I discovered earlier this year that if you google my name, one of the suggestions at the bottom of the page for “searches related to Julia Thiel” is “Julia Thiel bull’s balls.” It’s a hazard of the trade, I guess: for the past three years, I’ve been writing the Reader’s Key Ingredient column, a chef-to-chef challenge that has involved a plethora of odd ingredients. For our fifth installment, Phillip Foss (then of the Meatyballs Mobile food truck, now of El Ideas) challenged David Posey (Blackbird) to create a dish with bull’s balls.
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Our first chef this year took a different approach. Matthew Kirkley of L2O had been challenged by Dave Beran (Next) to cook with warabi starch, and wasn’t particularly impressed with it. (“It’s so soft it comes off as kind of snotty. . . . [I]f I was ever coming up with a dish where I was like, boy, I really need this to be weird and runny, I know where to get it now.”) Kirkley decided that the ingredients were getting “out of control,” and challenged Ryan LaRoche of NoMi Kitchen with celery.
Wolen, in a Key Ingredient first, created a dish without sampling his ingredient. He’d tried durian once, years earlier in Chinatown, and said that the experience was so bad that he never wanted to repeat it. He did eventually taste the custard he’d made with durian (though only after I tried it first and assured him that it wasn’t bad)—and even decided he liked it.
Nico: “Scrub what?”
Several minutes later, looking over at the abandoned plate with the graceful waves of ice cream melting on it, Cree said, “I hate that. I don’t want to look at it anymore. It’s embarrassing . . . like putting on an outfit and being like, dear god, I almost left the house in that.”
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