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Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street

Chris Kimball made his name running the America’s Test Kitchen, Cook’s Illustrated, and Cook’s Country brands. His approach to cooking, deep knowledge, and personality has endeared him to home cooks everywhere who look to him for advice.

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When we heard Chris was going start something new, we were very excited. Chris explained that he wanted to change the way Americans thought about cooking through a series of offerings from a physical teaching kitchen to a magazine, radio show, and website. Our mandate was to build a set of tools that would make learning in the kitchen easy.

We worked with the Milk Street team to plan, design and present their content to make learning at home fun and easy.

Our team loves food, cooking and kitchen projects and this was a golden opportunity to work with some of the best in the business to define a new take on cooking instruction. We prototyped some experimental interfaces, and over the course of a few months worked with the Milk Street team to bring them to life with content. The result of the partnership between videographers, designers, engineers and cooks is an easy-to-use interface that’s already building buzz in the culinary world.

Milk Street Recipe Page

The recipe pages have a prosaic overview and ingredients list (in true Chris Kimball fashion), but when you “start cooking” you enter a very different cooking experience. We found that while videos are the best way to understand nuanced techniques and see results (think folding in eggs or beating until stiff peaks form), the interface for controlling a video was difficult to use in a kitchen setting. Traditional video controls like pausing, scrubbing, rewinding, all made for a frustrating experience, especially with sticky fingers.

We broke each phase of cooking down into individual steps with simple looping gif-like videos.
Animated Cooking Gif
Animated Cooking Gif
Animated Cooking Gif
Animated Cooking Gif
Animated Cooking Gif
Outline of a tablet

The Milk Street team shot short videos to support these demonstration pages. It was a true collaboration between our designers and engineers and their content production teams to make it happen, and the reception has been very positive.

Multiple cooking modes meant we could support different cooking styles.

Ingredients are available in one long list for grocery shopping but are also broken down by step. When users are actively cooking, only ingredients for the current step are shown. And the whole thing can be controlled with a keyboard or touch gestures to make cooking from a laptop or a tablet a little easier.

Outline of a laptop
Outline of a phone
Outline of a phone
Outline of a phone

We’re continuing to work with Milk Street to refine their digital offering, its value, and how it works in tandem with their other distribution channels — all the key questions a modern media company asks themselves about how to deliver value and how to get paid. And as we’re doing all of this with an agile process, so the site will continue to grow and improve as we add more functionality and refine it over the coming months.

These recipes are just the first piece of our collaboration with Milk Street.

We’re grateful to Chris and his team for trusting us as their partner here, and we’re excited to continue helping them reinvent the way we cook. Give it a spin at 177milkstreet.com/recipes and let us know what you think!

Milk Street Recipe Landing Page

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