Answers to life's vexing cooking questions...
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Ask the Chef moves to Ochef.com – with daily
answers to life’s vexing cooking questions
Jan. 16, 2002; – The Q&A column Ask the Chef has a new home at Ochef.com (www.ochef.com). The column, which is produced daily, answers readers’ food and cooking questions – from the most basic boiling-water-type to complicated questions about food preparation, chemistry, safety, history, and nutrition.The Ask the Chef column was started and ran for several years at another online site, where it quickly became the site’s most popular feature. With a recent change of ownership at the former site, the editorial staff left and formed Food News Service, which launched the Ochef.com site.
The column is written by David Purcell, a longtime journalist and food writer, and features the input of dozens of cooking experts, including chefs, cooking school instructors, cookbook authors, nutritionists, and experts at government agencies, food industry trade groups, universities and food companies.
“No question is too tough for us to handle,” Purcell says, “at least so far. But there are times when it has taken us weeks, even months, to come up with an answer for a particularly challenging question.” In cases where none of our experts know the answer and there don’t seem to be any clues in the nearly 3,000 reference books and cookbooks in the company library, the staff often breaks out the pots and pans and cooks and analyzes the results and cooks some more until the answer is clear.
“In spite of the difficulty of some questions, our goal is to make the answers to every question comprehensible and interesting to every reader, even infrequent cooks and non-cooks,” Purcell says. “Because even if people don’t cook, they eat, and a lot of them are interested in finding out more about the foods they eat, where they come from, and how they are prepared.”
Because of the volume of questions received, Ask the Chef isn’t able to answer every one. But the staff tries to find a good mix of basic and universally interesting questions to answer each day.
Also, given the global nature of the Internet, 15% to 20% of the questions come from Britain, Australia, South Africa and other countries. “Some are a little surprising,” Purcell says, “such as the person in Australia who asked us North Americans about cooking kangaroo or the woman in the United Arab Emirates who had questions about German sausages. But foods have become so universal, and even exotic foods are now available in mainstream supermarkets, that most questions from overseas are relevant and interesting to North American readers.”
Ask the Chef and Ochef.com are produced by FNS LLC, which syndicates food news and articles to newspapers, magazine publishers and Internet sites around the world. For more information, email info@ochef.com or call (646) 546-5409.
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