Cooking with the grossest foods imaginable wasn’t the original premise of our long-running food feature Key Ingredient—that’s just how it worked out. The idea was that we’d ask a chef to create a dish with a certain ingredient, then that person would pick another ingredient and chef to pass on the challenge to, and it would go from there. And so it did, for 177 episodes, beginning in 2010 with Grant Achatz of Alinea and ending (next month) with Joe Frillman of Daisies. The series ran exponentially longer than either videographer Michael Gebert or I had expected, and after I left the Reader this summer, it seemed like it had reached a natural ending point.



           This was a tough category because a lot of chefs really, really hated the ingredients they were assigned to work with, but Michael Carlson was the most vocal about it. He compared Jeppson’s Malort to “bum feet and earwax” and suggested urinal cakes as an appropriate pairing. He wasn’t very happy with Paula Haney for giving him the ingredient, either: “I think it was a rough one. I think I’d rather her give me herpes or something.”

Grossest ingredient

Brian Enyart, Topolobampo (now at Dos Urban Cantina), natto (fermented soybeans)

           “You either love sea cucumber or you hate it,” Matthias Merges said during his shoot. He used a pair of chopsticks to poke at one, imported live from a Tokyo fish market, and it moved a little in response. When he pulled the chopsticks away, thick strings of brown slime came away with them. Merges compares their texture to chicken cartilage, crunchy and a little slimy, warning that it’s not for everyone. “It’s a very primitive kind of taste and texture,” he said.



           Eels are typically sold live, and the ones Poli got for his challenge were particularly lively. One escaped its container and slithered to the floor, proving difficult to retrieve (the phrase “slippery as an eel” exists for a reason). Even after Poli killed one it kept squirming. “We had to hold it down while we took the bones out, and then after that it stopped moving,” he said. “And then when we were putting the skewers through, it was still twitching.” Poli did like the flavor but said he’d only cook with eel in the future if he could buy them 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.”

Best presentation

Doug Sohn, Hot Doug’s (RIP), chicken feet