• Julia Thiel
  • Chicken sausage with chicken foot from Doug Sohn

This week’s Key Ingredient (in which Jason Hammel of Lula Cafe cooks with gjetost) is our 50th—a fact I probably wouldn’t even have realized if our videographer, Michael Gebert, hadn’t mentioned it at the shoot a couple weeks ago. It sounded about right—we launched just over a year ago, and have run Key Ingredient weekly since then with very few exceptions—but suddenly, it also sounded like a lot.

When the Reader started Key Ingredient last December, we thought it would have a finite life span. While we didn’t have a set period in mind, running it for about year seemed reasonable. At some point we’d surely run out of chefs or ingredients or both, or the whole thing would start to become repetitive.