American test kitchen

I know, I know. A recipe for a baked potato. Seems a little ridiculous. But I have to say, while it might be easy to make any old baked potato (hello, microwave!), it's not that easy to make an especially delicious baked potato. With a nice salty skin. And tender insides. This, my friends, is that baked potato. Best Baked Potatoes From America's Test Kitchen as seen at The Splendid Table Salt and pepper 4 (7- to 9-ounce) russet potatoes, unpeeled, each lightly pricked with fork in 6 places 1…

Learn how to prepare Chicken Piccata from "America's Test Kitchen from Cook's Illustrated."

From chicken and shrimp to potatoes and biscuits, these are the recipes that our digital members saved to their favorites the most this year.

America's Test Kitchen and its other publications like Cooks Illustrated and Cook's Country are my most trusted sources for recipes. ATK prides itself on

Which recipes did you cook the most this year? Click through to find out which of our recipes were the most popular in 2021.

Find the best recipes, reviews, and insights from the home cooking experts at America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, and Cook's Country.

Crusty Rustic Artisan Bread

To celebrate 20 years of the most-watched cooking show on public television, America's Test Kitchen fans around the country voted for their all-time…

We set out to make a smooth, creamy, cheesy sauce without the bother of a béchamel or custard. Making the whole dish in just 25 minutes was a bonus. Inspired by an innovative macaroni and cheese recipe that calls for adding sodium citrate, an emulsifying salt, to cheese to keep it smooth when heated (instead of adding flour to make a béchamel), we based our sauce on American cheese, which contains a similar ingredient. Because American cheese has plenty of emulsifier but not a lot of flavor…

Over the last two and a half decades we’ve developed some life-changing kitchen techniques that transformed how we—and our viewers—cook.

Our 25th anniversary season is full of innovative recipes, informative equipment and ingredient reviews, and helpful explanations for the science behind food itself.

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If you can plan ahead, by all means brine or salt your bird. But when you want dinner on the table in an hour, use this technique to get juicy, tender chicken. Roast chicken is often described as a simple dish, and it is, at least in terms of flavor—when the dish is made properly, the rich flavor and juicy meat of the chicken need little adornment. But the actual process of preparing and roasting chicken is anything but simple; recipes often call for complicated trussing techniques and for…

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Potato Pancakes (America's Test Kitchen). Discover our recipe rated 4.1/5 by 59 members.

How do you improve upon a classic? By making the beef taste beefier. We found that treating the ground beef with baking soda (so that it retained more moisture when cooked) and then breaking it down to a fine, uniform texture in the skillet delivered a tender, flavorful, and cohesive mixture that stayed put when placed on a bun. Limiting the aromatics to just onion (also treated with baking soda to soften it) made for a beefier-tasting mixture with a rich, luxurious texture. We made…

By using a few Test Kitchen tricks (like poaching our shrimp in wine), we created a restaurant-quality scampi with perfectly cooked seafood and a garlicky sauce. Our shrimp scampi recipe uses a few test kitchen tricks to ensure flavorful and well-cooked shrimp along with a cohesive, garlicky wine-and-butter sauce. First, we brine the shrimp in salt and sugar to season them throughout and keep them moist and juicy. Then we poach them in wine rather than sauté them, so they cook evenly and…

These days, pot roasts come in all styles and flavors. But when we went looking for truly beefy taste, a simple 19th-century recipe proved the best guide. We started our pot roast recipe by choosing well-marbled chuck-eye roast, which is full of collagen and well suited for braising. Opening the pot roast and trimming away the excess interior fat got rid of the pesky globs that refused to render as the pot roast cooked. Leaving the meat in two smaller roasts also shaved cooking time from our…

Vegetarian lasagna has its place. This is not that place. Meat lasagna can take all day to make. We streamlined the process by whisking together a quick no-cook cheesy filling and shaving time off the meat sauce prep. Since the sauce continues to cook in the oven as the lasagna bakes, we skipped the traditional but unnecessary long simmer on the stovetop. We tweaked the ratios of the components until we had lasagna that tasted markedly more meaty, rather than just tomato- and cheese-packed.