Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street

06/26/2026

Get the recipe for Evergreen Pesto here: https://bit.ly/4uXmuTZ

You can, in fact, keep pesto bright green for days. Basil is Genovese pesto's essence, but also its biggest liability—it oxidizes fast, quickly turning muddy and dull. Milk Street recipe developer Hisham Ali Hassan tested a few solutions.

First, swap in some arugula, a hardier green that retains its color far longer than basil alone, and it's peppery, so it doesn't dilute piquancy. Second, add lemon juice—its ascorbic acid acts as a natural antioxidant, slowing the browning. And third, cover the surface with a thin layer of oil before storing to create a barrier between the pesto and oxygen.

06/25/2026

Get the recipe for Spaghetti with Miso Bolognese: https://bit.ly/4eDX8Eu

One-hour Bolognese sounds antithetical (heretical?), but this is no shortcut; this sauce is our version of what might be called Japanese bolognese. It’s faster and simpler to prepare than traditional ragù bolognese—even meatier!—thanks to umami-rich miso and soy sauce. Chris Kimball is a convert.

It's an example of Japanese food culture's enthusiastic embrace of Italian cuisine, to the extent that it coined the term "itameshi" to categorize Japanese-Italian dishes. There are even Japanese “spaghetti houses” specializing in pasta dishes paired with ingredients such as cod roe, sea urchin or salted plum.

The base is all pork, with ginger, garlic, and scallion whites standing in for the traditional soffritto, and tomato paste for depth. You don't taste miso. You don't taste soy. You taste an extraordinarily meaty sauce that just happens to come together in a fraction of the time.

06/23/2026

Get the recipe for Browned Butter Seltzer Waffles: https://bit.ly/4vRzPho

After a lifetime of soggy waffles, Chris Kimball FINALLY decided to investigate why: everyone's just pouring pancake batter into a waffle iron. That gives you one uniform texture—no contrast between exterior and interior. A great waffle should be two things at once: crispy on the outside, light and fluffy on the inside.

The solution is two-fold: cornstarch for a lighter crumb and a can of cold seltzer, which aerates the batter and creates a remarkably crispy shell. Brown the butter for depth of flavor (you're melting it anyway).

06/20/2026

Lokelani Alabanza has created over 300 wildly inventive ice cream flavors—all an ode to Black America and its ice cream makers. According to the Ice Cream Queen, pretty much anything can become ice cream, including Nashville Hot Chicken, Ambrosia Salad, and Cream Cheese and Pepper Jelly (best enjoyed on a saltine). Once you have your base sorted out, it's all about building flavor, usually through steeping, straining and fun inclusions—like the crispy chicken skin in that Nashville Hot Chicken flavor. For Lokelani, ice cream is never just a treat; it is memory and nostalgia, creating a deeply personal experience for all who enjoy it.

You can hear more from Lokelani on this week's episode of .

Photos are credited to Brittany Connerly and Lokelani Alabanza.

Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/4eh4cb1
Or on our website: https://bit.ly/43Iox2T

Got a cooking question? Drop us a line at [email protected] for a chance to get it answered on air.

06/18/2026

Get the recipe for Toss-Your-Garlic Tomato Sauce here: https://bit.ly/4osoORi

We hate watery pasta sauce that ends up on the plate and not our pasta. To bind up all that free water, our solution is emulsification, and for that, we need a dose of fat. To find out which fat would be the best emulsifier, we vigorously mixed, tossed, and stirred three different ingredients into our tests: parmesan cheese, olive oil, and butter.

Parmesan cheese was our favorite for flavor, but it takes a practiced hand to balance the melted cheese with the right amount of starchy pasta water. Olive oil allows the tomato flavor to come through the best, however it takes a lot of tossing to ensure the sauce doesn’t have a greasy feel. Butter proved to be the best emulsifier requiring the least amount of elbow grease.

In the end, adding any one of these options will emulsify and tighten up your pasta sauce, as long as you’re willing to do the work.

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.