Over the weekend, I had some words with Chris Kimball on Twitter. For those unfamiliar, Kimball is the founder of Cook's Illustrated and host of the popular America's Test Kitchen, which airs syndicated on American Public Broadcasting Stations (PBS).

Most recently, Kimball is becoming known for writing an opinion editorial (op ed) for the New York Times, in which he took what amounts to those of us enthusiastic about food on the World Wide Web (WWW) to task for the fall of the Gourmet magazine. It was published October 8, 2009, several days after Gourmet's former editor Ruth Reichl cleaned out her desk.

Like Ryan Tate of gawker.com, I found Kimball's piece rather opportunistic. And, I think Tate describes best our shared sentiment in the following excerpt from his "The Trolling Cook" piece:

...a wrongheaded and nakedly self-serving New York Times op-ed about how much internet recipes suck, and how the web's terrible food writing basically killed Gourmet magazine. Where can you turn for quality recipes? Cook's Illustrated, naturally.

Source: Valleywag, Gawker.com

Further, my thoughts on Gourmet's "shuttering" closely align with another gawker.com writer, Hamilton Nolan. In another gem piece, "Gourmet's Dead. Don't Blame The Internet", Nolan writes

The internet loves experts. And it loves thoughtful, considered editorial...The democratic aspect of the internet...is not one that means that every opinion is equal; it just means that every opinion can be equally heard. The good stuff can still rise to the top. Conde Nast (Gourmet's former publisher) is not currently in a budget crisis because of an imaginary virtual "ship of fools" that smashed up the noble magazine industry like drunk savage hordes rampaging across an enlightened village. Conde Nast's problems stem from the fact that its entire business model was based on a sort of quasi-monopolistic sham sold to advertisers?a model that's now crumbling.

Source: Gawker.com

Imperceptibly, Kimball would later challenge the WWW on his blog to a recipe dual, pitting his test kitchen against a "wiki-style" recipe developer. The boys and girls at Foodista accepted the challenge.

Me, I see far too many parallels between Kimball's challenge and the software world, the realm of my professional career. The same battle is being raged right now between incorporated software companies like Microsoft (and its competitor Apple) and open source developers who produce such software as the Linux operating system.

Kimball believes his professional test kitchen hires can and will produce better recipes than anything that can be "crowd sourced", to borrow a Web 2.0 term. However, while I have thrown my support behind Foodista in the same way I support open source software, I think Kimball is completely missing the point.

Happily, while a partial version of a blog entry explaining my position sat in draft format, a chef I greatly respect (Jonas Luster aka: @wildhunt), posted his own with similar thoughts on his site, Chez Geek. As I originally intended, Chef Luster waded into the growing skirmish, "taking Chris Kimball by his word?." His entry is such a great read that I found myself re-drafting and finishing my blog entry in a comment on Chez Geek. The comment follows:

I recently tweeted to Chris Kimball via @foodista, who accepted the challenge, that Kimball is completely missing the point. In it, I added, "IMO learning how to cook is a question of tinkering and breaking free of recipes."

It's not the recipes that I keep going back to Cook's Illustrated for. It's the stuff around the recipes I find so much more valuable: the diagrams about how to truss a bird or roast, the explanations about what attempts with which ingredients produced different flavours, the tips about why adjusting temperature during baking produced better textures etc. It's the same reason I am an avid fan of Alton Brown's "Good Eats" and his books.

However, I also turned to Gourmet, but for vastly different reasons. Like Kimball's somewhat self servicing op-ed piece, I believe the demise of Gourmet has to do with poor management at Conde Nast and it misjudging the state of its audience.

I enjoyed Gourmet because Ruth Reichl and her crew published innovative dishes and photographed how they could be plated. Many complaints about Gourmet, post mortem, involve its former recipes and/or pieces employing ingredients that are difficult to find or prohibitively expensive. And, the recipes were equally difficult to attempt and often prone to failure.

I think people simply lost the ability to appreciate Gourmet because they've forgotten how to cook. Quite frankly, I'm no better. There are a little over a hundred posts involving recipes on my own blog.

Cooking is a dying art whose death is hastened by "paint by number" recipes. With people having too little time to devote to developing techniques or finding out why a recipe works, because we simply don't have time to fail at making a dish anymore, everyone looks to recipes. Recipes in turn have become very granular and reflect this increasing loss of skill and understanding. Hence, why Kimball believes and perhaps rightly that his recipes are of higher quality than his contemporaries. His come from a professional test kitchen, staffed with trained cooks/chefs. His are somewhat fool proof.

When Kimball replied to me, he tweeted "Are recipes that much of a burden? I cook from recipes!!!" I replied " u r not just cooking from recipes, u r cooking w/decades of experience, both yours and those of ur test kitchen." He responded "That would be, I think, the whole point!"

Damn right! Yes Kimball's recipes reflect the expertise he and his staff have developed over decades, but the recipes themselves do not pass on this expertise. Kimball cooks with experience that was gathered from a lifetime in a kitchen. We don't. While we may use his recipes and produce great results, we gain nothing if we don't read the "stuff" he publishes around his recipes.

There is a reason that cooking by taste isn't heard of much anymore. There is a reason that Michael Ruhlman, author of Ratio, thinks foodies are masturbating deviants who "get off" on FoodTV. We barely cook anymore.

Is there a solution? What is written in the blog above. Crowd source and share expertise from learning how to cook again. Post insightful recipes that are more than just instructions. And most importantly, go play in the kitchen.

Source: Chez Geek

That's my two cents on the matter of Kimble vs. the WWW. If you will excuse me, I am shutting down my Ubuntu-powered laptop and am off to play in the kitchen.

A transcript of my encounter with Chris Kimball follows...

foodiePrints (Oct 15, 10:31 PM)
@foodista I think @cpkimball is missing the point! IMO learning how to cook is a question of tinkering and breaking free of recipes.

cpkimball (Oct 16, 08:10 AM)
@foodiePrints Break free the chains of recipes? Are recipes that much of a burden? I cook from recipes!!!

mcogdill (Oct 16, 08:14 AM)
@cpkimball @foodiePrints Don, I agree w/Chris I don't mind cooking from recipes & like his help to understand why recipes do/dont work

foodiePrints (Oct 16, 08:59 AM)
@cpkimball @mcogdill Recipes aren't a burden. My blog has a little over a hundred of them. It's the lessons learned that are valuable.

foodiePrints (Oct 16, 09:00 AM)
@cpkimball @mcogdill IMO it is better to learn techniques and cook from ratios based on mass and an understanding of why a recipe works.

foodiePrints (Oct 16, 09:07 AM)
@cpkimball @mcogdill Recipes don't always convey this wisdom. Reading Cooks Illustrated's "stuff" around the recipe does.

foodiePrints (Oct 16, 09:11 AM)
@mcogdill Take a look at @wildhunt's blog "Recipe for Disaster": http://bit.ly/HQyY6

foodiePrints (Oct 16, 09:29 AM)
@cpkimball IMO u r not just cooking from recipes, u r cooking w/decades of experience, both yours and those of ur test kitchen.

mcogdill (Oct 16, 09:46 AM)
@foodiePrints Thnx Don for litteral food for thought regarding recipes. But when I am a home cook not chef I need them as a base 2 start.

foodiePrints (Oct 16, 09:56 AM)
@mcogdill As a home cook like you, I also use recipes as a base, but try to leverage expertise from other cooks and chefs.

foodiePrints (Oct 16, 09:57 AM)
@mcogdill This expertise comes from many sources, cooks and chefs on the web, books like @ruhlman's Ratio, and magazines like Cook's Illust.

foodiePrints (Oct 16, 09:58 AM)
@mcogdill I find it makes me more successful in my little galley kitchen.

foodiePrints (Oct 16, 10:00 AM)
@mcogdill Along those lines, I highly recommend @TheUnknownChef's blog of rants: http://www.theunknownchef.tv

cpkimball (Oct 17, 11:56 AM)
@foodiePrints That would be, I think, the whole point!

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