true that

Via: http://luckypeach.com/guides/official-dunkin-donuts-power-rankings

On Mustard

Throwback: David Chang

Outkast on Baking

"Stickin' together like flour and water to make that slow dough..."

Chef and Forager

In the dozen years since [Bill] Smith pioneered his honeysuckle sorbet, based on a centuries-old Sicilian recipe for "jasmine ice" and his own trial and error, he has taught his employees and their spouses how to pick the flowers. He pays them fifteen dollars for eight softly packed cups. This year, though, thanks to spells of cold and wet springtime weather, he's been largely on his own, forced to forage in thin patches that aren't booming with the typical blooms.

- From the Indyweek

Denatured Dessert

“I happen not to like sweets,” he [Alex Stupak, pastry chef of WD-50] said as we sat down after dinner and he began to explain his work. “It’s an idiosyncrasy of mine. I decided to become a pastry chef because it gave me autonomy. Whether you think your desserts are manipulated or not, they are! When you’re conceptualizing an entrée, a protein, you generally expect to get a piece of that thing intact. In pastry, it doesn’t occur. Pastry is the closest that a human being can get to creating a new food. A savory chef will look at puff pastry not as a combination of ingredients but as an ingredient in itself. Pastry is infinitely exciting, because it’s less about showing the greatness of nature, and more about transmitting taste and flavor. Desserts are naturally denatured food.” He looked at me sternly. “Birthday cake is the most denatured thing on earth.”

-- Alex Gopnik, From The New Yorker

Dessert circa 2011

It was as if the dessert chefs had given up on dessert, too, and produced something else in its place. At even a moderately upscale establishment, you would invariably get what I had come to think of as the Portman Plaza plate, since it so closely resembled the model that a developer would have proposed for the center of a crime-wracked mid-sized city in the seventies: three upright cylinders—small towers of something wrapped in something—with the tops sliced at an angle; a crumbly landscape of some kind; and a reflecting pool running around the edge. The plate would be advertised as, let’s say, a chocolate-peanut-butter mousse cake with walnut-balsamic crumble and a sesame sorbet with Concord-grape foam. But the effect was always the same: not enough of a cakey cylindrical thing, too much of a crumbly thing, far too much of a gelatinous thing, and an irrelevance of an off-key runny thing. Without surrendering sugar, dessert had surrendered all its familiar forms—the cake, the soufflé, the pudding—as the avant-garde novel had surrendered narrative, character, and moral. Losing our faith in art is, in a secular culture, what losing our faith in God was to a religious one; God only knows what losing our faith in desserts must be.

-- Alex Gopnik, From The New Yorker

Jewish Desserts

click to enlarge

"Mandel bread is Jewish biscotti in a universe where people are always saying, 'Hey, you know the problem with biscotti? It’s too thick and flavorful.'"  From Lucky Peach

Sonny's, Old City, Philadelphia

Crushing cheesesteaks with EJT; the shop was so packed we ate on top of the car

The Chef Stretches Out

We are seeing a phenomenon now where chefs have become minor celebrities, and with celebrity comes the investor that would like to capitalize on fame by building a fiefdom of profitable restaurants for the chef. Where 20 years ago fame might have meant a cooking show and a set of signature pans (e.g. Wolfgang Puck), now the chef in question can expand from the one heralded restaurant to several, often with different conceptual culinary programs.

In New Orleans, I saw this phenomenon at work recently. At John Besh's August, one can eat a fancy, expensive meal conceived by an expert in Southern Cooking. The problem was that most of the food wasn't very good. It wasn't for lack of trying. All of the frou frou ingredients were listed, along with thoughtful mashups of southern cuisine served on small plates that might have been seen on a lesser episode of Iron Chef. It was just that with the actual Chef Besh not at the helm (and who would expect him to? He now owns eleven dining concepts in New Orleans alone), the execution was poor, the etoufee dish was not hot temperature-wise, the spicing was off, and the dessert was stale.

For the entreprising restauranteur, there is no concept not to be explored or exploited: the high cuisine spot; the food truck; the ramen noodle shop; the mozzarella bar; the dessert and bakery concept; the pizzeria.  Who wants to be the next Batali?  But being Batali would mean not physically being there.  The Chef has left the building.

So when I say the Chef stretches out, what I mean is the Chef stretches him or herself too thin. In any kind of operation, especially one with "artisanal" food processes, you can see this happening. Ideally, you want the creative chef to leave his or her imprint on every dish, and for that dish to be unique in a way that speaks to the diner. But this may not always be possible, even with a relatively accomplished and well paid staff.

The staff, the workers that are doing the cooking for the Chef, are only as good as their training.  The U.S. gastronomy movement, being so new compared to Europe, is experiencing a severe shortage of well-trained cooks.  If the cook's training is rushed and not thorough, the end result will be below the quality of the celebrity chef.  But in the effort to both please the investors and keep the ego fed by expansion, a cruel facsimile of the Chefs' cooking gets into the public mouth. The thoughtful restaurant is not something replicable and franchisable like a McDonald's, yet the average McDonald's is doing far better in the consistency department than a restauranteur stretched thin.

An organization has the tendency to replicate the traits of its leader.  So if the restauranteur is overambitious, so will the restaurant be.  And if ambition and skill is diluted by a score of dining concepts, what remains for the customer to enjoy?

Moogfest Recap

GZA at Motorco 

(this should be his Blue Note cover)

image source

Let me first say that Moogfest was dope. With all the skepticism surrounding its virgin year in Durham, all the money issues chattering around, all the shit talk vis-a-vis Art of Cool, let me just say that Moogfest brought the pain. Should it be renamed "Durham on Drugs"?  Maybe.  But I will say that the sheer scale of the artists, venues, technology, and beautiful people that came to visit our little hamlet of the South was nothing short of deeply flattering.  I never thought I would seea a nighttime East Chapel Hill Street chock full of hipsters holding maps.  The Bakery Cafe, as you could imagine if you didn't visit, was hellaciously busy, posting our three busiest days ever. We look forward to next year with excitement and trepidation.  My favorite show?  Mad Professor at Bull McCabes.

The Delicatessen circa 1870

"Hungry city-dwellers visiting their local delicatessen could choose among the following: meat pies, smoked beef shoulder, smoked tongue, smoked fowls, roast fowls, smoked, pickled and salted herring, fresh ham, baked beans, potato salad, beet salad, cabbage, parsip, and celery salads, in addition to all the usual wursts, breads, and cheeses."
-- From 97 Orchard by Jane Ziegelman

On Chocolate

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/29/extreme-chocolate

On Matzo Brei

http://luckypeach.com/a-lesson-in-the-passover-pancake/

Snapshot Capsule: American Fried

School yourself in ecstatically funny food writing. Calvin Trillin, longtime humorist, food writer, and New Yorker columnist collects essays here on barbecue, phoney French restaurants, the best hamburgers of the Midwest, the crawfish festival of Breaux Bridge, and how to diet down while owning a venerable pizza chain. Recommended. From 1974.

Bento

via Lucky Peach

Bellegarde Bakery, New Orleans

After hearing much from my old friend Alex Ruch about Bellegarde Bakery of New Orleans, I was finally able to visit to watch him bake and even help out one morning.  A polymath and Duke Lit alumnus, Alex works part-time for Bellegarde when not professing at Tulane. Bellegarde's breads were inspiring, much in part due to the vision and zeal of owner Graison Gill.  Graison has to be one of the most principled, intense bakers I have ever met.  Read his statement of philosophy on their website, and you will get a small impression of his focus and drive.  He is currently milling two varieties of wheat on site.  It was a thrill to hold just-milled soft fine wheat, still warm from the grinding stones.

Alex loading the hearth oven

Alex cutting epis

Those baguettes doe

beignet frying at cafe du monde

I got to speak briefly with this beignet baker - he had true skills

HB2 Mechanations

Nice summation of the issues surrounding the recent HB2 cluster from Fresh Air's Dave Davies and PR Watch's Lisa Graves:

http://www.npr.org/2016/04/06/473244707/from-fracking-bans-to-paid-sick-leave-how-states-are-overruling-local-laws

Barred Lists

Sample Barred List - Beware Crazy Jerry!

Every bar, restuarant, or other service establishment has a "barred list", and we are no different.  There are various Downtown panhandlers that have hassled or stolen from us and our customers and are no longer served (also know as 86'ed).  At the top of our barred list right now is this man, Lindsey Williams, owner of Ninth Street Coffeehouse in Durham (no relation to the Bakery):

Lindsey was an erratic payer of his invoices for breakfast pastry, and then stopped paying entirely.  I would not recommend patronizing his store, and if you are a vendor, caveat emptor!