This food blog went to Nirvana this week.
That’s right, the glutton geeks were invited to a private tour of the L.A. Times’ Test Kitchen! Only three newspapers in the country still maintain such a facility, and we readers of the Times are lucky that it is one of them. The Food section is a must read for us, and is an unfailing source of great recipes (that actually work!) and interesting articles on all things food-related. We have cut out hundreds of recipes over the years and, yes, actually have made dozens. I particularly love their method-comparison tests, like the “best way to cook a turkey.” Dry brining won hands-down, and we and the boyos have used it for the last few Thanksgivings to great results.
So, how did we, along with our old friend, Sara, and our new friend, Pebble (she had an older sister nicknamed “Rocky”), get this boon? Connections, friend, connections. It so happens that Loni’s oldest niece, Noelle, is the Test Kitchen Manager! Boy, her “office” is a lot nicer than any I ever had.
They do all of their photo work here and in an adjacent studio. This end of the kitchen is traditional-homey, while the other end is more high-tech modern, and they shoot at whichever end suits the mood of the article. Doing food photography is not easy, and is harder here because the newspaper forbids any tricks in the pictures (e.g., no clear marbles at the bottom of the soup bowl to push the goodies to the top). Noelle oversees a staff composed largely of interns from various cooking schools. That helps keep the overhead down and the Food section alive. They hadn’t yet arrived, so we first got a tour of the editorial and old executive areas. That’s old as in the Times was purchased years ago by the Chicago Tribune organization, which shut down the exec offices here and consolidated in Chicago. And promptly went into bankruptcy. But that’s another story. Anyway, we saw the “bullpen” pressrooms that looked like my sons’ college dorm rooms, endless corridors, the circular seats of boardroom power, and an old linotype machine. It was clear that there was a lot of unused space due to the cutbacks that all print media are undergoing. The long corridors are lined with copies of articles and exposes that won Pulitzers and other awards. They’ve earned a ton, and it was a sharp reminder of how much we absolutely must have a robust Third Estate. We won’t get that from online blog sources that steal from the wire services and newspapers. So subscribe to your local paper now!
The main entrance to the Times has been closed for some time, probably for security reasons. It’s a shame, because it is a beautiful lobby, anchored in the center by a large revolving globe. Even though the entry is closed, the world still turns.
We made our way back through the corridors and newsrooms to the Kitchen, where the interns had arrived and gotten down to work. The Times sources its recipes from old and new cookbooks, restaurants, in-house concoctions, and wherever. But nothing goes into the paper until it has been modified for home cooks (all the kitchen gear is what would be found in upscale homes) and tested, tested, tested. I think Noelle said that the record was 17 consecutive tests on a dish before it was ready for print. There were several things being tried out today and the interns were beetling away.
One of the recipes under development was for butterscotch brownies. They saw me coming.
To no avail.
I declare the recipe a success! I also had my eye on some half-full bottles of wines that had been tasted earlier, but no glasses were handy and even I won’t drink straight from the bottle. Not in public, anyway.
Thank you, Noelle, for the very neat tour, and thank you faceless management of the Times that recognizes the value of the Food section and Test Kitchen.
We had some time to kill in the afternoon, and I had yet to find the guayabera shirt I’ve been looking for to sport at son John’s wedding this summer in Puerto Vallarta. If there’s one thing we have in L.A., it’s a garment district with plenty of Hispanic storefronts. So, we hopped the Dash bus (all of 15 cents for we senior types)
and we beetled off to the Alley.
English is definitely the minority language here. That’s what I get for having studied useless French in school.
We walked up, down, over and around. At least 40 blocks worth of shops. Do you think we could find one lousy classic Mexican shirt? Noooooooo. Everything but. Only one store had anything close, and their quality was awful. So where did I end up buying a very nice one?
J. C. Centavo, anyone?
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