A few weeks ago I was at the L&L Tavern having drinks with a couple of coworkers and watching one of them discuss politics on Channel 11 (in a segment that had been taped earlier). After the show ended, the bartender came over to chat. “I love the Reader,” he said. “But that column where people cook with yak phlegm? That’s terrible. It’s gotta go. No one wants to cook with that shit.” (I’m paraphrasing since I was laughing too hard at the time to breathe properly, much less take detailed notes.)
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And it’s true that many people don’t want to cook with the ingredients featured in the series—often the participating chefs least of all. The original idea wasn’t to find the weirdest and most disgusting ingredients available, though: It was to create a challenge in which a chef would choose a specific ingredient for another chef to work with. That person would pick the next chef and the next ingredient, and so on. And those chefs have proven more creative in selecting ingredients than I ever could have been.
For one thing, no matter how odd some of these ingredients may seem to the average Chicagoan, many of them are common in other countries and cultures. In 2011 we had balut (fertilized duck egg, a popular snack in the Philippines), bamboo worms (served fried as street food in Thailand), and natto (fermented soybeans common in Japan); this year there’s been huitlacoche (corn fungus, considered a delicacy in Mexico), chicken gizzards (available right here in Chicago at Harold’s Chicken Shack), dende oil (common in Brazilian and West African cuisine), and bee pollen (which herbalists believe will cure pretty much whatever ails you).
Ryan Poli of Tavernita had the distinction of being the first (though probably not the last) participant to have to personally extinguish his ingredient: eels that arrived very much alive. And he was the second to have an escapee; one slithered out of its container onto the floor and briefly eluded rescue. Killing them made them less lively, but didn’t stop them from twitching for more than an hour. Like many of the chefs, Poli said he’d consider putting his Key Ingredient dish on the menu—but in this case, only if he could buy the eels already filleted. “How much can you take of coming in every morning knowing you have to kill four or five eel?” he asked. “It would really weigh on a man’s soul, I think.”
