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.