Our Favorite Stories from 2011

Well, Gilt Taste is still just a toddler, but the end of the year is always a good time to reflect a bit. So we did that for about six or seven seconds, to  realize that we’re incredibly proud of the stories and recipes we’ve published in 2011.

From offbeat histories like the Birth of the Atomic Cheeseburger to eye-opening political pieces on The Most Important Fish in the Sea to poignant personal stories like The Cake that Makes Our Family, we’ve tried to put together a collection of pieces that will move, inspire, intrigue and entertain you. Here are some of our favorites from the year (though, to be honest, we love our stories so much this list is almost random), and here’s looking forward to the next. (And for our favorite recipes of the year, click here.)  

Call us sentimental, but we'll start this list with three of our first stories. Back then,  we wanted to show some of the breadth we were looking to cover, and we're a little choked up over how much we love them still. (Plus, we were in launch mode, which meant severe sleep deprivation and more takeout than one should eat in a lifetime, so maybe we're just kind of emotionally jittery about the whole thing). 

• A piercing report on the controversial natural gas drilling technique called fracking, and what it will do to your food supply by Barry Estabrook, creatively titled What Will Fracking Do to Your Food Supply? 

• From there we went to Hank Shaw, wild-food writer par excellence, for The Thrill of the Mushroom Hunt.

• And then came our first, hilarious piece by the inimitable Lila Byock, on the awkwardness of not liking chocolate: Confessions of a Chocolate Hater.

• We were honored to talk with Soyoung Scanlan, cheesemaker of the famed Andante Dairy, and came away with the most inspiring, heart-breakingly wonderful interview: What's it Like Being a Cheese Superstar?

• Of course, not all masters practice their craft in quiet, meditative silence. Jason Sheehan's What Makes a Pizza Master is a fast, loose, and grimy story about obsession.

• And while we're talking about Sheehan, his The Birth of the Atomic Cheeseburger, part history, part bar-room yarn, told us more than we ever could have imagined about the connection between green chile cheeseburgers and the invention of the atom bomb.

• We never claimed to be a food history site, but between that burger and Stella Parks's delightful, fascinating Unknown History of Red Velvet Cake (plus a recipe for her modern adaptation of the original), we were thinking about it.

• We ran a lot of stories about fish; it is, after all, our last wild food. But perhaps the most important of these stories was by Alison Fairbrother and Randy Fertel, about the menhaden. You've probably never heard of it, but it's being fished at dangerous levels, and because it feeds so many other species, it may beThe Most Important Fish in the Sea.

• If food is love, then it's also about family, and we featured many stories that talk about the bonds formed at and around the table. Shauna James Ahern's How Going Gluten Free Let me Find the Love of (my) Life isn't quite a classic romance - it takes place, in part, at a park surrounded by drunks - but it touches the same way.

• Lila Byock's The Cake that Makes Our Family tells a gorgeous story of her grandfather, an unlikely baker and hero in World War II, whose babka recipe winds its way, in strange and unexpected directions, through the generations.

• We all learn about food while growing up. But what would you learn if you grew up, like Julia Langbein, with a razor wit, an eye for comedy, and a mother who basically taught Finland how to open McDonalds franchises? My Mother, the Voice of McDonalds

• Of course, no family is complete without some tension, rivalry, and the occasional backbiting and undercutting. Tamar Adler's Sibling Rivalry at the Stove tells us what happens when two siblings, who otherwise love one another, become competing chefs.

• And Tejal Rao and L. Nichol's The Shucker's Tale is the sweetest, saddest comic you'll ever read about father, sons, and oysters.

• Matt Kronsberg took a look, at the awful flooding in northeast farms because of Hurricane / Tropical Storm Irene, and found a different kind of family, of communities coming together to try to save their farmer friends in It Takes a Village to Save a Drowning Farm.

• And on the other side of the farmer, we have the chef. In Francis Lam's (Not) Ducking a Legacy we take a look at Jason Franey, the young, innovative chef of Seattle's Canlis, and what it means for a chef to try to make a name for himself while respecting the mentors who came before him.

So here we are, a semi-random pick of some of our favorites from 2011. (For the rest, go to our Stories page.) Thanks so much for coming to see us! Happy reading, happy eating, and happy new year.