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The feature—which was suggested in outline by Mike Sula, given its name by then Reader editor Kiki Yablon (my suggestion was “Stick a Fork in It”), and worked out in practice by Julia Thiel and me—has proved to be pretty ideal in terms of being just enough game-show gimmick with occasional gross-out value to be showbiz, yet loose and realistic enough to let chefs be themselves and capture what they really do without artificial drama. In other words, there’s no Padma to walk in and announce that they suddenly have to work Swanson chicken stock into their dessert course. Occasionally wacky ingredients aside, it’s a pretty straightforward look at how chefs puzzle out what to make with something and how they think about how flavors work together to make a satisfying dish. For me it’s been a great experience in terms of going inside the city’s kitchens (which are all cramped, except the hotel ones) and observing the chefs, almost always without a minder present, at work.
The first episode . . . or is it? The first Key Ingredient was with Grant Achatz, right? Yes—but the first one shot and written was actually with Phillip Foss. He agreed to be our test subject, to see how the concept worked. Once the series got going, John des Rosiers made Foss (a buddy) his pick and worked him back into the sequence. This partly explains why the video for Foss’s challenge has some tricky-trendy effects (c. 2010, anyway) that were quickly dropped.
The dish that grossed out even the chef Sometimes a commenter will criticize Key Ingredient for being just about finding the grossest ingredient. First, why is that even a criticism on the Internet? But second, every one has been something that humans eat in some form somewhere, so it seems entirely justified to me to see how Western fine dining chefs approach foods from radically different culinary traditions. Anyway, the chef most grossed out by her ingredient was easily Kristine Subido, then at Wave in the W Hotel (now at Pecking Order). She got stuck with balut, cooked embryonic duck served in its shell, and she just couldn’t face it—even though she’d eaten it as a kid in the Philippines. (My fear was having to pick feathers or bits of bill out of my teeth.)
