Watching the early episodes can be borderline painful. Everything about the first season looks as if a busload of graduate students in sociology occupied a TV station and decided to create programming. The set is tenebrous with slasher-sequel gloom, and the cast appears breathless with fear. There’s truly cringeworthy flirting between Kimball and Bridget Lancaster (B.L.: cutting into a roast chicken: “So juicy, it’s squirting all over the place”) and the frequent unintentional jokes that threaten to capsize the proceedings (“It’s time to flip the bird”) are made unspeakably worse by the smothered fits of cackling that follow. The impression is of a camera crew that simply walked into the office and began filming. “That’s pretty much what happened,” says Julia Collin Davison, a kitchen assistant conscripted onto the show who became one of its mainstays. “You can see the stress-blindness on our faces.” Willoughby, who was handed the show’s science segment, agrees. “Those shows are pretty rough-looking,” he says. “I think what appealed to viewers was how real they were.” When I mentioned this to Kimball, he grinned: “That’s what people always say when you suck at something.”

For a week or two, Andrea Geary’s attempt to bulletproof the egg looked as if it would veer into the Fudge Zone. Old-Fashioned Chocolate Fudge is the recipe everyone at C.I. mentions as the ultimate kitchen calamity — a project that, despite sound intentions, a proven methodology and rivers of brow sweat, wound up on the scrap heap. For whatever reason, it became indexed in my mind as the Bataan Death Fudge. David Pazmiño, a test cook, spent four months stir-and-lifting the New England boardwalk confection, trying to solve the problem of the ultraprecise temperatures required in candy making. The stiffening fudge required real arm muscle to agitate, and soon the 200-plus-pound Pazmiño reaggravated an old injury, inflamed an excruciating case of tendinitis and took to wearing a thumb brace around the office. More than 1,000 pounds of fudge later, the recipe wouldn’t work without a candy thermometer, a tool Kimball judged too exotic for the home kitchen, and so Old-Fashioned Chocolate Fudge became a cautionary tale. “The poor guy left soon after that,” Kimball says, “and I think the fudge may have had something to do it.” In fact, Pazmiño stayed on for another 18 months after the O.F.C.F. debacle, but he did vent to me for a spell. “Sometimes you have to walk away from it,” he said. “And of course you can’t look at fudge again.”

At the test kitchen in Brookline, Geary’s Calvinist assault on the egg reached a make-or-break point, and echoes of fudge couldn’t be far from her mind. On advice from a Harvard food scientist named Guy Crosby, Geary separated the yolks from the whites, poured them into beakers rigged with precision thermometers and heated them in a pot of water. She ascertained that while the yolks stiffen at 158 degrees, the dominant protein in the whites, ovalbumin, doesn’t set until 180. Having eliminated boiling and simmering for aforementioned reasons of breakage and vagueness, respectively, Geary settled on steaming. After tests showed that changing the eggs’ position in the steamer basket (on the side, standing in a bottle cap with the round end up and the pointy end up) elicited no meaningful differences and further tests determined that steaming for seven minutes followed by a minute in an ice-water bath (to arrest the cooking) yielded the most appetizing egg, and even more tests convinced Geary that adding eggs to the pot didn’t affect cooking time, crisis struck. Identically cooked eggs were turning out differently. Roughly half the eggs revealed off-center yolks that turned stiff and chalky at the edge while the whites remained oozy at the center. The cruelty of this development — was nature itself mocking us? — set the teeth on edge. This juncture was where I would have gotten into the walk-in-pantry tequila, but Geary, made of sterner timber, shut herself in the bathroom with the lights off.

She was following a tangent. Geary duct-taped a toilet-paper roll core to the business end of a flashlight, and in the bathroom’s humid dark she beamed the contraption through two dozen white eggs to locate the yolks’ shadows, which she marked on the shells with a Sharpie (brown eggs were impervious to the device’s low-wattage luminance). Muted ahhs of scientific inquiry could be heard behind the door. A pair of fibrous strands called chalazae anchor the yolk inside the egg, and Geary figured that sundering them would allow the yolk to float to the center. She tried spinning one, dreidel-style, but it skittered off the counter and narrowly missed my shoe. Geary had another idea; she gave six eggs an ear-level shake, looking for a moment like an Afro-Cuban percussionist, and then dropped them in the steam. We waited, perspiring from the heat and expectation. Taste tests were happening around us in “America’s Test Kitchen,” and I began to anxiously nibble a round of a sausage log from the Catalan-Style Beef Stew recipe that was being evaluated at the adjacent counter. Soon the kitchen went quiet in anticipation. When Geary finally sliced the cooling eggs in half, delectably runny yolks glistened in the precise centers of the barely set whites. Astonishment. This mother of all aha moments made me feel as if I just watched a high-school point guard heave a winning 55-foot jump shot at the buzzer, but Geary merely slipped the digital timer back into the breast pocket of her smock and announced her transition to layering meringues. (It came to pass, months later, that fickle Friends of Cook’s scuttled the shaking — apparently it caused their eggs to explode — and Geary settled on a less-inspired method, but at the moment we stood basking in achievement.) Geary permitted herself only a wily grin, a look after having beaten the Perfect Soft-Boiled Egg that seemed to say, “C’est la guerre.”

Later, after she e-mailed her voluminous test notes to Kimball, he wrote back, “I submit.”

There was barely light in the windows of radio station WGBH, but Kimball was at the microphone, haranguing the deputy secretary of agriculture, Kathleen Merrigan, about the laxity of the government’s organic-labeling program. Merrigan was drowsy, and the pollen was bothering her eyes, but Kimball was wide-awake. “Eight o’clock,” he practically hollered, spiking the meters. “It’s lunchtime!” He pressed her on synthetic fertilizers, nitrogen-treated tomatoes, soil depletion and pasturing, at one point floating the idea that the U.S.D.A. is little more than the lobbying arm of Big Agribusiness. Merrigan countered with the kind of upbeat platitudes most effective bureaucrats are practiced at, but Kimball dug in. “It’s no guarantee that it will taste better, it’s no guarantee that animal welfare was better, there’s no real guarantee that it’s environmentally more sustainable,” he intoned, “so I wonder whether the term ‘organic’ has that much meaning.” After the mikes were off, he conceded grudgingly that the agency does require that organic meat be antibiotic-free and crops be rotated, but the subject stuck in his craw, mostly because organic costs more and, worse, smacks of elitism.

The interview was one of those times when it became clear that Kimball’s obsession isn’t cooking, or even food per se, but their social context and potency as metaphors. He may be the sole person associated with food journalism to remark, “There’s something about pleasure I find annoying.” Pam Anderson compares Kimball to a frustrated minister, and Kimball does admit to having delivered a few sermons at his pocket-size Vermont church. He dislikes politics and keeps his affiliations opaque, but when I pointed out that some of his writing bears a passing resemblance to campaign pronouncements by Rick Santorum, he was quick to call the former senator and his ilk a “bunch of idiots.” His real difficulty as an evangelist, however, is the one afflicting most multimillionaires who expound publicly on the virtues of simple living. His magazines and books have made him very rich — the company remains privately held, and while Kimball won’t disclose hard figures, he does admit, and not without pleasure, that annual revenues are well over $50 million. His homilies about pickup-driving agrarians are complicated by the fact that Kimball has been known to arrive at work in a Maserati and labors at macaroni-and-cheese recipes in adjacent bow-front brownstones in Boston’s South End that his employees sometimes call “Chris’s double-wide.”