The Most Popular America’s Test Kitchen Recipes in April 2020

In the past month, our homes became more than just the place we live. They turned into where we work, where we work out, and where our kids go to school. This time indoors has allowed us to spend extra time with family and learn some new skills—including in the kitchen. With so many people tackling new recipes and time-filling projects, we weren’t surprised to see that many of the most-viewed recipes in April were baking recipes. Keep reading to find out what the top six recipes were, and then check out the rest of our top 25 in this collection.

The golden brown coating and moist, flaky flesh of batter-fried fish come at a price: the oil. Cooks have turned to the oven to avoid the bother of deep-fat frying, but oven-frying often falls short. The coating never gets very crisp and the fish usually ends up overcooked. We came up with a recipe that puts the crunch back into oven-frying. [GET THE RECIPE]

We wanted to combine the ease of cream biscuits (which eliminate the step of cutting cold fat into dry ingredients) with the ease of drop biscuits (which skip the rolling and cutting) to create the easiest biscuits ever. But the most obvious solution—increasing the amount of cream in a cream biscuit recipe until the dough had a droppable consistency—produced biscuits that spread too much and were greasy. We found a way to prevent that and create the best-of-both-worlds biscuits we were after. [GET THE RECIPE]

Making chicken noodle soup with a deep, satisfying flavor requires a few tricks when using a slow cooker. First, we used a combination of bone-in chicken thighs and breasts. The cooked and shredded breast meat tasted nice in the final soup, but the bone-in thighs really gave the broth its flavor during the long cooking time. And for maximum flavor, we found it necessary to brown the chicken thighs (and remove the skin) before adding them to the slow cooker. To prevent the breast meat from overcooking (which happens when there is a lot of liquid in the slow cooker), we wrapped the chicken breast inside a foil packet. Boiling the noodles separately was a quick and easy way to make sure they had just the right texture. [GET THE RECIPE]

Our perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe produces a cookie that lives up to its name: moist and chewy on the inside and crisp at the edges, with deep notes of toffee and butterscotch to balance its sweetness. One of the key discoveries we made involved the butter: We browned most of it, which gave the cookies chewy texture and deep, toffee-like flavor. [GET THE RECIPE]

This recipe is approachable for bakers of any experience level. Instead of painstakingly adding softened butter to this dough while it’s kneaded, we simply melted the butter and added it directly to the eggs. We dispensed with the stand mixer altogether and opted for an equally effective no-knead approach that lets time do most of the work. To build structure and ensure an even, fine crumb in the finished loaf, we divided the dough and shaped it into tight balls before placing them in the pans. [GET THE RECIPE]

Some grocery stores were running low on staples like sandwich bread, so people made their own. This recipe makes a soft, well-risen, even-crumbed loaf of bread without kneading or shaping, from start to finish in less than 2 hours. [GET THE RECIPE]

Want to see the rest of our top 25? Check out our Most Popular America’s Test Kitchen Recipes in April collection. And view these recipe collections to see which recipes were popular in past months: 

• The Most Popular America’s Test Kitchen Recipes in February 2020
• The Most Popular America’s Test Kitchen Recipes in January 2020
• The Most Popular America’s Test Kitchen Recipes of 2019