Tried And True Tricks From 'America's Test Kitchen' : NPR

Want the perfect pie crust? Christopher Kimball from America's Test Kitchen says the secret is to substitute half of the recipe's water with vodka, for a dry, flaky crust. iStockphoto.com hide caption

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Making sure amateur chefs can re-create recipes designed by professional chefs is of utmost importance, Kimball tells Fresh Air 's Terry Gross.

"We bring people into our kitchen and watch people cook our recipes and send our recipes out by email, and we know that what people do with those recipes bears little resemblance to what we do with them," says Kimball. "For example, they will substitute ingredients with great abandon. They will never read the recipe ahead of time."

Kimball remembers a chicken recipe from several years ago. One man wrote in to say it was the worst chicken recipe he'd ever made. Turns out, the man didn't have chicken in the house, so he'd substituted shrimp.

"Well, 40 minutes of cooking shrimp in a skillet is simply not going to come out very well," Kimball says. "And guess whose fault that was? Mine. So most of recipe writing is what the person at home is going to do to your recipe. It's not whether you can make it in your test kitchen."

Kimball is also the founder, editor and publisher of Cook's Illustrated Magazine. More than 2,000 recipes from the magazine are collected in The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook. On Wednesday's Fresh Air. Kimball and his Test Kitchen colleague Bridget Lancaster highlight some of their favorite kitchen shortcuts and cooking techniques:

On turkey: Cooking turkey is fraught with peril, Lancaster says — all sorts of things can go wrong. She recommends either brining the bird before cooking — by placing it in a salt and water solution for a few hours — or dissecting the bird ahead of time and roasting it in parts.

"It's the most genius concept that I think we've come across," she says. "You roast the turkey breasts, you roast the parts, they all go on at the same time right onto a sheet pan, and the turkey breast, the thighs, they come out perfect. It's the most hands-off recipe you can come across."

On minestrone soup: Need an easy way to make minestrone soup broth? Use V8, says Lancaster: "Somebody just mentioned, 'Why don't we try V8, like the commercial says?' And V8 was perfect. It gave just the right body to the minestrone, the right seasoning. It was an 8-for-1 instead of a 2-for-1 ingredient, because it has all of those flavors in one shot."