Milk Street Magazine

My wife and I first really got into cooking through Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. We loved their scientific approach to refining recipes: get a variety of existing variations, try them out, figure out what works and what doesn’t work, and converge on the best recipe. In fact, their primary cookbook is called The Best Recipe (and is something every burgeoning cook should own). We subscribed to the magazine for years, and we regularly draw on it when planning out meals for the week.

But the last few years we’ve used the more recent issues of the magazine less and less. That’s mostly because they’ve been around long enough that they started to repeat recipes, and they weren’t really pushing the envelope with new types of cuisines. We started thinking about cancelling our subscription, in part because we weren’t get as much value from it, but also because they seemed to have started to focus more on cutting costs; the quality of the paper in the magazine decreased noticeably. When Chris Kimball left (or was forced out), we decided to go ahead and let our subscription lapse.

When we heard that Chris was starting a new venture, Milk Street Magazine, we thought we’d give it a try. Clearly Chris had a good track record, and we were intrigued by his expanding much more aggressively beyond more European-centric fare. We’re now in our second year of subscribing, and it’s been fantastic. We regularly find a few new recipes to try in each magazine, and a number of them have become favorites that are now part of our standard repertoire. We’re particular fans of their Tuesday Nights section, which offers several recipes that are easy to make on a week night. This week we’re making the Orange-Guajillo Chili Pulled Chicken (the recipe is currently free on their website for a limited time, so grab it!) for the second time, since we made it a couple of weeks ago and everyone loved it.

If you’re a fan of tasty food and like cooking, I’d strongly recommend subscribing. It’s only $20 a year for 6 issues.