Welcome to 17 Station St. in Brookline, Mass, home to America's Test Kitchen! This building, originally a mess kit factory built more than 150 years ago, is where everything we do—cooking, writing, editing, and publishing—takes place. In 1995, we installed a small and simple home-style kitchen with just two cooktops and four ovens that we used to develop all of the recipes for our major enterprise: Cook's Illustrated magazine.

Early in 2001, with plans to launch the America's Test Kitchen television show, we realized there just wasn't enough room in our small kitchen to produce a TV show and a magazine. So we expanded. Then, in 2003, with the show, the magazine, and a full-fledged book-publishing program under way, we realized we'd have to expand again. Today our test kitchen staff alone consists of 26 professional cooks who develop and test recipes for our TV show, our books, our original magazine, Cook's Illustrated, and our new magazine, Cook's Country, launched in 2004. What sort of kitchen do you need to accommodate all of this recipe development while still bearing in mind that the ultimate goal is for the recipes to work in a home kitchen? We came up with the following parameters:

• Compatibility with home kitchens: Our recipes must work in a home kitchen, so our appliances have to be similar to those found in our readers' kitchens.
  
  
• Camaraderie and efficiency: It's important for our test cooks to work together--sampling one another's recipes, sharing information on ingredients and techniques--but we also wanted each cook to work as efficiently as possible. So within our giant-sized kitchen we designed individual workstations complete with drawers, cooktops, ovens, sinks, refrigerators, and open shelving.
  
  
• Comfort: Many of our test cooks begin cooking at 8:00 a.m. and can still be found in the kitchen at 5:00 p.m. We wanted them to be as comfortable as possible.
  
  
• Safety: We wanted to make the kitchen absolutely safe.

Finally, we realized we did need one thing that a home cook doesn't need: a soundproof space to prepare recipes while an episode of the television show is being filmed. So we added a second, smaller soundproof kitchen..

Here are some facts about our kitchen complex: