Monday, September 20, 2010

The Color Of Things

A few of you have mentioned that I haven't written in a while, and you're right...I haven't. Hasn't been a whole lot to write about, and I frankly haven't felt like it. Some writer huh?

So here we are, 4 weeks in to the 2010 Fall Semester and life is good. I'll bring you up to speed on the events of the last few months, there have been a few.

We had a grill cook die of a massive brain hemorrhage.

My Sous Chef left after 10 years of service (although I think it was only 9 years) and didn't have the guts to tell anyone he was leaving. He sent another employee in to gather his bel
ongings and drop off his phone and time card. He left to begin a rewarding career at Arby's. Many of us are still celebrating! His replacement started exactly one week later and has already received immense kudos.

The lady that I nearly stran
gled (and nearly lost my job over) this time last year passed away a week ago from inoperable cancer in multiple organs. She will be missed by many! One of the last bites of solid food she ate was a brownie that I took to her at the Hospice. They were the only good thing I ever made according to her. I agree! Not my recipe.

Back in the Spring we pulled off a couple of the most amazing events of my caree
r, and I'm not sure why I didn't write about them except that I was tired and uninspired. But there's a couple things we did well here recently that I had to talk about because they were really cool.

The American Cancer Society has a program called Paint The Town Purple. Apparently purple (my favorite color) is the official color in support of all cancer victims and survivors in general. Well, it turns out that it's the official color for about 28 different things including 9/11, animal abuse, and eating disorders as well. I find the latter interesting. You'll soon see why.

We were approached by a group that is supporting the Relay For Life and Paint The Campus Purple movement to join them in a day of recognition. We decorated a section of our dining room decidedly violet, passed out purple ribbons to our staff, and created a menu of purple food.

There was purple cabbage, purple potatoes, purple jello, purple cheesecake, blackberries and purple Chantilly Cream, Purple Velvet Cake (Red Velvet Cake with a little blue coloring added), and my personal favorite purple soft-serve ice cream. We even made a couple purple desser
ts so as not to alienate the sugar-free constituency.

It's hard to make purple food that people and chefs alike can take seriously. Purple lends itself best to the dessert table I think. I thought of turning Vegetable Lo Mein purple, but I resisted. Plums
are out of season. Purple green beans are a past fad, and they turned green when you cooked them anyway.

Eggplant in my opinion, while inherently varying d
egrees of purple, just plain sucks. Who ever craves a big plate of eggplant?


In my training I have been subjected to a lot of little tips on food presentation, particularly when it comes to color schemes. There are certain colors that are just more appealing than others when it comes to food. Green is pretty natural. Bright reds always wake up the visual senses. Yellow is a good one, especially when we replace red tomatoes, peppers, and raspberries with their golden counterparts.

In the fall when we think of fall colors we think of orange and brown. One big challenge has always been making attractive plates in the fall when cooking with the season. Pum
pkin, winter squashes, acorns, wild mushrooms - what in the hell else is in season in October and November? The plate always comes out brown.

I learned years ago that blue is perhaps the most "inedible" color, although set up a snow cone stand and include blue raspberry syrup. Tell me at the end of the day what you sold the most of. Blue raspberry is my personal favorite Slurpee flavor at the gas station in the summer time. But what in the hell is a blue raspberry? Ever seen one? Me either.

Apparently there is, or was truly a blue raspberry that is closely related to the black raspberry (never seen one of those either). I found little about it on the internet, and no pictures...but still...I can't call up my produce vendor and order a flat of them so as far as I'm concerned they're a myth.

It is a core tenant in the school of thought that I come from that if the only purpose of a component on a plate is to make the
plate look better then it doesn't belong. Difficult at times.

I also subscribe to the philosophy that when tinting something edible one should use naturally derived colors. Green comes from "making chlorophyll" by pureeing parsley with a little water and straining the resulting liquid to achieve a beautiful, intensely light green coloring agent that adds minimal flavor. Orange comes from doing the same with carrots.

Of course in the 90's there was a short-lived trend in making everything clear - void of color. Charlie Trotter made "water" from everything. He taught us that tomato water is made by pureeing ripe tomatoes, letting the liquid sit and settle for a few hours, and siphoning off the clear yet intensely flavored water that rises to the top. Pretty cool really.

When making colored pasta dough a portion of the liquid in the recipe is replaced with a puree of blanched vegetables or herbs. Spinach makes green, beets make magenta, carrots make orange, roasted peppers make red, and so on. Roasted garlic makes brown...perfect for autumn!

But what makes purple food? Purple food coloring my friend - or at the very least red and blue.

I - or I should say we discovered one of the most interesting phenomenons of my culinary career. It seems that purple, while striking, beautiful, intriguing, and unexpected, actually makes pretty cool looking food - and popular. In fact, I would say that you could paint a turd purple and people from all walks of life would line up down the block and fight each other to get one, hot or cold.

Dinner opened at 4:30. I started stirring the first purple coloring into the vanilla ice cream mix at 4. We were out of purple food by 6 with three hours to go. Normal diners were gobbling up the sugar-free stuff just to get at the purple.

At 6:30 I frantically plopped scoops of room-temperature vanilla pudding from a tin can into plastic cups, piped in a generous helping of leftover purple whipped cream, threw a handful of blueberries into each one, and stuck in a lady finger for fun.

I walked out un
assuming into the dining room with about 18 of these delectable little suckers lined up on a bent up old sheet pan, all the while reciting Eddie Murphy's "parfaits are delicious" lines in my head.

Once at my destination I had to drop the pan and run for my life. Looki
ng back in haste I witnessed erstwhile normal, civil human beings ripping each others eyes out to get to the purple layered concoctions. Severed appendages flew across the dining room splattering the walls and windows with what appeared to be violet-tinted blood. My God - what have I done? It looked like old ladies at a bargain basement rummage sale. Vicious.

We never run out of dessert. We always have leftovers. This was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. Fortunately I had initiated a policy at the beginning of the evening that when we were out, we were out. I left before the riot found me.

But it was not the only such incident this week, for this week ended with Halloween.

Last year for Halloween I did strange, scary foods. We cut hot dogs into tapeworm like strips and stirred them into ba
ked beans. We colored Asian marinated chicken wings black and called them bat wings. We stirred corn and peas into meat-laden cheese dip to make it look like vomit. Everyone thought our efforts were ingenious and commendable, however they barely touched the stuff.

This year at
the last minute it occurred to me to give people something they would enjoy. I purchased $2,000 worth of candy...nearly a quarter-ton altogether.

It worked.

Coworkers bet that the candy would last anywhere from all day to into the weekend. Not me. I knew they'd go through it all and I was right.

Interestingly though when the smoke had cleared and the bones were picked clean all that was left was orange candy. Bit O' Honey, marshmallow Circus Peanuts, orange Pixi Stix, and those little wax bottles with sweet syrup in the middle, but only the orange ones. Weird.

All in all it was an educational week to say the least. My front-of-house counterpart suggested that we do a different colored food theme every month. Great idea, but no thanks.

Color me done.

Monday, February 8, 2010

You Ain't The Devil! Where's My Waitress?


Many of you know that when I travel I usually have a restaurant in mind as a primary destination. Sometimes it's to a 4-Star place to be dazzled like at Fleur De Lys in San Fran, sometimes a retail place like City Bakery in NYC, and quite often a local legend greasy spoon joint like my recent jaunt to Ben's Chili Bowl in D.C.


In Jonesboro, Arkansas there ain't much, let me tell you, but I've been in search of a great burger. What makes a great burger, you might ask? Well, a great burger is typically but not always hand formed from ground beef. Angus, choice, prime, sirloin, tenderloin, hormone free, chuck, or Japanese Kobe--doesn't matter. It's ground beef, and by law in most places it's cooked medium-well to well so who cares what cow it came from and what it costs?

To be honest I prefer my burgers medium to medium-well. I think that this is the range in which ground beef has the most flavor. I like steaks bleeding rare, "black & blue" or Pittsburgh-style, but a burger med-well with bacon, thinly sliced grilled (almost caramelized) onions, and freshly grilled raw jalapenos, not the ubiquitous pickled slices that adorn a well made stack of nachos. And for cheese, yellow American please. Who does this really well? Five Guys!

Now at times I do get in the mood for a mushroom and swiss burger with real swiss cheese and properly sauteed mushrooms. The 'shrooms should be sliced about 3/16" thick and seared in a "schtinking hot" pan. That's a European culinary instructor's description of a pan so hot that you can smell the metal. Don't forget the salt and black pepper, and keep them medium-rare in the middle.

Or there's the blue cheese burger with thin slices of red onion sauteed and piled on with blue cheese crumbles. Spend a bunch of money on Roquefort or Stilton if you want, but it all amounts to blue cheese at the end of the day. By the way, if it's an American or English cheese it is appropriate to write "blue" not "bleu". The Soda Shop in Davidson, NC does this one splendidly. Alongside they also serve my favorite burger accompaniment, the long forgotten and nearly impossible to find anymore cottage fry--1/4" thick coins of fried potatoes that almost souffle a little bit when you fry them.

The bun? I don't care, but it should be soft and warm. If you take the time to grill it so it's a little crispy around the outer edges that's nice but not necessary. No fancy kaiser rolls, ciabatta, brioche, or otherwise froo-froo bread. Just a freakin' bun please. Too small for the burger is better than too big.

Grease? Yes. Not juice...grease. There was a place in Matthews, NC many years ago called Roney's Grill--a middle-of-nowhere greasy spoon where they rarely scraped the grill and the old dirty bits that stuck to your burger and burned was an important part of the seasoning. I still can recall
fondly that taste in my mouth's memories! They had the right grease.

Chili? Mr. K's in Charlotte has a decent burger and decent chili...neither are great, but decent. But when combined with the taste of the char grill there...magic!

Condiments? Here's where I differ from most, sadly. No raw vegetables and no sauces for me. Salad goes in a bowl, and as comedian John Pinette says, "Salad is not food". Ketchup doesn't belong on anything, and mustard definitely doesn't go with it. Sorry.

The Penguin in Charlotte...sublime grease. Perhaps the best. Big Block Burger with onion strings on the side.

The Beacon in Spartanburg, SC...the burger about a 7...the onion rings about a 19...the bacon, about 1/4 pound. The combination...my death bed last meal wish!

Lenny's Burger in Phoenix makes a rockin' green chili cheese burger and McDonald's in southwest Colorado even does a good job when the chilies come in from Hatch, NM each summer. Harvey's Wineburger in Phoenix hand forms each patty and steams them in wine at the end, but it's not as amazing as it sounds. Pretty anticlimactic actually.

$500 foie gras and truffle burgers in Vegas? $186 Burger King burger in London? Get the fuck out of here. Who needs that? By the way, I got food poisoning once...at Burger King. Burger King sucks anywhere at any price.

I almost forgot what this article was about. It's about my quest for a great burger in Arkansas. My boss has been talking about this magical place where they have the most amazing thing that could ever be called a hamburger. A place that childhood culinary fantasies are made of. They have a huge cast iron skillet that has about a half inch of grease in it and that's where they make the burgers and the fries. I can't wait. When can we go?

Well, last Saturday night we went. And on the way he decides that the place that has the skillet is in Memphis, and the place we're going he's never been to afterall.

So off we go. Nearly 30 minutes and 15 miles north of Jonesboro on State Highway 49, through hill, dale, and Goobertown we arrive at Roy's First and Last Chance in Paragould, Arkansas.

The story goes that Roy's started out as a one room party shack in the middle of nowhere and as the news spread the place grew. One room was added over here and another over there, but the ground was (and still is) unlevel so each room is on a different plane--very aggravating if you're drunk. Funny too when everyone else
is but you.

Jonesboro is a dry county so Roy's was a treat. Not only can you watch perfectly good rednecks drink more than they should, but you can sit at your table and smoke while you do it. The room is dark (cuts down on the cleaning). The walls and ceilings are made of chipboard and covered with magic marker graffiti from everyone that's ever been in the place.

The tables are wooden picnic tables
that are bolted to the floor with attached benches. There is a bar and in front of that bar is a row of barstools. The stools probably used to belong to a diner and stood in front of the standard counter height counter. Now they are bolted onto a 6x6 that is bolted to the floor in front of the bar to raise them to bar height. The floor is covered by what appears to be roofing paper tacked down with roofing nails.

A modest amount of unrelated memorabilia adorns the walls, one piece being the menu. As I later found out it is actually "A" menu, not "THE" menu. I'll come back to that.

The kitchen is about the size and shape of a bug and vermin filled closet and most people wouldn't eat anything that came from the place, but I don't care.

I suspect there was music playing but I don't remember what. I was fixated on the fact that the hostess that greeted us was also the
bartender, the waitress, and the cook. There were no other visible employees in the place until about 45 minutes later when her husband showed up, had a beer, and made his way to the closet to start grilling burgers and frying cheese balls as fast as he could, which wasn't very fast.

Customers went behind the bar and helped themselves to beer shuffling through the stack of tabs on the bar and marking their purchases. Seemed like business as usual. There was a cocky looking, gum smacking Burt Reynolds type leaning on the backside of the bar. We wondered if he might be Roy, but if he was he certainly didn't seem phased that we and two other tables had been there for nearly an hour and had not been invited to order.

Robo-Waitress did furnish us with several beers and my canned Coke. Said she'd come back shortly to take our order but she didn't.

About 8:45 or so, an hour after we arrived, she approached our table and asked what we wanted. I began asking questions and ordering off of the menu on the wall. When I asked if they had bacon for my burger I was told they didn't. "Why not?", I asked. "Because this is Roy's", was the answer--nothing more.

Then I ordered Spicy Fries off of the menu on the wall and she said that that menu is old and that they don't have most of what's on it, including the prices. I had barely mustered a look of bewilderment when a friend of hers came to our table and handed her a cell phone, call in progress.

She took the phone and started talking, telling the caller that she was in the middle of taking an order and asked if he or she could hold on a second. He or she apparently couldn't hold on so the conversation proceeded. It was unevident whether she was asking us to hold on or asking her friend if they wanted mayonnaise.

We finally got the order in and about 30 minutes later we actually got 3 burgers and 3 orders of fries. Good timing too. I was about to eat the corner off of our picnic table.


This was a half-pound burger, hand-formed, well-done, and cold, but the fries were hot and not bad. Decent grease. The jalapenos on my burger were the pickled ones and the cheese, cold and unmelted white American. It's called Swiss American but I don't know why.

About the time we got done eating the band showed up. As they were setting up, one of the guys stepped into our barroom with the announcement, "Does anyone here have a roll of duct tape in your truck? I'll buy you a beer if you do". The only thing funnier than the fact that someone did was the fact that everyone there except me drove a truck. In fact there's only 6 of us in the county that drive cars, and 4 of us are from out of state.

I have no idea how much the bill was and we never spoke to Robo-Waitress again. She stood at the bar for most of the next half hour or so with a Parliment Light 100 hanging out of her mouth, perusing the bar tabs. I threw ten bucks on the table and we left, never to return most likely.

Back to skillets...

FYI, the World's Largest Functional Frying Pan lives in Rose Hill, North Carolina...my home state. They use it every year for a big chicken festival, and apparently in between festivals it reeks with the putrid stench of old fried chicken. I've never seen it, but I've been to Roy's. My advice--go see the pan.


Oh, and one more thing. If a burger weighs more than 6 ounces (before cooking) it needs to be split into 2 thinner burgers and called a "double". Just my opinion. Hands down the best double meat burger in the country...consistent, affordable, and yummy, is the Double, Double at In and Out Burger in Southern California. You get a double burger the way it's supposed to be, two beef patties and two slices of cheese. Get it with grilled onions and hand-cut fries for about the same price as Mickey D's and 101 times better. For the burger monster in you ask for a 4x4 (not on the menu). That's 4 meat patties and 4 slices of cheese. Yum!

Friday, January 29, 2010

Hold The Onions

A friend sent an interesting email the other day and I wanted to post it here and expand on my personal experience. So many sensational email warnings are circulating these days that Snopes can't research the facts fast enough. This one is quite true however, even if it may be remote.

The author writes:

"I have used an onion which has been left in the fridge, and sometimes I don't use a whole one at one time, so save the other half for later.

Now with this info, I have changed my mind....will buy smaller onions in the future.

I had the wonderful privilege of touring Mullins Food Products, Makers of mayonnaise. Mullins is huge, and is owned by 11 brothers and sisters in the Mullins family. My friend, Jeanne, is the CEO.

Questions about food poisoning came up, and I wanted to share what I learned from a chemist.

The guy who gave us our tour is named Ed. He's one of the brothers. Ed is a chemistry expert and is involved in developing most of the sauce formulas. He's even developed sauce formula for McDonald's.

Keep in mind that Ed is a food chemistry whiz. During the tour, someone asked if we really needed to worry about mayonnaise. People are always worried that mayonnaise will spoil. Ed's answer will surprise you. Ed said that all commercially made mayo is completely safe.

"It doesn't even have to be refrigerated. No harm in refrigerating it, but it's not really necessary." He explained that the pH in mayonnaise is set at a point that bacteria could not survive in that environment. He then talked about the quaint essential picnic, with the bowl of potato salad sitting on the table and how everyone blames the mayonnaise when someone gets sick.

Ed says that when food poisoning is reported, the first thing the officials look for is when the 'victim' last ate ONIONS and where those onions came from (in the potato salad?). Ed says it's not the mayonnaise (as long as it's not homemade mayo) that spoils in the outdoors. It's probably the onions, and if not the onions, it's the POTATOES.

He explained, onions are a huge magnet for bacteria, especially uncooked onions. You should never plan to keep a portion of a sliced onion.. He says it's not even safe if you put it in a zip-lock bag and put it in your refrigerator.

It's already contaminated enough just by being cut open and out for a bit, that it can be a danger to you (and doubly watch out for those onions you put in your hotdogs at the baseball park!)

Ed says if you take the leftover onion and cook it like crazy you'll probably be okay, but if you slice that leftover onion and put on your sandwich, you're asking for trouble. Both the onions and the moist potato in a potato salad, will attract and grow bacteria faster than any commercial mayonnaise will even begin to break down.

So, how's that for news? Take it for what you will. I (the author) am going to be very careful about my onions from now on. For some reason, I see a lot of credibility coming from a chemist and a company that produces millions of pounds of mayonnaise every year.

Also, dogs should never eat onions. Their stomachs cannot metabolize onions. Please remember it is dangerous to cut onions and try to use it to cook the next day, it becomes highly poisonous for even a single night and creates toxic bacteria which may cause adverse stomach infections because of excess bile secretions and even food poisoning."


As a chef of over 25 years I can attest that commercially made mayonnaise is a benchmark product and is pretty much bulletproof. Cooked potatoes however are highly susceptible to promoting foodborne illness. They are a perfect medium for bacterial growth.

Peeled and/or chopped raw garlic that is stored in an oxygen-void atmosphere (ie- canned or vacuum sealed, or in oil) can harbor the bacteria that causes botulism. I was always taught that but I can't prove it. Has to do with sulfur compounds.

Onions I'm not so sure about. In all my years I can remember twice hearing about onions promoting salmonella (from unreliable sources). I don't remember it from several rounds of sanitation certification, but I don't remember a lot of things. I do know that most foods spoil at some some point and eating spoiled food isn't cool.

We are aware in the foodservice industry that what causes foodborne illness is seldom the most obvious suspect. The biggest culprit is cross-contamination (poor food handling practices) and the greatest safeguard is proper hand washing.

Over my career of 27 years in the biz I am aware (not that there haven't been more) of only one time that someone legitimately got sick eating food from one of my kitchens. One day in 2006 something like 5 staff members of a hospital I worked at in southern California got sick eating tuna salad that was made that day. No explanation ever made sense and we never figured out what caused it.

First of all let's look at what it takes to create foodborne illness. Whole books are written on this topic but I will discuss the most commonly known and feared "food poisoning" scenarios. The ones that most people talk about are Salmonella, Botulism, and E.Coli. These illnesses are caused principally by bacteria, and either by ingesting the actual bacteria or the toxins that the associated bacteria produce (in which case you're probably ingesting the bacteria as well).

Bacteria are living creatures, and like most living creatures they require certain conditions to survive and multiply. We live, sleep, eat, drink, and breathe potentially harmful bacteria all of the time, and our immune systems adapt to their presence. Normally we are perfectly healthy and filled with little critters that we don't know are there.

It's when they are allowed to multiply that they cause problems. To do that they require time (could be hours, could be days), temperature (between 41 and 135 deg. F), food (usually sugar/starch, and protein), moisture, oxygen (though some prefer the absence of oxygen), and the right pH (typically neutral, between 6 and 8 on the pH scale).

Mayonnaise is made from oil, eggs, and vinegar. Due to the addition of lemon juice and/or vinegar commercial mayonnaise has an acidic pH level of 3.8 to 4.6. Bacteria cannot live below 4.5. Interestingly, if you try to make mayonnaise without the acid, you will not get mayonnaise. The acid is required to achieve emulsion. Because of the shelf-life extending qualities of commercial mayonnaise it is often used in the kitchen as a base for other cold sauces and dressings.

Potatoes on the other hand offer the perfect moisture content, food availability, and neutral pH to make critters feel right at home. Even if the surface is coated with caustic mayonnaise the potato itself dilutes the acid content and those little suckers bore inside and set up shop. Leave it on the picnic table for a couple hours and it's on.

Professionally, local and federal health codes dictate that if a prepared food product is allowed to sit in the "danger zone" of 41-135 deg F. for more than 4 hours it must be discarded. Good policy to follow at home as well. So why did the chicken legs that mom always left on the counter overnight never make us sick when we ate them two days later? Who knows.

Basically, buy good quality ingredients from reputable sources, store and prepare them properly, wash your hands, and enjoy your life and your food! We'll all die from food poisoning if something else doesn't kill us first.

By the way, an interesting little tidbit I picked up as a beekeeper a few years back--honey (in its natural and undiluted state) is the only food that cannot and will not spoil. Bees rock! I could argue that there are a few other unspoilable foods (just made another word), but that's another article altogether.

Follow up:

After writing this article I actually stumbled across a Snopes article about the email I received. Funny. An interesting read that concurs with what I have written.