A good BBQ operation looks more like a furnace than a kitchen. The “small” metal boxes are the actual pits, the pit master is stoking the coals in the coal pit and moves them into the individual BBQ pits.
As was obvious to most, last week’s “Jonas goes mad” string of emails, YouTube links, and those letters some of you got … April Fools and all.
To the few who were confused – I apologize. I actually concocted this months in advance and the rather … iffy … timing with a real world change in my life was neither intended nor actually much thought about by me when I implemented the prank.
That said, I am just back from Ohio where I took this insanely cool photo:
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a 1894 Rumford. First of its kind with Gas/Coal hybrid firing it didn’t have the 1920s enamel coating so it was a beast to clean.
The cool part, here, is the dual-firing that had to be done in a way that wouldn’t blow the whole stove up if the gas side overheated. To do this, a secondary vent was laid and had to be connected to an external area of the house.
These stoves still, however, killed a few cooks by flaring up in inopportune moments.
I will be incommunicado for the next two, three, days and then it’s Los Angeles time. Can’t wait to eat, talk, and visit the Magic Apple, America’s largest magic supply store.
2012 has been a hard year for me. I have spent years trying to perfect the art of cooking into a new medium, a place where job became craft, craft became art, and art transcended itself to move from center piece to the edges, a canvas for new experiences and experiments, no longer l’art pour l’art but art as a medium to enable new art and new craft.
What I sought was love. Love for my medium, love for the craft itself, and love as the ethereal medium in which I was allowed to love and be loved. Feasts I had many. Love I sought.
When I found it, the red hot glowing crystal inside the chamber of emotions I was unafraid. I grasped it with both hands, screaming in joy and agony over the sensations that washed over my body and mind. I wanted it, I held it, and then … as quickly as I had found it, it burned me. Betrayed, misunderstood, and battered I found myself in the gutter of life, unwilling, unable, to move on. Held to this plane of existence by a strand of hair I fought to regain footing in reality.
This is when it struck me, when I felt it. It was coming. My pain had not been in vain, my agony not been for naught. I heard the voices. No longer was I a battered victim of love’s cruel jokes and fate’s heartless contempt, I had ascended. And in the glory of the voices ftagn pthah I heard my calling. NOT FEAST, NOT MAN, NOT WITCH, NO That is not dead which can eternally lie BUT LOVE MUST I SEEK. Vri’leah Wgah! Nagl ftagn!
IN ME THE VOOOCIES THYE CRY AND DEMAND MY OBDEBIEDANCE. I MSUT NOT HETISATE BEFROE MY MNID SLIPS AGAIN ONE LAST WORD I MUST BEFORE THE MADNESS HOLDS OF ME FTAGN PTAH IT IS COMING THE OLD ONE AWAKENS THERE IS NO HIDING SAVE YORUSLEF RUN BFEORE IS IT TOO LTAE I KNOW WHRE THE OLD AND WITH STRANGE AEONS EVEN DEATH MAY DIE ONE RISES AND THE END OF TI
(as much as I dislike the idea of this in most cases, “like” festcraft on Facebook and get a free advance copy eBook)
Beef chapter: three wonderful places I am writing about, a primer on meat cuts, an intro to curing, storing, and much more, a few recipes, a box on transglutaminase (meat glue), and an interview with a German Master Butcher who’s done this since 1952.
Produce chapter: I am visting a self-sustaining farm in Oklahoma, foragers in Ohio, and Chez Panisse in Berkeley in April. Also building a seasonality calendar and adding some extremely cool recipes for vegetarian dishes and vegetables as main elements.
Dessert Chapter: A former Wolfgang Puck pastry chef talks about making desserts for a diverse population and how to deal with Coeliac disease, a pastry chef shows how to make vegan cupcakes, and (hopefully) a marshmallow goddess talks about flavors that work and don’t work. In the techniques section we make the perfect crepe and nitrogen ice cream, talk about the history of desserts in America, and then visit the Romans. Recipes range from pies to almond brittle and pecan snacks. Also a small addendum for weight lifters and runners on the go.
Alternative Sources: covering a little bit more about foraging. Also growing your own produce and fruits, an interview with a hunter, a conversation about backyard chickens, and the rise of urban farms.
Utah just passed legislation that makes it illegal to seek employment under false pretenses, namely the intent to document the ongoings inside companies such as factory farms. At over one million pigs raised and slaughtered in CAFO farms in Utah, this law is designed (albeit not officially heralded as such) to keep animal rights activists and their cameras out of farms.
Writes MoJo:
The Iowa bill shifted tactics—it criminalized posing as a job-seeker to get employment with the intent of documenting factory farm practices, a tactic that has been used to great effect by animal welfare groups.
While Iowa’s similar attempt simply tried to make it illegal to sneak cameras into factory farms, this one is a little more insidious since it addresses all elements of investigative reporting.
On one hand I agree with the farmers and ranchers and any other business – seeking employment under false pretenses is a bad thing. It costs the employer money, yields less than motivated employees, and results in more stringent, costly, and extensive hiring processes. On the other hand I am still not a fan of the secrecy under which food is produced in the United States. Instead of banning cameras on premises pass laws that make it mandatory for such operations to open their doors to the public and allow filming to credentialed reporters.
The CAFO and corn industries, closely linked in many ways to begin with, also benefit from vast governmental subsidies, support, and protection. And nothing that takes taxpayer money in tax cuts or subsidies should be allowed to operate away from those tax payers. The law is dangerous as it can now be used to simply impeach every whistleblower by claiming they had not sought employment under the correct pretenses. And, as so often, a $B industry easily beats a minimum wage manure mover in court, of only by outlasting them. Utah won’t be the last place to pass laws designed to protect inhumane and shady practices in those CAFO pens, it’s now time to act. Call your congresscritter and make sure the President knows. After all, he’s supposedly an advocate of healthy and non-industrial food.
With AB1678, the bill introduced in the California assembly that would make it almost impossible for Food Trucks to park anywhere downtown in the state due to ban-miles around schools, even harsher restrictions already in place in San Francisco, and other states and cities evaluating similar measures or making food truck operations prohibitively hard to start – what is happening?
Are we in a hype-spiral that has blown something originally very small and benign into a force that endangers our children? I don’t think so.
Food trucks are definitely surfing a hype, I am not sure they are a hype in and by itself. The hype these mobile food service operations are attached to is bigger: the, as I call it, New American Quest For Food.
Traditionally, restaurants have never been one to kill hypes. We all profit and benefit from this quest, we all cater to it through menu management, marketing, and other strategies. Many restaurants also started their own food trucks, getting into the business with an advantage few independent operators have – a full kitchen, a developed menu that can be adapted, and existing financial, social, and technical resources (and this starts with a place to park at night).
The drivers behind the anti-Food Truck movements are partially ill-informed politicians who are seeking quick solutions and scapegoats and find them in the weakest link in the food service industry (a win is a win, no matter how weak the opponent, something PETA and others have been doing for decades), and the owners and operators of fast food chains and drive through eateries.
To them, the newcomers are a threat in the area of fast service while providing individualized meals instead of mass produced fare. Add into this that the same companies who supply fast food also supply school lunch ready-mades and you will understand why those companies are so hell-bent on making sure the choices for, especially, young diners are between McChickenKing and the school cafeteria.
Walk-in and sit-down dining is often prohibitive enough to school children, students, and even businesspeople, that the fast food and in-house cafeterias do not have to fight them as hard. Put a mobile truck that can be parked in an office space parking lot or near a bus stop into the equation and those providers will lose money.
Food trucks aren’t new. Their prevalence and quality is, relatively, and that scares the old, packaged food, guard.
Update: on G+ Rich Thomas remarks:
I am not sure you have it right here. Listening to the debate about food trucks in the Bay Area, you hear a lot of complaints from sit down restaurants, not just fast service restaurants. You hear these restauranteurs talk about the advantage food trucks have by not needing to pay rent or property tax. They also talk about food trucks being able to move during the slow times. I think you are not giving a full reading of who is supporting AB1678
Further discussion about that part there.
Well, that was quite the time of no feastcraft. I am swamped with work and personal stuff and whenever I sat down to write something about something something else came up. And, yes, “something” is the perfect word for all that.
Thursday I’ll be heading out on a trip to Boulder, CO, for the weekend and would love some tips and hints and pointers at places to go and things to see, both on the drive north and back south and in Boulder itself. There’s a museum I found that’s about an hour out of the way that has a collection of victorian cookware that found its way into the States through immigrants. So I’ll be going there.
I’m also still looking for things to go see in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Nevada…
Tour De Food
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