Settling into the last cabin, lighting a Gauloises Blonde, he tried to read, but his mind and his eyes wandered a lot. Over basic training, wondering what the time ahead would bring, and staring out into the cold, rainy, gray, landscape rushing past.

Sometimes they passed a village. Desolate colchose style farms followed equally run down industrial parks, a dreary, weepy, gray that was only accented but not surpassed by grainy grey snow falling around them. This was the East. So close, once part of his country, it was so far to him. He’d passed through, once or twice, on his trip to Berlin, but never stopped here. For good reason – the train would not slow down or stop at all until entering the western sector of Berlin.

Berlin, an island of Western Democracy surrounded by Eastern German dictatorship, a last bastion of freedom in a sea of oppression. And, by virtue of its wall, the biggest, boldest, and loudest witness of a divided Germany.

The news were the same as any day in the past months. Weeks ago, in defiance of Moskov’s orders, Hungary had opened its borders to the west, allowing vacationing East Germans to “make across”, flee into Austria and from there to Western Germany. A process formerly reserved for those not fearing death now came down to only two factors – getting approval for a trip to Hungary and not leaving much family behind. For, as certain as death would be if they were caught before, their families would face repercussions as well.

Poland soon followed suit, Czechoslovakia allowed Eastern Germans to seek refuge inside the Western German embassy, followed a few days later by trains filled to the brim bringing those refugees into Munich and Bayreuth, Western Germany.

With a slowly eroding iron curtain came the “Monday Rallies”, “Montagsdemonstrationen”. Where first police and secret police beat and arrested hundreds, thousands followed the next week. At their peak, a week prior to this train ride, 230,000 eastern Germans paraded the streets of Leipzig, chanting “no violence”, “we are the people”, and “freedom buys peace”.

November 7 1989 was an exciting day for a lot of people, I am sure. But for none more so, than a new Border Patrol Cop, fresh from the train, arriving in Berlin.

Memories of my arrival at the 204/11 are hazy. I remember settling in, taking a shower, grabbing a fresh shirt from the pile, and a knock on the door of “my” room, a small, four bed bunkroom. “Hi, I’m Mats, this guy’s Jo, we’re your unitmates,” said a huge red head sitting on top of an imposing frame. “I hate to do this to you, but we got sitrep in 5”.

Me, the day the wall fell in my blues before work

We spent the next two days doing what we were asked to – observe and report. By no means, in no way, were we to interfere, unless Eastern Germans were able to make it past the Iron Curtain and the following no man’s land (spiked with autoguns and mines).

November 9 began like most days. Shower, chow (see to the left a picture of yours truly from said fateful day, reading the day’s sitrep orders and munching on muesli while smoking a Gauloises and nursing a hangover with some beer), sitrep, deployment, boredom. My shift was supposed to end at 7:30pm, with an allowance of 20 minutes to brief Third Shift and to vacate both observation towers and the nearby command post. At 6, in the midst of a news broadcast, Guenter Shabowski, a high ranking “politbureau” member got ready to give a quick update and to ask for an end to the Monday Rallies. Just as his press conference started, a piece of paper was handed to him which he skimmed.

At 7pm our phones rang – Shabowski (misreading the paper as we later learned) had just announced a complete opening of all borders towards Western Germany. We were to remain and observe.

At 8pm Western and Eastern broadcasting reported it – “the wall was open”. Our superiors, however, remained cautious. Reject all crossings, we were told. Guenther got out his bullhorn, telling everyone to stay calm, and few actually arrived at the crossing.

By nine the scene had changed. Thousands of East Berlin residents, eager to cross, had arrived. Screaming “open the gate,” they stood and waited. By 11:30pm a guard at the nearby Bornholm crossing decided to take matters in his own hands and opened the gate. At 11:54 we did, too.

That day, those hours, those minutes, marked the end of an era, the fall of a dictatorial regime, and the death of the Soviet empire. One small mistake, one guard at a border crossing in Berlin, was all it took…

What followed is hard to describe. We hugged, we screamed, we danced, we waved. Strangers would kiss me on the forehead, a woman tried to go down on Mats, right there, right then. The mood was ecstatic. Only twice more, both tragedies, the death of my father and 9/11, did I feel that much in that little time. I never was happier than during those hours. I knew this was history, but it took years to sink in what precisely I had witnessed.

Today, watching the news, seeing the world through more than my own eyes but also my son’s, I hope that – in not too distant futures – he will be able to sit down and write a “I was there” post. When we finally stopped discriminating based on race, religion, or sexual orientation. When the regimes in the Middle East fell, when peace came to the region. Maybe, I hope, he’ll write one about his feelings when, suddenly, somewhere, somehow, freedom and personal responsibility, peacefully, defeated ideology and bigotry. I can dream, can’t I? It’s happened to me, it can happen again.

There’s Open Table, which I could use. Get some points towards my free appetizer, maybe? Or the new Urbanspoon reservation thingie, a direct response to OT’s success I’d assume. Or I could Twerservate, if there would be any restaurants (aside from Mattin’s place) on it I would consider eating at.

All those work on my phone. Zagat has a native client (which costs $$, I still maintain it should be free for Zagat Online subscribers, but alas). So do Yelp and CitySearch.

That’s pretty 2.0, now, isn’t it? I could Google for a restaurant nearby and get a nice “get Directions” button, ratings pulled in from other sources, and a link to call.

And then comes the pain. Innocently I click on the restaurant’s link, trying to check out the menu, see what’s available, if they’re open, that stuff (I should mention, in this [hypothetical] scenario, someone else is driving :).

90 per cent of all restaurants we tried (over 50, I should mention) have either badly designed or completely inaccessible web sites. Visually impaired customers or road-weary travelers, trying to hit one last chow and beer before heading off into the vast culinary tundra that is the Central Valley, are simpy SOL.

As restaurateurs we need to recognize, that a large amount of our new customer traffic comes from web searches. Being on Yelp, Zagat, Urban Spoon, and – if our reservation system allows – Open Table, is more or less a must these days. But we also have to acknowledge, that more and more traffic comes from road-warriors, using small mobile devices such as the iPhone, Android phones, Windows Smartphones, and Blackberries.

The Three Don’ts for Restaurant Websites

1. Don’t use flash on your pages. The iPhone can not display Flash, Android and Blackberry have versions that do not support some of the fancier elements, and all of the above are on restricted (sometimes costly) wireless networks that will take forever to download that movie and sound.
2. Don’t play music. Really. Don’t. It’s not just annoying when browsing for menues at home and in the office, it’s downright death to mobile devices.
3. Don’t hide what’s important to on-the-go shoppers in links beneath links. What users on mobile devices really want to know can be summed up in three points: your menu, your opening hours, and your location – best mapped to a Google Maps links so it can be fed into the phone’s navigation application.

And the Dos

1. Spend the time to design a site for wireless devices. Pull the content mentioned above all the way in front.
2. Have a clear and large phone number (most phones link numbers in the format (xxx) yyy-zzzz directly to a “call this” application) on your pages. That number MUST be text, not graphic, or it can not be copied and pasted or clicked directly.

Some Examples

Chez Panisse – the site detects the iPhone and jumps over the restaurant’s atrocious musical intro animation. Once there, however, we have to pan, tilt, zoom, and search our way to clickables on the left, which open a picture on the right, which – when clicked – reveals actual content.

Content, at least, is in text (not images). Hard to find address and no Google Maps link. Reservations are convoluted, but at least phone numbers (once you find them) are in a format that’s clickable. Rating: 3/5, usable but not optimal.

Commis – completely unusable due to Flash-only design. Rating: 0/5, shame on you guys.

Five – annoying flash header with music, but the rest is text. Has both address and phone number clickable for the appropriate actions (open map, call) but hidden under “Contact”, whcih is one of the very small links on top of the page. Rating: 3/5 – usable, clickable, not optimal for small devices.

Rivoli – all Flash, but there’s an Open Table button one could click to get a reservation. Phone and address are not accessible. Rating: 1/5, sad, sad.

Cafe Rouge – annoying flash header, but clearly (albeit a little small) visible maps link on top of the page. No phone number clickable, it’s embedded in the maps link. Rating: 3/5, usable.

In conclusion – none of the usually so conscientious “Berkeley Five” meets the simple criteria for accessibility for visually impaired visitors. Two are semi-usable, but none of the web sites I looked at had their own mobile interface. Time to go 2.0, people, or – to say it with Micail Gorbachev – “those who come too late will be punished by life”.

Making a cake means spending time with a spatula. Time better spent making another pie. Cakes are elaborate, more concerned with looks than taste. Cakes have to be stacked, and sliced horizontally, and filled, and sealed, and corrected, and glossed, and creamed, and decorated, and preserved. Go ahead, take a big bite … your cake will look like a warzone. Pie is baked. Period. Take a piece of good old apple pie and the rest just looks better for it.

After all… Cake is French, Pie is American. Rather than wasting days stroking their rolling pins over elaborate designs that – at best – will lead to a quick “oooh” followed by their ultimate destruction at the hands of diners, American cooks eschewed the fancy French focus on style over substance and concentrated on taste. And pie is that much better for it.

Cakes need to be rested, frozen or refrigerated, built in layers. Pie comes out of the oven and is ready to eat. Slap some whipped cream on it, no need to spackle it, and you’re done.

The Cake is a Lie

As every modern man and woman, in tune with the world, knows – the Cake is a Lie. Just take German Chocolate Cake. It’s NOT EFFING GERMAN! Ok? Stop asking me for a recipe. It’s a bunch of weird ingredients mixed and sold by a dude named Mr. German in 1943. COCONUT? That alone should tip anyone off. Nothing to do with Germany. See? Lie! Cake lies. There’s no Black Forest in a Black Forest Cherry Cake. And it wasn’t invented anywhere near the Black Forest. No, ladies and gentlemen, it was (notice a trend, here?) invented by a guy named Schwazwaelder. Hundreds of miles from any forest you have ever heard of.

Then there’s Apple Pie – s’got apples innit. Cherry Pie? Gots itself some cherry goodness. Or it wouldn’t be called Cherry Pie, no? Truth in pievertizing. And no weird inventor dude ever felt compelled to immortalize his or her name in a pie. Mr. Cherry and Mr. Apple didn’t decide to stick some coconut in a shell and call it Apple Pie, just to brainscrew with you. Only cake people do that.

Portal end credits, “The Cake is a lie” (MP3).

Yes, Yes, you CAN have another slice of Pie!

Pie is good for you. Essential oils, minerals, green things, dietary fiber, proteins, and fats are in pie. Have another heaping helpful helping of apples, c’mon. Cake is bad for you. Sugar, saturated fats, that stuff. It’s all in the decoration.

Pie can be your friend in many ways

Say it out loud: “Meatcake”. Reminds you of an industrial accident involving rotoblades, no? Or a mediocre 70s b-list porn movie star. Now with me: “Meatpie”. And, yes, I’ll give you a recipe for that one. Pie comes in sweet and in savory. You don’t have to sell your preciously immortal soul to the dark gods of Baking & Pastry, you can remain, quite securely so, a cook and still make pie. Shepherd’s Pie, Chicken Pot Pie, Steak Pie. You name it.

• A roll (usually 400g) of flaky or puff pastry
• For every 400g of pastry, get 300g of steak. Cool it down nicely, then cut into very fine strips, I prefer them to be about 3 inch by 1 inch by 1/6th of an inch.
• Your usual seasoning suspects. Try it with some Worcestershire sauce for a change.
• Same amount as steak in grated cheddar
• One medium sized onion, cut fine dice, per 300g of steak

If your pastry is round, good for you. Else just use what you have, in shape. Quickly brown steak in pan, just the outsides. Remove. Saute onions until almost translucent. Remove. Add steak, onions, and grated cheddar onto one side of the pastry. Eggwash the sides, fold over heap, seal with your fork, toss in oven at 375 for 20 mins.

And, finally, the piece de resistance. The one thing to rule them all. The incontrovertible proof, that Pie > Cake:

Pie can be fried.

Try that with a cake for giggles. Yeah, you go ahead. Clean my deep fryer, too, when you’re done. Pie, on the other hand… just make some turnovers and instead of baking them, fry them. Voila, instant godliness.

I put everything in squeezies. I have one for peanut oil, one for safflower oil, one for vegetable oil, one for clarified butter, six for different vinegars, five for special infusions, two that sit empty at all times and can be used to quickly make a deco bottle, four with icings that I fill in the morning and food-color red, blue, and green (as well as keeping one white).

Then there’s the specials – spritzer bottles for oil and vinegar and sugar- and salt solutions. Misters for oils, two water bottles, one with a big pour spot containing today’s wine for the mains, one with a small needle pour for reduced balsamic vinegar, and more.

Yes, I am addicted to squeezies. I buy them bulk, ten per, at least once a week. I painstakingly sterilize them, then fill them. Every bottle is labeled in a color code, red for potentially hazardous (I also tie scrunchies around oils containing nuts), green for vegetarian, blue for things containing alcohol, yellow for oils that need special treatment, and so on.

Today is the first day of my new, bottle-free, life. Why? Because I’ve screwed my right arm up so badly, even squeezing a squeezie hurts like a son of a female dog. So it’s back to ladles. Until, of course, all that stuff the doc intends to put into me takes hold. THEN, I’ll be right back off the wagon. But it’s scary how much I never noticed I used those things. Until it hurt, that is.

Hey, hey :). I am about to embark on a four-day trip to Yosemite and beyond, hitting Reno at the apex and heading back home, staying at the locations marked with pushpins on the map (Big Trees, CA to Bodie, CA, to Reno, NV, and back home).

Contemplating some more stops, especially if it means finding new and exciting eateries, producers of fine foods, or anything else food and dining related. Anyone have any ideas? I am not averse to a 100 mile addition if it means seeing or eating something cool :)

This dish has a very loyal following at the House on the Hill, it’s still served (though not on the menu for over a year) a good two dozen times a month. It came from a need to devise something quick and tasty after a little ordering accident and is best served with a side of garlic bread and maybe a green salad.

You’ll need:

Beef Chuck Short Ribs – those cuts are rather tough and therefore cheaply available. It’s simply the beefy part of the muscle trimmed from the shortribs themselves. Your local megamart should have them for about two-fifty a pound.

Onions – I generally use one onion per 2 lbs of meat, enough to feed four people.

Bacon – no comfort food dish is complete without bacon. We’ll use it to get some additional textures and a whole new level of flavors into our dish. I use about 1/2 lbs per 4 lbs of beef.

Pasta – personally, I prefer Rotini pasta, since its spirally shape holds our thick sauce rather well. Alternatively any ribbon pasta will do. I try to have about a 60:40 ratio of pasta to beef.

Chicken, Beef, or Veal Broth or Stock – if you haven’t made any, recently, the store-bought brands can do in a pinch, alternatively, compromising some taste, you could use bouillon cubes dissolved in warm water or … simply water. It works.

And, of course, garlic, salt, pepper, to taste. I am adding chopped sage and rosemary (both fresh, of course) to mine, and a spritz (maybe 2, 3 tsp) of burgundy red wine per lbs of beef. Those are flavor additions, play as you will.

The making:

On medium heat, render the fat from the bacon. While that is in the works, fine dice your onion, mince your garlic, and set up water for your pasta. Take each of the beef short ribs (and now we’ll find out who has a sharp knife and who needs to go and see someone about that) and slice very thin layers of beef, about .2 inches thick and as long as you can make them. Slice against the grain of the meat and on a bias.

Once your bacon fat is rendered, remove bacon to a canister with a slotted spoon, carefully keeping as much bacon fat as possible in the pan. Add the onions and sweat until translucent and tender. Remove onions.

Toss your beef slices with a little flour, coating every piece thinly and evenly. While still at medium heat, add to pan. After about a minute toss the contents lightly to get some other pieces and sides a little time on the pan.  Your beef doesn’t have to be fully cooked, at this point, just get a little browning going for taste. Add broth to cover your meat to about 2 thirds, and leave on medium heat, stirring occasionally.

Now is also to the time to add sage and rosemary if desired.

When your meat is JUST about to be done, add the red wine if you wish. It’s by no means a must. Also re-add the bacon.

Don’t forget to check on your water, add the pasta as needed, cook to al dente, then remove and either cool in an ice bath or give a good cooling in the sink before returning to the pot.

Once your meat is nice and tender, add to the pasta, stir, serve.

A variation would have us add some carrots (medium dice) into the pan before adding the meat and sweating them lightly. Another would forgo the bacon, but what’s the fun in that.

Here’s the fun part number 2: if you let it cool down and pack it into tupperware, adding a tbsp of butter, all you have to do at work is microwave the thing and you’ll be the envy of everyone.

This dish is insanely simple. It’s also insanely tasty. Unlike beef Stroganoff it can be re-heated (no mushrooms) and over time it can become your own, personal, canvas to experiment with flavors, herbs, cooking times, and pasta types. Enjoy your meal.

NOT yours truly's chef, but a pretty close approximation of that grumpy dude.

Yesterday noon, strolling leisurely into the kitchen, I should have worn my fire retardant suit. No, I didn’t leave the fryer on or use the bottle of wine chef labeled as “do not touch” which apparently was his last wedding day bottle (that’s another story), but I did what I do so well – opened my big ass mouth.

Chef (and, as it turns out, even some of our diners) reads chez Geek. And yesterday’s post really, really, made him mad. Forgot-to-prep-the-chicken mad. Now, here’s the thing about Chef – he’s old-skool. He doesn’t believe in recipes any more than I do. He likes Cook’s Illustrated and he hates celebrity chefs. He reads Saveur and Sainte, never Gourmet or Sunset. He believes in taste based cooking, in more texture and flavors and less food porn, and he thinks foodies are to the culinary arts what Law & Order fanatics are to the U.S. justice system.

So why did he get mad? Well, I let his “welcome” when I hopped and skipped and jumped into the kitchen be your guide on that. Oh, and … warning … foul language ahead. It’s a kitchen after all, you know…

Chef: “You’re one fucking ray of negative sunshine, now, aren’t you, Luster?”

Me: “… the fuck?”

Chef: “Next time you spend an hour fucking around on that blog of yours, you better darn tootn well have a fucking leg to stand on”

Me: “… ermm, good morning to you, too, Chef.”

Chef: “Don’t try to hoodwink me with your academic ‘conflict resolution’ bullshit.”

Ten minutes of screaming Chef later, we know what we’re up against. And he’s right. I am one fucking ray of negative sunshine. If I may translate Chef’s argument, he believes that I have been spending social capital, accumulated as a cook, writer, and overall nice guy, by kicking others in the shin. Kinda like the kid who wins the high school arts and crafts contest and gets one free pass when caught throwing eggs at Mrs. Steinenberger’s house (not that I would know ANYTHING about that, just a .. hmm .. friend of mine did that).

But now, he says, I’ve been pissing up the legs of pretty much anyone. From foodies to Gourmet magazine. From celebrity actors posing as chefs to Cook’s Illustrated. From recipe websites to recipe magazines. And, so he insists, my arts and crafts ribbon has worn thin. And, he drones on while I kick the bain marie into service, it’s about hellatime to use the medium I so liberally used to insult anyone and anything, to prove my own damn worth.

So, from today to the end of December, I’ll try to do that. Prove to you, my dear four readers (hi, mom, don’t mind the cussing, it’s just Chef does that a lot), that I am not a screaming douche of Napoleonic proportions. Less negativity, more cooking.

Oh, and Chef… can I come out of the walk-in, now? Really, please? It’s getting cold.

This, apparently, is the face of Satan.

Via my good friend and former Sous Jason Strata comes this gem from Gawker. Now, I have to admit some things, first. I support the Valleywag idea of being a disruptive force in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” environment of the dot.com love fest echo chamber. I also am a long-time subscriber of Cook’s Illustrated, friends with some ATK test cooks, and known to be no fan of recipe websites.

I have always felt, that modern recipe publications are (see “Recipe for Disaster“) more or less a paint-by-numbers scheme, devised to ensure the reader’s return by keeping them generally in the dark about the true underlying basics and science of cooking, while enabling them to replicate someone else’s work more or less faithfully.

The Valleywag piece, however, stinks of vitriol. Cook’s Illustrated bad. Wiki recipe development good, so says Ryan Tate. And all that, for pointing out that a large number of recipes on the web stink?

Kimball reacted to the amateur cook/blogger/foodie outcry, and proposed a challenge, however. In essence, he wants us to pit our recipes against his, develop the dish in a Wiki based medium, and then see whose tastes better, is more easily replicated, and yields the superior product.

That’s a dangerous approach. De gustibus non est disputandum, as the romans said, there’s no accounting for taste. I often ask myself just how the heck TV cooking show judges get the cockiness to put down someone else’s flavor combinations when their own (case in point, Alex Guarnaschelli’s rather uninspiring and off-flavor food at Butter vs. her criticism of other people’s dishes) fail to please everyone, as well.

Before we take Christoper Kimball’s challenge, we should take another look at the difference between Gourmet, Cook’s Illustrated, and blogger recipes. Most anyone can follow a written instruction manual. But, as a quick dash down to your favorite neighborhood bookstore should confirm, simply following Hubert Keller’s, Thomas Keller’s, Grant Achatz’, or David Kinch’s recipes never yields the same food you’d get at their restaurants. Why is that?

It’s to a not small extent because of auxiliary base knowledge. A business neither celebrity Chefs, nor most bloggers, and certainly not Gourmet magazine is in. Auxiliary knowledge, however, is provided in large quantities by some others, Alton Brown comes to mind, so does Harold McGee, and – yes – Cook’s Illustrated.

Why does an egg stick? Why does steak stick? What’s the difference between browning and caramelizing? Why does dough rise? Is yeast the only functional leavening agent?

Let’s loot at the rising dough. It generally rises, because a leavening agent (such as yeast, beer, buttermilk, yogurt, and others) creates a gas (most often carbon dioxide), which is trapped inside the dough, creating a “rising” environment.

We can approach this issue in a recipe by simply giving measurements. 1 tsp of baking soda, 2 tsp of baking powder, 1 tsp of active yeast… or we can explain what happens, and why it does. Here’s a two-liner:

To get a rise, we need a containing agent, such as gluten or a gummy, and an expanding agent, such as either yeast, baking powder, ammonium bicarbonate (such as, for example, baker’s salt). Any mixture of time, temperature, or agitation could be used to create the containing agent (depending on which), while any mixture of the same might start the expanding process. In the case of gluten, it’s simple, so we’ll talk about that one.

The endosperms of some grasses (wheat, for example) contain two proteins called glutenin gliadin. When a dough is formed, by kneading or extrusion, the pressure exerted on the mixture forces glutenin and gliadin to adhere, creating a very fine structural mesh.

During the leavening phase, our rising agent (let’s just say we’re using yeast, others may function differently) gives off gas which is trapped in chambers of said gluten mesh. Left alone to rise, given a temperature of about 110 degrees F, dough becomes very bubbly and light, this way.

Ok, so here’s the basics. But what does that mean for us? Well, first, as you can see, gluten is formed through agitation and pressure. The corollary here, is that too much agitation and pressure can and will result in a thick gluten mesh and therefore small chambers for the leavening agent to expand in, yielding thick and “doughy” bread. The other observation is, that if our yeast fails to produce enough CO2, it might not rise the dough enough, again yielding a sub-par bread.

The world's first KitchenAid mixer

And this is, where it gets a little more complicated. The top reason for over-glutenized dough, is that most cooks simply don’t know when to stop mixing it. There’s means for checking that. One of them consists of removing a small amount from the bowl and stretching it between one’s fingers, creating a “window” of sorts. There’s no telling from here, how precisely the window should look, but every dough has a “perfect” window. How many Gourmet magazine recipes contain this information? How many blogs?

Under-leavening yeast can happen for many reasons. The most common is as simply understood as avoided – salt is yeast’s mortal enemy. Mixing salt and yeast at any stage in the process will lead to unhappy cultures. So the trick here is to prolong the time until contact, maybe by placing a line of four between the two in our bowl to ensure the salt and yeast are nicely spread out to avoid mass meetings of those incompatible minds. How many Gourmet magazine articles contain this? How many blogs?

Sourdough Bread

Oh, you thought we’re done? No, not by a long shot. Leavening also happens when water expands (steam leavened breads are yummy). This happens in any and all bakeware. The gluten mesh sometimes ruptures when steam forms too quickly in one part of the dough. Another time, it’ll result in even fluffier foods (try asking a French baker about his baguette recipe. If he doesn’t kill or maim you, which is likely, he’ll start waxing poetically about years of experiments with JUST the right amount of steam).

Where does all this (and we barely scratched the surface) leave us? There’s so many factors, the brand and speed of your mixer. The surface of your mixing bowl. Temperature in the room. Temperature in your proofing box (later this week, I’ll post a great video and pictures on how to build your own proof box at home using some cheap components and 10 minutes of work), the type of yeast, and – yes – the condition of your oven.

Recipes don’t address those. Gourmet never does. Heck, Gourmet’s “standard” presumption for recipes is a $12k Viking range. Who does? Cooks Illustrated does. Alton Brown does. McGee does, assuming you’re not too disinterested to connect the dots between his writing on leavening and your kitchen reality.

Alanine, an amino acid

So, with this long-winded ramble out of the way, we return to Christopher Kimball’s challenge. Winning it, means to fight it on his grounds, the world of auxiliary knowledge. A wiki full of recipes won’t do that. For the months of November and December, how about this – we pledge to never assume anything. We’ll explain recipes, not just post them. We’ll talk about the things happening with the food, why they happen, what the outcome is. We’ll break down our recipes into components and educate from the side-lines of our recipes, showing how the step that has us mix corn starch and water is called a “slurry”, how it works, what it does, why it’s needed, and what else makes for slurries. We’ll talk about sticking eggs, and sticking steaks. We’ll write about caramelization (needs carbohydrates, isomerization, water loss, formation of monosaccaride chains) and browning (Maillard reaction, recombination of proteins with starches).

Because, alas, Christopher Kimball is right in this regard – most recipes on the ‘net suck. By explaining them, we not only ensure they’ll be great outcomes, no matter the environment they are made in, we’ll also all become a lot smarter about food. If you haven’t posted about it, yet, now is the time. Oh, and there’s a third great reason to do so – it’ll separate the cut-n-paste recipe sites from real home cooks and chefs. And, hey, we all could use a lot more of the latter and much less of the former, now, don’t we?

In January, I’ll tally. Leave me a comment if you’re up for the challenge, I’ll make a blogroll and a RSS aggregator site for all your blogs. I’ll personally drive to Vermont and visit ATK. I’ll hand Chris Kimball and his staff our rendition of their work. And we’ll film it. I don’t know him well, but I know that, if we can do this, CI will have admit to have a worthy brother in the online pundits he has so little faith in, right now.

Hilariously funny, to be sure, and a great marketing gag. Hey, it got me writing about it :)

Sadly, the site’s handlers had to start the whole shebang with a virtual challenge, a throwdown of their own, of sorts, and a claim I can neither leave unanswered nor unchallenged. Here’s what we read when coming to food52’s homepage:

We created food52 to celebrate the best cooks in the world: home cooks.

Ouch. Ok, ok, just who the best cook is, that’s debatable. Matter of style and taste, I’d suppose. One man’s super-cook is another woman’s fryolator fool. And, sure, a little home-town teasing is never a bad idea. So we’ll let this one stand. From this non-home cook to all my brothers and sisters in arms – if home-cooks were the better cooks, they’d be making OUR food and charging a pretty nickel for it, not the other way round. But, alas, as I said – it’s a matter of perception. And, yeah, my mother is a home cook and she is, without a doubt, the best cook in the world. Then there’s nothing, for, like, a gazillionbillion lightyears, and then there’s others. Most of which aren’t home cooks.

Today's home cook, however, prefers "Food Network" themed Barefoot Comtessa looks over blue tile.

So, sure, let the homies think they’re the best cooks in the world. As long as they keep coming to my place for dinner when it counts, I can live with that. But…

Every week we’ll hold recipe contests. After a year – 52 weeks – Harper Studio will publish the winning recipes in a beautiful cookbook.

Recipes? The “best cooks in the world” use recipes? Dang. Recipes are to cooking prowess what paint-by-numbers is to Picasso. It’s to “best in the world” as training wheels are to the Tour de France. It’s the paper plane to getting buzzed by an F-16, the watching Bobby Flay to being Hubert Keller. In short, recipes are small dictators, mustached little men marching in lockstep between TV shows and magazine racks, proclaiming loudly the need to keep the plebes down. Teach a cook to read recipes and they’ll keep buying your magazines. Teach them to cook, and they’ll never need a recipe in their lives again. Nine out of ten mustached recipe dictators agree with that. Number ten just wants to take you out back and have you flogged.

We don’t need more recipe collections. The web is full of cut-and-paste jobs, glossy food porn action shots of a lacquered pork loin sitting on top of a spray painted salad of something. Food isn’t supposed to look that way. Blame Gourmet Magazine and the insidious food photographer’s guild whose idea of good looking edibles means to make them look inedible. We need more talk about the basics. Do away with lists of ingredients and instead teach taste, ratios, and the science behind the things that happen in a bowl, mixer, or pan. Do away with times and, instead, talk about the telltale signs that a steak is done, a cake baked, or an egg runny.

We need more I’m just here for the food, more On Food and Cooking, more Cook’s Illustrated, and less of the same-old-same-old recipe collections which, give or take one ingredient, have been published over and over for the past forty years (case in point: this year’s “Healthy American Cooking 2009″ featured 85 recipes, 83 of which “Healthy American Cooking 2008″ featured, as well. Food doesn’t change that much).

So, if you want to be the “best cook in the world”, take off those training wheels. Every possible recipe has already been published, Mme. Child and Mssr. Escoffier took care of that. Learn how to cook rather than following orders, and there might be, just might, a “best cook in the world” in your future.

Due to a recent avalanche of rather … unprofessional … comments by fans of things I supposedly “derided”, comments are temporarily closed for this post. Please email me at jluster AT chezgeek DOT org for comments for publication.