The Chicago Reader just covered its own 40th anniversary, and now Julia Thiel looks back on the 50th of one of its food features, the James Beard award-winning Key Ingredient. Well, it’s only its first anniversary, more or less, but the serial chef challenge, in which each week a local chef torments one of his or her colleagues with a strange ingredient which they have to make a dish out of, reaches its 50th episode this week with Jason Hammel of Lula Cafe, who has to use a Scandinavian sweet cheese called gjetost. Thiel writes the pieces (and does all the legwork and chef-negotiating), and we do the video for them, and have to agree with her that the participating chefs have “surprised me each week with their creativity, skill, and humor… I also had no idea how much fun chefs would have with the challenges, both in creating their own dishes and coming up with ingredients to make things as difficult as possible for the next chef.”
She doesn’t rank each and every challenge, but given the supremely weird things we and the chefs have sometimes been forced to eat (it’s a point of honor to try every one), she looks back on some of the most memorable and/or appalling, including fish eyeballs (“made me wince a little, but the soup [Cary Taylor] made was pretty good”), cod sperm ("wins the prize in my book for least appealing-sounding but most appealing in reality”), and balut ("the only ingredient we’ve had that actually made the chef gag”).
