World's Best Lasagna, the longtime top recipe at AllRecipes.com despite its hefty list of 20 ingredients and relatively long prep time. (Deb Lindsey/For The Washington Post) 
 
 John Chandler has a secret, and he guards it carefully, lest yet another friend or co-worker ask him to make it for a dinner party. 
 
 Chandler is, by day, a 43-year-old salesman and father of two, a self-proclaimed “Southern boy” who lives outside Dallas and grew up on college football and barbecue. Online, Chandler’s fans know him differently: He is the creator of the World’s Best Lasagna, an artery-clogging tower of sweet Italian sausage, ground beef and ricotta cheese that has reigned as the most popular recipe on AllRecipes.com for more than a decade. It has earned 10,423 ratings and been “pinned” to Pinterest more than 25,000 times. AllRecipes estimates that 12 million people viewed it in the past five years alone. 
 
 Given the wild popularity of AllRecipes.com — it averages 20 million visits each month, according to analytics firm SimilarWeb — it’s entirely possible that Chandler’s lasagna is the most popular recipe on the English-speaking Internet. 
 
 “How are you calculating that?” asked a startled Chandler, who has posted only one other dish on AllRecipes since the day he submitted the lasagna in 2001. He still can’t believe the recipe’s popularity. Neither can his friends. 
 
 “Most of them didn’t know I had this recipe,” Chandler said. “It’s not something I go around beating my chest about. But it makes an interesting icebreaker, you know?” 
 
 Lasagna does seem out of character for Chandler, who grew up in Atlanta, moved to the Dallas suburbs a decade ago and describes his heritage as “entirely Anglo-Saxon.” He learned to cook from his mother — the lasagna is his version of her recipe — and began cooking in earnest as an underage college student, when he realized dinner parties made good proxies for nights spent out on the town. 
 
 In 2001, his then-girlfriend, an avid AllRecipes user, urged him to put the lasagna recipe online, where others could make and review it. The dish quickly earned a string of five-star reviews and climbed to the top of AllRecipes’ rankings. Her own submissions, meanwhile, never quite caught on. 
 
 “We ended it soon after that,” Chandler jokes. 
 
 In the 12 years since, both Chandler’s lasagna and AllRecipes itself have seen their popularity balloon several times over. AllRecipes, still a ragtag start-up in the early ’00s, struggled to convince its critics that the Internet was cooking’s next frontier. Esmee Williams, now vice president for brand marketing, left her job at a software company that made recipe CD-ROMs in 1999 to become employee No. 18. Friends questioned the career move. 
 
 “I got a lot of sand kicked in my face,” Williams said. “The Internet was young. People didn’t think it would succeed. No one understood why people would want to read recipes by their peers and not by professional chefs,” Williams said. 
 
 But history has sided with Williams, who celebrated AllRecipes’ 15th anniversary last year from a downtown Seattle office. The company estimates it has more than 7 million registered users and 30 million unique visitors annually, which makes it the largest English-language food site in the world, ahead of Food.com, Cooks.com and Taste of Home, all of which operate on a similar home-cook-submitted model. 
 
 “I personally wouldn’t go to the Internet for a recipe . . . but I know that’s not fashionable,” said Jan Longone, the 80-year-old curator of the American culinary history collection at the University of Michigan and a longtime friend of Julia Child and James Beard. “I’ll put it this way: 20 years from now, I’m probably going to be obsolete.” 
 
 She is definitely in the minority. According to a survey AllRecipes commissioned last year, cooks now turn more to the Internet for recipes than to cookbooks or family members. Last year, according to Nielsen, sales of cookbooks fell for the first time since 2007. 
 
 That could signal a slight break from the previous 217 years of American culinary history, and it undoubtedly influences the way Americans eat. AllRecipes users tend toward the harried and middle-aged, people who enjoy cooking for their families but are hustling to get a quick Tuesday dinner on the table. That means they have priorities, said Williams: They prefer five to seven ingredients that they can find in their pantries or at a mid-range grocery store. They want nice, clean pictures of each dish. They don’t want to spend more than an hour cooking. 
 
 As a result, AllRecipes’ best-loved dishes — the ones that bubble to the top of millions of Google searches, spiral around Pinterest and end up, eventually, on countless kitchen tables — tend to be classic and easy, verging on unsophisticated. Just behind Chandler’s lasagna are a basic pancake, banana bread and sugar cookie, each made with seven ingredients. The site’s top-rated pot roast, which in August was briefly one of the most-discussed pieces of content on Facebook, calls for two cans of cream of mushroom soup, a package of dried onion soup mix and a 51 / 2 -pound roast. That’s it. 
 
 Chandler’s lasagna is the exception. It takes 21 / 2 hours to cook, excluding prep time, and its 20 ingredients cost $40 at a Washington area grocery store. After an hour and a half on the stove, the sauce tastes good the way a jar of Bertoli sauce tastes good: bright and acidic, but not particularly nuanced. And the ricotta filling, which Chandler makes with cheese, one egg and a bit of parsley, seems flat next to, say, the bechamel sauce that’s traditional in parts of Italy, or the nutmeg- and mint-tinged varieties that exist elsewhere on AllRecipes. Other cooks have suggested hundreds of tweaks: less salt and fennel, a cup of red wine, an extra pinch of Italian seasoning — even a wholesale healthful makeover that substitutes lean turkey and low-fat mozzarella for the ground beef and sliced cheese. 
 
 Chandler doesn’t mind the changes; in fact, he has used some of them himself. One of his sons has a gluten allergy, and his wife is what Chandler terms a “health nut,” which has forced him to invent different versions of the dish. Chandler also hates following recipes; he’d never even measured the ingredients in the World’s Best Lasagna until he decided to put it online. 
 
 “I like blending the flavors and coloring outside the lines,” he said. “The sauce is best when you salt it to taste and then, once you get it going, just flavor it as you go.” 
 
 His other advice for cooks who want to make his lasagna : Let it sit in the fridge overnight; it’s better the next day. And be careful whom you cook it for, because you could end up making it regularly. Chandler takes the dish to events 12 to 15 times a year, often at the request of someone who discovers it’s the “world’s best.” Although he generally doesn’t let on about his Internet fame, it comes up from time to time — such as when he wrote on Facebook about his interview with The Post. 
 
 “Well look at you all published in the recipe world. . . . Who knew!?” one friend wrote. 
 
 Chandler has since changed his profile picture to an illustration of a mustachioed Italian chef — facetiously, it turns out, because true to his Georgia roots, Chandler’s favorite things to cook are steak, barbecue and “anything else that can go on a grill.” 
 
 “I’m definitely not a foodie,” said Chandler, a man who has probably taught Americans as much about lasagna as Mario Batali has. “I don’t have aspirations to be on �?MasterChef’ or anything. But I love to cook.” ||||| Your move, Ron Swanson. 
 
 Matt 'Megatoad' Stonie, one of Major League Eating's top two eaters in the world, just set the bacon-eating record by housing 182 slices in five minutes. 
 
 That's a lot of pig; Stonie estimates that he ate more than six pounds of cooked bacon, which sports more than 28,000 milligrams of sodium, according to Smithfield, which sponsored the event in Daytona, Florida. 
 
 "The bacon was cooked just the way I like it -- a little crispy because I don't like having to chew it," Stonie told HuffPost Weird News after the feat. "I don't feel that bad. I'm used to 10 or 12 minute contests, where I'm eating 10 or 15 pounds of food. I came into this prepared." 
 
 Just as bacon hits its prime on the world stage, so has its champion. Stonie told HuffPost that he'll never lose his craving for the breakfast behemoth. Eating competitively is his job, and when he's stuffing his face on stage, he doesn't taste food the same. 
 
 "I feel the texture, I taste the saltiness, and I focus on getting it all down," he said. "But I love bacon, it goes with everything." 
 
 He added that he's picky about how his pork product is prepared: "It needs to be cooked perfectly. It can't be too crispy and if it's not warm when I get it, the fat coagulates into lard." 
 
 Going in, the new Baron of Breakfast didn't have much competition. MLE hasn't ever sponsored a true bacon-eating contest before, and for comparison's sake, unofficial eating groups show a measly 54 pieces of bacon as the previous "record." But Stonie needed to set the bar high today. After all, Megatoad is second only to Joey "Jaws" Chestnut on MLE's list of gustatory greats, and Stonie admits that the two waste no time in eating each other's records. EatFeats shows that the two are gut-and-gut in most competitions. 
 
 It wasn't immediately clear whether Chestnut would try to pilfer the pork record, but Stonie can rest easy knowing that today is his day. In fact, it has been his month -- he has set several records in Florida, including today's in Daytona and a 14.5-pound birthday cake eating record set in West Palm Beach on Feb. 14. 
 
 He also went chew-for-chew with Chestnut in the 2014 Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, though Chestnut edged him out in the final minutes, winning 61-56. ||||| Marilyn Hagerty, a food critic famous for her earnest review of Olive Garden, is back with another honest take on a household name -- McDonald's. 
 
 Touted as a critic almost everyone can relate to, the nearly-90-year-old Hagerty has reviewed restaurants for the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota for nearly 30 years, and worked at the paper itself for almost 60 years. Hagerty writes a lot about American dining, and has written about Olive Garden, Applebees, Taco Bell and Buffalo Wild Wings, just to name a few. 
 
 In her latest post, Hagerty visits four of her local McDonald's to take on the fast food giant... and she doesn't hold back. Here are a few of her most notable quotes: 
 
 On Big Macs: 
 
 "My visit to the McDonald's near Columbia Mall is where I enjoyed my secret sin -- a big Mac for $4.39. Something I do once every couple of years. But they help to fill up active, working people. They almost overwhelm lethargic people like me." 
 
 On coffee: 
 
 "The coffee, which is McDonald's brand, was strong and not too hot." 
 
 On lattes and latte machines not working: 
 
 "The lattes cost less than those I enjoy at Starbucks. But they are worthy. The only problem is occasionally, one of the restaurants will tell you their machine is not working. 'Not working?'' I think. I almost foam at the mouth in disgust, but I try to be pleasant." 
 
 On soda for breakfast: 
 
 "On a recent day with the noon temperature at zero the day before, the nuggets were free. I watched three young people carefully order the sandwich and free nuggets. And it's hard to believe, but they also had cola drinks for breakfast." 
 
 On the idea of sausage egg McMuffins: 
 
 "And with it I had a sausage egg McMuffin. That was $2.99 and a whopping 370 calories. You know you have eaten, and I like the combination." 
 
 Though we can't quite tell if Hagerty likes or dislikes McDonald's, she gives an incredibly accurate picture of what McDonald's is like during the day -- fun, fairly busy and a neat place to observe the community. HuffPost Taste reached out to Lisa McComb, Director of McDonald’s Media Relations, who was thrilled with Hagerty's review: 
 
 "We are honored Marilyn took the time to objectively review all the McDonald’s in Grand Forks, in a way only she can. We thank Marilyn for highlighting what we’ve known for years -- our hometown McDonald’s play an important role in the community. And, hey Marilyn, we’re working on fixing that latte machine." 
 
 Want to read more from HuffPost Taste? Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr. ||||| Two years ago, below a New York Times recipe for Katharine Hepburn’s brownies, a woman named Sydne Newberry left what is perhaps the greatest recipe comment of all time, in a genre known for excellence. 
 
 In merely 74 words she introduces us to tension, to intrigue, and to a plot twist so stark and shocking it has haunted those who read it long after they closed their browser window: 
 
 “This has been my go-to brownie recipe for 30 years. In the ’80s, an acquaintance in Germany to whom I brought some of the brownies, and who considered herself a great cook, asked for the recipe but was never able to get it to work. She kept asking me what she was doing wrong and I was never able to solve her problem. Eventually, she moved to the U.S. and stole my husband!” 
 
 Newberry’s comment is considered the Times’ moderating team’s “all-time favorite” and has made the rounds on Twitter several times. After its latest brush with virality, the Cut reached out to Newberry for the backstory. She’s a nutritionist, evidence reviewer, and research communications analyst based in Los Angeles who reviews medical literature and writes reports for federal agencies. 
 
 Here’s her version of the events behind The Brownie Comment. 
 
 She wrote that she first met the acquaintance when her then-husband of eight years was on temporary duty for the Air Force in Germany (their husbands at the time knew each other). Newberry brought them the brownies and after the acquaintance — described as “a gorgeous Italian woman who was very proud of her cooking and was a real food snob” — asked her for the recipe, they went back and forth in the mail trying to get it to work. When it didn’t take, “she insinuated that I’d purposely left something out of the recipe.” 
 
 Three years later, Newberry continued, the acquaintance visited and said that she and her husband had broken up. 
 
 “A couple weeks into the visit, I ran into a neighbor who lived behind the construction site [Ed. Note: Newberry said that her then-husband was building a second house on their property at the time], who asked me if it bothered me that my husband and the woman were fooling around! I didn’t actually believe the neighbor until a week or so later, I came home and caught the two of them. The woman hightailed it back to Germany, I went to stay with a friend and gave my husband an ultimatum,” she shared. “He said he wanted to stay married to me, but then he immediately headed back to Germany for another ‘business’ trip! I took the opportunity of his absence to move out. A few months later, she was back but I never spoke another word to her.” 
 
 But the next chapter of Newberry’s life was a happy one: she moved to D.C. and married her current husband, whom she calls the love of her life. And what’s his relationship to the brownies? “Ironically, he didn’t taste the brownies for years, because he’d always been allergic to eggs. He finally discovered he’d outgrown the egg allergy when he decided to go to culinary school! He loves the brownies!” Reader: he loves the brownies! 
 
 As for the other woman’s brownies? “Even after going to baking school, I never figured out what went wrong with the woman’s brownies and I sure never cared to ask her,” Newberry concluded. “Although I’ve modified the recipe a tiny bit recently … I still love it and think of it as Katharine Hepburn’s brownie recipe. And I can’t think of it without thinking of that little twist of irony.”
– What's more popular than pancakes, banana bread, and chocolate chip cookies? With 12 million views in the last five years alone, it appears the answer is John Chandler's lasagna. The dish, with its nearly two pounds of meat and more than two pounds of cheese, is appropriately called the "World's Best Lasagna," and it's spent more than 10 years as the No. 1 recipe on AllRecipes.com (or close to it; it seems to be No. 2 at the moment, behind Banana Crumb Muffins), reports the Washington Post. The 43-year-old Texan, whose day job is not chef but salesman, first put the lasagna, a variation of his mom's recipe, up on the site in 2001 (total number of recipes he's added to the site: two). And though AllRecipes' users—it's the most trafficked English-language food site—typically want quick and easy meals, Chandler's 21-ingredient dish, with its 3-plus-hour prep and cooking time and a cost the Post estimates at $40, has somehow persisted as the exception. With its 8,856 five-star reviews, it's certainly a big hit, though there are detractors ("Amy" described it as being "runny and not worth the trouble to make ... I'll stick to stouffer's from now on"). Many of the positive reviewers share their variations, and Chandler has some extra advice of his own: "The sauce is best when you salt it to taste and then, once you get it going, just flavor it as you go." Click for the recipe, or read about why you should add blueberries to your grocery list.