Four solid months of complete slackerdom. It was always designed that way (well six weeks of it, at least) so I had no reservations about it. Then, like Don Vito Corleone himself was speaking, I was made an offer I couldn't refuse. So back to the industry I go.

Funny thing is...through all of the hand wringing and guilt for leaving what I knew for 20 years and then returning to the heart of the beast, I have no regrets. Even more so, since I have actually been baking my happy ass *off* (keeping my sour starters healthy, making bread nearly every week...and always thinking of the next modifications I can make to my bread recipe arsenal) plus cooking and discovering new food joints and restaurants, I have rarely felt the need to write about such things anymore.

And yeah, about the writing thing...maybe it was just showing off when I couldn't achieve my dreams. Or showing off just because I wanted, needed and craved the attention about thinking that I knew more about food than everyone else. I am the first to admit that such arrogance lives right inside of me and actually feeds me from time to time. Well, maybe a little bit more than that.

But the humbling aspects of meeting and working with food industry people that really DO know more than you, have more experience than you, and actually have DONE MORE than you puts this arrogant little boy into his proper place. The arrogance is still extant but the quest to learn is much, much stronger and associating with and, more importantly, working with experienced folks is the order of the day, even if I can only do that occasionally because of the new path I have chosen.

Will I ever have my wholesale bakery operation (as I cryptically alluded to back in July)?
I will.

Will I make kick ass bread and other bakery goods?
Always.

Everything is just on a different timeline now...one that is bounded by nothing except my desire to succeed, no matter what job I do.

Indeed. Right now.

10 quarts, no waiting.  Well, as much "no waiting" as bread will allow. Stay tuned for more additions to the new "lab".

When I tell people I'm going to India, everyone says "ooh, how neat, you'll get to eat a bunch of great Indian food!". Well, not to burst anyone's bubble, to me India (actually the city of Chennai or Madras to the Brits) ain't all that. To spare you the excruciating details, let's just say this city is not one of my favorite places to go for a variety of reasons. Food-wise, however, there is some outstanding Indian food here but 2 or 3 days of two meals a day consisting of nothing but curries and dosas and tandoories gets tedious real fast.

On my first night here (which includes 24 hours of travel time, going to bed at 6 am, plus all that jet lag), my co-worker and I (full disclosure: the co-worker in this case, is my manager Irina, who is quite cool all around, pretty fun to travel with, and wee a bit of a chocoholic) were expecting an evening of fine supping at one of the restaurants we went to on the last trip.  But what her friend Kaushal found for us was anything but ordinary for Chennai.  And from the moment I saw Sandy's Chocolate Laboratory and Delicatessen, I knew it would be like Alice falling down the rabbit hole...

I like coffee houses with attitude. I especially like those that reflect that attitude through the clever design to their menus and interiors, and how they handle and treat their customers. Usually, those type of places have folks running them that are very knowledgeable but not arrogantly so. And because these places usually have a rabid interest in serving kick-ass (delicious) coffee beverages, their coffee and roasting skills also reflect the care and attitude.

However, attitude alone is not substitute for good service. And attitude for the sake of having one or trying to prove that you are somehow "hipper" than everyone else by being arrogant, treating your new customers like shit, and generally acting like idiots because you "know better" is even worse. Enter San Jose's Barefoot Coffee Roasters.

Barefoot Coffee Roasters have been around for several years and have become one of the better independent coffee roasters in the Bay Area. I drink their coffee through three or four different, and not affiliated, coffee houses. Their coffee has been consistently good so I have no particular beef with that. In fact, I support businesses like this but find myself less inclined to do so after the treatment I received this morning at their store on Stevens Creek Blvd. in San Jose.

Of all the dumbshit food combos that have blanketed the news lately (A KFC Double Down, anyone? Your delicious heart attack is just moments away!), this one struck some sort of nerve enough to wonder if the aim of all of this is to try and turn us all into (even more) dumb beasts.

What I'm referring to is IHOP's new "Pancake Stackers" that are "delightfully layered with creamy cheesecake..." Yeesh. Why? Aren't pancakes with some maple syrup and a side of bacon or sausage ENOUGH anymore?

Apparently not because IHOP's press release states that they'e topped [their pancakes with] "with one of America's favorite flavors -- cheesecake". Jesus, what's next? A deep fried, beer'n'salt battered slab of back bacon to go with IHOP's take on what makes America's taste buds tick?

Let's take a look at the IHOP scoreboard: Taste Buds 1 , Still Beating Heart 0. Way to go IHOP!

(Thanks to slashfood for the article link for this post.)

12 pounds of pork belly means it's bacon curing time!

This rather stuffed bread rack was the result of just one day of bread production in the CIA's test kitchen. The light next to the enormous deck ovens is already dark-ish in the daytime and even more at 8:30 in the evening when this shot was snapped.

(Although you really can't see them, the cool hand-written script on the masking tape labels for each of the bread is courtesy of the super-cool Melissa Landa...)

Remember those crispy, crackly, loaded-with-holes-inside baguettes that your local baker turns out by the bushel full? Yeah, me neither. There are very few bakeries that really turn them out like that. Granted, some are better than others, and some are really awful.

There are so many factors that go into the making of a truly great baguette that it is a difficult thing to pull off. Since I'm right in the middle of an artisan bread class at the Culinary Institute of America and starting to recognize the difference in preparation of dough for baguettes, it is truly stunning just how much thinking needs to go into producing a baguette that you and others will crave to eat.

This was Chef Aaron Brown's comment during last night's evaluation on the second day of the CIA's The Art and Science of Artisan Bread Baking course, in session this week in St. Helena, California.

Although there are no visuals this time around (no cellphones in the test kitchen, please...), there was a seven-shelf, steel rolling Metro shelving unit (6 feet tall, 10 feet long) that had every shelf filled with ciabatta, pugliese, boule, and baguette. The 100+ loaf baking frenzy started at about 4pm and ended three and a half hours later, each loaf crackling as it hit the 72° kitchen air.

It was a day of experimentation with what is known as "baker's percentage" and varying hydrations for starters. If you haven't already caught on, this is the "science" part of bread baking.

The "art" is how and what you use for flour (of the myriad of varieties), what your dough looks and feels like when you "fold" it and when it is "proofing", how you shape it, and how you bake it off. It all adds up to one heck of a lot of bread.

One of the few constants is my life is my "to-read" book pile which is constantly four and a half feet high. Displaying signs of under-use, it is semi-caked with dust and some of the books in it are a couple of years old from when they were purchased. I just have a notorious habit of buying books that I just can't wait to read then put them on the pile. And guess what happens next? I schedule time in my mind to read that book soon, i.e., somewhere down the line, i.e., when I've got nothing else to do... er, i.e., practically never.

It is brain-dead stupid and I know it. But when I finally get around to reading something truly inspiring (or entertaining) plenty of self-ass-kicking happens. This was definitely the case with Michael Ruhlman's "The Making Of A Chef".

The importance of cooking for those that you love (or just like a whole bunch) is the basis for a feast. Planning, scheming, and turning out food for a large crowd is thrilling, vexing, exhausting and supremely satisfying. The latter half of 2009 started and ended with large scale feasts, one in Los Angeles and one in San Jose. This is the second of two posts covering these events in detail.

(photo by wm. christman)

"It's a New Braunfels Bandera offset smoker."

Many years ago, my friend Tom had been researching Texas Barbecue and landed upon this unit as a potential (holy) grail for home barbecue. Looking over at the matte black finished smoker with its squat firebox and tall chimney, I immediately wanted one. The problem was availability. New Braunfels was a small Texas company with growing pains that didn't allow them much in the way of left coast sales. But with 40+ phone calls and two months later, I located one. Two weeks later I had done my first smoking run with a few racks of St. Louis style cut pork ribs.

Every three or four years since then, my wife Janet and I put on a giant-sized Texas barbecue. We do it because it's fun and we love Texas-style barbecue (low and slow) and frankly, the same amount of wood is used whether or not the smoking chamber is filled with meat or not. Barbecue travels well and leftovers last a long time. Most importantly, our friends always have a good time. Billed as "Bill and Jan's Texas Barbecue Party", we have been upping our game every time out for the past 12 years. The first official one had about 20 people and maybe 40 pounds of meat. Second one was 43 people and 86 pounds of meat. With the 2009 version, we were out to set a personal record. Here's how it came together...

The importance of cooking for those that you love (or just like a whole bunch) is the perfect reason for a feast. Planning, scheming, and turning out food for a large crowd is thrilling, vexing, exhausting and supremely satisfying. The latter half of 2009 started and ended with large scale feasts, one in Los Angeles and one in San Jose. The next two posts will cover those events in detail.

(photo by wm. christman)

The usual modus operandi when I go to Los Angeles is to get together with Les, who is my one of my best friends down there, and proceed to spend two and a half days visiting as many interesting restaurants, food trucks, farmer's markets and bars as our stomachs can handle. Usual (dietary) caution is thrown to the wind as we exist for one thing during those times: feasting.

In June of 2009, as we were planning another weekend of sheer gluttony, we decided to take one of those days and cook for handful of our LA friends. Since it was in the middle of a sweltering LA summer, it seemed natural to do a Mediterranean-themed summer grill.

And as most of our feasts go, we over-planned with the expectation that we'd scale back anyway. The initial menu had items like fig and prosciutto flatbread and beer-can chicken but as we planned shopping and judged time those seemed to over-complicate the theme. So we settled on a majority of cold apps, some excellent locally baked bread from the Village Bakery in Silverlake, two or three different kinds of marinated and grilled beef and chicken with potatoes and herbed grilled vegetables. Wine, bread pudding, ice cream and fine bourbon rounded out the deal.

Mark K. of Kihei, Hawaii writes, "Are we going to hear anything about Indian food??"

Well Mark, yes and no. As it usually happens with good food, the actual item disappears before any pictures can be taken. And what is a ...but the devil... posting without a delicious looking photo to (hopefully) make you drool?

And so it happened on my current business trip to India with the carrot halwa at Chennai's Eden, a restaurant with a modern Indian bent started by some local hotel management graduates.

I got the chance to click a few photos of their carrot halwa before the table's still-hungry occupants licked the plate clean. This version is moderately dense and carrot-y sweet. The condensed milk pushes the richness over the top. In smallish spoonfuls it's really good...and you'll go on tilt if you slurped up the whole thing in one go. Not that I have ever done that.

You can see a recipe for carrot halwa here or just go ahead and Google "carrot halwa".

Say "barbecue" to just about anyone and you're likely to get "ribs" as a response. I have been doing barbecue, in various forms, for years. And while one could endlessly debate the different methods of barbecue meat prep, technique, rubs and sauces, I prefer my rack of ribs cut in a "St. Louis" style.

Janet and I recently hosted our "once-every-three-or-four-years" Texas Barbecue Party and as I was doing prep for the chicken and ribs, I grabbed the camera to document the technique that Tom Dowdy taught me many years ago.