Currently: Russian Circles, in particular this song.

Among the updates:

- The entire page itself has had a face-life
- Links have been updated
- The bio and culinary synopsis sections have been made current and more cohesive.
- I changed up the old “Inspirations” page, and divided into separate pages for  both savory and pastry influences, as well as adding both musical and visual artists whose work I admire and also inspires and moves me creatively.
- There is a new sidebar item with a feed from from Twitter account.

It’s time for a fresh clean slate for new adventures.

On I-75 S, just north of the TN line.

It’s been almost a month now since Sarah and I made the move to Atlanta. And seeing as how it’s been several months since I made a substantial blog post (and well over a year since I posted with regularity), I figured it was best to begin this new adventure witha nice proper post about the move and what we’ve been up to.

The move went pretty well. Aside from the passenger side rear-view mirror falling off our moving truck just before we left, we had not a single incident on the nearly 500 mile trip, shy of a small stretch of construction just before we hit Tennessee.

The rear view mirror in question.

Not to say I wasn’t worried though. When we drove down apartment shopping a month prior to the move; I had a nasty bout of vertigo come on out of nowhere while we driving through the mountains between the Kentucky border and Knoxville, TN. Sarah finished that 50 mile stretch on the drive down, and I braved it on the way back to Louisville. The thought of driving a large moving truck (I’ve hardly drove anything larger than a compact car) and wrestling with vertigo honestly scared the shit out of me. I think worrying about the now sumo-taped rear-view mirror flying off kept my mind at bay and my worries were put to rest. Having a 14 month old we decided it was best if we broke up the drive into two legs: a 2 hour drive to my in-laws to visit and stay the night before heading out to finish drive the final stretch another nearly 7 hour adventure. Did I forget to mention that the first 2 hours I drove blind out my passenger side – having to stay in the far right lane, and call Sarah on the phone tospot me anytime I needed to pass slow moving traffic? At times that was crazy scary. Thankfully my father-in-law had a whole roll of sumo tape laying around to mummify the thing before we made the larger portion of the drive.

Upon arrival at around 7pm (rear view mirror still intact), we began unpacking as much as we could before darkness set in. Just before dark, we were met with a full on deluge of rain. When I say this rain was intense; I’m not kidding… A full on torrential downpour, and we had 1/4 of the moving truck unloaded and sitting on the sidewalk! Aside from the obvious downside to the rain, it was still welcome: I was literally soaked in sweat by that point.

Upon arrival at my in-laws, a rainbow.

I’ve got to say this though: I never thought I wouldn’t miss fine-dining. It’s just so nice to kinda take a step back and take everything into perspective. It’s nice to actually (and quite literally) get my hands dirty with product again. We both come home smelling like a campfire as a result of the pecan and hickory smoke we’re enveloped in daily. I sweat until my clothes stick to me, and drips into my eyes. I hardly wear my glasses in the kitchen between the heat, sweat and smoke film.

…And I wouldn’t take one step backward.

Been laying low for a while now, so I guess it’s time to say something.
By the beginning of July, Sarah and I will be moving to Atlanta and will be working with Lush Life Group, working on their new restaurant project. More details as we get close to an opening date… but for now, stay tuned.

Sarah and I were about to take a job as co-chefs at a restaurant here in Louisville; but started to get a lot of precautionary information from colleagues of ours that made us uncomfortable proceeding any further…

In the meantime…

Here’s some photos of dishes I’ve been doing at work in the past few months.

Valentine’s Day Dessert 2010:
smoked strawberry-maple fluid, toasted hazelnut, chocolate, jalapeno film, graham cracker, strawberry-frangelico cake, jalapeno-pickled strawberry, meringue, strawberry maserated strawberry

Parsnip, Grapefruit, Caramel:
Parsnip pound cake, parsnip-tahitian vanilla puree, pine nut-oat praline streusel, caramel powder, sumac, parsnip crisps, grapefruit cells, grapefruit-yogurt sorbet.

Bananas Foster 2012:
Rum caramelized banana, flexible chocolate, curried custard, brazil nuts, lime, plantain, brown sugar ice cream

Zen:
Sesame oil-black pepper sponge cake, ginger sable dough puree, bourbon barrel soy caramel, matcha green tea powder, passion fruit fluid gel, sesame crumble, foie gras ice cream

Elements of a Traditional Holiday Dinner:
Cranberry pound cake, sweet potato-orange terrine, preserved cranberry puree, five spice meringue, apple cider fluid gel, duck fat short dough, freeze dried raisins and cranberries, cornbread stuffing ice cream

Coffee & Doughnuts:
Semolina-cardamom fritter, coffee-chocolate soil, chocolate poached pear, pear gelee, semolina shortdough, pear-chocolate stock fluid gel, marzipan-thai long pepper ice cream

Big news coming soon, as well as a more timely stream of posts.

And now the fun starts…

A few sentences turned into a few paragraphs (as I knew it would…) but I did highlight a few key points in bold that I thought were most important.

I had fun thinking back to the whole experience, and as long as I took the time to write it, why not share the body of it here?

———-

For the dining public, I think underground dinners are a new way for them to approach dining. There’s a certain air of mystery to it: oftentimes, they don’t know what the menu is, who their dining companions are, or if it’s going to be held in a space that even resembles what you’d call a “dining room” It makes the entire process exciting again, and almost forces people to throw caution to the wind and just focus on what the food and experience of dining is all about. For a lot of diners and a lot of chefs, food is about sustenance and also about making/spending money to support that ideal. For us, our dinner gave us the opportunity to bring back the whole “performance art” aspect to it, and to rekindle the notion that dining should be an experience – not just in the company you eat with, but what you eat, how you eat it, and with flavors you didn’t know you would/could want to eat.

As chefs, it served as an important vehicle for us. We’re both young, and aren’t running our own kitchen – yet we both have our very own ideas of cuisine and what we think it is/could be. Oftentimes that may fall contrary to what we do on a daily basis where we work – It’s our chef’s vision and we continue to help realize this vision for the restaurant and it’s guests. Doing an underground dinner offered us the opportunity to stand on our own two feet, do our own thing and quite literally say: “This is who we are, this is what we do, here’s what we have to offer… Nice to meet you!” For chefs already in the capacity to “do their own thing”, it offers them the chance to focus on that nights meal and experience solely. They’re able to take more risks and perhaps do things that are a bit too out there for their regular restaurant guest… things that simply aren’t feasible to put on the menu on a regular basis. For cities like Louisville, that aren’t nearly as progressive or avant-garde food-wise as say Chicago or New York, it’s hard to take that risk on what “I want to do” vs. what are people really going to buy or understand. Underground dinners tend to attract the kind of people that aren’t afraid to occasionally take a risk cuisine-wise, and they know to expect the unexpected – from the food, the location, the entire experience; and that makes our job as the chefs a whole lot easier -  and more enjoyable. We can simply focus on giving them what we want them to experience, and not worrying about any preconceived notions of what their experience should be.

Reading these words now, I see how the ethos of pastry work in general has become much of my work demeanor – for better or worse, and to my benefit and fault.

Daniel talks about how profits for dessert can run quite high; as low cost of ingredients keep food cost low… Though often labor costs can run high, especially when you consider time spent versus end result. He also notes how the dessert course can be as much as twice and profitable than your starters and main courses… but the have to be marketed well.

Few seem to understand the relative economics of this.

(bear with me here, this part could be especially boring to most…Skip past all the numbers and percentages if you want… I’m just trying to make a point.)

Consider this:

A server could push to sell two $13 apps to a table running 30-40% at cost, sell two main courses at $32 at 30-40% cost, or sell two $10 dessert running 5-10% cost.

Here’s a cost analysis of the base revenue from the table with $26 in apps, versus the table with $64 in main courses, of the one with $20 in desserts – with the theoretical food costs mentioned above:

$26 in apps at 30%, cost is $7.80, with a profit of $18.20. At 40%, cost is $10.40 with a profit of $15.60.

$64 in mains at 30%, cost is $19.20, with a profit of $44.08. At 40%, cost is $25.6 with a profit of $38.40.

With the desserts, $20 at 5% costs $1.00 to make, with a profit of $19.00, at 10% cost is $2.00, with a profit of $18.00.

The argument is especially compelling when you compare the apps versus desserts, since they’re at a much closer price-point, the total check average difference is less varied: from an economic standpoint, is most situations, it is more financially sound for a restaurant to encourage it’s waitstaff to push for dessert sales rather than apps, to benefit the restaurants bottom line and profits margins.

But then I’m left with my continued quandary:

Why pay to outsource dessert products, upwards of 40-50% at cost, instead of justifying the need for a dedicated pastry chef?

Sad, sad, sad.

The argument still remains: “well, people just aren’t as likely to order dessert…” While this is very much true in some respects, it also suffers from that same negative attitude that most chefs/operators (with no pastry background) have when it comes to the pastry chef, pastry program and desserts in general… It’s simply an afterthought. It’s sub-standard, not worth the effort, or just not as important to the meal, dining experience/whatever as the savory food is. So there is no push for the staff to sell. Simply looking at the bill, a server sees $26 on the bill for 2 apps, versus $20 for 2 desserts. And as the restaurant business is… most FOH staff is largely coming and going. Few intend to be career-servers, so little look at the long term benefits for both themselves and their restaurant. Simply live in the moment and make as much cash as you can each night. From a purely monetary, cash in MY pocket perspective… I can’t say I blame them. Though from an operator’s standpoint, I’m shocked that few don’t realize or even care about the reality of the economics behind this. The profit margins on desserts rivals that of wine and spirits and Daniel does a wonderful jobs of putting it into terms even the most inept could understand. (And does it in a manner far less complicated and wordy that I have in this entry… but, “Hey, making pastries is what I do for a living and is something I’m passionate about… so yeah, I’m likely to sound a little irritated and ramble on.”

Fortunately for me, I have been employed by some chefs who truly see the value of having a dedicated pastry chef. And quite frankly, I wouldn’t be where I am today if I wasn’t given a long leash, free reign, and a lot of trust and time to find my own voice. Biggest thanks go to Todd and Duane for teaching, trusting and pushing me to go further and be better.

I am the first to acknowledge that I not the world’s best pastry chef, and there are plenty far more knowledgeable and talented than myself. Being self taught and from a savory background… I never got the traditional training, nor was it well rounded, nor did I have a mentor in pastry. I continue to draw my inspiration from the savory kitchen and am completely honest when I get questions about baking bread, wedding cakes, classic French pastry, and the like… I could fumble my way through it with a recipe… but I’m by no means an expert and do have my shortcomings. That is a big part of my pastry inability. On the other hand, I can blend flavors, marry flavors, and taste in my head like no other. My savory background makes me a little more fearless than those with only classic pastry training, and I’m just as likely to be found incorporating soy sauce, truffle oil or olives in my desserts as I would chocolate or vanilla. Modern/progressive cookery is also more applicable to the pastry kitchen than to the savory side (Wylie at WD~50 would beg to differ), and not having the traditional training, I’ve got now problem “breaking the rules” of classic pastry… since frankly, I never got the memo and told what the rules were. So I’ve taken the opportunity to be a bit of a pastry loose-cannon, and continually learning as much as I can about food gums, hydrocolloids, food starches, etc. and applications for them, all the while incorporating them and traditional savory techniques into my pastry program… In addition, I also use this knowledge to enhance elements of our savory cuisine for the restaurant.

My whole initial intention with following this path into pastry wasn’t to stick solely to it. I wanted to be better, more well rounded and shaped than a lot of chefs out there who only know how to grill, sear, roast and toss a salad. I’ve spent 10 years in kitchens, of that I’ve spent 6 years doing pastry – 3 years almost exclusively. I’ve also worked in a wine and spirits store deliberately to expand my beverage knowledge and to gain valued experience in guest service skills… And at this point, I feel like I’ve gotten a lot out of the whole “restaurant experience”… A little of this, a lot of that, some of this, some more of that…

At this point I’ve been typing for so long, I’m starting to move away from my initial point of this entry, so I’ll try to bring it full circle with a quote from Daniel from Letters to a Young Chef:

“Cooking is all about speed and creativity in technique. It is also about the ability to improvise, to accommodate variations in ingredients, while maintaining consistency in the finished product. Pastry is the opposite. It is less about spontaneous creativity and more about precision and measuring. Instead of speed it is about waiting. Pastry ingredients–flour, sugar, butter, sometimes chocolate–are much more uniform than the basic ingredients in appetizers and main courses. In a way, pastry is more like chemistry, whereas the rest of cooking is rather like music. Both have a written-out plan, but in baking you rarely deviate and in cooking you must change and adapt. Classical versus jazz, if you will.”

I now truly see how I have embodied this and how the rhythm and movement needed for a pastry chef has changed my rhythm in the kitchen. I one was frantic, fast and hurried. Now I am fluid, constant, measured and calm. It has it’s pros and cons. It really does… And few of my fellow cooks (past and present) can truly understand it. And I know it has to aggravate them as much as it aggravates me that I can’t just reprogram my brain over night to re-adjust to working “the other side”…

Things that being a pastry chef will do to you/make you realize/most cooks without pastry experience don’t understand about pastry chefs:

The OCD need to measure everything to the exact gram or fraction of a gram; The need to have everything labeled, clean, neat and in the same spot every time (often alphabetized); the methodical slow, precise movements and measures; Having recipes that I do not deviate from/or do so cautiously, or hell – the notion of having recipes anyway – that shit rarely exists in the savory kitchen. For every moment it takes to cook and plate a hot app or entree, there is just as much time spent beforehand and during service plating a dessert. It may take you 1-2 minutes to plate a dish, and me 2-3 for a dessert… but how long did you spend prepping and cooking it a la minute, versus all the pre-prep devoted to the pastry kitchen… It’s all relative, but in a differant way, and hard to see unless you’ve worked both sides. (the argument of working both sides is equally true when comparing the FOH and BOH… few rarely understand both perspectives.)

I haven’t wrote in a few months, so this entry is long overdue, and has been building for a while. Thanks go to Daniel’s words for inspiring me to sit down and write again. It feels good.

He’s two months old now, and the light of our life.