The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is like an immensely powerful kitchen, designed to cook up some of the rarest and hottest recipes in the universe, like the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter known to have existed shortly after the Big Bang. While the LHC mostly collides protons, once a year it collides heavy ions--such as lead nuclei--a key ingredient for preparing this primordial soup.