Makin Stuff

Cooking for other people though, that is a good time.  Feeling inspired, making a nice meal, and gathering a small group of close friends for dinner and drinks sounds like a great Sunday night to me.

Cooking also serves as a creative outlet, which a guy like me needs.  Now that I live in LA, finding a workshop has been pretty difficult.  Spaces are few and far between and expensive.  So my other hobbies have to be put on the back burner, so to speak, for a while till I can get situated.

I have much respect for all my friends who are chefs and do it for a living.  True artists they are.  Not only do they make food that is delicious, they also make it look so good.  The plating is the most difficult part I find.  Also they are always so motivated, constantly improving their craft, learning new techniques and using new ingredients, trying new dishes, it is quite inspiring.

I first realized that I liked to cook when I was quite young.  We had an assignment in class, must have been the 1st or 2nd grade, were we had to make a cookbook for our grandmother.  I put together a pile of milkshake recipes.  I know what you’re thinking, how many milkshake recipes can there be?  Enough to get an A in 1st grade, so at least like 5.  I ofcourse tested out all the recipes myself, needless to say they all had my stamp of approval.

A few years later, in 8th grade, our teacher asked us to make a 5 – 10 – 15 year plan.  Up till that point I had never really thought about my future and I didn’t take this assignment to seriously.  So I wrote something down about becoming a chef, because that seemed like an interesting answer to the assignment.  The thing is, my mom also worked at my school and my teacher shared my answers with her.  She told my family and then my simple answer to an in class assignment somehow morphed into my destiny in the eyes of my family.  I spent years dispelling that myth.

Each group of people I’ve worked with has their own set of lingo.  Carpenters work in eighths of an inch, bakers work in grams, painters work in gallons, and chefs work in pinches and handfuls.  Cooking is more of an art than a science.  You have to taste and smell the food as you make it.  You have to use your senses to create tasty dishes instead of relying on measurements.  This is why I can never be a great chef, my palate is not nearly refined enough.  However I can get good enough to make a Sunday Brunch enjoyable and that is good enough for me.

Speaking of Brunch, Benedicts are one of my favorite dishes to make.  So many variations you can make and all so tasty.  Mostly I love hollandaise sauce and everything it covers.  Hollandaise on steak and eggs, crab cakes, potato hash, eggs, anything really.  Put in on a salad, I don’t care.  Add in a Bloody Maria or a Mimosa and you have yourself a grand ol time.

There is something so satisfying about making a nice meal, even if it’s for one.  A satisfying salad with mozz and basil seeds or a nice fat burger with chipotle aioli and truffle fries.  Plus you feel like such a responsible adult after cooking yourself a meal.  Plus you end up saving money which is also nice.

Learning to cook is actually pretty easy, not at a chefs level but as a home cook.  Find something that inspires you, buy the ingredients, and get cracking.  Mess it up a few times, mistakes are how you learn.  I’ve made some terrible dishes, some so bad I had to throw it all away.  I’ve accidentally used salt instead of sugar or poured almost an entire bottle of cayenne into a dish and tried to save it.  You gotta know when to scratch a dish and start over.  Anyways, pick up a frying pan and saute some onions, the smell always makes people think that you are making something delicious.

I remember traveling through France one year with my parents when I was young and we stopped in some small town to see some castle (all of which I pretty much forget).  We were walking around this charming little town and happened across a kitchen store.  To this day I have no idea why we went in there, neither my mom or dad had any interest in kitchen gadgets at the time and my sister and I were too young to have any say.  Never the less there we were, perusing knives and gravy boats and copper bottom sauce pans.  At this point in my life I had very little interests in general besides maybe video games and maybe the internet (think AOL Chatroom era).  So there we were, killing time in some small shop that none of us had any interest in until I saw these knives stuck to the side of a piece of wood on a pole with a round base.  It was like magic!  They were just stuck there, and you could pull them off and stick them back to the wood and they wouldn’t move.  So cool for me and my little brain (It looked a bit like this from what I can remember).  At that point I was way more fascinated with the magnets then with the knives.

So fast-forward ten years or so to the point where my love of knives had fully blossomed and I had my own kitchen with my own set of knives and all I had to put them in was some shitty old knife block.  At first I thought those knife blocks where kinda cool, but I quickly realized that I like the knives themselves way better than the block.  Plus I also was made aware of how dirty the inside of that block could be since it is impossible to clean down those tiny holes, even though I am pretty much the opposite of a germophobe I still didn’t like the idea of my knives getting dirty before I used them.  What did I do you ask? Well what any good DIYer would do, I made something!

This was right around the time when you could find those generic magnetic knife strips pretty much anywhere but I didn’t like those either.  I didn’t and still don’t like the idea of knives coming into contact with any other metal which was pretty much unavoidable with those strips.  Then I remembered that floating magnetic knife block made of wood from my childhood and I was inspired!

The restaurant I worked for at the time bought a decent amount of good wine which came in these fantastic wood boxes (you may have seen them in my previous post) and they weren’t doing anything with them so I nabbed a couple for myself.  I broke those boxes down and used any face with a logo as the face of my knife racks.  I used the other parts as the back of the racks and sandwiched in the middle were neodymium rare earth magnets.  These magnets are super strong and most of them came from China.  They would hold my heavy cleaver through the 1/8 inch of wood no problem.  The first few racks I made were actually made of pine I got from Lowes but those were just trials till I got everything down and figured out.  So with my Ryobi 13 in Planer and my Kobalt 10 in Miter Saw I set out to make a few Knife Racks.  There was also some glue, clamps, and sanding involved as there almost always is with woodworking.

I was pretty happy with the finished product and once I figured out how to mount them properly they worked really well and looked nice.  I ended up selling a handful of them for $50 a piece as well which paid for all my magnets and expenses which were few since the wood was free.  Eventually I played around a little bit with a Dado blade and table saw which made the finish a bit nicer.  A dado blade allows you to cut out different widths into the wood, like a channel down the middle.  They are a collection of stacked blades and you can choose how many to put together to achieve the thickness you want.

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I don’t have any left and the since then the price of the magnets has tripled but I will probably end up making myself a few more once I got a workshop going.  I think at the time when I was that one in the French store it was going for a few hundred dollars so who knows what I could get for mine.

At one point a friend of mine changed out the leaf springs in his truck so I had some spare metal laying round and decided to make a knife.  Leaf springs aren’t actually ideal for knives because they endure a great deal of stress which make for tons of tiny stress fractures in the metal.  You can’t really get stress fractures out of the metal, especially with the minimal tools that I had available to me at the time.  But free is free not to mention this was my first knife.

The first step was to cut it down to the size I wanted and then get the curve out of the steel.  I took to it with a torch and a 5lb sledge-hammer till it was flattened out.  Then you have to decide on a shape.  I went with something pretty easy to make because of my limited tool set and experience.  

It took a while to get it all shaped on my grinding wheel but after many hours of ear-splitting metal removal (always wear protection, motto for life) I finally I got it to where I wanted it.  After getting the general shape down you have to heat-treat a knife.  Heat treating is a process where you heat the knife up to a certain temp and then rapidly cool it. This crystallizes the  structure of the metal and hardens it.  Metal has 2 qualities, Hard and Tough.  Hardness is defined by the Rockwell scale.  The harder a metal is, the sharper it can become but also the more brittle it becomes.  Toughness is the ability of metal to bend before it breaks.  The tougher a metal is, the more flexible it is.  To make a good durable knife, it needs to be a good balance of Hard and Tough.  So you heat treat the knife to make it harder.

The next step is to do the final shaping of the knife but you have to be careful because you don’t want the metal to get too hot, it could mess with the heat-treat.  So you slowly do you final shaping, then you anneal the knife.  The annealing process is similar to the heat treat where you heat up the metal but to a lower temp and then you let it cool slowly.  This process is how you make the metal tough.  It takes away a bit from the hardness but that is the point (haha pun!  Get it?  Point?  Knife? Ok I’ll stop).

You also have to decide on the scales of the knife.  The scales are the handle.  I had some South American Blood Wood which is purplish brown in color.  So I made some handles out of blood wood.  I just glued them on to the knife, but you can also rivet them.

After getting the scales attached, its time for a final polish.  To do this, you get some really high grit sandpaper (like up to 3000 grit) and sand all the grinding marks out of the metal.  You also sand down the scales and add finger groves if you like and all types of other fancy things.  I went with a flat straight style but this was an experimental knife anyways.

Although I call it a “kitchen” knife, it is actually way to thick to be used on a daily basis.  The spring steel was a 1/4 of an inch thick which is way to thick for a kitchen knife.  It is also super heavy due to the thickness.  You have to decide what the knife will be used for ahead of time to determine what type of edge to put on the knife.  Thick knives like this one are more commonly used as cleavers and are no good for delicate slicing so you put an edge (convex) that is conducive to heaving chopping.  The Convex edge isn’t very sharp but it lasts.  A flat edge is the most common and is easy to make.  It looks like a triangle.  The hollow edge is the sharpest but the most delicate.  Here’s a site for more info on knife edges if you are interested.

The steel I used for this knife was not stainless steel so it can rust and get stains and whatnot.  One thing I tried that didn’t work out super well but also wasn’t terrible was a wax.  You heat the metal up enough to open up the pores, then apply the wax.  The wax gets absorbed by the metal and adds a certain water repellant property to the knife.  After the wax, you sharpen the knife and you are ready to go, brand new knife in hand.  From there you have to take at least 1 picture of you chopping something or video of you cutting down a tree of whatever you are into.  I don’t have one but I promise to get one next time I make a knife.  Oh also, don’t cut yourself sharpening the blade.  It is super easy to do, I did it and it hurt.  Almost cut off my thumb, so be careful.

Dear Ducati – The beginning of a love affair

Back in 2010 I bought my first road bike.  Before that I had only ridden on the street a few illegal but amazing times, and off-road.  I had a dirt bike growing up, a little 2 stroke 125cc frankenstein of a bike.  It was awesome.  There was no stopping that little bike, oh the places we went. I pretty much always wanted a street bike, since high school.  My family (with the exception of my dad)…

I guess I started woodworking way before actually but I was too young to treat it as a hobby.  It was more of a chore, something my dad and I did on the weekends.  All I wanted to do was play video games or hang out with friends or whatever teenage boys want to do but my dad always had plans.  Together we built an addition to the house which ended up being my room, we made me a desk to go in said room, we even made me some speakers!  I wasn’t terribly excited to learn all these skills but they came in quite handy later (as a handyman, pun!).

Woodworking as a hobby is great because as I said, it is easy to get into, forgiving, and satisfying.  It is easy to get into because wood is readily accessible and the tools are pretty cheap.  You can do a lot with a sander (mine is a trusty Dewalt Orbital), some glue, a few clamps and some screws.  You don’t need much to get started and you can build your arsenal from there.  What I mean by forgiving is that wood is flexible and workable compared to metal or concrete.  If you cut too much off, you can almost always add a piece on or reuse that wood for something else.  It doesn’t take much sanding to make a difference and it goes by fast so you can see progress in your work.  Also, there is very little with woodworking that is time sensitive, so if you need to put it down for a few hours or days there’s no problem.  Plus the material is cheap or free so if you mess up, just make another.

Being a server is great as I’ve said before.  It has plenty of benefits, but the major thing I find it lacking in is a creative component.  Woodworking in contrast fulfills that need quite well.  At the end of the day, there is a tangible thing that you have created.  You can feel it and see it and depending on what you have created, use it.

One of my first projects was a cheese/charcuterie board.  The is basically a plate that is made of wood that you serve cheese or cured meats on and hopefully looks nice.  The restaurant I worked at then always had these wooden wine boxes that they couldn’t do anything with which gave me some inspiration.  I also had some connections back then so when I went through all the restaurant’s wine boxes, I got in touch with the wine rep we used and she gave me as many boxes as I could take.

These wine boxes are made of a softer blond wood, probably pine or whatever is available, and are not quite suitable for a cheese board.  A good serving platter needs to be a durable hard wood that has a tight grain to keep bacteria and mold from developing in the wood itself.  So I decided to only use the face of the wine boxes.  I reinforced the back, added sides made of hardwood and then found an epoxy coating.  The epoxy coating was key because it allowed me to sell some of these to restaurants.  The epoxy was food safe, scratch resistant, heat safe, non-yellowing (UV resistant), and pretty thick.  Plus it added a nice shine to the boards.  This meant they could now go through dishwashers and survive repeated use each night every night for a long time.  I ended up selling these to 2 different restaurants in Indiana, one of which (Bluebeard) is still open and using them.

I had a few trees fall in my backyard during a bad storm back in May of 2011, one of which was a mature black walnut tree.  My friends and I spent weeks cutting this tree into usable pieces.  After letting the wood dry out for a bit, I was able to use a portion of it to make these cheese boards for Bluebeard.  The restaurant was named after the book by Kurk Vonnegut so I bought a copy.  I took some of the pages of the book and burnt them into the shape of Indiana, which I then glued to the wood and covered with the epoxy.

Bluebeard boards

Bluebeard

Woodworking was a good stepping stone for me.  The lessons I learned I was later able to apply to a variety of hobbies and jobs.  It’s all about craftsmanship, working with wood you learn to be precise while measuring (measure twice, cut once).

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To be clear, that first attempt was actually a little while ago, about 6 weeks actually and I’ve been baking at least 2 loaves a week since then.  Today I baked my best looking loaf yet with great spring and a nice crust.  The recipe was based on Ken Forkish’s recipe for white bread which 80% of which is pre-fermented.  The only thing I really changed was the percentage of white flour (all-purpose) to wheat flour, 70% to 30% respectively.

So let’s back track a little.  After that first disastrous loaf, I decided to take things a little slower and read through almost the entire book (Flour Water Salt Yeast) before continuing.  I bought all the equipment Ken recommends that I was missing:

A dutch oven – Cuisinart 7qt enameled in red

Various Cambros – 6qt and 12qt round clear plastic containers with lids

Digital instant read thermometer

Proofing baskets

Really the only thing I didn’t need to buy was the kitchen scale and the roul’pat.

Ken (can I call him Ken?  Is that ok?) recommends a 4qt dutch oven so mine is a bit too big but I am overcoming that obstacle as I go.  The reason you would want to bake bread in a dutch oven is because it is covered and while the bread is baking, it releases steam.  This steam is caught in the dutch oven and is what creates a nice spring (how much the bread rises) and crust.  I have been experimenting with adding a bit of water when I initially put the dough in to create that extra steam and it seems to be doing a decent job.  One last thing to consider when buying a dutch oven is the handle.  Most these days are made of some type of plastic that will melt and bubble at temps needed to bake bread.  They are easily removed and replaced with a metal or ceramic handle able to withstand the 500 degree oven but these can run you $25 or so on amazon and you have to wait to get it.  I bought a ceramic door pull at the local hardware store for $8 and fit it on.  Make sure if you go this route to buy a shorter screw that fits, the screw that comes with the door pull is too long and then you’d have to cut it which can be a pain.

I don’t really think that the Cambros are that necessary, if you have large enough containers.  I never really need anything bigger than 6qt so the 12 is a bit overkill, maybe once (if) I start doubling the recipes.

The thermometer is key.  I had an analog instant read but it wasn’t very fast or that accurate.  This thing is water proof and reads to the tenth a of a degree.  It is important to be somewhat accurate with the water temp when adding it to the flour and yeast.  If the water is too hot, it will kill the yeast, too cold and the yeast doesn’t activate. The proofing baskets are cool and convenient but also not necessary.  When proofed in the baskets, you get those cool flour rings around the bread after baking.  Other than that, no real bonus over using an oiled metal bowl that I can discern although it is nice to have a dedicated proofing bowl and is a bit drier with the flour than the oil.

The Kitchen scale is also important.  It needs to be accurate and able to weigh in grams.  The first one I had wouldn’t register less than 2 gram intervals and also wouldn’t really work under the 50 gram mark so I couldn’t accurately measure out the salt.  These aren’t really expensive and are valuable for baking in general.  Weight measurements (gram/oz) are more accurate than volume (tablespoon/cup) and less prone to user error.  The next scale I will buy will be this OXO.  It has a pull out display and a stainless cover which is removable for easy cleaning.

So, on to the bread.  I’ve been experimenting with multiple variables (only 1 at a time though) including proofing time/temp and ratio of AP flour to Wheat flour.  My latest bread is 30% wheat and 70% AP and was proofed overnight in the fridge.  Also, 80% of the dough was pre-fermented in a biga.  That means that 800 grams of the 1000 total grams of flour was left to ferment with some yeast and flour for 14 hours.  For me, a pre-ferment (biga or poolish) is the way to go.  I don’t waste as much flour and dough to a starter (feeding and maintaining) since I don’t bake everyday but I also get a deeper more developed flavor than a quick Saturday bread (named so because you can start it in the morning and bake that same day).  Also I thing that fermentation in general is a bit healthier and adds nutritional value to the bread.

According to Ken’s book, the longer you ferment and proof and let the dough develop (to an extent) the more flavorful the bread.  To do this though, you need to adjust the temperature.  You can’t just let the dough proof for days in a 70 degree kitchen, it will over proof and loose texture.  You can however let the dough proof in the fridge overnight and it will be just fine, or in my experience a bit better.  I haven’t found a limit on how long the dough can proof in the fridge yet, although I am sure there is one.  Letting the dough proof in the fridge has several advantages.  First off – better flavor which I already covered.  Second – more flexibility.  You can tailor the timing to your schedule and bake when you are ready.  You can get the dough ready a day ahead and then bake the morning you need it.  Last – A cold dough holds it shape a little better when taking it out of the proofing basket and placing in the dutch oven.  The bread comes out more visually appealing and more spring.  The spring is caused by gas bubbles in the dough being trapped by gluten and then expanding.  These bubbles are full of flavor and look great when you cut into the bread.  A warm dough is a more relaxed dough and spreads out a bit more when placing in the dutch oven.  The only problem with proofing in the fridge is that the dough doesn’t expand as much as when it is warm.  What I might do next is proof the dough outside for an hour and then place in the fridge till I’m ready to bake.

The roul’pat is a silicone mat that is similar to the sil’pat baking mats but is only used to roll out dough.  It isn’t oven safe but is quite a bit larger and keeps my counter relatively clean.  It somehow walks the line between non-stick and having some grip for the dough.  If the surface has too much flour, you can’t get a good tight dough ball when forming before proofing but conversely if it is too sticky then you also can’t handle the dough.  This mat works really well in this situation, and you can cut on it with a dough scraper without damaging anything

That first bread was inedible but since I’ve had some really good ones.  Practice makes perfect (or better anyways) and in the process you get fresh, delicious, healthy bread to eat with pretty minimal effort.  I have much more to learn but soon I will try to tackle an authentic french baguette and see how that goes.  Stay tuned!

Bread Baking Failure – a learning experience

I’ve recently started baking bread(s) and it has been wonderful.  I love having fresh bread ready to eat all week-long.  I started by looking up a recipe for sourdough starters and going from there but that didn’t work too well for me so I ended up buying a bread book.  After a bit of research I decided to buy Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish.  There are a few things that I really like about…