Thomas Colicchio, courtesy The Feed Bag, and Tony Bourdain, courtesy Michael Ruhlman's blog.
OK, we said that the round of food porn yesterday would be all there was in The Year That Was here on the Serious Eats homepage, but I'm dredging up these photos of Messrs. Colicchio and Bourdain as the set up to a very big punchline you're all going to love. I promise. So gawk at the pix above and come back in a bit for the big reveal.
Last one. The Year That Was ends here. It's been real!
Snapshots from Italy: Spremuta, Anyone?: Gina DePalma on fresh-squeezed orange juice in Rome.
Photo of the Day: Pastel de Choclo, Chilean Corn and Meat Pie: A baked corn and meat dish commonly found in Chile.
Snapshots from Chile: Hot Dogs and Sandwiches at Rapa Nui: The completo, a hot dog topped with sauerkraut, avocado, chopped onion, and mayonnaise.
The Year That Was: Where serious eaters were eating out—or should have been—in 2008.
Regional Hot Dog Styles:To celebrate July 4th weekend, we brought you Serious Eats' definitive guide to America's regional hot dog styles.
Where to Find Duck Fat Fries: Chefs across the country were skipping peanut or cottonseed oil to embrace rendered duck fat for fries.
America's Heroes, Grinders, Subs, and More: Hoagies, heroes, subs, wedges, po'boys, grinders, and the list goes on. We compiled a list of America's best hold and cold sandwiches.
iPhone Waiters Line-Waiter's Guide: Apple's iPhone 3G came out July 11. We imagined there would be some iPhone camping expeditions at Apple Stores across the country, with people lining up to get their grubby little hands on one as soon as possible. We're more concerned with grub in hand, so we asked our nationwide network of Serious Eats contributors to give us their picks for serious eats near the Apple Stores most likely to draw crowds in New York, Philadelphia, D.C. Metro Area, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Clear Flour Bakery. Photograph from mkrigsman on Flickr
Boston City Guide: Boston Magazine's Amy Traverso gave us the rundown on Beantown from post-Fenway feeding to the best clam chowdah. Go Sox!
"'What are your favorite kitchen tools?' My teeth." —HeartofGlass, in summing up the Talk topics mentioned in TYTW: Nagging Questions
We've been going a bit nuts with with our "The Year That Was" year-end roundups here on Serious Eats. Thank you for indulging us. (For those of you getting sick of these retrospectives, here's the official party line on that.)
To make it easy for you to browse all these wraps, I've gathered them all here for you. Enjoy! (Or not!) After the jump, the roundup roundup.
Continuing The Year That Was with our pick for Ingredient of the Year.
I know it seems like a cliche and passé at this point, but I have to call a spade a spade, or perhaps I should say I have to call a pig a pig (but maybe not, more about that later).
Bacon is most assuredly the ingredient of the year.
Every important, influential, and innovative chef, from David Chang to Grant Achatz to Thomas Keller, made substantial use of bacon in 2008. It was used in appetizers, main courses, and desserts: bacon cookies, peanut butter and bacon "Elvis"cupcakes, and brittle, anyone? It even showed up in cocktails (bacon martini, anyone?).
It's used unadorned and as a mix-in, and served plain and fancy. It's used in cuisines around the world, from China to France to Italy to Mexico. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, brunch, snacks, small plates, big plate, medium plates, in diners and four-star restaurants, bacon is served anytime, anywhere, by anybody and everybody.
And not just any bacon. These days we know much more than the brand of bacon. We know who's been making it for how long, who's been raising the pigs, what breed of pig it's made from, what it's cured in, and how long it's smoked for using what kind of wood. We know what the pigs the bacon is made from have been eating. And in fact we know that sometimes it's not even made from pigs. GQ recently named lamb bacon as one of the best foods in the U.S.
So next year don't be surprised if cucumber bacon finds its way to a restaurant table or fancy-pants grocery store. We've even got food writers expounding on bacon fatigue. When someone writes a story about bacon fatigue that's when you know an ingredient is white-hot.
Hell, as I'm writing and thinking about this I'm thinking that we ought to award bacon the ingredient of the 21st century. I know we have 91 years to go, but based on the evidence outlined above, could any serious eater come to any other conclusion?
Bacon's gone from a supporting actor's role in the food universe to flat out cultural icon. Bacon's a star, damn it, and stars have to be treated and recognized as such.
I was wondering when someone would express this sentiment. From the Serious Eats inbox ...
Why the fuck did I read your site all year when it turns out I can just tune in this week and get an entire year's worth of shit in my RSS feeder? Enough with the damn reviews clogging things up. I can't find the new material for all this review shit. Stop it. Stop it now!
—Holli
on vacation with a damn Google reader clogged with stuff I've already seen
Continuing The Year That Was with miscellaneous questions we asked in 2008. Looking back on it, it seemed that Ed originally had cornered the market on this type of blog post. But then something happened and Ed's style rubbed off on the rest us. Hmm, now how did that happen?
Is vanilla ice cream with black specks better than vanilla ice cream without?
What do you call cola drinks?
Are you skeptical of molecular gastronomy?
What's your favorite Halloween candy?
What's the trick-or-treating age limit?
Who likes sweet potato fries?
Do you have a local grocery store that you've sworn undying loyalty to?
Is it rude to eat on mass transit?
Who should pay at a birthday dinner?
Should women get special treatment at restaurants?
Should picky eaters fake food allergies?
Continuing The Year That Was are our favorite photography stories from 2008.
Photograph by Graciepoo on Flickr
After renown New York City chef David Chang banned photography at his restaurant Momofuku Ko, we asked other chefs and restaurateurs what they thought about customer photography in their upscale restaurants. That set off some insightful reader debate whether foodie photographers should be allowed to shoot their dishes.
The banning of photography extended beyond restaurants—the famous Tsukiji market in Tokyo banned camera-toting tourists from visiting during the early morning market.
But don't feel deterred from whipping out your camera at a meal, as we learned that taking photos of food may help you lose weight.
We also learned that food porn is similar to real porn. (If your own food photos aren't food-porny enough, improve your camera skills with these ten food photography tips. )
And for some beautiful photography that isn't just close-ups of food, this gallery of a Waffle House wedding in Georgia was surprisingly moving, and Corey Arnold's fish-work photography was amazing.
The Year That Was, as measured by Ed's waistline.
Ed started his diet on January 10. He flirted briefly with 100-calorie snack packs, was rebuked for it, and then renounced them. Still questionable: Ed's ideal diet breakfast—Diet Coke, potato chips, and a banana. Then again, he did discover his inner bok choy, which makes a weird kind of sense, I suppose.
And for a series of posts that you'd think would have been fairly innocuous, it managed to incite mild controversy when The-Feedbag's Josh Ozersky attacks Ed and then posts a retraction.
My main beef with Ed's diet posts is that they have inspired my girlfriend to get on my case about starting my own serious diet.
But let's focus on the positive. Ed started his diet at 254 pounds and is now down to 233 pounds. Net loss for the year so far: 21 pounds. Good job, Ed!
Continuing The Year That Was with a remembrance of some wonderful people who left us in 2008.
Sadly, we said goodbye to some wonderful folks in 2008: Jean-Claude Vrinat, Herb Peterson, Robert Mondavi, Frederic J. Baur, George Carlin, Sherry Cermak, Bernie Mac, Isaac Hayes, Don LaFontaine, David Foster Wallace, Robert Steinberg, Paul Newman, Carmen Rocha, Lou Dorfsman, Briana Brownlow.
Continuing The Year That Was, with food-based pixelated distractions.
Super Mario Bros. Cupcakes. Photograph from hello naomi on Flickr
OMG. How many food video games came out this year? Major League Eating was announced in early March, teased us in April, still hadn't come out in May (when we sent Ben Brown to a press event in San Francisco and Gordon Mark to one in New York), and finally came out via WiiWare on July 14. MLE was perhaps the most inspired of this bunch of games, which also included Iron Chef America, Cake Mania, and Hell's Kitchen (which Gordon Mark, who sort of became our de facto in-house food-gamer, reviewed here—and a whole host of others we've probably overlooked.
All this nonsense inspired a parody. And it was dead-on: Dishwashing Champion.
Of course, you can't heap Cooking Mama in the bunch above, as it remains the gold standard in food-related video games. In 2008, it added 3-D characters and released Cooking Mama World Kitchen.
Oh, so this game is not really food-related, but we identified some of the real-life restaurants in Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City.
I thought we could get through all the thematic Year That Was posts yesterday, but we actually have MORE today. So here, for your daily video fix, another trend that had us food-lovers all agog in 2008—stop-motion food videos.
Stop-motion films are nothing new, but looking back in our video archives, we were surprised at just how many food-related herky-jerky shorts we blogged in 2008.
So, what does food do when you're not eating it? The magic of stop-motion animation showed us that chocolates hearts fall in love, chocolate bunnies fall in love, slabs of meat fall in love, cupcakes dance, and Cadbury Creme Eggs commit suicide. And sometimes the food did nothing so grand as get eaten by something else.
More in The Year That Was.
Video game characters bento box from Anna The Red
Food that looked like other stuff turned out to be a theme of 2008 on Serious Eats and on other blogs. Plain loaves and rolls were apparently boring. Baked goods with more interesting shapes, like piggies, bunnies, lobsters, and mummies ruled the day. Similarly, people transformed plain cupcakes into popcorn, poodles, nursery rhymes, and corn on the cob.
Bento boxes were everywhere, getting facelifts as popular album covers, video game characters, and Sanrio characters.
This probably should have been in the Media entry, but whatevs. The Year That Was continues.
Top: Wallace and Gromit as bakers in "A Matter of Loaf or Death." Above, clockwise from left: Amy Adams, Julie Powell, Meryl Streep, Julia Child.
Nominated for five Oscars, Ratatouille wins Best Animated Feature category.
A movie based on the Julie/Julia blog-book is announced, with noted foodie, author (Heartburn), and director (Sleepless in Seattle) Nora Ephron at the helm. Our own Ed Levine gets a part as an extra and has dinner with Ephron after his scene wraps. Martha Stewart claims the movie is about her!
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to be made into a movie.
New Wallace & Gromit movie, A Matter of Loaf and Death, is set in a bakery.
Keanu Reeves to star in a chef movie. Whoa or no? Most serious eaters say no.
Pizza
Food as Other Stuff
TYTW on Serious Eats New York
Food in Space
Food Media
Food Shortages, Scares, and Rising Costs
Videos
Science
Starbucks
Bacon
OK, I promised you at the end of the previous Year That Was post that I'd do something a bit more fun. Does this qualify?
Outer space alone is vast, mysterious, and profound. But once humans start putting things in space, the concept goes from sublime to ridiculous at light speed. I mean, monkeys? Pigs? Food?
Yes, food.
In 2008, space got spicy with kimchi. A new ringed object was spotted when bagels went up on a Space Shuttle mission. We found out that outer space smells like steak. And the Japanese made space beer. And, oh yeah, this weird space food sticks video made the rounds on all the blogs.
Yes, food brings space absurdity to a new level. A new, astronautically delicious level.
Pizza
Food as Other Stuff
TYTW on Serious Eats New York
Movies
Food Media
Food Shortages, Scares, and Rising Costs
Videos
Science
Starbucks
Bacon
It's an old trope that the only people who care about media news are members of the media themselves. And while we are a "blog," we do indeed consider ourselves part of this illustrious and infamous industry. So please indulge our navel-gazing here in this installment of The Year That Was. In the interest of getting this particular retrospective over with in one shot, I'm going to lump many different media fields together.
©iStockphoto.com/ideabug
It was not a good year for newspapers in general, with several dailies reducing frequency and coverage, going web-only, and even filing for bankruptcy. It's no suprise then that newspaper food sections were also downsized accordingly (and Serious Eats readers were a mixed bag on whether this affected them or not).
Either because of or in spite of the downsizing at papers and magazines, we saw many veteran food writers migrate wholly or partially to the web.
The New York Times food section online did away with the antiquated practice of posting all its food news to the website late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning and is now publishing stories online—often days before the traditional Wednesday print version appears.
But not all publications are in dire straits, we're told. Non-mainstream food mags (above) are getting more attention via the web than they might have a decade ago, while men's magazines are supposedly getting serious about food. And at least a couple new magazines launched this year: Food Network Magazine and Jamie Magazine. And a trend piece tried to convince us that the crap economy is actually good for food magazines, as people are cooking at home more now.
Continuing The Year That Was with some of the more downer news of the year.
Food Shortages: Worldwide hops, butter in Japan, pork in Turkey, snails and oysters in France, water in European olive oil producing countries, bananas in Japan. Even Stephen Colbert and John Stewart weighed in on the global food crisis. The eight world leaders meeting for the G8 Summit in Hokkaido, Japan, scarfed a six-course lunch and then an eight-course dinner before discussing the world food shortage situation.
Rising Food Prices: Paul Krugman told us that rising energy prices was just one of the many factors contributing to rising food costs. The rising cost of popcorn made movie tickets more expensive. Cereal boxes shrank but prices did not. Some people responded to all the media coverage by stockpiling foodstuffs like rice and flour. Others stole restaurant grease to turn into barrels of bootleg biofuel.
Food Safety Scares: Salmonella in tomatoes and jalapenos, melamine-tainted dairy products from China, and mercury-rich fish.
Pizza
Food as Other Stuff
TYTW on Serious Eats New York
Movies
Food in Space
Food Media
Videos
Science
Starbucks
Bacon
And we continue The Year That Was with some of our favorite food videos of the year. Each weekday around noon ET, we try to bring you a fun, short video you can watch covertly at your desk or while taking a break at home. These are roughly in chronological order, except for the first few, which were true standouts—at least in my book.
Continuing The Year That Was are our favorite food-science stories from 2008.
Test Tube Meat! Wired covered a three-day meeting of the In Vitro Meat Consortium in Ås, Norway, detailing the possibility of test tube meat. Cheaper to produce and more environmentally friendly, in vitro meat production may arrive in grocery stores within 5 to 10 years. In response, PETA announced a $1 million prize to the "first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012."
An "electic tongue"! Spanish scientists developed a portable "electric tongue" that can identify wine characteristics.
Sunscreen for fruits and veggies! Sunscreen isn't just for sentient beings anymore; now there's sunscreen for fruit and vegetable crops. 20 to 40 percent of certain crops are destroyed each season due to overexposure, but thanks to California-based Purfresh, farmers can protect their crops with a spray-on SPF 45 sunscreen that blocks harmful rays while still allowing crops to photosynthesize.
Cooking may have made us smarter. Cooking stimulated cognitive spurt in humans about 2 million years ago when the human brain rapidly doubled in size from other primate brains.
Your tongue might be able to taste calcium and it tastes like... calcium. A sour bitterness is the best description, which could explain why certain people don't like collard greens, bok choy, kale, or bitter melon
Taking photos of food may help you lose weight, drinking coffee will not, and you just might be overeating because you don't get enough pleasure out of food.
Robots were big in food news this year, most of the groundbreaking (or not-so-groundbreaking) developments coming out of Japan, not surprisingly: a robotic farming suit, a slow-as-molasses robot dishwasher, a breakfast-cooking 'bot, a bartending automaton, and a pancake-flipper.
Pizza
Food as Other Stuff
TYTW on Serious Eats New York
Movies
Food in Space
Food Media
Food Shortages, Scares, and Rising Costs
Videos
Starbucks
Bacon
Continuing The Year That Was, our year-end retrospective of food news.
Wow, were there ever a ton of Starbucks items this year, starting with the news that McDonald's was entering the coffee business, challenging Starbucks in a big way. The rest of the year, we watched as the Seattle-based coffee chain attempted to answer that challenge and many more.
Starbucks, whose stock declined over much of the year, brought back founder Howard Schultz as CEO, eliminated jobs, got rid of its breakfast sandwiches but then brought them back, started grinding beans fresh in-house, bought the Clover Equipment company, released a new milder brew but then brought back its old bitter "burnt-tasting" blend, redesigned its cups and then scrapped the redesign, started a social-networking site to grab your ideas, inspired a blog written by an anonymous S'bux barista, introduced a fruit smoothie option, closed 600 stores (including one of the two branches under Stephen Colbert's desk), closed most of its Australian stores, debuted a line of healthier breakfasts (including oatmeal, Serious Eater Erin Zimmer's favorite breakfast), created new piadini sandwiches, and came out with a Gold Card that offered discounts to Starbucksaholics.
Last Friday we started our year-end review with the Top 10 most-viewed posts across Serious Eats land. Today, we're taking a look back at the food trends of 2008. We were originally going to do this in one post, but with all the stuff we've published this year, we would have worn out your scroll finger. So we've broken up this retrospective into more-digestible bits. Your tasting menu of 2008 begins this morning, fittingly enough, with bacon.
Bacon was all over the place on Serious Eats in 2008. That's not a huge change from 2007. And, for those of you who accuse us of being too baconcentric, let me just point out that our first bacon post of the year did not appear until the late, late date of January 3*. Here are some notable bacon items of 2008:
Just a sampling: How it's made, edible bacon bowls, the bacon bra(!), a bacon tiara, a bacon costume, bacon soap, and, yuck, bacon in a can. That's not to mention the very recent cheese-filled bacon roll and strange and brilliant way to baconify any website.
Unlikely foods to include bacon: bourbon, gelato, chocolate, more chocolate, cupcakes, cinnamon rolls, doughnuts, mayo (though there's no real bacon in this vile stuff), and Chex mix.
Weird: Someone looking to send a message to Congressional Representative John Boehner (R-Ohio) over the banking bailout in early October caused the congressman's local offices in West Chester, Ohio, to be evacuated. The jokester sent a package of, yes, bacon. (It's pork, get it? Har har.)
Some folks accused hipsters of ruining bacon, but we don't believe it can ever be ruined. (Well, maybe it can—by bacon dust.)
* Shocking, I know. I'll make sure we start 2009 with a bacon post on New Year's Day.
Pizza
Food as Other Stuff
TYTW on Serious Eats New York
Movies
Food in Space
Food Media
Food Shortages, Scares, and Rising Costs
Videos
Science
Starbucks
OK. Now we've come to the Top 10 Talk topics of the year. This one was a little funny, because when I ran the numbers, I found that most of the highest-ranked posts were from the beginning of the year. That's because they've had all that extra time to accumulate pageviews. So what I've done is highlight the Top 10 overall and then the No. 1 post of each month, which gives you a better idea of what was popular in a given time period. —Adam
1. Breakfast for a Crowd: Any Ideas?
"I need some ideas for breakfast that will feed 10 people. I would like to prepare something relatively simple that incorporates at least one fruit/vegetable to make it relatively healthy. What are your favorite breakfasts for a crowd?"
2. Best Places to Eat in New York City
"I'm taking a friend to NYC on Saturday and would like to know where the best places to eat are. I need a restaurant that is casual attire (not Le Benardin or Per Se etc.) that has really good food. I've heard a lot about The Spotted Pig, Union Square Cafe, and Gramercy Tavern. Has anyone ever been to any of these?"
3. How to Make Fried Rice Like They Do at Chinese Takeout?
"Whats their secret? I have a rice cooker that cooks up nice rice. But how do they get it the color/flavor they do? Those little pieces of pork. How do I get them as yummy as they do?"
4. What Do You Do with Spaghetti Squash?
"I've recently discovered that I like spaghetti squash and, more importantly, that my husband will eat it too. I tried a good recipe recently for Spaghetti Squash with a Spicy Meat Sauce (spicy in terms of cinnamon), and I'm wondering if anyone has other good recipes they would be willing to share."
5. Election Night Party
"Hey all... I am thinking of having some people over for election night, and want to make some election-themed food. I can't think of anything to do other than make 'traditional' American food (like the 4th of July), but I am thinking more in terms of appetizers/finger foods. Any suggestions?"
The final 5, and the month-by-months, after the jump.
You know, it's the day after Christmas. Most people are out exchanging gifts or still visiting with family. And it's a Friday. Both good reasons for taking it easy today. So we're going to do some navel-gazing with a look back at the Top 10 posts across the Serious Eats family of sites. Seems fitting to begin with the main Serious Eats site. These are the Top 10 posts on Serious Eats in terms of pageviews. Think of it as a "people's choice," whereby the people voted with their clicks. —Adam
1. Snack to the Future: The Col-Pop, an All-in-One Chicken Nugget and Soda Cup: The Colpop
The most amazing fast-food packaging invention ever takes the hill and rules the roost—spurred on by numerous links from gadget blogs, Digg, and everywhere else on the web. Our No. 1 post of the year came early—in February. How it came about: We wanted to order fried chicken for lunch at the office, grabbed the BBQ Chicken menu, and began writing down our order. When Raphael got his hands on the menu, he spotted the Colpop in a tiny picture at the bottom. We knew we had to order it. We documented it, blogged it, and the Colpop quickly made its way around the web and became something of a fast-food-packaging phenom. We thought we'd see more dual-pack snacks come around the bend in 2008, but, sadly, that hasn't been the case.
2. America's Regional Hot Dog Styles
On the heels of Slice's regional pizza style glossary, Ed Levine suggested the humble hot dog be documented as thoroughly. Our correspondent Jenn Sit was up to the task and created a guide to red hots, white hots, deep-fried dogs, Chicago dogs, you name it. Did we catch your area's hot dog? Find out.
3. 'Palin Syrah' Wine Drops in Sales After Sarah Palin Veep Pick
Remember all those stories about Palin Syrah wine and how its sales were down—and then up? You heard it here first. No, seriously. Let it be known that Serious Eats correspondent Amy Monroe broke the news here and that the blogosphere and then the mainstream media then ran with it. Cheers!
4. Top 10 Awesome Nostalgic Foods We Want Back
We love getting into the Talk threads on Serious Eats. Inspired by a particularly backward-looking thread in April, Erin Zimmer rounded up your favorite nostalgic foods that you wised were still around. Seriously, people—Crystal Pepsi?
5. Essentials: Roast Chicken
This was sort of a sleeper hit. From our Serious Eats Essential Recipes library, roast chicken comes in at the midpoint of this list. It's not a flashy recipe, but it's tried and true, and my guess is that a lot of people are looking for a simple and sound way to cook this bird. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race.
After the jump, the rest of this year's top posts, plus a bonus No. 11.
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