Salami, salame, salumi

After hours of detailed cutting and explanation Francois needed a break. His lovely wife Christine laid out a spread of fresh fruit and vegetables. We brought several recently crafted sticks of salame and cured meat to a cutting board. I was still trying to develop a fondness for salame. Of course I love Bratwurst sizzling on the grill. And who can pass up breakfast sausage or bacon on a Sunday morning, but eight kinds of dried salame? Francois and Stephan kept talking about something called Nostrano. To me it sounded like a Sicilian crime family.

But then Francois reached and sliced off a paper-thin piece. He lifted the slice to his nose and smiled. He said, “Look at it, look at the particles inside and the clear delineation between the lean meat and the fat, smell the pleasantly mild, acidic quality.” He put it down and picked up the whole sausage. He gave the cut end a squeeze and pointed out the firmness, the color and the way no moisture or melted fat appeared. Put that way I began to think I might learn to like it after all. I was definitely ready to try some now that it had been described in such a cultured way.

I gave in and tasted all eight along with three varieties of cured ham. By the end of lunch I was sure of two things; I had a new appreciation for artisanal salame and I would be requiring a renal regulator to balance the recent influx of salt into my system. A few pints of Alaskan IPA might do the trick.

April 17, 2012

I don’t often take aspirin but when I do I eat three. Is Alaskan beer stronger than those in the lower 48? It might be the altitude, or maybe the latitude. Regardless of the after effects from the Midnight Sun Brewery work in the shop began on time. After all we have plenty to do this week. The five of us are to transform four mature hogs into an exciting collection of Salumi. The list includes Atriaux, Boudin Noir, Rillettes, Pate de Campagne, Headcheese, Mousse de Foie, Frankfurter, Saucisson de Lyon, Cotechino, Saleme Nostrano, Sopressata, and Chorizo, Jambon Royal, Speck Tirolese, Lonzo Coppa and several whole loin Porketta Roasts.  Once we finish we will serve many of them at a grand banquet for fifty hosted by the proprietor of Palmer Alaska’s finest and most progressive restaurant, Turkey Red.

We began work today at 9am, a late start for a baker. There seems to be no rush to begin work up here because the days are so long. The sun comes up at a very casual pace, lighting up the sky long before it breaks over the mountain. It crosses overhead by the lengthiest possible route and then takes it’s gay ol’ time deciding to go back down. It’s almost indecisive. I watched it set yesterday and it seemed to hang just above the horizon for hours.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Saturday April 21, 2012

Several steps are require to make a proper pate’ en croute. There is the pie dough and it’s handling, there is the pate’ and it’s garnishes and after baking there is the addition of the aspic or jelly to fill the gaps inside created by steam between the crust and filling. If there is a problem in the early part of the process a simple job becomes a complex chain of repairs and half-assed triage. Fortunately I am an expert at half-assed triage. The dough made with freshly rendered lard was stunning in it’s flavor, texture and handling qualities. The pate’ was fresh and delicately seasoned. The trouble started as it baked. It expanded from the heat in the oven and upon cooling contracted leaving fault-lines and crevasses’ across the top and down the sides of the assembly. No time to ruminate on what I did wrong, how would I be able to fill the gaps in my terrines with jelly if it was all going to leak out? How could I serve this? Am I going to let down the team? My lateral thinking took over. It was essentially a plumbing problem. I needed to plug the holes in the crust before pouring in the warm aspic.  A bit of raw Pie dough might patch a small hole but these terrines looked like a train wreck. I unmolded each terrine and lifted it gently onto a sheet of saran wrap careful to put all the dough pieces back in the same place they started.

Mitigate the damage. Work with your back to the chef. It was all coming back to me now from my days at the CIA. Francois walked passed at one point when the pate’ lay on the table looking like road-kill. Wisely he walked on. Once enveloped completely in Saran I slid them back into the mold and injected them with aspic from a narrow funnel. The finished slices will look perfect on the silver platters as they enter the dining room, if they gel up in time.

Saturday evening April 21, 2012

We transferred our finished products to the Turkey Red restaurant. Jason and Stephan blended in with the kitchen and crew and got our tightly rolled porketta roasts into the oven. As they cooked we helped prepare the rest of the food. We laid out platter after platter of sliced Salumi. The pate’ firmed up and sliced well. I needed a chart to reference the identities of each variety of Charuterie. After that last couple of hours in the kitchen we straightened our hair, took off our aprons and tucked in our shirttails to sit down in the dining room and enjoy our food with some of Turkey Reds best customers. We ate like kings and had a wine pared with every course. After dinner we retired to an Alaskan saloon close by to unwind and toast our teacher and generous hosts.

We add bacterial cultures to our salame to create a healthy environment where great new flavors develop. Francoise handled our workshop in the same manner. We were showered with valuable wisdom of his art and craft.  And for good measure he inoculated us with a longing for the small farm and the neighborhood Salumiere. He shared his vision of an economy more palatable then the sterile factory feeding that fills our stomach today.

I’m home now making arrangements to assist a farmer with finishing his pig for slaughter and working on a way to procure a quart or two of fresh pigs blood and a supply of freshly rendered lard.

Success is not an option

Ninety percent of restaurant start-ups fail. We found the ten percent solution. Something in the following stories may reveal our secret.

His shiny head butted me in the hip as he lifted his load off the floor. Tyler thumped the big bag of flour onto the table next to me as we discussed what to do with our pathetic pastry cook. He’d shown up late for work and still felt we owed him something. I was trying to take a day off and appeared calm standing next to Tyler in the sweltering kitchen. He was more a part of the environment. Flour and dough bits stuck in the hair of his sweaty tattooed arms, tomato sauce spattered on his damp tank top.

Veins pulsed up the sides of his skull and the rings on his fingers glittered as he shook. “I’m going to be sick, you come tomorrow and work with him. I can’t do it anymore.” Regretfully I committed to a 3:00 am shift, again.

The bakery is compact yet it serves the small population of Kilauea and the visitors who drive passed it every day. A sign at the end of the road reads, “The Northern most inhabited point in the Hawaiian Islands.” Beyond it is a cliff that falls into the lonely expanse of the Pacific. It was beauty that put us here in the fix we were in. With its shoulders wrapped in a green shawl of rain forest and its toes dipped in the blue ocean Kilauea was irresistible.

It’s a rural community originally sprouted around a sugar plantation. Weathered little homes in front of dirt sidewalks lined narrow streets. The tin roofed elementary school is so old the doors still have skeleton keys. A quiet Post Office, a little Market, and a few shops for tourists make up the place. Move here and people will soon know you whether you intended it or not. After nine pm the dark silence in town can be stupefying.

One morning, years ago in Kilauea a man gave up his struggle with free enterprise leaving behind a floundering bakery. The Hawaiians sat in the shade and watched. Soon half a dozen would be captains of industry were vying for the space.  We out maneuvered them.

At 2:00 am July fifth 1991 I rolled over in bed to turn off the alarm the first day of business had began. Katie feigned sleep. I brewed coffee and grabbed my old bike for the short ride over to the soon to be prosperous Kilauea Bakery. Laying Trusty Rusty by the steps of the cottage that was to make our fortune I looked up at the night sky. A palm tree took a dark bite out of the star lit sky. Standing in the balmy air on top of the worn plank stairs I put the key into the lock and let myself in. The only sign of life was the chatter of refrigerators laboring to keep their new loads of food cold. We had spent a month transforming the place and I could still smell the fresh white paint that we brushed over the termite riddled walls.

To say our bakery was in a shopping center might conjure too common a picture. Kong Lung Center was a cluster of old buildings that had served as a commissary for the Kilauea Sugar Plantation. Our cottage was eighty years old. Built of first growth redwood plank, it had once held horse equipment; it was a Tack shed. New paint and a linoleum floor gave a clean, food-service look to the inside. The outside with its wide eves, wooden porch, and plantation paint was left untouched to reflect its fading past.

The interior was divided between the service counter and the kitchen yet a customer who climbed the stairs and opened the wooden screen door with a squeak could step to the counter and see the ovens roaring away against the kitchen’s back wall.

My first task was to scale out a bowl of ingredients and begin mixing the inaugural batch of bread. I’d been cleaning the big mixer the previous day and had absent-mindedly left the mixing speed up high. In my distracted state, being proud or anxious that morning, I hadn’t noticed. It was in the highest gear, reserved only for whipping cream. A speed so fast those seven hundred pound bread mixers will actually walk across the floor from the spinning vibration. Decades of struggle began the instant I pushed the button. The explosion of motion flung a forty-pound snotty mixture of flour and water over pristine tables, shelves and ceilings. It just took a couple of seconds before my startled mind reacted by slamming the “off” button but by then I was dripping with white runny globs and shaking flour dust from my hair.

Thinking back now I hadn’t realized the significance of the moment. It marked the beginning of days filled with endless explosions of food and broken down equipment and hours when customers and employees alike seemed a bit unusual and in constant need of attention or counseling. Like a Venus flytrap, the bakery had engulfed its next victim. A food service operation’s inherent movement toward chaos initiated a drawn out and brutal kind of therapy on me.

I swept frantically. Taking time to wipe up globs of spatter resembling paper mache’ paste wasn’t planned. Something made me pause alone in the florescent light. In what would become a repetitive phenomenon when things seemed to go inexplicably haywire I detected the ghostly fragrance of the previous bakers Swisher Sweet cigars. The odor would hang in the air most often in that last cold hour before dawn.

Our first paying customer was a jovial soul named Thea Carlyle. She banged on the door in the dark. On her way to open the mini-mart close by she had promised to check in. I hoped that maybe she was an angel of mercy coming to stand by and help with the mess. What she had in mind was hot coffee and the privilege of handing over the first dollar bill. We wrote something about luck and prosperity in the greenback’s margins and tacked it to the wall. She left with fresh pastry and coffee and I dashed back to my mess.

By 6:30, with a pastry case full of Danish and crispy breads, there were at once two jobs to do. Sell everything before it became stale and then wash the pots. Standing at the low sink faced me away from people entering through the front door. While bent at the sink I listened for the squeak of the screen door. I scrubbed and rinsed and wondered about things.

The morning rolled into afternoon with a scattering of visits by curious friends and neighbors. They politely complemented the efforts and leaned on the display case to offer advice. I succeeded in not offending or poisoning anyone. In between chats I finished the pots.

By adding up expenses and figuring the mean size of each sale I deduced the daily volume of sales we needed to avoid failure. The more I scrubbed and thought the more that squeak of the screen door gained a significance beyond it’s quaint noise. It had to squeak ten times an hour, less than that I began to worry and feel lonely. I scoured blackened sheet pans and promised myself I would worry about failure for only three years. With each squeak I’d happily dry my hands, straighten my apron and greet my customer cheerfully. I told myself, do this right and they may come back. Don’t appear too, they’ll sense desperation.

On slow days I found myself turning around or drying my hands thinking I’d heard or imagined the sound of the door hinge. This wouldn’t do over the noise of the refrigerators, fans, pots banging in the sink and the old stereo cassette player. I added a small bell.

The tink of the thin brass clapper soon blended in with the rest of the audio scramble. We had plenty of returning customers from the first week. Having one of the only two eateries in town may have helped. The pots often had to sit until closing time. I became a fixture behind the counter serving coffee, pastry and the topic du jour.  To be continued…

One good Egg

Profit is not a four-letter word, Loss is. Percentage of sales that is profit increases when percentage of sales that is expenses decreases and percentage of expenses decrease proportionately to the increase in sales volume. In other words it became evident that if we wanted more money left over at the end of every month we would have to stay open for dinner in order to increase sales volume. The conundrum was we would have to struggle more to struggle less. We now needed a full time manager because I sure as heck wasn’t going to give up any more sleep.

“This is great! You should open a restaurant…. Ha!”. Dave stood above me eating my lunch as I lay on the soggy floor groping for tools to fix a leak. I was fighting to get all three sink basins of our  three basin pot sink to stop pissing water all over the floor. The problem was as soon as I could fasten two drains the third would leak. I was rushing because our new Dishwasher was on the clock doing nothing as the dishes piled up and I needed to get back to my bread dough that was rising on the table. In the tropic heat of the kitchen it was growing rapidly and beginning to resemble the huge stomach of the executive Chef/Instructor who taught me how to make bechamel sauce back at the Institute.

I lifted my head off the floor to respond to the joke but could only see Dave’s slippers and dropped back again with a splash. As I lay there I relaxed a moment and envied plumbers the hefty wage they received while laying in such a comfortable supine position. In the end I jury rigged the drains with gray Duct tape and pulled myself up to finish explaining my management problem to Dave.

“Dave, you taught us, Profit is not a four letter word, loss is.” I wiped a fresh expression to my face with cold water, washed my hands and moved to the table to punch down the dough.  “I can’t do it alone, Katie quit her real job for this but she can’t help in the kitchen. She’s in the office all day keeping us out of debt, dealing with the house and two baby’s in diapers. We need help. I know it can work but we’ve got to open nights and double our sales to cover the rent and the electric bill. You’re the man Dave. We’ve talked about doing it on our own for years and here’s our chance.”

Dave was at the top of the list in the head-hunt for a co-conspirator. He was a friend in the business who retained a sense of humor in the most horrid situations. He kept a dry wit and simmering libido under a cloak of low self-esteem. Something like Woody Allen on Viagra.

I met Dave in 1974. After I convinced my parents that I needed freedom (not) to excel scholastically I left the Bay area and drove down the coast to Santa Cruz California. Working nights in restaurants there provided endless food and a little spending money to support long days of surfing. Dave managed a house of omelets called “The Broken Egg.”

Santa Cruz was an easy town to be eighteen in. The first rent I paid was forty-nine dollars a month. But still the money had to be made. One day with hair still wet from the freezing, green ocean by that town I tucked a T-shirt into Levi’s and walked into “The Egg”. In the dimly lit dining room I could see a figure wiping black lacquered tables. He had a lanky, slightly bent posture. I asked the young man if the manager was in, “Yes that’s me, can I help you?” His smile had a frantic look about him and his hair was crazy like Einstein’s.

I applied and Dave hired me to wash dishes. Through attrition I became his assistant manager in a matter of weeks. It was a salaried position that in the restaurant business translates to sanctioned slavery at the cost of printing a business card. A title and a salary that actually meant unlimited hours of work without hourly compensation. We became friends there preparing, serving and cleaning up what sometimes resembled a perpetually recurring mob scene at a UNESCO food drop in Somalia.

Dave became a favorite role model. That thousand square foot patch of downtown Santa Cruz was always a spark away from exploding into disorder and somehow he managed holding together a pre-ignition sort of atmosphere. The crew of bossy waitresses he’d inherited from the previous manager who’d deserted needed to feel that they had control of their lives. Dave finessed them daily so that they would continue to strut miles back and forth from the pick-up counter to the black lacquered tables carrying white bake-lite plates heaped with snotty omelet’s and tan plastic mugs full of generic diner coffee.

We served breakfast in a seedy neighborhood. Next door to the Egg was a Greyhound bus depot and a dingy card room. Directly upstairs was a place called Staircase Massage. During the night shift a lady from Staircase would call every so often and order a side of Mayonnaise. The first time she came down to get her order I held out a level two-ounce portion cup. She said, “Honey are you new here? I need a bowl.” I pleased her with what she wanted naively thinking at the time that they must eat a lot of sandwiches.

I managed to remain fairly naïve in spite of Dave’s management examples.  At the end of a horrendous rush of customers and omelets he could deftly adjust his interpretation of company rules regarding interpersonal relationships with employees. While he might be locking himself and a waitress into the tiny Managers office I would diligently plod onward with the never-ending tasks at hand. Like cleaning the overflowing and reeking grease trap by hand after one too many omelet chunks had slithered down the drain of the pot sink.

It’s all up (chuck) from here.

A grease trap is probably the best place to start in the restaurant business if you plan on moving from the bottom up. I was first introduced to a grease trap by the owner of the mighty three-unit Broken Egg chain. Mr. Hutchinson, with an artificial enthusiasm in his body language rolled up his sleeves to demonstrate for me the exciting and important job of grease trap maintenance. I was honored. The grease trap is a heavy steel container that intercepts kitchen drainage before it exits the building for the municipal sewer. Municipalities will not accept grease in their sewer systems and they require restaurants to separate it from wastewater and dispose of it themselves. There are no high-tech signals to tell you when a fifty-gallon grease trap is full. Perhaps a description of a typical cleaning is in order.

One likely sign that it’s time to clean the Grease Trap is the smell of rotten eggs that will suddenly fill the restaurant. Another no less certain but more tangible sign is a slick of viscous amber ooze welling up from the floor under the dish sink and spreading slowly outward into the main kitchen traffic aisles. As a rule the probability of an overflow is higher on busy weekend mornings.

Picture a full dining room about ten am on a Sunday morning. Families of five or six are dressed up for church and small groups of friends in cycling apparel or pre-beach ware wait for a table. The customer can barely hear “I can seat you now” from the hostess over the din of chatter, utensils clanging, waitresses and cooks calling out to each other and the usual audio abuse of painful music coming from the kitchen’s sticky ghetto blaster. The pimply dishwasher is washing off half full plates of omelet remnants, cheese goo and fruit garnish’s and stuffing them into the dish machine as fast as he can. A cook might be standing at the other end of the machine waiting for the clean dishes to come out the other end because he’s got omelets finished and no plates to put them on. The cook and the dishwasher notice a new foul smell and look down at their feet to find themselves standing in a spreading puddle of grease that only a solvent as powerful as jet fuel can cut. In unison they yell, “Tom please!” over the cacophony of the rush. “Please” being the required tail to any sentence spoken within the confines of the Hutchinson workplace. I calmly finish explaining to the needy customer in front of me why their omelet will be just another minute or so and walk to the next crisis. Ah yes, it’s The Grease Trap Overflowing During the Breakfast Rush Crisis. Everyone on shift knows two things at this point. Keep working and let that sucker for a job title, the assistant manager handle it.

That reluctant but driven restaurant man first grabs a warm stinking pile of wet napkins, table cloths and kitchen towels in the dirty linen bag, a few four gallon plastic mayonnaise buckets, a screw driver, a pair of gloves and a small sauce pot. He snaps on the latex gloves and sops up all the grease and slime on the outside of the trap with the pile of dirty linen. This usually results in a damaged linen fee from the linen company but it’s a small price to pay for a quick fix on a kitchen oil slick. Next he removes the screws holding down the steel lid and lifts it up off the vat. Breathing through his mouth he avoids vomiting at the odors rushing off the bubbling raft of coagulated effluent. It’s a mix of egg and cheese protein, frill picks, peas and a wide range of green and black textured molds. Inserting a gloved hand and the sauce pot he pushes into the raft and gently lifts warm soft globs of it into the waiting bucket.

Try as he might to keep from getting splashed a piece of one of the blobs will invariably calve off and fall back into the evil stew. As if in slow motion a drop of slime will lift off and sail up toward him to land on the shirt or worse yet onto the cheek. No time to dwell on the possibility of contracting some rare wasting disease from the spatter. He carefully scoops out all the grease and gray water and last but not least the sludge at the bottom consisting of coffee grounds, nuts and seeds all encased in slime the texture of loose fecal matter.

With any luck he can get all this into the buckets and seal them in under thirty minutes. He’ll give everything a final wipe, spray the area liberally with Lysol, scatter salt all over the floor to prevent slipping and go wash up in order to get back on the floor and help bus tables.

That’s it. That’s as bad as it can get. From the perspective of being hunched under a sink digging with your hands into a reeking grease trap the rest of the job seems sweet. Dave and I learned this together and these many years later he was the person we wanted with us in the trenches of our expanding culinary conflict.

An innocent impressed into service.

Offering someone a job in a risky business far from home with no guaranty of success can be tricky. Location was our strong point. Hawaii calls for most people living above the twenty-fifth parallel. Never mind that rent and food alone eat up most of every paycheck. Getting Dave to visit, getting his feet onto the beach of this fair shore gave us our best chance of hooking him and yanking him into our little boat. One impassioned and overly enthusiastic call and he agreed to a visit.

His plane set down on the runway in February, 92’. He’d left Santa Cruz in dismal winter weather. Taking off from SFO the ocean below him slowly shifted from muddy shades of green to deeper blue as he rocketed closer to the islands. He landed in warm weather under sunny skies. In those days, before Jet-way tunnels were installed on Kauai the effect of arriving in paradise was romantic. The graceful young flight attendant in her floral uniform opened the hatch and you walked down a metal staircase directly into a blast of bright tropical sunlight and the moisturizing humidity of paradise. Dave emerged at the top of the stairs with a smile; he may have already had a Mai Tai. He crossed the tarmac to the breezy open air terminal of Kauai’s inter-island airport. We draped him with orchid leis and hugs then directed him to our version of limousine service.

We proudly drove a dull blue 67’ Plymouth Valiant. The best car 150 bucks could buy. It was decorated specifically for arriving visitors. We had glued a sandy beach to the dash including a few shells and a rubber shark and spray painted Aloha Limo across the doors. A cup and a pair of rubber slippers were permanently forgotten on the roof just over the driver’s door, held there by glue. Concerned citizens gestured wildly as we drove off into our two-week recruiting effort.

The quality of the sand at Pilaa is like flax seed. It is shiny, smooth and sensually soothing to the touch after the mid-morning sunshine warms it. Dave was laminated there. He lifted his head to slide a sandy forearm under his chin, coral grains stuck to his cheek. Behind him the infinite mass of the Pacific gently surged under early beams of light. He had dozed off and it wasn’t even noon. “I could get used to this” he said. My spot had lost its optimum temperature. I rolled across the soft incline. After the waves break on the outer reef they ripple in over shallow coral beds and sluice onto shore. The sluicing affect leaves thin patches of sand with the perfect aggregate. The highest grade flax. I rolled to a nice spot to warm my skin after our dive. The swim fins and masks lay half buried next to my spear and a shimmering blue-green fish that would soon be lunch.

The Latitude was having the desired effect on Dave and the three of us were having fun being together. After I finished baking and Dave woke up we would go find a new beach to play at each day. We cooked brightly colored dinners and filled the kitchen with conversation. We plotted dream restaurants or the next morning’s location for our ocean entry. Finally with the warmth of the sun baking him to a light brown Dave began to ask questions relevant to someone planning a move. He committed to a year’s sabbatical from Santa Cruz in order to help us open the evening half of our operation, Pau Hana Pizza. By April he was back to the island with several boxes of Bachelor packing. Important tools of the trade like a Tennis racket, Surfboard, dive gear, swim suits etc. He set up camp in the living room and began looking for a decent rental.