Making it right. When good enough is no longer good enough.

Each Thursday morning before work, I take the Blue Line train one stop further than normal and stop at the Daley Center Farmer’s Market. For much of the market, the produce is the same that I see two days later at Green City, but on the South Side of the plaza are the vendors that do not frequent Green City. That is where I do most of my shopping.

In August, I was hustling my way from the market to work when I spotted a display of lovely chilis and picked them up. I have had ghost chilis before, but they cost a pretty penny, so when I saw a quart of chilis for a few bucks, I had assumed that they were randoms. After all, who puts a dozen ghost chilis in with a bunch of other chilis and sells them for a fraction of the guy next door? Continue reading »

“Would would happen if…?” is a question that I ask constantly – not just in food, but in all areas of life. In July, I was in the midst of exploring obsessions for coffee and for vinegar. It was at that point when I wondered “What would happen if coffee could be fermented?” Now, knowing basic chemistry, I knew that coffee all by its lonesome would likely never ferment. It was hot water extracting flavors and oils from beans. There was no sugar to convert in coffee, at least in my coffee there was not. When I made coffee for my mother-in-law, whose coffee resembles a toaster strudel more than coffee, I realized that coffee dissolves sugar and that the resulting compound could be fermented.

At that point, I had done some research to see if coffee vinegar had been tried before to results, but I did see that people were making coffee kombucha in the same way that I was planning on trying coffee vinegar. It seemed almost natural to try them side-by-side to determine which would work better. Continue reading »

People mock Twitter and sometimes with good reason, but for those looking for information from people who have put in time and effort to refine processes, Twitter can be a fantastic resource. For example, browsing Twitter back in April, I can across this gem of a tweet (the word “tweet” makes it sound so iffy) from Matthew Jennings.

I make beans a lot – an embarrassing amount – so when a chef that I admire as much as Matthew Jennings posts his bean enhancement process, I took note. Jennings is the chef/owner of Farmstead & La Laiterie in Providence and features hand made foods with ingredients native to New England. The one ingredient in the paste that caused me to take note, Awase Miso, was one that was not only foreign to New England, but completely foreign to me as well. Continue reading »

Something that I learned long ago was when the smoker is smoking, you take advantage. There is not technically infinite smoke, there is enough smoke for anything that you put in that smoker. You win some and you lose some, but when you fire it up, you had better have already thought about what you wanted to infuse with delicious pecan hull and bourbon barrel smoke. Continue reading »