Tyler Kord - Food52 Dynamite Chicken

Thank Yous

First and foremost, I would like to thank my incredible two-year-old daughter, Barbara. Her feedback was some of the most useful I received throughout the process of writing this book. Its hard to imagine a more straightforward criticism of a recipe than to see the food youve spent hours or even days perfecting spat out onto the floor. And how she howled when I was writing and not focused on her! In the end, she really, truly liked very few of the recipes that made it into this book. But shes so cute, and I want to scream at people on the street because I love her so much.

Thanks also to my wife, Katherine, who at all times had much more, and clearly more important, work to do than to worry about my silly chicken cookbook. She pulled our screaming baby off of me to allow me to get this project done, and that alone would have been enough. But shes never been that into chicken, and yet, like a chicken-eating saint, she ate nothing else for months to help me test recipes. It felt like that movie where Seth Rogen is writing a chicken cookbook and Michelle Williams has no choice but to cheat on him, but I dont think Katherine cheated on me much, if at all. Dont worry, Katherine, we can stop eating chicken now and go back to eating beans for every meal like we did before!

My agent, Jonah Straus, is who I am referring to every time I casually mention needing to speak to my agent or grab a drink with my agent when on the inside I simultaneously feel like Im awesome and bragging like a pompous jerk. But Jonah never makes me feel like Im bragging because he has much more successful clients than me. Still, I want to thank him heartily for always looking out for me.

Thank you so much to Ian Knauer of The Farm Cooking School for teaching me how to kill, gut, and clean chickens. It seems creepy to say that I had a really wonderful time murdering chickens with him, but I learned a lot and it made me think a ton about what it means to kill and consume animals, and it was a super-important and enriching experience.

Its funny that people think Im a good writer, because theyve never actually seen anything Ive written before it was edited. Even my emails tend to be very long and rambling, so the sixty recipes in this book started out at roughly 1,500 words each. Brinda Ayer was the editor who managed to turn it all into a coherent book. For months we had a weekly call on Tuesdays at 11 a.m., during which I would rant and ravesometimes about chicken but more often than not about cultural appropriation, authenticity, or my own insecurities as a white man (and also as a person)and she helped me sort through it all. Thank you so much, Brinda, these exclamation points are for you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I would also like to thank Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs for seeing something in me that shouted Chicken! and giving me the opportunity to write this book. And Suzanne DAmato and Kristen Miglore, thank you for not talking Amanda and Merrill out of it.

I appreciate the whole creative team at Food52, but I especially want to thank Alexis Anthony, James Ransom, Sarah Wight, Anna Billingskog, Yossy Arefi, and Josh Cohen, who were so sweet and wonderful and helpful.

And this book wouldnt exist without Julie Bennett, Emma Rudolph, Emma Campion, Lisa Bieser, Mari Gill, Serena Sigona, David Hawk, Allison Renzulli, and the rest of the team at Ten Speed Pressthank you!

Last, I would like to thank my baby, Barbara, again, because she is seriously so cute and looks enough like a chicken that we should have slipped a photo of her into the book. Next time.