Simmer your mashed potatoes in milk, not water! Potatoes are like pasta, in that they leach starches into their cooking liquid. In the case of pasta, you want to reserve some of that liquid to give sauce a luscious shine and bind it to the noodles. In mashed potatoes, cooking in milk, and preserving that starchy liquid, gives your potatoes a natural creaminess and allows you to skip the weighty heavy cream. #MilkStreetCookingSchool director Rosie Gill demonstrates. Get the recipe for Milk-Simmer

Coconut milk is key to building deep flavor in Thai cooking—so choose wisely! Chef Pailin Chongchitnant, creator of Hot Thai Kitchen, is here to help you spot the key distinctions. Then, bring those skills to her online #MilkStreetCookingSchool class next week, where she’ll show you how to make her luxurious, coconut-rich Turmeric Crab Curry, which comes together quickly but sings with flavor. Join Pailin for her class on Tuesday, April 4, 6 -7:15pm EDT. Register HERE: http://bit.ly/3nzDz9k | Ch

Dispatch from our first culinary tour! All week, Milk Street’s associate education director April Dodd has been sending us (very enviable) documentation from Mexico City, where she’s been making mole and tamale from scratch, shopping at local markets, visiting family farms, and, of course, sipping margaritas at J.M.’s favorite cocktail bar. This comes from a stop at the Mexico City tortilleria Maizajo, which specializes in nixtamalization: an ancient Mesoamerican technique of preparing dried cor

MILK STREET COOKING SCHOOL: Add Flavor to Grains Many ask us how to add more flavor to grains and starches like pasta, couscous and bulgur. The answer? Parch your starch. Underhydrating gives grains “room” to absorb other flavors later in the cooking process—they can finish cooking in a flavorful sauce. Try this tip tonight in our Peruvian pesto: bit.ly/milkstpesto | Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street