was a leak broth, like just gently cooked leaks, and so there was kind of this
1:35 delicate soft like kind of sweet and vegetital. Yeah. Okay. Um, and then uh nice chunks of kabucha squash and just like really great textures. But the flavor really blew me away and like I think I want to say there was like a touch of fennel in there. It was just really beautiful. Oh, that sounds so lovely. Why didn't you bring me any? I didn't know. No, that's not true. I just ate it all. You know that's fair. So where where in the process was that recipe? because I think there's there's a really interesting process that we use here of, you know, starting at a five recipe test going through and I'm curious if you could place that recipe kind of how far it is to where it's finished. It seemed pretty close. I the conversation was around um the amount of squash in there and usually you don't worry about you know do we want one and
2:22 a half pounds of squash or 2 lbs of squash until you're really happy with all the other um elements um that are a little bit more fundamental to what the texture and flavor of the soup is. Um when you're like maybe we need four more pieces per bowl, you're pretty close. Okay. So it's like those those last details that you're fine-tuning. Yeah, exactly. What was the last recipe that you finished? And you can talk talk to us about that a little bit. I just wrapped Well, I'm actually in the process of writing the story for um a Shiokoji steak. Oh my god. All right. Tell us more about that. Um well, it uh so shioji is this marinade made with um salt, water, and mold inoculated rice. Mhm. And um it's it's kind of magical
3:11 what this little like innocuous looking paste. It looks almost like to me it looks almost like um oatmeal. Um but you apply it to the steaks, let them hang out and um you know how most marinades they like add some salt and they sort of change the flavor a little or like the meat is well seasoned but it's like kind of mostly surface treatment. Yeah. Yeah. The the shioji here actually physically transforms the meat. And so you can take something inexpensive, treat it for 4 hours to two days, depending on how much time you have and what sort of flavors you're going after. But what you end up with is something that tastes uh like a dry-aged steak. It's incredible. It's like savory. It's
3:58 nutty. Um there's a little bit of tenderization happening on the surface. Um, and and it's just transformative. It's so cool. So, you're using that word transformative and normally when people are saying that in cooking, it's like hyperbole, right? It's like over the top. Like it actually you're like, "Okay, it makes a difference." Cooji is truly transformative. It's absolutely miraculous. And it's this mold that like it gives us sake and mirin and soy sauce and like miso miso and like some of the most flavorful and amazing ingredients in the world. basically like moldy food is the best food. Yeah. Right. At the end of the day, like it's the tastiest cheese, right? Totally. And cooji is incredible. And so shiokoji, which is the sort of um I don't know, it's the liquid version of koji that has a lot of
4:44 salt in there. It's your traditional Japanese marinade, but what's so cool about it is you have these like dueling enzymes going to work, right? And so one of them attacks like starches and breaks them down into sugar, sweet and and wonderful. and the other attacks proteins and breaks them down to like glutamate and and savory amino acid. I I consider tell me if you agree with this that it almost like turns like meat into like sort of junk food. And I mean that in the best possible way. The way like um uh MSG and like hydrayzeed proteins kind of make snack foods extra delicious. I think cooji does the same for meat or for anything protein. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. like it it we're so used to like sweet and umami in in snacks
5:30 kind of like bumped all the way up and it's this natural way of doing it that doesn't turn into actual junk food. It's still healthy for you and good for you or whatever the base thing was, but that it um yeah, it makes it so good. I remember we played around with this years ago on like a pork chop and we were like just blown away by it. So, I'm I'm excited to hear that you're digging into it. Um and this is for Cooks Illustrated magazine. It is. I think um I should know this because I'm writing this story right now. It is slated for September, October. So, look for look out for this in the summer. Oh, I can't wait. Yeah. Now, I know you also wrapped recently on a pizza recipe because I got to taste a lot of that pizza. Um, and it was like sort of a Neapolitan style that you were going for, right? Yeah. So, the really the really tricky thing about that recipe is Neapolitan styles rely on
6:20 a super hot oven. And so if you have one of those pizza ovens, whether it's like an indoors or an outdoors one, um you can get close to achieving those temperatures and get something pretty good. But if you don't have one of those ovens because you don't have the space or just aren't willing to invest the cash into buying that thing, is there a way to hack the pizza dough so that it will behave as if it had been baked in that super hot oven? That is some heady stuff. It was right. That is like very very lawn. You're like, how do I hack this dough so that it behaves like this other dough in a different environment? It was sort of reverse engineering a thing. It was like here's the traditional dough. It It's got these ratios. Here's how it behaves in this super hot oven. And the two of them
7:06 together are what define Neapolitan pizza. Yeah. And so if you can't have that oven but want that same result, how do you change the dough? Yeah. Wow. I I mean I had the pizza many times and I you actually sent me home with some of the dough that I got to play with and it is phenomenal. Like it was definitely the best pizza that I've ever made at home. Yeah. I mean I I want to be respectful to the folks who have dedicated their lives to making a true Neapolitan pizza and who um because because their work is it's amazing. It's fun. It's tasty. But we don't all have like huge wood burning ovens. Yeah. But there is like, you know, if you wanted to play around with this, if you just like playing with pizza, if you want to experiment just for the sake of experimenting and still get something
7:52 tasty, this might be the recipe for you. It's definitely the recipe for me. I'm so excited. And what issue is that in uh July, August. July August. Okay. So, it'll soon be up on on our app and meas.com. Yes. Stay tuned for that. Yeah, it'll be it'll be fun. I can't wait to make the little video showing how to make it. So, Lon, I could talk to you all day and interview you for probably hours and and we will over the course of this podcast. But we also have a really amazing guest here that I'm excited to bring out. He doesn't specialize necessarily in pizzas, but he has specialized recently in small round baked things. Delicious baked things. Yeah. So, I'm really excited to welcome Ben Mims. Welcome to the test kitchen, Ben Mims. Thank you guys for having me. It is so
8:37 great to have you here. Ben, you are so many things, but you're a very talented cookbook author, editor, writer. Uh, I'm so excited to dig into your career because I I'm a little bit jealous of it. Oh my god. But before we get there, we have a longunning tradition on the show where I choose a tea based off of our guest and brew it and we get to enjoy it and talk about the tea and a little bit about you as well. So, today I've chosen Jasmine Pearls for you. Uh, and the reason I chose this is I've spent some time with your most recent book, Crumbs, and you have this really great um intro conversation about seeing almond extract in your in your parents house and wondering why it wasn't used like vanilla extract and that it wasn't made from this. And so I chose an infused uh tea or a scented tea because I I feel like that really ties into cookies and kind of flavors and stuff
9:23 like that and also kind of world travel as you talk about a lot in your book. So I want to serve this up for you here. So, jasmine pearls are are I mean, they're one of the most beautiful tees when they're um when they're in their unbrewed state. There's so much you can learn about tea from seeing it before it's brewed, seeing the color when it's brewed. Sure. It's funny you picked this one because jasmine flowers are like are my favorite flowers and they bloom all in LA at where I live at this time or not this time of year but about April and so it's like my favorite smell. Wait, so you're saying that I absolutely nailed the You absolutely nailed it. Yeah, I love the smell. I did not know that. Cheers to that. Cheers. Cheers, Ben. I love these little cups, too. These are so cute. Yeah, my friend made these. So, I mean, jasmine, it's a classic tea. And you can see the the color here. It's
10:09 kind of a muted golden yellow. Um, some of that is from the the jasmine blossom, some of that from the tea itself. And then it's all about that aroma. And it's so fresh and wonderful. So, you've always loved jasmine flowers. Always love jasmine. You know, growing up, I didn't eat a lot of it, so it was very like poperri smell. But then like once I started cooking with um you know, Middle Eastern flavors and like especially like rose water, orange blossom water. Something about it. You know, I used to cook in San Francisco and there was a a manufacturer there where their rose water did not have that kind of like popery headache smell to it. It was very very light. Um they stopped manufacturing. I can't find it anymore. But that made me love flour waters. So, actually like you know some of the uh things I love to bake with most have this kind of like very flour water strong flavor to them which I think is
10:55 fantastic. I love it. It is fantastic and it's one of those things that I think especially with cookies so much bakes off during when you're actually baking them if you don't start with something that has some real punch to it and a lot of the the blossom waters can have that that you don't have as much in the end product. Absolutely. Yeah. when else also you use more than you think you should because yeah it's going to bake off and then after it sits and cools it's going to evaporate some more and so you actually want you know you want it to still be kind of a powerful bite but you have to use a little bit more than you think because it is just water it's going to evaporate and so not have that much flavor in my experience uh blossom waters tend to be and almond extract are super divisive people love that floral vibe or they hate it how do you I really like it I and
11:40 I used to really detest Franchapan and like all those almond extracty flavors. I don't know why I flipped, but do you ever try to like do you ever try to convince people to give it a shot? And if you do, what do you tell them? I find that your flour waters, almond extract, even though they may not be sweet, they have that like kind of sickly sweet aroma sometimes to some people. So I always just say add a lot of acid like lemon juice. So I any kind of like flour water thing I syrup I make maybe ton of lemon juice into it or a ton of lemon zest, ton of orange zest, like you need a lot of citric acid or citrus acid to counterbalance that like sweet aroma that it has. And same with almond. I feel like if you add enough lemon to it, it takes away the sweetness, but you still get the beautiful kind of almond aroma and flavor that's still there. So
12:26 Wow, that's such a good tip. I love that. That's such a good tip. Y so I I I want to talk about your your newest book at some point here, but I want to go back a little bit because you talked about cooking in San Francisco. You're actually from Mississippi originally, and I I look at your career and it's so fascinating because it feels like you you went to culinary school and then you just took jobs at so many amazing publications. You were at Seavore for a while. You were at Lucky Peach, which is kind of a time capsule experience. Um, and I'm curious at this point in your career, do you see yourself, you know, you're a great writer and an editor, you're also a cook and a baker. Like where's your what's your happy place? You know, I think that what you just described is like the the dilemma that I always face where it's like I want to do everything and I don't want to be tied down by one thing. So, I've always been curious about what I
13:13 don't know and always trying to learn what I know and try to master that as well. So it's um yeah I you know have always um I was having this discussion earlier with someone in the test kitchen where like they were like you know have you always written or like to cook more and I was like I went to college for journalism I went to coloring school right after that thinking that's what one had to do to uh work in food media. Turns out you don't and people never did. Uh you either were just like you know an editor who knew someone really well and they kind of gave you a job writing about food or you worked in test kitchens and you were a former restaurant cook. So, I like went to school for both thinking that's what I had to do. Um, and then every job I've had since then has miraculously or by my design been I want to be able to cook half the time and I want to be able to write half the time. So, I need like it was like built into what I want to do.
13:59 Um, just because I do love both equally and to me food is not divorced from writing about it, stories, history, context, all that kind of stuff. And so I've always wanted to be able uh you know there's that thing where people get upset about having to read long stories or headnotes before online recipes and I'm like unfortunately I really believe in them because to me the only difference between 100 different mac and cheeses is the stories behind them and like why people did certain things the way they did them. And so I love the stories. I think the context really matters. And so I've always wanted to be in charge of that and working on that. Um and so books has been a great way to do that. That's why I've written um a few cookbooks here now and want to do more just because I'm getting to think about food in that way and not just um you know short stories for magazines. Although I love doing that too, but I
14:45 love getting really deep uh into like the history and the stories and kind of creating the whole world to realize oh this little cookie that you're eating or whatever it is um has like you know so much information behind it that like once you pay attention to it you appreciate it more. Well, it seems like going into school for both of them served you super well. like you've been able to keep both of those kind of on the same track. You're going to have a good friend over here in terms of headnotes. Lon is a big a big headnote fan. No, I had to be converted like and to this day I routinely remind myself, no, you got to go back and read it. It's important. Um, and I think it took being a recipe developer and fielding a lot of questions before I was like, "Oh, no." Like all of when I write a recipe, all
15:31 of the like questions that I can anticipate, the answers need to be in the recipe or they need to be in the headnotes. Yes. Absolutely. Yep. And I found that uh you'd be surprised how many people even you say, "Please read the headnote," they just don't. So, I have been doing I've been incorporating it more into actual recipes I write where I say, you know, take this and put it on a rack like or say like it will cool down. This is okay. This is what this looks like. Like, don't rush it in the in the method in the method because I I just I anticipate what I know people are going to say. Even I've had friends who mean really well. I want to make a recipe and they just still don't make it the way I say it to and they like mess it up. So, I'm just trying to be like And you're not mad at them at all. I can tell I'm not mad at them at all. And I'm just like, what is going on with your brain? But it's just, you know, just uh I'm try to give people like this thing might look different than what you expect.
16:17 That's okay. Take a step back, breathe and then continue on and trust the process. Yeah. Which, you know, I get it. A lot of recipes online you can't really trust. So people are scared, but you know, if you go to a right source or good source, then you can trust them over time. When we were chatting earlier, you talked about how compact recipes are also important. How do you balance giving um enough information that people feel supported and capable of trusting the recipe without overexplaining and being too rigid? Yeah, that is. So, we were talking about how I I feel like recipes are getting longer and longer and longer because we were talking about how, you know, the internet kind of ruined recipes in a lot of ways because it made comment sections like instant and so people are like, "Oh my god, this person's having this problem. We have to make these recipes
17:03 longer. we have to like be super detailed like move the pan 10 in to the left and like it's like it can give you a little much. So I'm very much for going back to the days of mix the ingredients in a bowl bake at 350 till done period. So there's like two ingredients but you're going back to like um there's no cup measures measures use a hand of this and a but there's a good in between and so it is like it's a difficult balance to strike. Yes. And so I I try to when I'm developing recipes like you kind of and I can't think of a good example, but just like write them in a way using techniques that don't require a lot of explanation or that aren't too um uh in what's the word I'm looking for? Intimidating to to make. Uh and so um that's the way I found it kind of gotten around it because you know my
17:50 dream is to write a book where there's just no instructions and you just figure it out on your own. But that is not for everyone. So you have to like help people a little bit along the way. Yes. Yeah. I'll read that book. Yeah. You know what's so interesting is I think like you can see this sort of arc over time of like the recipes we're talking about like we have this rare American cookbook collection in our library here um which you have to check out before you leave. It's really cool. But if you go back there aren't a ton of measurements in there and then they creep in more and more and I think we are at sort of a a hyper descriptive stage here. But I think it also speaks to who the who the folks are are learning to cook at this point in time and like gone are the days and my mom's an amazing cook and baker and I learned some stuff from her but even I like I didn't apprentice with her in the way that I think a lot of people did in the past with a parent or a grandparent and
18:35 then you get to this point where you're like I want to make you want to make amazing food and you want to cook from like all these different cuisines and you have fewer skills than you ever did and so there's there's an interesting challenge and I think Lana and I think about this a lot here at the test kitchen of how to teach people at different levels. Yes. Yeah. You know, and and like how much handholding do you need and and moving into it and I think um the internet does has broken some things, but it also allows you to to speak to people in different ways, which I think is good, whether it's like super detailed video or kind of pull back um on that. Yeah, absolutely. I want to switch gears and talk about cookies a little bit because you have just finished this incredible book called Crumbs and is it 300 recipes? Is that right? I mean 250 but with variations it comes out to 300. So technically this is American session. We we count variations. Okay. We always count
19:21 variations. Variations are a lot of work. They are a lot. Variations are a lot of work and they're really important. Exactly. Um but that's but that's an incredible undertaking and it's really cool because you've you've sort of tackled cookies from around the world which um it's funny like as as an American and with that sort of American lens I think about American cookies primarily. I love when I go to other places and try them but it's not something I usually seek out. in your sort of research, did you find like are there certain countries that are more cookie obsessed than others? Oh, yeah, 100%. Um, I think the countries that have the most cookies in the book are like Germany and Italy. So, it's, you know, in Germany makes sense because they've been doing nothing but experimenting with butter, sugar, and flour for like centuries and centuries. Um, Italy, you know, I make the reference that as many pasta shapes as
20:06 you can think of, that's how many cookies they have. Like, it is just infinite ways of just, you know, half a thumb print, a full thumb print. you know, a finger knuckle like they will come up with all these different variations of cookies. Um, so interesting. Scandinavian countries. Um, I make the joke that, you know, they have nothing to do in the winter time except for make cookies because it's so dark. So, you know, you there's there's you look at the reasons why certain places have a lot of cookies and you're like, oh, it's because they these different uh environmental factors are at play or they just, you know, these are readily these ingredients that are readily available to them. Um, I think some of the best cookies that I enjoyed were the middle the Mediterranean ones, which was in the chapter, which some people controversially didn't love. I uh looped Italy um and then like North Africa in with the Mediterranean and
20:53 Spain, too, because it's like I was doing the controversial. Yeah. I wanted I wanted the drama of it. One person to clutch. Yes. Yes. Some person couldn't imagine that I put Italy in the Mediterranean instead of Europe. But I was like, well c like in terms of cookies and the flavors they use, vastly different from the rest of Europe, but those um those cultures make a lot of different cookies as well. A lot of fried cookies, a lot of ones soaked in honey and the flour waters that we were talking about earlier. So um it was interesting to see because yeah, coming from an American point of view, our cookies are completely different from every other cookie in the world. There's not the same chewy, sugary texture. there's not the same flavors. Um, a lot of like dry shortbreddy things. And so going into, let's say, you know, Southeast Asia where there's a lot of,
21:38 uh, coconut, there's a lot of pandan, black sesame, there's a lot of rice flour, going to South America where there's a lot of cornstarch, tapioca starch, cassava starch, um, panella, like their version of like the raw brown sugar. um and then are going to let's say you know um uh Russian kind of Baltic countries where there's a lot of like fresh cheese and like um olive oil and and honey and some of like the Greek cookies and stuff like that. So that's how I kind of organized the book was just looking at every cookie and seeing oh there's lots of flavor themes and overlaps within these regions. Yes. And so I kind of had to not invent some regions but kind of shove some together. But um but also if you really think about it, a lot of these cookies that have been around for a long time predate modern borders. So I had to like kind of
22:26 like what is Western Europe? I don't know. It's like kind of that this little area that's just basically France and Germany. Those cookies kind of like all mixed together. So it was fun to figure out where things overlap and kind of um group them together depending on influence. Um, you know, like the UK, Australia, New Zealand are one and they're like are very far apart, but we know why they're so very similar. So, um, so that was really fun to kind of figure out those histories. Yeah. I like it. It's like Ben's New World Order and it's entirely based on cookies. Literal New World Order. Yeah. Were there any cookies that maybe would push it what people would think a cookie is? Fabulous question. I was um thinking about that myself because there was a Dutch cookie that uh controversial uh author Rald
23:13 Doll loved and wrote about in one of his books. It's basically pi dough. He you make it like that. You roll it out, but you roll it in just like a bed of like turbanado sugar and more on top and you just keep rolling it. So eventually just like sugar and pi dough dough become one. So you cut it out and bake it. So it's really crispy and flaky. Yeah. And so I had to get very technical with a lot of the definitions for the cookies because it technically had all the ingredients I wanted incorporated in a different way than most cookies and it is technically you're making pie dough and I was like we're not going to do that but with the sugar in it ends up becoming something different and it was unique enough where I wanted to include it. Um so there are a few instances like that where and there's a few cookies that have yeast in them but it's like a vestigial ingredient um where it doesn't actually provide any lift. It's just there still. Um, but I left it in.
24:00 That's so fascinating. Barely, if at all. I can't even remember the ones that where I did, but I left it in just because all the recipes that use it today still have it in there, even though it's not really being used. And I wanted to stay true to what the recipes uh, you know, what they say. I didn't want to like take anything out and have one have anyone say, "Oh, you're messing with Yeah. It makes me wonder if um, uh, chemical leavenveners have like replaced yeast and like all these recipes." 100%. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So many of the cookies I found like were just bread or leftover bread chunks or just like dough. Um the German feoose is really fascinating because that was just uh leftover bread dough that they would just mix some spices into it, throw it in the oven to test, you know, as the oven's cooling down how um how hot it is
24:48 and then you would take some of that leftover dough and keep mixing in more. And they would, you know, mix in like um potassium carbonate I think like potach. It's kind of like old school leavener or like ammonium bicarbonate which smell like salts and just like and that stuff took like months to rise as well. So they were just like things just sat around you know all the time back then. Everyone had so much time back then. Yeah, they had a lot of time and it really is that people had a lot of time back then to figure out different shapes of the same thing over and over again. So it's a little different than how we conceptualize cookies today. But um yeah, a lot of it was old dough, old bread dough that then over time you think you've this thing for centuries and centuries. I'm like, "Okay, let's make it a little bit sweeter. Let's make it a little bit fatter." So, butter starts coming in more, sugar starts coming in more, and now it's very different from what it used to be, but
25:33 it's uh some of the shapes may remain the same, but they all ended up as bread that then the baking powder completely changed once the yeast was swapped out. Yeah. Wow. That was fascinating. I think there's um a description of pasta that I've always loved. I I forget who the quote is attributable to, but it's that um like pasta is like architecture for the mouth because like it's it's just different shapes and you you can question like why are there so many different shapes of pasta, you know, like one could kind of get it done, but it's just like they're just more interesting. And it sounds like sounds like there's a real analog there with cookies that like Oh, yeah. especially in Italy, it sounds like, you know, small tweaks like half a thumb print versus this. And it's just a simple pantry made a lot more interesting through technique. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, you know, there's always
26:19 it's a functional shapes as well because there's always like fingershaped things that are made for like dunking or like rings that are, you know, maybe it's because they're easy to hold. Um, you know, your squares, your like, you know, there's mounded things like this, just any kind of way, shape, or form you can think of to cut something or to shape something, they've figured it out. Um, and it was also kind of interesting. Um, I kind of there was a I was researching a butter cookie in Germany and I came across like a text from the 1500s uh in like Gothic like nosatu German looking text and where all it was discussing for pages was just different ways to mix butter and or fat and sugar together. And they have a term for when you cream it together. They have a term for when you melt the butter and then just like whisk in sugar. They had a term for something else. And so that just kind of um showed how like long these people
27:06 have been thinking about how to like mix these two things together. So like they're they're thinking that seriously about how to just combine the ingredients. They're also thinking seriously about how to shape them, about how to uh go about uh baking them and how to play with shapes and different things like that. And so um yeah, that was really fascinating to kind of see that uh you know, everyone's been taking this stuff kind of like seriously and thinking about it for a long time. Um it's just a lot of those texts are not normal for us to read or find. They're usually in a lot of um like professional catalog books that like used to come with like you know if you were in a at a certain bakery or whatever you would like get this like this guide almost guide. So it's not so interesting beautiful romantic. It was just very technical. So those things are there. Yeah. I have a really hard question for you here. Um so a few years ago we published a a recipe for bachi dama
27:53 Italian cookie and we called it the world's cutest cookie. M do you think is there is there a cuter cookie out there? Are we wrong? No, I think I think the two little cookies kissing in the middle is very cute. I was going to say there's a I believe it's Argentinian one that's basically the same thing, but it's like two little shortbread marbles with guava paste. Um so it's like kind of the same cookie. That might be cuter on Alpha kind of. They love they love sandwiches, sandwich cookies down there. A lot of sandwich cookies in South America. Um, which most are descended from the Alphahore from Argentina. Um, yeah, cute cookies. Cute cookies. You know, the Swedish cookies are very like playful looking and like checkerboard cookies are cute. Yeah, but there Yeah. Yeah, the bot dam is pretty cute. Um,
28:40 there's a few there's like one. It's fine. You don't have to I mean I I'd rather you don't come up with I want to I want to believe that we got it right. There's cute colors. I think I think you are right cuz that is a very cute shape. It's that's different from everything else. Okay. You you heard it here first. Mims confirms patch dama the cutest. Cutest. Yes. So, we also like to do not like a lightning round, but like ask some different questions that aren't necessarily connected, but I do want to keep this one a little bit connected for you. Okay. American cookies. It's where my heart lies. What's your favorite? Um, I'll give you two answers just because there's an American cookie and then there's like is I might not be an American cookie. Snicker doodle is my favorite for sure just because that texture I love anything cinnamon sugar that texture and also I'm very proud of that recipe because I find that a lot of
29:26 snicker doodle recipes are not chewy like they should be. They don't have that crack top like they should be and they're too thick. This one's like what I believe to be the perfect snicker doodle cookie. Um but my actual favorite cookie which happens to be in the American chapter is a ginger molasses. So it's like also chewy kind of like firm. The turbanado sugar on the outside is really cracked and just like Yeah, that's my favorite. I love that. What about you, L? I need you to go first. You need me to go first? I do. So, this is going to be the most boring answer ever. Do not say chocolate chip. Oh, no. No. Look. So, so I I I do love a chocolate chip cookie. It just like checks so many boxes. My mom has always made fabulous ones. We have an incredible recipe here that is like toffee and wonderful, but I actually think it's um it's like chocolate crinkle cookies, also called earthquake
30:12 cookies. We also have a wonderful recipe and it's like almost brownie, almost cookie, lives somewhere in the middle, but that chew. Yeah. And I think there's another a whole another episode where we dig into like why Americans love chewy cookies so much. Um, but I I would say that's probably my favorite. All right, Lon, we bought you some time. I still don't I still don't have an answer. Um, years ago, one of my colleagues developed a recipe for peanut butter sandwich cookies. Oh, those are so good. Um, I learned a very important lesson when she first started that recipe and it's if you have to eat five very different sandwich cookies and provide feedback about the texture of the cookie, the texture of the filling, the flavor, the size, the shape, the ratios. You You get one bite. You have to make all of these determinations with one
30:58 bite. I thought I was going to be sick after that tasting. That's a lot. It was hard. It is a lot of cookies. Yes. Um, all right. All right. So, we talked about sweet stuff a ton here. Um, I actually just tasted one of your dishes um that you have been calling hot fish salad. Uh, a beautiful piece of seared halibit buried under this gorgeous salad of radikio and endive and it's got some um some fennel in there and this like bright acidic uh dressing. The reason that I got to try it is you are now part of the ATK residency um which I'm so excited to have you here. you're going to spend a couple years with us developing recipes, um, showing up on our podcast and TV shows. Um, and and I'm just curious, what was your interest in coming to ATK and kind of joining us? Yeah. Well, I've always been a huge fan
31:44 of America's Test Kitchen. I've watched the videos for a long time. Um, and I've read all the books and so it's, um, nice to be here where, um, food is taken seriously and people invest in it and people care about it. Um, and also, you know, I love to kind of push myself as a recipe developer as well. And I would say that I am not the most um uh technical or thinking about technique all the time. Like I love to indulge in it, but I'm not like super into it. And so that's why I always turn to you guys and your expertise for that. So getting a chance to be a part of it and kind of uh uh move myself a little bit closer to what you do um is really exciting for me. And so um I'd also never been to Boston, so I wanted to come try it out. And that's the part you love the most, the nice cold weather. Yeah. The cold weather. Yes. Well, Ben, we are so
32:29 thrilled to have you here for the residency, on this podcast, and in so many more ATK things. Um, we're I think we're going to learn a ton from you, and we're going to convince Lon how to enjoy cookies. I think that's my mission now. Your time here. Yeah. Yeah. Force feed you until you like them. Someone's going to bring me cookies every day. Thank you so much for joining us. If you're interested in Ben's recipes that we just talked about, the salad, um, or any of these cookie recipes, head to americasestkitchen.com or check out our app, America's TestKitchen. We'll be back with more. Awesome. Thank you guys. Thanks,
