'Milk Street' Bakes – and Teaches, and Tours the Globe for New Recipes

Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Television airs on WTTW Saturdays at 3:00 pm and is available to stream via the PBS app.
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For the first time in its eight years of existence, Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street has released a baking cookbook. True to the Milk Street spirit, Milk Street Bakes is global in outlook, featuring recipes you’re not likely to find in any old baking book: the Portuguese sponge cake pão de ló; Chinese sesame-scallion bread; Colombian empanadas and cheese buns; Turkish cookies and flatbreads. The book doesn’t shy away from savory recipes or spices; you’re also sure to find plenty of the sesame paste tahini, which can lend a dish a similar savory-sweet nuttiness to peanut butter.

“What I really like about the cookbook is that if there’s an ingredient or a technique that might feel like it’s new to some people, it shows up multiple times,” says Rosemary Gill, the director of education at Milk Street’s cooking school. “I think this is very educational-forward. If you brown butter in the Swedish sticky chocolate cake” – one of her favorite recipes in the book – “you also brown butter in our brown butter-cardamom banana bread or brown butter mochi with coconut. You’re not going to learn a skill and not use it again.”

The same goes for ingredients – you won’t be buying an unfamiliar spice or product for a single recipe and then letting it molder in the back of a cabinet, since it will show up in numerous recipes.

“Spices are really important to Milk Street,” Gill points out – a product of its international outlook, which is particularly beneficial to baking. “Baking is one of the most extraordinary things to learn when you’re traveling, because there’s such depth of knowledge in the tradition of doughs,” Gill says. Milk Street’s team gets to draw on those long traditions when they learn recipes and techniques from home cooks and chefs around the world and try to translate them to an American audience and kitchen.

Gill helps bring those knowledgeable home cooks and chefs to Milk Street’s audiences via the cooking school, which offers classes both in-person in Boston and online, as well as educational sessions for youth with various nonprofit partners. A class might focus on Shanghainese baking with a guest chef, handmade pastas with a Milk Street staffer, or a Middle Eastern rice dish with a cookbook author.

Gill and Milk Street have also introduced another way to learn and experience new dishes this year, in the form of culinary tours to regions and countries around the world. Organized with Culinary Backstreets, the tours pair small groups of people with a local chef or cook as a guide. The trips might include a taco crawl and bartending lesson in Mexico City, or a visit to an olive grove and winery in Greece. When Gill stopped in Chicago recently, she had just returned from the inaugural tour to Venice, where the group learned to cook in their guide’s home and explored velvet and glassblowing workshops.

“When you travel, you learn that there’s no right way to do anything,” Gill says. “You go somewhere and they know the right way to make stew. You hop three countries over, and they know the right way to make stew, and they’re completely different, and they’re both right, and they’re both delicious.”

Gill believes that experiencing such differences of approach leads to more confident cooking and a willingness to experiment at home – she’s observed such a change in herself over her time with Milk Street. “I think that frees people up from this mentality that if they don’t do it a certain way it’s wrong,” she says. “It keeps your mind open, and it also allows you to be creative in the kitchen.”