Apple Butter

A no longer barfy Ezra.

Ezra was not feeling well when we got home. She was mopey and wouldn't eat her dinner and we were of course concerned, given her age, but we also knew the duck snacks she had form our previous night's dinner were probably bit much for her. She went to bed with her bowl for the most part disregarded, but it seemed a night's rest would do her much of the good she needed. I was up late as usual. About two hours after she went to bed she got up and pawed at the door to be let out, which I obliged. She was out for a few minutes, then came back in, much as she usually does. An hour or so after that she came out of the bedroom again, this time with some urgency, pawed at the door, and promptly barfed in the corner before I could rouse myself to let her out. I opened the door and she went out as I was cleaning up, and when she came back only moments later, she had a bounce in her step and a bright countenance. She went directly to the kitchen, finished her dinner, and went back to bed as if nothing had happened.

I had made some chicken stock (for Ezra) tonight and the bones along with paper towels full of dog barf merited a trip to the garbage can before morning. In my house that means a trudge across the front yard and tonight it was the most perfect of winter nights. It was deathly cold all day today and tonight was colder yet. But it was as still as within a vacuum outside. The wind is usually a bit of a bully here, so close to the lake, but tonight it could not have been more serene. The clouds had broken up and the stars were out, along with a sliver of moon. For the better part of the late afternoon and evening, chunky, meandering snowflakes lazed their way to the ground, or rather to rest gently upon their predecessors on every horizontal surface. Before long, the rails of the deck were covered in the same skein of light snow as the tree branches which will pose narcissistically in the morning for soon to be Facebook posted photos.

I am up late tonight, though, not just for the gin and dog barf, but because there is apple butter bubbling away in two slow cookers and the oven. A few days ago, our neighbor Al Meusen, who tends the orchard across the street, stopped to offer Ulla some apples and pears. She figured she'd take a handful or two, but he ended up leaving her about two bushels of apples and a half bushel of pears. She invited Amy and I to share in this little windfall if we would help in the processing. It was decided that we would make applesauce and apple butter, and some canned poached pear for Ulla, and for some reason, the overwhelming majority of the apples were committed to the butter instead of sauce.

This was perfectly acceptable to me, though I worried about the practicality of such a quantity. Apple butter was lingering in my mother's larder with regularity when I was growing up, one of the many legacies of Appalachia that found their way into our home in the north via my mother and her roots. Apple butter tastes like home to me, maybe more than any other food. It has been far too long since I have enjoyed a home made biscuit with dark, sticky apple butter slathered across it.

It has been some time since I made it because the last time was a sobering moment in my cult like love of all things cooking that spring from Mom. A few years ago I had a bushel of apples, and knowing full well the apple butter I wanted to make was the one Mom made, I called and asked her for the recipe. She laughed and told me she just threw a jar of applesauce in the slow cooker with some spices. I was crestfallen. Apple butter was important to me and to learn that it was something Mom found an acceptable short cut for was disheartening to say the least. I suddenly found myself in a wilderness, wondering what other short cuts were lingering in my childhood favorites, but also, without mentorship regarding the correct path to take for the apples before me, right now in this very moment. For the first time, Mom left me hanging.

Of course, getting to the point Mom started at, with apple sauce, is pretty simple. And of course, it turns out Mom has made apple butter from apples many, many times. But as her days became more and more crowded, the "cheater" apple butter was a way for her to keep a piece of something in her pantry that had real culinary importance in her family in spite of a lack of spare time to cook apples down and mill them. Still, it was a moment of pause for me. Not so long after, I learned after years of begging for "the secret", that Aunt Bobbie used Crisco in the biscuits I loved so much. For a minute, my world was falling apart.

With time I came to understand that the real secret ingredient in Aunt Bobby's biscuits was Aunt Bobbie: her hands, which moved as her mother had taught her. And I learned that Mom could make great apple butter from canned apple sauce because she knew apple butter form the inside, she knew the path that needed walking enough to know which details mattered and which could be breezed over in an effort to keep meaningful cooking before the children. She, tired and tattered and stressed, could have just bought apple butter. Instead, she went as far back in the process as made sense in her kitchen. She bought apple sauce, and stayed up late one night when no one noticed, and spiced and sugared, and simmered, stirred, and canned.

Apple butter ready for cooking.

Tonight we steamed apples and had a marathon of food milling. We added apple cider, some sugar (far less than recommended) some spices, some dusty old bottles of brandy. There was so much apple puree, but I thought between the two houses we could fit it into our slow cookers. We, of course, could not. I had to load the last of it into my fortieth birthday present, an enormous, oval Le Cruset pot. When Amy had asked me what I wanted for my fortieth, I only slightly jokingly said I wanted a Dutch oven big enough to cook an entire oxtail at once (at the time we were eating oxtail frequently and I was tired of the hassle of cooking a whole tail in batches -- risks the quality of the fond). She came through in spades.

Reducing the sugar in a preserve recipe affects how it will set. Pectin and sugar are allies in gelling so when we made the decision to reduce the sugar (by two thirds) in our recipe, we had to compensate by cooking longer and relying on evaporation to do part of the job. This lowers yields, but concentrates the fruit, and you end up with something that is not so cloyingly sweet.

When we were discussing Al's generosity Fred remarked how spoiled he sometimes felt with our lives here on the hill. Not just with the generosity of the neighborhood, but of the overflowing culinary wealth in our larders and freezers. But nights like this, and the labor day Sunday spent canning tomatoes, and the four days of Pig Week we spent butchering the hogs, make it a well deserved embarrassment of riches.

We adapted an apple butter recipe from the Ball Complete Book Of Home Preserving. I think we may have cut the quantity of sugar a bit too far. The butter is bubbling away in the slow cookers and I'm extrapolating the results a bit, but the recipe below reflects my thought that the sugar should get bumped up a bit. We really liked the idea of using cider and that's why we chose this recipe. Also, we had to take a low and slow approach with the reduced sugar, so the cooking method deviated from their recommendation. We spiced ours differently (I am not a huge fan of cloves) and added some brandy leftover from New Holland's early forays into distilling, partially because Ulla was tired of it hanging around.

So here's what we ended up with:

Apple Butter
Yields a metric shit ton

30# apple puree, made by steaming the whole, unpeeled apple until completely soft (the peels and cores contain a good amount of pectin) and passing through the finest plate of a food mill
1 gallon of fresh apple cider
7 cups of sugar
2 TB ground cinnamon
1 TB ground nutmeg
1 TB ground ginger
1 fifth apple brandy or dark rum

Combine the ingredients and load them into slow cookers or cook them on the stove top in a heavy bottomed pan over a very low heat, stirring frequently, until there is no remaining free liquid and the apple butter is firm and smooth when chilled. Pour into hot half pint jars and process in a water bath for 10 minutes.

Our Lives' Wedding With The World

Last year, a few days before we were to slaughter the hogs, I slept fitfully if at all. Death and animals were on my mind a lot. At the time, Amy and I were close to losing Japhy, our very loved dog, at fourteen. She was grey in the muzzle. Her legs didn't really work as they were meant to anymore. But she was sweet and loving as she had always been, perhaps more so. We knew that she would do her best to keep going. That was her way. She was going to force us to choose the day that she wasn't going to be with us anymore. It is a horrible thing to think that you will schedule the day you will kill a creature you love so much, a day, that if nature could be circumvented, you would hold at bay forever. When the weather began to gray and turn cold, I thought it mirrored my heart in ways I was not prepared to face. I was not ready for gloom and sadness in the skies when I looked up from the lifeless body of my long time companion.

So that fall as the demise of Japhy was looming, I couldn't help but feel a little emotionally squeezed as we made the decision to slaughter the hogs on the farm instead of sending them away to an abbatoir. Ulla championed them staying home, where they would be cared for and loved until the end. She stayed in the house until the deed was done, but it didn't take long to see how brave she actually was. Most people who raise animals for meat avoid forming a real bond with them. I remembered thinking that Ulla would regret naming these pigs, and petting them, and playing with them, and caring for them with genuine affection, that it would take a great emotional toll on her. What I didn't know, is that she understood that from the beginning and she didn't care. What mattered to her was that the lives they lived were wonderful. If she withdrew from them, it would be to protect herself and that would be of no help to the animals.

So she loved them. And slowly, the rest of us decided we could love them too. This year and last we told stories about these hogs like they were our pets. We laughed about their antics and felt genuine sorrow when they were gone. But we also understood that they were there for a purpose, and without this purpose, they would't have existed at all. And in the end, there is a job that must be done and to do that job well was meaningful.

We had four hogs this year, twice the herd. The experience last year was so overwhelmingly positive that we were immediately convinced that pigs would be on the farm the next year. Fred hatched a plan to get some friends involved in year two. We invited people out to be a part of the slaughter, butchery and charcuterie of these four hogs because we knew we should share it. The learning curve had flattened a bit from year one, and the path to flattening it out further next year became more obvious. Fred began to talk of handling the shot himself instead of leaving it to someone else. If not the shot next year, a gun and some shooting lessons.

Sleep was again elusive the night before this year's slaughter. No one likes the idea (and certainly not the practice) of killing animals. Darrell, the farmer who supplies Red Horse with pigs, a man who has been around this particular farm chore his whole life, is the first to admit a distaste for it. But Darrell was there on the day of our slaughter, an indispensable participant in every way. The farm was set up and fires were blazing. My heart sank when the first pig went down, and again with each of the four, but immediately the work to preserve these animals as food at the highest level possible became priority and just as quickly a sense of accomplishment and reverence set in. Smiles began to spill across faces in the group that only moments before wore sadness.

And everyone set to work. Some were watching the temperature of the water churning on the smoky fire, some began to scrape bristles while others went off to attend to the next kill. Ulla kept us fed and caffeinated, roasted chestnuts, and wrapped an arm around those who needed it. Amy, loathed to see anything wasted from so generous a gift, put aside the swelling of her full heart to climb into the pen to collect blood. Not minutes before, she scratched his head and smiled lovingly at him. The year before, after the first pig went down, the first ever in our circle, she saw that Fred, who held that pig down during the stick, was a little shaken. Amy walked over and hugged him briefly. He closed his eyes, he rested his chin on the top of her head and forgot for a moment, his boots, for the first time since he became a farmer, covered in blood.

This year, the last pig to go started to get a bit agitated. Not stressed, but nervous. We decided it was best to not let this state persist or get worse. "Do you want to scrape or kill?" Fred asked. Five of us gathered in the pen. Travis took his time, as usual, to find a still moment, a moment of peace to take the shot. He fell. Travis stuck. He ran away in his dreams as we tried our best to keep him still. He slowed for a moment, then ran again, going nowhere. The same as the three before him. I suddenly heard myself whispering to him that it was all ok. Scratching him behind the ear. I looked up toward the fire and the first of the pigs was split and ready for butchery. As the sun started to set, that cliched "good tired" of a hard day's work began to set in, doubled with the relief of knowing we had done our best, done well, by the animals in our care.

Some say the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. I think the same applies when it comes to how we relate to the animals we eat. To withdraw your engagement with animals as food (or as companions, tools, or simply as unseen neighbors) and think that somehow this makes life better for them is at best naive. Left to the flippancy of mother nature, a death in the wild typically comes with great suffering. This is why we call a death with mitigated suffering a "humane" death, because as humans, as creatures with an understanding of suffering and death beyond simple physical responses, the best among us try to do better than disease, starvation, and injury without medical attention.

We are by nature omnivores, which means at some point in history we were (and sometimes still are) predators. Eventually, farming replaced hunting as the primary means of obtaining meat and this perhaps began a new conversation about the morality of eating animals. Sometimes, even the most ardent vegan will aquiesce at hunting, unable to reconcile the idea that without it overpopulation would cause great suffering in wild game populations, and that all humans, including vegans, are to blame for this. It occurs to me, then, that their problem is with farming, not the act of eating meat.

That one bad day a well cared for animal ends up at, the day the gun and the knife come out, especially at a farm that claims to care about its animals, seems to the soft hearted as betrayal: a friend and caregiver who steps up and performs unspeakable violence against them. But it is is not. It is fulfillment. It is the delivery of the promise we made these animals when they came to be under our stewardship. We promised to find a place for them in this world, a world that we have selfishly usurped and callously neglected to account for them in.

In exchange we ask for blood. But if there is no blood, there is no deal. There is no room in this world for them unless we fulfill our obligations to one another. Should we decide to not eat them any longer, we reduce them to nuisance, and then to extinction.

I tire easily of the banal rhetoric that sometimes passes for a defense of animal rights. They say life is sacred but it is not. Life, whether short or long, influential or transient, has definition which outlasts the corporeal. It's entirety, which includes death and the impact it has on its successors, is equally significant, but we shortsightedly see value only in what is before us readily, the "real world". Life is a moment, a blur, a minute piece in a long and unknowable continuum, a continuum that is forever changed by even the slightest shrug from every life and this is what gives life its real beauty. Death is not cruel. Death is not a thing apart from life. We toast to death. We praise and thank the dead. We welcome it as a part of life and living. When we close our eyes and plug our ears and pretend death is not among us, we dishonor everything that was once real. And when we pretend that it is better to disregard a living creature than it is to bring it into our lives, care for it and see that it has a good and humane death, we commit an act of emotional selfishness. I wonder if there is a difference between the gluttonous meat eater who has no association between meat in a package and an animal, and the vegan who thinks his diet eschews violence and acts in advocacy of a creature he has made extensive effort to have no interaction with.

There is no tragedy in a good life followed by a kind death. Tragedy is in suffering. Pain, abuse, cruelty, indifference. Indifference. As long as I don't pull the trigger I am not culpable. This is cruelty: caring more about keeping the keel of your emotions stable than the day to day welfare of the creatures you share the earth with. Maybe to call it cruelty is hyperbole, but it is certainly not advocacy. No vegan has ever spared an animal death. The conscientious meat eater who chooses to buy meat from farms that care for their animals makes a real world impact on animal welfare. That one bad day is coming for us all. I wonder what the ultimate aim of veganism in defense of animals is, since it can't be an end to death. It seems to me their stance is more about protecting their own precarious emotional well being than opting in and understanding the relationship between people and agrarian animals in a real and meaningful way, the good, bad, and ugly in it.

As it turned out, Japhy outlived the first year's pigs until spring. We had walks every day that winter that brought joy to all involved and her almost absurdly happy face lasted until the end. When we laid her down for the last time on the porch where she loved to nap, it occurred to me that she was not sad, not nervous, that she was not drifting away wishing for just one more day. She lived until it didn't make sense for her to do so anymore. And then she was gone. A firm, embracing breeze was rattling through the tree's new leaves. It was a beautiful, warm, sunny spring day.

Let Soup Be Soup

Squash, Pear, and Celery Soup

It occurred to me tonight as I was sitting down to dinner that I haven't posted any recipes on this site, so I thought 'd fix that. A few days ago I made a big batch of squash soup for Amy to take to work for lunch. I have been making this same squash soup for several years now and I think about why it came about each time.

Squash soup is one of those ubiquitous fall offerings in restaurants this time of year and that is as it should be. They are an almost comical harbinger of fall, soul satisfying and bracing against the cold. Quite often they are made clumsily, too thick and sweet or spiced to high hell with cinnamon or nutmeg. They often more closely resemble baby food than a comforting, adult meal. I wanted to break away from the typical mold, but it's hard with squash soup. Even the not so great ones are pleasurable as a sort of seasonal touchstone. You don't want to rob the soup of that character. You want it to be familiar, just relieved of a little of its cliche.

Turns out this wasn't so difficult. Squash, obviously, is a fruit, but like tomatoes, arrives on American tables in vegetable garb.  So a new path quickly became clear: bring the vegetable quality a little more forward and stop treating it like pumpkin pie filling. Think of it as a savory soup with sweet qualities. To do so required only a few minor tweaks.

First, pair the squash with celery. The two make very good partners and I am a little mystified as to why  they don't appear together more often. Celery is undeniably savory, underutilized as a forward flavor, and a great vehicle for bringing the savory character of other foods out. Adding two leeks to the pot helps in the same way, though the leeks play a more supporting role.

Second, simmer the raw squash in the pot with the other ingredients. Most people roast squash prior to making their soup. Many recipes encourage this route. Roasting intensifies the sweetness and mutes vegetal notes. It also, not so incidentally, relieves the cook of the effort of peeling. But for our purposes, a simmer will keep the "vegetable" in tact.

Third, skip the pumpkin pie spices. These flavors trick the brain into reading sweet, even when sweet is not present. If you must add some sort of spice element, try fennel seed, or dill pollen, or fresh ginger instead. This soup relies on bay leaf as its principal herb, again because it is great at reinforcing the savory quality of anything it simmers with.

It would be incorrect to think that this soup is not sweet. It is. The idea is to bring the savory characteristics forward and not mask them with tooth aching sweetness. Without a bit of sweet, the soup would lack depth and the squash flavor would be flat. We rely on pears and pear cider to the job here. They provide a little natural fruit sweetness and a touch of tartness that adds additional balance. Pears pair marvelously with both squash and celery as well and all three hit their peak at the market at about the same time. They make quite the trifecta.

Finally, a generous addition of butter marries everything together and provides a little richness. It may seem like a lot, but remember the recipe makes about a gallon and a half of soup. When all is said and done, you will have a homey, comforting, but complex and mature soup worth dwelling over for a moment. This recipe calls for butternut squash because it must be dealt with raw and butternut is far easier to peel than a more flavorful amber cup or kabocha. If you decide to use another variety, just make sure to adjust quantities accordingly.

Squash, Celery, and Pear Soup

1 large butternut squash, peeled, seeded and diced
1 head of celery with its leaves, the greener the better, roughly chopped
10 ripe bosc pears, peeled, cored, and roughly chopped
2 leeks, tough green tops removed, roughly chopped
2 bay leaves
1 small branch of summer savory or thyme
3 cups pear cider
about 3 cups light mushroom stock or water
1/2# salted butter
salt

Place all of the above in a large stock pot. Use only enough mushroom stock to let the ingredients move about freely. Bring to the simmer and cook until everything is tender. Remove the savory and bay leaves.

Ladle off a bit of the cooking liquid and reserve. Transfer the soup in batches to a blender and puree. Let the blender run on high speed for about a minute. Run the soup through a chinois if you have one. Use the reserved cooking liquid to thin the soup to desired consistency if need be. Remember to let the soup be soup. It shouldn't be overly thick.

Season with salt to taste. The soup freezes and reheats remarkably well so make a lot. You will be happy to have it all winter long.

Seventy Nine Jars

The haul.

Canned tomatoes are a staple in our home and we share this culinary habit with our friends and neighbors Fred and Ulla. For the past several years we have collaborated for an afternoon on putting up a year's worth. This summer we began to ration the last of 2012's jars in both homes so we decided to up the quantity. We bought and canned 3 bushels. This yielded 80 quart jars, one of which broke during processing. It might not look like much but it took the better part of a late afternoon and evening.

For those of you who have never canned your own tomatoes, here's how it goes. Roma tomatoes must be blanched, chilled, peeled, and packed into scalded jars with a hot liquid, capped, and then processed in a water bath to seal the jars and kill off any active bacteria which could cause food borne illness in storage.

The peeling is the most tedious part. Three bushels is about 1200 tomatoes. Fred, Ulla and I tackled the blanching and peeling while Amy, leading the charge, juiced an additional bushel of beefsteaks and prepared and packed the jars. We had two turkey fryers going outside to handle the blanching and processing. Truth be told, processing takes the longest. Between the two cookers we could process 15 jars at a time, 35 minutes to a batch, plus time to come to temp and time to cool. Luckily, once the jars are packed there is lots of down time. So we had dinner and drinks, conversed comfortably as neighbors do, and waited, occasionally responding to a timer by lazily rising to take jars out of the water or put fresh in. The sun went down and Ulla began to fade. Soon she was gone and we decided the dirty dishes could wait til morning. Not too long after that, Amy ran out of gas and Fred and I brought out the whisky to ride out the remainder. It was a good day, a day that makes the bond between our two households one of great depth.

Fred was telling me that he went into a mild panic as he sat on an airplane on his way home form Denmark thinking about the many things massing on his very busy horizon, one of which was tomatoes. He worriedly thought to himself, "I have no plans for tomatoes" and in Fred's world this is not okay. He would spend an entire winter cooking greens, pasta, pizza, braised meat, BBQ sauce and salsa, with no tomatoes in the pantry. An entire year without something in his pantry he always has but never takes for granted. Sure you could just buy them, but that is not where the bar has been set. And Fred is not one to lower his bar. Nor are Amy and I.

So on a very busy Labor Day weekend we canned tomatoes in lieu of the beach or a hike or dinner out.  But it does not feel like a sacrifice because these are the activities that the make the hill the hill. Fred and I spoke for some time about how much we love it here once the whisky was flowing. We talked about how 122nd Avenue which rolls over the crest of the hill and in front of our homes seems to split the weather coming off the lake like a knife: look north and you might see churning grey clouds in the distance ready to unleash a summer storm, and to the south, across the road, a billow of high white clouds on bright blue skies blushed pink with the setting sun. We talked about how these tomatoes are an irreplaceable piece of our existence here. We looked forward to watching the pigs chow down on the peels and pulp that collected as we prepped.

Canned tomatoes of good quality can be bought but they are very expensive. We can get very good tomatoes locally if we haven't grown our own, and taking control over the canning process can yield even better results. This year, I finally talked everyone into investing a bit more time and money into packing the tomatoes in juice. I thought this would have a few benefits. Normally, home canned tomatoes are packed in water, which is poured off before use. I thought after all this effort it would be nice if the entire contents of the jar were useable. Also, when you pack in water the pH becomes a concern. If the pH is too low, safety demands the jars must be processed for much longer (lowering their quality) or pressure canned, which is interminably slow (we only have one pressure canner and it only fits a few jars). Adding acidic tomato juice - verified this year by a pH meter, an expensive but very worthy investment for anyone who cans, cures, or ferments - can eliminate the need for long or higher temperature processing. It can also eliminate the need for lemon juice or citric acid which can alter the flavor, color, and texture of canned tomatoes. It is vitally important to know that acidity of the tomatoes and their medium in the jar is below 4.6 to ensure safe storage. Under no circumstances should you consider shorter processing times or eliminating additional acidification without confirming a safe pH. The most compelling argument for packing in juice in my mind, though, is flavor. When you pack in water, some of the tomato flavor and color will be lost to it. Tomato juice will enhance, not degrade the flavor of the fruit in the jar.

As always, the proof is in the pudding. It will be a few weeks before we will crack open this year's tomatoes and see what's what. If this step yields good results, maybe next year we will add a little alcohol to the juice. Some tomato flavors are soluble only in alcohol, which explains why a little red wine in a tomato sauce does so much. So perhaps starting in the jar could have a profound positive effect on their flavor.

At. St. Anthony, we are laying the foundation for the best possible canned tomato, starting on the farm. We are discussing varieties that grow well in the north, prepping the soil they grow in with the ash from our wood ovens to simulate the "shadow of Vesuvius" where the San Marzano, the king of canned tomatoes grows, trellising, handling. It is sometimes hard to imagine a fruit so badly treated in modern cooking. Tomatoes are truly seasonal, but are still too ubiquitous throughout the year. They are often refrigerated which means death to their flavor. Proper ripeness is crucial, but often overlooked. Acidity is not just necessary to the safety of canned tomatoes, but also its culinary value. Bright, sharp acidity is the cornerstone of great sauces and braises and the backdrop that showcases the best a tomato has to offer flavor wise.

The lessons we have learned from year to year canning on our back porches will certainly help us get there at St. Anthony. More importantly, these cooking proclivities borne naturally form our love of the hill will light the path toward our discovery of the cuisine of this place on earth. This is our guiding principle, our mission: to cook from our hearts and our home. I will know that we've strayed from our vision if the food in the restaurant would seem out of place in our home. In some important ways, the hill will be looming over St. Anthony with a watchful eye. One could do worse.

A Prayer For Pumpernickel

Onions cooked on wood coals and The Bunny Kitty.

Amy is in Madison, WI right now visiting her sister and niece. She ate at Forequarter and I am very jealous (Madison easily has the best collection of restaurants of any city of it's size in the country -- it is about the same size and proximity from Chicago as Grand Rapids, but the disparity between the two scenes is...for another post). My jealousy, however, has been tempered by the fire burning behind me, though that tempering has in turn been tempered by melancholy: usually when there is a fire burning in our yard, she is here.

I am of the opinion that every restaurant kitchen could be made better by the inclusion of a wood burning something. Oven, grill, hearth. I say could be because there is ample evidence that bad cooking cannot be improved upon by live fire. Good cooking, however, can. I have gotten into more than one argument with an equipment engineer friend who extolls the virtues of gas and gas assist pizza ovens. He thinks that because the smoke only comes into play by perfuming the dining room that a serious cook, one who cares first and foremost about the results a given piece of equipment produces, would not choose a wood burning stone oven over gas. My opinion, is that he clearly has not spent enough time working with one.

I, however, have. First of all, I am not entirely convinced that gas fired stone ovens perform at the same level as solid fuel ovens. Gas ovens cannot be used efficiently for retained heat baking, which for me is one of the main reasons to own one. And regardless of what you're cooking, recovery time, convection, and chamber humidity are crucial to achieving excellent results. Smoke, as he points out, is only incidental. He is right about this, if you consider the aroma of wood smoke in a dining room as incidental (it is not). The smoke produced by a wood fired oven is icing, not cake. The foods cooked in a wood fired oven are not decidedly smoky, nor are they intended to be. It is continuous, uninterrupted intense heat that is responsible for the high quality of well made pizza crust, deeply caramelized meats, and candy sweet root vegetables. Can this heat be reproduced by a gas fired oven? Sometimes. Is it more than just incidental that the best you can hope for from a gas fired oven is that it might sometimes approximate the qualities of a wood oven? Absolutely.

Second, and more importantly, though my friend would probably be exasperated at this largely aesthetic supposition, wood changes something in the mind of a cook. Turning a burner on a gas range is done without thought. Building and tending a fire is always demanding of one's attention. A wood fire is wild and unpredictable. You cannot hope for behavioral consistency so you must always be vigilant. You must always, as Irma Baumbeck famously said, "stand facing the stove." A live fire forces the cook to engage, to identify, manage, and master idiosyncrasies with each fire, even hour to hour in the same fire. Instead of worrying only about what goes into the oven, you  must tend to the oven itself. But great control and opportunity await the cook diligent enough to become skilled. This is admittedly a lot to heap on the shoulders of some nineteen year old who is only cooking because he can't settle on a major. For someone with blood of wood smoke and bones of fire brick, it is a constantly shapeshifting opportunity to shine.

Lemme s'plain: without a doubt the best thing I have ever smelled in my life was a failed loaf of bread.

I was obsessed with retained heat baking at Journeyman. When I learned what a real loaf of pumpernickel bread was about, I lost my mind. Today, pumpernickel is mostly a white flour "rye" bread made dark with the addition of dark beer or molasses or, in the worst loaves, some fake colorant. But traditionally, in the days when a German baker used a wood fired oven to bake bread, pumpernickel was loaded into an oven when it was not being refired to bake the following day. The slowly waning heat of the oven was the perfect environment to bake a dense, all rye loaf that could coast to doneness over twelve, maybe even sixteen hours of baking as the oven temperature slowly dropped. It got that dark, almost black color, by slowly baking at low temperatures, skirting the line between delicious and burned, not by the addition of other darkly colored things. This was the bread that the baker took home to his family. It was an intense sourdough that staled slowly, over the course of weeks, not days. It was nutrient dense, flavorful, and as luck would have it, a perfect mate to beer, sausage, and smoked fish.

I spent three weeks making a rye starter specifically for this bread. Four days fermenting the dough in precise stages. On a Sunday night after service, when we would be closed for the next two days and the oven would not be refired for next day's baking, I shaped ten or twelve loaves, loaded them into the softly radiating oven, and went home. When I came in the next morning, the aromas of that bread filled the entire restaurant. It was powerful, inescapable, but still warm and soft and elegant. I will never forget it. I won't try to describe it further. It is not possible. It can only be communicated through the nose. I thought I might cry for a moment. I was so sure I had tapped in to some deep culinary vein that had eagerly awaited a hero to unearth it.

But the bread wasn't good. The oven stayed too hot too long and the loaves were dried out and inedible. We had gone to great lengths when building the oven to insulate it so that it would retain heat for long bake days, and the modern materials we used to do so did their jobs well, too well for real pumpernickel. Something, I would venture to say, no one I know has actually tasted. And I knew it right away, the moment I lifted a loaf and felt its dry, steely, stubborn, unyielding texture in my fingers. I was the only one who would ever know the aroma of pumpernickel from the Journeyman oven, and even I would never know the taste. I didn't bother to try again. I knew our oven couldn't do it. For some reason, I just knew.

Natural gas does not yield such days.

In the fire pit behind me, there are onions roasting in dirty wood coals for the Harvest Dinner I am cooking a course for tomorrow. I don't remember how I came across it, but I find myself a little obsessed right now with escalivada, a Catalan dish of eggplant, onion, tomato, and bell peppers roasted in the coals of an open fire, usually served on bread with salt packed anchovy and olive oil. When I read about it I knew I had to find a home for it in my cooking. So the onions for my salad tomorrow got thrown skin on into the waning embers of a campfire. A fire I lit and enjoyed all by myself. An industrial carbon credit's worth of wood got burned to cook eight large red onions. It took the entire night from lighting, tending, burning wood down to coals, then finally cooking. I'm not sure they are done yet. But they smell good. Not as good as a loaf of failed pumpernickel, twelve hours into baking, but they are certainly making me hungry.

Faster Than Coyotes

The Perseid meteor shower happened tonight. Last night too, but then only clouds and blind darkness. I love these displays but forget that you rarely actually watch a meteor. They appear and fade in a graceful flash. We imagine a long and effervescent line across the sky that we follow with awe and admiration, but really it is only a fraction of a moment in a corner of the eye. By the time you turn your head it is gone. But the awe and admiration never go away; they remain strong enough to drive you outdoors in the middle of the night when the promise of a new show is offered.

I wandered as I often have in this idle summer into the cross street in front of our house in the quiet, country darkness. By this time I am several gin and tonics deep, and have dug into the Scotch ale I planned on aging 'til winter. I am standing in the middle of 122nd Avenue and 62nd Street, the place I love more than any other, looking up at the sky, waiting for meteors. And they come. One. And then another. And then two more. And then nothing. They stop.

But I still stand there, neck craned and beer dangling from limp arms, no less impressed by the sky above me than in the meteor filled moment before. The Milky Way slashes the sky in half and the purple glow from Holland burns out the north sky, but is beautiful in its way. I keep staring at the stationary stars. I wouldn't be here if the Perseids hadn't called me out, but this sky, a sky I have had on every clear night, keeps me captivated. It always does, from the moment the sun begins to set and the late afternoon/early evening light turns otherworldly and gives way to a perfectly quiet night. A breeze always blows through the trees at night here. But even on this corner, which is so noisy all day in the summer, from Hutchins Lake, the winery up the road, the cidery next door, it is so peaceful now. Not one car. And I looked up, here, from the top of the hill, at so much open sky.

And as I stood there, stepping a few inches one way or another to find the exact center of the cross road, where the cement was at its widest, or looking up to the sky for the Perseids, I saw a small black figure a few feet away, moving cautiously from side to side. It took me a minute to realize it was Steve, our cat. When I did, I moved toward her to give her a scratch behind the ear. She waited until I was close, then nervously bolted up and moved a few feet away, closer to the house. We repeated this little dance two or three more times until she had me in the yard, where she amorphously collapsed in the dark grass and finally let me scruff her head. She scurried off into the dark and I went inside to refill my beer.

Glass heavy, I went back into the street to see the stars, falling or otherwise. Not more than a moment passed before I heard the very sorrowful cries of Ginger, the youngest cat in our house, and then saw her, and Steve again (her Momma, incidentally), sheepishly making their way toward me in the road. When they got close, I reached out with affection, which they very suddenly rebuked, and moved toward the house. I finally figured out that they were distressed by my being in the road. The road to them, I guess, is a big rock. A big rock where a remorseless beast with two white, glowing eyes lives, who is faster than coyotes, faster even than the wind. It doesn't do to linger. So they coax me back to shore a few short feet at a time, staying just out of reach.

This is the first time in all my years with pets that I have seen cats behave as you might expect a dog to: with something akin to genuine concern for your well being. Arguably I have drunkenly anthropomorphized these events. But a third foray onto the middle of the road led to another visit from my feline sirens, and I am convinced. All the creatures of this hill watch out for me. And even though the glowing eyed beast hasn't shown itself for hours, it seems wise to be at least equally vigilant.

But the glass is heavy and the stars are falling, and I think even the cats understand. Everyone I know would be in the middle of this road if they were given the chance. And there is one. And then another. And two more. And then a still moment, where only the Milky Way and her stars, who will be here tomorrow and for all the days to come, make me forget there was ever a meteor.

The New Dark Roast

We are a pendulous nation when it comes to our tastes.

As we begin to rediscover good things to eat in the wake of our recent journey away form mass made mediocrity our tastes shift, and often shift too far. In the heyday of the small American coffee house we rediscovered a taste for big, hearty, bitter dark roast coffee in (over)reaction to our disdain for the ordinary. Craft beer helped remind us that hops are not the enemy, and now you're hard pressed to tell the difference between a pale ale and an IPA as the hipster hop heads add more and more hops to the kettle to one up each other. And in the past few years we seem to be more widely appreciative of dry riesling and more apt to turn our recently educated noses up at the sugary sweet stuff.

It is of course very good news that we are becoming appreciative of dry riesling and dark coffee. But for some reason in America when we have a cultural shift in our tastes we have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We see our former proclivities as telling of our lack of taste in the days before our enlightenment. This is madness. The fact is you don't give up an appreciation for sweet riesling when you have finally found love for dry. Becoming accustomed to, or even appreciative of hoppy beers does not make malt forward beers less delicious. Smoky, medicinal Scotch does not make bourbon with honey or butterscotch notes at the front any less enjoyable.

As a nation we had tended toward too much sugar in most things. It is arguably an indication of two dimensional taste. Bitter, smoky, mushroomy, moldy (blue cheese) usually take a little more to come to terms with. Desserts in most restaurants are far too sweet. I personally have very little love for cola because it's too sweet. As we begin to consider ourselves a bit more sophisticated in what we eat, early on in this process anyway, we decide unnecessarily and pretentiously that it is time to put childish things aside. And then we start to make more bad choices. Like not drinking light roast coffee or off dry hard cider. We miss out on voluptuous ice wine, silky milk chocolate, and sticky sweet home made jam with the fortitude to stand up to dull, dry toast.

Right now the coffee on my counter is Uncommon Grounds Papua New Guinea, a medium light roast that is complex and powerfully delicious. A dark roast would have killed this coffee. In my fridge there are three different IPA's around a big bottle of malty, sweet, home made scotch ale, two cases of bone dry home made riesling in the basement and an ice wine with 18% residual sugar. To be fair, I am guilty of these same knee jerk overreactions. When I started getting a little more knowledgeable about red wines from France, I started looking at fruit forward Californians with some disdain. Maybe this is because what we have disdain for is the prevailing tide. It's hard to see a passionate sommelier watch his wine list be cherry picked for name known California boutique nonsense in lieu of something really special that doesn't suit the current mood. We would all do well to remember that delicious comes in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes, sweet is more than just sentimental and immediately gratifying.

Good taste is about being open to new flavors and new ideas from all corners of the food and drink world. It is a terrible sin to let your pretensions make your experiences more narrow. That is the opposite of eating and drinking well.

A Walk In The Woods

Photo sent to Andy for proper identification

The phone rang yesterday and Ryan Burke, the cider maker at our new neighbor, Virtue Farms, was on the line asking if I knew what this onion like thing was he just found growing wild around the barn. "There are hundreds of them," he said. I grabbed my phone and went across the street to check it out. A quick photo messaged to Andy Davis confirmed that it was a wild chive, or onion grass, as some people call it. Phone calls are rarely short with Andy. He is intensely well versed in all things wild and edible and will talk about them as long as you'll listen. But yesterday he was a little forlorn. He was sitting on the shore of the Pacific ocean, marveling at it's beauty, but still sad because he was in a part of Oregon that didn't support morels. The weather had finally gotten warm for a day or two in Michigan and we had a bit of rain, all just after Andy left for the West Coast, so he was unable to go hunting for them once the conditions finally favored their appearance.

And as I walked around the barn at Virtue with Ryan, looking at the brittle, Lot's wife like, lifeless shoots of last years wild asparagus, one defiant moment form crumbling into the earth to make way for this year's harvest, I was struck with a bit of that same melancholy. Usually at this time of year I am in a professional kitchen, exploring my way around the newest of the new, vegetable wise. In Michigan, you get through most of winter on storage crops. You get a little sick of potatoes and rutabaga a few weeks before the first thaw will hopefully find the farmer able to dig up a few of last year's jerusalem artichokes or turnips that wintered over, marking the official start to the agricultural season. Shortly after that, again if you're lucky, tender, flavorful wintered over spinach will appear briefly, and then it's time to head to the woods.

The past couple of years working with Andy has taught me that spring is about much more than morels, ramps, and fiddleheads. The woods teem with wild food. Even now, before the morels have even popped, Andy tells me he can get cattail shoots, violets, pokeweed, watercress (if the floodwaters recede), day lily tubers and shoots, wild chives, and, of course, the first of this year's maple syrup. As summer progresses, Andy will bring around dozens of varieties of mushroom, more greens, and edible tubers and shoots, herbs and taproots.

Last year was the first year Andy made aggressive motions toward making his hobby a career, and, unfortunately, we had a severe drought. This year, I have no restaurant. Next year, you can be sure, wild food will be as important to menu formation at St. Anthony as cultivated. It is more than just a little heart breaking to be on the bench this season. When I left Reserve, I was hoping to have more time to write and cook what inspires me with more freedom. Turns out, it was the work that inspired me. Turns  out, I'm not quite the self motivator I thought I was. I will most certainly make good use of this restlessness when I am in front of the stove again.

In the meantime, I should get Andy to take me for a walk in the woods.

Up From The Basement

It was over fifteen years ago when I first salted a leg of pork and hung it to dry. Since then there have been some successes, some failures, but either was the result of luck, groping in the dark to find the target by happenstance if favorable conditions prevailed. But recently Brandon Sturm and I, my long time sous chef, butcher, friend, have posted back to back successes in the the cellar. The last few times we have cured and dried a ham, we acted deliberately. Technique has become codified through experience.

Many things make the achievement good ham elusive: vagaries in written mentorship, the rarity of practitioners who can (or will) teach, the difficulty of appropriating suitable environments to age in. But the biggest thing standing in the way of the novice who wants to become an expert is the 18 months or so it takes to make one. You don't have any results to evaluate for a very long stretch of time, and because so much time has passed, it can be difficult to recall the procedures you went through to produce it even if you took copious notes. And then you make your corrections, and wait another 18 months for those results. It takes tremendous patience and fortitude to get good at curing ham, so it's astonishing that I've actually come to a point where I feel comfortable with the technique and feel good about what I produce. Like I am finally at the very beginning of attaining some level of skill and expertise.

I am not typically someone with a lot of stick-to-it-iveness. I have a banjo, guitar, mandolin, several harmonicas, a ukelele, and I can't play any of them. Usually, my enthusiasm doesn't outlast my incompetence. But when it comes to ham, for some reason, I have the patience of Job. I will go down to my basement and spend time with the hams hanging there, searching for any hint of how they're doing and plotting correct courses of action or inaction. Over the years I've learned to keep things simple. For one stretch I cleaned my hams with a light vinegar solution, then a brine, and finally have come to realize that a clean, dry towel is best. Also, that it is best to disturb them as little as possible.

I have also learned that my basement, where I do my aging, is a massive part of what makes these hams unique. Several people who have eaten them over the years can recognize its particular funk. The foundation is built from a mix of flagstone and cinderblock. It is a walk-out, so two walls are exposed to the elements, leading to swings in temperature and humidity throughout the season. This mimics, though less dramatically, what American country hams go through. So these hams, though they are cured using methods very similar to the curing of prosciutto, are a little wild and funky. When people ask me to describe them, I have a little trouble. They're like, well...just what they are. No, not like prosciutto, no, not country ham. They are the hams from my basement. Be nice to me and maybe I'll let you try one sometime.

As we are preparing for St. Anthony, which will have a temperature and humidity controlled aging room, I sometimes wonder if I'll produce hams. They could not possibly be as interesting as what comes up from the basement. And this is what great food is all about. Great food is something that is tied obviously, tangibly, tastily to the place it is born. It would be more than just a little disheartening to make hams without giving them the exposure to the natural environment they need to stretch their legs and become who they should be.

But maybe that's one of the things that makes a ham from the basement worth celebrating. It is truly local, made by and for the people of this place alone, the inner circle.

I'm guessing I felt directed to write this because, for the first time in years, the basement is empty. There was a long stretch where nothing went up and now they have all matured and been eaten, or are in the process of being eaten. It just doesn't feel the same down there.

Time to salt a pig leg, Sturm.

Row Away From The Rocks

Hedge your bets. Hope for the best when you strike out against the prevailing tide, but always guard against failure by moving to the middle of the road. Always have a Plan B. Subjugate the truly substantial things you could accomplish to the altar of solvency. Call on God, but...

I have been thinking about money lately. Non stop. There are, of course, two groups that think about money more than they should. Those who need it and those who have too much of it. Those who have just enough to not notice, well... they are very rare birds indeed. I want to be that bird. I know the consequences of financial failure first hand, but I also know the potential benefits of the high road.

I need to finance a restaurant and a magazine; a not insanely expensive, but not particularly cheap restaurant. But it's a place that I plan to put everything I have worked hard to understand about cooking together. It is stuck in my head and I can't get it out. And I have spent the last few years preparing for it. I've been in front of the camera and gotten people talking, something which believe me does not come naturally. I've stuck to my guns and stayed here and championed this place, my home, and I think have had at least some positive impact on our dining scene. And now I need to get back in the kitchen to finish the job. And I don't mean to be arrogant, but the region needs it too. I have spent the last decade, not just thinking about what I want to to cook, but what we should be cooking here, in this place, in a way that suits us here and only here. It's not about me, but us. And I think I've finally got a line on it. I don't know for sure, because we have to build it, cook in it, taste it, spit it out and start again. But I do know we are closer at this moment that we have ever been. And the only thing standing between us and a giant leap to the next level is cash.

And so I think about money. More to the point, I think about the good things that never happen in this world because they go un-financed. Not just the capital conceits like restaurants, but the charitable, ideological, environmental... we seem to have an enormous ineptitude when it comes to knowing where to put our  money. This is particularly shocking when you think about how much time and resources we apply to that very question. But it's true. We routinely spend our money poorly in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes we are too conservative, sometimes too greedy, sometimes just plain stupid. Mostly we are arrogant, especially when it comes to money. So many people who have money feel that it validates them, that somehow they have achieved expertise that is commensurate to their capital.

What I have learned is quite the opposite. I am repeating myself but it merits repeating: money rarely equals taste. Or intelligence. Or financial savvy, even. In my experience, those who have money are most likely in that position because of inheritance, greed, or dumb luck. Generally speaking, the rich are not a particularly impressive lot. Folks like Aubrey McClendon and Donald Trump should provide ample evidence to support my theory. Unfortunately, doing something with long term positive effects is of little interest to someone judging the quality of an investment by how quickly and aggressively it provides returns. So we languish in mediocrity, the rich get richer and buy more marble counter tops, and the rest of us dream of nothing more than an opportunity to really achieve. Change the world. Today. Not in a decade when the simpletons with cash finally figure it out, but now.

I think the fact that we live in a country that has such enormous wealth but still bumbles it's way so clumsily through first-worldism is proof enough that the current crop of resource intensive humans are not up to the task (just to be clear, this post is not a rant against my former employers). It can be too easy to load a chip on your shoulder when things aren't going your way, and I cannot honestly say that a few sour grapes have not influenced my current unsavory mood. But, gun to my head, even with the benefit of distance, I think what I say has validity. I think we are coming to a very important tipping point in western civilization: soon the market and the economy will no longer be two sides of the same coin. Soon, the market will consume the economy and the trend which already favors excess for the few will become the rule.

And the only way to stop it is to opt out. Start putting your coin in the purse of the guy who has no shareholder to answer to: the guy who answers to his client and his community. Become mistrustful of any relationship that does not include a face you recognize and a handshake you feel good about. Put your money into something you want to see in your community, something you know is going to make the world immediately around you a better place, instead of some faceless fund that is accountable to no one, especially you, and provides you little more than a few extra dollars.

You will never spend your money more wisely.

The Lateral Line

The post Reserve era has left me with the opportunity to do some things I couldn't fit into my schedule when I was working full time in a professional kitchen. For the past several years Amy has extolled the excellence of the Winter Beer Festival, but until now I was unable to attend. To say she was right is a gross understatement. This festival is everything a beer lover in the great white north would want. There are some 70+ Michigan breweries pouring their staples and some rare specialties (some were pouring beers made exclusively for the festival). The air was perfectly crisp and fat snowflakes lumbered drunkenly toward the ground. There was great music, an insurance adjuster's nightmare of a snow hill to romp on, roaring fires, smoked turkey legs, and for me, someone who has worked on the fringe of the craft beer industry, a chance to see friends I haven't seen in a while and drink their outstanding beer.

We stayed the night in a hotel in Grand Rapids the night before the festival and beer hooligans were filling the lobby bar. They are not hard to spot: typically a group of younger people, dressed simply and having a very good time, probably passing around a 750 of something good to drink. I think one of the things that is so appealing about the craft beer industry right now is it's youth. Many people working in the industry are quite young and even the old timers have a great vitality and energy.  The craft beer industry seems from the outside to be filled with happiness at a level you would surely never find in other professions. But these guys are pros, too. They smile a lot, converse generously, drink freely, but at the end of the day the job is done and done well. Pride in a job well done is crucial to being happy in your work. This seems obvious, I know, but too many people overlook it. 

I talk from time to time about how in Michigan we don't always spend much time taking pride in being who we are. When the local foods movement landed here, the food culture that surrounded it in its place of origin, the Bay Area in California, came with it. Cooking locally there meant cooking with a strong Mediterranean vibe. That's who settled the region. That's what the climate mimics. And thus, Cal-Ital is born. For some reason when Alice Waters' influence was felt here, her cooking style came with it. We asked our farmers to grow heirloom tomatoes (turns out tomatoes grow remarkably well here), we made fresh pasta, and made our own salumi. What I am beginning to discover, however, that our story, the story of the north, of pierogi, of apples, storage crops, and French and German charcuterie, is the story we should be exploring. The cooking of the north is becoming quite trendy in high end restaurants around the world as well. It is genuinely and truly fascinating. I think this is why the craft beer industry has grown into itself so successfully in Michigan, more successfully you could argue, than Michigan's wine industry.

Beer, if you buy into this lateral line of influence from Europe I'm proposing, was the alcoholic beverage of choice for the people of the North. As Michiganders, the descendants of the Germans, Dutch, Poles, French...we embraced it readily, like we were somehow predisposed to it. It came naturally and as a result, Michigan is the nation's craft beer leader (you heard right, Portland). And it is not that the North does not have a long and great tradition in winemaking, it's that the wine industry here, driven by market demand, has not until recently even begun to celebrate riesling or Gruner Veltliner. We still plant cabernet and merlot that doesn't belong here because popular tastes are so skewed toward fruit heavy big reds. In America, the great wine making traditions of the Mosel, Austria, or Alsace are often viewed as second class citizens. But this puts Michigan in a great position. If we get behind the things we do well and suit the land and climate, champion them, rise up against the prevailing tide and lead instead of follow, the wine industry here will be as unstoppable as California's.

In short, we need to take a cue from craft beer. It was not long ago that the idea of craft beer carving out a place in the market was viewed as naive at best. But Goliath fell and fell hard. It is nearly impossible to find an independently operated bar or restaurant that doesn't have at least one faucet dedicated to a local brew. It is not uncommon to find lists made up almost entirely of Michigan beers. This is success through honesty and self awareness. It works. It it will always work. It will be a guiding principal at St. Anthony. Thanks to all my friends in craft beer for lighting the path, showing us it was not so treacherous after all. A gift almost as good as great beer.

Long Live The King

Most of the people who know me and have heard me talk about Reserve for any length of time have probably had the misfortune of hearing me whine about everything that was wrong with it. Indeed, the list is long and I stand by it. The restaurant was put together by massively over paid consultants who clearly knew nothing about modern cooking and even less about producing charcuterie and by the time I came in to the picture it was too late to right the ship. And the clientele...

I had actually left Grand Rapids over a decade before because I could not sesame crust and sear another piece of tuna. Staying there would have meant the slow decay of my culinary education and career. But much seemed to have changed since then (and much has) so I came back to work here under the impression that Grand Rapids was ready to think about their restaurant culture in a little more contemporary fashion. Unfortunately in the early days Reserve attracted a well heeled but not particularly food savvy patron. One night a customer at the bar explained he didn't eat at Reserve because he expected a fancy room like ours to serve food that was more modern and trendy, you know like lamb lollipops or sliders, or, yes, seared tuna. He also thought our wines were over priced, and he knew good wine. He always ordered the most expensive bottle at Bonefish Grill. Around this same time, Chad Miller's Bloom and Corez both closed, and once again the dining culture here seemed doomed. I thought at that moment, much to my great disappointment, that this grand experiment was over.

For a restaurant to find success in Grand Rapids it must capture the loyalty of the locals. No one comes here specifically to experience the restaurant scene and the majority of visitors are business travelers which explains the number of steakhouses downtown. So any restaurant that tries to break from the norm must do so without alienating the people who live here (on the lakeshore, populations swell with part time residents and vacationers from larger metropolitan areas who have had more exposure to modern dining). And the locals here notoriously mistake price points and quantity for quality and this, along with a pervasive lack of self awareness, is what really stands in the way of the dining scene getting better. With restaurants you really get the operators you ask for. And it was painfully obvious they weren't asking for Reserve. We weren't trying to be innovative or avant garde, we just wanted to avoid doing things like everyone else. We wanted to feel free to be ourselves and pour wine and cook food that reflected that.

So fairly early on our opening general manager was chased back to Chicago and I hatched a slow moving plan to get back to my home by the Lakeshore. That plan will eventually culminate in St. Anthony, but in the meantime it has led to me leaving Reserve at the end of January. A lot has happened since those dark dining days in 2010, and I now find myself wishing I could stick around a bit longer. Over time, we have built a good reputation, especially among others in the industry. This is an important first step. There must be a culture within the industry before one can blossom without. And this is happening in Grand Rapids. Things get better everyday. More and more people are starting to understand that Reserve and a few other restaurants are run by passionate people who wish nothing more than to share what roots their passions in their professions.

It's a cliche, I know, but in the restaurant business in particular, the people make the place. Spend as much money as you want, but a restaurant will never be great unless the people who have boots on the ground are of high caliber and that is certainly true of the heart of Reserve. Peter Marantette, Mathew Green, and Brandon Sturm are unimpeachable stewards of their crafts. It has been my great privilege to work with them. Caleb Williams is perhaps the best line cook I have ever seen and is already showing signs he'll be a great leader. Brian Proctor has such enthusiasm for his work I would recommend sitting down with him for a beer to anyone who has lost their passion for cooking. Tori Gersonde, who has no desire to cook for a living, brings a commitment to quality to her work that shows just how remarkable a person she is.

We very rarely had disagreements at Reserve, but when we did, it was because somehow mediocrity or mistakes crept in, and the anger and frustration anyone felt stemmed from their knowledge that we were better than that. I have been thanked several times by my staff for what they learned from me, but I don't know how much validity there is in that. This crew came through the door with a lot of talent and skill. I will take credit for fighting hard to keep our standards high and creating an environment that was as free from sacrifice as possible. I think putting this much talent in an environment like that can only yield great things. And that is why I will be keeping a close eye on Reserve to see what comes next. The place has been left in very good hands. This story is not over. I think years from now, we'll see that this restaurant will have had a big hand in making the dining scene in West Michigan better. I am sad to be on the sidelines, but happy to have had a hand in it.

Thanks to the entire staff at Reserve. I am very proud of you all and the work that we've done over the last couple of years. Keep doing what you know in your heart is right, for yourselves, the restaurant, your clients, and your profession, and fight against the push toward the middle of the pack. The high road has benefits, I promise. One day you'll wake up and the world will be different, and you'll know you had a part to play in that. Sitting it out to be safe is never worth it.

Cheers to what's coming,
Chef

Rain Delay

So, for a variety of reasons, Brandon and I have decided to delay the opening of St. Anthony for a year.  Principally, this is because of our timeline. Time is the best resource you have when trying to do something right and we have no interest in rushing through the process. Keeps your eyes posted on this blog for more info and to hear about two other projects on the way this summer.