Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street

06/16/2026

Get the recipe for Chicken with Peanut and Red Chili Sauce here: https://bit.ly/4xvaZWg

The French may have created the five mother sauces, but Chris Kimball thinks Auguste Escoffier might have added a few more if he'd studied Mexican cooking.

On a recent trip to Mexico City, Chris visited Jorge Fritz and Beto Estúa's cooking school Casa Jacaranda, where chef Emilio Perez taught him to make encacahuatado, a rich peanut-chili sauce that shares DNA with mole—toasted chiles, toasted nuts and seeds, charred tomatoes, onion, and garlic—but is super quick.

What makes this recipe especially valuable is that it teaches you the fundamental techniques of Mexican sauce-making all at once: charring vegetables on a comal, toasting chiles and peanuts to deepen their flavor, making your own broth by simmering chicken in water, and pulling everything together in a blender. The result is a velvety, layered sauce that can be easily customized.

06/15/2026

You can also put pasta in beans.

Milk Street's Claire Lower shares her favorite recipes for giving beans the pasta treatment.

06/13/2026

Pane Coccoi — also known as Pane Pintau, meaning "painted bread" — is an intricately sculpted sourdough found all throughout Sardinia. Our director of education Rosie Gill had these at Panificio Porta 1918 on a recent trip.

Historically known as the "bread of newlyweds," it's expanded its role in Sardinian life, turning up at weddings, births, high school graduations, marriage proposals, and virtually any occasion worth celebrating. It's shaped into elaborate forms — roses, sea creatures, geometric patterns — each one a small sculpture made from dough. Because the shapes need to hold their precise detail through baking, the dough is kept at very low hydration, far drier than a typical sourdough loaf, giving the baker enough control to coax delicate petals and fine lines from the same material that might otherwise become a country loaf.

Some versions are made so dry that they keep indefinitely, functioning almost as keepsakes or decorative objects.

Want to learn more about Sardinian food traditions? Milk Street and Culinary Backstreets may be heading to Sardinia sometime next year!

View all upcoming trips here: https://bit.ly/43rSOD5

06/10/2026

Get the recipe for Lazy Bougatsa: https://bit.ly/4dYOtfj

Bougatsa—the Greek custard-filled phyllo pastry—is one of those desserts that's worth every bit of effort. But what if you skip the effort entirely? Cookbook author and food editor, Mina Stone, explains how her "lazy bougatsa" ditches the meticulous layering. Instead, the phyllo sheets are casually accordioned and packed into a baking pan, drizzled with butter, baked until golden, then drenched in a sweetened condensed milk mixture that soaks into the pastry. The texture lands somewhere between a croissant and a custard pie: crunchy, buttery shards of phyllo throughout a light, not-too-sweet filling. It's a deconstructed version that's genuinely easier to make than the original, and the result is something we'd happily eat any time of day.

06/09/2026

Get the recipe for Gâteau Basque au Chocolat here: https://bit.ly/49yjNQU

The best recipe you've never heard of is...Gâteau Basque au Chocolat! It's a traditional Basque pastry — a buttery, cookie-like dough encasing a rich chocolate custard — and it might be the most forgiving recipe we've ever made.

Chris Kimball wants you to know: It does not matter how good you are at rolling out dough. It's essentially a self-correcting recipe that rights itself in the oven. If you can shape Play-Doh, you can work with this crust.

Even if the dough breaks when you transfer it to the pan, even if it cracks, this dessert will emerge from the oven looking great. The layer of chocolate custard between the layers of pastry doesn't hurt either.

06/08/2026

The meaty juices mingle with a buttery mix.

Milk Street's Claire Lower shares her favorite method (and recipes) for saucing a steak, and it all comes together on a cutting board.

06/07/2026

Goong ob woon sen is a Thai-Chinese dish that's essentially a one-pot wonder: layer shrimp and glass noodles in a covered pot, pour in liquid, and let everything steam together for 10 minutes. No stirring, no fussing. The noodles absorb a savory-sweet sauce spiked with black pepper, ginger, and garlic, clinging to the shrimp in a sauceless, deeply flavorful tangle.

Traditionally, this is cooked in a clay pot over coals, but a Dutch oven does the job beautifully—its heft conducts heat evenly and steadily, mimicking the original method. One note: glass noodles (also called bean threads or cellophane noodles) look like rice vermicelli but are not the same thing. Check the label for mung bean starch—100 percent mung bean starch is ideal.

Traditionally cooked in a covered clay pot over a coal fire, goong ob woon sen—a Thai dish of Chinese origin—comes together with ease.

06/05/2026

Wash your leeks after you cut them, not before! It may seem counterintuitive, but it's the easiest way to ensure your leeks are free of dirt. (Leeks are kept pale by mounding soil around them as they grow, making them notoriously prone to grit.)

According to recipe developer Haley Laube, halving and rinsing the multi-layered allium isn't enough. Doing all of your knife cuts, then rinsing thrice in a bowl of cold water (outfitted with a handy sieve) will ensure you have the cleanest leeks of your life.

06/04/2026

Get the recipe for Gâteau de Ménage ("Household Cake"): https://bit.ly/3SeUo8I

The Best Recipes You've Never Heard of is...gâteau de ménage! Or, "housekeeper's cake"—which is essentially the world's biggest Danish, but with subtler sweetness and a lighter crumb.

The charm of this recipe is its humble simplicity, and it's similar in concept to the brioche tart that Nancy Silverton made on "Baking with Julia"—the one that famously brought Julia Child to tears, transporting her back to France. Chris Kimball says this easier version has sat atop his dessert list for 30 years.

It's a simple yeasted dough, kneaded for ten minutes, rested for an hour, with a thin layer of lightly lemony custard on top. No special ingredients, possibly most of it already in your home.

06/03/2026

Burning shallots adds incredible depth of savoriness to this self-saucing chicken—an easy, elegant dinner that looks and tastes far more impressive than the effort involved.

Inspired by a recipe from Kevin West's "The Cook's Garden," we roast a whole chicken in a screaming-hot cast iron skillet over a bed of shallots and garlic. As the bird cooks, the shallots scorch and caramelize underneath, developing flavor and color that become the base for a simple, velvety jus — loosened with dry vermouth and finished with butter.

The cast iron is key here. Preheating the skillet in the oven gives you a fast cook time on a whole bird, no spatchcocking required. And the shallots do double duty: their pectin helps emulsify the pan sauce into something surprisingly silky from very few ingredients.

The result is an easy, elegant dinner that looks and tastes far more impressive than the effort involved.

“Burnt” here is a good thing. Shallots and garlic roast under a whole chicken, where the shallots in particular develop scorched outer layers.