Restaurant Oddities in Pictures

These are a few favorite images from my culinary life in the past year. I love to find unexpected beauty in the everyday world, especially the sometimes grim world of a chef's daily challenges: clogged floor drains, discount produce, decrepit second-hand equipment, wasted food, inter-staff friction, wacky customer requests we chefs strive to satisfy. All of these "issues" have a shiny side somewhere, like a dented-up roll of aluminum foil.

What the. . .?

Pool of Water Near Ice Machine Exhibits Strange Rainbows

Biofilm?

"My God, it's full of stars."
(Or maybe grease. . .)

Superior Technique Salvages 50 Pound Blue Pumpkin

People who cook always say that big squashes have no flavor. Baseball-bat zucchini end up in the compost every summer in many a garden. That big jack-o-lantern never really makes a pie worth eating. . .

Well, maybe that's because we don't treat them right. Squashes seem to start out from the blossom packed with flavor which gets less intense as they grow. It's like the water that helps them balloon in size dilutes that original charge to a low and disappointing voltage. I happen to have a Prodigious Pumpkin from my friend Mike at Harvest St. Louis. . .

. . . Which gives us the opportunity to practice one of the Cook's Maxims: Remove Water to Intensify Flavor.

Will it work?

Milestone: First Appearance in Print

Work hard enough long enough in a town of this size and people will come to know you. . .

Well, that has worked for Dave Bailey anyway whose coattails I am happy to ride on. The good thing about being one of the Go-To-Guys in the Bailey's Empire is that I get assignments such as: "submit 3 recipes representing our restaurants, have them tested, typed and sent by the end of the day."

Non-Fancy Super-Crunchy 10 Minute Granola

Yes. You can do this.

Ever check out the Vegan or Raw Foods section of the Health Food store and come across these little snack packets of uber-granola weighing 2 ounces total and costing 9 American Dollars? I saw some the other week, and I thought: "This is it. Boutique Granola costs $56 a pound.  The end of the Roman Empire (take 2) is at hand."

Magic Dinner, and That's No Crock

'Tis the season. . .

. . .when long-cooked dishes return to our tables and life gradually becomes more and more busy as the Holiday Juggernaut approacheth. Maybe you want the time to bake cookies for everyone you know. Or put up jars of the last tomatoes of the year. Or recreate that long-lost spun-sugar Titanic that you made as a final project in Pastry School (too bad the ants found the original one!) But dinner still needs to be made, friend.

Well, you probably know someone who brags all the time about their crock pot and you think "I want dinner to be magically ready when I come home from work, too. . ." But you have a small kitchen without the parking space to plunk down one of those overgrown hot plates. We cooks know that the most important Kitchen Real Estate is counter-space. . . especially adjacent to a sink and power outlet (wow!)

Don't worry about that office blowhard. Have you got a regular old soup pot with a decent lid? Do you have a working oven? Chances are very good that even a crappy apartment oven can handle 225 degrees for a few hours. . .

Congratulations! Welcome to Magic Dinner Prep School!

Cooks Should Never: Hotwire Pasta Machines

Fried!

Let's say, hypothetically, that you were operating a newly-purchased, beautiful expensive Italian pasta maker/extruder and it suddenly stopped functioning.  And you traced the problem to a blown fuse, which no one in the greater Metro area can find. And say the machine was still full of dense semolina dough that was threatening to become cemented permanently inside the interstices of the extruder's delicate parts unless something could be done to disassemble the machine.  And imagine that the special Italian wrench for removing the parts in peril was NOT included with the machine by the seller for the simple reason that the parts can be easily loosened by running the machine backwards for 10 seconds. . . except of course it won't run AT ALL.  Time is passing as you and your boss make phone calls to every single electrical supply house within 50 miles and they all say "What size is the fuse? Really? We could order it for you. . . be about 10 days."

Robot Rehab

Operator Error

(The most common cause of equipment failure.)

The flat blade to our Robot Coupe dicer looked like it had been used to chop gravel. Getting a new one would take a week. . . There's 40# of fresh salsa to be made, a bucket of mirepoix to be chopped, and it's Thursday evening, Chef!

Caramel Squash Butter

Caramel Squash Butter

Here's a recipe that may provide welcome variety once you've made that squash soup, squash puree, and spherified squash gel. . .  It only takes a little bit of cooked winter squash to make a pint jar, and it goes down well on toast on these cold mornings.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups (packed) Cooked Squash (see below for techniques to maximize flavor)

1/2 c Sugar

1 pinch Salt

1/4 c Water

1/2 tsp Cider Vinegar

10 cardamom seeds (not the big pods), cracked 

How to Carve the Toughest Winter Vegetables

It has happened to all cooks: 

We are tempted to do something we KNOW is dangerous, but we really WANT to do it anyway. Take this beautiful hard winter Golden Nugget squash:

Its skin is like armor. It's going to be SO GOOD, if I can just get the blessed thing apart! And so we end up going at this spheroid with our knife while it rolls unpredictably, berserk, causing us to nearly lose a finger.


Well, no more of that for my readers! Here's a series of knife techniques that will allow you to apply big forces safely to bust into the treasures of tough winter vegetables.  No Rutabaga is too mighty to withstand these methods!

Artisan Bread Preview: Small Batch Restaurant

One of the delicious components of the menu at the soon-to-be-open Small Batch Restaurant will be European style breads.

If you know our work from the sandwich breads at Rooster or the baguettes at Bridge, you know we make everything in house and work numerous styles of pastry with the same talented crew. We are adding to our lineup some true Slow-Food long-rise sourdough breads with shattering crusts and deeply-flavored, chewy interiors.

Real Adventures In Cooking: Off the Grid and Into the Frying Pan

08/17/2013

Power outage at your favorite brunch spot.  

Pretend you're the customer.
What would you like the owner to do about it? What CAN he do about it? Put up a CLOSED sign on the door and let everyone go back to bed? Would you blame him if he did?

Well, that's not going to happen if we're talking about Dave Bailey and Rooster. You're not going home hungry just because Ameren UE decided to pull off an unannounced seven-hour repair that darkened the whole block.
Call it a lesson in dedication to hospitality.  Call it ballsy. Call it theatre of the absurd.
This is the story of what happened a couple weeks ago in Downtown St. Louis.

It was two hours before go-time at one of the busiest brunch restaurants in the city when the lights went out. 

Ameren techs made vague promises of a reconnect sometime within a 4 to 8 hour window. Dave Bailey and Exec. Chef Peter Clark, standing in the only available light by the windows at Rooster, strategized ways to receive and feed the impending 600-700 people who usually dine on a busy Saturday.

Scrap the menu, scrap the format.

Breakfast Buffet, ten dollars a head.

They called the staff together and deployed them in teams.  Some set to work in the dim inner rooms of the building prepping ad-hoc stations for service, some moved out to the sister restaurants whose kitchens were standing mostly idle at that early hour.

One team brewed coffee into 20 airpots over at Bridge, one team of line cooks started knocking out  French Toast by the hundred on Range's spacious flat-top. By about 9 a.m, carts laden with hot food came wheeling back in the doors at Rooster and the impromptu breakfast buffet took shape.

Chef Peter staged and stocked it attentively while Dave Bailey schooled the staff on how to run service in Power Off Mode.  Dave himself with his cell-phone and a Square credit card reader would (and did!) personally ring in every credit transaction over the course of the day.  Waiters would wave and point him toward tables ready to settle up, and he would dodge like a pinball around the dining room collecting money. Dishes would be washed and sanitized by hand and stacked on the useless electric dish machine to air dry, bar service would just have to happen without fridges. Then they opened the doors.

By 11 a.m. the game grew hectic as tables turned at a record pace for a place that usually allows for leisurely dining.  Some customers I gather left at once when they found out that Rooster's full menu wasn't available, but most plunged into the new situation and filled their bellies on local bacon and sustainably raised pork sausage, French toast and biscuits and gravy.

A block away, the Commissary kitchen at Range re-prioritized every project serving the needs of Dave's 5 restaurants and set teams of cooks laying out and roasting off bacon 20 sheet pans at a time to keep up with the appetites at Rooster. The house-made (from the whole hog!) pork sausage which had been stocked to last Rooster thru Monday was gone by 10 a.m. Cooks were grinding and mixing, pattying and cooking off that sausage all day long.

Meanwhile, I split off from the fray and pulled together a catering affair for 170 college students and got it out the door in time for an 11 a.m. set up off-site. That required scrapping the staffing plan entirely and making use of a few Rooster and Range staff who didn't have their hands full otherwise, plus my Range chef squeezing in 200 burger patties in whatever space he could clear off between rounds of French Toast.

The Bakery, on the same grid as Rooster, spent the first hours of the day saving all 400 gallons of ice cream plus innumerable frozen ingredients from their rapidly warming freezer, moving van-loads to the freezers in other Bailey's basements.  When the lights finally came on past noon, they switched into War Emergency Power to catch up on the bread and biscuits Rooster had devoured, cutting and shaping orderly forms by hand from 100-pound masses of dough. One of my bakers was working three stations at a time, hammering out more ice cream, pressing tortillas, and shuttling racks of buns into ovens in a tight choreography that any line cook would admire.

Savory Chef Christian Ethridge and Head Baker Justin Haltmar kept the whole thing on the rails with me as we powered through into the relative calm of 3 p.m. when the calls for "MORE" finally quit coming from Rooster. By 5 p.m. the Commissary's deliveries had completed stocking up the other restaurants for weekend service, the college students had been fed, and the chaos had been reigned in at last.  We stood looking at each other, a bit dazed. "What did we just do?"

One of my cooks shook his head and said to me: "There WERE 200 pounds of bacon ready to cook today.  It's all gone."

Yes, the buffet business is a different animal than the a la carte one.

If you dined at any of the Bailey's Restaurants that day, I hope you went home happy.  It takes a small army to keep the home fires burning for you. Those like me who call the shots in the company work constantly to KEEP the job from ever becoming as hard at is was on 8/17/2013. But of course, we kind of love those crises, too.  Whatever the situation, it's an honor to serve you. Dave and his crew never quit.

A Modest Proposal Regarding Office Veal (with due Respect to Jonathan Swift)

In the First World, we humans make life easier on ourselves using every trick we can think of.  Adjustable chairs help us use less energy while we sit.  Vehicles take us anywhere in the comfort of climate-controlled cabins.  Instead of our muscles, we employ machines to dig, plow, reap, hammer, brush our teeth etc.  We have taken a privileged position in the quiet cubicles of the world. . . and we have become office veal.

As a consequence, our flesh is more tender, heavier on our frames, and of course better marbled than the meat on those skinny little fryers in the Third World. They are digging wells with shovels, we are driving through for a free refill. They are riding bicycles through the smog, we are lounging by the radio in traffic.

We could be giving back a little to the world whose resources we guzzle. Think of the peasants of China or Africa.  Imagine how much more those sinewy folks could get done after a hearty meal of USA Trotters with Manioc Greens! Tax-Attorney Love Handles braised with wild ramps! Dental Office Receptionist Osso Buco with Mint Chutney! Investment Banker Tenderloin Roasts served on Dollar Rolls with Lipo Aioli. We could really change some lives out there. Not to mention, some of us could fetch quite a good price!

With the advances we have made in pain management, prosthetics and ergonomic furniture, there isn't a compelling reason not to become a Center-of-the-Plate contributor to the next course of global food mania. Write off that leg with the bad knee on your taxes; then hack it, cryo-vac it, ship it to a tycoon in Hong Kong who needs something rare to serve his guests at the executive dinner.  It's a win-win for din-din!

I myself am not a stout person, and so you may be thinking that I am ridiculing only the more ripely formed of my brethren.  But just where does a lean lanky body fit into this emerging market? I will have to hawk my under-bulked carcass to afficianados of Grass-Fed Beef, I guess. It may be too early in the craze to reach my full market potential, but I'm hoping that Whole Foods may make me an offer once they see what kind of flavor-to-fat ratio I bring to the table. (I'm researching how long it will take to get my derriere Certified Organic.)

Or maybe I should go capitalist rogue and start the world's first (?) Suicidal-Cannibal-Pop-Up Restaurant. Take that Ludo Lefebvre. "Good evening, I'm Stephen Trouvere, and I'm proud to be serving <me> tonight."

Office Veal.  Market it as an exotic, dangerous, taboo ingredient for those who like it weird. Or market it as comfort food for locavores.  Either way, with 6 billion people to feed, we should probably take a hard look in the mirror and lop off some part that needs plastic surgery anyway.

Hey, those hams alone could feed a village.

Travelogue: Portland Maine's Oddities and Delicacies

This is a highly abbreviated list of what there is to eat or gawk at in Portland, ME, as compiled from my own experience in the summer of 2013.

Obligatory lighthouse shot. C'mon. . . it's nice!

There will be no photos of the lobsters.  We ate them all too quickly.

Cooks Should Never: Deep Fry In the Pouring Rain

Pridefest, St Louis 2013.  

You know what happens when a drop of water or two accidentally gets into a pot of hot oil?

Spit, sizzle splat.  Maybe you get a little freckling of burns on your forearm from the leaping droplets.

Now let's say you have 50 hungry guests waiting in line for Loaded Fries with Pulled Pork, Aged Cheddar and Barbeque Sauce, and you already have 20# of fries immersed and roaring in gallons of hot oil, and it starts to pour down rain? Of course the fryers can't be under the tent for safety reasons, so they aren't.  The patrons are hungry, wet and cold.  Would you call off the show, shut down and turn them away?  

Hell no, me hearties! Batten down the sheet pans, roll down those sleeves and fry on! FRY ON I SAY!

No one was harmed, and we learned that a French fry remains crispy under the surface of the oil even if the oil is being rained into. Not recommended, but it worked this time.

How to Make the Best Yogurt Ever, for $3 a Gallon

Really? Yes.
That last piddly 2 tablespoons of your favorite store-bought yogurt is good for something after all!

Success! 40,000+

Yes! 

Good Skills, Good Tools, Good Attention 

Make wild ideas possible.

Here's the proof:

The spoonful of peppercorns is resting in a bed of carrot micro-dice, accomplished with the formidable Shun Edo Santoku.  Watch the event unfold by clicking this video link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwzELYaMAD0

(OK, so the dice could be more uniform in shape.  I will do better next time in the name of chef-perfectionists! It's not easy to manipulate damp carrot threads into even stacks.)

Here is the raw material.  That's 4 ounces.

Here are some images of this alien micro-landscape. (All Photos by Zoe Eon Fink)

First I cut the carrot into slices.

Then into little threads.

Then into dice. (Grains of Kosher Salt at right to show scale.)

That's more than 40,000 pieces.
Which means each one weighs approximately 1/10,000th of an ounce.

YES!! Thanks to all who helped on this project. NAMASTE!

The 40,000: What If?

40,000

That's a big number (in some contexts.)

What if it were the answer to the following question:

Into how many pieces can a person cut a carrot?

This Person:

This Knife:

This Carrot:

(OK.  Haven't chosen the Carrot yet. . .)

Sounds like an action film, right?!
It's a no-holds-barred real-life man-versus-nature contest happening in my kitchen tomorrow.  Video to follow.  Just you wait and see!

How to Turn Your Microwave into a Bread Proofer

Proofing bread in your home kitchen can require creativity when you're also trying to, say, cook a week's worth of dinners on your day off so the kids don't get rickets from too many PBJs.  Since bread dough has to remain protected from drafts and nestled in a warm and moist environment, it usually makes sense to cover the dough with plastic and put it in the baking oven with the light left on to create heat.

If you own a single oven, this ties your hands in the hours that bread is proofing, and also leaves the question: where does this bread go when I'm ready to pre-heat the oven to bake it?

Answer: The microwave.  (Just don't actually turn it on!)

How to Blend Hot Liquids

First, what is the problem with blending hot liquids? They release copious steam when agitated, and steam is super hot and produces tremendous pressure when confined (think: locomotive weighing 100 tons, moved by steam.) If you put a hot liquid in your blender and put the airtight lid on, it will invariably come blasting off the moment your machine revs up, splattering you and your kitchen with scalding liquid.  Big, dangerous mess.  Thanks to Carmine for posting this humorous video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qmZaL7pErA

Summer in 20 Minutes

We call it Summer Soup, although its popularity in my house has stretched around the calendar.  Since it's simple and uses ingredients that freeze well, it's no trick to have it anytime.

Last summer I was searching for a way to feed green things to my two year old.  We had a new baby at home also, so I needed a FAST dish healthy and tasty enough that the weary, nutrient-starved parents would enjoy it, too.

Bio-Cultural Questions / Thought Experiment

Which of these photos makes you most comfortable with the idea of pork for dinner?

(No slaughterhouse photos)

Popcorn Grits? No Thanks!

Some fads bring wonderful new products to a wide audience all at once (cellular phones.)  Some cause a lot of buzz about items which blaze briefly, then retreat to obscurity for good reason (slap bracelets.)  Popcorn grits, you are the latter type!

Wounded Beauty: DIY Dent Rehab

Cake Artist "TT" needed big help with a knife.  I answered the call.

Bad juju emanated from the dented blade.  "Ex-roommate," she explained.  "Can it be fixed without grinding off half the blade?"

"I'll try," I said.

The Pleasure of Work: 200 Times Over

When you love what you do, you find reasons to work more!  That's not crazy, really.

I didn't really have to cut the veggies into brunoise (tiny dice) for this Chicken and Rice I made for my pre-schoolers. . . but I wanted to use my knife and my skills.

National Pistachio Day

Yes, it's a pretext for rationalizations on the nutritional merits of eating pistachio ice cream.

It's also a good reason to shave and go on the air to raise awareness about Dave Bailey's restaurants and some of the delights we serve.

http://fox2now.com/2013/02/26/national-pistachio-day/

Wounded Beauty: the Backbone

Wounded Beauty part 2

What I have heard for years about Shun knives is: they cut true. I am in a position to agree. But why do they perform so well? Any knife geek can tell you that a good edge makes a good tool.  But it's the backbone and handle of the Edo knife that elevate it in my experience.  

Wounded Beauty

Have you ever had to care for something that needed your help, but that scared you to even touch it? 

Back in 2001, in Minneapolis, a woman sat down on the retaining wall in front of my apartment building sobbing.  I had never seen her before.  No one from my neighborhood, she was clearly hurting and had no place to go with it but the public sidewalk.  I was coming down the stairs to get on my bicycle, and I felt moved to do something.  Or rather, I became rooted in place, unable to walk past her and go about my business.  I sat down on the wall a few feet from her, gathered up my courage, trying to think of a response to her unknown grief.  Eventually, I moved closer to her, said hello, and put my hand on hers where it rested on the stone.  She looked at me, apologetically, ashamed maybe of being in such a state.  It was hard to look at each other, but she gripped my hand and then it was easy to just say reassuring things. 

"You're not alone.  You can survive.  Do you have somewhere to sleep?  Do you have anyone to talk to?"
She nodded, couldn't speak yet but nodded clearly.  After a few minutes, we had one more mutual hand-squeeze and I got up, unlocked my bike, and went to work.


What reminded me of that encounter was the weird thrill of a situation that arose last week.  Luckily, in this case, the wounded beauty that came to me was merely a knife.