Gratin 'N' Budweiser with Chef Bill Smith

Summary

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"Peppers are promiscuous, and you never know what you'll get," he says, slicing the dark red pepper from his garden in the back. It's a variety that he doesn't remember planting. "Oh, but this is good. It doesn't knock you out, and it's got this nice sweetness... I like its heat."

[Bill Smith] is open to invention to find the right recipe. And he takes pleasure in the fact that he doesn't always find it. That constitutes the adventure. "Oh, I've made some dreadful things, but - hopefully - none of them reach the table," Smith says, snapping asparagus stalks. "Really, I'm more likely to do something dreadful here when I'm by myself. I'll throw a steak on the grill and get busy and invariably burn the shit out of it."

Special things sometimes happen. One is his honeysuckle sorbet, a local springtime favorite. Gene Hamer, his boss at Crook's, was enamored with the smell of the blossom and asked Smith if he could do anything with it. After years of prompting and consideration, it finally happened. "I found an old Arab recipe from Sicily for jasmine ice, and the secret was that the flowers had to be left in cool water for a long time to pull out the flavor. You can't cook the blossoms or they'll fall apart," Smith remembers, noting that - if he hadn't stumbled upon the jasmine ice recipe - he was prepared to study French perfuming methods to extract the honeysuckle's essence. "I would get it to work one year and then forget what I did the next. Finally, I found that recipe."

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Gratin 'N' Budweiser with Chef Bill Smith

Bill Smith's cooking is inspiring - the process and the product. Moving around the colorful kitchen in his Chapel Hill home, a small ranch house surrounded by student apartments off of Columbia Street, Smith peers into a gas oven, stands up and proclaims, "Well, I am sort of fearless."

He's telling the truth. In the kitchen, Smith - the head ch...

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