Boston Globe food columnist Adam Ried got one of his best column ideas ever when a late-night case of the munchies led him to try making a milkshake out of chocolate sorbet. "It was so much better than the mocha shakes I'd made with chocolate syrup," he recalled, and soon he had a bunch of people over to test-drive some more variations. ("It's not hard to find friends to taste milkshakes," he confided.) One guest sprinkled cardamom into the mocha shake; Ried loved the results, and the column wound up focusing on a batch of similar "twists."

From there, he went on to develop Thoroughly Modern Milkshakes, and one of the first questions we had when we met him for drinks at The Stand was whether there were any flavors he hadn't been able to refine to his satisfaction...

Once he got started experimenting, it was hard to stop. "The contract was for 50 shakes," he said of the book deal, "and I think I ended up with 110." Working on a tight deadline (less than five months), he wound up test-driving 100 variations during a visit with his sister; "I shudder at how many calories I consumed that one week," he reflected—sure, a couple slurps would've given him an idea of the flavor, but how would he know if it was enduring without testing the entire glass? Afterwards, he joked, his doctor suggested his next book should be about "the wonders of dressing lettuce with plain lemon juice."

That's not the actual idea he's working on, of course, but he is working out a concept for a second book at his own pace. In the meantime, he's enjoying the wide range of dishes he gets to tinker with through his Globe column. Prior to that gig, he wrote for Cook's Illustrated, where "it's all about meatloaf and apple pie, so that's what I did." (Not that he's knocking it: He notes that the magazine was able to attract a million subscribers in under 15 years by focusing on those basics, and he still writes for the sister publication, Cook's Country—along with a recurring role on PBS's America's Test Kitchen.) "Some of my other friends who write cookbooks tease me for going too slow as I write recipes," he added, "but I do want to at least try the obvious variations. I don't know how people do those books with 1,000 recipes. It would take me years without a staff."