Orlando — The Vegan Black Metal Chef is sacrificing something on his granite pentagram. It is a potato.

The potato is chopped into ragged pieces, about an inch and a half square, with a horrible metal instrument of death, then boiled, then beaten with a large silver mace shaped like a human skull. Flecks of potato flesh spray onto the Vegan Black Metal Chef’s carefully applied makeup, which, like the Vegan Black Metal Chef, is also vegan. The cooking utensils on the counter — swords, daggers, blades of chaos — shudder menacingly with pulsing vibrations of the ominous background music, which, like the Vegan Black Metal Chef, is also black metal.

Then the Vegan Black Metal Chef mixes the potatoes with a dollop of dairy-free Earth Balance buttery spread and a splash of almond milk and plates them attractively on a spiked metal tray with some vegetarian baked beans and a serving of corn.

A few weeks ago, a video appeared online. It was called — yes! — “Vegan Black Metal Chef Episode 1: Pad Thai.” It featured a man in chain mail, arm bracers and rubber shoulder armor (“pauldrons”) whipping up a delightful noodle dish in his kitchen. “Cut the tofu in half, like so,” he instructed in guttural snarl. “You are missing one ingredient. That is, of course, the heat . . . of . . . SATAN.”









It has more than a million views.

It is your cooking future.

Now, in the kitchen of his Orlando bungalow — the decor is a cozy dungeon-chic — the show’s star is working on Episode 2, to be posted online this week. It’s a manic endeavor in which he showcases three different vegan meals, including his Redneck Special starring mashed potatoes.

“People have said, ‘You should put this on the Food Network,’ ” says Brian Manowitz. (Vegan Black Metal Chefs are usually not born as such, and sometimes they are born as nice Jewish boys in Tampa named Brian Manowitz.) “I don’t know if the Food Network would really be interested.”

YouTube is. YouTube has become the repository for extreme cooking shows — cook-or-die kinds of shows, which are equal parts pageantry and commentary on just what America is doing in its collective kitchen.


Occasionally a black metal chef needs to go grocery shopping.

“I am always on the lookout for a good vegetarian soup stock,” says Manowitz, examining the ingredients on the back of a small foil packet.

Here we are, in a strip-mall Asian market that smells like dried mushrooms and fish paste. Manowitz slowly pushes his cart through the narrow aisles, casually drumming his black-polished nails against the handle, pausing to admire the imitation-meat products in the frozen foods section. Generally, he stays away from imitation meat. However, he says, “I can make a really good vegan shrimp scampi.”

His hair is in a ponytail. His build is muscular. His skin is pale and slightly irritated, the way skin gets when it is frequently covered with face paint.

Manowitz’s series is called “Vegan Black Metal Chef,” but it could have just as easily been called “What do vegans eat, anyway?” This is the question that Manowitz set out trying to answer. It is the question that every vegan is forever getting from every omnivore who seems to believe there is a parallel dimension of secret vegan foods.

But Manowitz, 30, who stopped eating meat in college at the suggestion of a girlfriend, never thought in terms of individual foods. He thought about full menus: red beans and rice. Whole-wheat pasta with vegetables. Stir-fries and curries of varying levels of heat. He is, lest his YouTube subscribers doubt his prowess, a really good cook.

He had tried making vegetarian cooking videos before, but they never really went anywhere — there was just too much other food-related stuff out there, clogging up the arteries of the Internet.

There was not, however, other stuff out there that involved custom-made rubber body armor and blast beat drumming.

Note the utter appropriateness of this combination. There is no group of people who are so intent on protecting their bodies from the influences of a herd-mentality society as vegans — except black metal fans. There is no group of people who are as indignantly self-righteous, as comically misunderstood or as regularly mocked as black metal fans — unless it is vegans.

Manowitz grew up in Tampa, studied behavioral neuroscience in college in Gainesville and planned on going to medical school. Instead he started playing guitar and moved to Orlando after graduation. He says it has a really great metal scene, which, considering the seething animosity that some residents must feel toward Mickey Mouse, is not entirely surprising.

Now he makes a living doing freelance sound engineering and playing in two black metal bands. On a sunny afternoon before he begins the taping for Episode 2 — which he films on his own, with a tripod — he congenially explains the subtle differences between black metal, its cousin death metal and its uncle thrash.

“Here’s a shortcut,” he offers helpfully, after outlining the differences between one’s more chest-based growl and the other’s raspier tone. “Death metal sounds like Cookie Monster; black metal is like Donald Duck.”


Something is happening to online cooking. Which is to say, online everybody is cooking like the Vegan Black Metal Chef. Cooking with testosterone (the women, too). Cooking with insanity. Cooking with unnerving intensity, and sometimes cooking with power tools.

Vegan Black Metal Chef is the latest example, but earlier ones include “Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time” — which can best be described as “Ultimate Fighter” meets lutefisk — and “Epic Meal Time,” a Dude-Where’s-My-Spatula take on cooking, which blends wisecracks and bacon. Their videos average four to five million views apiece.

“We’re in some real next-level [stuff] here,” yells “Epic Meal Time” host Harley Morenstein in one episode, as he prepares a Cheesy Grilled Cheese Tower. A calorie counter running at the top of the screen soars into quadruple digits.

“I like to say it’s a celebration-of-food show,” says the Canadian Morenstein in a phone interview. “Let’s do it how you really want it. Not how society pretends it wants to eat, but how that little fatty inside of you wants to eat.”

YouTube’s extreme cooking genre has exploded in the past year — though surely it owes something to the Japanese and their classically weird import, “Iron Chef.”

Outside of this YouTube world, the rest of cooking gets pickier and pickier. More organic. More antioxidant. More local, to the point that only tomatoes grown in your own bathtub will suffice. “Vegan Black Metal Chef” — and all of its satiating brethren — is a rejoinder to every delicate food trend that has infiltrated the nation’s cookbooks and an answer to the prolonged adolescence that has made whole swaths of 20-somethings fear the kitchen.

The response is: Shut up and just cook something.

“I was always paralyzed whenever I would try to cook,” says Zach Golden, a New York copywriter, of the domestic failings that led him to launch the extreme cooking blog “What the [Bad Word] Should I Make for Dinner?”

“Make some [bleeping] baked stuffed lobster,” the site suggests in accusing block letters, providing a link to a recipe.

Golden recently got a book deal — the paper version of the site comes out in August — and he has a massive Facebook community of potty-mouthed cooks who report on their evening menus: “Thai chicken and [bleeping] veggies,” posts someone, to the cheerful response, “Nicely done, [bleep]!”

“I think that half of them are celebrating the defiance,” Golden says, “and half of them are celebrating the use of [Bad Word].”

Somewhere along the line, hunger became an act of defiance, feeding it became an act of rebellion. The people who follow this extreme cooking movement have looked at the Food and Drug Administration and its ever-changing recommendations — the four food groups, the food pyramid, the brand new MyPlate — and thought, Chuck it. We are going to just get into the kitchen and let ’er rip.


It’s 4 a.m.

The Vegan Black Metal Chef is still cooking.

More fire, please. More weapons. He gets a cut while he is dicing some veggies, a battle scar from the deadly Brussels sprout saute. He decides this would make excellent television and waves his bloody finger in front of the camera. Then he seductively licks the knife.

He has cooked until his hair is sweaty, until it clings to his makeup, until his shoulder armor sags off his back. He has cooked in such a way that anyone watching him cook would say, “I can do that. I am going to kick that pasta with spring vegetables’ butt.”

He has put on a good show.

Finally, just before the sun begins to rise in Orlando, he puts the finishing touches on his last dish. He then commences with a ritual headbanging, which is how he typically likes to end a successful cooking session.

The black candles flicker. The countertop is covered with an amazing feast of delicious and cruelty-free menu items. The stereo blasts metal.

Manowitz headbangs and headbangs, his long hair flying, until the meal is cooked, and the song comes to an end, and the only sound left is the sound of his chainmail, fluttering gently through a haze of smoke.

Awesome.

Nothing beats Epic Mealtime. Nothing...

Post some more of your fave episodes!

Careful what you wish for. There's hardly a bad episode...

How many times have you wondered whether it is acceptable to eat sushi with your fingers? And how many times have you been told that it isn’t? As a matter of etiquette, many cultures eschew eating with one’s fingers, which seems to be ingrained particularly deeply in western behavior. But be at ease, sushi fans, because sushi has a long history of being finger food, at least some sushi that is.

Nigiri (finger) sushi was the first “fast food.” Originally sold from carts in the street, it acquired its shape so as to be easy to eat on the go. It wasn’t until centuries after its introduction that the sushi restaurant came to be. And with the restaurant, came new ways of eating sushi. In bowls and boxes, platters and leaves, sushi in its myriad forms was served to a growing pool of restaurant goers. While still finger food, some styles were introduced that could not be easily eaten with the fingers (and shouldn’t be), such as sashimi. But while many choose to eat nigiri sushi with chopsticks, this only seems to be a question in the western world.

So… Can I eat sushi with my fingers, you ask? Of course, nigiri sushi is the ultimate finger food.

Meshi Agare!

A relatively small serving of the Chili Four Loko (I'm an omnivore) with a knife and fork, no problem.

BTW, anyone else here noticed recipes in comics?

I believe one issue of Power Pack contains a recipe for James Power's Lentil Soup. (The running joke being everybody hated it, except Franklin Richards who responded to it like he did everything served at the Power house: "Oh boy, my favorite!")

And it's not comics, but in my early teens I was a big fan of the Dragonlance books, and they released two companion large softcover books full of legends, songs, poetry, and, yes, recipes, of the Dragonlance world (or just inspired by), like "Otik's Spice Fried Potatoes", and "Fizban's Fireball Chili". I actually attempted some of them, with varying degrees of success and modification (and ate my own variation of Otik's Spice Fried Potatoes quite regularly in my teens when I was going through a particularly finicky eating phase). I still have the books somewhere, I'm sure.

Esther Inglis-Arkell — Do you eat a cereal that's "fortified with iron"? Do you doubt that this means you're just eating tiny iron filings? Time to think again.

Here's a quick experiment to make eating cereal every morning either less appealing or way more cool, depending on your point of view. Grab a flaky cereal - preferably one that is 'fortified with iron'. The small snack-pack type cereals work best, both because they come in little bags inside the box which will be handy for crushing the cereal and because it's likely that you can scam one off of your workplace. Put some cereal in a bag or a non-metal bowl and crush it to powder. Add just enough water to cover the cereal. Now take either a magnet or (recommended) some magnetic tape wrapped around the end of a popsicle stick, and put it in a smooth, clear sandwich bag. Stir the bagged stick around in the cereal for about ten minutes.



Withdraw the popsicle stick/magnet and what do you see? There should be miniscule metal bits clinging to the magnet. Those are iron filings, if only tiny ones. They are put there on purpose. Technically, they are good for you. Everyone needs a little iron to stay healthy. Most of it goes to your red blood cells, helping them get oxygen to other cells in the body. There are two types of iron, heme and nonheme. Heme is found mostly in animal products, in the hemoglobin - the aforementioned red blood cells.

Since meat is a lot of trouble to produce and to manipulate in the food industry, heme iron is often tough to come by. Nonheme iron, not associated with red blood cells, is found in lentils and legumes. This is easier to get, and is what's added to 'fortify' foods with iron. No, companies haven't actually stooped to shaking iron filings into breakfast cereal - it would probably also be more expensive, anyway - but the result is the same. With a little work, and the right tools, nonheme iron can be taken right out of the cereal again, leaving people staring at a fuzzy, metal-covered magnet and wondering, "Should I eat that?"

Via the Office of Dietary Supplements and Totally Irresponsible Science.

Image by Antonio Petrone / Shutterstock.com

Swedish Meatballs. They are good for you.

Lingonsylt are for Swedish nationalists. WE DONT LIKE THAT

Pancakes. Lots of you wanted to see them. Like this? WELL EITHER WAY ITS GOOD FOR YOU!