Meet Voracious Billy Goat
Until recently, I worked at Cook’s Country Magazine, part of America’s Test Kitchen. Cooks in this hallowed institution are assigned a recipe and descend upon the kitchen, armed with…Pounds worth of ribs! Bushels of potatoes! Vats of oil! Skeins of cheesecloth! Gallons of heavy cream! Wheels of cheese!
Such outsized amounts of ingredients are necessary when you’re going to make a recipe over and over. And over and over. And over and over, ‘til death—or your editors—do you part.
Part of the job in a test kitchen is tasting. Ideally, one would take dainty bites of several version of, say, chocolate cake, but rarely would I limit myself to those amounts. And so, I ate, despite my cursed acid reflux (punked by a higher power!). I love to eat, consider it part of my job, and, like certain little hoofed ruminants of the genus Capra, I just don’t know when to say “Stop.”
Voracious Billy Goat is a diary of my time at the test kitchen. For 18 months, I wrote down every meal, bite, and nibble that I had there. Since recipe development would go on for weeks at a time, I’ve decided to post some entries out of chronological order, to avoid the posts’ content being monotonous. Not that any of this constant mawing ever makes for dull reading.
Baaaah!
María del Mar Sacasa