Travis Lambros of Pickled Perfection with his dad's secret pickling mix.

​Originally designed to preserve vegetables for extended lengths of time, the pickling process has been around since ancient times. Julius Caesar fed pickles to his troops to increase their stamina. Pickles were purported to be a part of Cleopatra's beauty routine, and Shakespeare repeatedly mentioned them in his plays.

Wait, that isn't a pickle! Or is it?

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"I love to cook," he tells New Times. "I probably should've gone to culinary school."  

Lambros did the next best thing. He perfected his pickling recipe, rented kitchen space at Lester's Catering in Phoenix and recruited sons Travis and Adam to help make and package pickles with a little kick.

So how do you get from crisp asparagus spear to spicy pickle? 

​Behind Traci Wilbur's Arcadia ranch home is a little building.  We step through the door into a room with pale lavender walls and shiny industrial ovens surrounded by gleaming subway tile.  

A breeze blows in through an open window mingling with the scent of freshly baked pie.  Have we died and gone to a kitchen in heaven?

No, we haven't stumbled across the pearly gates, but we have just entered Traci's workspace, an industrial kitchen custom built by her husband and home to her bakery, Pie Snob.  

​In ancient times, Mayans drank cacao concoctions to achieve an altered consciousness believed to bring them close to a god-like state.  It was this promise of elevated awareness and an interest in Divine Metaphysics that initially attracted Sam Filicetti, an electrical engineer, to chocolate-making.

The Mayans drank the chocolate, but we prefer to bite into it and getting the cacao mixture to the perfect state is where the modern magic happens.  The process of getting chocolate to solidify and form a shiny coating is tricky.  

Filicetti, who calls his company ib2, explains that many large chocolate producers use a small amount of paraffin to guarantee the glossy finish and this addition can give the finished product a slightly waxy taste.

​The secret to Bill Hutchison's Kissed With Fire Salsa starts in New Mexico, where the official state bird is the roadrunner and the official state question is "red or green"?  

The question refers to the New Mexico Chile, a pepper with a long and somewhat heated history in the state. In Albuquerque, people say that the early picked green peppers are the best, while a ways north in Santa Fe, residents swear by the sweetness of the late- picked red. 

While traveling on business as a maintenance contractor for State Farm Insurance, Hutchison fell for the mouth-watering subtleties of the New Mexico chile pepper. After sampling chile dishes all across New Mexico, from roadside gas station booths to well known favorites like Albuquerque's Sadies, Hutchison brought the peppers back to Phoenix where he began experimenting with the chile in his own recipes.

As for the question that causes such debate among our neighbors in New Mexico? Hutchison is a green man.

Doctor Hummus proudly poses with the mixer that began his business. Lucky for us, he's moved on to bigger and better.

​Saber Rouin's father always wanted him to be a doctor.

Rouin was born in the North African country of Tunisia. His story begins on the deck of a cruise ship, a Love Boat of sorts, where he launched his early culinary career, and met his wife. From there, he journeyed on to Las Vegas where he was employed as a chef in one of the large casinos. 

Just after the birth of his son, Rouin decided to shift gears and settle in Phoenix, a place he thought would provide a more family-friendly environment. In Phoenix, he finally found a way to utilize his love of food while making good on that promise, he'd made to his father back in Tunisia.  

Rouin never earned a medical degree, but Phoenicians know him by his alter ego and local company Doctor Hummus. 

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Jordan Stejskal used to struggle with a multiple personality problem.

For years, the Phoenix native worked for a Scottsdale architecture firm where she was a self-described office Super Girl in pencil skirts and heels.  When she wasn't in the office, Jordan turned into the hippie chef, a farmer's market groupie who enjoyed whipping up homemade meals.

Last year, Jordan found a way to merge the two parts herself with a new business called The Gardeners Kitchen.