walk the line

Here's how it works:

One of the wait-staff brings in an order written on a ticket. They stick their copy of the ticket on the back side of the hot line window. The chef sticks his copy of the ticket on our side of the line and reads off the order, e.g., "Pick up: beet tartare, crostini, an arugula salad! Order in: two ravs, a marinara and a cashew cream!" At which point I would will scramble to get my stuff together, probably shuffling in place while picking up the wrong plate for bread, looking about for the ring mold to put tartare in and then overdressing the arugula salad (think Jerry Lewis in oversized shoes).

After bungling about there for a few minutes, I'll place the appetizers up in the window (a shelf above the cold line), call out something like, "Apps in the window!" They'll then get taken out to their table by the food runner, who will cry out something like, "Table four going out!"

From there we pick up other tickets that have come in or we dally about reorganizing and cleaning our work stations, prepping food for later in the evening or the next day, or just gaze into each others eyes longingly until we're told to fire the next course on that ticket. At which point I'll busy myself with some dough stretching, distribute some toppings, and try not to burn myself while shuttling pizzas in and out of the oven.

There are some nuances to this whole process. Different dishes take different amounts of time to make. My pizzas require between three and five minutes once they're in the oven, while most of the pasta dishes probably require between two and four minutes and portobello steaks need more time. So in order to make sure all the food is ready simultaneously, pizzas get started first and then once they're about half-way finished, pastas get thrown in the boiler. At this point our timing for stuff is pretty good, so food tends to get out relatively fast and grouped together properly. Of course, if we end up with a large table ordering, it can delay the orders for everyone else in the restaurant.

Happy BSD 2011

Happy Batman Sticker Day everyone! Yup. Still preachin' the gospel.

Advantage: Home.

Sports Illustrated published an excerpt of Sportscasting by Tobias Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim. The article was all about the myths and realities of home-field advantage. Apparently one of the causes is bias in officiating. When they looked at statistics related to team travel, fans' support affect on players, and player comfort related to familiar environs, they found all those things to be statistically irrelevant based on in-game performance of players (they actually found visiting quarterbacks to have a slight statistical advantage over home quarterbacks). What they did find was that umpires and referees are swayed by crowd reactions. In soccer they found, for instance, that when the home team is winning at the end of the game, the amount of extra time added is less, averaging 2 minutes, while when the home team is losing the extra time averages 4 minutes. The number of penalties and fouls also favors the home team. This is also true on the gridiron. And in baseball called strikes and balls also fall in favor of the home team.

While this probably isn't the only cause for home-field advantage, it does seem like a pretty important aspect of it.

An that's the interesting thing I read recently.

* * *

In restaurant news, we're working on developing a cashew-based mozzarella substitute. We're working from a recipe by Miyoko Schinner. So far we've found the recipe works in terms of flavor, but the consistency is much too soft. Agar agar seems fairly temperamental and it seems like we're going to try and replace it with Irish moss (a seaweed). Hopefully we'll figure it out in the next couple weeks and can replace the butter-y tasting Daiya cheese with something a little more satisfying.

cooooooooooooooooookieeeeesssssssssss

Rebel that I am, I'm makin' truffles for the cookie party. We've got your standard dark chocolate, cardamom–ginger, chili, and paprika–cinnamon (which is really mostly cinnamon). Well, at least I've made the ganache for the filling. I still have to coat most of them in a shell. I mean, I guess I don't have to—we could just spoon the ganache into our chompers. I imagine it'll be less satisfying that way though.

Portland's on it way to becoming a pizza town:

Food lovers who know anything about Portland, Oregon, may first think of the city's renowned food-cart scene. Or its way with the microbrewed beers. Or its rising coffee-roasting culture. All thriving. Add to that a killer artisanal pizza moment.

(Serious Eats)

smarter than the average donkey?

The Achenblog has a couple of interesting thoughts on the current tax bill. One of them carries the transcript of Obama's response to a reporter questioning Obama's values. A clip of this appeared on the Daily Show last week. Here's a bit that wasn't included there: 

That can't be the measure of how we think about our public service. That can't be the measure of what it means to be a Democrat. This is a big, diverse country. Not everybody agrees with us. I know that shocks people. The New York Times editorial page does not permeate across all of America. Neither does The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Most Americans, they're just trying to figure out how to go about their lives and how can we make sure that our elected officials are looking out for us. And that means because it's a big, diverse country and people have a lot of complicated positions, it means that in order to get stuff done, we're going to compromise. This is why FDR, when he started Social Security, it only affected widows and orphans. You did not qualify. And yet now it is something that really helps a lot of people. When Medicare was started, it was a small program. It grew.

Under the criteria that you just set out, each of those were betrayals of some abstract ideal. This country was founded on compromise. I couldn't go through the front door at this country's founding. And if we were really thinking about ideal positions, we wouldn't have a union.

heave-ho

I admit that I've neglected this thing for a while, at least with pretty much anything substantial, personal, or what the average person reading this might consider interesting. That is to say, I'm uninterested in reading a lot of the stuff here and when the author isn't even interested, that doesn't exactly indicate Andean condor-like majesty of prose or content. (Though, I suppose that's not really the point of this thing anyway.)

You might have noticed I played with bloggers template designer. We are amused. And look: color! Fun!

What most people seem to be interested in here is the restaurant. What is going on with that exactly? The stuff that seemed to me new and exciting for the first couple months are now kind of old hat and pedestrian. But it's been six months now and I definitely feel much more at ease than I did the first few months. I haven't had chest pains in a couple months for instance (something that seemed to correlate to ingesting caffeine before service—I stopped doing that).

Milestones for Portobello since my last related post (August 22nd):

1. listed in the Willamette Week's guide to top Portland restarants
2. appeared on the Cooking Channel
   
3. started serving lunch
4. began serving fancy prix fixe meals on weekends
5. had one very positive and one middling review regarding the pizzas
   

Our line is also all crazy. Nate (formally master of apps and desserts) is now the chef de tournant or rotating chef. He's been trained up on pretty much everything and can fill in at any station on the line. I'm now picking up appetizers, desserts and pizzas and am slowly getting lessons on the sauté line, which is to say I'm occasionally getting splattered with hot oil and narrowly avoiding melting my flesh with boiling water.

Jesse, sous-chef and living art exhibit, is now running the show most nights, as Aaron the co-owner/head chef is preoccupied working lunch, designing prix fixe menus, and encouraging everyone to do push-ups.

On the pizza front specifically, we've gone through a few menu changes, and I've made some dough adjustments after learning a little more about salt and its effects on gluten development and enzyme activity.

Since August we ran through our Autumn menu which included a pizza with butternut squash sauce, cherry peppers, brussels sprouts, garlic, and cashew cream in addition to what've been our four standard pizzas: a marinara, a daiya cheese-based margherita, a spicy field roast and cherry pepper pie, and the "piscia"—caramelized onions, olives, capers, garlic, and oregano.

The Winter menu has boasted the standards plus a sweet potato, caramelized red onion, kale, garlic, and rosemary pizza; a pie with butternut sauce, hazelnuts, chili oil, shaved apple, and sage; and last week we had one with cashew cream, chanterelle mushroom, brussels sprout, garlic, pear, and chao cheese. (Is it pizza as I imagine it? Eh. Not exactly, but they tasted good. Trust me. The hazelnut pizza, sans apple, has been my favorite thing to make for myself for a few weeks now. I made a version at home for some friends and they were all pleasantly surprised.)

Yes, I'm positive. The best of 2010.

There was a lot to choose from this year. My list clocks in at an hour and forty minutes, which is a lot to sit through. I swear it's worth it though. Everything on this one was either released in 2010 or late enough in 2009 that I didn't hear it until this year.

black and white and brown all over

I just started reading DFW's The Broom of the System and there's a paragraph at the beginning of chapter three that sets the scene. It's filled with seemingly trivial details about the color of paint on handrails (yellow) and the texture of the lawn grass. Embedded in there is this: "Outside the doors an old black woman stood motionless with her walker, her mouth open to the sun." Evocative, yes. But the generic "old black woman" kind of bothers me. If he was describing an old white woman he presumably would have just written, "old woman." Or at least he would have been more specific in his description of skin tone. This is presumably because of some innate bias we have when imagining fictional characters to thinking of them as similar to ourselves by default. So for DFW, who was a white male, in order to paint the picture he imagined, he had to note that this old woman was black.

What I'm getting at is that by noting specifically that the woman is black it underscores the fact that this detail is a real point of distinction and that since none of the other characters so far have been described as black, we assume that they aren't and we can probably continue to make this same assumption for the rest of the novel. It makes me wonder what a black reader might think when arriving at this line.

While I imagine that Wallace did not exactly have a black audience in mind when he wrote the book, I also can't assume that he only imagined white people reading his work.

the latest and greatest

Sarah is finally here! It only took a few years, but she's now living with Amie in NE. We had dinner this evening at Blossoming Lotus, which is the other well respected all-vegan restaurant in town. Coconut sweet potato soup was consumed among other delicious plates.

I've also been reunited with another friend:

Remember her?

The Great Catsby presides over a new kingdom.

She's also better behaved. I don't have to distract her with a toy at all times.

Furthermore, as probably all the readers of this blog are aware, Portobello was listed in the Willamette Week's 2010 list of the top restaurants in Portland. Pat on the back to us. I don't have any new shiny blocks of color to share from the restaurant, but I did make some cheesy pizzas at home the other week:

...still got it.

ITEM! One Fuji bicycle, which has become my main form of transportation (with thanks to Oma for the capital, and Morgan for having a bike to sell):

 

Also, the other week I went on a short hike with Laurel and Jonah to Horsetail falls out in the gorge. It was lovely:

Buke and Gass

It's so rare to find music that really hits that pleasure spot in my brain—the same spot that makes my eyes roll up in the back of my head when I fiercely scratch that mosquito bite that's been itching all afternoon. I mean really rare. There are songs that can get me going, hype me up, follow me around and stick in my head with T-1000-like tenacity (Hannah Georgas' Bang Bang You're Dead is the most recent example I have of that). But sometimes it's years between finding a band that just brings a smile to my face.

Buke and Gass are it right now. Their music gives me that blissed-out sensation. It's unlike anything I've ever heard before—just two people with homemade instruments, a modified bass ukulele and a hybrid guitar-bass; they also simultaneously play a kick drum and bells with their feet.  While they're singular in their sound, Buke and Gass's aesthetic is right up my alley—it's melodic, cacophonous, dynamic, fiery, percussive, and cerebral yet emotive. Mostly they just rock my socks off.

Judge for yourself.

PS Thanks Radiolab.

Foxconn

Mike Daisey's a monologist. Really he's a storyteller who draws on autobiographical material. I attended his performance of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, an examination of the history of Apple, the cult of Apple fandom, the "visionary-asshole" who is Steve Jobs, and most stirringly the seedy underbelly of electronics manufacturing.

Apparently half—HALF!—of all electronics in the world are produced by one company: Foxconn. Foxconn has its largest manufacturing facilities in Shenzhen, which is southern China, a town that grew from a fishing village of 500 (according to Daisey) to a city of 14 million in only the past 30 years. Their facilities employ 430,000 workers. They have 25 cafeterias that each feed 10,000 people at a time. Daisey, who went there, interviewed Foxconn factory workers about their working conditions and posed as an American businessman to get access to the insides of the factories to see what the conditions were actually like. His report, not surprisingly, is hella depressing. While he was there a worker died from exhaustion after a 32-hour shift. He met factory workers who were as young as 11 years old. He met an employee who was labeled a troublemaker and blacklisted by the labor board after asking why she was not receiving overtime pay for working 105-hour weeks. He saw the netting that was installed around the office and factory buildings at Foxconn after a series of workers committed suicide by jumping from the roofs.

Despite all this, Daisey still loves his technology. He remains optimistic that things will change because, he says, "they do change." He notes how Apple was once near the Greenpeace's dirtiest companies (due to their uses of heavy metals, packaging waste, etc.). Now Apple is atop Greenpeace's list of cleanest companies. Why is that? Primarily pressure from consumers. I plan on emailing my buddy Steve Jobs about it soon.

Sungold.

Oven management is really something you don't think about too much when you're only making a three or four of pizzas in a night. It's also pretty straightforward when you can only fit one pizza in your oven. The oven at home can generally bake two or three pizzas in a row before it needs some time to reheat, which takes about 15 to 20 minutes.

The Bakers Pride at work though is a trickier beast. Because it has two decks, but only one burner, and seemingly poor thermal mass. Any time I open a deck to put a pizza in, take it out, or move it, I heat is lost. And it doesn't matter which deck I'm messing with, if I open one, I lose heat in both.

And the temperature difference between the top and bottom deck is probably roughly 50 to 100 degrees. There are up and downsides to this, which I'll get into soon. But for now I have to grab my shin guards. My legs are in demand.

LA: The Sequel

I unclogged my bathroom sink today. Hooray.

In other more appetizing news:

Two LA slice joints had the dubious honor of my bum in their seats.

Tomato Pie is a kinda hole-in-the-wall greasy slice joint. It's cramped, with bar seating around the circumference, and seemingly without air conditioning. It the kind of place that could be a hive of scum and villainy (and I mean that in the best way).  While it ain't gonna be the origin of a pizza revolution, they churn out some very decent slices.

The Sunny Los Angeles Exterior

On the left we have their Margherita slice. On the right we have a slice of their Tomato Pie.

I sampled their simplest offerings. The Margherita was pretty straight forward tomato cheese and basil, while the tomato pie offered a marinara with a kick, sprinkled with some parsley and romano. 

While the undersides revealed themselves to be on the golden-brown side of things, they were pleasantly crisp without being crackery. The winner here is the tomato pie, which might be described as a grandma-style (or nonna-style), with an olive oil-infused, pan-baked crust, and a sauce that's tart, sweet, and spicy.

For dessert I went to Vito's and tried their margherita-esque slice featuring globs of fresh mozz and a uniformly super-thin crust:

Whoever the architect of this slice was, did not really think things all the way through. Vito's thin crust does not have the kind of structural integrity required to hold the weight of cuts of cheese that thick and and fresh tomato slice. So really, I ended up eating some cheese, then some tomato, then some crust, more cheese, and more crust. Disjointed is my best description. Also the slice was over $5.

Given that I ended up eating most of the components individually, I can say the cheese was rich and creamy—exactly what I look for in a fresh mozzarella; the tomato sauce was fine, but a little too thick and pasty; the tomato slice was your standard grocery store beefsteak slice, which isn't ever going to win me over; and the crust, while nicely charred, was dry with little-to-no rise on the edge.


Conclusions: Tomato Pie named their establishment after the right kinda pizza... though also, if they'd named it Sausage and Mushroom Pie, it maybe wouldn't have the same kinda marketing pull. I give it six and a half Mulligans. Vito's was overpriced and medicore for an upscale "sliceria." If I end up in LA again, I wouldn't go back.

Tales of LA: A Moon Landing

There's a water problem in Los Angeles. It's so bad that bottles of the stuff now cost up to $9. This is true. At least the $9 part. To be fair it was the water in my parent's hotel room at the W Hollywood, which has a nightclub on the first floor and the second floor, and apparently is also stocked with naked men to appear in hallways at odd hours of the night.
From the mini-bar:

yes, 200 ml of vodka is $33

My base of operations (facing the celebrity center for the Church of Scientology... the street was guarded by security with guns... on bicycles):

Think the apartment complex in the Karate Kid, but nicer

Also street traffic is now so bad they've instituted public blimps:

At least the pizza situation is under control.

First stop: Mozza

Squash blossoms, tomato & burrata

Margherita with mozzarella, tomato & basil

Coach farm goat cheese, leeks, scallions, garlic & bacon

Abita! Root beer!

Blond, yet crisp.

Big and crunchy on the outside, soft and airy on the inside.

All in all, I was quite pleased with the pizzas Mozza's volleying out.

Highlights!: 

• The tomato sauce on the Margherita was rich and piquant.
• An incredibly creamy burrata with a delicate flavor similar to egg whites.
• The puffy edge, which maybe appeared to be little much—almost showy—but turned out to be light and flavorful. I'd be happy to finish any slice with an edge as nice.

In all, I wasn't blown away by the pizzas at Mozza. They were very good, but in some cases it seemed they were concerned with appearances over palate. The squash blossoms for instance—as far as I could tell—didn't have any flavor at all, though they looked beautiful, especially with the mounds of bright white burrata floating on top of them. Also $23 for a 12" pizza is a bit pricey. UPN could get away with it, but they were serving arguably the best pizza in the country.

This is also one of the few instances were a blond crust was actually very good. It was crisp, but not crackery. And it held it's own against the weight and wetness of those burrata mounds. They also get some bonus points for being a fancy joint that also serves root beer.

Rating: five-and-a-half mulligans out of eight.


Further pizza adventures TK.

Culinarily speaking...

First point of business: Portobello now offers pizza to go (other parts of the linked report are false). So now you don't have to wait 45 minutes for table.

* * *

#2

So when I've said in the past that there are no good slices in Portland, I was wrong. Give Pizza A Chance actually does some pretty solid work. When I originally tried their wares when I first moved here, it was toward the end of the day and the slices available were limited and had likely been sitting out for quite a while. I failed to take this into account in my thinking. After dropping by there for lunch this afternoon, I can say that their slices are better than most NYC slice options. They certainly blow Escape from NY out of the water.

I tried the margherita and the sausage and mushroom. The former was crisp and pliant, with dots of char on the underside. The mozzarella and basil used were fresh along with a couple of thin wedges of roma tomatoes. A mildly seasoned tomato sauce was there too, hiding under the mozz. The crust has some whole wheat in it to add a little extra depth of flavor (it adds a little bit of weight and chew as well, but it's a minor compromise in this case).

The sausage and mushroom slice was a little more pedestrian. The crust wasn't quite as well baked and the grease from the sausage soaked through a little bit. But it was plenty satisfying with Carlton Farms pork sausage and aged mozzarella.

I followed that up with ¡¡BEIGNETS!! from The Swamp Shack.

mememememememe

BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Some of the things I didn't think about when considering the life of a pizzamaker:

1. that my glasses would constantly be covered in flour
2. the hour and half it would take to clean the kitchen
3. how quickly I would need to rush to fulfill orders
4. how long I would sometimes have to wait between orders
5. wearing sneakers could lead to pulling a muscle slipping on wet concrete
6. I could make more than $100 in tips in a week
7. how tired my legs would feel—especially my right leg, as I absent-mindedly put all my weight on it
8. the amount of money I'd save on dinners
9. free soda pop and alcohol at the end of the night

trouble in two parts.

1. There's No Pilot? 

That beautiful Baker's Pride oven, which was adjusted to burn ever more violently at temperatures that would sear the eyebrows off of distant alpacas, started to cough and sputter the other night. Apparently the thermocoupler—which sounds a like a fake piece of equipment lifted from a Star Trek script, but is actually a sensor that, when a pilot light flickers out, will cut off the gas line—went on the fritz and started indiscriminately shutting off the gas.

It started doing this about 45 minutes before we were supposed to open at the end of last week. Our head chef (we'll just call him HC), spent a good 10 minutes burning his hands trying to fix the problem. Eventually we got it running and the rest of the evening went relatively smoothly.

2. There's No Co-Pilot?


Today the sous chef (SC) walked out. HC seemed to handle it pretty well. And by handle it, I mean he hired a replacement this afternoon. So, yeah, he takes care of his shit. The amount of stress he's able to take is pretty remarkable.

There are any number of reasons why SC decided to leave and give no notice. I reckon there's something going on outside of work and this was a way of indirectly dealing with it. At least, as of last night he seemed like he was having an alright time.

* * *

Still on the work-front, it looks like we'll be getting a wood-burning oven to replace the Baker's Pride sooner rather than later. Once our plan is in place, I'll divulge some more details.

the perils. the tribulations.

Tonight I ran out of dough. I went through roughly 40 dough balls. A couple of them I burned—my fault (though, in my defense, the thermostat was adjusted to bring the oven temp up to 700-ish, so the timing for cooking the pizzas changed). I'm happy people are ordering the pies though. And they seem to still enjoy them.

Yesterday, Aaron, the head chef, gave us a run-down of how he'd like the kitchen cleaned. He said it should take us 45 minutes. Tonight it took us about 2 hours, and we seemed to be working at a faster pace (thanks to that old stand-by of better communication and teamwork). While he gave us pointers on more efficient ways to accomplish tasks—cleaning from the top down and finishing up one task for the entire kitchen before starting the next one—he also added more steps to the process. And in the end, the thing that seems to suck up the most time is dishwashing. So no matter how quickly we kill the work stations and floors, there's gonna be some back-up when it comes to pots and pans.

We had a new pizza on the menu tonight: leek cream sauce, asparagus, shaved lemon and fennel, topped with basil. Other pizzas were the same as last week with a couple minor adjustments. I'll pretty much eat anything with the basil-cream sauce.