From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman and this is good food. Okay, right off I have to admit, I am the

opposite of a culinary obsessive when it comes to cooking and probably eating too. I learned early on

that too much pressure to be perfect was not good for my already high anxiety-tooled nervous system. So I've learned to accept the good

enough, which is what I like and what I hope others like too. But I also accept that there are

people out there like Ella Quittner, people for whom the investigation is paramount. Ella's book

obsessed with the best, 100 plus methodically perfected recipes

based on 20 plus head-to-head tests is fascinating for our food-obsessed culinary project-driven world.

Hi. Hi. I'm so excited to be here. I'm sure not the first to notice this, but I really love that your name has the word quit in it and that you are by definition not a quitter.

Yes, you and a bunch of kids in middle school all notice that immediately.

I'm glad I'm in that level of good company.

You know, I never said they were bad kids from middle school. I love that. So I have to say that personally, when I think about doing even three

iterations of a recipe, my mind immediately explodes. And, you know, I had restaurants, I cooked in

restaurants for like over 30 years.

The photo on page 5 of 34 individually wrapped dough pucks just breaks my brain.

I'm sorry? What is your method to keep everything organized as you move through the process

of each mission?

There's a lot of documentation happening.

So for those bench tests, I'll create a spreadsheet where I'm tracking all of these

quantitative and qualitative measures around my tests, everything from how many minutes

does this method take to, you know, for something like whipped cream, it might say, okay,

we used a cup of heavy cream in each recipe, what volume of whipped cream is resulting so I can track

the erration levels. But then there's also subjective columns in there. What did this taste good?

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