Andrea on Food Labor

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/07/30/539112692/a-chefs-plea;

Farm to Table

Eric Smith, artisan woodworker and farmer in Timberlake, NC, built us a fantastic 8' long farm table for our patio.  Previously, he has also contributed a table to Panciuto in Hillsborough and other local establishments.  We are stoked to have this piece of handmade furniture, crafted from salvaged boards.  The farm table brings people together - it is really a special way to share a meal.  This is the second table we have added to the patio, the first (about two months ago) from local craftsman Todd Levins.

I was able to do a short email interview with Eric, who happens to be a great writer and thinker as well as a carpenter:

When did you first get into carpentry? 

I started doing carpentry about 12 years ago in the small seaside town of Essex, Massachusetts. I was in my mid-20's and, oddly enough, working at a bakery at the time.

How did your skills develop? 

I had absolutely no experience when I applied for a job fixing antique chairs at Walker Creek Furniture in Essex.  My boss told me he was glad I was inexperienced because I would do things his way and not the 'right' way.  After gluing spindles, stretchers and back-splats together for several months, I graduated to fixing dressers and whatever else people would drop off at the store to get fixed.  Over time I began to gather the basic skills of woodworking and also a general knowledge of wood and how it's used to make useful objects.  My boss noticed that I had a flair for creativity and began to ask me to create 'one-off' pieces of whimsical furniture for the showroom, some of which were very well-received.  A few years later I was running the wood-shop where I had started out fixing chairs in the corner with only a handful of tools that I knew how to use.  

Tell us about your idea for this table in particular,  any technical details,  and any special considerations. 

I've always liked the atmosphere of 9th St Bakery - the big industrial expanses of floor-space, the unpretentious straightforward feel of a bakery interested in turning out delicious food and beverages, the location right in the cusp of downtown Durham.  I wanted to make a thoroughly sturdy table, both in form and function, to match the industrial scale of the place.  But I also wanted to make something warm and familiar in the way that bread is warm and familiar, and also inviting and down-to-earth. The design is simple, classic, dependable and, hopefully, not without a degree of rugged elegance.

Tell us about the wood that you used for it what it's made of, and where you found it?  

The wood for the table top is 'heart pine' and I got it at the Reuse Warehouse in Durham.  They got it from a 100+ year old tobacco barn a few counties over and milled it up into manageable thicknesses.  Heart pine is very resinous and thus holds up very well over time, as well as finishing to a lovely flame-orange glow when oiled.  The wood for the base is also mostly heart pine, the legs having come from a dumpster that I raided a few years ago.  The channel running up the sides were where the floorboards interlocked.

Tell us about your connection to the Ninth Street Bakery and the connection between the Farm and the Bakery

I've enjoyed coming to the Bakery in connection to Lil Farm's partnership with 9th St. in its production of Queen George's Ginger products.  Many late nights of filling jars with candied ginger and syrup, the radio blasting and my energy levels sustained by a steady supply of delicious baked goods, coffee, and the insistent cadence of the assembly line.  Visiting in the day time is a much different experience.  I've had some very lovely and calm moments sipping coffee on the patio watching Durham busily hum all around me.  It's awesome to see produce from Lil Farm end up in a fantastic soup or some other offering.  But the Farm can't take credit for the Mandelbrot - that's my favorite thing they make...except for maybe the Babka.  Or challah.  Hard to decide.

Eric inspecting his work

The table in action (in the foreground)

Manifestos

Adam Sobsey returned from a summer trip to France with a mission: to reimagine the moderately priced, high quality bistro food that is so common in towns large and small outside of the big cities like Paris.  This food relies on fresh ingredients, not processed food, and is prepared to order.  Tipping is not part of the culture (service/gratuity is included in the cost of the meal).  A sense of communality and community is the ethic of the bistro.

We discussed this over Mapo Tofu at Szechaun Garden and the possibility of creating a dinner around these principles (at the Bakery) on a recurring basis.

Adam's a writer, and I brought up the fact that really, what he was laying down was a manifesto about the state of our food economy and modern gastronomical habits.  His "day" job is as a bartender at a local fine dining restaurant, so these issues are presented to him literally five nights a week.

The manifesto was written and performed, the food was prepared, and the people enjoyed.  This was on July 30th.  Our next one is August 27th.  Check out the pics and video below.

To everyone who passively enjoys the food culture of the Triangle, I say check your passivity at the door.  Great privilege means that we have the onus to think actively about food culture.  I hope these events spur more discussion, more behavioral and consumer changes, more manifestos.  We have titled the event Manifest, and we hope you can join us.  Manifest will be unlike fine dining, and more like family meal, served family style, without tipping, for a moderate cost ($20-$30pp).

MENU

Pan amb tomaquet

Insalata caprese w/ hand-pulled mozzarella

Spicy yellowfin tuna “dragon” “roll” w/ shiso-celery leaf chiffonade

Accompaniments:

Provençal piment cabbage sort of like the kind we had at that place in Borough Market

Potato-cucumber salad in celery vinaigrette

Potato-cabbage wok-salvage

Sweet minty tomatoes

Ari’s tarte tatin

Yellowfin Sesame-Encrusted Tuna Loin Encrusted with Shiso and Celery Leaf

Adam and the fruits of the BYOB

MANIFEST

The common, recurring image of our present moment: a person sitting in a parked car, with the engine and the air conditioning running, using a smartphone, drinking a soda and/or eating fast food.

back when bread was bread and bikes were a primary mode of transportation

smoked meat is the best meat

"There's something about having a smoked meat sandwich on rye bread with that yellow mustard. Smoked meat is delicious on scallops, it's delicious on liver, it's delicious with kidneys, it's delicious cold on its own with celery root.  It's not just a sandwich stuffer, we cook it, we do the Joe Beef liver with the smoked meat on it and three little slices of pickles -- it's wonderful food.  Smoked meat is the best meat. Of all the meats it's the finest of the meats."

David McMillan, Joe Beef, via Munchies

a short history of french bread

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/dining/boulangerie-revival-france-pascal-rigo.html

Do you remember that time Hannibal Buress dropped in on Moogfest and stole the whole weekend?

at Motorco

building a Moog

with Flylo

Days of Heaven

"Good bread was sufficient unto itself, at any hour of the day; it needed no accompaniment, not even butter."  -- Steven Laurence Kaplan, Good Bread is Back

On Garlic

Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980) from waanaki on Vimeo.

Evaluating Bread With Conan

http://www.videobash.com/video_show/late-night-bread-expert-professor-steven-kaplan-661947

New Bakery Hats Available Now

Modeled by Farmer George O'Neal

Working Side by Side With Latinos

This is kind of a funny story.  I was working at Ninth Street Bakery in the Fall of 2009.  I was mixing bread and doing the oven work, baking off the loaves.  And one day, when baking the challah, I forgot to set my timer correctly, and the loaves came out 10 minutes too dark.  And the customer refused the loaves and requested replacements, asap.  So after a 10 hour baking day that started at 4:30am, I drove back from Carrboro to Durham to mix another batch.  Around 7pm, the dough was ready to shape.  Except I had never formed round challah before (it was Rosh Hashana time, when round challahs are traditionally made).  I asked Antonia, one of the bread formers (she knew how to make all the dough shapes), to help me.  Antonia, a native of Honduras, was helping me, an East Coast Jew, make challah for Rosh Hashana.  The irony was not lost on me.  The loaves were made and baked off for the customer.  But the image of standing there while Antonia instructed me stuck in my mind to this day.

President Trump seems to find the mere existence of Latinos, legal or otherwise, to be problematic.  If he knew who is on the job sites of America, or if he had worked side by side with Latinos, I wonder if he would gain an appreciation for their work ethic and skills.  As is typical for many restaurants, the Latino workers at the Bakery, all eight of them, are some of the hardest working and reliable employees I have.  To denigrate them rather than celebrate them is misguided and racist.

We are working with El Futuro to give away free cookies and coffees to patients who meet certain treatment goals.  This is a small and seemingly insignificant way to support the Latino community in Durham, but I think when Latino families come into the Bakery, it reminds me that all are welcome and that we (and by we I mean the service industry) have a collective responsibility to serve every race and income class.  I hope we can do more in the future.

More here on immigrants in restaurant kitchens: https://lifeandthyme.com/video/migrant-kitchen-ep1-chirmol/

Take them by the hand

We had two new pastry cooks come on in February and our Assistant Manager Jacob and I have been hard at working training them.  The longer I've owned the Bakery (it's been about three-and-a-half years), the more I've come to value training.  It's said that the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden would teach his players on the first day of camp the best way to tie their shoes so they would never go untied in the middle of a game.  And that is precisely the point, that a successful Bakery, like most businesses, concentrates on the details and the thousands of micro-adjustments that add up to a perfect loaf.

Another great example is one from master baker Jeffrey Hamelman.  He recounts a tale of mixing Irish Soda Bread in Dublin in a converted pig trough.  At dawn the buttermilk would splash in and he would then be "up to his elbows" mixing the dough with the owner perched over his shoulder telling him to mix it more gently, with a light hand, so that the pastry would be soft and flaky instead of dense and hard.  Many days, I am like that owner, on the floor, showing our employees the best way to clean an 80 quart mixing bowl or to organize the walkin or how to properly cream butter.  It is highly repetitive work, but also rewarding.  When I can move on to another task and trust that recipes will be executed to (near) perfection, it is enormously satisfying and the Bakery is stronger for it.

How Long Does It Take to Learn to Bake Bread?

I sometimes get asked how long does it take to learn to bake bread.  

3 weeks to learn the basics.

3 months to gain a proficiency.  

5 years to gain mastery.  

But the learning never stops.   I learn something new about bread every week.   It is like a chrysalis endlessly unfolding or like a snowflake fractal growing at the cusp of its edge.  It is periodically frustrating, but it always brings me back with renewed interest.

Mural

Ninth Street Bakery recently invested in a new mural above our Downtown space.  I think it really brightens it up, and evokes our from-scratch mentality.  Our organic flour is milled locally at Lindley Mills in Graham, NC, so you know that our flour has been milled from whole grain and used within about two weeks!  That is the main difference between our product and factory-made supermarket products.  No preservatives, no additives, ever.

Before and After

Scott Nurkin, owner of The Mural Shop, is a one-man business.  He saw this project through from start to finish, initially brought in for the job by Julie Cohoon from Center Studio Architecture.  I got to speak with Scott on tape for a little bit to learn more about him and his muraling work.

What was your background in muraling and how did you get started?

I started at UNC in the Painting and Drawing program and got my BFA there.  As soon as I graduated, there was a muralist named Michael Brown who lived in Carrboro who was looking for an apprentice.

I apprenticed for him for 3 years, taking that job right out of school, not thinking I would stick with muraling forever. I spent the summer working for him, then I begged him to work full time which I did for three years, then after three years we amicably parted ways and I struck out on my own.

At the same time I was touring with a band (Birds of Avalon), and it afforded me to make some money and then head out on the road for months at a time.  I did that from 2003 till 2008.  Then the economy tanked, the band slowed down, so I had to figure out what to do next and I decided to commit to muraling full time.

I built a website, and slugged it out from 2008 to 2013, taking any job, whether it be hand-painting signs in peoples' garages or that kind of thing.  I was slowly building up a clientele and a portfolio and the last couple of years it has been pretty good.  For some reason the mural industry is booming right now, and it probably has something to do with street art becoming really popular, with graffiti writers turning into rock stars on social media....so by 2017 the business has been good to me.

How do you incorporate the creative into your commercial jobs?

I try to use my talent to understand what a client wants and shape that direction versus being like, "This is my one style."  I think my style comes out in everything I do though - for instance with Ninth Street, there is a tie in to wheat and breadmaking so that worked out nicely but another example for a job I was recently doing in South Carolina - there is a mixed use space there on top of an industrial cotton mill from the 1800s so all the art references cotton ginning -- I kind of pride myself on using my skills as an artist and what I like and what I reference and incorporating it into what clients want. I use my forces to steer the client, but ultimately it is the client's vision.

What was the process and vision for this project at Ninth Street Bakery?

So this one started a year ago.  The original concept was a wheat tie-in, and I took that idea and ran with it.  It moved from a single stem of wheat to a field of wheat given the linearity of the space and I thought something colorful and impactful would suit the space. So the idea was to do a huge impact right away so that as soon as you turn the corner, you can't help but go, "Whoa, what is that?"  Then there was the decision of doing realistic wheat versus some kind of cartoonish wheat and we ultimately did the realistic wheat because I thought it would be taken more seriously that way.

Luckily this one was so high up that I had a lift and the lift affords me the ability to move really fast up and over the space so I can touch the wall all across the several hundred square feet I had to work -- versus using a ladder where it's a lengthy process of gridding the image out and make sure all the lines are going exactly up and down, stepping back, etcetera.  So I didn't have to grid this one - it was a lot of using the eye on the stem work so that it looked balanced and fit the space and layering the color in.  I also used aerosol on this one which is not something I typically use a lot but I loved it, and I loved the way it responded to my vision of the piece.

So what's next for Scott Nurkin and The Mural Shop?

There is more work here [we are in discussion on a mural on the interior of the Bakery], and there is a project in Raleigh - an inclusionary project -- "Welcome to Raleigh, Y'all" in 16 different languages, to counter some of the political movements that the clients feel are not correct in our State. This is going up near Downtown Raleigh.

After that, there is more work at the cotton mill in South Carolina, as well as some big work for some small towns in North Carolina, Sanford and Carthage, so a lot is coming up.  In terms of expanding what I do, I just spoke with some people about hiring on some extra help, mostly office manager and backoffice help, so hopefully by 2018 we'll have some more employees and the company will have expanded.

Parking Downtown

In just a month since the new parking meters have gone in Downtown to increase revenue for the City, we have seen weekday foot traffic to the Cafe decrease an estimated 10-20%.  Apparently, just like the seniors affected in this article, there exists a whole class of people who would probably rather stay away from Downtown rather than pay a meter fee.  Before the meters, on-street parking was hard to come by, but not impossible. I imagine the folks that would rove around looking for a spot are now preferring to stay away rather than pay or go into a parking deck.  I just hope that there is a learning curve here and that folks slowly learn to use meters and start coming back.  I would hate for something like parking meters to impede the growth of the City.

I wonder if the revenue gained by the City will outstrip the daytime business lost for Downtown businesses like the Bakery.  What is the breakeven point?  Fact is that there are so many places for folks to shop nowadays that we still need to give incentives to come Downtown.  Just imagine what would happen if Southpoint Mall starting charging shoppers for parking to try to increase revenue?

Pay Scale

I look at our pay scale at Ninth Street and continually hope to add on new customers because with new wholesale customers, we can pay our employees more. My goal is that everyone in skilled baking or cafe positions make $14.00/hr. We are closer to that now then when I took over the Bakery in 2013. But I still look at the disparity in pay across industries and wonder how it is that some folks can make more than three times what others make and we are all working full time.

This was brought into high relief for me when I worked for Duke for a short time before owning the Bakery. I worked in a Division with physician leaders and spoke with one about how entry level physician pay at a community clinic might be $150K, which was more than three times what I was making as a research analyst (and I thought I was doing quite well!). It makes sense that physicians should be paid more than analysts, but for that multiplier to be 3x made me think that it's strange that we pay the same price for goods and services. If we go out for hamburgers, we might pay the same price, but for the physician, that hamburger is effectively a third as expensive (it puts one third the dent in his disposable income).

Without a robust safety net for folks on the bottom of the stratification ladder, it makes no sense to me that pay should be as stratified as it is. I understand we exist in a free market where supply meets demand, but for the economics to dictate that some jobs to pay so little, while other pay so much is indefensible. I would love for the food service living wage to be $42.00/hr instead of $14.00, but the economics of this business do not allow for that. Until we have a redistribution of income and universal access to basic services such as higher education, technical training, health care, transportation, and so forth, there is no way we can live guilt-free in a society obsessed with foodie-ism, fancy beers, and Snapchat.

Stats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_States

beer of the moment

Bond Brothers Local IPA

Death of the Celebrity Chef

It may be that I am writing on a topic already long gone past, but the celebrity chef is dead.

I don't mean the Emerils, the Fieris, but instead the Boweins, the Changs, the Rickers. Around 2011, when the celebrity hipster chef was in full force, it was this beautiful combination of ethnic food and English-speaking, classically trained chefs who could translate Asian (or otherwise) food for a Caucasian palate. I was completely obsessed, buying the Momofuku Cookbook, the Mission Chinese Cookbook, among others. They were like rock stars on Vice TV's Munchies channel or on the pages of Lucky Peach. It was so enchanting.

And now, those restaurants have lost their charm, and perhaps their purpose. On a recent and much-planned culinary trip to New York, I got to encounter the actual restaurants that made the foodie movement of the 2010s, and the results were unimpressive and underwhelming. The dishes, now having been served the same way for years, have lost their appeal, urgency, or novelty. The pork buns at Momofuku Ssam were whatever. The restaurant was less than a quarter full, which was disappointing in itself when I had always imagined it with a line down the block. Even the newer upstarts, like Black Seed Bagels (of the Mile End Deli restaurant group), a Jewish ethnic rediscovery project, was downright bad. The bagels were underrisen and borderline inedible - it was like eating roughage. The trip perfectly mapped our gastronomical moment of having gone from foodie-ism to fatigue. The celebrity chef is no longer in the building, he or she is on Snapchat.

My resolution from the trip was that for future food pilgrimages, I would skip the celebrity chefs, the contrived food that was backed by a good PR team, and instead head for authentic restaurants only. My best meal all trip might have been a $3.00 foil-wrapped jalapeno and cheese tamale that came out of a steam basket underneath a bar at 2AM in a dive in Leffert's Gardens.