Goodbye, Test Kitchen: It was used (and tired), we are

After three decades of perfecting recipes, feeding the hungry photographer, and cook batch after batch of Christmas cookies, the Foodday Test Kitchen closed before you. The Oregonian in a new building later this month

The Test Kitchen debuted in the 1980s, as the first editor Foodday Ginger Johnston created as a place for style food for photos. It was not much actual recipe makes tests in space, until a decade ago, when the then editor Martha Holmberg started using it to test all local service revenues in Foodday ago.

The person who does most of the cooking was director Linda Faus Test Kitchen, stove draw the clock on weekdays, which the editors Oregonian smells more like a restaurant in a busy office makes. Faus, who is known for their diligence in 2009 retired but continues to cook in the kitchen of the test, especially when sales fell flat. As a culinary Sherlock Holmes, had a talent for identifying why a recipe does not work, and you could test four-course or five times to make just right.

Before I know Faus, I knew blow his reputation with perseverance recipes and joints when learners reports left the dirty dishes in the sink test kitchen at night.

"Your mother does not work here," he said. "Make your own damn food!"

Goodbye, The Oregonian's Test Kitchen is in a new building move in July, the departure from the test kitchen, where Foodday recipes have been perfecting for years tested means. Grant Butler offers a final reflection about food and happy memories of cooking in this room.

I often tell people that day, I was more nervous Oregonian's when I interviewed for a job. The second most stressful day Faus first tried the original recipe of mine (a dish of wild hazelnut crust salmon). Fortunately, she went passed with flying colors. Since I have come to know as a total coward - as long as you leave as clean as you found evidence the kitchen.

Very little experience in the test kitchen never went to waste. The kitchen is in the northeast corner of the press room, right next to the photo department at The Oregonian, and testers Foodday recipes were always proud to have the legions of photographers, often too busy to provide a meal were normal news assignments.

In recent years, the test kitchen has been frequently of videos that uses different cooking techniques, and we have implemented new methods of storytelling in our bag of tricks. And we open the kitchen to visit the authors of cookbooks that show us how they came to make their favorite meals more.

All that ended last week when the Test Kitchen served its last meal and settlement of internal sales teams to employees Oregonian Media Group and Advance Central Services. The sale raised over $ 1,400 that start sharing the fall season campaign. It is also gratifying to know that all these blenders, can openers and pans went home with family members Foodday.

The new building will not have an Oregonian's Test Kitchen, but that does not mean that we test our recipes. The letter is now the recipes in the kitchen to test at home, and still several testers outside income that we have worked with over the years.

We will work harder than ever to ensure that our recipes work and are very tasty. But she the ingredient that makes you happy laugh test kitchen stove, and it will solve photographers to taste what happened and lost feedback.

Sounds like a good excuse to invite a photographer to dinner.

- Grant Butler