San Ho Won

 -Nytimes

Track of the Moment

 

Oscar and Kenny are now famous

 https://www.instagram.com/reel/CdtsnH2qFsw/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

Throwback to 2020

 March 20, 2020

Music spotlight: Corin L.

Many of you know Corin as the highly excitable baker in the background often singing, dancing, or just generally goofing off (he has a whole barnyard of animal noises at his disposal, including an owl, and a rooster), but you might not know that he is a music lover and guitarist and singer-songwriter (a man of many talents, not just baking!). In any case, Corin has fully taken over DJ responsibilities at the Bakery, so for the last couple of months, and perhaps into the future, it will be all country and bluegrass, all of the time.

We are now a parking garage city

Find a good customer to serve

RIP Dom DeMarco

 https://ny.eater.com/2022/3/17/22983154/domenico-dom-demarco-di-fara-pizza-dies-obituary

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/17/dining/dom-demarco-dead-di-fara-pizza.html

So many cranes, so little time

 https://downtowndurham.com/new-development-map

Ingredient Costs and Supply Disruptions

As ingredient and materials costs have increased 40%+ since January, it has become increasing difficult to manage, not to mention periodic shortages of basic items, like cake boxes, hazelnuts, even cream cheese. We have also seen increases in wages to keep staff on their jobs during Covid, and now these inflation-related costs make me fearful of what the future holds. With our ingredient costs running over half a million dollars a year, 40% is hundreds of thousands of dollars, while our profit margins typically are no more that 5%. Doing the math makes me scared. Hopefully the pain will alleviate soon.

Thank you

There are many reasons to buy local. From the bottom of our heart, we thank those customers that chose to support us and other local producers through these last two years of the pandemic. Your support has made all the difference.

Permanent residency

 

No More Black Boxes

In 2007, at age 28, I made the very characteristic, but very fated move to go into business with my best friend. It failed, as one might suspect, and we broke up as friends, also probably suspected.

It was a silkscreening business. He was the printer and artist, I was the business muscle. No matter what kind of smarts I brought financially, I could never actually print the shirts, and if my friend had a procrastination and organization problem due to his bipolar disorder, which influenced, or was self-medicated by his weed addiction, the shirts never got made, or got made poorly, or were late for our customers. He needed me on the team to help him, he said. But what he really needed was $12K to get a better printing machine, a six-table setup that he thought would springboard the business to success. We rented a U-Haul and drove it from New York City to Bethlehem, PA to pick up our brand new machine at Vastex. I made peanut butter and banana sandwiches for us for the ride down. We left at 6am. We lived together, sharing a one-room studio in the Bronx, no A/C, sleeping on side-bys-side futon mattresses on the hardwood floor. I left the business three months later. The business was going nowhere. We could barely cover our rent. I wouldn't talk to my friend for three years.

What I vowed after that experience was that if I ever owned another business, I would learn how to do everything myself, so I wouldn't have to rely on anyone. Looking back, I should have learned how to print the shirts, if I really cared enough to save the business.

When I owned my second business, a baking business, I did just that. I could do, or figure out every position in the bakery, from bread mixer to slicer to pastry to financials. No longer reliant on other people, I trained all of my own employees on every position. I currently have thirty of them, and we do about $2 million in sales a year.

But the linchpin, the bottleneck of my business, are the machines. Without a working spiral bread mixer, we cannot produce dough. Without a working oven, we can't bake bread. As much as I have tried to learn everything about my business, I've never been a mechanically minded person. When a refrigerator or an oven broke down, I always called a guy, and how quickly we could get up and running depended upon his skill and availability. Over the years, I've probably spent over $150K in mechanical repairs alone. We have a lot of old machines. Our mixer, a Kemper, probably dates back to 1960. I love these old machines, for their simplicity. They are a window into a simpler time in mechanics, before everything became digitized and computerized. Our mixer's electronics, if you could call it that, is just a set of physical switches. There is not even a digital readout. There is something about machines born before the handheld calculator and the digital watch. They have souls.

But I digress. Two days ago, our mixer went down. Fully locked up. The dough hook, that curvy metal thing that looks like a corkscrew, would not turn. At all. We were dead in the water. Our normal mechanic was booked up for the week. No mixer, no bread. I called a neighbor who was the retired mechanic for the bakery. He agreed that if I provided the muscle, he would show me how to break the machine apart (thanks Gene!!). We started with the dough hook, then the flywheel, inspecting the drive shaft, the pulleys, and the bearings. Finally, we found the culprit. The aging motor had locked up. It had done so once before, in the aughts, and been rebuilt. I disconnected the electrical. With assistance, we hefted out the 150-pound motor, placed it on a cart, and brought it to a local motor shop. Understanding my plight, they broke the motor apart, replaced the worn bearings, and put it back together. The motor went back in the machine, and we re-assembled it from the guts on up. When the flywheel and the belts magically turned, I was ecstatic, elated, and that's saying a lot for a depressed person like me. I've never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I imagine that euphoria when seven hours of hard labor turns into a working machine is likely what the author was going after. I was intensely grateful. I had a newfound appreciation for the complexity and importance of technology. I never thought I would ever be able to repair a machine like our mixer. What it showed me is that there is no such thing as black boxes.

Every family has something they call a "junk drawer", or something like it. It's a loosely organized area that requires some fishing to find anything. Maybe it is a closet. Maybe it's an attic, or a crawlspace, or a shed. But everyone has some place that is disorganized and exists only as an abstraction of mixed up parts. That is what machines are to me, and what they are to many people. Many folks go to their auto mechanic without the faintest idea of how to repair their cars. Their car exists as that black box, and the prospect of a lengthy, involved, or expensive repair fills them with dread and anxiety. But whether it is replacing brake pads, rotors, a muffler, or dropping an engine, these are just mechanical things that either fit together, or they don't, and the skill of the mechanic determines how fast or how well it will be replaced.

For me, it doesn't make economic sense to learn to repair my own car. I have a bakery to run, a family to raise, and perhaps more importantly, I don't want to do my own car repair. I don't want to learn, I don't want to buy the tools, and I don't want to spend the time. I don't want to get dirty. So I pay a guy, and whether I drive or not is fully reliant on him, just as I would otherwise have been fully reliant on my mechanic to fix my mixer.

We live in an interconnected world, one now on steroids due to the influence and rapacity of global capitalism. There was a time when ordinary people did home repairs. Less so now. In the outsourcing of everything, we are fully reliant on someone else for virtually everything, from the clothes we wear, to the food we eat. We were generalists. We are now a nation of specialists. Humans used to make and mend their own clothes, and they used to grow their own food. No longer. Now all we have is a loose system of "junk drawers", people we can call when things go awry to fix everything, and hope the job gets done right. We even have therapists and medications to fix our besotted brains, which just don't seem to function as well as in prior generations. Maybe they're overloaded with images and thoughts of our cell phones, and out of RAM or disk space.

What I am saying is that the agency I felt in taking apart that Kemper mixer can be applied to everything. We know enough about the human mind to say that there are truly no more black boxes. If we want to fix something, we can fix it, it is only a question of our determination.

Politics is a great, and curious example. I despise Trump, I find him to be a vile human being. He decidedly was one of the worst presidents on record by any measure, and left our nation reeling and feeble after just four years of proto-facist chaos. Yet half of our voting public voted for him. How could that be?

Rather than write off those voters as black boxes, one would have to understand their brains, perhaps even at a biological, neuronal, or hormonal level, to understand how Trump could hold attraction for them. There is no shortage of academics and pundits who have tried to explain away Trump, but until we have a better handle on the self-annihilating (suicidal?) voter, we'll never have the opportunity to remedy the situation so we never have another one like him. I feel committed to undoing these black boxes. Our future, and that of our children depend upon it. The long list of ills mounts every day. The environmental climate is deteriorating. We must act, we must learn, and if it means breaking apart the brains of those who are greedy and stupid, metaphorically or literally, let it be done.

And then, the mixer broke again the next day, and all my pride evaporated, and was replaced with familiar dread. The motor still worked, but because the driveshaft was bent, we couldn't mix more than 150 pounds of dough. The motor simply wouldn't displace sufficient force. For my efforts, I received not a full solution, but a half-solution.

Ultimately if the mixer goes down completely, we can buy a new mixer.  There is no alternate world we can move to if we destroy the Earth. If we lose a single unique life to climate change, there is no replacement for that human being. People are not expendable, and neither is the environment. There is no Plan B.

Small changes, minimal difference

There is a point at which a soup is perfectly salted. Yet approaching that point, and going over it, there is a band of acceptability.

I remember distinctly a video of chef Angela Dimayuga that profiled the restaurant Mission Chinese in NYC and in the background, poking his head into the frame, was the founder and owner, Danny Bowein. He was adjusting the thermostat. To be successful in the food industry, an almost obsessive attention to detail is necessary, especially when evaluating and adjusting the food.

One needs to know the degree of saturation difference and mouthfeel between a batch brewed coffee that has brewed for four minutes versus three minutes and thirty seconds (bitterness, turbidity on the tongue) if one is going to make a great, or even a half good cup of coffee. 

I remember during my trip to Hill Farmstead, Shaun and the other brewers knocking their heads together about blending in 2% versus 2.5% of another beer. We tasted mini-samples, which were hotly debated over, leading to multiple rounds of tasting. Novice as I was, I could taste no discernible difference if I was to blind taste it, especially if one was to judge its quality.

Utopia Bagels: The Old School Way

 

Best of 2021

New Beer: Master Shredder by The Veil

This Year's Sign That the Apocalypse is Upon Us: https://www.wral.com/durhams-new-selfie-museum-takes-the-art-of-selfie-photos-to-the-next-level/19634921/  

Words of the year: Languishing; Burnout

BBQ: Prime BBQ

New BBQ: Lawrence BBQ

Local HVAC Mechanics: Boer Brothers

Food Pilgrimage. Jon G’s, Peachland, NC

Cheese: Jasper Hill Farm, VT

Swimming Hole (local): Turtle Hole

Swimming Hole Pilgrimage: Long Pond, Greensboro, VT

Beer Menu: Hutchins Garage

Dive Bar Struggling to Hold On and Stay True Amidst a Tornado of Gentrified Development: Accordion Club

Netflix: Squid Game; Sex, Love, and Goop

Restaurant: Rose's

Anticipated Opening: TNP FIT CLMBR Edition

Deal: Ninth Street bread delivered to your door

Pizza: Di Fara Pizza, Cary 

Specialty Foods: Sundries at Locopops

Deli Sandwich: Old North Meats

Insider Political Analysis: NC Primer

Beer: Hill Farmstead, especially 2019 Cherry/Raspberry Harvest

Instagram Food Personality: Dan Pizzutillo at Pizzeria Ida

Hair From a Rock Star: Jenn Wasner, as shot by Jeremy Lange

Indie Track: Hard Way, Flock of Dimes

Festival: Merlefest

Ice Cream Pilgrimage: Emack and Bolio's, Cape Cod (try the frappes)

New Instagram: L I L A C C O R D I O N

Local Instagram Influencer: The Doctorette

NSB Charitable Program: Durham Neighbors

New Opening: Ideal's

Album: Jenn Wasner, Head of Roses

Song: Essence, Wizkid

Rap Song: Wockesha, Moneybagg Yo

Bagels: Isaac's

Soups: Guanajuato (try the sopa de mariscos)

Dog: Jumanji (Black Newfie owned by Jordan)

Beer Study: Hill Farmstead

Factory Made Chips: Kettle Brand Krinkle Truffle and Sea Salt

Factory-made Candy Bar: Pearson's Salted Nut Roll

In Memoriam: Downtown Durham

In Memoriam: Mary Beth Bishop

In Memoriam: Vernon Mitchell

A Return to Hill Farmstead

After visiting Hill Farmstead in 2018, I thought I had reached the proverbial mountaintop. I had kept in touch with owner Shaun Hill since, and petitioned for a monthlong internship this past July, which I was lucky enough to land. As you could probably imagine, it was a holy grail, once in a lifetime moment for me, and was meant to be a respite as well from the burnout I had experienced through the pandemic. Hill Farmstead has been voted best brewery in the world eight times. Ostensibly, I was there to learn the craft and possibly start a brewery when I returned, or simply get more deep into homebrewing. What I came away with was much more.

Once I arrived in Greensboro (VT), I’m in there on the brew cellar floor where the magic happens and the first four or five days I’m just furtively asking questions like I might be able to take something away immediately, and by the fifth day or so I realize, oh my gd, how little I know.  In my diary, it literally reads, "I've learned just enough to learn how little I know." You could study beermaking for years and still feel like an amateur, a poser, upon landing at Hill Farmstead.

In breadmaking, I would say there are twenty-five critical control (process) points, whereby if you screw something up at any of those points, your resulting loaf will be suboptimal. For beer, I would say it's closer to one hundred. Shaun and his team are brewing, then fermenting, dry-hopping, transferring, conditioning in a fermenter, foudre, puncheon, or wine barrel, and then bottling, and bottle conditioning until finding the optimal time to open, market, and present the beer to the thirsty public. It's so fucking tough, and makes breadmaking look easy by comparison. Yes, you can make really mediocre beer really easily, just as one can make mediocre bread. But if you drink your way through the HF catalogue, you'll see this unrivaled attention to detail, to craft, that makes it just one of the best in the world. The quality of the beer is directly proportional to the sophistication and predilections of Shaun's palate, as well as his meticulous attention to detail. "There is no Shaun," he said once, his nut-brown eyes glinting, "I am the brewery." I told him he had a book, or several books in him, as the beer not only is great, but is often accompanied by his personal philosophy as it is rendered through ancient and modern philosophers, as well as his ancestors that worked the very land that he brews on and sources some of his ingredients and water.

The beauty of the land there swept me over. While learning to attach tri-clamps to giant fermenters in a land of no cell service, dirt roads, and copious ponds to swim, I fell in love with the Northeast Kingdom as it's known, the beer, and even the people, often curmudgeonly and terse as they are. Returning to Durham after a month away, I wondered who I would be if I lived there permanently.

All Hail the Pep Cup (Review)

Some say the circle is the divine shape, but lovers of pizza know that the square is the true test of the pizzaiolo’s skill. I love pizza. Who doesn’t love pizza? But do we have opinions about it? Sure? Are they subjective? Yes. Who is this guy anyway? Also, fuck pizza, right? But shit, I will never stop eating it. 

Those thick, square slices (also known as Sicilian) can be topped with any number of options, but they’re best when teeming with pep cups—tiny, sliced, cured meats that, when exposed to high temperatures, flex concave, like seedlings yearning for the light. Unlike the thin bland pepperoni slices that typically top a pizza, they’re salty and spicy, full of garlic and umami, not to mention thicker and chewier than ordinary pepperoni. Little orbs of unctuous goodness. Little flying saucers of gold.

 

The Triangle happens to have two of the best pep cup slices in North Carolina (imo). Coronato and DiFara Pizza each swagger like two heavyweights in the ring for Sicilian pie dominance.

 

Coronato is crust-to-crust, wall-to-wall pep cups, all completely inverted as they should be, with a little bit of crispy char for flavor and texture balance. For DiFara, some pep cups are braised (mmm...braised cured meats) into the cheese and sauce, yielding a different meaty mouthfeel altogether, some charred inconsistently. A hot slice of Difara is swimming in a soupy delicious sauce, whereas Coronato covers their pie in generous grated Parm.

 

The way each restaurant sets up and handles their pie dough influences the final product. The piemakers at Difara press each piece into the mold prior to baking while the makers at Coronato set up the dough, chill it, and then slightly deflate it using their fingers prior to topping. 

 

The result is that DiFara is more like pizza, and Coronato is more like focaccia. It depends what you like, but one would have to say that DiFara is the more “authentic” (shit, I hate that word) pie.

 

And you wouldn’t think sauce would be the difference-maker, but the cooked San Marzano sauce at DiFara, surprisingly black-peppery, almost obscures the cheese. The shreds of basil scissored onto the pie that gives a slight hint of herbaceousness, cutting the lactose intensity of the browned mozz. 

 

Both pies go into very well seasoned (olive-oiled) pans, which yield the best fried toast crust you could ever imagine, cooked to perfection in a high temperature oven in a thick pan.

Like a momma choosing their favorite child, it’s hard to pick just one, but for my money, DiFara outlasts Coronato. The dough to sauce texture is superior, and the sauce is better— it doesn’t matter how many cups you load on there (and trust me, Coronato will go down swinging). 

The Science of Sourdough for the Gluten Sensitive

For my gluten-sensitive peeps, try our long-fermented Country Loaf:

https://www.bonappetit.com/story/gluten-sensitive-sourdough

In Memoriam: Mary Beth Bishop

Mary Beth Bishop, January 30, 1942 - March 12, 2021

Mary Beth was one of my original customers when I ran Berenbaum's, and continued her devout patronage through the years I've owned NSB. It's hard for me to describe her smile even now, her laugh, her generosity. At the time in 2011 when I met her, she was married to Alan, who though a tall man, was quite stooped and walked with a cane. They made quite the pair. She was a foodie's foodie, enthusiastic and giving, a great lover of our gingersnaps and biscotti and mandelbrot and kombucha and sandwiches. She survived breast cancer and chemo, only to have it come back. She survived her son, Steve, who also passed away from cancer two years before. She went through the breakup with Alan post-cancer with the utmost strength and dignity. She was like a surrogate mom or grandmom to me here in Durham (my family lives in Boston). She had a beauty and spirit and a liveliness all her own. I don't think I can put into words what it felt like to give her a hug, or what it was like to carry her bakery packages to her Subaru (with her dog Lisi in the back) that last time I saw her, to say goodbye without knowing it's goodbye. I heard two or three weeks later she passed very suddenly in the hospital. She had been getting weaker, and had a stubborn cough and laryngitis that went unexplained for months. The cancer had returned, this time in her throat and her lungs. I bake for people like Mary Beth, and I hope to carry a piece of her wherever I go, and in whatever I do.

A short prose poem:

And if you should take a grain of sand from Shackleford Banks home with you in your shoe, you will remember the name of her on her birthday, and on the grave that is scattered through the ashes of time in the hills of her birthplace of Casper, Wyoming.