Milk Street’s Favorite Interviews of 2024

We talked to a lot of great people this year. From a bonafide PhD flavor scientist to the country’s leading authority on pizza dough—and an actor who eats soup for breakfast—these were the cooks, enthusiasts and educators that changed the way we cooked (and ate) in 2024.

Julia Turshen Is Doing It for the Home Cooks

I definitely think of myself as a home cook who writes for other home cooks, and for me that means understanding that it's just one person. There's no prep team. There's no dishwashing team. There's not a crew of people who are going to bring a dish to life. When it comes to home cooking, the cooking is like this much [pinches fingers] of the whole picture. There's the planning, the budgeting, the grocery shopping, the cleaning of vegetables and just getting things ready. The prep, the making the dinner itself, but then the cleaning up and the storing of leftovers and figuring out what to do with those leftovers and keeping everyone you're cooking for—keeping their really random wants and desires and dietary restrictions and all that stuff in mind. It's just so much work. So I write every recipe with all of that labor in mind. And I think when people cook it's such an investment of time and money and energy and I just don't want anyone to waste any of those very precious resources.

Stanley Tucci Thinks You Should Eat Soup for Breakfast

Carbonara, let's face it, is pretty amazing for breakfast, because it is breakfast. But instead of bread, you have pasta. We have eggs, bacon and a starch. Perfect breakfast. My son had it. I made it the night before last. He is so in love with it, he literally couldn't stop talking about it. And the next morning, I said, “I have a little bit left over and I'm saving it for you.” And he was like, “Oh, great!” Then he goes, “Oh, actually, um, I'll just have that now.”

Tamron Hall and Lish Steiling Want to Build Your Kitchen Confidence

And one day, I noticed Lish in the kitchen and her tattoos on her forearm—one is a radish, and one is a carrot. I didn't know the radish at the time. I recognized the carrot—full disclosure—but I saw things with roots, and I thought, “Someone with root vegetables tattooed on their arms? They mean business.” I also noticed that she had a couple of bruises on her arm, and I thought, “Wow, cooking is like MMA? What's going on here?” And I went over and said, “What's going on with your arms?” And she said, “Oh, this is a carrot and a radish, and I'm in boot camp.”

How to Have Good Taste with Dr. Arielle Johnson

There's some interesting work that came out a few years ago suggesting that the ability to detect sourness has to do with our late-primate, early-human ancestors needing to be able to eat fermented food, or have a better time eating lacto-fermented food, as opposed to spoiled food. So if you could taste acid and like it, you'd be more likely to eat the lacto-fermented food, as opposed to things with less beneficial bacteria, and then also maybe try to deliberately lacto-ferment things and then have a longer life and healthier family, etc.

Maria Capdevielle Wants You to Think Outside the Ice Cream Maker

In Italy, you can find all kinds of flavors. It gets wild. There is a gelateria called Veleno, which means “poison.” They combine different flavors, even peperoncino, and things like that. But at a gelateria, I would start simple with the basic flavors, especially pistachio, nocciola—you are always going to find those, but yeah, it can get wild in Italy.

Peter Reinhart Only Has One Pizza Rule

It's a cliché, of course, but anytime you introduce pineapple to the equation, camps are going to form. And to me, it should be a non-argument, because the only reason people are opposed to pineapple on pizza is because it's not an Italian thing. Some are really fixated on pizza being an Italian product, which I'm not, and I don't believe it is. I think they get bragging rights for a lot of reasons, but they don't own it.

Dan Pashman Wants You to Get Excited About Pasta Salad

I think that somehow with the word “salad,” the fundamental components of a green salad got lost. They didn't travel with the word. When we transitioned from green salad to pasta salad, it became very mayo-y and gloopy. Anyone who loves a good salad [knows] first of all, there's going to be some acidity. There's going to be bright flavors. It's not going to be gloopy. It's not going to be heavy. It's going to be bright. It's going to have a sort of savory zing to it and then it's going to have some amount of crunch whether it's from greens or anything else. A great salad is kind of juicy. It should be bright and acidic and fresh and crunchy and juicy, sort of mouth-watering. Especially in the summertime, when you're eating at a barbecue or something. Those are the flavors that I want, especially in hot weather.

Grilling Expert Genevieve Taylor Debunks Bad BBQ Science

Recipes say to bring the meat out of the fridge for 20 minutes before you start cooking, to bring it to room-temperature, and I thought, “Really?" So I did an experiment, I got a temperature probe on a wire, I set my telephone video up for a time-lapse recording. I took a ribeye steak—it was probably like an inch thick, so not a massive steak. I put it on a plate, I put it on my kitchen worktop, probe in, camera on, walked away. I got bored after about five hours. After five hours, it had come up two, three, four [degrees] Celsius. It hadn't come up, so taking it out of the fridge for twenty minutes is going to do precisely zero.

For ‘Sugarcane’ Author Arlyn Osborne, Heritage and History Are Key Ingredients

I am hoping that pandan is going to have its moment in the sun. I feel like ube went from trendy to very mainstream. And that took a little while but everyone's familiar with it and everybody loves it. And obviously, you just need to give it a chance. Its counterpart is green, and I also think it's a wonderful flavor. I really want people to start cooking with that because it's just as good as ube.

Cookbook Author Anna Francese Gass Wants You to Snack Like an Italian

Italians don't sit down to eggs and bacon in the morning; it's something very small to just kind of open up the appetite. A cookie—Italians eat lots of cookies in the morning. But it's not the kind of cookies we have here that are laden with frosting and this and that. It's this simple, kind of nut-filled, protein-filled little bite that they have with their coffee. And it's always about the pairing with the coffee. You'll also see a lot of cakes in the morning. But again, not like the cakes we eat here that are frosted, and three layers and all that—it’s a lot of nut-filled, fruit-filled things that kind of feel like breakfast.

Cookbook Author Cherie Denham Wants to Solve Your Soda Bread Problems

My granny made what she called “cakes of soda bread,” and “soda farls,” and would make one of those breads every other day—wheaten bread as well. They're all made with bicarbonate of soda. Fresh bread was made every day, and on the odd occasion it wasn’t used, it was always toasted, or it was thrown out to the geese at Granny’s house. So the geese were the best fed geese around. But yeah, it's absolutely a daily bread.

For Cookbook Author Özlem Warren, Turkish Breakfast Is an All-Day Affair

I absolutely adore çilbir. Çilbir is Turkish-style poached eggs with garlicky yogurt and pul biber oil on top. That's taken the world by storm. And to be honest, that is actually traditionally a mezze at home. People would have it when they went out for a drink, and somehow a Turk must have introduced çilbir abroad. And when you think garlic yogurt, maybe it's a tad too much for early morning. But when you think of brunch, it really ticks so many boxes—a meal in itself, with a nice crusty bread on the side.

Beyond Marinara: In Latin America, Pasta Provides a History Lesson

Contrary to Italians, Latin Americans love to over-sauce their pasta. There is a saying that goes, “How do you know an Argentinian from an Italian? Well, the Argentinian over-sauces their pasta.” So you usually have some sauce left on your plate. In Mexico and Peru—in some other countries, too—but mostly Mexico and Peru, after they toast the pasta, they add a sauce to it. That's the first pasta that's cooked in the same pot—the one-pot pasta. Everybody thinks that the one-pot pasta recipes are 20th century. They're not. They actually go back to the 1600s.

Chocolate Can Sense Your Bad Mood, and Other Tempering Tips From Valerie Gordon

Water and chocolate hate each other. So anytime you're working with chocolate, you have to make sure that all of your equipment, all of your tools have no water on them. They've got to be completely dry and very clean. It just disrupts the whole thing. It's complete chaos. They do not play well. Don't set them up for a play date.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.