On the Need to Know

I never thought I did an especially good job of leading my students at The Culinary Institute of America to understand that knowing why food behaves in the ways that it does when we manipulate it, is just as important as knowing how to cook. I think at best I probably reinforced the belief that consistently positive outcomes in the kitchen are not possible if you don’t understand the science to a few who already believed it. But I’m sure that my entreaties to question everything that happens and to not take anything for granted was lost on the majority of students who, in all fairness, were mostly of the popular opinion that an Institute was not, like a college or university, supposed to encourage skepticism as much as train them in a specific set of tasks.

However, expectations of the school and my role as a teacher there aside, the truth remains that unless you always cook from carefully vetted recipes in the same place on the same equipment with ingredients that are produced and stored under the same conditions, unexpected things are going to happen. And forget it if you, like most cooks, like to fiddle around with or develop your own recipes.

This point was driven home to me this morning during a reading of a method for making sour dough starter at Michael Ruhlman’s blog. The method he described involved adding a cabbage leaf to a mixture of flour and water, letting sit overnight, dosing it with flour and water again and letting it sit for another night before using it. I don’t doubt for a moment that the method produces the vigorously bubbling starter that he describes, but I’m not sure why it bubbles faster than a simple mixture of flour and water left to ferment for the same period of time.

The obvious answer is that there is yeast on the cabbage leaves that is introduced to the starter. But why would we assume that the yeast that lives on cabbage is capable of colonizing wheat? There are thousands of species of yeast, many of them quite host specific and not all of them capable of digesting starch. There is very little starch in cabbage so why would cabbage host significant number of starch digesting yeast?

Another possibility is that the cabbage is adding in invert sugar which the yeast gobble up. However, neither Ruhlman nor the person he learned the method from (Carri at Two Sister’s Bakery in Homer, Alaska) report crushing the leaves to release sugar from the cells which, I think would be required to extract enough of the cabbages’ measly <3% sugar content to produce the dramatic bubbling they report.

It is possible that what is introduced to the starter by the cabbage is some type of bacteria. Bacteria will produce gas just like yeast, and if the right kind are introduced will drop the pH and make the starter sour. One type of bacterium that is always found on cabbage that has not been cooked or fumigated is Leuconostoc bacteria which produces prodigious amounts of bad smelling gas. However, if Leuconostoc bacteria is present in Ruhlman’s starter culture he reports no off odors. Not yet at least.

Not knowing what the cabbage is doing in his starter is not great. Professional bakers have been making starter in very specific ways from flour only for generations because that is the best way to assure a microflora that be built exclusively of a specific population of yeasts and lactic acid producing bacteria. I would not be at all surprised to find that in a few days he discovers that his starter has a big colony of funky smelling bacteria blooming on its surface. I’ve had that happen to me a few times after I’ve added something unique to my starter.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Deep Thought: Best thing is no thing

I usually don’t pay much attention to bumper stickers. Most of them seem to express ideas I don’t want to care about: someone’s favorite band; the place or pet they “HEART;” the politician they think is going to make life demonstrably different and, increasingly, vulgar assertions that in more polite times were only found scrawled on the walls of restroom stalls and subway tunnels. But the other day as I was walking from the gym to my car, I saw a bumper sticker that stopped me dead in my tracks. It read

“The best things in life are not things.”

Well, you could have knocked me over with an iPhone application after I read that, and not because –as might be assumed- I’d never thought of it before. Rather, I simply never expected to see anything like that on the bumper of a late model car in the parking lot of an “upscale” gym in the hyper-materialistic United States of America of the 2000’s. But there it was: metaphysical truth on the bumper of a Toyota Camry.

The best things in life are not “things” (material objects), they are experiences like looking at your children and seeing that flame (or whatever the hell it is) burning behind their eyes. They are those moments that transcend mundane thinking and you see the world as it really is and become simultaneously aware of its beauty and propensity to mete out misery. (Of course, it is also true that many of the worst things in this life are not things either. But any discussion of this here is unwarranted by the feel-good nature of this blog 😉

Food is great, we could not live without it, but far better than the food itself is the experience of eating something that has been so well-prepared and is so wonderful that it sends you elsewhere.

I not sure that I care much about food beyond it’s ability to provide my body with nutrition and myself with a way to earn a living. But what I care deeply about are it’s collateral cognitive and emotional affect within the people I feed and, of course, myself.

How about you?

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Time Must Have a Stop (I wish)

Getting older has it’s advantages. If you haven’t ruined your nervous system with drink or drugs, the accumulated experience of years of interacting with thousands makes it easier to see the truth behind the lie and the absence of evidence behind the statement of conviction. False friends are easier to spot and if you are really lucky, it begins to become easier to know what it is that makes you happy.

I don’t remember thinking much about what I needed to make me happy before the age of 11. Happiness kind of just rolled in on it’s own in small waves made up of simple things like digging holes, eating, camping, shooting trap and clamming with my father and his buddies and, as you see in this photo that my brother posted on Facebook last night, trying to tease a meal from Long Island Sound.

I’m the chubby guy in the middle. The kid in the foreground with the bamboo pole is my brother Gary and the kid in the background is Ed Hart who lived across the street from us in Glen Cove, NY.

Where does the time go people? Ah, to be ten again!

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Drowning Man Survives, Finds Chicken Wing Prices Still High

I lost my writing mojo a couple of weeks ago following the death of close friend. I’m usually pretty resilient in the face of heartbreak but as my friend Michael Ruhlman wrote in a recent email “sometimes life drops a ceiling beam on your head” and there is nothing you can do until consciousness returns. Well, I’m not yet fully conscious yet. I still feel like a sailor who was about to come about on a good run on a smooth sea and got knocked overboard by the boom. However I am awake enough to realize that if I’m ever going to write anything of moment again, I should start taking baby steps now.

So here is my hand coming up out of the water and grasping the gunwale. I hope to be flopping around in the bottom of the boat coughing up sardines soon. In the meantime, please accept my apologies for appearing to have jumped ship and consider for a moment how much worse life would be if our livelihoods were dependant on cheap chicken wings.

“Shares of Buffalo Wild Wings may be overcooked, as soaring wing prices and a recession threaten to take a bite out of the fast-growing restaurant chain’s profits.” (Star Tribune)

Embedded video from &amp;amp;lt;a href=”http://www.cnn.com/video”&amp;amp;gt;CNN Video&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

My Big Adventure at The Culinary Insitute of America

Behind the concierge’s desk in the entry hall of the Escoffier Restaurant at The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, NY is a photograph of the brigade de cuisine of the Hotel Pierre in New York City as it was at the hotel’s grand opening in 1930 . In the front row is Auguste Escoffier, the man to whom the “E Room” (in CIA lingo) is dedicated and whose book “Le Guide Culinaire” did more than any book -before or after- to establish the haute cuisine as an international standard for sophisticated western culinary art.

To Escoffier’s right is the hotel’s owner, Mr. Pierre, and Charles Scotto a former apprentice of Escoffier and the hotel’s executive chef. Flanking the three leaders and in several ascending rows, is one of the biggest kitchen brigades I have ever seen. It is hard to give an exact head count but I estimate that there are over a hundred people in the photo. In the second row behind Chef Scotto is my paternal grandfather, Giovanni del Grosso. (Shown in an earlier photo above, second from left in the second row.)

It’s difficult to write about this picture without sounding like I’m bragging or lamely trying to boost my credentials by indirectly associating myself with one of the most famous figures in western culinary history. (After all, my grandfather worked for Chef Scotto, not Escoffier.) However, when I saw that photo last Tuesday, moments before I was to give a presentation on Food Blogging, I have to admit that I felt something like pride commingled with the sense that like that photo, I was not only in the right place, but that I was meant to be there. This was not the first or the last occurrence that prompted me to understand that there are many reasons why I feel a special affinity for that place, but it was certainly the most eerily metaphysical.

The runner up for the most peculiar event that caused me to recognize that I was in a place of kindred spirits occurred the previous evening.

Monday evening (2/23) I gave a presentation on my work at Hendricks Farms and Dairy in Telford, Pa. in The CIA’s Danny Kaye Theater at the Hilton Library. The final third of the presentation was a tasting of the charcuterie products I make at the farm and two of Trent Hendricks’ raw milk cheeses. On the plate were two forms of air dried beef, three salami, two cheeses and something that I brought on a hunch that someone other than myself would find it interesting. Earlier in the month I had almost pitched the thing into the furnace because it stunk and mites had drilled into the bone leaving dust trailing in creepy brown filaments. Small wonder, it was an eleventh month old leg of lamb.

In 2008 I cured four legs in a simple brine of salt and sugar for three weeks, glazed them with a mixture of lamb fat, pepper, salt and juniper berries and hung them in the aging room to dry.

We’d sold one leg of after 6 months, but the response to the product was so tepid that the remaining three were shunted aside and forgotten until one day when a local chef came to visit and expressed interest in trying one. After he called to say the lamb was inedible, I tossed the rangiest of the remaining two into the wood furnace and put the fourth out of my mind until the week before I was scheduled to give my presentation when, something told me I should bring it.

You could have knocked me over with a sprig of thyme when, after I’d finished the tasting and had asked the audience which meat they thought was the most interesting, about 2/3 responded that it was the lamb.

I suppose that I would have gotten a similar response from any group of of chefs and cooking students. But I prefer to think that the reaction was an idiosyncratic response by a unique group of people whose devotion to craft is so complete that they are able to overlook the obvious (the meat looked like wood and smelled like dirty sweat socks) to see things for what they really are.

I’m sure my grandfather, who ended up working at The Pierre Hotel for more than thirty years and who, because he spent so much time on his feet in lace-up leather shoes and was “old school” when it came to hygiene, would not have thought twice about the smell of that lamb.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

My Big Adventure at The Culinary Insitute of America

Behind the concierge’s desk in the entry hall of the Escoffier Restaurant at The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, NY is a photograph of the brigade de cuisine of the Hotel Pierre in New York City as it was at the hotel’s grand opening in 1930 . In the front row is Auguste Escoffier, the man to whom the “E Room” (in CIA lingo) is dedicated and whose book “Le Guide Culinaire” did more than any book -before or after- to establish the haute cuisine as an international standard for sophisticated western culinary art.

To Escoffier’s right is the hotel’s owner, Mr. Pierre, and Charles Scotto a former apprentice of Escoffier and the hotel’s executive chef. Flanking the three leaders and in several ascending rows, is one of the biggest kitchen brigades I have ever seen. It is hard to give an exact head count but I estimate that there are over a hundred people in the photo. In the second row behind Chef Scotto is my paternal grandfather, Giovanni del Grosso. (Shown in an earlier photo above, second from left in the second row.)

It’s difficult to write about this picture without sounding like I’m bragging or lamely trying to boost my credentials by indirectly associating myself with one of the most famous figures in western culinary history. (After all, my grandfather worked for Chef Scotto, not Escoffier.) However, when I saw that photo last Tuesday, moments before I was to give a presentation on Food Blogging, I have to admit that I felt something like pride commingled with the sense that like that photo, I was not only in the right place, but that I was meant to be there. This was not the first or the last occurrence that prompted me to understand that there are many reasons why I feel a special affinity for that place, but it was certainly the most eerily metaphysical.

The runner up for the most peculiar event that caused me to recognize that I was in a place of kindred spirits occurred the previous evening.

Monday evening (2/23) I gave a presentation on my work at Hendricks Farms and Dairy in Telford, Pa. in The CIA’s Danny Kaye Theater at the Hilton Library. The final third of the presentation was a tasting of the charcuterie products I make at the farm and two of Trent Hendricks’ raw milk cheeses. On the plate were two forms of air dried beef, three salami, two cheeses and something that I brought on a hunch that someone other than myself would find it interesting. Earlier in the month I had almost pitched the thing into the furnace because it stunk and mites had drilled into the bone leaving dust trailing in creepy brown filaments. Small wonder, it was an eleventh month old leg of lamb.

In 2008 I cured four legs in a simple brine of salt and sugar for three weeks, glazed them with a mixture of lamb fat, pepper, salt and juniper berries and hung them in the aging room to dry.

We’d sold one leg of after 6 months, but the response to the product was so tepid that the remaining three were shunted aside and forgotten until one day when a local chef came to visit and expressed interest in trying one. After he called to say the lamb was inedible, I tossed the rangiest of the remaining two into the wood furnace and put the fourth out of my mind until the week before I was scheduled to give my presentation when, something told me I should bring it.

You could have knocked me over with a sprig of thyme when, after I’d finished the tasting and had asked the audience which meat they thought was the most interesting, about 2/3 responded that it was the lamb.

I suppose that I would have gotten a similar response from any group of of chefs and cooking students. But I prefer to think that the reaction was an idiosyncratic response by a unique group of people whose devotion to craft is so complete that they are able to overlook the obvious (the meat looked like wood and smelled like dirty sweat socks) to see things for what they really are.

I’m sure my grandfather, who ended up working at The Pierre Hotel for more than thirty years and who, because he spent so much time on his feet in lace-up leather shoes and was “old school” when it came to hygiene, would not have thought twice about the smell of that lamb.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

The Sublime and the Ridiculous

Sublime is the meat from a bull that we butchered today and ridiculous is the bread. Both can be seen in the slideshow below.

The last time I saw anything the color of this meat was in 1980. It was in a small church in the Ticino of Switzerland whose apse was fronted by Doric columns whose shafts were made from marble that I’m guessing was from the Levant. The marble matrix was the color of coagulated oxblood interspersed with brown globs of what I assume was calcareous mud. Although I’d studied geology in college and had learned to expect miracles like this, I was blown away by the esoteric luxuriousness of the stone, made all the more poignant, I suppose, because of their presence in a church that was pretty much of Podunk.

Anyway the meat is from Devon bull from the farm that was slaughtered last week. Unless you hunt or work with meat all the time, or you work in a context similar to mine, you probably have never seen anything like this. There is almost no inter or intra-muscular fat. I cannot describe the aroma without going hyperbolic (So I won’t.) and the color well, it is what it is. All of it together is sublime.

The bread is another story altogether.

This bread should have been brilliant. It was made over a period of a week by me and baked on Wednesday (yesterday). As it turned out, it’s a mess because after it finished its oven spring and reached it’s maximum height in the oven, I backed the temperature down from 500 to 450 degrees, went back to the computer to work on a document and forgot about it.

I’m not sure there is anything profound about the congruence of these images. I’m not even sure why I put them up for any reason other than that they feel like good examples of complementary opposites.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

A Meditation

On The Pernicious Effects of Using Bread Starter
for Leavening
on Quantitative Baking Process Skills

I baked my first loaf of bread when I was sixteen years old. But disallowing for the occasional loaves of brioche, rolls and baguettes that I made over my years of working in restaurants and banquet/catering establishments, I did not begin to bake in earnest until 1999, when my then allergic-to-wheat-gluten son’s condition (Happily,he has outgrown the problem.) compelled me to flip a bird at the baking industry and take matters into my own hands.

Verily, it’s been about 10 years that I’ve been making bread on a regular basis. I bake twice a week (not including the occasional loaf I make at the farm) for the family: one 3-4 pound hearth bread, made from starter without added yeast, and a 2lb “sandwich” loaf leavened with pure (SAF) yeast that I use for the kid’s lunches.

Until about a year ago, my approach to baking was very different from how I approached other forms of cooking, save charcuterie. I recorded all of my recipes in notebooks or spreadsheets. Everything was weighed, percentages of each ingredient noted and when I baked, I followed the recipes as carefully as someone of my limited interest in following directions could muster.

I still follow my recipe for sandwich bread verbatim. But the process for hearth bread has become much less formal. It’s more intuitive and has come to more closely resemble the way I prepare most things. I measure less, sniff and poke more and depend on “instinct” to know how much of each ingredient to add in proportion to the others.

On one hand this ad hoc approach is cool because it draws on internalized apprehensions about how to construct the dough and frees up my exiguous quantitative mind to do more important things like attempting to reorganize the lyrics for “Free Bird” or measure the timing for the “Three Stooges” routine that I’m planning to spring on the the family at dinner. However, it’s also a big pain in the neck because if I continue to not pay attention to how I measure ingredients, I know there are going to be big problems down the road when I have to make more than one loaf at a time.

The degeneration of my quantitative baking process skills started almost as soon as I began to culture my own yeast and bacteria to leaven my hearth bread. (Why I chose to use starter for hearth bread, but not other types of bread has to be a topic of another post.)

As most of you know, the process of making bread starter requires that you add a quantity of flour to a quantity of water and let it sit until you see evidence that the naturally occurring yeast and bacteria are propagating. Unless you have a scanning electron microscope in your kitchen, the evidence you look for is coincidental to the growth of these microbes and can only be evinced by the presence of their waste products: carbon dioxide bubbles (which you can see), acid (which you can taste) and the smell of fragrant alcohol(s). Once your flour and water mixture shows signs of fungal and bacterial growth (Typically within 12 hours if you use organic flour.) you have to feed the bitch (Bourdain) more flour and water each day for about a week until the starter is bubbling vigorously and, f you want sour dough, the acidity increases to a desired degree of tartness (less than pH4).

Now here is what knocked me off-balance and turned me from a precision loving Johannes Vermeer kind of baker, to the gluten drooling Jackson Pollack I am today.

When you feed the starter, you are supposed to delete the same amount of flour and water that you add in as new food. Otherwise, if you keep adding and you don’t subtract from the initial mixture, you end up with too much starter. Also, you need to keep track of how much flour and water you have in the starter at any moment because when you make the final dough, you need to know how much of each there is.

This is especially true of the water because as little as 10% too little or too much water can mean the difference between dough that is tough and won’t spring well in the oven and dough that is so slack that it spreads out all over the oven floor. like gluten vomit.

After months of doing the math and making sure that I knew exactly how much water I had in my starter, I reverted to type and decided to wing it. Soon I was building starter by dumping in whatever: grapes, wheat berries, wine, various seeds, toothpicks (kidding!) and letting what happened happen.

To my fortune, I’ve only had a one or two loaves that have spread all over the oven because there was too much water. But most have come out just fine. However, I expect that my luck is a due the small scale of production and that the day that I have to make dozens of loaves is going to be the day that I have to pay for for the pleasure of my degagé approach to a process that should be precise.

(I think I’m doomed.)

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

A Meditation

On The Pernicious Effects of Using Bread Starter
for Leavening
on Quantitative Baking Process Skills

I baked my first loaf of bread when I was sixteen years old. But disallowing for the occasional loaves of brioche, rolls and baguettes that I made over my years of working in restaurants and banquet/catering establishments, I did not begin to bake in earnest until 1999, when my then allergic-to-wheat-gluten son’s condition (Happily,he has outgrown the problem.) compelled me to flip a bird at the baking industry and take matters into my own hands.

Verily, it’s been about 10 years that I’ve been making bread on a regular basis. I bake twice a week (not including the occasional loaf I make at the farm) for the family: one 3-4 pound hearth bread, made from starter without added yeast, and a 2lb “sandwich” loaf leavened with pure (SAF) yeast that I use for the kid’s lunches.

Until about a year ago, my approach to baking was very different from how I approached other forms of cooking, save charcuterie. I recorded all of my recipes in notebooks or spreadsheets. Everything was weighed, percentages of each ingredient noted and when I baked, I followed the recipes as carefully as someone of my limited interest in following directions could muster.

I still follow my recipe for sandwich bread verbatim. But the process for hearth bread has become much less formal. It’s more intuitive and has come to more closely resemble the way I prepare most things. I measure less, sniff and poke more and depend on “instinct” to know how much of each ingredient to add in proportion to the others.

On one hand this ad hoc approach is cool because it draws on internalized apprehensions about how to construct the dough and frees up my exiguous quantitative mind to do more important things like attempting to reorganize the lyrics for “Free Bird” or measure the timing for the “Three Stooges” routine that I’m planning to spring on the the family at dinner. However, it’s also a big pain in the neck because if I continue to not pay attention to how I measure ingredients, I know there are going to be big problems down the road when I have to make more than one loaf at a time.

The degeneration of my quantitative baking process skills started almost as soon as I began to culture my own yeast and bacteria to leaven my hearth bread. (Why I chose to use starter for hearth bread, but not other types of bread has to be a topic of another post.)

As most of you know, the process of making bread starter requires that you add a quantity of flour to a quantity of water and let it sit until you see evidence that the naturally occurring yeast and bacteria are propagating. Unless you have a scanning electron microscope in your kitchen, the evidence you look for is coincidental to the growth of these microbes and can only be evinced by the presence of their waste products: carbon dioxide bubbles (which you can see), acid (which you can taste) and the smell of fragrant alcohol(s). Once your flour and water mixture shows signs of fungal and bacterial growth (Typically within 12 hours if you use organic flour.) you have to feed the bitch (Bourdain) more flour and water each day for about a week until the starter is bubbling vigorously and, f you want sour dough, the acidity increases to a desired degree of tartness (less than pH4).

Now here is what knocked me off-balance and turned me from a precision loving Johannes Vermeer kind of baker, to the gluten drooling Jackson Pollack I am today.

When you feed the starter, you are supposed to delete the same amount of flour and water that you add in as new food. Otherwise, if you keep adding and you don’t subtract from the initial mixture, you end up with too much starter. Also, you need to keep track of how much flour and water you have in the starter at any moment because when you make the final dough, you need to know how much of each there is.

This is especially true of the water because as little as 10% too little or too much water can mean the difference between dough that is tough and won’t spring well in the oven and dough that is so slack that it spreads out all over the oven floor. like gluten vomit.

After months of doing the math and making sure that I knew exactly how much water I had in my starter, I reverted to type and decided to wing it. Soon I was building starter by dumping in whatever: grapes, wheat berries, wine, various seeds, toothpicks (kidding!) and letting what happened happen.

To my fortune, I’ve only had a one or two loaves that have spread all over the oven because there was too much water. But most have come out just fine. However, I expect that my luck is a due the small scale of production and that the day that I have to make dozens of loaves is going to be the day that I have to pay for for the pleasure of my degagé approach to a process that should be precise.

(I think I’m doomed.)

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Deep Thought: Mise en place

I think that if there is any one thing that distinguishes a happy cook from one who is constantly frazzled (of course there is no one thing) it is in manner in which we approach the act of cooking. A contented cook makes sure that everything is put into place before any real cooking occurs. All of the ingredients are cut, apportioned and arranged in the order in which they will be cooked so that once the cooking commences, everything falls into place at the appropriate moment. It is out of the frisson of order that the joy of cooking occurs. There is no way to find contentment in cooking if its prelude is not orderly.
The photo shows the partial mise en place (total mise en place would include pots, pans etc.) for a meal that I cooked for my family on 1.12.09. The apple is incongruous and was not used in this meal.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.