Cooking and Eating in Chicago

Please Excuse Eddie From Blogging....

2009-08-11T22:58:00.004-05:00

Dear Readers,

I'm going to be posting a lot less frequently here, due to the fact that I'm now officially in the midst of OPENING A RESTAURANT.

Yes, it's official. I've posted fleetingly about this here because I didn't want to get too ahead of myself, but we closed on the purchase of the existing restaurant last Friday, the lease is in place, the brown paper is covering the windows, and I'm officially working full-time toward getting the place open early-to-mid-September.

I'm still going to be blogging...in fact, I may pick up the pace a bit, but not here. I've been using a different blog to document the buying-a-restaurant process for a while, and now I'm going to use it to document the opening-a-restaurant process. I plan on trying to write over there almost every day. It's a much more train-of-thought, journal-style blog, so it's a lot easier to crank out a quick post in a half hour.

So, given these circumstances, I would like to now take this opportunity to notify all of you that I probably won't be reviewing bacon, analyzing the difference between using half-n-half vs. heavy cream in homemade ice cream, or reviewing Julie & Julia any time soon (ok, I made up that last one--I am SO FREAKIN' SICK of hearing about that damn movie. Can it open already so people can stop prattling on endlessly about it? Damn!)

So. In conclusion. If you want to keep reading me, go run over to my burger blog and check me out over there. I'll still post here, but probably only a few times a month for a while. And mark your calendars to start counting down towards the opening of my burger, fries, and shakes joint in Evanston.

The concept? The short explanation I've been giving everyone is "Hot Dougs meets Five Guys". That works. We're going to be grinding our own beef fresh every day for burgers, cutting potatoes fresh throughout the day for fries, hand-dipping corn dogs and beer battering onion rings, and mixing up shakes and malts on the old fashioned spindle mixer. It's going to be low-key, non-chain-feeling, and inexpensive. We'll also do classic Chicago style dogs, Maxwell Street style Polish sausages, beer-simmered brats, and some fun toppings for the fries.

Anyway, thanks for reading, see you after the hiatus, and come find me over at the burger shop blog.

See you there!

Me to Michael Pollan; "You're an Elitist Gas-Bag"

2009-08-04T20:35:00.018-05:00

Yep, that's right. The ethical-eating authority, best-selling author, and Food, Inc. star muffed one. And I'm calling him on it. I'm no authority on anything (except maybe Italian Beef sandwiches), but there it is.

I'm actually a big fan of Pollan and his writing. I loved The Omnivore's Dilemma, recently saw Food, Inc., and have kept current by following articles he publishes every now and then. The guy's really well-informed and has a lot of worthwhile stuff to say about how we eat and how we should change our approach to food.

But in his most recent article, published last week in the New York Times, Pollan screws the pooch. Big time. Not only is he just flat-out factually wrong in about six different places, but in his attempt to find a scapegoat for the current sad state of affairs in how Americans eat, he targets feminism. Specifically, Betty Friedan.

(Not that feminism, broadly, or Friedan, specifically, is above criticism. They're not. But neither are they guilty of what Pollan tries to pin on them. More to follow.)

That's not all, though. In his (mostly justified) rants about The Food Network (Lord knows I've made my feelings about the network known), he gets enough details about the shows wrong to allow careful readers to realize he doesn't actually know what the fuck he's talking about. It seems like he had a research assistant watch a few episodes and report back or something, so he wouldn't have to lower himself to actually watching "low culture" like Iron Chef or Triple D. Who knows... maybe he switched the network on and left it running in the background while he flipped through the recent issue of The New Yorker.

And, really, that's where Pollan's article rubbed me the wrong way. The whole thing has this condescending, scolding, elitist tone that really muddies the message. The article is hung on the framework of discussing the recent film Julie and Julia, but he uses the film's subject matter as a jumping-off point to continue the national discussion of our broken, dysfunctional relationship with food and eating that he's been prodding us to have for years. Most of what Pollan's got to say is right on the mark. All his major points are true and, yes, need to be written about, discussed, and changed.

But having a Long Island born-and-bred, Northern California-dwelling Berkeley-tenured ivy tower male like Pollan lecture middle America about why they're morons for watching The Food Network isn't a great way to move that discussion forward or get people to listen. And blaming Friedan's Feminine Mystique for re-framing our approach to cooking causing generations of women to view it as "drudgery" isn't a great way to get feminists, stay-at-home-moms, or working women to take what you're saying to heart.

I'm going to quote liberally from the article and simply respond, since this is what I found myself doing as I sat in front of my computer screen reading it. Overall, it's a thought-provoking piece containing lots of valid points and valuable insights. But in the name of a good rant, I'm going to focus just on the parts that really got the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, starting with the one that's drawing so much ire all around the net:

Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air — 1963 — was the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.

This is the quote that's gotten Pollan into trouble with the feminists and has bloggers and twitterers of all stripes buzzing. I don't take issue with the sentiment behind it--neither Friedan nor feminism is anything approaching a sacred cow with me--but it's just flat-out factually incorrect. Dead wrong. Bzzzzt! Thanks for playing, Mike, you can pick up your parting gifts on the way out.

Saying that Friedan's book "taught millions of women to regard housework...as drudgery" is just drastically, laughably, misleading. The post-war years prior to 1963 saw women emerging as a huge sector of the workforce and factories that had been geared up for the war effort re-tooling as production facilities for all manner of convenience food products. The booming advertising industry was quick to jump in and assist in the food industry's effort to convince women that food preparation was drudgery to be avoided at all costs, and did so with incredible effectiveness. All of this was well-underway by the time The FM was released in 1963. There are entire books dedicated to documenting this phenomenon and what gets me is that I'm confident Pollan is not only aware of them, but has read them.

Which means that his scapegoating of Friedan and feminism is lazy at best. Perhaps he didn't want to stretch an already-very-long article to more fully flesh out the various parties who really were responsible for this negative re-frame of cooking. A less charitable read, though, could view Pollan's choice as a cynical attempt to co-opt negative sentiment towards feminism to bolster his cause, or maybe just as a way to drum up some controversy and get people talking.

Regardless of which explanation is accurate, it's some weak-ass shit from a guy I expect far better from. Incredibly enough, a few short paragraphs later, he says:

Many of these convenience foods have been sold to women as tools of liberation; the rhetoric of kitchen oppression has been cleverly hijacked by food marketers and the cooking shows they sponsor to sell more stuff.

So Pollan acknowledges here that other forces were working to portray food prep as "drudgery", not very long after trying to blame the whole thing on Friedan. But who had more influence in the early 60's? A feminist writer or "food marketers"? Which enjoyed more circulation--The Feminine Mystique or magazines like Women's Day and Family Circle?

I spent an enlightening if somewhat depressing hour on the phone with a veteran food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, who explained that “people call things ‘cooking’ today that would roll their grandmother in her grave — heating up a can of soup or microwaving a frozen pizza.”

Another cheap shot in an attempt to make a valid larger point. I admit to having more limited knowledge than this Balzer guy, but I've never heard anyone refer to microwaving a frozen pizza as 'cooking'. It just seems like Pollan is taking the easy way out to make his point.

...you do have to wonder how easily so specialized a set of skills might translate to the home kitchen — or anywhere else for that matter. For when in real life are even professional chefs required to conceive and execute dishes in 20 minutes from ingredients selected by a third party exhibiting obvious sadistic tendencies? (String cheese?) Never, is when. The skills celebrated on the Food Network in prime time are precisely the skills necessary to succeed on the Food Network in prime time. They will come in handy nowhere else on God’s green earth.

This comment misses the mark for me on two levels. First, the shows he's discussing--Iron Chef America, Chopped, and Top Chef--do not claim to be instructional cooking shows. They're billed as entertainment. Although the recipes are often made available online after the show airs.

And second, the ability to improvise and construct a dish or meal from random ingredients *constantly* comes in handy in real life. I do it ALL THE TIME. It's a great skill to have and shows that give contestants a basket of unlikely ingredients and challenge them to compose a tasty dish with them can, yes, be instructional, but--and this is even more important--they can be inspirational, especially to home cooks who find themselves fishing around the bottom of the freezer with a hungry family due to arrive home any minute.

I guess a guy like Pollan, who probably only shops at organic-humane-eco-friendly-localvore farmer's markets hasn't ever found himself in that situation. Must be nice.

We learn things watching these cooking competitions, but they’re not things about how to cook. There are no recipes to follow;

Arrgh! HUGE pet peeve! Learning how to cook isn't about following recipes! Are you KIDDING me, Michael? This statement actually makes me wonder if *you* really know how to cook.

Or as a chef friend put it when I asked him if he thought I could learn anything about cooking by watching the Food Network, “How much do you learn about playing basketball by watching the N.B.A.?”

Um....tons? But besides all that's learned by watching, the more important point is that watching often inspires people to get out there and PLAY. What a dumb, dumb comment.

What we mainly learn about on the Food Network in prime time is culinary fashion, which is no small thing: if Julia took the fear out of cooking, these shows take the fear — the social anxiety — out of ordering in restaurants. (Hey, now I know what a shiso leaf is and what “crudo” means!) Then, at the judges’ table, we learn how to taste and how to talk about food. For viewers, these shows have become less about the production of high-end food than about its consumption — including its conspicuous consumption. (I think I’ll start with the sawfish crudo wrapped in shiso leaves. . . .)

And the hits keep on comin'. It was at about this point in the article that I became really aware of Pollan's insulated bi-coastal sensibility. I'm not saying that he comes off as a totally out-of-touch, holier-than-thou elitist, but...um...yeah...actually, that IS what I'm saying.

Listen, I've barely ever even seen crudo or shiso leaves on menus and I've been a chef for 15 years. I had to go look up sawfish to find out what the hell it is and the first thing I find out is that it's critically endangered and is completely banned from international trade. Where the hell is this Pollan guy eating? What's next? Is he going to drop a reference to the last ortolan feast he went to?

His point here his valid, but it gets completely lost in the underlying messages he's cluelessly broadcasting about himself and the perspective from which he approaches his work.

Sure, Guy Fieri, the tattooed and spiky-coiffed chowhound who hosts “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” ducks into the kitchen whenever he visits one of these roadside joints to do a little speed-bonding with the startled short-order cooks in back, but most of the time he’s wrapping his mouth around their supersize creations

Again, Pollan doesn't allow reality to stand in the way of his scapegoating. I happen to watch D,D&D almost religiously and I can attest to the fact that Fieri almost always speaks with the owner or chef, that he's sincerely respectful of their success and their "creations" and that he possesses a solid enough kitchen background to know exactly what the folks he's interviewing are talking about--something that probably couldn't be said of Pollan. Fieri doesn't usually interview "short order cooks" and his characterization of the restaurant staff as "startled" reveals Pollan's ignorance of how the show is filmed (restaurants featured on the show close down on the day they do the "kitchen shoot" so no one is being caught unaware).

“I love that after a day where nothing is sure — and when I say nothing, I mean nothing — you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It’s such a comfort.” How many of us still do work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world and ends — assuming the soufflé doesn’t collapse — with such a gratifying and tasty sense of closure? Come to think of it, even the collapse of the soufflé is at least definitive, which is more than you can say about most of what you will do at work tomorrow.

Ok, I haven't seen the movie and I assume Pollan has, but I'm not sure how he gets souffle from egg yolks, chocolate, sugar and milk. Maybe that's what Julie Powell was talking about, but soufflés, which do usually contain some egg yolks, are more characterized by the presence of egg whites, which are whipped stiff and then folded into the mixture to give the soufflé its essential poofy rise. I've also never seen a soufflé recipe containing milk. When I hear a recipe described as "yolks, chocolate, sugar, and milk getting thick", I think chocolate mousse, not chocolate soufflé.

I'm telling you, I think this Pollan guy DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO COOK!

Since 1967, we’ve added 167 hours — the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor — to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized nation — an extra two weeks or more a year. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.

Oh, but it's all Betty Friedan's fault that women view cooking as drudgery and reach for Rice-a-Roni or canned soup. Gimme a freakin' break!

Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care.

Gosh, I just can't imagine why feminists like Friedan would portray this sort of mindset as a form of oppression. Uh....maybe because it IS one? Sheesh, Pollan, can you contradict yourself MORE?

Chunks of animal flesh seared over an open fire: grilling is cooking at its most fundamental and explicit, the transformation of the raw into the cooked right before our eyes. It makes a certain sense that the grill would be gaining adherents at the very moment when cooking meals and eating them together is fading from the culture. (While men have hardly become equal partners in the kitchen, they are cooking more today than ever before: about 13 percent of all meals, many of them on the grill.)

Yet we don’t crank up the barbecue every day; grilling for most people is more ceremony than routine.

Ugh. The dreaded use of "barbecue" as a synonym for "grill". A bigger pet peeve doesn't exist in my world. More evidence the guy's not a cook. Attention, fancy, multi-degreed writer guy; "grilling" is cooking food quickly directly over live flames. "Barbecuing" is cooking food slowly with low, indirect heat. They aren't the same. You grill a burger. You barbecue a pork shoulder. Look it up.

Rant over. I'm done here. Read the article and lemme know what you think. My take on it is that Pollan didn't do his normal standard of due dilligence. Maybe the grad students that usually do his research for him are all on summer break.

Either that, or he's trolling.

Visit Number 10,000

2009-07-30T00:26:00.007-05:00

That's a direct cut and paste from my sitemeter in the title above. Hooray for me, ten thousand visits have been logged to this site. Nice of the folks over at Wrigley to notice. When can I come sing the 7th inning stretch?

All things considered, I'm not even sure that 10,000 is a lot for the amount of time we've been open for business, but it feels like a big number and we're celebrating and feeling festive about it over here at C&EinC corporate HQ. Bourbon and blackberry ice cream may soon be busted out.

I'd like to take this opportunity to now thank a very special person, the distinct individual who was my 10,000th visitor; to you, person in unknown state, country, and city, someone who apparently did a Google image search on the term "SMOKEHOUSE" and somehow got linked to my site, and whose visit consisted of 1 page view lasting zero seconds, I say....

Thanks. Nice knowin' ya. Come on back, now.

The bloggers know all about the statistics and analytics that are available. I just have what they offer for free. It's crazy stuff. Mr. SMOKEHOUSE's info wasn't there, but about 75% the visits do give me info about the person's state, city, country, and often their ISP and/or the name of the business. I've checked my sitemeter and discovered that my wife or my mom is reading *right at that very moment*. Spooky.

It's kind of voyeuristic. I don't have that many visits (50-70 a day) that I can't recognize some of the individuals who come through fairly often. You get to imagining what that person in Auckland or Bettendorf is like, checking in nearly every day, using their XP or Safari operating systems, and I can't help but fantasize about how after that person from Kraft or Panera reads my site and becomes a big fan, they'll be calling me up to offer me a high-paying job any moment. More likely, though, it's just some staffer loafing on the job.

I can also see how people enter and leave the site, so I get an idea of where my traffic comes from. I can tell when friends check in via my Facebook page, especially if they do it from work, where the ISP and IP address are more likely to tell me the company name. When people log in from home, it's almost always just "comcast" or "cox cable" or something, so it's harder to tell who's who.

I can see how all this info could be really useful to people trying to generate orders or business through their site, but since I'm not doing that, it all just comes across as kind of surreal and nosy. Is it really my business what screen resolution the guy using Road Runner in Temple, Texas is running? Is it worth my time to speculate about whether the person reading me over at the University of Pennsylvania is a professor or a student? And why does that same address from the EPA keep popping up? Are the feds monitoring my carbon footprint?

Oh, and then there's my most loyal customer...the one who comes back time after time, never missing an article, yet not bold enough to write a comment and try and break the plane of the computer screen by engaging in a discussion. Perhaps someday I can meet this person, my most loyal reader and fan. You know who you are.....anyway, thanks for reading from your home out there in Mountain View, California.

Almost Meatless Virtual Potluck--Potato Corn Chowder

2009-07-28T23:02:00.009-05:00

I met Tara Mataraza Desmond at the food writing symposium at The Greenbrier in May. Tara's book, which was published by Ten Speed Press in April is called Almost Meatless: Recipes That Are Better for Your Health and the Planet. It looks nice. I haven't read it, but Ten Speed always publishes lush, beautiful books, and Tara seems like she knows what she's talking about.

I also follow her blog, Crumbs on my Keyboard, and when she recently contacted me about taking part in a virtual potluck, where a whole bunch of food bloggers cook and blog a recipe from the book, and then everybody would publish it all on the same day, I said "cool idea. Just send me a recipe involving bacon."

So she did. But it also has silken tofu.

Of course, I left this until the last minute (it's supposed to be cooked, photographed, and blogged by tomorrow), and with all the other stuff I've been up to lately, I was pressed for time. First thing I had to figure out was where to go to buy good bacon (it only calls for two strips, so I figure I need to use the real stuff), the aforementioned tofu, as well as a fancy ingredient like chives. I didn't need to be going store to store to find stuff, so I was thinking that I was going to go to Whole Foods, but I doubted that they'd have real (read; cured) bacon, rather than that nitrate-free celery juice crap, so I headed over to Sunset Foods in Northbrook.

I make it a point to really never go to Whole Foods, because I spend way too much time and money in there, and the place just pisses me off out of general principle. I can't help but feel like I'm teetering on the brink of the fall of the empire when I'm in a WF, do you know what I mean? It's just such a big, overblown spectacle. It disgusts me, and yet I also love it. And then, later, I feel bad about loving it. Food shopping is just not meant to be that nice. I'd make an exception for this sort of thing, but to be honest, I'm relieved I thought of a better option.

Sunset is (or tries to be) just as fancy and upscale as WF, but they also carry everyday items like Diet Coke, Kraft cheeses, and Cheetos. I did indeed find good bacon (Neuske, long overdue review to come), silken tofu, and chives, so Sunset was the right place to go, but I wasn't overly impressed with their offerings. It's a high service place--they have people that put the food on the conveyor belt for you--but I'm much more interested in the food. I'm always game for a few impulse purchases in a new grocery store, but even though I hadn't eaten all day, nothing looked all that good to me, especially for the prices they were charging. I ended up with two pretty full brown paper sacks for around fifty bucks.

Besides the ingredients for the recipe, I picked up the makings for a salad, a loaf of sourdough bread to go along with it, and a few other things.

Almost Meatless' Potato Corn Chowder
Serves 4 to 6
2 slices bacon, cut into 1/4-inch dice

6 ounces silken tofu

5 cups fresh or frozen corn kernels

salt and pepper

1 medium onion, cut into 1/4-inch dice

1 pound Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch dice

4 cups chicken stock (page 131)

1 bay leaf

3 (2-inch) pieces parmesan cheese rind
1 small bunch chives, minced

Cook the bacon in a Dutch oven or large saucepot over medium heat for about 5 to 7 minutes, until the fat renders and the bacon is crisp. Remove the bacon bits from the pot and set aside.

While the bacon is cooking, combine the tofu with 2 cups of the corn and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a food processor and puree until smooth and creamy. Set aside.

Add the onion to the bacon fat left in the pot, and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes, until the onion is completely softened but not brown.

Add the potatoes and the remaining 3 cups corn, along with a heavy pinch of salt and a few grinds of pepper, and stir to combine. Add the stock, bay leaf, and cheese rind, bring the liquid to a boil, and then reduce the heat; let the soup simmer for 20 minutes, until the potatoes are very tender. Remove the cheese rind and bay leaf.
Working in batches, puree about half the soup in a blender or food processor. (Or blend partially with a stick blender in the pot.) Return the pureed soup to the pot and stir in the pureed tofu and corn mixture. Simmer for 10 more minutes. Taste for salt and pepper and adjust as needed. Top with chives and reserved bacon bits.

I liked the flavor of soup. It had a lot of good sweet corn flavor. Basically, the jist of this recipe is that you take the silken tofu and puree it with the kernels from 3-4 ears of corn. This tofu "creamed corn" subs in for the cream and milk that would normally go into a chowder and makes the end result healthier.

By now, everyone knows that trick of cutting the kernels off the cob in a bowl, right? It works.

If I did this recipe again, I'd remove half the solids, then puree the soup well and add the chunks of corn and potato back into the soup. I pureed the whole thing a bit too far, I think, and the finished dish didn't have the characteristic chunkiness that you'd expect from a chowder. Doing it this way is easier (I just used my stick blender, rather than the food processor that the recipe calls for), but I think a smoother soup would be worth the effort.

It's hard for me to follow recipes. I found myself virtually unable to avoid adding some diced red bell pepper to the onions as they sauteed gently in the rendered bacon fat, although I did manage to restrict myself to only using Tara's proscribed two slices of bacon. Which wasn't easy. But it actually was enough since there was plenty of smoky bacon flavor throughout the soup.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the others bring to the virtual potluck!

Blackberry-Sour Cream Ice Cream (with recipe!)

2009-07-26T23:51:00.007-05:00

I've been working with the ice cream maker attachment for my KitchenAid and having some success. My first take, an attempt at strawberry, went horribly wrong, resembling more of an icy, frozen mousse than ice cream. It tasted fine, but the texture was awful.

More recently, I've been working with blackberries. I made this blackberry ice cream recipe prior to leaving for our recent jaunt to the North Woods, and then I made it again, with the addition of sour cream, yesterday.

After the problems I had due to not properly chilling my mixture the first time, I've been letting it sit at least overnight before spinning, with improved results. Overloading the bowl is another pitfall I quickly learned to avoid.

I've been doing some reading about making ice cream and learning. Many people recommend allowing the mix to sit in the fridge for 24 hours before freezing, and say that this 'curing' of the batter ensures a creamier product. I also hit my mixture with a stick blender right before I churned it, per another website's recommendation.

I learned that the term "overrun" refers to the amount of air that's incorporated into an ice cream while it freezes. The longer the freezing process takes, the more air is whipped into the mix. Italian gelato gets it's luxuriously smooth mouth feel from its lack of overrun, and for me, the denser and smoother an ice cream is, the better, so that's what I'm working toward.

Using the KA attachment on the mixer's lowest speed ensures the quickest freeze time, and therefore the lowest amount of overrun, since the ice cream mixture stays in contact with the freezer bowl longer. Turning up the speed helps in avoiding ice crystals, since the mixture freezes more slowly and uniformly, but this also whips more air into the mixture. Also, as I learned with my batch of strawberry, that never fully froze, the KA's freezer bowl thingy only has so much time before it's not cold enough to perform. This is one huge drawback of the "freezer insert" style of home ice cream makers. You can't just add more ice and salt.

Making fresh fruit ice creams really smooth and creamy is even more challenging, due to the additional factors the fruit brings and how they work against smooth creaminess.

If I'm making a fruit ice cream, I want the flavor to really pack a wallop, so I use a LOT of fruit. I'm using stuff that's in season, and is inexpensive, and that's the point is to enjoy it and really concentrate its flavor as much as possible when it's available.

I also want to use the fruit in its *fresh* form. The first strawberry ice cream recipe I tried involved cooking the fruit down and making a jam, essentially, which was then mixed into the ice cream base. To me, that misses the point of using fresh fruit, which brings all sorts of wonderful flavor notes that disappear when cooked. Cooked berries are nice, but they are a distinctly different taste than fresh ones. It's the fresh flavor that I'm after here, so all the recipes that I'm using involve pureeing and straining out lots of seeds.

But these choices about flavor have a trade-off; the finished product will be less smooth and creamy. Raw fruit freezes to ice crystals, and pureed fruit is always going to lend a more sorbet-like quality to a finished ice cream. That being the case, I need to really try and maximize the techniques I use to ensure what I make is as smooth and creamy as it can be.

Making ice-cream is a very technique-heavy process. Each time I do it I'm surprised by the amount of bowls, strainers, and rubber scrapers that I use. Lots of moving things from one place to another.

Blackberry-Sour Cream Ice Cream

1 C half-and-half
12 oz. sour cream
1 C sugar
1 C heavy cream
4 egg yolks
2 quarts blackberries
1/2 a vanilla bean
pinch salt

1. Mix yolks and half the sugar together in a bowl.
2. In a saucepan, heat half and half, cream, the remaining sugar, scraped vanilla bean, and one pint of the berries. Scald cream, allow to simmer for about five minutes. Remove from heat for a couple minutes. Remove vanilla bean. Puree with stick blender. Strain.
3. Temper warm cream into yolk-sugar mixture, whisking quickly while adding a bit of warm cream, then more, to ensure eggs do not curdle. Return mixture to sauce pan, put on medium heat, and cook slowly, stirring with a rubber spatula until the mixture thickens to coat the back of a spoon.
4. Strain the ice cream mixture into a shallow pan or bowl set in ice*.
5. Puree remaining fresh berries with stick blender. Push through a fine mesh strainer to remove seeds. This should yield about 1 1/2 cups of seedless berry puree.
6. Cool mixture thoroughly. Once cool, add berry puree and sour cream, whisking to fully incorporate everything.
7. Allow to chill overnight in the coldest part of the fridge overnight or for 24 hours.
8. Process according to the ice cream maker's directions.

*lots of advice out there about cooling the mixture down as quick as possible. the bowl set in ice appears to be key. Some say to hold back 25% of the cream and pour it in cold to aid in cooling, but then the proteins in the cold milk won't have been denatured during the scalding process, which is also supposed to aid in producing smaller ice crystals and yielding a creamier product. Ice cream is all about trade-offs.

That's a good recipe, adapted from the one I linked to above. I'll keep working on it, but I've also found a few other recipes that look pretty nice.

Road Trip--Up North, Wisconsin

2009-07-23T14:50:00.006-05:00

Due to spotty internet access, a few pics will have to serve as a sneak preview of the posts that will surely bubble up as a result of my recent trip to the North Woods.

Kids, Wisconsin, Summer, fishing, swimming, and eating. Lots of good stuff to write about. Over the next couple weeks I'll document my experience with an old fashioned shore dinner, the North Woods phenomenon known as the supper club, and some real-deal contender burger places.

For now, enjoy!

Very good (but not the world's best) burgers at Fred's in Burlington.

Enjoying the clean sands of Crystal Lake.

Shore dinner

Ice Cream Misadventures

2009-07-16T09:34:00.008-05:00

Between the amazing peaches and cherries that have been showing up at Costco, farmers' markets, and even my local Jewel(!), we've been eating a lot of fruit recently, and when I stumbled onto a two-dollar ice cream maker at a garage sale on a particularly balmy lunch-hour, I instantly thought of making a great peaches and cream or cherry with mascarpone*.

But the two-dollar ice cream maker's motor died halfway through the first batch of nectarine I made and I ended up finishing it by spinning the metal drum by hand and holding the dasher. Needless to say the end result was not smooth and creamy. Once it was cured--stored in the freezer overnight--it was hard like a rock and full of ice crystals. Not very pleasant to eat, even if we allowed it to thaw for quite a while before digging in.

I had the taste for this project at this point, though, so I started researching. Everything I looked at for less than around forty bucks seemed cheap and chintzy and I figured that the motor on these cheapies would quickly burn out as well.

So when I came across the ice-cream maker attachment for the KitchenAid stand mixer, I figured, ok, that makes more sense, since it uses my KA's motor. (I have one of the older KA's, which are gems. )

After debating the pros/cons of spending $75 on something that's just an attachment, when all these full-on, freestanding appliances can be had for fifty or less, the next round of produce was upon us and my romantic notions of making some beautifully creamy fresh fruit ice creams motivated me to dip into my gifts/bonuses mad money account, and I doubled up on the shipping by including a copy of the new Wilco cd. Splurge!

I went looking for more nectarines or peaches in the midst of a trip over to Babies 'R Us for more childproofing stuff (Nora is into everything these days), but I found some organic strawberries that just smelled great at Fresh Farms, I spun up a batch of strawberry ice cream.

We were in a rush to eat dinner, get the ice cream made, and get out of the house for Henry's camp carnival, which is a pretty huge event here in bucolic Park Ridge, Illinois (an officially-designated Tree City, USA), so I didn't think to take any pictures.

The main issue was that I didn't allow the mixture to chill thoroughly before using the KA attachment to freeze it. Also, forgot to think about the mixture expanding while freezing, so I totally overloaded the bowl. And THEN added a bunch of chopped strawberries for good measure. Then, while it was spinning, I read the instructions where it said not to overload the bowl. Duh.

So it never quite fully froze. After about 50 minutes, it had a light, frothy, mousse-like consistency, and tasted great (I added a few drops of balsamic vinegar for tang), but it was barely cold and not at all smooth and creamy. Pressed for time, I dumped it into tupperware containers, threw them in the freezer, and headed out for an evening of bouncy slides and rubber chicken toss.

I knew it was going to be bad when I put it away, and it was. Very hard and crunchy, even after it softened and I mashed it around with my spoon a lot. Not good.

I'm holding out on any assessment of the KA ice-cream maker attachment at this juncture, because I just went about the whole thing all wrong. The ice cream mixture should always be well-chilled and allowing it to sit overnight is good for flavor development as well, so rushing the process the way I did was a boneheaded mistake. Overloading the well didn't help and, since I've never done this before, I'm just randomly pulling recipes from the web.

Anyone have a good ice cream base recipe? Maybe one that includes a measure for fruit or fruit puree? The peach one I made with the doomed garage-sale ice cream machine was interesting because it involved making a simple syrup, and then using the hot simple syrup to cook the egg yolks while running in the stand mixer. This technique seems easier to me, plus there's less risk of curdling than the traditional method involving tempering the egg yolks with the hot cream, then returning that mixture to the pot to finish cooking.

I'll try it again a few times over the next couple weeks and we'll see how it goes. As I write this, it occurs to me that I'm following Ruhlman and Leibowitz on Twitter, but it never occurred to me to check Ratio, or Leibowitz's ice cream book. Duh again. Learning process.

*ugh. huge pet peeve, here. The endless inability to pronounce the name of this soft, creamy fresh cheese. Mas-car-, folks, not mar-ska-. And don't get me started on Chee-pohl-tay.

Woo Lae Oak--Korean BBQ in Schaumburg

2009-07-13T23:49:00.020-05:00

Ok, it's actually in ~~Algonquin~~ ~~Rolling Meadows~~ Greater Woodfield, but Mitch spotted this place when he was all drunk, riding in my car on the way back from Finn McCool's one time, and asked me what Korean barbecue's all about. After a brief description, he muttered something like "anything that involves meat and has the word 'barbecue' is alright with me" so when another high school friend came in from Texas for a visit, we looked the place up and figured out that it was Woo Lae Oak.

I couldn't find much online about the place. It's a chain based in Seoul, Korea, with outlets in New York, Beverly Hills, and Tyson's Corners(?). It's quite large and well-appointed, and I think for that reason they do a pretty good business on banquets and meetings--almost everyone else in the place was dressed up; the men were mostly wearing suits and there were quite a few of what looked like business meetings taking place. The four of us were seated around a large, very comfortable booth with a circular table, quickly plied with cold beer and soju, and our modest attire of shorts and t-shirts didn't seem to faze anyone.

I haven't had a whole lot of Korean barbecue, but I was expecting the server to bring a hibachi or some kind of portable charcoal grill to the table. Once we ordered, though, the waiter came over and removed the center portion of the table to reveal a round grill right there, embedded into the table. Cool.

"Yeah, grill in the table... real cool, Ed. Bring me some meat RIGHT NOW."

While the grill's getting hot, they bring you all the panchan, which are different relishes, pickles, and various fish-jerkies and such, and there was some sort of steamed egg custard-like cube served up, which I can't say I enjoyed. There are three essential dipping sauces, which our server encouraged us to use individually, or together. I liked the sesame oil salt best, and used that on almost everything, along with the soy-sauce based one. The three sauces can be seen at the far right of this picture, with chopsticks being dipped into the soy, the uppermost of the three little dishes. The sauces really did a nice job accentuating the flavor of the meat.

Because, basically, it's all about the meat. We ordered a few different kinds of beef, some pork belly, and some shrimp and scallops. I knew to ask for a couple specific things--bulgogi, for example--but some of the stuff we had was just me pointing at the menu randomly. The best one, which I won't even attempt to remember the Korean name for, was rich beef rib meat, cut from the bone into 'fingers' which completely melted when cooked quickly.

The experience was, over all, pretty nice. Our waiter wasn't the most outgoing, but he did a decent job of cooking and serving the offerings, using a scissors to cut neat portions of the various meats and doling them out bite-by-bite, suggesting specific sauces or other panchan to eat with each different item. I wasn't sure if we were going to have to cook our own meat, as is standard in some Korean BBQ places, but there it didn't seem to even be a possibility. Our server never gave us the choice, and whether that's because we weren't Korean and he assumed we wouldn't know what we were doing (he'd have been correct) or that's the standard practice at this place, I can't say.

Among the online reviews, I did read a few cranky criticisms about the waiters not speaking English very well. And while this is probably true, the staff did a fine job of communicating with us, and the menu's translated well enough, so I'm not sure why it's such a big problem.

Oh--good opportunity for a minor rant; what is it with people who get all upset if their server in an authentic (and by that I mean that it's run by people who are cooking and serving their native cuisine) restaurant doesn't speak great English, or they don't have tea or ketchup or whatever it is that person "must" have or they will just absolutely plotz?

People, please get over yourselves. Look, I can appreciate the LEYE-level standard of customer service, appointments, and just general fit and finish of the restaurant, but I don't carry that expectation out into the world of small, family-owned and run restaurants. Why would I?

If you're going to places like that (and you should be) you're going for the food, so forget about assessing the level of service, or focusing on the haphazard, chintzy decor, or the spartan qualities of the bathrooms. Leave your chain-restaurant expectations at home, strap yourself in, and just point to some stuff on the menu. Take a plunge, try something with a head or an eyeball fer crissakes. Order something with tendon, maw, or tripe in it, and allow yourself to be taken out of your comfort zone once in a while. It's just one meal. Really, what's the worst thing that could happen? If it's terrible, you'll have a snack at home later.

The meal at Woo Lae Oak seemed kind of slow, at first, since they could only really cook one or two different things at a time, but the pace actually ended up being something that I really enjoyed about the meal, since getting only a few bites of each item at a time, then waiting for the next course provided a much calmer, more leisurely feel to the evening and I think I probably ate less while not feeling any less full as a result. Plus, it gave us ample time to catch up, which was nice. Probably another reason why this place seems to cater to larger parties.

The one complaint I have is that the in-table grill didn't seem to generate enough heat to really put a good sear on the meat, and because of that, a lot of the stuff seemed to steam more than grill or "barbecue" once the cooking surface was loaded with raw beef, pork, and/or shellfish. Kind of a fatal flaw. I've only been to a couple other Korean barbecue places, but it's my impression that the ones using charcoal are cooking over higher heat and, subesequently, putting out a better-quality end product.

So, bottom line; Woo Lae Oak was nice, but nothing fabulous. It's acceptable Korean barbecue in a fairly luxurious and upscale setting, so it's perhaps a good middle ground for those who want to be adventurous diners without wanting to give up the mainstream-restaurant-level surroundings. Or for those who want the experience but don't want to go all the way into the city to go to somewhere like San Soo Gap San or Hae Woon Dae where you'll end up cooking your own food over live charcoal.

Our tab ended up being about $60/per person, including tax, tip, and quite a few drinks. Plus, we ordered almost all protein items, rather than adding some rice or noodle dishes that would have filled us up a bit more economically, so really, it's not all that expensive, all things considered. Definitely worth a try.

Just make sure you bring your English->Korean dictionary. Or have a couple glasses of soju and muddle through...that's more fun anyway.

Food, Inc. Screening (FREE)

2009-07-09T09:58:00.006-05:00

I haven't seen Food, Inc. yet. It's currently the biggest thing since sliced uh, whatever in the food world and it's high on my list of to-do's, but I'm not generally a movie-goer and what with the two kids, we generally pass out shortly after 9:30 most nights anyway.

But, Chipotle Grill is sponsoring free screenings of the film next week, July 15th and 16th at the Landmark Century theater at 7:15. Free is just enough of an excuse to get me to motivate and get out of the house to check it out. It's a first come-first served deal, so expect lines.

The film, directed by Robert Kenner, features Eric Schlosser and Bay Area uber-food authority, Michael Pollan, so if you've read some stuff by those two guys, you already know at least some of what this movie is going to be about. My impression is that it will be a much glossier, better-produced presentation of the high points of Fast Food Nation, Omnivore's Dilemma, and Debra Koons Garcia's wonderful 2004, The Future of Food.

Some reviews I've read have said it's quite disturbing, and that you'll "never want to eat again" after seeing it. But Alice Waters is quoted on the film's ads as saying it's "the film I have always been waiting for". It'll certainly be thought-provoking, and should generate plenty of fodder for discussion.

Along those lines, I was hoping to get a post-film meet-up* going. For those who are interested in this, head over to the Duke of Perth, just up Clark, after the Thursday night screening. Around 9 or so, I'm thinking, and we can break it down. I'll be there having a beer or two, at any rate, for those interested in stopping by.

After learning about fun stuff like extra-virulent strains of E. Coli and Salmonella, I'll probably just limit my post-film intake to beer. And/or whiskey.

*Ok, I know the term "tweetup" but am I obliged to use it? Please don't make me. Though, I am going to "tweet" this event. Argh. I hate that term. I only use Twitter because people tell me I'm supposed to. I swear. Anyway, hope to see lots of you there.

Chicago Food Blogger Virtual Cook-Off

2009-07-07T15:51:00.020-05:00

The Tribune's "news lite" arm, Red Eye is generating some content by staging an Iron-Chef style cookoff involving some fellow members of the Chicago food blogerati. It's a bracket elimination type contest that will be going on over the next few weeks.

Fun! I'm in.

The deal is that at 10am, someone from Red Eye announces the secret ingredient and then four of us all start cooking. And taking photos. And writing. The blog entry and photos are due by 8pm that evening, and then people vote. I face off against Titus Ruscitti, whose blog I'm a huge fan of, and he's also a three-time (I believe) Chicago Chili Cookoff champ, so I'm just going to try and do my best.

Last week's ingredient was cherries and two fine bloggers moved on to the next round with dishes like cherry meatballs and cherry knockwurst or something, and I was figuring the Red Eye folks would stay in the summer fruit mindset so was thinking peaches, plums, maybe...

But they hit us this morning with.....tamarind.

Crazy. I've worked with it sparingly. Mostly the paste, which is already processed, and have tasted it plenty in drinks like tamarindo, which is a staple in hot summer Chicago prep kitchens. The main idea with tamarind--which is sour, tart, and a bit astringent--is to sweeten it up plenty so as to get that really nice sweet-sour thing going. After brushing up on all things tamarind, I set out upon my quest.

First question; where to go to get some? My local Jewel isn't going to have any (my wife gave me a list, since we figured I'd be going to the store for the epic cookoff), so I figure I'll head over to H-Mart in Niles. And, as luck would have it, this is a day that I'm taking care of the kids, so wherever Battle Tamarind takes us, they're along for the ride.

Woo-hoo! H-Mart! Sweet bean cake samples!

They had some fresh pods, no paste, and I also picked up a few cans of tamarind juice, some tamarind candy and a whole bunch of other stuff that I was planning to use for my dishes. Once I got home, I got busy with lunch for the kids, naps, and processing tamarind!

Whole tamarinds come in large maroon-brown pods that are very dry and brittle and pulled away from the seed sac kind of stuff inside. You just crack off the shell and pull away the pulp and fibers, yank the strings out and then throw the seeds and pulp together into a bowl. It's way too sticky to clean so the way it's usually done is to soak the seed pods for a few minutes in hot water, and then work the whole mess with your fingers until the pulp separates from the seeds enough that you can strain them out and get a paste. I did it this way and got a nice smooth brown paste, which is what I worked off of for all my dishes.

That's it on the right. It looks kind of like refried beans, but the taste is strongly sour, also tart, but with lots of floral notes and a somewhat mouth-numbing kind of quality.

After tasting it straight, I mashed it through a sieve and sweetened it with a simple syrup I made from palm sugar and water, then added a bit of salt. I worked off of this basic tamarind paste for all my dishes.

First off, I took some of the tamarind paste, muddled it with some fresh mint and ice, and then added a couple cans of "tamarind juice" which, the label states, is 30% tamarind mixed with water, sugar, and high fructose corn syrup, some fresh squeezed lime juice, and poured the whole thing into a pitcher of ice to chill in the fridge.

I served this tamarindo, strained, to Henry to have with his lunch, and then mixed up a little cocktail for myself to enjoy after I put him down for his nap. It consisted of the tamarindo, a tiny dash of bitters, more fresh mint, and a good couple glugs of Elmer T. Lee single barrel bourbon. I shook it all up in a cocktail shaker with lots of ice and served it in a glass dusted with pulverized tamarind candy. Kind of a Thai Julep, I guess.

Thank you, Red Eye, for giving me an excuse to drink bourbon at lunch!

Once I got a nice buzz on and promised Henry another tamarindo if he took a good nap, I got busy cooking.

I decided to do an appetizer and an entree, in addition to the cocktail. I laid out my prep and started working on both dishes. For the entree, my plan was to do an Asian braise with some chicken quarters, and then grill them to crisp up the skin, which I would glaze with a tamarind barbecue sauce. Braised-and-glazed chicken legs and thighs. Description to follow.

I got the braise in the oven and then started working on the shrimp appetizer.

Appetizer; Bacon-wrapped shrimp, herb salad, French melon sauce

I picked up some head-on shrimp at H-Mart, which were a bit small, but it's always more interesting to have the heads on, both visually and for sucking once everything's all brown and
crispy. I shelled the tails, rubbed them with a bit of the tamarind paste, wrapped them in bourbon-vanilla bacon from Father's Country Hams. Next, I made a syrup out of palm sugar, soy sauce, and fish sauce, that I reduced down to a thick caramel before mixing it with the tamarind pulp.

They had nice-smelling French melons at H-mart, so I got one, chunked it up with a little salt and lime juice, and hit it with the stick blender until it was as smooth as I could get it. Then I turned the stick up and streamed in some canola oil to emulsify and smooth-out the sauce. I stuck it in the fridge for a while and then strained it, since I knew I was going to take a picture, but if you wanted to make a cool melon sauce like this at home, you really don't have to strain it, and I normally wouldn't.

To fill out the plate, I picked leaves of cilantro, mint, and parsley, chopped them roughly, and dressed them just a bit with a squeeze of lime juice and a dash of oil. These flavors all play off of each other really well. The sour tamarind, bright lime, and fresh herb flavors cut through the richness of the bacon and the shrimp, and everything really plays well together in your mouth to give you that awesome Southeast Asian eating experience where all of your taste buds are going at full bore--spicy, sour, salty, sweet--all at the same time.

Entree; Tamarind Braised-and-Glazed Chicken Legs and Thighs, Sesame Slaw

After separating the chicken legs from the thighs, I browned them a bit and then sweated onion, ginger, garlic, scallion, and red chile before adding a can of the tamarind juice, a can of coconut milk and a bit of water. I brought the whole thing up to a simmer and then covered it and put it in a 275° oven for about 2 hours. My goal was to get the chicken really tender and infused with those Asian flavors, but not to allow it to break down to the point that it was falling apart and the skin came off. I pulled it out, refrigerated it, and then made my tamarind barbecue sauce.

The tamarind pulp, molasses, rice wine vinegar, lime juice, and palm sugar went into the glaze. I cranked up my grill and charred the glazed chicken bits over high heat, getting plenty of browning and caramelization. Since it was already braised, the chicken was fully cooked and almost falling-apart tender. I just grilled it to get the char on the skin and crisp up the glaze. It wasn't easy to get it on and off the hot grill without it falling apart, but I just managed.

The slaw is red cabbage, some napa, shredded carrot, some mayo thinned with rice wine vinegar and lime juice, and enriched with sesame oil. I added some anise seeds and sesame seeds as well. Crispy shallots went over the top.

It turned out great. You could definitely taste the ginger, garlic, and coconut from the braise, the meat was super-tender, and the burnt sugar and smokiness of the barbecue sauce nicely offset the sour tanginess of the tamarind. The slaw added a nice fresh, crunchy contrast to the braised dark meat chicken.

So that's that. It's now 7pm, I'm just finishing this post within the time limit, we've eaten dinner, my bourbon buzz is gone, Henry's begging me for yet another cup of tamarindo, and I can definitely say I learned a lot about tamarind today. Hopefully I will manage to move on to the next round as well.

Good luck to all the blogger-chef-testants and thanks to Red Eye for putting this fun deal together! Oh, and don't forget to vote early and often for me here, by writing a comment in the section after the Red Eye blog entry about Battle Tamarind!

The Bacon List Scoreboard

2009-07-06T10:03:00.003-05:00

Seems like a good idea to tally up the scores and see how the various bacons stacked up. I'm sure most of you are scoring at home, but for those that aren't, here's a quick-n-dirty rundown for you:

Broadbent's Original Hickory Smoked 9.1
Niman Ranch Applewood Smoked 8.5
Father's Hickory Smoked Country Bacon 7.7
Kirkland Hickory Smoked 6.0
Dutch Farms 6.0
Andy's Deli Smoked Slab Bacon 4.0
Cudahy Signature Applewood Smoked 3.0
Gusto Brand Bulk Bacon 2.0

More to come soon! Anyone have a particular bacon that you think I should try and review? Let me know!

The Bacon List--Father's Original Hickory Smoked

2009-07-05T08:39:00.010-05:00

It's been a while since I've added to my now-approaching-formidable list of bacon reviews that I lovingly refer to as The Bacon List. Hence, a new addition to the future archives;

Father's is making country ham, bacon, and other cured porky delicacies out of Bremen, Ky, which sits, along with numerous other country ham producers, in the western tip of Kentucky. This area is centered loosely around Owensboro, which is a largely untapped culinary goldmine, considering the amount of really good barbecue, ham, and bacon being made in the area.

My brother gifted me a pack of four different flavors of this lovely-looking bacon; he's a big fan of the Grateful Palate and I believe he used their site to internet them to me as a birthday gift. Father's makes a huge selection of flavored bacons, stuff I've never seen or heard of before; honey-barbecue bacon, jalapeno bacon, vanilla-bourbon, peach-cinnamon, and a bunch more. For the purposes of consistency and comparing apples-to-apples as much as possible, I'm sticking to their most basic offering in the review.

Designation--Fancy or Grocery Store? Fancy. Dry-cured, long smokehouse smoke, not compressed. Definitely a artisanal-type fancy bacon.

Price--How much did I pay per pound for the bacon? $9.23/lb. I didn't pay for this, but when I went to their website and clicked through as if to buy a quartet of one-pound packs at $27 plus shipping costs, I got this number, which is by far the most expensive bacon I've reviewed to date.

Uncooked appearance--Color, texture, wet- or dry-ness, mushy or firm, etc... Nice looking slices, for the most part, dry yet moist, plump meat, nice and red. Asymmetrical slices, larger on one end than the other, show that the belly wasn't compressed or tumbled prior to processing. This is typical of a true artisan-quality product. The package I had, though, contained quite a few half-slices and what looked like trim. At this price point there should be only perfect center slices.

How it cooks--Tendency to curl, how much it shrinks, tendency to spatter... Cooks fast. I have no idea why, but this bacon cooks much faster than most that I get. It hardly shrinks at all, which is typical of true dry-cured, long smoked bacon.

Cooked appearance--Color, shape, texture. Cooks flat. Almost no curl, a normal amount of grease rendered, beautiful dark red color, perhaps indicative of a bit more nitrites than other producers.

How does it taste--Sweetness, saltiness, smokiness, texture (melting, chewy, flabby, spongy), "porkiness". Strong salty flavor. Salt is the dominant component with this one. There's nice pork flavor and smoke there too, but salt hits you first and keeps hitting. Very little sweetness as well, resulting in a fairly unbalanced overall flavor. It's a good hangover bacon for this reason, but it's not as well-balanced as I like to see from a producer of this level. I had high expectations, so that may have changed my perspective some. This is a very good bacon--the quality of the process is evident and the meat definitely has that great melting/crisp quality that you get from dry-curing, but the finished product, in my opinion, missed the mark due to being too salt-heavy.

One thing that occurred to me is that, given the fact that this company offers all kinds of maple, honey, vanilla, and cinnamon-flavored bacons, perhaps they veer towards the less sweet side on their products that don't overtly feature the sweet sticky stuff. We'll see. Although I don't include flavored bacons in the sweeping-in-scale project that is The Bacon List, my brother's gift did include a few, so I'll report back here at a later date if I find that I like them better than this straight-up hickory smoked stuff.

Overall rating--All bacons reviewed will be given an overall rating from 1-10, with 1 being practically inedible (I say "practically" since, you know, it's bacon--how bad can it be?), 5 being a perfectly serviceable bacon for use in cooking or on a sandwich, and 10 being....well, let's be honest; there won't be a 10. 7.7. This is a good rating, but not where a product of this caliber or price should be at. Father's puts itself up in the seven range simply by doing it the old fashioned way, artisanally curing and smokehouse-smoking their bacons. But the flavor of the finished product isn't as balanced between pork, smoke, salt, and sweet as I would've liked, and the somewhat sloppy packaging, which included some trim and ends, is simply unacceptable for something being sold for ten bucks a pound.

Starbucks VIA Giveaway (or How I Rationalize Being a Corporate Shill)

2009-06-30T20:07:00.011-05:00

FREE STUFF ALERT!

I am giving away four Starbucks VIA gift packs!

Four lucky winners will receive the handy-dandy tumbler pictured above along with six three-packs of Starbucks VIA Colombian and Italian blends. The mug is specially designed to hold six individual VIA packets, so you will, according to their website, "never be without great coffee again". Whatever. It's a package valued at $22.95!

How to enter and win:
Simple. Comment on this post and tell us all about your favorite coffee--where you get it, what kind of drink you like best, how it's made, what makes it so good, your individual coffee quirks...whatever.

After a week or so, I'll choose the four comments I like best and send out the Starbucks swag to the lucky winners.

____________________________________________________________

Now, to address the larger issues and ramifications of such a shameless display of symbiotic mutual self-promotion.

I've referred briefly in the past to my policies about reviewing stuff that comes my way for free, from PR companies, event organizers, or whoever, but I haven't ever codified an actual policy. Maybe now's a good time.

Basically, my driving guideline is that the credibility of this blog means far more to me than a free book, dinner, or pound of coffee, so I err on the side of caution. For example, I will always indicate when products or services came my way for free when reviewing them, and I always tell people offering freebies that my acceptance of the goodies in no way guarantees a positive review.

That said, I try and keep this blog relatively positive, so unless something is just egregiously bad, or I'm in the mood to rant, I would probably be more likely to simply not write the piece. This is my general tendency whether I've paid full price or not.

This wasn't much of an issue at first, but as this site has gained traction and generated more traffic, I've started getting frequent unsolicited emails from folks who would like to see their products (or the products of their clients) featured.

It all seemed fairly small-time and manageable until a PR guy representing the supposed evil empire known as Starbucks Coffee came knocking at my Gmail address . All of a sudden, entertaining the option of taking a mug and some free coffee made me feel like I was on the brink of becoming a complete corporate sell-out whore. What would be next, I figured--crowning some corporate PapaDomino'sHut pizza franchise the new Barnaby's? Hell, no!

But, crazy coincidence; I got some free samples of VIA from a Starbucks a few months ago when they first came out. They sat in a drawer until a couple weeks ago, when I brought them with on the camping trip I took with Henry, and at 6:45 in the morning, after sleeping fitfully through a night of thunderstorms and then escorting a four-year old through the mud to utilize a horsefly-plagued outhouse, this new "gourmet" instant coffee seemed like an acceptable option.

I drink iced coffee when it's warm out, so I just mixed two VIA packets with about 8 oz. of cold milk, some ice cubes, and a Sweet-n-Low.

The verdict? It was damn good. In fact, under the circumstances, it was fantastic.

I mean, it's not espresso good. Not anything like the nectar I generate with my Rancilio Silvia and the Adam's Blend I get from Casteel. Nor was it as good as an iced latte at Starbucks (which I find fine; acceptable in a pinch, if overpriced).

But for something I can make on the go--on a road trip, or camping, or as an alternative to the garbage that sits outside hotel-room bathrooms--it's pretty damn good. I can definitely see situations where this would be a welcome alternative to driving around hoping to find a place to get a decent cup of coffee, when I'm not willing to drop down to a gas station or Dunkin' Donuts level-brew.

Not a ringing endorsement by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly something that makes sense in certain situations.

This is the conclusion I'd already reached when the PR company goons tried to strongarm their way into my inbox, with their fiendishly courteous emails proffering their tantalizing freebies.

So, I figured....why not?

Bottom line; I'm going to take free stuff and go to free dinners and events sometimes, but I will always disclose when whatever I'm reviewing was a freebie, and I will always inform the party offering the freebies that there's no guarantee of a favorable review.

I'll try not to let if effect my opinion of the product, service, or event being reviewed, but whatever...I'm human. Sometimes, despite my attempts to approach the review from the perspective of someone who paid full price, I'll probably be unduly influenced by the tiny "thrill" that getting free stuff brings. The flip side of this of course, is that, depending on how the exchange is handled (sometimes people can be really crass and pushy about this kind of stuff), it might have a negative impact on my opinion of whatever's being reviewed.

That's that. I'm human, this is a blog, not Journalism, and, in the great scheme of things, you'll still probably see far more PR-agency-generated material in your daily newspaper or evening news than you'll see here.

See? You can trust me. I am ~~not~~ a corporate shill.

Finchville Farms Bacon Shots + More Ham

2009-06-28T16:33:00.008-05:00

I had so many pork porn shots from my Finchville visit that I'm doing a second post just to show them off.

Bellies

More bellies

Cured bellies

Ham slices ready for the store.

Hams in stockings.

I'm probably going to get more static from vegans for this. Oh well.

Country Ham--Finchville Farms, Kentucky

2009-06-25T16:00:00.023-05:00

At a dinner party hosted by Sky Full of Bacon's very talented Mike Gebert a few months ago, I was served (among other delicacies) ham biscuits. Which, if you just do a quick google and look at, say, cooks.com, you'll see are just simple little biscuit sandwiches of sliced ham.

These were not just simple little biscuit sandwiches of sliced ham, though. They were amazing. Biscuits made with lard Gebert had rendered himself, part of his homemade bacon process, a country ham from Father's in Kentucky, and home-canned preserves to slather on the delicate yet rich biscuits before adding a thin slice or two of the smokey, somewhat funky ham. This elegant little sandwich literally melted in my mouth, and the ham made a strong impression on me.

I managed to latch onto the tag from Gebert's ham, which sat on my desk for a couple months. My intention was to order a ham from the same purveyor and try and replicate it for myself. I never got around to doing that, but as part of a recent road trip, I incorporated a visit to a different producer of country hams named Finchville Farms in Finchville, Kentucky.

Finchville Farms is a small, family-owned operation run by Bill Robertson, whose family has been operating it since its inception in 1947. I sat down with Mr. Robertson before we embarked on a tour of his facilities and, as we talked about ham, we both eventually asked the same question aloud, incredulously--"why not?"

See, we were taking about country ham as opposed to European cured ham products like Italian prosciutto or the Spanish jamons Serrano and Iberico. And we both wondered why American country hams haven't yet attained the same success or recognition as their European counterparts. I didn't have an answer. Part of the reason it's taken me a month or so to write this article is that I've been trying to come up with one.

For me, as a chef, I was always somewhat bewildered by country ham. I never worked with it, so didn't really know the process. I knew it needed to be soaked in changes of water for a few days, and then roasted like a "regular" (read; saline-injected commercially processed) ham, and the resulting product would have a firmer texture and a more pronounced flavor than the standard spongy salt nibbles that turn up in our everyday omelets and deli sandwiches.

But I'd never tried it, so I just wasn't sure. And could it be thinly sliced, raw, and used in elegant presentations as a homegrown stand-in for prosciutto? I'd never seen it done that way and it seemed like everything I read about country ham was a cooked preparation like Gebert's , so, again....it remained a mystery.

Bill's answer (that's him to the right, in his office at Finchville) was, yes. "Sure, you can eat it raw, thinly sliced, like prosciutto," he said. "But nobody does. "

Country ham is most often seen as "steaks"--thin leg cross-cuts with a round slice of the bone in the middle--and these are cooked quickly on a griddle or in a pan and served alongside eggs, toast, and hash browns for $3.95 at gritty little neighborhood diners throughout the South and Midwest. When I've had it this way, though, I haven't cared much for it; it's usually kind of tough and stringy and too salty.

So that's more or less where I've always been on it; I'm a big fan of the European cured ham products, sliced thinly and draped over cool, juicy melon slices or ripe figs, but I haven't been much for American hams, whether the clove-studded, pineapple-ringed, Dr. Pepper-glazed, spiral-sliced Easter variety, or the more gourmet-sounding, but still disappointing country ham.

I appreciated Mr. Robertson's hospitality and generosity, for sharing both his time and products (My intention was to purchase a whole ham, like the ones seen sitting on his store countertop, but Bill steered me towards the ready-to-eat or cook products and laid a trunkload of samples on me). I've tried a bunch of different ones, but I'm still don't think I'm fully appreciating or understanding the appeal of this product. The only really amazing experience I had with it was at Gebert's dinner party.

Maybe part of it is how Gebert cooked his ham, I don't know. Another factor to consider is the varied styles of curing and processing. Bill at Finchville doesn't use any nitrates or nitrites in his hams, only salt and sugar. Some producers add spices or herbs, or use different types of sugar like brown sugar, molasses, or maple. Oh, and Finchville hams aren't smoked, either. Most that you'll find are, like the Father's ham I had at Gebert's gathering.

The process varies enormously from one maker to the next, but the essential steps are that a fresh or "green" ham is dry cured for a period of 3-5 weeks, then is rinsed and hung for a longer period--usually 8 to 12 months. At this point the ham can be used, or it can be smoked. The smoking can also be done prior to hanging. Some ham producers wrap the hams in muslin during the hanging process, others leave them naked to the air.

Obviously this process was developed prior to refrigeration and these methods were originally motivated by the desire to preserve fresh meat. Pig slaughters were usually at the beginning of the cold-weather months as a way to further prevent spoilage, and the various parts of the animal would be cured, cooked, smoked, and/or hung so that the cooler temperatures would prevent spoilage during the crucial point, and once the warmer weather arrived, the hams would be sufficiently cured to last through hot summer.

In fact, the summer is said to be beneficial to the flavor of the country hams. Like cheese and wine, ham is a product of its environment. As they hang, the hams are exposed to hot temperatures on summer days, but cooler evenings, and this temperature fluctuation is said to be beneficial for the flavor of the meat. Locals speak of the "July Sweats" as crucial to a country ham's flavor development. Native molds form on the outside of the hams as a reminder that this is a living process, and white specks of concentrated protein, similar to what's found in superior long-aged cheeses like Parmigiano-Reggiano, appear in the meat. Essentially, this is controlled spoilage.

But, hey, controlled spoilage is where it's at. Beer, wine, stinky cheese. Spicy kimchee, sauerkraut.

So the ham I got from Finchville is more or less exactly the same as what they make in Parma, Italy...I'm thinking. Why can't it be served more like prosciutto di Parma is typically used?

Well, I'm not entirely sure that it can't. But the intended end use needs to be considered while the product is being processed. That is to say, if a country ham producer set out to make Kentucky Prosciutto, they'd have to employ a different process. The current products are heavily salted, because the end users are going to soak them in changes of water, and then either roast or boil in more water. If the ham were going to be served raw, sliced paper-thin, the salt content would have to be scaled way back, so as to allow the end product to be less salty and also softer and more full of moisture than current country hams, which are like rocks. Typically, prosciutto is left to cure for 15-20 days, while country ham sits soaking up salt for 35-50 days.

The other thing is that Finchville uses commercial pork. I asked Bill about it when I noticed some Swift boxes near the dumpster, and got a waved a hand in the air as a response. This appeared to be Bill's way of acknowledging to the heritage pork movement, so other than mentioning some of the attention heritage breeds are getting from Chicago chefs, I didn't press him about it.

European hams are all made from pigs from the particular region, and the pump-it-full-of-hormones-and-saline-and-get-it-to-market-weight-in-half-the-time American factory farming model has, for the most part, been rejected in Europe. So, like with heritage breeds, the meat of the European pigs has a more fully developed flavor. It's fattier, and of a superior quality.

Now seems like a great moment to mention La Quercia, which appears to be doing just exactly what I just described over in Iowa, and their products are now being carried and touted by just about every pork-loving chef in Chicago.

So, after plunging headlong into this project, I find myself with more questions than answers. I'm kicking myself for limiting my experience with Finchville's products to the pre-fabbed steaks and ham biscuit slices, wrapped all tight and shelf-stable in their cryovack packs, and not bringing home a whole ham, as I'd planned.

Is the main reason that country ham isn't utilized similarly to prosciutto simply that it hasn't traditionally been done? American country ham producers have always included pre-cooking as a part of their process, and almost always market convenience products, like the ones Bill graced me with. As a result of the cooking being such a prominent part of their process, the USDA requires all uncooked country ham products to carry a label bearing cooking instructions, including the suggestion that pork always be cooked to an internal temperature of 160°.

So partly, it's a matter of it's always been done this way, and the government suggests that it continue to be done this way.

Technically, however, the USDA has no opinion about whether country ham can be eaten raw. They have not taken an official position. And the country ham producers haven't asked, for fear of having some stringent requirements slapped on them. So the mystery continues.

So, the next logical step for me is to buy a whole ham. Whether from Finchville, Father's, or somewhere else. There are now tons available through internet mail-order. And then maybe get one from La Quercia and do a taste test to compare how the various hams taste raw. Oh, and I'll need a profressional deli slicer to do these fine products justice.

Yup. Next time I've got a spare thousand bucks laying around, I'll be sure to do that. I guess that's part of the reason there hasn't been more experimentation with these products...the entry costs are high.

S0, there you go. Lots of valuable info about a traditional American product, some taste tests, a visit to the producer, an interview with the guy who runs the company, and still, the answer to the question that Bill and I asked in his office remains elusive.

"Why not"? I don't know.

Alber's Ice Cream/Union Dairy; Freeport, IL

2009-06-22T21:17:00.032-05:00

I took my four year old son, Henry camping a couple weekends ago. Ever been camping with a four-year old?

Anyway, he loved it and we more or less accomplished my goal, which was to give him his first real overnight camping experience so when we start doing longer trips, he'll be used to it. After doing a few backyard campouts, this was our first real foray out into the wild world.

We ventured out about an hour from the city, to nearby Rock Cut State Park, which is a very nice little state park that I've visited and camped at before. They have two lakes--one that's used for fishing, another with a sandy beach, and the campground where the tent campers (as opposed to RV campers) set up is situated nicely between the two lakes. Henry, however, in his typical assertive-for-no-apparent-reason-about-things-he-doesn't-even-have-the-faintest-clue-what-he's-talking-about way, told me early and often that he did "NOT want to ride in a paddle boat. NO. WAY. DAD."

I've learned not to try and convince him that paddle boats are fun, or to even ask what he's got against them, anyway, since he's never been on one. No point to it. Mmm hm. No paddleboat. No way, no how. Check.

After getting an early start, setting up camp, and loading up on firewood and worms for fishing, we were ready to get something to eat, and I was determined to avoid the campground hot dog stand and the endless highway exit fast food options.

We cast about for a while, then found ourselves in the nice little old town of Freeport, Illinois, which just happens to be one of the sites where Abraham Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas in 1858, as the two stumped around Illinois in their respective campaigns to become the state's next US senator. The debates all centered around the issue of the day--slavery, and are said to be where Lincoln's mettle was proven and his chops were honed for his presidential run just two years later.

More importantly, though, directly behind Debate Square, where the historic event is commemorated, there's a really cool old ice cream parlor.

I saw the art deco facade when I turned a blind corner and knew that my aimless wandering had paid off. Sometimes when you're hungry it's tempting to give in and just hit the Denny's or the Culver's off the exit ramp, but then you find a sleeper like this place just loaded with old time character and charm.

I was hoping for a patty melt or something similarly diner-minded, but we found out that the "grill" portion of this establishment is closed on Sundays, so we had no choice but to eat massive ice cream sundaes for our lunch. Here they are:

Mine was the turtle sundae, that's it on the left, and Henry is all about the mint ice cream, so he got what they were calling a mint meltaway sundae, which had mint chip ice cream, hot fudge, a ton of whipped cream, and a bunch of crushed Andee's mints all over the top and sides.

The ice cream in this place was good (it's Cedar Crest), and they appear to be doing a nice job jazzing it up with their sauces, toppings, and all the fixin's, but the reason this place is worth an hour drive (or at least a detour if you're heading west) is its perfectly preserved condition. It's beautiful. Pristine. It could (and probably should) be in a museum, but it's not; it's still functioning as this town's little local restaurant and ice cream parlor, the counters are staffed by local high school girls, and honestly, most of the people in there looked at me like I was nuts for taking pictures of the shiny chrome and Formica, the amazing soda fountain set-up that runs down the center of the long oval of counter seating, and their sweet old jade green Hamilton Beach spindle milkshake mixer.

But I'm NOT crazy. THEY'RE the ones who are crazy for not recognizing beauty and art when it's right under their noses! Look at that setup!

The ice cream dipping cabinets are still working, they're using those pumps for their syrups and flavorings, the hot well holds the hot fudge and caramel at just the right temperature, and there's not a speck of dirt or a bent piece of stainless to be found. Do people realize how rare that piece is? How incredible it is that no one ripped it out during all these years?!

Remember what I said about camping with a four year old. I'll just say this; no matter how many times they tell you they want to "help", they really don't. Oh, and we now know that four is not old enough to apply Deep Woods Off. But if you let'em get really hungry and then promise them a big ice cream sundae, they're putty in your hands.

Henry doesn't understand why they would prepare and bring the dad's ice cream sundae a full ten minutes before they prepare and bring the kid's. I didn't get it either.

Anyway, after a couple of big ice cream sundaes, our stomachs were cooled down and full, our faith was restored in the world, and we headed back to the campground for some short-attention-span fishing and a few good hours of playing with the pump (endless fun, apparently).

We did our campfire dinner, had the obligatory s'more or two, strummed the guitar a bit, and then settled down in our sleeping bags for some flashlight play and, eventually, sleep. I'm fairly sure I slept at least a little.

Whoa! Camping with a four year old! No one ever said it was restful. Remember what I said earlier about training Henry for longer camping trips? Maybe I'm the one who actually needs a warm-up outing or two.

I won't say the ice cream sundaes at Alber's/Union Dairy were the highlight of the trip...but let me just put it this way; I'm glad I know it's there in such close proximity to the campground for next time.

Summer Break

2009-06-16T08:22:00.003-05:00

Just wanted to touch base quickly and offer an explanation, of sorts, for the long gap in posting. Most of my energy these days is going into enjoying the weather, taking care of the kids, and other endeavors, so I haven't been posting much of late.

But, not to worry. I'm anticipating having some quality time on my hands soon, and have posts about Korean barbecue, my first crack at making duck prosciutto, the best bagels in Chicago, a perfectly preserved 40's era ice cream parlor, and my tour/interview with a Kentucky country ham producer working their way through the process.

So stay tuned!

Healthy Kids Cook-Off

2009-06-05T00:45:00.007-05:00

There's a great event this weekend that I was invited to attend and unfortunately won't be able to get to (Henry and I are going camping!) but it's not too late for you to plan on attending and bringing your kids.

It's an Iron-Chef style cook-off where kids will team up with Kendall College students as well as local well-known chefs like Michael Kornick, to see who can whip together a tasty and nutritious snack using "secret ingredients".

The finalists will compete in what the press release calls a "fast paced" cook off in front of a live studio audience "just like on TV". Snacks and prizes are provided, and the whole thing is also done in conjunction with something called the Healthy Living Fair which features demos, free samples, and lots of other cool stuff. You'll also get the opportunity to check out Kendall College's amazing new facility on Goose Island.

The whole thing promises to be plenty of fun, but it's also pretty important; when school lets out, 8 out of 10 kids who receive free school lunches during the year don't get any assistance over the summer. This event is geared towards raising awareness about child hunger and also teaching adults and kids alike how to prepare simple and nutritious meals and snacks.

It takes place this Sunday, June 7th from 12:00 noon to 5pm at Kendall College--900 North Branch Street (on Goose Island near Chicago Avenue and Halsted) in Chicago.

So, go! Bring your kids. Cook, watch, feast, and have a good time.

The Best Burger in Chicago

2009-05-30T07:34:00.006-05:00

I finally made the trek down to Beverly to try what many claim is the best burger in Chicago. Top Notch Beefburgers is located at 2116 W. 95th, just a bit east of Western Ave., and yes, it's all it's cracked up to be.

What can I say, other than to add my name to the pile of admirers who have crowned Top Notch as the standard-bearer? It's the best of the form. Hands down.

The beef is incredibly fresh. Top Notch uses round for their burgers, and they grind the beef fresh, in-house, every morning, from great 90-lb primal cuts of beef. They patty their fresh beef into thin, 5 oz. burgers, and griddle cook them, gently, until they're just cooked through, but still juicy, with tons of wonderful fresh beef flavor.

The bun is the classic, flabby, nondescript, white bread burger bun. It wouldn't stand up to a larger, medium-rare burger, but it's perfect for the style that Top Notch is serving, mainly because it stays in the background and doesn't interfere with the beefy flavor of the meat, which is really the focus here. I had mine with grilled onions and cheese (sharp American comes standard), which I believe to be the purist's preference.

I've gone into some detail already about what I'm looking for from a burger, so I won't repeat myself, but I want to state for the record, right here, that Top Notch delivered exactly what I have been seeking from a burger. The raves are on the mark. It's just too bad this place is roughly 167 blocks south of where I spend most of my time.

Oh, and the fries! I didn't mention the fries yet, but they are fabulous. They may not be the best fries in the city, but they're damn close. A place with a burger this good doesn't need to turn out a perfectly-done version of the fresh-cut, double-cooked fry. Their burger is the draw, right? So they definitely don't need to cook their fries in beef tallow, do they?

But they do, and they're perfectly seasoned, crisp, and nicely browned without even approaching dark. While I was sitting at the counter, during a fairly busy lunch, I saw the fry cook make batch after small batch of fries which went straight onto plates with their burgers almost every time. The guy could've made two or three really large batches, considering the rate at which they were serving them up, and just worked from the heat-lamped dump pan, but he didn't. Instead, almost every customer got fries that had just emerged from their sizzling hot bath of beef fat.

Details like that are what makes this place so awesome. They get it.

I could go on and on about the retro-without-trying-to-be wood paneling and formica counters, or the milkshakes made on the old spindle machine with milk straight from the "cow". But, honestly, I wouldn't care if they served these burgers and fries to me out of the back of a rented moving truck or from a kiosk inside of a Wal-Mart--they're just that good.

Life is generally better when viewed through a vanilla malt.

Cochon 555--Strange But Tasty

2009-05-29T01:09:00.016-05:00

The hit of the party--Bluprint's maple sugar-dusted bacon cotton candy on a crispy bacon "stick"

I've been somewhat reluctant to write this post because I didn't want to write what some will see as a negative review of Cochon 555, which was held at the Drake Hotel here in Chicago last Sunday night. The event was a benefit, of sorts, for an organization called Farms for City Kids, but it's also (I gather) a money-making endeavor for Atlanta's Taste Network, which organizes these events, and an advertising/marketing opportunity for the winemakers and restaurants that participate.

Nothing wrong with any of that, of course, and it's more or less standard operating procedure for these type of events.

But even though I got in for free, courtesy of Foodbuzz and the event's organizers, I went into it with the mindset of someone who might've paid the $125/person ticket price. Frankly, if I'd paid full price to get in, I'd have been pretty disappointed. The fairly steep ticket price, coupled with the fact that this event was held smack dab in the middle of a holiday weekend, probably accounted for the fact that it didn't sell out.

Not to say that I didn't enjoy myself; I did, actually. As a part of the VIP reception, I arrived around 4pm, saw a couple familiar faces, introduced myself to a few bloggers/writers who I know from their reading their stuff, but had never met in person, and worked the wine tasting tables. Which, honestly, was far more difficult than it should have been. The wineries insisted on enforcing a strict "tasting pour" policy which made the typical cocktail reception revelry somewhat challenging, to the point where I just ditched my glass and gave up.

This is part of the reason that the event had a strange feel to it, overall. Alcohol should never be hard to come by at these sort of things, but I was far from the only person who could be seen darting back into the VIP reception room fishing bottles of Three Floyds beer out of the ice bins that were left behind in there after the main event began. In fact, I was pulled aside by a number of people who saw me with my Alpha King bottle and wanted to swap their underfilled wine glass for one as well.

The 5pm Sunday night start time meant that most of the eating and drinking was over by about 6:30, and the group of 200 or so pork-lovers found themselves kind of milling around with nothing, really, to do or pay attention to, for quite a while while we all waited for the "winner" to be announced.

There was a pig-butchering demo happening during that kind of in-between time, and that was interesting. The strange juxtaposition of watching a pig carcass being broken down amidst the gilded columns and crystal chandeliers of the Drake's Gold Coast Room led to some interesting discussion among the event's attendees. I spoke to people from quite a few different walks of life and most commented that they found the demo to be compelling, but also very strange. This is a common reaction to being confronted with the reality of whole-animal eating, which I've touched on in other posts, but I don't think it's ever been laid bare in quite the same way before. You haven't really pondered this attraction/revulsion issue until you've spent a half an hour talking hog butchery with a wide-eyed Gold Coast socialite while watching a guy take a hacksaw to a pig's spine.
This was a good thing, overall, I think, and something that I believe would probably not have taken place a mere three or five years ago. Suddenly, awareness that bacon, pulled pork, and cracklin's come from the same animal that is laying there, splayed out, brutally dead in it's whole form, is not only acceptable within the more refined context of this sort of event...it's actually hip.

(Do people even say "hip" anymore? You know what I mean. I'm 40, what can I say?)

I tend to forget that not everyone who goes to events like these knows about food. Despite just about every restaurant doing some preparation of head cheese, but most of the folks I chatted with while we watched the pig-butchery demo had no idea that anyone would actually use the pig's head to make food. When I explained the process the chefs employed to produce the little Cabernet mustard-topped disk they just finished nibbling on, more than a few of them blanched. One even proclaimed it to be "gross". (That's the Signature Room's head cheese pictured at right).

Along those lines, the food at the event was largely underwhelming. Part of this, I blame on the venue and the format. The chefs had little to no heating apparatus at their disposal, since the event was held in a ballroom, and this resulted in many of the dishes being served cold or at room temperature. While this was fine for some things, many just didn't hold up well.

There was also a lot of redundancy. At least three of the five stations did a similar take on porchetta, which translates to a very large, stuffed, tied skin-on pork belly stuffed with loin and all manner of other stuff, roasted, and then sliced and served. Seems like this could've been coordinated a bit better by the event's organizers.

Some original dishes stood out; The Bristol's mortadella-filled, lard-fried donut holes were wonderful--fried and stuffed to order, each one (I had at least four) was served hot and delivered a perfectly sweet and savory pillow of pork-filled fried dough. Bacon cotton candy from Bluprint was probably the dish that most people talked about, but novelty aside, it was just a really nice little party snack--the spun sugar floss was wound around a bacon "stick" and then dusted with bacon powder and maple sugar. I was also impressed with the bacon Manhattan served up at Bluprint's station by bartender Chris Chickerneo, which combined Templeton Rye, sour cherries, and bacon fat.

Attendees got to cast a vote for the restaurant they thought did the best job at creating varied, tasty dishes from their pig, and I voted for Patrick Sheerin and his crew from The Signature Room at the 95th. They did what I thought was the best take on barbecue, with their smoked pork shoulder over cornbread pudding, their charcuterie (including the ubiquitous head cheese) was well executed and was also brightened up nicely by zippy pickled green tomatoes, and their miso-cured pork belly with porcini dashi and ramp kimchee really stood out as a fully-realized restaurant-caliber dish in a room mostly full of hors d'ouevres.

Team Signature Room also scored points by being smart enough to use their immersion circulator as a way of keeping everything hot until they were ready to serve it. While the others struggled with remote warming boxes and induction burners, the guys from the Signature Room simply opened up vacuum-sealed bags of their prepped product that had been gently held at the optimal temperature, and plated. I'd never seen an immersion circulator used for this application, and found it ingenious.

The graham elliot team took the title of "prince of porc" and will now advance to compete in the Grand Cochon, which will be held once this event completes its 10-city tour, despite the fact that the eponymous restaurant's chef was nowhere to be seen. The representative of Team g.e. that I spoke with, however, explained that the chef had allowed each cook to put together a dish that drew from their own background--in other words, preparing heritage pork in a way that reflected their own culinary heritage--and walked me through each dish with a bit of back story about the cook who'd conceptualized it.

This concept appealed to me and almost excused the absence of the chef himself, but I couldn't help but think that if Bowles had been there, I wouldn't have been served the lard-based biscuit or da yooper pork pasty that were both underwhelming due to the fact that they were served practically stone cold.

I hate to come off as curmudgeonly or unappreciative. Don't get me wrong, it was a good time.

To cap off the evening, the MC drew business cards out of a big bowl to determine who would get the honor of taking home parts of the pig that was butchered for the demo, and I found myself walking up to the front, the lucky recipient of one of his (or her) rear legs.

I'd never actually cooked a fresh ham before, so wasn't really sure what I would do with it. Fortunately, as I lugged it around the ballroom, I ran into Gary Wiviott, and promptly hit him up for advice. I was planning on smoking some ribs the following day for Memorial Day, so G Wiv advised me to just pop the ham right on the smoker as well, and treat it basically as I would a pork roast. Which is what I did and it turned out wonderfully--really tender, smokey, and juicy.

For my final trick of the evening, I bugged the Kendall College Culinary School volunteers for some ice and a plastic bag so my ham wouldn't spend too much time at room temp during my 'L' ride back home, and then I hit up the Drake's front desk guy for a shopping bag in which to haul the whole package around the city. Quite the spectacle, I was; drunk on Templeton rye, sugar-buzzing on bacon cotton candy and salumi donuts, and hauling an Abercrombie and Fitch bag stuffed full of heritage pig leg down into the Chicago Avenue Red Line stop, trying to look inconspicuous. I'm starting to think that I need to bring a cooler and ice paks everywhere I go.

Road Trip--Buffalo Trace Distillery, Frankfort, KY

2009-05-27T15:57:00.017-05:00

The final stop on my trip back from the Greenbrier, earlier this month, was a visit to what I now know to be the legendary Buffalo Trace distillery, where they create some of the finest Kentucky Bourbons on the market.

Buffalo Trace is a part of the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. It's being marketed to tourists and Bourbon lovers as a destination, and there are folks who even buy the "passport", make a trip of it and try to visit as many of the eight distilleries that ring the area around Frankfort as they can.

In keeping with this attempt to make this whole thing more marketable and accessible for tourists, I found the area to be well-marked, with street signs indicating where to turn once I got off the main highway, so finding the place was fairly easy. I pulled off into what appeared to be a large estate, and the drive wound around past some very well-kept gardens until I pulled into what was obviously the working distillery and tour zone.

As soon as I stepped out of my car, I was smacked in the face with the smell of bourbon. The distillery's parking lot sits right next to one of the large barrel aging warehouses, and the grainy, caramelly, woody smell seems to hang in the air around the compound of more than 100 buildings that make up the distillery. This smell, along with the fact that the 55 gallon barrels can yield as little as 5 gallons of finished product, have given rise to the term "angels' share" to refer to the huge quantity of the tasty brown liquor that evaporates into the Kentucky air as the environment and its temperature fluctuations work their magic and turn grain spirits into fine Kentucky bourbon.

I did what they refer to on their website as the "hard hat tour", which took me, according to their literature, "behind the scenes of the bourbon making process where the magic happens". As part of a small group of four guys, the tour guide walked us through the entire brewing/distilling/aging process from where the grain gets trucked in, right through to where the pure spirits go into the barrel to age.

The grains (corn, wheat, malted barley) are cooked in giant pressure cookers.

The mash is then cooled, yeast is added, and it's allowed to ferment in huge vats. The mash is constantly bubbling furiously and an oily, bubbly scum forms along the top. It smells like beer.

Buffalo Trace is really a pretty amazing place. The name refers to the fact that buffalo herds used to cross the Kentucky river at this particular spot, and is the owners' way of paying tribute to the "mighty herds that carved paths in the wilderness and a destiny for our ancestors."

The site was first settled in 1775 by brothers Hancock and Wills Lee, and was originally called Leestown. The story goes that the region's fine limestone-filtered water and burgeoning grain farmers made it an ideal place for a distillery, and, perhaps due to those circumstances, there has been a working distillery on the site since 1787.

It's gone through a lot, though. It was known as Blanton in the early 1800's, then was purchased by George T. Stagg in the 1870's and rechristened O.F.C. distillery. It eventually came to be known as the George T. Stagg distillery, which is what it's called on the National Registry of Historic Places.

During prohibition, George T. Stagg distillery was one of only four distilleries in the country to be granted a permit to continue producing alcohol for "medicinal purposes". People could get a prescription from their doctor to purchase whiskey, and some 5 million people got in on the act, purchasing the quart maximum that they were permitted every 10 days.

In 1992, it was sold to the New Orleans-based Sazerac company, which gave the distillery its current name and, in 1999, started marketing bourbon under the Buffalo Trace (which is a Kentucky Straight Bourbon) brand name.

Which brings us to some of the rules and nomenclature associated with bourbon. The label "bourbon" is a federally-protected descriptor. In 1964, the US Congress recognized Bourbon Whiskey as a "distinctive product of the United States." The Federal Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits (27 CFR 5) state that bourbon must meet these requirements:

Bourbon must be made of a grain mixture that is at least 51% corn.
Bourbon must be distilled to no more than 160 (U.S.) proof (80% alcohol by volume).
Bourbon must be aged in new, charred oak barrels
Bourbon may not be introduced to the barrel at higher than 125 proof (62.5% alcohol by volume).
Bourbon which meets the above requirements and has been aged for a minimum of two years, may (but is not required to) be called Straight Bourbon.
Bourbon aged for a period less than four years must be labeled with the duration of its aging.
If an age is stated on the label, it must be the age of the youngest whiskey in the bottle.

The distinction, then, between bourbon and other various types of American whiskey, is an important one. Bourbon need not be made in Bourbon County (there are, in fact, no distilleries in Bourbon County, Kentucky), and it doesn't even need to have been made in Kentucky to be called bourbon. But it does need to adhere to the requirements above.

So, for example, Jack Daniels, is categorized as Tennessee whiskey, and cannot, by law, be called bourbon.

Now that the term "bourbon" has been fully explained, we can tackle the concept of "single barrel".

Basically, as bourbons go, the less expensive commercially-produced brands like Jim Beam or Maker's Mark, while they are legitimately called Kentucky Straight Bourbon, they are not "single barrel" bourbons. These brands consist of the contents of hundreds of barrels--some may be ten or twelve years old, others as young as two--which are then combined (don't say "blended"--I learned the hard way) so that a consistent color and flavor profile is achieved.

Which is fine. There's a certain consistency and appeal to these products, and the price is right. Buffalo Trace's eponymous brand falls into this category.

But the real draw here is the single barrel stuff. In 1984, the world’s first single barrel bourbon to be marketed commercially was released under the label, Blanton’s Single Barrel Bourbon, named after Colonel Albert B. Blanton, who dedicated his life to preserving the tradition of handcrafted small-batch produced bourbon amidst a quickly-modernizing industry.

Buffalo Trace makes and markets its own brand of single barrel, Eagle Rare, which is available as a 10 year-old single barrel at 90 proof and a 17 year-old "antique collection" offering.

But what I found really cool is the fact that Buffalo Trace produces and ages a number of other brands, each to the specifications of their master distiller, each with a different personality and flavor profile; Blanton's is a great brand with a number of different offerings, Elmer T. Lee is named after Buffalo Trace's distiller emeritus, and is bottled when he decides the time is right, and Rock Hill Farms is much prized, but difficult to find. There are others.

These distillers get first crack at the prime aging spots. Experts claim that specific floors within specific aging warehouses are superior; they offer the best temperature fluctuations between Kentucky's hot, humid summers, and cool, foggy winters, and that these severe temperature changes are what gives the contents of the barrel its distinctive mellowness and flavor notes. According to their website, "the fourth and fifth floors of Warehouse C and the fourth through sixth floors of Warehouses I and K produce our absolute best whiskey." Who knew?

Other products produced at Buffalo Trace include Pappy Van Winkle Family Reserve, which is a wheated bourbon, has been rated the number one bourbon whiskey in the world and goes for around $250/bottle, and Sazerac Rye (rye whiskey is a smoother, yet spicier version of bourbon) are also made at the distillery. Rain vodka (the only vodka made exclusively from organically-grown American grain) is also produced at BT.

Bourbon is a distinctly American product which, despite achieving some degree of notoriety in recent years, hasn't even begun to approach the prestige level that Scotch whiskey has enjoyed forever. Until I went and immersed myself in the history of this fine amber sipping liquor, I was sorely ignorant of the amazing tradition, incredible standards, and great variety that Bourbon offers to those who are inclined to delve deeply into the genre and start learning and drinking. There's simply a ton to know, and there are lots of great resources out there.

And, amazingly, the center of the bourbon universe is a short 5-6 hour drive south of Chicago, tucked away in the country between Lexington and Frankfort, Kentucky, just waiting for city dwellers like me to discover, which, in my mind, is a pretty good excuse for a road trip.

Cochon 555

2009-05-20T10:25:00.020-05:00

250 Guests
300 Pounds of Pork
400 Bottles of Wine
100 Pounds of Cheese
20 Judges and Chocolate

Sound good?

Yeah, I thought so. That's the teaser they're using at the website for Cochon 555, an event that's being held this weekend (Sunday, May 24th) at the Drake Hotel to benefit and raise awareness for an organization called Farms for City Kids.

Basically, the deal is that each chef gets a 70 pound heritage pig and does a head-to-tail preparation. The lucky guests get to sample what the chefs come up with, wash it all down with wine from five family owned wineries, and then vote to determine which chef did the best job.

The event is being held in ten cities, and the ten winning chefs will then compete in a "Grand Cochon", from which will emerge, I presume, a grand champion, effectively, a King of Pork. Chicago is the seventh in this series of events. Past host cities included New York, Napa, and Des Moines, and the whole thing has gotten rave reviews online.

I'm going on Sunday (full disclosure--I'm attending on a press pass that was procured for me by the good folks at foodbuzz), and I can't wait. The chefs that will be representing Chicago are Graham Elliot Bowles of graham elliot, Sam Burman of bluprint, Patrick Sheerin of The Signature Room at the 95th, Stephen Dunne of The Paramount Room/VOLO, and Chris Pandel of The Bristol. Very promising.

Some of the chefs I'm already familiar with--look for something with pop rocks or corn nuts from Bowles and probably something rustic like belly confit or shank from Pandel--but the others will be new to me, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing what these guys choose to do with their pigs. Chefs love challenges like this, where they're given a beautiful heritage animal (heritage breeds usually have more flavor and fat than those used in by the big, conventional producers) and are charged with featuring all the cuts, so as to really showcase the wonderful and varied preparations that are employed in using a whole animal and trying to honor it by wasting nothing.

Tickets, I believe, are still available for this great event. You can click through their website to find out. It promises to be spectacular eating, drinking, and people-watching, the Drake is a fabulously posh Chicago institution, and the whole thing raises awareness for a great cause.

Hope to see you there!

Granola Recipe

2009-05-19T15:18:00.008-05:00

I referred to making granola in an earlier post, but never posted the recipe. We've been working from a recipe that I got from the Food Network's recipe website for nearly a year now, and I've tweaked it to the point that it gives us great, consistent results.

This makes a big batch, maybe 2 weeks' worth for a small family, but it keeps just fine in a sealed plastic container.

6 Cups rolled oats
1.5 Cups freshly-ground flax seeds
1.5 Cups wheat germ
1 Cup brown sugar
2 Cups shredded coconut
1 Cup toasted sunflower seeds
3 Cups other nuts (we use walnuts and pecans), chopped
1 Cup vegetable oil
1 Cup maple syrup (real)
2 T. salt
1 T. vanilla paste

Pre-heat oven to 275°
Mix the dry ingredients.
Mix the wet ingredients.
Combine and mix until well coated.
Spread mixture evenly over two half-sheet pans.
Bake on bottom rack until well-browned and dry (maybe 1 hour).
Turn pieces over, lower oven to 200°, bake another 45 minutes to ensure it's fully dried and crunchy.

(my blogger software is changing the numbers on that list to little flowers, for some unknown reason. Somone who knows html, could you write me on how to fix that?)

It's a great breakfast option to have on hand for everyday, get-out-of-the-house type eating, combined with some nice creamy yogurt, or just milk.

I used a vanilla paste that's made by Rodelle Vanilla that's just fantastic as well. Vanilla paste is the actual pulp from the vanilla beans, pre-scraped and mixed with a bit of extract and corn syrup, so the texture is nice for this kind of application. If I poured vanilla extract straight onto the granola, it would quickly soak into only a few chunks; this pasty stuff allows it to thoroughly mix with the dry, sticky granola ingredients.

(full disclosure--they sent me some swag after I did a review of their whole vanilla beans that I buy at Costco)

No long commentary here. Truth is, I'm doing some late Spring cleaning and I almost threw out the original recipe. I haven't re-written it with the alterations, and just wanted to get it down somewhere that I wouldn't lose it. Paper is so obsolete.

Road Trip Photos--Hip Louisville

2009-05-18T16:09:00.018-05:00

Ok, I will readily admit that I'm not as cool as I used to be. I'm forty. I have two young kids. Sorry. I try my best.

But as a once-hip indy-record-store-dwelling post-collegiate goof-off of some notoriety, I feel that even in my advanced middle-aged state, I can appreciate a good thing.

During my recent trip through the mid-South, I stopped in Louisville one evening for dinner and a stroll and happened up a great neighborhood along Bardstown Road that featured lots of urban hipster eye-candy in the form of cool bars, restaurants, and shops, live musicians playing outside a coffee shop in what I think is called Deer Park, and just a really nice neighborhood, with many friendly folks out and about.

Lots of cool signage in this area. I'm a sucker for creative and retro signage.

I had some food, which didn't actually impress much (maybe Louisville isn't a barbecue town, despite its proximity to Owensboro, which happens to be one of the great barbecue regions of the US), so I'm not really going to speak to the restaurants much with this post. But the neighborhood and the people really struck a nice tone for me on a warm late-Spring night.

I love record stores.

Walking a block or two off the main strip, I found a nice neighborhood with old trees and architecture very reminiscent of Chicago bungalows. Lots of brick, limestone, and squared-off corners which are everywhere in the Midwest and always give me a very comfortable and familiar feeling.

A little further off the main shopping drag, there are some amazing turn-of-the century mansions, too. You'll have to crane your neck out your car window to see them, since the most ornate and stoic examples sit perched way up on their own little hills, but park real quick and get out and look around at these beauties. They're amazing.

I was amazed at how, only five hours south of Chicago, Louisville felt so positively southern. Despite the quick drive, I was in The South; people had accents, every restaurant served cornbread and biscuits, and it was so much more warm and humid and green. This would be a nice place to live, I think.

The proof that I'm old, of course, is that I came back buzzing about Louisville and the impression it made on me, but instead of suggesting to my wife that we pick up and move there right now, as I might've done when I was in my 20's, my thought was that it would be a great place to retire to someday. Sad, this getting old thing. But also kind of cool.

My Post-Symposium Post

2009-05-17T15:29:00.006-05:00

Sorry for the prolonged absence. I've been out of town the past week at the Symposium for Professional Food Writers at the Greenbrier in West Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.

It was an incredible honor to be there. The whole thing was hugely inspirational and validating, both as a writer, but also just as someone who's as interested in food as I am. Spending a week with similar-minded people was great fun and really re-charged my batteries on both an intellectual and spiritual level.

Now, the challenge is to harness that energy. Many of the successful presenters at the Symposium shared their methods and models with the attendees, and I find myself going in twenty directions at once, trying to write for this or for that potential project, so I've taken a few days off from posting here, out of sheer inability to organize my thoughts and head in one specific direction.

I road-tripped it down there, so I took advantage by visiting a few food-related spots. I spent an evening in the hip Highlands area of Louisville, visited a farm where they make country ham the old fashioned way, ate lunch at a cool art deco diner in Charleston, West Virginia, and toured a bourbon distillery that's been in continuous operation since 1787. I'll be blogging about all that stuff under the new header "Road Trip" which will feature stuff that's outside the scope of Chicagoland.

I've also started a second blog, where I'll be documenting the process of opening and running my restaurant; it's going to be a good quality burger joint here in Chicago and I'll be blogging the story more or less in real time. As a business owner, I'll be hoping for things to run smoothly, but the writer part of me wants to see plenty of challenges and drama, which always make for better storytelling. As a restaurant industry vet, I know I can safely count on the latter.

The burger blog is in development now, but it'll be fully up and running soon.

Thanks for reading.

More Burger (and Fries) Research

2009-05-07T11:11:00.019-05:00

As the unveiling of my project grows closer (I'll share more details when I can), I've been cruising around town trying boatloads of burgers and fries.

The more I try, the more I'm amazed at the differences from place to place. Here are some quick reviews of places I've tried recently.

Muskie's
2878 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago

This is a classic-looking old place with a sparse, simple menu that regularly gets pretty good marks on the various restaurant review sites. It's very clean inside, the owner is usually running the show behind the counter, and is extremely competent and friendly.

The burger, however, is your standard-issue frozen hockey puck. Besides lacking juiciness and good beefy flavor, which is almost always the case with a factory-formed, machine-stamped frozen patty, mine tasted freezer-burnt to boot. If the best part of a burger is the toppings, it's just not worth it, in my opinion.

The highlight at Muskie's is the fries. They're cutting their own potatoes here, but they're doing a thin fry, just about the same size as that awful place that starts with McD. And, these crispy shoestrings were cooked perfectly. Nicely cooked through with a great crunchy, well-browned exterior. This is the only place I've ever seen do a fresh-cut fry in this style. Very nice.

That's-a-Burger
2134 E 71st St., Chicago

This place has been recommended to me by dozens of people and I finally got around to trying it. The burgers are a nicely-done example of the diner-style griddled smashburger; fresh beef scooped and then smashed on the flat top. I did see (despite having to look through the bullet-proof glass) the guy scoop the fresh beef and flatten it with a specially-bent spatula that he fashioned (I presume) for this specific task, so they're at least doing it the way it's supposed to be done.

As a result, the burger was pretty good. Beef tasted fresh and had that nice crispy-yet-crumbly texture you want from a griddled diner-style burger. It was pretty juicy as well. They have a lot of other interesting-sounding stuff on their menu, and I've heard rave reviews about their turkey burgers, but I was interested in sampling just the straight-up burger and fries, mostly unadorned, in order to really be able to taste and assess the meat.

The fries, while fresh-cut, were abysmal. The trick with fresh-cut fries is to be able to cook them through in the time it takes the outside to brown and crisp up. In order to accomplish this, most places cook their fries twice--first in a lower-temperature oil, to cook the potatoes, and then again, at a higher temperature, to crisp and brown them.

That's-a-Burger, I believe, skipped the first step, resulting in fries that did not fully cook through before they started to brown. Then they wrapped them up in the same butcher paper as the burger, Gene and Jude's style, where the trapped steam caused them to lose any hint of crispness that they might have had when they came out of the fryer. They also lacked salt.

Which wouldn't normally be that big of a deal--I can add salt myself, no problem--except that since That's-a-Burger offers no dine-in options, not even a ledge to perch on while you stand and eat, we were a block and a half away, eating in the car, so it wasn't all that feasible to go back and beg for a salt packet.

Oh, and I also had an issue with the spongy, cake-like bun, which had a kind of strange-tasting artificial sweetness to it that I found just very off.

Another thing about this place was that it took them more than 20 minutes to cook our order of three burgers and fries. We just walked in and ordered, but from what I observed, it seems like the protocol is to call your order in ahead of time. I'm not sure why it would take that long to cook burgers and fries. Wish I could say better things about this place. I wanted to like it, really I did.

Poochie's
3832 Dempster St., Skokie

I stopped at Poochies with the intention of having a burger and fries--honestly. But the really unique item on their menu is the char salami sandwich. They cut thick slabs the long way off of an all-beef kosher salami, and then cook it on the char-grill, crisping it up, rendering out some of the fat, and giving it a great, smoky, charred flavor.

It's served on very good crusty bread, as well. It's quite a sandwich. I ordered mine with the mustard and grilled onions, and I give this combo very high marks.

The fries, though, at Poochie's, are really the star. Here is a perfect exemplar of the fresh-cut fry the way it's supposed to be. Cooked through, almost creamy on the inside, nicely browned and crispy on the outside, and well-seasoned. These fries are perfect. Order the cheese fries and they'll slather a mound of gloppy Merkt's on there too. Just as good as Weiner's Circle, but without the verbal abuse!

They do char cheddar burgers with the Merkt's at Poochie's too (in the same vein as Paradise Pup), so I'll have to get back there fairly soon and check out the burger, although I doubt it's made with fresh beef.

Goldyburgers
7316 Circle Ave., Forest Park

Another oft-recommended burger spot is Goldyburgers in Forest Park, just west of Harlem Avenue and south of the Metra tracks. This place is definitely worth seeking out. It's a classic old tavern that's just perfect for taking in a Cubs day game.

The burgers are definitely fresh beef, hand-pattied, and have good flavor. They're also pretty big--at least a half pound, I'd guess. The one I ordered was, unfortunately, overcooked, but I believe that if it had been cooked as I ordered it, there would've had a lot more juiciness to it. Even cooked all the way through, it wasn't dry.

The service here was very friendly, in that kind of neighborhood corner bar sort of way. There's a lot of low-rent charm here as well--the food is served on cheap paper plates, 50's-era paper place mats appear after you order food, and kitschy burger-themed salt and pepper shakers adorn the tables.

The fries were nothing worth mentioning, but the feel of the place and the good (potentially very good) burgers make it worth checking out.

Kuma's Corner
2900 W. Belmont Ave., Chicago

Kuma's was a must-try for me, since they've won all sorts of awards for the best burger in the city. So I stopped in for lunch on a weekday around 2pm and the place was packed to the point that I just managed to find a spot at the bar.

I had the "Kaijo" which featured bacon, blue cheese, and "frizzled" onions. As you probably know, all the burgers are named after heavy metal bands at this place. I'm not familiar with the band Kaijo, but the burger sounded good to me.

It was cooked spot-on perfect, as you can see from the picture above, and the meat tasted like it was fresh and looked hand-pattied. It was juicy for days and was, overall, probably the best burger of the bunch I'm reviewing here.

The one thing I didn't love about the Kuma's burger was the fact that it was over-topped. They really heap on the toppings, which, when you're dealing with fresh, good-quality beef, really kind of overwhelms what's supposed to be the star of the show. I also wasn't crazy about the "pretzel"-style bun, but I did appreciate the fact that it was structurally sound enough to stand up to the giant, juicy, over-topped mess (and I mean that in a good way) that is the Kuma's burger experience.

The freezer-bag-to-fryer waffle cut fries and chips are nothing worth mentioning. It's a shame that a place that features burgers this good isn't also doing high-quality fresh-cut fries, but given the volume they're doing and the small kitchen, I understand why they've made that choice.

So, to recap, the Kuma's burger was the best of the bunch, with their good-quality, fresh beef and ability to cook it to the correct degree of doneness. While I prefer the thinner, diner-style griddled burger featured at That's-a-Burger, the main consideration for me is the quality of the beef, the freshness, and the juiciness, and Kuma's really delivered on all three.

The runaway winner for fries was Poochie's, with a special mention to Muskies for their unique shoestring hand-cut fries.

That said, I think I can do better.

Happy Birthday To Me!

2009-05-03T09:26:00.005-05:00

Today's my 40th birthday!

I'm not one for big blow-out type birthday celebrations; I usually just work on my birthday and don't make a big deal of it. Today I'm packing up the family and going out for breakfast at an old-fashioned diner I've been meaning to try, and then heading over to the Kane Country Flea Market. My wife hates going to antique stores and flea markets so I try and drag her to one on my birthday, when she can't protest or complain about it.

Later, we'll all go out for dinner with my parents and the plan is to follow it up with a visit to Margie's Candies for some of their amazing ice cream, which, for me, is far superior to cake.

On days like this, I'm just happy to spend time with family, appreciate the fact that we're all healthy, relatively happy, and in a position where we can spend quality time together.

Thanks to everyone for the kind birthday wishes. And, since forty is "the new thirty" (or so I'm told), I'm not at all worried about being old. (Yeah, right!)

Cheap Stuff That Works Vol. 4--The Best Sauté Pan

2009-04-30T10:00:00.008-05:00

Ok, I'm not going to mince words here. I've done the work. I've tried everything. And I can say, without a doubt in my mind that these French carbon steel pans from de Buyer are the best you can get, even if you spend twice what they cost.

Calling them "cheap" might be a bit of a stretch, but considering how they compare to the really pricey stuff that's comparable in quality, they're a great value and well deserving of being tagged as part of my Cheap Stuff That Works series.

I got a big load of All-Clad LTD pans for my first wedding. They're extremely high-quality pans and I still have them, some fifteen years later. They look great and function well. But the French carbon steel pans leave them in the dust, and the All-Clads are roughly double the price.

Check it out. This 12" pan is going for just shy of a hundred bucks (marked down from the ludicrous $155 list price) over at Amazon.com. That's a good price that you'd have to shop around for. But the same size on the French steel can be had for $69.95 from the Chef's Catalog website.

And it's a superior pan!

Ok, some things to know: first, the French carbon steel pans require, like cast iron, seasoning. That means they arrive clean and you have to dirty them up before you can use them. It's a really easy process that I've touched on before. There are tutorials all over the internet on how to do it, so I'm not going to get into it in much depth here. Basically, what I do is wipe the inside of the pan down with an oil-soaked paper towel, and then throw the pan in a 400° oven for a few hours. I try to do it when I'm using the oven for something, so I'm not wasting too much energy. You can do it over a burner as well, which is what the picture above shows.

The main way to season your pans is to cook with them. There's really no way to quickly get the seasoning that repeated usage over time produces.

Second, you shouldn't use soap to clean the pan. But if it's well-seasoned, you won't need to. A rinse with hot water and a good wipe with a wet scrubbie (or, alternately, salt) will do the job.

In order to allow the seasoning to set, you should avoid cooking food with a high acid content or deglazing with wine for the first few months. This is all part of the normal seasoning process, though, and once you've got a nice well-set crust on the pan, you can do anything you want (even use soap) and the seasoning won't go anywhere. It just takes a while for it to build up.

But once it's there, it's a thing of beauty. A well-seasoned pan is more non-stick than the best Teflon pan, and without the dubious chemicals found in the non-sticks. Pictured to the right is my big, honkin' 14-incher that I've had for about four years. The patina on there is so solid that I can use soap, scrape it with metal tongs, deglaze, whatever, and the seasoning isn't going anywhere. They're not pretty, these pans, but they work. If you want pans to hang on your pot rack and look shiny, these aren't the best choice. They're for cooks that use their gear for cooking.

The thick, heavy construction of these pans is wonderful for heat conductivity, comparable to cast iron, but they have the traditional shape that cast iron lacks, and can be manipulated a lot more easily. They also have just the most perfect slope to the sides, which causes a quick back-and-forth shake of the pan to flip the food nicely without having to actually pick the pan up off the burner.

There are quite a few products out there that are labelled "French steel" or "blue steel", and they're all pretty good, but I've had the best experience with these de Buyer brand pans which are part of a line this company is calling "Carbone Plus". They have a few lines, but this is the heaviest of the bunch, which, for the purposes for which this pan is suited, is what you want.

Eight to ten years ago, it was almost impossible to find these pans in the US. I worked in a restaurant back then which had them shipped in from France at great expense. Now, they're everywhere. I see them at Williams-Sonoma, Sur la Table, Chef's Catalog, and lots of the online shops. Shop around, though, because some of the fancier places are charging 25% or more over what discount outlets charge. The deal at this link, where you get an 8", a 10" and a 12" inch for $140, seems pretty good, considering that's still less than the list price of ONE 12" All-Clad.

Check them out. You'll thank me later.

Makin' Bacon

2009-04-28T09:25:00.014-05:00

In my recent entry about Peoria Packing Butcher Shop, I talked about how I bought a pork belly to experiment with making my own bacon. Well, the process has come to its logical conclusion and I thought I'd share the results.

Bottom line; the bacon I made was good, but not great. I do, however, have a pretty good handle on what can be improved upon, so I believe that the next batch will be better.

Lacking the seminal Michael Ruhlman book, I turned, of course, to the internet for information on what, exactly I needed to do to turn my pork belly into everyone's favorite cured, smoky treat. There's precious little credible information out there, in fact, but I did stumble onto this thread on LTH forum by my idol, and virtual mentor in so many endeavors, Mike Gebert. The thread served as a perfect primer, especially because Gebert used the Weber Smokey Mountain smoker and went into some detail about how to keep the smoker running cool enough to simulate the cold smoking that is typical of bacon production.

It's really a very easy process that's worth taking on, if only for the sake of going through the motions and learning how it's done. Here's a step-by-step walkthrough of what I did.

Step One: The Belly

As already noted, my belly was purchased at Peoria Packing, and I really didn't consider the choice very carefully--I just grabbed one randomly off the pile. The belly comes as one large floppy piece. I had trouble at first figuring out how this thing would end up resembling a slab of bacon, but after I cut it into three more or less equal pieces, it started to take shape. I got two good-sized blocks that I planned on using for my homemade bacon and one piece, from the scrawny end, that I figured I could use for braising or something.

In retrospect, the belly that I got at Peoria Packing wasn't all that great. It was pretty thin, resulting perhaps from sloppy trimming when the ribs were removed from the belly section. PP offers bellies with ribs on as well, so next time I may buy that cut and remove the ribs myself, leaving as much meat on the belly as I can. Or I may check Chicago Food Corp on Pulaski. There are also some other, more expensive options for getting high-quality bellies that I might pursue.

Step Two: The Cure

I recalled, vaguely, from somewhere, that the basic ratio for curing meats is 10:5:1, meaning 10 parts salt to five parts sugar to one part pink salt (sodium nitrate, aka Prague powder). Pink salt is optional, but it helps preserve the color, adds flavor, and makes the curing process safer, inhibiting stuff like botulism, so I made a quick trip over to The Spice House in Evanston and picked some up. It's also available over the internet through websites like Sausagemaker.com.

So, using that ratio, I mixed 500 grams of kosher salt, 250 grams brown sugar, and 50 grams of the pink salt. I decided to keep this cure really simple and just add black pepper for flavor, so I coarsely ground some peppercorns (about 75 grams) in my old coffee grinder, and threw them in as well.

Then I liberally applied the cure to the belly pieces, put each one into a ziplock bag and tossed them in my old basement fridge on a sheetpan (in case the bags leaked). I turned the bags over every other day to make sure the cure soaked in evenly, and after a week in the bags, I took the bellies out, rinsed them, dried them well with paper towels, and put them in the fridge on a rack set over a sheetpan so they could dry off and form a pellicle. The pellicle is kind of a skin that forms that allows the smoke to 'stick' to the meat and also prevents too much moisture from being lost during the smoking process.

Step Three: The Smoke

The big challenge here was getting my Weber smoker, which is designed to 'hot' smoke at temps between 200° and 275° to run colder, so the pork bellies would cook as little as possible. The right way to smoke pork bellies for bacon is in a smokehouse or with an offset smoker, which allows for cold smoking.

But I don't have either of those, so I was determined to get my WSM to run at about 150° for the 3-4 hours I figured I'd need to impart a whole lot of hickory smoke flavor before the bellies would have a chance to cook much. Besides one pretty funny MacGyver-esque set-up, which some guy constructs using dryer exhaust venting, foil pie plates, cardboard boxes, and duct tape, what I found was that building a very small fire and keeping it just barely going was the way to go. That's what I did and I ran a pretty solid 150° for four hours.

Step Four: Slicing

Slicing bacon by hand is hard!

After my bacon came off the smoker, I let it cool on a rack, then wrapped it in plastic and allowed it to firm up overnight in the fridge. The next day, I put the pieces in the freezer for a few hours and then took them out to slice them, which, I found, is no easy task.

I ended up with kind of a variety of thicknesses, basically due to my inability to consistently slice evenly, but that ended up being fine, since it allowed me to see how the various thicknesses cooked up. Cutting thicker slices is easier, and the thick slices cooked up nicer anyway, so that's what I'll go with next time around.

Step Five: Cook (and eat)

So? How'd it turn out?

Well, like I said, pretty good, but not great. I'd leave it in the cure for a few days longer next time. The thinner parts of the belly had good salt and sweetness, but the thicker sections lacked flavor and tasted more like fresh pork. So 10 days of curing next time around, rather than the seven I did this time.

The smokiness was excellent. You can see by the black outer edges that the smoke really penetrated and flavored the bacon. It's got that really incredibly strong smokiness that you can smell as soon as you open the door of the fridge. I used hickory chunks and I'll do it the same exact way next time around.

The texture was varied. The thinner pieces, while crispier, also had kind of a chewy, jerky-like quality to them, while the slices that were cut thicker ended up being more tender, with that melting quality where the fat just kind of disintegrates in your mouth. Thick slices are better.

All in all, while I'm not going to subject my first run-through to the stringent review process of The Bacon List, I'm deeming this experiment a rousing success. The end result was certainly edible, and better than most grocery store bacon I've had. And while it falls short of something like a Niman Ranch or a Broadbent, I think the potential is there to approach that level of quality.

All in all, a fine diversion resulting in some pretty good breakfast meat. I'll certainly do it again and I'll keep you posted how things progress.

My New Favorite Restaurant

2009-04-22T23:37:00.020-05:00

A recent search for a cheap, serviceable pickup truck led me up to Waukegan for the Waukegan Auto Auction, and while I didn't buy a truck, I ate a dinner that was so good, I'm proclaiming the place that served it to me to be my New Favorite Restaurant.

The place is Captain Porky's, and it's situated right on the border of Zion and Beach Park, Illinois, just across the street from Illinois Beach State Park.

Moments like this generate a strange simultaneous mix of emotions. I'm literally thrilled to have discovered this place. At this very moment, as I type, I'm coming up with various excuses that will justify driving the 45 minutes each way. Oh, the thrill of anticipation...the feeling of future promise. And, yet, while I'm exhilarated at the notion of having a New Favorite, I'm also angry, frustrated, and left with a feeling of being somewhat cheated.

How could this place have been in existence for all this time and I've only now found out about it? Think of all the shrimp, crab, and lobster I could've been eating! Think of the rib tips and hot links that are gone....forever...long ago resigned to the compost heaps of history, and the many inferior meals that I wasted the time, effort, and calories on when I could've been eating at Captain Porky's.

But (sigh) all I can do, really, is look forward, towards the future.

Summer is coming. 45 minutes isn't really all that far to drive to go to the beach. And what better way to augment a trip to the beach than with wonderfully fresh fried seafood and good barbecue?

I have a feeling I'm going to be very tan this summer.

Okay, so what's so great about Captain Porky's?

Well, it's one of those places like Calumet Fisheries or Hagan's Fish Market where you pick the type of seafood you want and they sell it by the pound and cook it up for you on the spot. Which is cool. These places are kind of a dying breed in Chicago and they usually feature some pretty darn fresh seafood prepared by people that really appreciate fish and, therefore, respect it and know the best ways to cook it.

But Porky's goes way beyond that. I ordered a half pound of fried fresh jumbo gulf shrimp, which were hand-breaded in front of me while I watched.

These shrimp were things of beauty. Sweetness for days, a great, almost lobster-like texture, with a super-light, flavorful and greaseless batter that just barely clung to the shrimp, but still provided great crunch and a perfect toasty, slightly salty counterpoint to the succulent meat. A really nice, zippy cocktail sauce as well. It might sound like I'm exaggerating if I called these shrimp "transcendent", but I assure you, I am not exaggerating.

Have you ever tried fresh gulf shrimp? If you're not sure, then you probably haven't. 95% or more of the shrimp found in restaurants is farmed stuff from Vietnam, which starts out bland and kind of poopy-smelling from eating homogeneous feed and being raised in crowded vats or ponds with eighty bazillion of its brothers, and it doesn't get any better once it's frozen into a block, shipped halfway across the world, and defrosted under running water in one of hundreds of Chicago restaurant basement prep kitchens that don't want to deal with the added effort or expense of sourcing fresh gulf shrimp.

People don't know any better. They think shrimp is shrimp. But, oh, that is just not so. And the irony of it is that you don't know what you're missing until you travel, maybe down to New Orleans or somewhere along the gulf coast, and someone happens to toss some fresh gulf shrimp your way. There's a world of difference. Fresh gulf shrimp have FLAVOR. They are caught from the wild, in the ocean, where their diet is varied, and this provides a rich, concentrated shrimp flavor that you just don't get from the farmed stuff. The texture is far superior as well. There's this wonderful, meatiness that's firm but yielding, a pleasant 'snap' when you bite through it, and an almost buttery richness.

I'm going on and on for a number of reasons; it's been years since I had a fresh gulf shrimp, I've never had them prepared as perfectly as the ones Dino, the owner of Captain Porky's served me tonight, and, honestly, the last thing I expected when I started trolling around the fairly depressed-looking area north of Waukegan was that I'd be eating the best shrimp ever from a styrofoam container while standing under the open hatch of the back of my car. Plus, I paid $7.50 for a half pound which was generously comprised of six or seven big shrimp.

Ok. Are you getting it now? It gets better.

They've also got an aquarium style smoker over at Porky's, which they're firing with apple wood and lump charcoal, and they're using it to turn out ribs, chicken, pulled pork, rib tips, hot links, and whatever kinds of fish Dino feels like tossing on the smoker that day (you can see the fish at the very top of the picture to the right). When I asked for a small order of the pulled pork, he pulled out a shoulder and started working it over with a cleaver on a large butcher block, so it's not sitting in a steam table all day getting mushy.

The menu is enormous. There are thirty different options listed under "Seafood Dinner" (comes with choice of garlic potatoes or french fries, coleslaw or greens, and dinner roll or cornbread), among them crabmeat-stuffed gulf shrimp, smelt, frog legs, oysters, alligator tail, and four different kinds of crab. You can get most of those as a po' boy sandwich as well, or just order whichever type seafood you're interested in to be fried by the pound.

They had some great-looking pre-packaged items, like shrimp, crab, lobster, and conch salad, there's gumbo and clam chowder, 14 different side dishes, and they're baking their own cornbread, dinner rolls, and kaiser rolls for sandwiches. Plus the barbecue, which is authentic, legit, real-deal stuff. The hot links are made on site.

This place is like some kind of dream--or nightmare, possibly--come true. How can I possibly ever try everything? I could go there twenty times and not even scratch the surface, especially because I wouldn't be able to avoid getting the hand-breaded jumbo gulf shrimp every. single. damn. time.

But here's the real kicker; Dino, the owner, is a bigtime foodie from Greece whose family still owns and maintains an olive grove there. Once I expressed an interest and started taking pictures, he really warmed up, pulling out a giant demijohn of green-gold olive oil from under a table for me to sample. He poured a little cupful, broke off a chunk of dinner roll and dunked it in, soaking it, and then brought it up toward my mouth, motioning for me to taste his family's oil.

Not surprisingly, it was fantastic.

Then he pulled a plastic-wrapped lump from a display cooler cluttered with chunks of vacuum-packed smoked fish, duck eggs, and other, less recognizable stuff and started unwrapping it, describing it as "homemade parmesan". It was grainy, aged maybe a year, quite salty with a little gaminess, more like a pecorino than a parmesan, so I asked if it was sheep's milk. "No," he replied, smiling proudly, "goats' milk. From my herd."

If this guy was anywhere near the city, he'd be heralded as a genius and the place would be mobbed every day, even if he charged double his current prices. How 'bout a lobster roll for seven bucks? Or a softshell crab po' boy for eight?

Here's the rub; the place, I fear, is about to get very, very busy. Dino told me that he's going to be on the Food Network show Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives, which is going to be filming this weekend at The Shanty, the nearby restaurant he helps his son run. He said that the Food Network wanted to feature both restaurants, but that he was concerned about the crush that might cause. He seemed well aware of what's been called the "Check, Please" effect--the phenomenon of very good restaurants suddenly getting much worse as a result of being featured on some prominent show and the subesequent flood of people that kind of publicity causes.

If anyone can manage to avoid that particular pitfall, it's Dino.

I was so enthralled with Captain Porky's that I talked it up to my buddy Mitch, and we made the trip up a mere two days after my maiden voyage. We set out fairly early with a cooler full of beers icing in the back of the car, figuring that this time we'd do it up right and take advantage of the nice weather and the nearby picnic tables.

Dino remembered me from earlier in the week, and after I introduced Mitch, he motioned for me to come in the back so he could show me his smoker. He was working on some kind of new project involving oak, salmon sides, and rib tips. He excitedly told me his plan, smiling madly, as if describing some sort of world domination plot; "You see the fat on this?", he asked, shoving a chunk of rib tip an inch from my face, "I'm gonna put the salmon on the bottom rack, and the rib tips above it, so the grease from the pork drips down, flavoring the salmon."

As I munched on the rib tip ("Try it--it's not done yet, but it's still good--you can taste the oak"), he gestured wildly, eyes bulging with intensity, as he described the evil, pork-fat-flavored smoked salmon plot he was hatching. I nodded my approval and rolled my eyes skyward, acknowledging his mad genius.

As Mitch and I ordered way too much food, the incredibly friendly and accommodating staff handed us samples of practically every item we pointed at or inquired about. I gobbled down a couple crawfish tails, a souffle cup of gumbo with rice, a chunk of smoked chicken, and some cheese that Dino quickly battered and fried as an experiment that he deemed "too salty".

After our order was placed, we made our way out to the picnic table, strategically situated near the dumpsters, and settled in. It wasn't long after we revealed the bounty within the styrofoam clamshells that Dino came out, bearing chunks of pork-fat-drizzled salmon hot from the smoker, imploring us to try it. Of course, like everything this crazy, deep-fried, wood-smoke scented Midas touches, it was fantastic.

Dino ranted a while longer about his lambs, why "all meat you buy in this country is crap", and his organic gardens, which supply 75% of the vegetables for the restaurants, while we proceeded to eat like kings, lazily taking in the sunset and the cool lake breezes. We washed down our hot links (amazingly tender, smoky, with great seasoning), St. Louis style ribs (perfect--among the best I've ever eaten), shrimp, crawfish tails, and tartar sauce-dunked fried walleye pike fillets with plastic cups of cold Leinenkugel's, slowly scarfing more than we thought we were capable of, and exchanged looks of appreciation and satiety as we wiped the grease from our lips, confident in the knowledge that we were fully immersed in the moment, enjoying some of the best food in the world.

Dumpster-side dining at it's finest. It doesn't get any better than this.

It's tempting to try and frame my Captain Porky's experience within the larger context of food politics, weaving Dino's passion for provenance into a meaningful diatribe about the evils of factory farms and industrialized produce. The amazing scope of his vision--growing his own vegetables, harvesting wild mushrooms, raising his own chickens, lambs, goats, and pigs, dry-aging his own beef, making everything from wine to cheese--lends itself to the type of back-to-basics discussions of food and foodways that seem to be nearly ubiquitous lately, including right here on this blog.

But I'd rather just show up at Porky's and enjoy. It's a simple place that lends itself to simple pleasures. Perfect fried jumbo shrimp and cold beer. Really well-executed barbecue and sticky, greasy fingers. It's nice to know that Dino is behind the scenes, micro-analyzing each tiny detail in his crazy-man quest to control every aspect of the food production process and ensure that the end result is the best it can possibly be. Don't get me wrong; I do applaud this kind of thing as representative of an alternative to the mass-produced, soulless food that dominates American dining--especially at this price point.

The beauty of Porky's, though, is in its simplicity and accessibility. Those so inclined can make the pilgrimage and pick Dino's brain about seasonality and organic mulch--I guarantee he'll talk you under the table. But folks who don't know the difference between a smelt and a fish stick will appreciate this place just as much. Maybe more.

Which is, if you think about it, maybe the best possible way to change the way regular people think about food. 98% of Americans would never in a million years dream of attending a $125 per person farm-to-table dinner in a fancy downtown restaurant, but even those who don't know or care about terms like organic, sustainable, heritage, or heirloom can wander in and appreciate the difference between a six-dollar order of Dino's rib tips or clam strips and what they're getting just about everywhere else.

Sometimes, those of us who are food-obsessed or in the industry can forget that "good" food--from a qualitative and socio-political viewpoint--doesn't have to be expensive or fancy.

Thankfully, Dino is up in there Zion, quietly (or, more likely, not-so-quietly) doing it the way he's been doing it for the last 25 years, and helping us remember that.

Easter with da Frittats

2009-04-18T12:38:00.010-05:00

People all over Italy have widely varied accents and often speak regional dialect from back in the days before Italy was a unified country (which didn't happen until about 1870 or so). So when you travel around, not only will you hear unrecognizable dialect in places like San Gimignano and Siracusa, but you'll also hear Italian spoken with vastly different pronunciations.

Sicily is a prime example. They often change the 'o' sound on the end of a word to a 'u' sound--so lo Siciliano, which is the proper Italian for "the Sicilian language" becomes lu Sicilianu. To make it even harder on those of us with a passing knowledge of guidebook Italian, locals will often switch back and forth mid-sentence between dialect and "proper" (read; Florentine) Italian.

Local dialects are an incredibly insightful window into the history of a region. Siclian dialect is peppered with words derived from Arabic, Greek, Spanish, French, and even a little German thrown in, reflecting the many inhabitants the island has known over the years. Up north, in Trentino-Alto Adige, for instance, the influences are primarily from Austria, and along the northeastern border of Italy, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, you start hearing Eastern European and Slavic influences in the dialect.

Here in Chicago, however, we have an Italian dialect all our own, which I sometimes refer to as Caputiano, in reference to Caputo's, the well-known Italian produce market and deli on Harlem Ave. in Elmwood Park where any real Chicago Italian worth their salt goes to do their shopping.

An informational aside: There are now many grocery establishments calling themselves Caputo's. The original Caputo's are now known as Angelo Caputo's Fresh Markets. The other chain--Joe Caputo and Sons--is decent, but it's not as good as the original, and then there's Caputo Cheese Market in Melrose Park, which is noted to be "Owned & Operated by Wiscon Corporation. Not affiliated with any other Caputo".

Anyway, Caputiano is a unique dialect of Chicago area American-Italians in which the last letter of words (and it's usually limited to names of foodstuffs) is dropped entirely. O's also change to U's, reflective of the Sicilian heritage of many Chicago-area Italians.

So mozzarella becomes mootzarel, scamorza become scamorz sometimes even smooshed down into skmorz, and sopressata, puzzlingly, becomes supersott.

The more you listen, the stranger it gets. Hard 'C' sounds are softened, to the point that they start to sound more like a 'G'. So capicolla sounds like gavigool. Throw in all the nicknames, hand gestures, and typical Italian non-verbal sign language, and you've got something really fun to be a part of.

Which brings us (finally) to the topic of this post. My family is blessed enough to know an Italian-American family who generously includes us in the annual Easter blowout they hold at their home. In typical fashion, they go all out for this party; bunny and chick-shaped candies are everywhere, there's a lamb-shaped cake, big Easter baskets and stuffed animals for the kids, a mad-dash Easter egg hunt out back promises plastic eggs filled with half-dollar and dollar coins (along with the occasional one filled with dirt!), and, of course, a massive spread of great food.

The main event and centerpiece of the Easter blowout, though, is Big Mikey's frittat.

A frittat is, basically, a frittata, of course. But it's oh so much more than that. It's the frittata to end all frittate. It's the frittata that ate Melrose Park.

Big Mikey (in typical Italian-American fashion, "Mikey" is about 6'7" and 280 lbs.) is a pro at this by now. He's got a special pan he uses just for the frittats, which is the biggest, deepest sauté pan I've ever seen in my life. The day before, he loads up on imported salseech and salumi--soopersatt, gavigool, mortadell--cheeses like fontina, scamorza, and ricotta, which gets drained through cheesecloth, and a case of eggs, and then on Easter morning, he gets down to work.

Big Mikey occupies his corner of the kitchen all morning, cranking out one frittat after another while talking, greeting guests, playing with the kids, eating, and yanking people's chains a little. He likes to play up the fact that I'm a chef and ask me if he's "doing it right", confident that he's in his element and, in his kitchen, I'm the novice. Of course, I give him his respect and bow down to his frittat skills.

This shows just how big the frittat pan is. Look how it dwarfs the burner.

It's a great, raucous affair. There are always tons of kids running around stuffing themselves on candy, there's a really interesting mix of old-school Chicago Italian-Americans, Polish and other more newly-arrived Eastern European immigrants, and a Jewish contingent as well, so the buffet runs the gamut from lox and bagels to cannoli to hot, garlicky borscht. The guys usually have a few TV's on, tuned to the Hawks game or the Masters, talk business, and will step out side to smoke cigars at some point. The women dote over the kids, catch up on gossip and push everyone to eat more, and a good time is generally had by all.

Our family is truly honored to be included every year, and it's really great to see how thrilled our hosts are with our kids. They shower them with gifts and Easter candy, but, even more meaningfully, with attention and genuine affection. Italians, in general, have a really deep appreciation for young children. As a parent who sometimes gets fed up with the day-to-day drudgery of raising two kids, it's a refreshing reminder of where my priorities and focus should be.

It's one thing to prowl the neighborhoods of the Chicago area, eating in restaurants, shopping in ethnic markets, and doing the legwork to discover unknown delicacies and food traditions, but it's another thing entirely to be invited into someone's home to share in their family's personal culinary culture. Every family, regardless of region and cultural history, is different, and does things their specific way; a substitution grandma made along the way due to her personal preference, or adjustments made due to limitations of a specific kitchen, equipment, or what's available at the time often become codified and manage to stick for generations.

So it's a rare honor to be included in a family's Easter feast. It's become a tradition for us; we go every year now and, although we don't usually see Big Mikey, Grace, and their family much during the rest of the year, they treat us as if we'd just seen them yesterday and there's never a hint of that awkwardness that sometimes goes along with seeing people only occasionally, for the big holidays.

Once the kids' faces start showing a flush from running around after having eaten too many Peeps, we know it's time to head home. We say our goodbyes, give and receive kissses on the cheek and hugs, and Mikey packs three or four massive slabs of frittat onto a foil-covered paper plate for us to take home. Usually we're so loaded down with gifts, Easter loot, and leftovers, have to make two trips to the car, and then the hugs and goodbyes start all over again.

So, humorous Italo-American Chicago-style slang (aka paisanics) aside, Easter, for us, is wonderful opportunity to be a part of another family's traditions and enjoy friends, family, and Big Mikey's frittat!

Burger Research

2009-04-14T10:47:00.007-05:00

As some of you may already have read, I'm actively working on a project for which I'm researching burgers. Everything about them; the best way to cook a burger, whether it should be made thick or thin, which cuts of beef to use in the grind, the ratio of fat to lean, the perfect bun, etc, etc....

I've been running around town trying lots of different burger spots, and have been doing tons of reading on the web as well.

This post is going to serve as sort of a compendium for the information I've amassed thus far.

On the local front, The Chicago Burger Project is a promising blog that began as a quest to eat through Time Out Chicago's 55 Best Burgers article. Two years later, the guys who started this blog have managed to choke down 41 of them, and written some decent reviews, but their pace has slowed down considerably--lately they put up a new post only every other month or so.

As usual, LTH forum is a wealth of information. One can, if time allows, do a search and wade through the literally dozens of topics about various types, styles, toppings, and specific restaurants. And then there are topics like this one, from which one man's nostalgic meanderings about the burger of his childhood (Mike Gebert of Sky Full of Bacon again) a ~~near~~-scholarly discussion emerges and touches on the burger's provenance, the etymology of the term, and it's history in various regions. Deep.

Expanding my scope outside Chicago is fruitful. People take burgers a lot more seriously in places like New York, New Jersey, and L.A., I'm afraid. Chicago has it share of food specialties and does a lot of things well, but it's not a burger town.

George Motz may be the foremost expert on burgers in the country (and, therefore, the world). His Hamburger America empire includes a Beard Award-nominated film, a book, and a blog, all bearing his HA brand. He's taught a course on burgers at NYU, has consulted for Wendy's and has had a burger named after him by esteemed burgermeister Harry Hawk.

A Hamburger Today, the burger blog maintained by Serious Eats is a logical command center for such an endeavor. It's one of those blogs that's maintained by multiple editors and bloggers, takes itself pretty seriously, and does a really excellent job of reporting just about every burger-related story on the web, along with generating some of its own original material.

I found this piece, which reviews 12 of NYC's best burgers using a numerical ratings system similar to the one I employ for my Bacon List to be really informative and helpful. Sometimes simply identifying and figuring out the right words to use to describe the concepts being discussed can be really difficult, and this piece goes a long way towards establishing a workable lexicon with which to discuss, evaluate, and reverse-engineer burgers.

In this piece, Chef Tony Maws of Craigie on Main in Cambridge, MA uses three different cuts of beef, two types of fat, and dehydrated miso powder in his fancy-schmancy burger mix, before cooking it up in a hi-tech C-Vap oven and browning it on a 900° plancha. That's a bit outside the scope of my project, but there's still some useful insight there.

Along those same lines, here's a rundown of how to make the Blumenburger, Heston Blumenthal's 32-ingredient, 30 hour prep-time burger that he worked up for the BBC's series In Search of Perfection, which seeks to re-work classic dishes so as to arrive at the benchmark version.

And then there's this hilarious nugget that someone dug up and put on YouTube. It's a Wendy's training video from the 80's, which, yes, does contain some interesting info about the technique the fast food chain employs to cook their patties (they keep the griddle at a very low 250°) But the appeal is more in the dated look and feel, along with the bust-a-gut-funny rap-song dream sequence. This one is not to be missed. Make sure to watch both parts.

There's much more, of course. Burger blogs are freakin' everywhere. There's The Burger Beast, HoosierBurger Boy, Portland Hamburgers, and Texas Burger Guy. And then there's Cincinnatti Burger Guys, Burgatory, a guy who just reviews fast food burgers, LA-based BurgerTour, Waunaburger out of Wisconsin, and, of course, twelve bazillion blogs and articles about people eating sixteen-pound manhole-cover sized burgers, and burgers that are so over-the-top decadent that they render themselves completely disgusting.

And then there's this:

God, the internet is just so weird.

Oh, and out of what I've tried so far, I liked the burger at Five Guys on Clybourn the best. Very juicy. Enjoy!

Tooting My Own Horn

2009-04-10T21:32:00.009-05:00

Today, I received a phone call from one of the organizers of The Symposium for Professional Food Writers at The Greenbrier in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, informing me that I've won a scholarship which will enable me to attend this prestigious week-long conference.

I'm thrilled!

This is an elite industry event that limits attendance to fewer than 100 food writers, editors, publishers, and agents, so it's a huge opportunity for me to network with people that are normally very difficult to access.

It's also a great way for me to become a better writer. The symposium consists of all sorts of workshops and coaching sessions that are geared towards helping the attendees improve their writing, tailor their writing style for specific publications, and think outside the box with regard to subject matter, style, and medium.

I was awarded the James Peterson Food Writing Passion Scholarship, which the website says "will be awarded to a food writer whose writing ties food with life and with a certain passion in being alive. The main criterion for this award is written excellence and "just good fun" in writing about food and drink."

Let's just let that sink in for a minute. They thought my piece displayed "written excellence"! I know, can you believe it? "Just good fun," sure, I can buy that. But "written excellence"? I may just re-write the blog description in my header to include that phrase. I mean, if the people reading this blog are being graced with written excellence, they ought to know.

The piece that won was my review of Broadbent's Original Hickory Smoked Bacon, and the director of the event, who called to tell me the news, was literally gushing about my writing. She said that there were hundreds of submissions for the scholarships, but that my entry was the unanimous winner, and that the judges said it wasn't even close. (!) She was probably stroking my ego, but I really don't care. I'm basking in it--at least for a few days.

Anyway, as you might've surmised, I'm really pleased by this development. When I found out about this event and their scholarship program, I figured, sure, what the heck...why not enter? So I selected a few pieces to submit, went over to Kinko's to get five copies of each piece printed off, and crammed the whole bundle into mailers, figuring that I'd at least be able to say that I gave it a shot. I did not expect to win, or even figure I had much of a chance.

It's really nice to get the validation that comes from having industry professionals tell me that my writing is good ("written excellence", even) . It feels great. This blog is mostly intended to be an outlet to for me to vent out all this stuff that I would otherwise just bore my wife, my friends, and random pizza delivery guys with. I've taken it fairly seriously, but that's because I enjoy writing and want to get better at it. But I've really just looked at is as an exercise, an outlet, and a fun pastime. Now I feel like I might be actually Doing Something.

The symposium is in early May, and I'll blog about it once I get back. Industry heavyweights like 12-time Beard Award winner Steve Dolinsky and French Laundry Cookbook co-author Michael Ruhlman will be there, and if I can manage to get some pictures of myself with them without coming off like some star-struck, wide-eyed food writer groupie, I'll share them here on the site. It should be fun.

I'll try not to let my head get too big, but don't be surprised if you're asked for your credit card number the next time you try and pull me up on your blog reader. After all, "written excellence" isn't something that people just give away for free.

Ditch the Recipe and Just Cook!

2009-04-09T23:53:00.008-05:00

I've written quite a few times about my disdain for recipes. I believe that recipes are a crutch that prevent people from learning how to actually cook.

For the most part, they're unnecessary. There are some exceptions, of course, but the overwhelming majority of recipes are simple techniques embellished with multiple flavor variations.

Case in point--my mother in law. She's a damn good cook who stows a file folder full of clipped recipes in her giant suitcase every time she comes for a visit. I snuck a look at it a few weeks ago, and, among other things, there were eight separate recipes for bread pudding and baked french toast. Eight different recipes for her to keep track of, all variations on exactly the same theme; some type of bread soaked with custard, with some sort of flavor and/or add-ins like fruit or nuts, which is then baked in a shallow dish.

She clearly likes this concept; she's making eight different versions of it. Think of the possibilities that might open up to her if she were to ditch the recipes and embrace the (really, very simple) techniques that these recipes are built around.

Most cooking simply involves hanging various ingredients on a template or skeleton. All the recipe does is name the specific ingredients involved, rather than leave that choice up to you. The great, gaping knowledge gap, which is what distinguishes cooks from recipe-followers, is an understanding of the template and how it works, and the realization that the options of what kind of bread to use, which flavors to add, and whether to use dried cranberries or raisins are infinitely malleable and really, rather arbitrary.

So let's take a look at one of my mother in law's bread pudding recipes--Cranberry Orange Bread Pudding--as an example. The template for this recipe is simple:

Bread + Custard + Flavorings + Other stuff + Bake it.

The only real knowledge one needs is what a custard is and how to work with it. Everything else is completely variable.

Here are the ingredients from this recipe, and, in paranthesis, the role they play in the template:

King's Hawaiian Bread (Bread)
Whole Eggs (Custard)
Additional Egg Yolks (Custard)
Milk (Custard)
Sugar (Flavorings)
Orange Juice (Flavorings)
Orange Zest (Flavorings)
Grand Marnier (Flavorings)
Vanilla Extract (Flavorings)
Dried Cranberries (Other Stuff)

So, by simply pulling back, understanding the role each ingredient plays in the dish, and then considering all the other various ingredients that can play the same role, you can write forty bread pudding recipes in about five minutes. Think about it:

Bread--how many different types of bread could you use? Brioche, wheat bread, challah, crusty baguettes, cinnamon-raisin bread, focaccia, cinnamon rolls, doughnuts, banana bread, sourdough...the list is endless. How about a savory bread pudding with rye bread, caraway, crispy bacon, apples, and sauerkraut? Sounds weird, but that might be a pretty cool little side dish for grilled pork chops, no?

Flavorings--Again, the list is endless. Orange, lemon, lime, vanilla, chocolate, maple, honey, every extract you can think of, every liqueur you can think of, coconut milk instead of regular milk, savory, sweet, sweet and savory, etc, etc. Think of flavors that go together and reconfigure them into the familiar framework of the bread pudding. How about a key lime bread pudding with key lime juice, lime zest, and a rich bread like brioche with bits of broken graham crackers mixed in? Peanut Butter and Jelly Bread Pudding. Bananas Foster Bread Pudding. It's literally endless.

Add-ins--Nuts, chocolate chips, dried fruit, fresh fruit, cooked fruit, crunchy toffee bits, candy, vegetables for savory (or sweet, I suppose) bread puddings....

The only thing that might be even slightly unfamiliar here is the custard. But making custard is just a question of knowing the correct ratio of eggs/yolks to liquid.

That concept--of using ratios in cooking--is the subject of a new book about cooking (I'm not calling it a cookbook) by Michael Ruhlman. I'm a big fan of Ruhlman for both his excellent writing and the way he attempts to de-mystify cooking in his books. I haven't read or even checked out this book yet, but based on his other books (The Elements of Cooking is a really great resource for budding cooks), and the concept, I think it's bound to be good.

The book is called Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking and the concept is similar to what I've described above. Ditch the recipes and begin understanding the simple underlying principles on which recipes are based. Then just mix and match the ingredients of your choice based on what you have on hand or what you feel like eating.

Ruhlman's book furnishes some of the basic ratios for various types of breads, quick breads, stocks, sauces, and, yes...custards, and allows readers begin to understand the basic principles of cooking in the same way that chefs approach the process. Alton Brown says that "having a ratio in hand is like having a secret decoder ring that frees you from the tyranny of recipes", and he's right, despite employing his typical science-geek frame of reference. It's a book I plan on reading because I enjoy Ruhlman's writing and the fresh approach he brings to the subject matter, but I'm even more interested in recommending it to novice cooks.

Ruhlman's blog has a post up about the book, and he's doing a giveaway promotion, in conjuction with Share Our Strength, which is a wonderful organization. Anyone who donates--regardless of the amount--by clicking through to Ruhlman's page on SOS will be eligible for the giveaway. You can win signed copies of the book, a fancy scale, and some other cool stuff, so I encourage everyone to check it out.

Charities like SOS typically see a big decline in donations during trying economic times like this, so it's important to keep them in mind while we're all figuring out ways of cutting back and being more frugal. Think of it this way; learning to cook will actually save you money by allowing you to more easily utilize what's in your pantry or is on sale, and you can use some of the money you save with your newfound culinary skills to help feed hungry kids. Plus, you might even win a cool prize.

Peoria Packing Butcher Shop

2009-04-06T09:49:00.017-05:00

I referred briefly to my recent visit to Peoria Packing in my review of the bacon I bought there, but didn't really get into the whole experience of the place itself, which is a real trip and very thought provoking.

Most Americans are pretty squeamish about meat, despite the fact that we eat more of it than any other country in the world. At this point, we are really insulated from the process. Meat is fully broken down into only the most desirable parts, fully trimmed, and ready to go from the shrink-wrapped styrofoam tray right into the pan. Or fully cooked on the plate, if consumed in a restaurant. It's been like that forever, for most of us, and we really don't think about it too much.

Until we're confronted with something different, like a European market where piles of offal or whole animals are just out in the open, for all to see. Even for someone like me, a chef who's been dealing with larger primal cuts of meat for years, these cruder, more "real" displays represent an off-putting paradox, because I find myself curiously attracted and also, at the same time, repulsed.

I think this is true for most Americans, with varying degrees of attraction/revulsion, of course, and most simply avoid the revulsion side of the equation, which results in a sad state of affairs. We've managed, as a society, to hide and sanitize the reality of meat. Perhaps that's why we eat so much of it.

A visit to Peoria Packing will cause one to ponder these things, because once you enter the butcher shop wing of this small grocery store across the street from their commercial packing house, you will be confronted with MEAT in a way that not too many Americans are accustomed to.

PP's meat section is a large refrigerated room with big long tables running the length of it. The various cuts of meat are just piled onto the tables and customers (wearing the required latex gloves) just kind of rummage through the piles until they find what they're looking for. The meat is very fresh, very inexpensive, and they carry cuts that are difficult to find elsewhere. I went specifically to get "packer cut" brisket for smoking. I also picked up some pork bellies (to make homemade bacon) and a few other things.

A lot of people have trouble handling this set-up. The online reviews of PP are mixed, with quite a few folks stating they'll never go back due to the way the meat is just right out in the open for anyone to sneeze or cough on. This is true, of course, but I didn't see this happening and I like to believe that people have enough sense not to do that. Most people do a pretty decent job of covering their mouths and not coughing or sneezing directly on me, so I'm not sure why expecting them to do the same in a roomful of meat is any more of a leap.

I think this sort of revulsion is how people deal with the fact that they are just not used to seeing meat displayed this way. It is jarring, I will admit, and seeing whole cow's feet, pig's heads, and other less common animal parts is definitely a bit of a shock as well. I think a lot of people are simply put off by the sheer real-ness of it, and so they use the "unsanitary" claim as a rationale for their revulsion, and as a justifiable reason to avoid that experience in the future.

Revulsion, however, is natural when confronted with meat. Revulsion is normal. Meat is a dead, decaying animal. It's bloody, gruesome, and serves as a reminder of our own mortality. Yet most people eat it every day. I'll go out on a limb and say that NOT feeling revulsion at the sight or thought of meat is what's, in fact, abnormal.

We're so unaccustomed, though, to this feeling, because the meat industry has done it's level best to eliminate any and all reminders of death, blood, and the idea that these are animals we're eating. And they've been very successful, with the full compliance of a willing populace, who values avoiding the cognitive dissonance of feeling both hunger and revulsion far more than it values coming to terms with our carnivorous impulses.

Up until recently, the luxury of not getting to know one's meat up close and personal just wasn't a real possibility for most people. It's only in the last hundred years or so that we've acquired this new found squeamishness, which has gotten to the ridiculous point where some people act all grossed out even by chicken served on-the-bone, or with skin. Grow up, folks.

The conflict intrinsic to eating meat has long attracted deeper thinkers. Cultural anthropologists and sociologists like Mary Douglass and Claude Levi-Strauss have written reams on this fascinating subject. It's human nature to be both repulsed and attracted by meat, and people have been dealing with it since back in the hunter-gatherer days. It's just that here in modern-day America, we've made a new art form out of figuring out ways to avoid dealing with it.

The flip side of this is the head-to-tail movement that's been steadily gaining momentum among chefs. In Chicago, chefs like Paul Kahan, Jason Hammel and Amalea Tshilds, and Paul Virant have been sourcing whole animals direct from the farmers who raise them and utilizing all of the various cuts, including the organs. There is no better way to pay tribute to an animal that has been slaughtered for food, these chefs say, than to ensure that nothing goes to waste.

These chefs feel it's their responsibility to close the awareness gap created by the commercial meat industry, and they're bypassing it entirely by going direct to farmers, buying whole animals, and doing the butchering themselves in their subterranean restaurant prep kitchens.

So the head is used to make pâté, the cheeks to make guanciale or braised for ravioli filling, the neck for coppa, the bellies are cured for bacon, and the feet used for cotecchino or for their natural gelatin. Blood sausage, tripe, and kidneys are making a comeback among foodies.

Before you wince and get all squeamish, stop and think for a moment that the bacon you enjoy is also attached to lungs, a heart, a head, and feet, and ask yourself what happens to all that stuff once you've eaten your ribs and bacon. If you're not a vegetarian, animals are being killed to support your meat habit, and if you're not eating anything but the prime cuts, you're wasting big chunks of the animals that were killed to feed you.

The Reader's Mike Sula did an extensive piece called The Whole Hog Project (scroll to the bottom and check out the reader comments to get a taste of how strongly people feel about the subject) which documents the paper's purchase of a rare mulefoot pig, and follows Dee Dee's (yes, they named it) life over the course of a year and a half, culminating in its slaughter. It was a fascinating and courageous exercise in journalism which cut right to the heart of America's schizophrenic relationship with meat, and it was recently nominated (along with Mike Gebert's Sky Full of Bacon video podcast that accompanied the Sula piece) for a prestigious James Beard Award.

It's extremely thought-provoking stuff, and it's a subject that most people would prefer to avoid thinking about. But it's also perhaps a subject that we must consider more often, considering our love/hate relationship with food, the growing national obesity issue, the extent to which we consume highly processed foods and fast foods, and the myriad other ways in which we're all dysfunctional in our relationships to what we eat. Myself included--I'm certainly no exception.

I'm not claiming, mind you, that I have the answers here, or that a visit to Peoria Packing will solve all your problems. But I do think that burying our collective heads in the sand and continuing to buy grocery store trays with shrink-wrapped beef tenderloin and BSCB is the exact wrong thing to do.

So, instead of mindlessly purchasing your animal proteins from the grocery store, take a trip over to PP and check the place out. Bring your kids and do your part to kind of de-mythologize the process for them, and start closing, if only by small increments, the awareness gap that the meat industry has spent decades building in their attempt to try and insulate us from the inner conflicts that are inherent in being carnivorous.

I was actually somewhat concerned that it might bother Henry, my four year old son, who made the trip with me, given that, in many of the books we read him, piggies and cows are cute barnyard animals that talk, sing, or drive the school bus. But it didn't. After we got back, my wife asked him what he liked best about the place and he said, enthusiastically, "the pig heads!"

Henry, 4, surveys the carnage

So there you go. This little field trip can be an opportunity to start grappling with these deeper issues of morality, mortality, and animal rights, or you could just look at it as a good, cheap option for bulk burgers, hot links, and ribs. Either way, Peoria Packing is worth a visit. Don't forget to bring a cooler.

Chinatown

2009-04-02T23:14:00.016-05:00

First off, let me just say that I will admit to having huge blind spots. I tend to get intimidated by big-deal "things"--subjects or areas that are just massive and deep, or require a decent amount of expertise that others possess, but I don't. And what happens, as a result of this, is that I avoid diving in, or even dipping my toe, into that particular arena, due to my reluctance to play the role of novice.

Such is the case with Chinatown.

Until recently, my only experience in Chinatown was as a kid, going to Phoenix for dim sum with my parents a few times, and, as an adult, driving through the area, lost, on my way to or from McCormick Place.

Thankfully, I found a mentor; someone even more food-obsessed than I, someone with extensive Chinatown experience, into whose hands I could place myself for, at least, my initial experience. An acid-trip "spirit guide" of sorts, only instead of metaphysical hallucinations, we'd be dealing with live turtles, sharkfin, and spicy tofu.

I met Mhays (a fellow denizen of LTH forum) at the mac and cheese sMACkdown, and immediately connected with her and her family, so we made tentative plans for a dual family outing, which happened last weekend. With the logistical barriers of where to park, explore, and eat taken out of my decision-making equation, the novice factor was effectively addressed, and my sense of being completely intimidated by the sheer scope of Chinatown became much less of a consideration.

I realize that this is a silly reason to avoid exploring culturally rich areas, but it is what it is. I have this ~~somewhat~~ obsessive need to thoroughly research and investigate EVERY little aspect of something in order to feel that I've experienced it as fully as I'd like to--I'm the guy who reads five guidebooks cover to cover before going on vacation, if that helps you to understand the mindset. So sometimes it's easiest to simply limit my horizon, rather than attempting to take on an entirely new genre.

By putting myself entirely in the hands of someone else, however, someone who's already done the work, conducted the research and fieldwork, I can sidestep my (admittedly unhealthy) maximization tendencies, and become a mere follower who's simply about just enjoying whatever happens to float across his field of vision.

So, that's what I did, and my Chinatown spirit guide did not steer me wrong.

We essentially skipped the main drag along Wentworth that I was expecting would be our focus, in favor of the more easily-accessible Chinatown Square, which is essentially a closed-off open air mall, which kind of turns its back to Archer Avenue. We found plenty of gift shops loaded down with swords, fake fountains, and lucky buddhas, quite a few medicinal herb shops in which we stared at one glass jar after another wondering what the hell you're supposed to do with THAT, and food markets like Mayflower market where we bought bagfuls of weird-sounding candy, frozen barbecued pork buns, and checked out tanks of live fish and reptiles.

We did quite a bit of wandering, so we worked up a pretty good appetite for lunch, and after checking in at Phoenix and finding a half hour wait for their dim sum, we took Michelle's advice and headed over to Lao Sze Chuan.

We were seated immediately at a large corner table, and promptly given hot tea (which was very welcome on this snowy late March day) and a plate of spicy pickled cabbage on which to munch while the kids played around with chopsticks and bugged us to open the candy we'd just bought.

The food was, as expected, very good, with the specialties of Dry Chile Chicken, Dry Chile Beef, and the Szechuan Green Beans being the standout dishes. We also had Salt and Pepper Small Fish (essentially deep fried whole smelt), Pot Herb with Pork, a soup with clams and tofu, a tripe dish which wasn't what we ordered, and some steamed buns and crab rangoon for the kids.

And while the food was worth returning for, what I really enjoyed was the place itself. It was bustling on a Sunday afternoon, jammed with people, all of whom seemed to be celebrating something--if nothing else, the fact that they were in a great restaurant feasting on well-prepared spicy dishes instead of out in the snowy cold. But, beyond that, I found the service to be just excellent. We had at least four different people at our table refilling water and teacups, whisking away empty plates, bringing more chopsticks to replace the ones the kids kept dropping, and just generally making sure that we were well cared for.

At one point, I managed to extract my nose from my plate of spicy chicken long enough to notice that one of the servers had commandeered our seven-month old, Nora, and was standing next to the table, rocking and holding her, grinning from ear to ear and showing her off to the other servers, who had all gathered around. And Nora, who can be skittish with strangers, was loving it. (Yes, the server did ask my wife if it was ok before snatching up my kid.). It's this kind of personal attention--genuine, caring interest in people--that really underscores what hospitality is all about. These women really enjoyed having us as guests in their restaurant, and they made it clear in no uncertain terms.

So, yeah, the food was good. But what stood out more was the actual experience. It's that kind of stuff that transforms restaurants with good food into Great Restaurants.

More importantly, what I got from the trip was some level of knowledge, so that I no longer feel intimidated to tackle this kind of outing all on my own. The easy in and out logistics of the Chinatown Square section make it seem much easier to just zip in there for a quick lunch and an afternoon of browsing, and I'm looking forward to checking out some of the other places, like Spring World, BBQ King House (which is where the first picture of this piece was taken), or (Little) Three Happiness (the namesake of LTH forum).

So, thanks, Michelle. It was great to get our families together and I hope this will be the first of many of these kind of outings (stay tuned--we discussed a Maxwell Street Market outing once the weather gets nicer).

Google Images is My Friend

2009-03-31T18:12:00.008-05:00

Here's a quick selection of shots that have been knocking around my blog folder for a while. I don't have anywhere in particular to use them, so I'm just going to post them all up. They're too good to waste.

The Bacon List--Gusto Brand Bulk Bacon

2009-03-30T14:36:00.009-05:00

With the weather starting to break, and the first smoke of the season already in the bag, I decided it was time to get serious and head down into the city to buy some whole briskets at Peoria Packing for future consideration.

So Henry and I woke up early on Saturday morning, skipped breakfast, threw a few of those cool-pak things in the cooler, and got down there nice and early.

When I started this far-reaching project of epic proportions that I'm calling The Bacon List, I figured that whenever I found myself in new or different stores where they sold bacon, I'd always pick some up, and that way I'd constantly have new products to try.

This was the case at Peoria Packing on Saturday (I'll do a full run-down of the butcher shop itself sometime in the near future), as I walked up and down between the tables piled high with meat and encountered a few large cases of sliced bacon just kind of loose in a big pile inside the cardboard box. The sign said "Gusto smoked bacon" and the price was right so I grabbed a plastic bag off the roll and threw in a few handfuls of bacon slices.

Packaging, as we've seen in the past, isn't always indicative of what's inside. I figured this bulk bacon was probably about as good as many of the grocery store bacons I'd been trying.

But, boy was I wrong. This stuff is NOT good.

I looked up Gusto and it appears that they're a packing house out of Montgomery, Illinois that carries bacon, ham, breakfast sausage, and a few other smoked items. They also have a great logo:

I'm considering putting this on a T-shirt

Yup. Great logo, alright. Their bacon, on the other hand, sucked. Let's go straight to the rundown.

Designation--Fancy or Grocery Store? Not sure. I would venture a guess that this is grocery store-quality, but it was fairly dry. That could, however, be explained that it wasn't vacuum sealed in plastic, allowing for some air-drying. I may have to create a new designation for this one--Cheap.

Price--How much did I pay per pound for the bacon? $1.59/lb. sold in bulk at Peoria Packing.

Uncooked appearance--Color, texture, wet- or dry-ness, mushy or firm, etc... Very thick slices, fairly dry, large, broad slices. Decent looking streaking and texture.

How it cooks--Tendency to curl, how much it shrinks, tendency to spatter... Lots of shrinkage and curling. Due to my cooking method, most bacons I review don't curl up much. This one was an exception. It shrank a lot (perhaps almost 50%) and it curled up like crazy while cooking on a sheet pan in the oven. This indicates that this bacon carries a lot of water weight in the form of saline injections, phosphates, and other liquid (read; quick, industrial, short-cut) cure ingredients. Not generally indicative of a good quality bacon.

Cooked appearance--Color, shape, texture. Lots of curling. It rendered quite a bit of grease into the pan as well. Lean parts are a nice-looking dark red, fat browned up well. It looks pretty good other than the shrinkage and excessive curl.

How does it taste--Sweetness, saltiness, smokiness, texture (melting, chewy, flabby, spongy), "porkiness". Extremely disappointing. The first thing that I noticed when I ate this bacon was the freakish crunch. This was due, I later determined, to the rind being left on. With a rind-on bacon (which I don't think I've ever experienced before), the thin strip of skin essentially becomes like a cracklin' as the bacon cooks. And that's exactly what I tasted when I ate this bacon--that pork rind flavor you get from eating a cracklin'. Not bad, exactly, but not what I'm looking for from bacon, and the drastic contrast in textures was somewhat of a distraction.

I could've dealt with the rind-on thing if the bacon tasted good. But it didn't. It basically delivered nothing. It had almost no salt. No sweetness. And despite searching deep down into my palate for a whiff of smoke flavor, I could find none. This bacon tastes only of plain, bland pork. Like a poorly-seasoned pork jerky or something. I ate a second slice to make sure it was as bad as I thought, and it was. It's pretty rare that bacon goes begging in our house, but this batch did. We ended up putting five uneaten slices off to the side. That's just sad.

Overall rating--All bacons reviewed will be given an overall rating from 1-10, with 1 being practically inedible (I say "practically" since, you know, it's bacon--how bad can it be?), 5 being a perfectly serviceable bacon for use in cooking or on a sandwich, and 10 being....well, let's be honest; there won't be a 10. 2.0. This is by far the lowest rating I've ever given, and I'm honestly not sure how anything, short of being rotten or inedible, could rank lower. I'm actually giving this stuff a free point just based on the fact that it was so cheap, although I wouldn't bother eating it again at any price. Not even cooked into recipes or crumbled into a salad. It's just a waste of calories.

In fairness to Gusto, it appears from their website that they do carry a number of different types of bacon and that this one is probably the cheapest of the bunch. Their other products might be quite good, who knows?

March Madness

2009-03-28T23:02:00.010-05:00

This week's Thursday night out was all about watching NCAA basketball. My friend Mitch got some good news this week, so he picked the venue and we ended up at Finn McCool's in Schaumburg for a night of beer, bar food, and basketball on big TV's. Not my native habitat, but it ended up being pretty good.

Unlike some of the other sports bar-type places that we considered, McCool's is not a national chain. It's local. They have three locations, and from the look of their menu and the food, they're doing some scratch cooking in the kitchen. Or, at least, about as scratch as you're going to get from a place that offers diners the option of buying something called a "beer tower".

From where I sit, expectations are pretty low for places like this. McCool's served up fairly fresh-tasting pints of Guinness, the bartenders were friendly, efficient, and competent, no matter which way I turned my head, there was a huge TV showing basketball, and my burger (their Hickory Burger with bacon, cheddar, BBQ sauce, and fried onion strings) was really quite good.

That's it to the right. I ordered it medium and, as you can see, that's a pretty damn-near perfect medium. Pretty good for a bar where, for most patrons, sports, alcohol, and bartender cleavage are probably much higher on the priority list than food.

A couple more interesting notes; they have something on their menu they're calling a "phatty melt", which is a burger that's served between two grilled cheese sandwiches in lieu of the bun. This seems like a nod to this new trend where people are wrapping everything in bacon, batter dipping and deep-frying things that aren't normally deep-fried, stuffing meat with meat and then wrapping it with bacon, and just generally trying to jam so much fatty decadence into things that they border on (or cross over to) being totally disgusting.

The more original novelty item on McCool's menu is the "inside out grilled cheese". I love the sound of this, and although I didn't order it or even see it, I am already figuring out how I'm going to go about reverse engineering my version of this. If I figure something out, I'll blog about it.

All in all, it was a very fun night out with old friends, we watched some good games, my final four is still intact (go Villanova!) and I have a (slightly) less negative attitude about sports bars, thanks, in no small part, to the smoking ban.

TTOWA Korean Dumpling House

2009-03-25T17:27:00.016-05:00

Dempster Street cuts east/west from the lake out to where it splits into Rand and Miner just past the tollway. If you drive that straight shot east on Dempster, you'll whiz right by one of the most incredibly diverse selections of restaurants in the Chicago area as you make your way through Evanston, Skokie, Morton Grove, and Niles.

Seriously. It's one of the best food streets in Chicagoland. Here's a quick list of just *good* places I can personally vouch for:

American, Hot Dog Stands--Poochies, Wiener and Still Champion, Hub's (you like'a da juice?), Herm's Hot Dog Palace, Kappy's Pancake House, and Hot Dog Island.

Middle Eastern--Kabul House (Afghan), Pita Inn, Larsa's (Lebansese/Assyrian style pizza), and Bread 'n' Bowl (Georgian bakery and dumplings).

Jewish--Kaufman's, New York Bagel & Bialy.

Asian--Oh Bok Jung (Korean), Dempster Fish Market (Japanese. Check out their strangely minimalist website).

What's really interesting is that thousands of foodie-types like me have probably driven by these places dozens of times without even noticing them. Ok, the hot dog stands, everyone knows about (especially the ones known for their char salami sandwich), but most of the smaller, ethnic places occupy small, nondescript spots in strip malls that make it really easy to miss them as you whiz by (or sit in traffic).

This is certainly the case for TTOWA, a Korean Dumpling house located at 5844 Dempster in Morton Grove (just east of Austin). It's tucked away in a little strip mall along the north side of the street, and I probably drove by it a couple hundred times before I finally noticed it and decided to give it a try.

My first impression was to be impressed with just how nice the place is. The bar is set fairly low for small, independently-owned ethnic places, but TTOWA is a really roomy, well put-together, nicely designed, comfortable space. It's got a decidedly low-key Zen design aesthetic, with rice paper screens, lots of natural wood tones, and a very clean, sparse look, and as I walked in, it felt calm and welcoming. I don't usually mention the decor of restaurants, but I thought this one deserved a paragraph.

My friend Tom and I were seated promptly at a large four-top, and the energetic and upbeat server immediately plunked glasses of ice water and mugs of hot tea in front of us. I'm not a tea drinker, but I'm always game. I tried it, but this stuff was weird. It tasted like a malty, yeasty, hot, uncarbonated cola. Very strange.

Whatever. We were here for dumplings. We ordered the mandu combination, which would allow us to try an assortment of the delicate little dough packages--kimchee, chicken, and pork. The dish is pictured above, and it was really good. Really thin, tender wrappers around excellent fillings. I love dumplings.

Before they arrived, though, we received small green salads that were really quite tasty despite looking like what you'd get at a wedding at the Ramada Inn out by the airport. Plain iceberg lettuce with a beige dressing. I almost didn't even try it, but once I did, the lettuce was really fresh, cool, and crunchy, and the dressing packed a really nice ginger-sesame kick.

We were then showered with panchan. This is one of the really fun parts about Korean dining. Panchan are small side dishes that are traditionally served with Korean meals. The most famous is kimchee, the super-spicy, pickled and fermented cabbage dish that serves as a filling, side dish, condiment, and probably (somewhere) even appears in a dessert. Korean restaurants seek to distinguish themselves with their arrays of panchan, and so most places will hit you with five, seven, or nine little plates of interesting pickles, spicy veggies, mini pancakes, and all manner of other cool little things. It's a sweet deal because they don't charge for it, and it's a great way to try all sorts of weird stuff you'd never order.

We asked our server to tell us what all the various dishes were, and despite her very limited English, she did a darn good job. There was kimchee, spicy dandelion greens, some kind of potato salad thing, a pickled gourd or radish of some sort, and something with noodles that was pretty tasty.

What she lacked in language, she made up for with effort and energy. I think we opened a door by asking her some questions, because once she sensed we were interested in learning more, she really opened up. I'm thinking it was probably the same woman Mike Sula referred to as "hyperkinetic" in his recent Reader piece about TTOWA. She was, indeed, a trip.

Ordering our entrees was kind of an adventure. I knew I wanted some kind of hot pot, but wasn't sure what. I was kind of hoping they'd do the whole production of bringing a burner to the table, with that big earthenware crock type thing they use, but the lady wouldn't let me order that. Instead, she guided me towards a different dish, still a sizzling hotpot, but without the propane-fired porta-burner, because, she said, it was served with "wonderful black sticky rice". Ok, sure.

So we ordered that--it was, I believe, a jeongol--and I was quite happy that we did because she really put on a show putting it together. It came out boiling rapidly in its little earthenware crock, and Tom and I enjoyed watching her put together a plate for each of us--tossing the noodles with the broth, mixing everything up just so, placing some rice, some broth, some veggies, some meat, and some noodles in just the right amount in each of our bowls. It was like having a Jewish grandmother doting over us. Chattered the whole time, too, she did, although we barely understood a word of it. No matter--we felt cared for.

Our other entree choice was kind of a combo fried chicken deal. Pretty tasty little pieces of chicken, some still with bones in them, with a light batter, half of them tossed in a very spicy red sauce. The chicken was tasty--piping hot, lightly fried, not overly greasy, and nicely tender--but it wasn't memorable and I wouldn't order it again. To her credit, our server attempted to steer me away from this dish and into ordering some kind of pork stir-fry, but I didn't listen. Next time....

Still more freebies arrived after the plates cleared, as Ms. Perky suddenly materialized with a couple of sweet red bean paste buns--one steamed, the other baked--steaming hot from the oven. She appeared to take great pleasure in announcing them and explaining what they were as she placed them in front of me with a flourish (Tom was in the bathroom). The baked one was great.

So do go check this place out. It's a great bargain, the dumplings are enough of a draw all on their own, but you get tons of free add-ons with your meal, and the waitress is a bubblingly fun laugh riot who really knows a thing or two about the true meaning of hospitality. Places like this are why it's so great to live in major metropolitian areas that have such a wide variety of immigrants and ethnicities, and Dempster Street is really a microcosm of that; the delis and hot dog stands illustrate the food traditions of immigrants from a generation or two back, and the ever-increasing concentration of Middle Eastern and Asian (especially Korean) restaurants give a pretty clear picture of which immigrant groups have been settling in this area in more recent years.

And, hey, if you don't like your bibimbop, you can always go grab a char cheddar burger at Poochie's afterwards.

Maple Syrup Festival at North Park Nature Center

2009-03-24T15:02:00.006-05:00

I've lived in "Greater Chicagoland" for my entire life, save for the two years I lived in Europe. And I lived in Chicago, within the city limits, for close to 15 years until a recent move put me just a bit outside the city limits. But I never heard of the North Park Nature Center until a few years ago when my wife (who is an unrelenting recycler) nagged me into going over there for an electronics recycling event that they were having, where you could drop off old computers, cellphones, etc, to be disposed of properly.

I was amazed to find this fairly large complex hidden in plain sight just off Pulaski, between Foster and Peterson. The place is huge. It's hard to believe that such a big chunk of the north side has somehow managed to survive without developers moving in, but there it is. Go see for yourself.

It's really quite an amazing and wonderful place. I'll quote from their website:

North Park Village Nature Center is located on the northwest side of Chicago and includes a forty-six acre nature preserve and also an educational facility. The Nature Center and preserve are situated within the North Park Village complex, a cluster of buildings located on approximately 155 acres of land.
The nature preserve features trails that wind through woodlands, wetlands, praire and savannas. A discovery room, a hands-on table of natural objects and interactive displays are highlights of the Nature Center. Programs offered include public programs for pre-schoolers, school age children, families and adults; an eco-explorers summer camp and outreach programs.
Open 7 Days a Week, 362 Days a Year!
(closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day)
10:00 am - 4:00 pm
The mission of the North Park Village Nature Center is to provide urban citizens with an opportunity to interact with wildlife, plants and other natural resources through environmental education and access to improved natural landscapes.
There are plenty of opportunities to learn about and enjoy the riches of nature at the only Nature Center in Chicago - please come for a visit!

We walked the nature preserve when we were there last fall for their annual Harvest Festival, and were thrilled to find ourselves deep in the woods, watching frogs, hearing birds, dragonflies, and crickets, and--more than anything else--enjoying nature right in the middle of the city. The festival featured live music, a scarecrow-building contest, a storyteller, and a farmer's market, and it was really a great way to spend what was a gorgeous fall day.

So, met with an equally gorgeous pseudo-spring day (you take'em when you can get'em around here), we headed over to the Nature Center for their annual Tap the Sap Maple Syrup Festival that took place this past weekend.

Well, besides being just a nice excuse to get out of the house, commune with nature, and enjoy the weather, I am also pleased to say that I actually learned quite a bit about maple syrup (and tasted some as well).

I may be revealing my ignorance here, but did you know that the sap that is tapped from the Maple trees is clear when it comes out? I didn't. I thought it was brown, sticky, and thick, like syrup. But it's completely clear and resembles water, both in appearance and taste.

In order to transform it into the familiar breakfast stand-by, the Maple sap is then boiled down--reduced by a factor of 40--so that the natural sugars caramelize and the liquid thickens. At the festival, they do this over an open hardwood fire, so the syrup also takes on a good amount of smokiness. The resulting stuff, which they bottled and were selling, is a revelation; dark brown to the point of being almost black, yet thinner than you'd expect. The flavor is wonderfully sweet, mapley, but also woodsy and smoky, with lots of wonderful undertones and interesting notes.

We ran into a volunteer who explained the process to us while we were out in the woods checking out the scene. Most of the action happens in February, but "you guys are too big a bunch of sissies to brave the weather in February," he explained, so they wait until mid-to-late March to hold the festival. Most of the sap is already harvested by then, but there's still enough flowing for yokels like me to get the idea.

The trees are just tapped with little metal spigots, and when the sap moves back up through the root system up into the tree (after the winter), some of it flows out of the spigot and into plastic jugs that hang on the trees to catch the stuff. When the jugs get full, the staff dumps the sap into plastic buckets along the trail. I opened one up and checked it out, and it was full of bugs and all sorts of stuff. They do, of course, filter it before boiling it for a day or two. Who knows...maybe that's where all the "subtle undertones" and "interesting notes" come from.

The whole thing was eye-opening, to say the least. I consider myself somewhat of an expert on foodstuffs, how they're procured and subsequently transformed for the consumer. Yet I can't believe how clueless I was about Maple syrup, especially considering how close I live to major producer states like Wisconsin and Michigan. I am humbled. The world of food and food production is so vast; there's always more to learn.

So we romped around in the woods, the kids got to climb on stuff, see a few birds, and--most important of all--escape from the concrete and noise of the city and near 'burbs. We found the same storyteller that Henry liked so much last time and listened to him for awhile. Then we headed into the Nature Center building for a bathroom break, and ran smack into a pretty damn good bluegrass band playing to a room full of people. They were called The Giving Tree Band and they were just fabulous, with two guitars, an upright bass, a banjo and a fiddle. What a great, joyously raucous, jingly-jangly way to cap a day at the Nature Center.

The volunteer we talked to spoke glowingly about their Winter Solstice Festival, which is held at night, with great bonfires, candles everywhere in the woods, and some sort of live wolf show, or something, so we're planning on making it over there for that as well. And I was honestly so inspired by the place, how nicely it's run, and what a great resource this sort of thing is for city-dwellers, that I'm considering volunteering.

Their festivals are a great draw, and a good excuse to go check the place out, but I urge everyone reading to just get over there and walk around the next time you've got some time on a sunny day. You can, in a hour's walk, move through natural woodlands, savannahs, wetlands, and prairie. And, in a short amount of time, you can absorb enough nature to forget, for a while, that you're living amidst the noise, traffic, and pollution of the city. Oh, and it's free.

Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Smokin'!

2009-03-20T22:44:00.006-05:00

It's the first day of Spring and the sun is shining, so that's reason enough for me to bust out the smoker. I use a Weber Smokey Mountain smoker and generally do ribs, chicken, and pork shoulder at least a couple times a month when the weather is good.

It's easy and the results are delicious, but it's quite the process. There is a bit of a learning curve to get started. And mastering the process is a long journey. But there are resources available.

I used Gary Wiviott's excellent Master the WSM Smoker in Five Easy Dinners Course, which I stumbled onto via LTH Forum. Followed it to the letter, I did. And emerged with a good amount of working knowledge about how to handle the smoker. I highly recommend Prof. Wiviott's method for novices.

Reading GWiv's website will give anyone interested the fine details and methods, so I'm not going to cover all that. What I will do is gloss over the process, giving whoever's interested a bit of an intro into barbecue, generally, and the WSM, specifically. If you find yourself wanting more specifics after reading this, they're easy enough to find.

First, I'll define what we're talking about. "Barbecue" is a term that is often misused. It refers to a process of cooking meat (usually) for long periods of time over low, indirect heat, in near-constant contact with the smoke of hardwood. Low, smokey, and slow cooking. The trick is to keep the smoke moving across the meat while keeping the cooking temperature low; usually around 200°-250°F.

The WSM accomplishes this by having the fire burn at the bottom of the "bullet", and then placing a pan full of water between the fire and the the racks that hold the meat in the upper area of the unit. The water pan helps to moderate the temperature, as well as catch drippings from the cooking meat that could result in flare-ups if they landed in the fire.

This process allows the smoke to infuse and flavor the meat, and the long, low-temp cooking causes the collagen and connective tissue in certain tougher cuts of meat to break down, resulting in a transformation that anyone who loves good barbecue is familiar with. Cuts like beef brisket, pork shoulders, and ribs become meltingly tender and unctuous when given four, eight, or 12 hours of the barbecue treatment. It's a unique way of extracting the most flavor and enjoyment out of these particular pieces of meat.

One thing that really makes me bristle is hearing people referring to their grill (especially a gas grill) as a "barbecue" or saying that they're going to have a "barbecue" when they're planning on cooking some steaks, burgers, or dogs on the grill. THAT'S NOT BARBECUE!!! That's "grilling". There's an enormous difference.

Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against grilling. I own a gas grill and use it often. But I don't call the burgers, chicken, or portobellos I cook on my grill "barbecued" because they're not.

Grilling is a high heat method of cooking in which the food sits on a grate directly above, and in close proximity to, the heat source--usually open flames. The foods cook very quickly. Therefore, it's best suited to items that are leaner and inherently tender; steaks, chops, fish, burgers, etc. "Lesser" cuts like ribs and brisket would be a disaster on the grill, as the tougher fibers of these meats would not break down during the quick grilling process. Ribs are often finished on a grill, but try grilling them from their raw state and then eating them. Not good.

Even if you're using a charcoal grill, and loading it up with real hardwood charcoal (as opposed to those nasty, chemical-laden "briquettes"), you're still grilling. If the heat is high and direct, it's not barbecue.

Grilling is often considered (especially by marketing/advertising types) as the ultimate "guy thing". Take a look at the father's day gift ideas every year and all you see are these high-tech grilling gadgets and tools. But smoking is much more of a real guy thing than cooking a steak on one of those $4,000 gas grills with their infrared sear burners could ever hope to be.

I mean, think about it; anyone can turn a knob, wait a few minutes, plop a steak on a grill, poke it with their silly temperature sensing fork a few times, and then pull it off when the thing beeps. A friggin' monkey could do it.

Smoking, on the other hand, involves fire. Fire that you light with a flame. Fire that burns differently every time, depending on the air temperature, the wind, and the quality of the charcoal.

Like the primeval ancestors that came before him, a true barbecuer makes a fire and that fire is a living thing that must be controlled. It's much more of a "guy thing" to work with your fire, learn its idiosyncrasies, and figure out how to simultaneously tame and maintain it. There is much skill involved with this. Turning a knob and clicking the igniter on your big, shiny, culinary equivalent of a Hummer doesn't put you in touch with your inner caveman, no matter how much you grunt like the guy from Home Improvement when you do it.

I joked in my last entry about how I enjoy taking on projects with steep learning curves. Well, this one's no joke. All the senses are involved in the smoking process--watching the fire and meat, smelling what the fire's doing, listening to hear when the water pan needs refilling and when the charcoal has gone to ember, touching the meat to figure out if it's reached that falling-apart level of tenderness.

Not only that, but once you've got the basics down, there are an infinite number of variables to mess around with. You've got your various rubs and marinades to play with. Hardwood options include oak, hickory, mesquite, pecan, apple, alder, and more. The classic meats to use are brisket, pork shoulder, and chicken, but once you've got those nailed, you can start branching out with turkey, fish, smoking your own pork belly for homemade bacon, making your own smoked sausages, and on and on. It's also nice to smoke non-meat items while your main dish is going. I usually do a pot of baked beans that I set on the smoker for a few hours while the ribs or chicken is going, and I've also smoked onions, peppers, and even potatoes to use in side dishes.

It's one of those minute-to-learn, lifetime-to-master things. And those are often the best things.

Ice Cream Personality Insights

2009-03-18T09:53:00.006-05:00

The weather's been so amazing the last few days here in the Chicago area--highs up in the 70's yesterday--and when it's warm out, we start craving ice cream. We usually have a couple cartons in our freezer at home, but one of the joys of summer is taking a walk and going out for a cone or a cup.

We were talking about this the other day and kind of micro-analyzing our ice cream vehicle preferences. I'm a cone guy. My wife always gets hers in a cup.

The cup, says she, allows for greater control. She does not enjoy the anxiety-producing pressure of having to maintain the cone, so as to prevent the rapidly melting ice cream from dripping all down her hand.

For me, on the other hand, that's half the fun. I like the "challenge" of working the cone in just such a way that it prevents the ice cream from getting all over the place, and I've developed kind of a system that combines a steady lick-and-turn technique with the occasional large chomp off the top of the cone which I've found to be a rock-solid method of dealing with even the sloppiest of double-scoops.

What's interesting, though, is that these dueling mindsets are perfect insights into our respective personalities. I'm much more of a figure-it-out-as-you-go type of person, and this drives my wife crazy. She likes to be fully in control, to know what to expect and how she'll handle it. Conversely, her need to plan everything down to what seems to me to be the tiniest little inconsequential detail drives me nuts at times. So she finds the control and the ease of use of ice cream in a cup to be comforting and I find it to be boring, compared with the hands-on wrangling of random ice-cream drip patterns that typify summer cone-slurping.

There's even a product (of course) that attempts to solve this dilemma via a motorized rotating "cone". Ugh. How lame.

I will not be purchasing such a product, because I'm one who values attaining learned skills that take time to acquire. Cooking and playing guitar are both skills that took me a lot of time, effort, and dedication to become good at, but the learning process was enjoyable, and the skills, once attained, are useful and were worth the effort (in my opinion). It's really a basic philosophical difference about how one approaches life--do you want to do the work required to attain the ability to do things The Way They're Supposed To Be Done, or do you just want to take the easy way out and have your ice cream spoon-fed to you all your life?

Despite my clear opinion about which choice is superior, both are valid options. We're all entitled to order our ice cream in whatever form brings us the most enjoyment. Add kids to the equation, though, and things get interesting. Both of us engage in lighthearted "lobbying" to convince Henry that our preferred method of ice-cream delivery is superior, and the subsequent reasoning and explanation that derives from this is pretty hilarious.

I've opted out, to some extent, because in the rare cases that I've managed to sell Henry on the idea of getting a cone, I've found that the constant coaching that's required ("Ok...now turn it. No, turn the whole cone. And then lick. Keep going....good.") is somewhat exhausting and I tend to neglect my own cone. I also usually end up eating a good bit of his cone just to "help" him, which I really don't need to do.

He also seems to prefer the cup. Or maybe that's just my wife's doing.

But beyond the essential question of cup vs. cone, there are plenty of other choices involved with going out for ice cream that can also be viewed as a window through which to view one's personality; flavor choice, of course, is huge. Or the question of soft serve vs. scooped ice cream. Toppings as well. To jimmy or not to jimmy? That IS the question.

You may not have previously considered your ice cream choices as so completely elemental and indicative of your personality, but, really, think about it. Are you someone that always orders just vanilla, amidst thirty other nutty, chunky, rainbow-colored options? Do you (like me) always tend towards whatever flavor has the most "stuff" in it? Have you ever asked them to hold the cherry off your sundae? Or do you ask for extras? Does the instant gratification of soft serve do it for you, or do you prefer the denser, richer product that scooped hard ice cream offers? And how does Italian gelato even factor into the discussion?

I'm feeling like I've opened a can of worms here, and that this blog may not even be big enough to tackle the subject. Perhaps this is doctorate thesis material.

I lick, therefore I am. But what am I? And what does how I lick--and what I choose to lick--say about me?

Enjoy the weather.

Making REAL Mac and Cheese

2009-03-15T10:17:00.028-05:00

It's tempting, when beginning a piece about mac and cheese, to go on a long-winded rant about all those nasty powder-cheese concoctions that line the shelves, trying to lure you with their supposed ease of preparation, their overly salty cheesiness, and strangely skinny noodles.

I'll go ahead and resist that particular temptation, as I'm sure it's been done to death. As a transition, though, I will share a funny anecdote--the story of what happened the first time I ever tried to make Kraft Mac and Cheese. I was probably a sophomore in high school, and wasn't much of a cook at the time. My range was limited to after-school microwaving and toaster-ovening and sporadic Sunday-morning pancake-flipping.

But, I was hungry after school and the usual stuff wasn't going to cut it this day, so I decided to make myself a batch of the ol' blue box. I was no cook, but I could follow instructions, I figured. So I did exactly what the box said; I cooked the pasta in boiling water, then added the contents of the packet, plus a little milk and butter. I stirred and stirred, but I was mystified about why it never thickened up. It was like soup.

What the heck did I do wrong? I called a friend and asked her and we went through it step by step. "Ok, so then you drained the pasta, and added the cheese powder, right?" she said.

"Uh...drained the pasta?"

Whoops. I guess that's where it went bad.

Seriously, though, this tells you about my level of cooking ability at the time. I didn't know to drain the pasta, and the instructions didn't even mention this crucial step! I blame Kraft's recipe writers. C'mon, people! Lowest common denominator! Plastic garbage bags have messages telling me not to wear them over my face, and my wife's hairdryer has a tag on the cord with a message that reads "DO NOT USE WHILE SLEEPING", but you can't tell me to drain the frickin' pasta?!

(As an aside, the cheese powder packet that comes with the Kraft Mac and Cheese is really good sprinkled over hot popcorn. For a real dorm-room classic, combine the cheese packet from Kraft dinner with the foil seasoning packet that comes with ramen noodles, sprinkle over popcorn. Consume while drinking cheap beer. Enjoy.)

Anyway, I've come a long way since those days and now I make what I (and my family) believe is the very best macaroni and cheese......ever! This is the very same recipe I used in my triumphant appearance at the first annual sMACkdown, at which I tied Stephanie (Top Chef) Izard.

What follows is a step-by-step guide to making my mac and cheese. Included in this presentation is a bonus step-by-step to making Bechamel sauce; one of the classic French "mother sauces" and, as such, a wonderful leaping-off point for literally hundreds of different sauces. Seriously, Google it. Stuff like knowing how to make Bechamel with your eyes closed is why chefs don't need to use recipes.

First, get a pot of water going for the pasta, and start making the Bechamel. I don't need to tell you to salt the pasta water, do I? It should taste like ocean water.

Bechamel sauce is simply milk thickened with a roux. A roux is simply butter (or oil) and flour cooked together in equal parts to make a paste. Put the butter in a saucepan over low, add the flour and let it melt. Whisk the flour and butter together as it melts. You want to let the roux cook a bit just to cook out the raw flour flavor, but for mac and cheese, we're using a light-colored, or "blonde" roux, so you shouldn't let it take on any color.

Once the roux is dry and kind of crumbly, and it's cooked for a few minutes, remove about half of it, so as to be better able to control how thick your sauce gets. You may end up using all of it, but it's better to be able to add it little by little than to have to keep adding more liquid to thin down your sauce.

Next, add the milk. Just a little at first. The roux begins thickening when it's boiled, so adding just a little milk will allow the mixture to boil almost immediately. It will quickly thicken up to the consistency of mashed potatoes (or wallpaper paste), which allows you to whisk out any lumps before adding the rest of the milk. Once it thickens up like you see in the pic to the left, go ahead and add the rest of the milk.

In the meantime, grate your cheese. I use cheddar (for flavor and color) and another cheese with better melting characteristics like Monterey Jack, fontina, or Swiss. My go-to is Gruyere, and then I add some Parmano cheese to bring up the sharpness.

Also in the meantime (the milk takes a while to come up to a boil), make the breadcrumb topping. I use panko, salt and pepper, more Parmano cheese, chopped parsley, and melted butter. Just melt the butter in the microwave, combine everything else in a bowl, and then pour in the butter and stir it all around with a fork so the melted butter coats everything else.

By now the Bechamel will be more or less ready. You want it pretty loose, since adding all the cheese will thicken it up. It should have started to thicken, and come to a gentle boil. Let it boil for a couple minutes to allow the roux to thicken it, and add more roux as necessary to adjust the consistency. It's better to over-thicken it, since you can always thin it out with a bit more milk. But once you add the cheese, you can't add more roux, since bringing it to a boil would cause the cheese to separate.

Once your Bechamel has thickened and you've allowed it to boil for a few minutes, remove it from the heat, let it cool a bit, and then add all the grated cheese to it, whisking to melt and incorporate the cheese. You'll also want to season it here. I use salt, pepper, and Tabasco sauce--not for the heat, but for the acidity it adds. Make sure you taste and re-season enough times so that you get that kind of pinch in the back of your cheek that the sharpness of the cheddar provides.

The sauce should be creamy and you should see some stringy-ness from all the melting cheese when you pull your whisk out. If it's too thick, add some milk to thin it down. You want it kind of thin, since adding the pasta, allowing it to cool, and baking it will all thicken it.

When the pasta's cooked, drain it well, add the sauce to the large pasta-cooking pot, and then combine the pasta and sauce, tossing it well to coat it in the sauce.

CRUCIAL TIP: Try to make sure your pasta is hot when you toss it with the cheese sauce, since it'll absorb the sauce much better than it will if you let it cool down first. Also, once the pasta and the sauce are combined, let the mixture sit in the pot for a while before putting it in your baking dish. This lets the sauce thicken up and soak into the pasta, preventing the sauce from pooling up in the bottom of the baking dish.

At this point, taste it and adjust your seasonings again. Even if your sauce was perfectly seasoned, you may need to add more salt, pepper, or Tabasco to compensate for the addition of the bland pasta. You can also add more milk at this point if the mixture is too thick.

If you're adding stuff like peas, bacon, or ham, this is the point at which to do it.

Turn the whole mess out into a baking dish, top it with your crumb topping, and put it into a 350° oven, and bake it until you can see the cheese sauce bubbling up. Then crank up your oven's broiler and get the topping nice and brown.

That's it. The top should be all toasty, buttery, and burnt-cheese tasting from the grated cheese in the topping, the mac and cheese will be super-creamy and rich-tasting, and you'll get that great contrast of the creamy interior with the crunchy browned topping. It's awesome stuff.

Plus, once you've got the roux and Bechamel technique down, you can use it to make tons of other sauces. Country gravy and biscuits, chicken fried steak with sage cream gravy, and sauce Nantua (a cream-based Bechamel flavored with crawfish and other shellfish) are all examples of fairly well-known Bechamel-based sauces.

So that's it. My (nearly) award-winning mac and cheese recipe, complete with step-by-step photos and commentary. You now officially have no excuse for ever again buying any blue box, lecithin-laden, Velveeta Whiz-based product.

So, We May Be Opening a Restaurant...

2009-03-11T22:31:00.007-05:00

As those who have been reading this blog know, I'm unemployed. And have been for a while now. The prospects look very bleak. Every interview I go on, the hiring authority tells me how flooded with quality applicants they are, and I keep hearing the figures on how many jobs are lost each month. It's hard not to think I'm fighting a losing battle by looking for a job.

My friend Jason, who's in the process of opening a restaurant in Pilsen, told me that a recent ad seeking a sous chef generated one response per minute for a full day. He said he had lots of executive chefs who said they'd be willing to work as line cooks, just to get in the door. Whoa.

Besides fantasizing about making my living as a writer, and then laughing at this pipe dream when I check my Google AdSense balance, I've been kicking around the idea of opening a place for a while now. All the trade publications I read talk about how down economies offer the silver lining of a buyer's market, lots of available spaces with favorable terms, and almost-daily restaurant auctions. So I've been surfing Craigslist and other business listing sites and taking a look at what's out there. There's a lot.

About six weeks ago, I happened upon a listing that piqued my interest, primarily because the location was really good. I called the number, set up an appointment, and went and took a look.

It's a restaurant that was only open for about 9 months, and the space has been home to three different concepts in the last four years. It's a small storefront--about 1500 square feet, and it's in a busy, fairly affluent area with lots of foot traffic. It's very near a theater as well as a couple other venues that draw people into the area. I've since been back twice with various partners and consultants in tow and we are currently in negotiations to purchase the space, the lease, and the contents of the restaurant.

The concept that we're envisioning was inspired by the location. We approached it by trying to figure out what the area needs, and what would be well-received and profitable there, rather than starting with "what kind of restaurant have I always dreamed of running?"

I'm not going to get into too much detail at this point, because I'm worried that I'll somehow jinx the whole thing, but the plan is that we will change the layout of the existing table service restaurant and re-launch it as a more easily-approachable and affordable quick-serve place. The area has quite a few well-known full-service restaurants, but little in the way of decent quick options. More than once, I've found myself in this neighborhood, not wanting to take the time for a sit-down meal, casting about for a place to grab a quick burger or a hot dog, and come up empty.

I haven't been blogging much lately because I'm neck-deep in due diligence. I've run kitchens and restaurants for years, but never owned one, never started a company or purchased an existing one, and so I'm dealing with lawyers, wading through "so you want to start a business" pamphlets I got at the local SBA office, and making checklists of all the various permits, licenses, and filings we'll need to do, should this thing take shape the way I believe it's going to.

It's exciting, but nerve-wracking. I have, of course, written a menu, sketched out a kitchen layout and floor plan, and started re-connecting with purveyors I've worked with in the past. That's the easy and enjoyable stuff for me. But I'm doing my best to restrain myself from getting to deeply involved in the fun stuff, since the whole thing might fall through and all the work (and emotional investment) I put into it could be rendered fruitless overnight.

So, for the time being, I'm focusing on aspects that I need to put into my business plan to pitch this idea to potential investors and banks. Projected cash flow statements, income statements, and working budgets. Pay-back and pay-out schedules, whether to form an LLP, LLC, or corporation, and other really fun stuff like that. I'm out of my element, so I'm trying to use all the resources available to me via family, friends, and past work associations, and learn all I can from the internet. I've been spending a few hours on the phone every day, as I still also juggle naps, meals, and stories for the kids, diaper changes for Nora, and playdates for Henry.

Watch this space for future developments. If the purchase actually goes through, I'll feel more comfortable blogging about the details, and we're hoping that's going to get done within the next couple of weeks or so.

The Bacon List--Niman Ranch Applewood Smoked

2009-03-05T17:00:00.011-06:00

When I spotted a pack of Niman Ranch Dry Cured, Applewood Smoked Bacon on the shelf at my local Trader Joe's, I knew that I'd have to buy it and do a review for my ongoing sweeping epic series, The Bacon List. Niman is an interesting company that's gone through some recent shakeups, so it makes sense to dig a bit deeper into the back story before reviewing the bacon.

Niman Ranch was the first "boutique" farm name to garner national recognition by appearing on high-end restaurant menus as a descriptor for the center-of-the-plate item. When chefs such as Zuni Cafe's Judi Rogers and the iconic Alice Waters started name-checking Niman on their menus back in the late '80's, a trend was born. A foodstuff's provenance suddenly became important. Chefs and savvy diners around the country took notice.

Back then, Niman-Schell Ranch (as they were known at the time) was doing something quite extraordinary; raising beef and pork naturally, without hormones or antibiotics, and with all natural vegetarian feed. Further, these animals weren't being sent to finishing lots, as the overwhelming majority of commercially-raised animals are. They were finished and slaughtered within Niman's system, which valued humane treatment, sustainability, and sought to ensure that the products were good for those who ate them and for the planet as a whole.

This sort of thing was appealing to some chefs, who, like Waters, took a dim view of the commercial meat industry for a number of very valid environmental and political reasons, but most chefs using Niman's products were interested almost exclusively in the end result product itself; bottom line, the meat just tasted better.

As more and more foodservice operators and chefs jumped on to the farm-to-table bandwagon, Niman's growth was exponential, and by the late '90's, as McDonald's corporation's Chipotle Grill contracted to purchase all their pork from Niman, the operation grew so big so quickly that the folks at Niman Ranch had little choice but to purchase much of its pork from a network of like-minded farmers rather than raising it all on their own.

They were, however, still committed to finishing and slaughtering their animals in their own facilities, and so were forced to truck thousands of hogs across the country, from the farms in the midwest where they were raised, to the Niman finishing/slaughter facilities in Northern California. They refused to outsource beef, however, and were simply unable to keep pace with demand for their naturally-raised, pastured, grass-fed product. The beef cattle--fed on the less calorie-dense grass, and without the growth hormones that sped up the process--took twice as long to reach market weight and cost about twice as much to get to market. Chefs raved about the superior marbling and flavor and demand was very high, so prices could be set accordingly.

(Yes, this post is about bacon. Be patient. This is important stuff.)

Despite the fact that the methods employed by this company influenced a major movement in the world of gourmet food, and built an incredibly strong brand identity, the company was never profitable. Bill Niman, the company's founder and ideological leader, explained that he was "consciously deferring profitability to expand the brand." In other words, he was less interested in building a profitable company than he was in changing the way that people look at meat, and food in general. The money was less important to him than the message.

But, as commendable an ideology as that might be, it's not a formula for running a successful business. Despite the fact that Bill Niman had built his modest cattle ranching hobby into a business with $65 million in annual sales, the company was losing an average of $3 million per year and began veering dangerously close to bankruptcy.

Enter Chicago-based Natural Food Holdings, LLC, a division of massive equity company Hilco. The company owned Sioux-Preme Packing, which processed all of Niman's pork, and in 2006, purchased a 56% stake and took over four of the seven spots on Niman Ranch's board of directors. The company immediately began to make changes in an effort to "streamline the operation" and become profitable.

But "profitable" in food production almost always means cutting back in ways that impact the quality of what's on the plate. Niman fought the new owners' plans for shutting down their finishing lot and slaughterhouse and outsourcing these tasks to larger, more efficient companies (that might not continue the humane and environmentally-friendly practices so integral to Niman's vision). The Niman feedlot was sold in 2008.

The new owners began using "antimicrobials", which technically aren't antibiotics, but yield the same end result while still allowing the company to proudly proclaim their products to be free of antibiotics. Niman only gave the animals medicine when they were sick, but the new owners were using it as a matter of course, the same way commercially-raised animals are treated.

The new owners also locked horns with Niman over the distance that animals were being transported, the conditions of their transport, and the changes in the cattle operations. In 2007, Bill Niman left the company and in January of this year, the changeover became complete. Natural Food Holdings and Niman Ranch merged, giving Natural complete ownership of the company, all its holdings, and exclusive rights to the brand name. Bill Niman is no longer legally permitted to use his own last name in any commercial endeavor.

Niman has moved on. He's into heritage turkeys now, and is raising them commercially on the 1,000 acre Northern California ranch that he managed to keep separate from the company that he now has no share in. He made news recently by announcing that he is boycotting his namesake company, due to questionable practices that he claims compromise their natural, environmentally-friendly, humane ideals, and that he can no longer consume their products in good conscience.

The whole thing's really a sad story. It leads one to wonder whether quality-driven, humane, ethical food production can ever possibly be economically viable.

Anyway, that's the back story. Let's get to the bacon. Since I've already gone on so long about the company's history, let's go straight to the rundown:

Designation--Fancy or Grocery Store? Fancy. But take everything you read above, and the sheer size of this supposedly artisanal company into account and judge for yourself. The package says 'dry cured', and, to be honest, it tastes like it's made the old fashioned way.

Price--How much did I pay per pound for the bacon? $8.65/lb. I purchased a 12 oz. package at Trader Joe's for $6.49.

Uncooked appearance--Color, texture, wet- or dry-ness, mushy or firm, etc... Great looking. Nice bright red on the lean meat, perfect fat-to-lean ratio with nice streaking, all slices are center-cut and thick. Texture is very firm and dry, indicative of a true dry cure.

How it cooks--Tendency to curl, how much it shrinks, tendency to spatter... Very little shrinkage. Typical of artisanally-produced bacon that is dry-cured and smoked over a longer period of time, it hardly shrank at all. This is due to the fact that the meat isn't injected with any saline, sugar, or phosphate solutions like the factory-produced stuff, and the long hot smoking pulls all the moisture out during the production process. The end result is more meat on the plate after it's cooked.

Cooked appearance--Color, shape, texture. Wonderful, deep red-brown color, almost no curling, a bit of darkness on the outer edge indicating a true hardwood smoke. Texture is perfect--nice crispness when cooked well, but strips cooked a bit short of totally crisp are nicely yielding with awesome melting fat.

How does it taste--Sweetness, saltiness, smokiness, texture (melting, chewy, flabby, spongy), "porkiness". Among the best I've tasted. Great real smoke flavor, which you can smell strongly while it's cooking. Great balance of flavors. This is a perfectly balanced bacon, with equal parts smoke, salt, sweetness from sugar, and pork flavor. The fat is wonderful, giving that great melting quality you get from bacon of this caliber, and the texture is very good; crispy yet with a nice chew. This is a really well thought-out, well put-together product. You can really tell that this product has evolved over time. Many, many tweaks have been done to the curing/smoking process that have brought this product to where it is today. Really excellent.

Overall rating--All bacons reviewed will be given an overall rating from 1-10, with 1 being practically inedible (I say "practically" since, you know, it's bacon--how bad can it be?), 5 being a perfectly serviceable bacon for use in cooking or on a sandwich, and 10 being....well, let's be honest; there won't be a 10. 8.5. This bacon lacks the character of a Broadbent, but it's really not far off. I have to wonder whether knowing what I do about the company has influenced my opinion, and if it might have scored higher if it came from some small farm in Virginia wrapped in brown paper and burlap with the name hand-stenciled on. What can I say? I do my best to remain objective and to taste purely on the basis of taste, but I am only human.

Bottom line, this is a very, very good bacon. Right up there in the upper echelon of real small-batch, old school producers. It's worth purchasing, especially since it's widely available at Trader Joe's, but the price makes it fairly cost prohibitive, so it's more of a special occaision/splurge bacon. Certainly worth the money every now and then, though.

Chicago "Tavern Style" Pizza at Bill's Pub in Mundelein

2009-03-05T09:09:00.014-06:00

Bill's Pub in Mundelein is a classic old joint that's been around since 1954. I grew up not too far from here and went to this place probably hundreds of times as a kid, loving their great, cracker-thin crust pizza, playing pinball and Zaxxon in their game room, and thinking that throwing my peanut shells on the floor while we waited for our pizza to come was the coolest thing ever.

I also remember being a bit spooked by their dark, "northwoods style" dining room and the dozens of taxidermy animals that populate it. Nothing like chowing down on some really good, crispy thin-crust pizza while some raccoon that was killed in 1961 stares you down.

Little did I know then that Bill's was such an exemplary example of Chicago's absolute best type of pizza--tavern style thin crust. Yep, that's right. Chicago pan, or deep dish gets all the play and is most well known nationally, but, in my opinion, the real Chicago-style pizza is the cracker-flat thin crust creations turned out by ledgendary places like Pat's in Lakeview, Marie's in Albany Park, Candlelite on Western Ave. near Howard, and Vito and Nick's on the 8400 block of South Pulaski.

"Tavern style" pizza is characterized by being ultra-thin. It's the anti-Malnati's. The crust is paper-thin and crackery-crispy. Most tavern style pizza places also do not create an outer "lip" of crust, so the sauce often goes all the way out to the edge, which can sometimes make it kind of difficult to eat, since there's nothing to grab onto. Tavern style thin crust is always cut into squares, rather than pie slices, and is sometimes referred to as "party-style" pizza or "cracker crust". It's fabulous stuff and goes great with cold beer.

The integral element of a good thin-crust pizza--the crust--can be assessed by employing a move I call the "end crust grab", which tests the structural integrity of the crust. The key to a really good thin crust pizza is that the crust, despite being super-thin, stays crisp and rigid enough to support the ingredients. Thus, part of the responsibility lies with you, the diner. If you want a good thin-crust pizza, you can't overload it by ordering tons of toppings or loading on extra cheese. I generally order a one or two-topping pizza, give it a minute or two to cool down after it arrives at the table, and then employ the "end crust grab" to assess. Good pizza places, besides making a quality crust, will know not to pile on too many toppings. As you can see by the picture to the right, Bill's passes the "end crust grab" test with flying colors. My fingers are holding just the extreme outer edge of the piece, and the crust easily supports the weight of the toppings. Not even a hint of flex or give there. Kudos, Bill's!

But Bill's Pub is about more than just pizza, even though I don't think I've ever eaten anything else there. It's got this great frozen-in-time feel to it. It's way out in the sticks in Mundelein (or at least, it used to be the sticks, before the subdivisions and strip malls started creeping in), and even if you walk in at 8:30, as Mitch and I did following an aborted attempt to try a different restaurant in Long Grove, the place seems really dark, compared to outside. The dining room/bar area is a crazy-quilt muddle of taxidermy, beer signs, plasma tv's tuned to sports, and northwoods pine paneling. It's the perfect setting for what this place is--a halfway to Wisconsin, no-frills place to stop and grab a beer, have a pizza, snack on some peanuts, and shoot the shit with your pals.

(Left: Mitch looks on while I execute the "end crust grab". He thinks I'm nuts, but he hangs out with me because I find the best places to eat.)

Mitch and I walked in and motioned to the only server we saw, who indicated that we should just grab whichever table we wanted. He was busy, but showed up promptly with water and a basket of peanuts, and we ordered a pitcher of Leinenkugel's, which was delivered with nice, cold, frosty mugs. Our server was exactly what you'd imagine from a joint like this as well; a mullet-headed twenty-something guy with some acne who you could just tell was looking forward to getting off work so he could fire up a doobie and crank the AC/DC in his Firebird while driving home.

Which is fine. He was an easygoing guy and was nothing if not friendly, welcoming, and competent. We ordered our pizza and a basket of jalapeno poppers to start, and got settled in.

The apps are just your standard out-of-the-freezer-into-the-fryer stuff, but the pizza is just out-of-this-world good. The sauce is great, with a nice sweetness, but still a good amount of tang, and it's not too loose or juicy. The toppings are high-quality. Like any good pizza place, they use fresh sausage that is pinched off onto the pizza, so the grease from the sausage renders out and permeates the finished product. Mushrooms are raw, but sliced thinly enough to cook through and get browned and crisp. Their cheese, too, is good quality, and, as with all good tavern-style pizzas, browns up nicely, yielding a great, flavorful amount of crunchy, browned cheese around the edge.

And, of course, there's the crust. While I'm on record as stating that my all-time favorite pizza can be found at Barnaby's Family Inn in Niles (which is basically a tavern-style, but with a couple idiosyncratic twists), Bill's runs a very close second. I've had the thin-crust pies from all of the Chicago icons mentioned above, and while they're all very, very good, Bill's is better. The difference is the crust. Bill's crust is so thin, so crispy, and is really just a perfect example of what the Chicago tavern-style pizza is supposed to be.