ATK’s cast members Dan Souza, Lan Lam, Bridget Lancaster, Julia Collin Davison and Elle Simone Scott
When America’s Test Kitchen (americastestkitchen.com) aired its first television episode on PBS in Aug. 2001, there was no YouTube or Instagram. And yet today, despite our omnipresent mini-computers with their endless cooking videos, ATK is celebrating its 25th anniversary amid a robust audience of home cooks loyally tuning in.
The cover of ATK’s 25th anniversary cookbook.
Little has changed in the show’s format over the decades. New cast members have joined, but Bridget Lancaster, Julia Collin Davison and Jack Bishop have all been on-air since season one. What has changed is the content. Instead of the first season’s “Stir-Fry Made Easy,” season 25 has “The Noodle Show” in which test cook Lan Lam makes the Korean classic Japchae. “The content of the show has grown with our cooks and fans. The recipes have evolved to include a global pantry as ingredients have become much more readily available to everyone. People have an interest in a far greater reach of cuisine,” says Dan Souza, the Chief Content Officer. To feed that interest, the show places more of an emphasis on the cultural context from which the recipes are born. “We’ve brought in wonderful voices from across the culinary spectrum who are reporting where things come from, who influenced it and how it got to where it is today. We don’t look at anything in a vacuum,” says Souza.
The brand has innovated in other ways as well, embracing new platforms for storytelling across all of its content. They’ve introduced a YouTube channel, an app, podcasts and added more TV shows, including a reality show on Amazon called America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation. Souza is credited with establishing ATK’s YouTube presence, modernizing the print publication Cook’s Illustrated and generally appealing to younger audiences for making the science behind cooking fun and accessible (well over 3 million people follow ATK and Cook’s Illustrated on Instagram). And he has plans to continue to bring the brand into the cultural zeitgeist. “If you give us an afternoon with a magazine, we can teach you. If you give us 30 minutes with the TV show, we can teach you. In 30 to 60 seconds, I can also teach you something that will absolutely change the way you look at an ingredient and how you cook dinner that night,” says Souza. The brand has three more TV shows in the works, they’re relaunching the online hands-on cooking experience and are revamping their app to make it a sleeker, easier tool.
ATK Chief Content Officer Dan Souza
Within the brand’s evolution, there is one constant—the special sauce that originally captivated fans and kept them for decades—a mix of authenticity and trust. The brand has always eschewed advertising for a subscription-based model. The talented cooks behind the recipes will never share anything they haven’t meticulously tested first because they genuinely want their audience to be successful and love cooking. “If you’re teaching people how to cook and actually improving their lives, they want you to stick around and they want to keep coming back,” says Souza.
Photography by: COURTESY OF THE BRAND
