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Home cooks adore him. Bloggers can’t stand him. Foodies call him simultaneously brilliant and boring. On his relentless path toward culinary perfection, he has certainly stepped on a lot of toes (especially when critiquing the ever-growing food blogosphere, which he recently blamed for the demise of Gourmet magazine). Yet Chris Kimball, the studious, and perhaps obsessive, creator of America’s Test Kitchen on TV as well as the magazines Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country, really just wants to keep America cooking, and cooking well (Internet or no Internet). WW sat down with the self-proclaimed expert over Blueplate pot roast last week, while the author was in town promoting his new cookbook, to talk test kitchens, food journalism and the Grateful Dead.

WW: So tell me about your new books.

Chris Kimball: More Best Recipes is all the recipes from the last five years that weren’t in New Best Recipes. It’s a companion piece. It’s sort of like Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volumes 1 and 2. We did a contest for Lost Recipes. We were surprised. We got 2,800 recipes submitted and I would say about 20 percent were really, really interesting, which is a really high percentage for a recipe contest. Usually you get people making chocolate chip cookies with like, M&Ms in them or something. These, these were really quite good.

Would you actually cook from that cookbook at home?

Yeah, we actually cook a lot from Cook’s Country.... I like those recipes. We don’t really do a lot of fancy cooking.

What other kinds of things do you cook at home?

Well, it’s pretty boring. We eat out of our freezer. We raise our own beef and pork, chickens for eggs. What we eat is mostly whatever we have in our freezer. New England boiled dinner is a dinner I love. And yeah, sometimes we’ll cook out of Cook’s Country or once in a while just make something up. I would say that we mostly eat what we produce—it’s clean, it’s organic, the pork is much better than the crap in the supermarkets. So, I’m not an adventurous cook. That’s why I go out to restaurants. I don’t want to do Thai food at home.

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