milk street recipes

Tomato-Olive Focaccia
Tomato-Olive Focaccia

Tomato-Olive Focaccia excerpted from MILK STREET BACKROADS ITALY by Christopher Kimball and J.M. Hirsch. Copyright © 2025 by CPK Media, LLC. Photograph by Connie Miller.

MILK STREET BACKROADS ITALY by Christopher Kimball and J.M. Hirsch. Copyright © 2025 by CPK Media, LLC.Discover the real techniques, ingredients, and stories behind the Italian dishes you know and love—and the ones you’ve yet to try—with more than 145 delicious recipes that bring simplicity back to Italian cooking, from the James Beard Award-winning team at Milk Street. 

Forget everything you thought you knew about Italian food. In Italy, cooks throw away their garlic, they don’t stir their polenta, and they never labour over pans of risotto. But they do make enormous meatballs that are tender and light, and they occasionally break all the rules when making pasta.

The editors at Milk Street have spent years scouring small eateries, local markets, farms and home kitchens from Lombardy to Calabria and from Sardinia to Sicily in search of fresh takes on classic recipes as well as little-known regional favourites that never crossed the Atlantic.

On our travels we found new ways with pasta, from foolproof cacio e pepe in Rome to Puglia’s olive oil—crisped fettuccine with chickpeas and a lemony pesto from Amalfi, where the pasta itself is enriched with citrus. Plus some surprising tomato sauces, including spaghetti all’assassina from Bari—spicy, charred, and made in one skillet. (more…)

Mango Salad with Toasted Coconut and Cashews 
Mango Salad with Toasted Coconut and Cashews 

Mango Salad with Toasted Coconut and Cashews excerpted from MILK STREET SIMPLE by Christopher Kimball. Copyright © 2023 by CPK Media, LLC. Photograph by Erik Bernstein.

MILK STREET SIMPLE by Christopher Kimball. Copyright © 2023 by CPK Media, LLC. Photograph by Erik Bernstein. Used with permission of Voracious, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

The James Beard Award-winning team at Milk Street delivers 200 easy, clever recipes you can just cook: the world’s greatest culinary ideas, distilled to their essence and simplified for weeknight meals.

Milk Street has spent years learning from cooks all around the world and applying those lessons to weeknight cooking here at home. This book takes the best of those great culinary ideas and pares them back to their most basic, essential elements. The result is a set of recipes that are genius in their simplicity.

Each of these 200 recipes works with just a handful of ingredients and short active cooking time; these dishes are done when you need them, or hands-off so you can let them cook while you do something else. The keys are high-impact ingredients, transformative techniques, powerful flavour combinations, and layers of texture. Milk Street Simple recipes help turn a straightforward bowl of pasta or a head of roasted cauliflower into a delightful meal, with no fuss and recipes that are endlessly flexible. (more…)

Greek Chicken and Potato Traybake
Greek Chicken and Potato traybake

Greek Chicken and Potato Traybake, excerpted from Milk Street: Tuesday Nights Mediterranean. Photography by Connie Miller.

Milk Street Tuesday Nights Mediterranean

Mediterranean cooking is so much more than olive oil, grilled fish, and just-harvested vegetables. It is a diverse cuisine that encompasses the cultures and traditions of Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The food is direct, simple, and honest. It is proud to be served without disguise or embellishment.

Every Tuesday Nights recipe delivers big flavour, but the cooking is quick and easy. Each of these 125 Mediterranean dinners is ready in under 45 minutes, and many take just 20 minutes start to finish. Dishes include:

  • Green Shakshuka
  • Spicy Egyptian Eggplant with Chickpeas and Herbs
  • Bulgur Salad with Summer Vegetables and Pomegranate Molasses
  • Harissa-Spiced Pasta and Chicken with Green Beans
  • Greek Spanakorizo with Shrimp
  • Spanish Ribeye with Green Olives and White Wine.

The recipes are organized by how you cook, with some chapters focused on time—Fast (45 minutes), Faster (35 minutes), and Fastest (under 25 minutes)—while others dive into themes such as Hearty Vegetable Mains, Supper Soups, and Flat and Folded—including pizza, flatbreads, pita sandwiches, and panini. Many of the recipes require only one piece of cookware, and they all are built from pantry staples. Dinner? Solved—every night of the week.

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Vietnamese Chicken Salad with Sweet Lime-Garlic Dressing (Goi Gà)
Vietnamese Chicken Salad with Sweet Lime-Garlic Dressing (Goi Gà), Excerpted from MILK STREET: The New Rules Copyright © 2019 by Christopher Kimball, photographs by Connie Miller of CB Creatives.

Vietnamese Chicken Salad with Sweet Lime-Garlic Dressing (Goi Gà), Excerpted from MILK STREET: The New Rules Copyright © 2019 by Christopher Kimball, photographs by Connie Miller of CB Creatives.

This revelatory new book from James Beard Award-winning author Christopher Kimball defines 75 new rules of cooking that will dramatically simplify your time in the kitchen and improve your results. These powerful principles appear in more than 200 recipes that teach you how to make your food more delicious and interesting, like:
  • Charred Broccoli with Japanese-Style Toasted Sesame Sauce (Rule No. 9: Beat Bitterness by Charring)
  • Lentils with Swiss Chard and Pomegranate Molasses (Rule No. 18: Don’t Let Neutral Ingredients Stand Alone)
  • Bucatini Pasta with Cherry Tomatoes and Fresh Sage (Rule No. 23: Get Bigger Flavour from Supermarket Tomatoes)
  • Soft-Cooked Eggs with Coconut, Tomatoes, and Spinach (Rule No. 39: Steam, Don’t Boil, Your Eggs)
  • Pan-Seared Salmon with Red Chili-Walnut Sauce (Rule No. 44: Stick with Single-Sided Searing)
  • Curry-Coconut Pot Roast (Rule No. 67: Use Less Liquid for More Flavour)

You’ll also learn how to:

  • Tenderize tough greens quickly
  • Create creamy textures without using dairy
  • Incorporate yogurt into baked goods
  • Trade time-consuming marinades for quick, bright finishing sauces, and more
The New Rules are simpler techniques, fresher flavors, and trustworthy recipes that just work—a book full of lessons that will make you a better cook.

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