Inside the Better Homes and Gardens test kitchens

DES MOINES - Just like Vogue magazine wouldn't show last season's handbags, Better Homes and Gardens strives for recipes that reflect the latest trends in cooking and baking.

'Food is just like fashion,” said Nancy Hopkins, senior deputy food and entertaining editor for Better Homes and Gardens magazine. 'We look everywhere - cookbooks, magazines, TV shows, chefs. The inspiration for a recipe comes from everywhere.”

Hopkins and her team ask questions like 'How are young people learning to cook?”, 'Who are today's stylemakers?” and 'What is the next potato?” (See the end for the answer.)

BHG, the fourth-best selling magazine in the United States, is produced in Des Moines by the Meredith Corporation. Edwin Meredith, an Iowa native and U.S. Agriculture Secretary from Feb. 2, 1920, to March 4, 1921, founded the magazine in 1922.

BHG readers can see the magazine's test kitchen for the first time during a consumer cooking experience Oct. 10 to 11 in Des Moines.

Participants will see demos by James Beard Award-winner Scott Peacock and master baker Gesine Bullock-Prado, who is also Sandra Bullock's sister. Guests will tour the test kitchen, eat delicious food (of course), get $200 in swag and see some of the 25 Sweets of Christmas to be featured in the BHG December issue.

Developing tastes

The Gazette got a sneak peek of the test kitchen earlier this month and talked with Hopkins about how staff develop and test the recipes that appear in the magazine.

'I take pride in matching the person working on a recipe with the story,” Hopkins said.

Hopkins and her team came up with the idea for 25 Sweets of Christmas and decided what types of goodies they wanted in the mix. There's a Marcona almond fudge, taking advantage of the hip, new almond variety, and sweet hand pies.

Bullock-Prado, author of cookbooks 'Sugar Baby”, 'Pie it Forward” and 'Bake it Like You Mean It”, joined the collaboration to develop specific recipes for the December feature, Hopkins said, speaking by phone from Bullock-Prado's Vermont home, where they were on a three-day photo shoot.

'We do about eight shots a day,” Hopkins said. 'We've got fudge and candies, cake and a hot chocolate/cookie scenario.”

Farm-to-table is an easy trend in Iowa, but it's also big nationwide, she said. The magazine's August issue featured recipes that use the summer harvest of zucchini, sweet corn, green beans and tomatoes.

Six national food bloggers hit BHG in September with a story called 'When Bloggers Gather,” in which the food-and-drink writers developed recipes they enjoyed together at a California dinner party.

'We were looking for stylish people and bloggers are really stylemakers these days,” Hopkins said.

Homemade (and tested) in Iowa

But BHG food offerings can't just look pretty. They have to taste good. That's why founder Meredith insisted in 1928 the magazine add a test kitchen - a progressive step at the time.

On our recent tour of the test kitchen, located in the Meredith complex in downtown Des Moines, culinary specialist Lori Wilson stacked layers of fresh sliced cucumbers, bell peppers and olives onto a gigantic tuna sub she was testing for the May 2015 issue of Midwest Living, another Meredith publication.

'The first time, the sandwich was just too wet,” Wilson said. 'We had roasted red peppers in there, bottled red peppers, and they were too wet. They made the sandwich soggy.”

Once pressed and grilled, the sandwich will be tested by a group of specialists and editors for flavor, texture and appearance. Some recipes are tested three times before they make it to Meredith magazines.

'We don't want readers to cook something and be surprised,” said Martha Miller Johnson, editor of Diabetic Living.

Meredith has eight culinary specialists who test four or five recipes a day. They work in 10 side-by-side galley kitchens that combine the beauty of marbled white granite and sleek fixtures with the functionality of cross-sink chopping boards and shallow spice cabinets.

The test kitchen hasn't always been this classic. Photos from the 1960s show royal blue countertops with Plexiglas walls between kitchen bays. The blue was replaced by canary yellow and then peach, said Lynn Blanchard, test kitchen director.

'We remodeled in 2005 to update a lot of our look as well as create a space that looked like you were in someone's home,” Blanchard said. 'That's what we call our showcase kitchen.”

Blanchard, who schedules the recipes to be tested for the various magazines, points out appliances from 18 different companies and demonstrates an electronic database of all test kitchen recipes.

The test kitchen tests more than 6,000 recipes a year. To keep up with the hustle, a grocery shopper goes out every day to buy the food needed for the next day's recipes and assistants wash dishes.

ConnecTing with readers

With 7.6 million paid subscribers in the second half of 2013, BHG has hung on to readers better than other magazines.

Subscriptions were down .1 percent from the second half of 2012, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, but that was less of a drop than other similar publications.

'We tap into a younger audience by being on trend,” Hopkins said.

And what are the new trends for Fall?

'Thanksgiving will be all about make-ahead,” she said.

BHG worked with Faith Durand, executive editor of the food site the Kitchn, to develop comfort food recipes that can be made in advance. Among those recipes is one for creamy mashed potatoes drizzled with kale pesto - AKA 'the next potato.”

HOW DO YOU MEASURE A YEAR AT MEREDITH?

The Meredith Test Kitchen in Des Moines tests recipes for eight major magazines, including Better Homes and Gardens, Midwest Living and Diabetic Living, as well as special-interest publications. Here's a typical year for the test kitchen:

More than 6,100 recipes tested

More than 2,500 food images produced

$130,000 spent on groceries

6,000 cups of flour

4,000 cups of sugar

400 dozen eggs

3,200 cups of milk

600 pounds of butter

800 onions

800 teaspoons of salt

IF YOU GO

What: Better Homes and Gardens Cooking Experience

When: Oct. 10 to 11

Where: Better Homes and Gardens, Des Moines

Details: Watch demos and taste food prepared by Scott Peacock, a James Beard award-winning chef and cookbook author, and Gesine Bullock-Prado, a master baker and cookbook author. Participants also will tour the BHG test kitchen, learn 12 slow-cooker recipes and receive a gift bag worth $200.

Cost: General admission to the two-day event is $395.

Register: www.eventbrite.com/e/better-homes-and-gardens-cooking-experience-registration-11764272255?ordersrc=rdbhg1109095.