“Quit School Join the Band”—vinyl matrix inscribed on Born Against’s Industrial Relations 7-inch, 1990
I can think of only one time when Ladner asked me do something I was not entirely keen on. He wanted a selection of cookies made of all different grains. It was conceptual. I dug the idea, but the problem was that I couldn’t get my head around it. I kept putting it off, and Ladner kept prodding. Are you gonna do the fucking grain cookie thing or what? When I finally figured out what the selection could actually be, I realized that he wasn’t asking me to prepare anything I wasn’t up for. It was exactly what I wanted to do.
Babbo, near Washington Square Park in Manhattan, is a key restaurant in the Batali-Bastianich empire. I had its namesake cookbook branded into my subconscious from repeated readings years before I ever stepped foot in Del Posto. I knew all the words. I’d ingested all the book’s ideals and propaganda, had stared at its pages and studied them for hours. And not just the desserts. The whole damn thing. In a way, joining the staff at Del Posto was like getting to join my favorite band. It was eerily similar to when, several years before, I got to join Born Against, at the time my favorite band, as their seventh drummer. I had pored over their lyric sheets in the same way I’d obsessed over the Babbo book. I listened to their records incessantly. It was ludicrous that I got to join that band. I had to quit college to do it. My mom was not pleased.
The record that everyone in Born Against obsessed over more than any other was Flex Your Head, a compilation LP on Dischord Records. It was an album that made you want to DO shit: start a band, make some art, anything creative. I knew it backward and forward, way better than I knew anything else in my vinyl collection. We all did. It represented everything we believed in, even though the record was already eleven years old by the time I joined Born Against. It was a statement on the state of DC punk rock in 1981, compiled by Dischord boss Ian MacKaye, exactly as the Babbo cookbook was the definitive doctrine of New York Italian food innovation in 2003, brought together by boss Mario Batali.
The really rare early pressings of Flex Your Head, the ones still on the wall at record shops sporting disproportionate price tags, have a generic stock photo of wheat grains as an in-joke. Just give this thing we care about so much whatever bullshit cover. Later pressings revealed the now-iconic blurry dude in a hat. But those wheat grains tilting in the wind: That was the picture, man. We all wanted that copy. Amber waves of grain. Inspirational.
When we did finally figure out the cookie plate of multiple grains, I took ownership of it like I’d personally conceived, developed, and accomplished it. It’s exactly what I would have done anyway, Ladner.
Born Against. Pensacola, Florida, January 1993. Photo by Christina Brown.
For these cookies I use a combination of instant polenta and pulverized freeze-dried corn to get a really corn-y flavor. (For pulverizing, pulse the freeze-dried stuff in a clean coffee grinder.) Christina Tosi, the James Beard Award–winning pastry chef behind Milk Bar, taught me how to do this. Freeze-dried corn is available at most health food stores. I love the stuff. Don’t ever get a bag near me or I will eat it all in one sitting and get a gnarly stomachache. And blame you.
This is a thumbprint cookie and there is nothing that crazy about it. But the huckleberry jam baked into the cookie halfway through gets even jammier by the time it finishes baking. Right when the cookies come out of the oven, we add a couple freeze-dried corn kernels on top to hammer home the corn flavor, which makes them look simultaneously insanely elegant and totally stupid.
Yield: 50 to 60 small cookies
Unsalted butter 1 cup, or 2 sticks (220 grams)
Granulated sugar ¾ cup (150 grams)
Eggs 2 (110 grams)
Instant polenta ⅓ cup (65 grams)
All-purpose flour 2⅓ cups (300 grams)
Freeze-dried corn, pulverized 1½ cups (70 grams)
Baking powder ¾ teaspoon (4 grams)
Baking soda ¼ teaspoon (1 gram)
Kosher salt 1½ teaspoons (6 grams)
Turbinado sugar to coat
Huckleberry Marmellata (here)
Maldon salt to taste
Whole freeze-dried corn pieces as needed
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with a Silpat and set aside.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer, using the paddle attachment, combine the butter and granulated sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and continue to mix.
3. In a separate bowl, sift together the instant polenta, flour, pulverized corn, baking soda, baking powder, and kosher salt. Add to the butter mixture and mix until just combined.
4. Shape the dough into nickel-size balls and roll in turbinado sugar. Place the dough balls on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 5 minutes.
5. After 5 minutes, remove the sheet from the oven and make an indentation with your pinkie finger in the top of each cookie. Fill the indentation with a teaspoon-size blob of huckleberry marmellata and return to the oven. Bake until the cookie is golden and the jam has set a bit, about 4 minutes.
To serve: Top with two ridiculous kernels of dried corn and a piece of Maldon salt and eat immediately or within a few hours. Don’t let the cookies sit overnight.
Born: The tenth child of twelve, female
Occupation: Baker, owner of BabyCakes NYC
Status: Married with a kid
Notable quote: “Pull your own strings.”
Shoe size: 8
Lunch food: Kale chips, nuts, seeds, nori, a handful of chocolate chips
Beverage: Yerba Mate
I Heart NY: My first memory is having a deep desire to live in New York. It’s the only place I could have opened an at-the-time bizarre bakery and watch it become celebrated even with all its quirks. I love New York fiercely.
First time: The first bar I ever went to was the 500 Club in San Francisco in 1993. I was seventeen. They gave me a Tom Collins and it became “my drink” because it was the only drink I knew other than beer.
Accomplishments: Growing a baby.
Ambition/future plan: To scrape together enough money to invest in young women and men with great ideas and no funding.
Quinoa is one of my favorite grains to cook with, but as a chef at an Italian restaurant I don’t get to use it very much. I’ve tried using it in rice pudding, budino, but even after I’d laced it with mascarpone and amaretti and orange zest, it just never seemed Italian enough. Quinoa has never made it to the Del Posto menu.
I created these sandwiches for a friend who requested a gluten-free dessert/snack option. It was a one-off. But I kept the recipe in the bank and bring it back every once in a while because it’s totally fun to eat, even if you are completely tolerant of ye olde gluten. I like to think of it as quinoa wrapped in itself. A few years back, I used to taunt the meat-roast cooks at Del Posto when they’d prepare a veal tenderloin wrapped in beef deckle as “a baby wrapped in its own mother.” This is the same thing.
The cookie is overcooked red quinoa seasoned with a little honey and salt and then sandwiched between puffed quinoa “crackers” that are less complicated than you might expect. Normally in my life I have always gravitated toward the massive-effort-with-little-payoff-style of things (traveling three thousand miles to play a show in an ice cream shop for no money, working sixteen-hour days for months straight on a set salary, etc.). But the payoff here is huge! You won’t regret it.
Yield: 4 to 6 servings (unless you’re feeling particularly lonely, in which case 1 serving)
Red quinoa ¼ cup (46 grams)
White quinoa ¼ cup (46 grams)
Water 1 cup (236 grams)
Salt to taste
Peanut oil for frying 1 quart (864 grams)
Honey to taste
Sugar to taste
White wine vinegar for drizzling
1. Preheat the oven to 200°F. Line a baking sheet with a Silpat and set aside.
2. In a fine-mesh strainer, rinse the red quinoa under cool running water. Swish the grains around with your fingers to make sure they are really clean, about 2 minutes, and set aside. Repeat with the white quinoa.
2. In a small saucepan over medium-high heat, add ½ cup of the water, some salt, and the red quinoa and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to the lowest setting, cover, and cook for about 15 minutes. Remove from the burner and let stand, still covered, for 5 minutes. Transfer the red quinoa to a bowl and set aside.
3. Follow the same cooking instructions for the white quinoa but do not add salt to the remaining ½ cup water. When the white quinoa is done smear it across the reserved baking sheet, and dehydrate it in the oven (see here) until crispy, with just a little moisture remaining, about 45 minutes.
4. In a large deep-sided saucepan, heat the peanut oil to 350°F.
5. To the reserved red quinoa, mix in honey, sugar, and salt. Set aside. Line a medium bowl with paper towels and set aside.
6. When the white quinoa is dehydrated, break it into irregular chunks. Deep-fry in the peanut oil, turning occasionally, until extra crisp, about 3 minutes. Transfer each batch of fried chips to the reserved paper towel–lined bowl and salt immediately. Drizzle the chips lightly with vinegar.
To serve: Mush some red quinoa into a ball and smush it between 2 chips. Repeat this over and over again until you run out of chips. Serve immediately.
“This is a story, a very special story. It’s about Brian Jones, one of the Rolling Stones”
—“Godstar,” Psychic TV, 1985
An easy recipe—shamelessly easy—it requires nearly no effort. The cookie is slightly crunchy (the instant polenta) and a little dark (the industrial buckwheat flour). At Del Posto, we cut it out with a cute, fluted cookie cutter. This cookie is Genesis P-Orridge wearing a tutu.
Yield: Depends on the size of the cookie cutters
Unsalted butter 1 cup, or 2 sticks (240 grams)
Sugar ⅔ cup (133 grams), plus more for coating
All-purpose flour 1½ cups (190 grams)
Instant polenta 4½ teaspoons (22 grams)
Buckwheat flour ⅔ cup (80 grams)
Salt 1¼ teaspoons (5 grams)
1. Preheat the oven to 325°F.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer, using the paddle attachment, combine the butter and sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy. Add the all-purpose flour, polenta, buckwheat flour and salt and mix until just combined.
3. On your countertop, place the dough between two pieces of parchment and roll it out to ¼-inch thickness with a rolling pin.
4. Transfer the parchment-covered dough to a baking sheet and refrigerate until firm to the touch, about 30 minutes. Cut the dough into shapes of your choice.
5. Coat each cookie with sugar, place on a baking sheet, and bake for 16 minutes. Cool the cookies on a cooling rack. The cookies will keep for several days in an airtight container.
What’s the difference between crêpes and crespelle? Nothing. They are exactly the same. The buckwheat flour and brown butter announce that it’s autumn—like putting on a camouflage coat with a quilted liner the very second you can see your breath in the air for the first time since March. I like to serve these with Ricotta Gelato (here) and some Candied Squash (here). If possible, I’ll put some maple syrup on there, too. Get some good maple syrup, but not that grade A crap. It’s too refined. That’s sissy stuff.
Yield: About 20 crespelles
Sugar 2 tablespoons (25 grams)
Cornstarch ¼ cup (28 grams)
Buckwheat flour ½ cup (60 grams)
Salt 1 teaspoon (4 grams)
Eggs 3 (150 grams)
Whole milk 1 cup (244 grams)
All-purpose flour 1¼ tablespoons (10 grams)
Unsalted butter ⅓ cup, or 1⅓ sticks (90 grams), browned
1. In a medium deep-sided bowl, combine the sugar, cornstarch, buckwheat flour, salt, eggs, milk, all-purpose flour, and browned butter and pulse for 10 seconds using an immersion blender. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.
2. In a small nonstick pan coated with nonstick cooking spray over medium heat, pour about 2 tablespoons of the batter into the center of the pan and swirl to spread it out evenly.
3. Cook for 30 seconds, flip, and cook for another 10 seconds. Remove and let each crespelle cool individually on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Once they are cool, stack the crespelle atop one another and store on a plate, covered with plastic wrap. They will stay in the fridge for a few days, and in the freezer for about 2 months.
This is the recipe that encapsulates perfectly all I try to do at Del Posto. It’s like a rice pudding, but with an exceptional artisanal polenta as the grain. We finish it with a touch of butter, for creaminess, and a splash of olive oil because I put olive oil in everything.
All good polenta takes hours to cook. There are no shortcuts. When polenta is done cooking, it turns into a sweet napalm that splatters boiling hot projectiles all over your arm. Be careful! Don’t waste any!
We serve it with a scoop of vanilla gelato and Huckleberry Marmellata (here), or sometimes as a miniature bite on a shard of Polenta Chip (here) with whatever fruit is in season. Be sure to find a polenta that remains gritty even after you’ve trounced it into submission with hours of simmering. In the words of Ladner, the goal here is something that is “texturally rewarding.”
Yield: 4 servings
Anson Mills polenta ⅓ cup (55 grams)
Whole milk 4¾ cups (1,175 grams)
Salt 2½ teaspoons (5 grams)
Sugar ½ cup (100 grams)
Eggs 2 (100 grams)
Extra-virgin olive oil 2 tablespoons (27 grams)
Unsalted butter 2 tablespoons (28 grams)
1. In a medium saucepan over medium-low heat, whisk together the polenta, milk, salt, and sugar. Once it starts to stick to the bottom of the pan, whisk the mixture even more. It’s worth it. You’ll know the polenta is ready when it starts to knot in the middle as you whisk. It will be bound and almost dry when it’s done.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk the eggs. Add a little hot polenta to the eggs to temper them, otherwise they will cook themselves and it’ll be nasty.
3. Add the tempered eggs to the polenta and cook over low heat, just until the polenta has thickened. Pour the polenta into a bowl, add the olive oil and butter, stir, and serve. (If you don’t want to eat this right away, you need to press a piece of plastic wrap over the surface of the polenta or a skin will form.) This will last for 3 to 4 days in the refrigerator.
See here.
I hit rock bottom in Los Angeles near the end of 2004. My band Wrangler Brutes had imploded violently, a gaggle of thirty-year-old men acting like diaper-wearing toddlers (my caterwauling was particularly WWF meets maternity ward). I had left my job as pastry sous at Campanile, was flat broke with no girlfriend, and was living in the guest room of my best friend’s house. I needed a job.
The funny thing was that I got plenty of jobs. They just all sucked. I couldn’t rationalize committing myself to a year (at least) at any of these restaurants. This was my era of the tasting.
Tastings are miniature stress-filled auditions to get pastry chef gigs. You show up at an unfamiliar kitchen, make some desserts, and present them to the head chef, with maybe a chef de cuisine or a general manager in tow. I was a master of tastings. I loved doing them. They stressed me out and would keep me up at night, but I always knocked them out of the stadium. I was a professional! They would involve several rounds of desserts, some small, some plated; maybe I’d make a loaf of bread if I had time. Preparing tastings, you’re always weaving in and out of people and working in a foreign kitchen. Sometimes the people are helpful, and other times they sabotage you. It can be passive-aggressive warfare, for sure. A fresh bag for an adrenaline junkie like myself.
My Babe Ruth–pointing-at-the-bleachers dish is always polenta crêpes, because nearly every kitchen has the raw materials. It helps that it is also a simple variation on Claudia Fleming’s cornmeal crêpes from The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern, her masterpiece and my bible.
Yield: About 20 crêpes
Whole milk 1½ cups (365 grams)
All-purpose flour ¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons (93 grams plus 17 grams)
Heavy cream ½ cup (119 grams)
Sugar ⅓ cup (66 grams)
Eggs 3 (150 grams)
Salt ¾ teaspoon (3 grams)
Vanilla bean ½, scraped
Anson Mills polenta 5 tablespoons (52 grams)
1. In a medium deep-sided bowl, using an immersion blender, combine the milk, flour, cream, sugar, eggs, salt, and vanilla bean scrapings until smooth.
2. Pass the mixture through a strainer into a bowl and stir in the polenta. Cover with plastic wrap and chill overnight.
3. In a small nonstick pan coated with nonstick cooking spray over medium heat, pour about 1 ounce of the batter into the center of the pan and swirl to spread it out evenly.
4. Cook for 30 seconds, flip, and cook for another 10 seconds. Remove and let each crêpe cool individually on a plate. Once they are cool, you can stack the crêpes on top of one another to store. They will stay in the fridge for a few days, stacked on a plate and covered in plastic wrap, and in the freezer in an airtight container for about 2 months.
POLENTA SHORTCAKE WITH BLACKBERRY COMPOTE
Even when strawberry shortcake is crummy it delivers, which is something fast-food franchises and commercial manufacturers have known and banked on forever. They pay people good money to know what people like! Good Humor ice cream bars and KFC parfait cups, even the McDonald’s strawberry sundae—each flirts with the strawberry-cream construct. But there is a Grand Canyon-esque gap between a perfect strawberry and the strawberry-like flavoring you find in those desserts. Even at the supermarket, those red-skinned, white-fleshed strawberries don’t have much to them. Nothing like the sex bombs you find at your local farmers’ market in the heat of June. It isn’t June right now where I am, and I’ll assume it isn’t where you are either: Use blackberries instead. They are far easier to manipulate into something delicious when they are not at their peak. A bit of sugar and lemon and you can get an inky purple-black mess that will be great.
If you have kids, put them to work on this one. For once they can earn their keep. The legacy of this recipe should be mini handprints of seedy blackberry goo on the wall of your kitchen and your pant leg. (Or the sticky shortcake wreckage pictured.)
Yield: 12 servings
BLACKBERRY COMPOTE
Blackberries 2 cups (300 grams)
Sugar ¼ cup (50 grams)
Juice of 1 lemon
Zest of 1 lemon
Salt a pinch
1. In a medium bowl, combine ½ cup of the blackberries, the sugar, lemon juice, lemon zest, and salt and mash them together with your hands or your grandmother’s potato masher, until you have a gooey mess. Let the blackberries sit for 30 minutes. (Go make the shortcakes.)
2. Press the berry mess through a chinois or fine-mesh strainer to get rid of the seeds. Add the remaining 1½ cups blackberries, stir, and serve.
FOR THE SHORTCAKES
All-purpose flour 1 cup (125 grams)
Instant polenta ⅔ cup (110 grams)
Salt 1 teaspoon (4 grams)
Baking powder 2¼ teaspoons (8 grams)
Granulated sugar 3 tablespoons (40 grams)
Heavy cream 1¼ cups (303 grams), plus more for brushing
Maldon salt for sprinkling
Turbinado sugar for sprinkling
1. Preheat the oven to 325°F.
2. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, polenta, salt, baking powder, and granulated sugar. Make a well in the center and pour the cream inside it carefully. Slowly and gently drag the outsides of the well in together until the dough is just combined.
3. With your hand, divide the dough into 12 irregular blobs and place them on an unlined baking sheet. Brush each lightly with cream, sprinkle with Maldon salt and turbinado sugar, and bake until just set and lightly golden in color, 10 to 15 minutes.
FOR SERVING
Corn Cream (here) 2½ cups
To serve: Split each shortcake in half, stuff with blackberry compote, and douse it with corn cream. Serve to eight-year-olds absolutely immediately.
Everyone in the kitchen at Del Posto agonizes over polenta. We ship in the best possible stuff from either these crazy folks in upstate New York, or else from a tiny company called Anson Mills in South Carolina that takes the stone milling of obsolete grains to unheard-of levels of obsession. Anson Mills sends us gritty, gnarly product that takes three hours to cook and is still gritty as hell when it’s done. I’d never waste that precious stuff on the chips that follow.
Thankfully, a good polenta chip demands something low brow—in fact, the chips I make require that you find the absolute worst dry instant polenta you can get your hands on. Trust me, it’s everywhere. The good stuff is hard to find, but this instant junk . . . I guarantee your local supermarket has some dusty nine-year-old packages tucked away in the dry goods aisle somewhere.
At the restaurant I use these chips as a garnish all the time. They are crunchy, contain no sugar, and taste incredible. Nothing is more annoying than when you go to an ambitious modern restaurant and you’re served something that is supposed to be crunchy and exciting but is limp and frightening instead. These polenta chips are our crunch mercenaries. Ladner sometimes does a variation for a passed assaggi (little taste) that utilizes these chips as the bread in a baccalà sandwich.
Yield: 4 servings
Water 1 quart, plus 1 cup, hot (950 grams, plus 236 grams)
Salt 3 hefty pinches
Instant polenta 1½ cups (250 grams)
1. Preheat the oven to 300°F. Line two baking sheets with Silpats, spray with nonstick cooking spray, and set aside.
2. In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, bring the 1 quart water and the salt to three-quarters of a full boil. Whisk in the polenta until it thickens, about 1 minute.
3. Add the 1 cup hot water and puree the mixture using an immersion blender until the polenta is a light yellow color, about 3 minutes.
4. Spread the mixture on the prepared baking sheets. Bake until crisp, about 40 minutes. Break the baked polenta into whatever size pieces you prefer.
When I was a kid and I’d make a mix tape (maybe to impress a girl I had a crush on, maybe to impress myself), I would mumble quietly to no one, Avoid using anything that Ian MacKaye has played on or released. But then in the end the tape would be 45 percent Dischord Records songs. Every time. I felt compelled by a higher force. And it’s the same with sbrisolona. Even when I’m consciously trying to keep it to a minimum, I still end up with sbrisolona on every single plate. I use it a lot.
In Italy, sbrisolona is a crumbly cake-cookie hybrid shared among friends while sipping coffee and talking passionately about nothing important. It comes as a single cookie, but as soon as the first person snaps into it the whole thing shatters into confetti all over the table. It’s great. My version of sbrisolona is never intact. It is born as a crumble or, more accurately, a streusel topping. I use it to coat balls of strawberry ice cream for a snack that mimics a Good Humor ice cream bar perfectly. I toss it on desserts that are a bit too introspective otherwise, the ones that need to be reminded that everything we do is supposed to be a joyful experience.
Yield: 3 cups
All-purpose flour 1⅓ cups (233 grams)
Instant polenta 1⅓ cups (233 grams)
Sugar ¾ cup (150 grams)
Salt 2 teaspoons (8 grams)
Baking powder 2 teaspoons (8 grams)
Egg 1 (50 grams)
Vanilla bean ½, scraped
Zest from ½ lemon
Zest from ½ orange
Unsalted butter, very cold 1 cup, or 2 sticks (233 grams)
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment or a Silpat and set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, polenta, sugar, salt, baking powder, egg, vanilla beans scrapings, lemon zest, and orange zest and mix by hand.
3. In a food processor, combine the butter and polenta mixture and pulse until the butter is pea size. Do not overpulse; you want there to be chunks of butter. (If you don’t have a food processor, you can use a pastry cutter or two knives—just don’t use your hands, because the butter needs to be cold.)
4. Sprinkle the mixture out into an even layer on the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 8 minutes, stir with a fork, and finish baking until lightly browned, about 10 minutes more.
To serve: Store in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks. Keep on hand for pretty much anything and everything.
Born: Star sign Scorpio
Occupation: Musician
Status: The female version of Ian MacKaye
Notable quote: “Girls to the front.”
Shoe size: 7½
Lunch food: Leftovers inside a flaxseed wrap, microwaved
Beverage: Ice water
I Heart NY: Liverwurst toast in the lunch place inside ABC Carpet & Home
First time: While eating Ramen in Osaka, 2004
Accomplishments: Wrote a catchy song about a Metrocard once
Ambition/future plan: Avoid e-mail for an entire year and see what happens.
POPCORN WITH NUTRITIONAL YEAST PUDDING
For a stretch I lived at a group house in Mount Pleasant, Washington DC, at 1654 Monroe Street. There were four bedrooms, and when I first moved in, I shared a room with my buddy Josh. He hung out there during the day and I slept there at night and the situation worked nicely. It was in the basement, maybe five square feet. I had a backpack and a laptop to my name and I paid $250 a month.
A lot of great artists and musicians did time at 1654 Monroe. Before I lived there, Eddie Janney, of Rites of Spring and Happy Go Licky, and I talked over tea about starting a band we never got off the ground. Mick Barr, guitar guy and my eventual bandmate in Oldest, and I made plans for Oldest there, in the wee hours, when Mick was still wide awake and I’d just gotten home from a restaurant shift. Hey, Brooks, wanna start a band?
There was always a half-eaten bowl of popcorn on the kitchen table when I came home late after work. Our housemate Justin was vegan and would often snack on stove-cooked popcorn seasoned with olive oil, salt, and nutritional yeast while watching cable. By 2 a.m., when I’d get home, the popcorn was a wet mess. I never bought groceries, so I’d eat the leftover stuff as a late dinner. One night I mashed it up with a fork and made a pudding. When it’s that late and that quiet, weird things happen.
Ten years later, I was happily surprised to see a popcorn pudding recipe in an issue of Lucky Peach, where Daniel Patterson of Coi restaurant in San Francisco did the same thing, only professionally. There was no nutritional yeast in his version, but the approach was remarkably similar. His is fed to guests seeking a Michelin-starred experience, and mine is drunken leftover mush because I’m too lazy to buy groceries. Food is food. A shameful gag on one coast is the third course of a tasting menu on the other.
Popcorn brand of your choice (no microwave popcorn, please)
Salt to taste
Nutritional yeast to taste
Extra-virgin olive oil about 1 hefty teaspoon
1. In a medium saucepan, make some popcorn per the instructions on the package.
2. Season with salt and top with loads of nutritional yeast. It should taste as sharp as 24-month aged Parmigiano-Reggiano. Add olive oil and mix.
3. Toss with your hands and let the popcorn hang out in a bowl on the kitchen counter for a while.
4. When the popcorn is nice and mushy, mash it up with a fork and push it through a medium-mesh strainer to eliminate the hulls. You can use it as a spread on items of your choice, like old toast or new toast. Or you can eat it when it’s still crunchy, like a dignified human being.
BAND TOUR FOOD DIARY: YOUNG PIONEERS
When I’d tour with Young Pioneers, we’d carry pieced-together notebooks of where to find health food stores and vegetarian-friendly restaurants. It was rare that we found anything, and we cooked at people’s houses a lot. We traveled with a milk crate that held a frying pan and olive oil in case our host was not adequately equipped. My mom’s husband at the time was selling crappy Herbalife products, so we made him give us a big bunch of vitamins and elixirs so we would stay healthy on our month-long tours. Jesus, how much healthier could we be? There weren’t any drugs on these trips. We never drank or smoked. We all ate vegetarian and every show was a total-body workout. Why we felt the need to be healthier, I have no idea. But we ate a lot of falafel and a lot of healthy burritos. There’d be an occasional Buddhist Chinese place with mock duck and we would lose our minds.
But it was the non-Buddhist Chinese spots that were the most unreliable, and our nightmare was mapo tofu. Chinese take-out joints are everywhere, and you can usually craft a vegetarian meal easily enough. But we weren’t exactly Chinese food scholars, and someone would always gamble on the mapo tofu, mostly because it sounds safe. From the back of the van you’d hear bags of food torn open. And then a defeated groan: Shit, is that meat? Fuuuuuck! The mapo tofu risk was high. Why would anyone mix ground pork with tofu? What’s the point?
When we’d make food at people’s houses, it was usually Adam, our guitarist, who would cook. Most often it was his famous vegan fettuccine: whole wheat pasta drenched in olive oil, garlic, tahini, and clumps of nutritional yeast. Totally satisfying, a complete gut bomb, the perfect sleeping pill for passing out in your sleeping bag, four people deep in a suburban living room in Arkansas. When I first told Ladner of these early, monk-like tours, he looked at me and scrunched his face. God, that sounds miserable. But it wasn’t. (Continued here.)
ALEX STUPAK SCARES THE SHIT OUT OF ME
There comes a point in every cook’s life when you realize that it’s time to stop ripping people off and do your own thing. You make a Venn diagram. You populate each circle with all the different techniques you have stolen and/or learned throughout the years. You place one hand over your eyes and nose and part your fingers slowly to see if anything in the middle section makes sense. Does it?
In 1988, I started my first band. We were pretty awful, but goddamn we tried. We practiced in my mom’s basement in Towson, Maryland, and Barbara, bless her, put up with our lousy noise for way longer than she should have. We were bad and it was loud.
We were all sixteen and we had a vision: sound like Joy Division. We wanted to be gothic and scary and dark. We failed. We sounded like a crappy punk band. Of course, we still ripped off Joy Division, Bauhaus, and Savage Republic, it’s just that we sounded like a bunch of teenagers with no chops and absolutely no licks in doing so. We were, in the grandest sense of the term, a “local band.” We played one show outside of Baltimore—a gig in DC, thirty minutes down the B-W Parkway in a grim neighborhood (circa 1990), with Neurosis and Filth, both on tour from California. There were twenty paying people in attendance when Neurosis played at the show’s finale. Earlier, when we played, there were maybe two, and they were the friends we had brought down with us. They got in for free.
Fast-forward to 2006. I was pulling double restaurant shifts at Komi (morning production) and Tosca (night service) in DC. I wasn’t doing it for the money; there wasn’t really any money to be had. I mostly just got off on designing dessert menus for two very different restaurants. But I was running out of ideas. So I started stealing recipe ideas from New York City restaurants that I found online. These thieving sessions occurred late at night on a laptop, sitting on the back porch of the group house where I lived in Mount Pleasant, the power cord stretched out the door. The occasional raccoon from the creepy nearby bamboo forest would wander by, but otherwise there was complete silence in total darkness. There were many searches.
I was obsessed with Alex Stupak’s work at wd-50. It was pure genius. And I ripped it off constantly in DC. I mean, who would know? I stole Alex’s twisty chocolate ganache thing blatantly (mine would always snap and fall limply as it left the kitchen), as well as his liquid shortbread thing (it’s a liquid cookie that is frozen so it melts! What?).
I had to go work for him. It felt inevitable. My girlfriend then, Stella, was living in NYC, and I was traveling up there a couple times a month, and as comfortable as DC was, I felt the itch to hurl myself into the vortex of the New York pastry chef world. Wd-50 was looking for a new pastry cook, and a couple e-mails secured me a stage. I was very, very excited.
I hopped the Chinatown bus up to NYC on an early Sunday morning, after service, at 2 a.m. The bus driver got lost. We ended up doing a series of unnecessary U-turns just outside Greenbelt, Maryland. Have you ever been on an unlicensed charter bus full of screaming strangers? The driver was besieged by insults and worse. We can see the B-W Parkway on the left! It’s right there! What’s this guy doing?
Stella lived in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. It was still dark when we pulled up at 88 East Broadway in Manhattan, the unloading dock for the Chinatown bus. Everyone got off the bus and instantly scattered into the morning darkness. I had no idea where I was. My usual New York City visits centered around St. Marks Place and Williamsburg, and I’d never been this far south on the island. A livery cab picked me up and charged me fifty dollars for the three-mile ride to Stella’s place.
The next day I got to wd-50 at 11 a.m., excited beyond belief. I was wearing puffy chef’s pants and rubber Birkenstock clogs. When I arrived, I walked downstairs and Alex greeted me. He was not smiling. I later discovered it was his day off and he came in only to oversee my time in his kitchen.
We sat at an empty banquette in the dining room. I told him that I was working at Komi in DC. He was expressionless at first and then half-smiled to indicate that he really did not give a fuck at all: DC was a backwater. NYC was the promised land. I mentioned that I had spent some time at Campanile in Los Angeles. I may as well have said I had worked at the Del Taco drive-through window on Los Feliz Boulevard. His shoulders sagged, deflated.
“Do you know how to make a fluid gel?” he asked.
“Absolutely. I made one last night!” I said.
We went into the basement prep kitchen. I was handed a recipe for a milk sauce. Really just milk sweetened with honey, seasoned with salt, and then set with gellan gum, a hydrocolloid that, as they like to say, is “thermoreversible,” or heat stable. Right on, I was going to bust this out in a matter of seconds. It took me an hour, and in the end, I had only a clunky, chunky mess of off-white blobs littering a sheet tray. Alex looked at it and grabbed a plastic bowl scraper. He handed it to me, pointed toward the trash can, and walked away. I scraped.
He set me to work making dough for the iconic wd-50 flatbread, which was the job of the pastry department. In the end, it was to be a very thin, nearly see-through lavash cracker pebbled with sesame seeds. So cool! I’d seen pictures of this on the Internet! Rad! I can’t believe I’m getting to make this!
It took me way too long to make and stretch the dough. How did I know? Alex told me. “Listen, man, if I give you this job, I am going to be on your ass. You’re really fucking slow.”
The two other pastry cooks in the basement prep kitchen were Rosio and some guy who didn’t offer his name. Rosio was nice, helpful, very sweet, and was working on eight different projects at once. She was probably fifteen years my junior. The other guy called everyone “chef” pejoratively, was prematurely potbellied, and sported heavy bags under his eyes. Had it been New York in 1988, he would have been smoking a cigarette in the kitchen and trading barbs from the Truly Tasteless Jokes books with no one in particular. He would have had ninety-eight euphemisms for “vagina,” absolutely. He saw me as both a complete hack (he would no doubt have to remake everything I was screwing up) and a guy who could potentially take his job.
Alex called me a few days later and offered me the job. I took the call at a Dunkin’ Donuts downstairs from Komi and accepted a job offer from wd-50, surrounded by a display case of old doughnuts and the smell of microwaved scrambled eggs. I said I could start in three weeks.
Then I got cold feet. I turned down the job like a complete coward. All of my credit cards were maxed by this point and I didn’t have any mom loans left to take. Without these things, the math didn’t make sense. I couldn’t afford to move. Plus Alex is intense, and it would have been a daily shakedown. I chickened out.
Even though we had spoken several times on the phone, I e-mailed Alex to decline. It was a weak way to go about it. And he let me know it in a twenty-two word e-mail that I discovered in my Yahoo trash bin a few weeks later. To paraphrase: You will never amount to anything, and you completely suck.
I was crushed. The e-mail made me shrivel like a slug freshly sprinkled with salt by a mean eleven-year-old. Humiliating. I was always going to be a local band playing to two people. It was decided.
Alex Stupak has since given up pastry cheffing entirely. He owns two very successful Mexican restaurants in Manhattan, where he is in charge of savory menus. He is no longer merely a chef. He is an operator. Everyone who works in kitchen for extended periods of time dreams of being an operator. I have nothing but complete and utter respect for the man. But he still scares the living shit out of me. I’m a salaried pastry chef. He’s a restaurateur.
In 2012, I was invited to present at an international food conference in Mexico City called Mesamerica, one of the many slightly self-congratulatory food conferences that are held all over the world these days. I went on right after the scholar Diana Kennedy, who sat on a couch with a moderator and discussed sustainability and authenticity in Mexican cuisine. Alex was invited to present as well. We flew to the Mexican capital from New York on separate planes. My thirty-minute performance was unintentionally comic and I cooked nothing. I told a story and then played a crappy punk song—in English, in front of fifteen hundred Mexican food-obsessed people. Alex made Mexican food. That took serious confidence and risk and guts. I was just clowning.
After the performances, I was standing outside the venue when some excited Mexican kids asked to take my picture. Alex was a few feet away, and they gestured for him to join me in the photo. We both cringed, and then the kid snapped the photo. A permanent, perfect Venn diagram.
Jennie & Brooks.
As a kid, I spent a lot of time cooking with my mom and grandmother. It wasn’t why I became a professional cook, but it absolutely contributed to the love and respect I have for food and cooking. Crustoli were one of the cookies I made with my grandmother, Jennie, each year for the holidays. In Sicily, these are called chiacchiere, which conjugated and translated means “purposeless passionate talking, or talking nonsense.” They’re eaten midday with a glass of wine by gossipy old ladies and shit-talking grandpas as they complain about “everything and nothing.” They are dough knotted into an awkward twist, deep-fried, and given a quick shake inside a brown paper bag partially filled with powdered sugar. The bag eventually disintegrates from the heat and oil. That was always my favorite part. Sometimes the most pronounced food memories have nothing to do with what you put in your mouth.
Yield: A big platter that disappears fast
All-purpose flour 2 cups (250 grams), plus more for dusting
Sugar ¼ cup (50 grams)
Eggs 2 (100 grams)
Unsalted butter ¼ cup, or ½ stick (57 grams), softened
Dry white wine 2 tablespoons (29 grams)
Baking powder 1 teaspoon (3.5 grams)
Zest of ½ orange
Salt to taste
Peanut oil for frying 1 quart (864 grams)
Powdered sugar for serving
1. In the bowl of a stand mixer, using the hook attachment, combine the flour, sugar, eggs, butter, white wine, baking powder, orange zest, and salt and mix on medium speed.
2. Dust a countertop with flour. After the dough comes together, transfer it to the countertop and knead with your hands until it becomes smooth. Form the dough into a ball, transfer the ball to a bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let it sit on the countertop for 1 hour.
3. With a rolling pin, roll out the dough to ⅛ inch thick. (You can also use a pasta roller if you have one.)
4. In a medium deep-sided saucepan over high heat, bring the peanut oil to between 325° and 350°F.
5. Using a knife, cut the dough into 2 × 4-inch strips. Cut a ½-inch slit lengthwise along the center of each pastry strip. Loop one end of the strip through the slit and pull it through into a little bow-tie thing. Ta-da!
6. Fry the crustoli, a few at a time, for 1 to 2 minutes on each side, or until the pastry bubbles and the crustoli are golden and crisp. Drain them on paper towels on top of a cooling rack.
7. While they are still hot, shake the crustoli in a brown paper bag with some powdered sugar and serve immediately.
More stale bread: my favorite. At Del Posto we use these often as a crunchy component to plated desserts, a textural bonus that brings the sweet yeast flavor of toast. Making them is really fun. We cut into a large loaf of rustic Italian bread with an airy crumb structure (I prefer filone) and pull the innards into free-form tufts of bread. It reminds me of when Han Solo sliced open the Tauntaun and slid Luke Skywalker inside to warm up in the guts after Luke had his ass handed to him by that Wampa.
Yield: About 3 cups
Rustic Italian bread 1 loaf
Sugar about 2 tablespoons
Salt about 1 tablespoon
Extra-virgin olive oil enough to lightly coat the bread pieces
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2. Using a knife, split open the loaf, pull it into two halves, and tear the bread out in bite-size pieces.
3. In a large bowl, toss together the bread, sugar, salt, and olive oil to taste. It’s up to you how sweet or salty you would like your croutons.
4. Spread the pieces of bread in a single layer on a baking sheet. Bake for 10 minutes, stir, and bake until golden brown throughout, about 10 minutes more.
I make these in a very inefficient and time-consuming manner that includes pushing toasted bread through two different-size perforated pans. It’s loud and messy. One of our former cooks, Adriana, was so annoyed by the crunching sound that she refused to be in the room during the process. But it’s a great way to get the irregular miniature bread chunks that we love so much. A more reasonable and perfectly acceptable approach is to use a regular strainer—like a colander. These bread crumbs are used on Bastoncino (here), Sfera di Caprino (here), and the Sunchoke Crudo (here), among others. They’re also just good to have around when you want some nonsweet crunch.
Baguette, day-old 1
Extra-virgin olive oil 5 tablespoons (67 grams)
Salt 2 teaspoons (8 grams)
1. Preheat the oven to 300°F.
2. Slice the baguette into ½-inch pieces and scatter the pieces in a single layer on a baking sheet. Bake until dried out and crunchy, about 10 minutes.
3. In a food processor, add the bread and pulse until roughly chopped. (If you don’t have a food processor, you can crush the baked baguette pieces using the bottom of a heavy saucepan in a seesaw motion.) Using a medium strainer, sift out the fine bread crumbs (save these for the pea cake coating, here) and reserve only the small pieces (they should look kind of like Grape-Nuts cereal).
4. In a large deep-sided saucepan over high heat, bring the olive oil to 320°F. Fry the bread crumbs until golden brown, about 5 minutes. Drain on paper towels and salt heavily. These keep for a week in an airtight container.
Grapenuts & bread crumbs.
Fried fruit (frittelle) was on the menu a few years back in what used to be the enoteca section of Del Posto, beside the bar near the front window. One Christmas Eve, a night we are always very busy and the stress levels are in the red, I nearly came to blows with Daniel, then the manager of that section of the dining room. Fried fruit was involved.
Daniel and I had conducted a series of heated screaming matches in the kitchen from 11:30 p.m. to 12:20 a.m. (Merry Christmas!) At issue: I’m an adrenaline junkie asshole and Daniel is a stubborn Italian from Friuli. Eventually, I refused to let him serve a fried fruit I’d finished and went to serve it myself. He blocked me in the passageway of the kitchen as I left, creating a wedge with his chest and shoulders. I pushed against him with one forearm, outraged that a waiter would dare take on a chef. In my other hand was a plate of warm, cinnamon-drenched frittelle accompanied by soon-to-melt gelato. Flying fists seemed inevitable. The rest of the staff looked on, some horrified, some laughing hysterically. I would have gotten my butt kicked and been disgraced. But I wouldn’t have surrendered that plate. Finally, I moved past him (or he let me pass, whatever). Today, Daniel and I are friends, the near-fisticuffs a smudged, if comical, Christmas memory.
Apples and pineapples work wonderfully. Peaches in the summer are the absolute best. It should be a firm fruit. Apple rings are the most forgiving and nonconfrontational.
Yield: 4 servings
Granny Smith apples 2 cored and sliced into ¼-inch rounds
All-purpose flour 2 cups (250 grams)
Eggs 2 (100 grams), beaten
Bread crumbs, untoasted (here) 2 cups
Peanut oil 1 quart (864 grams)
Salt ½ teaspoon (2 grams)
Sugar ¼ cup (50 grams)
Ground cinnamon ½ teaspoon (1 gram)
Yogurt Sorbet (here)
Extra-virgin olive oil for drizzling
1. In medium a deep-sided saucepan over high heat, bring the peanut oil to between 325° and 350°F.
2. In three separate bowls, place the flour, eggs, and bread crumbs. Going one piece at a time, dredge the fruit in the flour, then the egg, then the bread crumbs and set on a plate until all the fruit is prepared.
3. Deep-fry the coated fruit pieces, turning occasionally. Don’t put too much stuff in at once. The fruit is done once it is golden and floating in the oil, about 3 minutes.
4. Remove the fruit from the oil and drain on a paper towel on top of a cooling rack.
5. In a bowl, combine the salt, sugar, and cinnamon.
To serve: Drop each piece of still-warm fruit into the cinnamon-sugar mixture, coat thoroughly, and serve immediately with a scoop of yogurt sorbet and a drizzle of olive oil.
See here.
If something is meant to be crunchy, it must be crunchy. I talk about this constantly with my staff at Del Posto. Humidity is the enemy. In the middle of a sweltering New York City summer, I often pine away for the dry heat of Las Vegas or Phoenix, where nothing ever goes limp in their restaurants and bakeries. And then I think back to all the hellacious trips I’ve made to Las Vegas and I stop pining immediately.
Pasta frolla is my go-to tart dough, and it always does the trick. It isn’t persnickety like puff pastry and it can be made start to finish without much thought or preplanning. Perhaps its most important virtues are that it retains its crunchy bite under even the most slobbery of fruits and it isn’t too sweet. Bake this dough until it’s nearly burned and you won’t be disappointed.
Yield: 1 baking sheet
All-purpose flour 2 cups (250 grams)
Instant polenta 1¼ teaspoons (25 grams)
Sugar 3 tablespoons (38 grams), plus more for sprinkling
Salt 2 teaspoons (8 grams)
Unsalted butter, cold ¾ cup, or 1½ sticks (170 grams), diced
Ice water 1 ounce (43 grams)
Egg 1 (50 grams) beaten
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer, using the paddle attachment, combine the flour, polenta, sugar, salt, and butter on medium speed. Stop when the butter chunks are the size of peas.
3. Pour in the very cold ice water and combine as quickly as possible, resisting the urge to overwork it, about 1 minute. (Chunks of butter are still good. Embrace them.)
4. Using a rolling pin, roll the dough out on a sheet of parchment until it is ¼ inch thick. Lift the dough by the parchment and transfer it to a baking sheet.
5. Brush the dough with the beaten egg and sprinkle with sugar. Bake until golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes. Cool on the pan on a cooling rack.
Blueberry Crostata—sorry, this recipe isn’t in the book.
DOUGHNUTS: THE HARD WAY AND THE LA WAY
Shoving doughnuts into my mouth directly from the fryer is among my favorite pastimes. During dinner service, I often imagine a restaurant so tiny and intimate that the little joys of a restaurant cook’s life (eating molten doughnuts, spooning vanilla gelato straight from the ice cream machine while it’s still running) could be experienced by the guest. It would be immersive, like an amusement park’s hall of mirrors or a haunted house. Moving from place to place, room to room, no barriers, no walls, interacting directly with the chef. Then one day I realized that what I was imagining is everyone eating at their mom’s house.
DOUGHNUTS: THE HARD WAY
Yield: As many as you can make
All-purpose flour 4 cups (500 grams)
Sugar ⅔ cup (133 grams), plus more for coating
Active dry yeast 1¼ teaspoons (5 grams)
Salt 1¼ teaspoons (5 grams)
Eggs 3 (150 grams)
Water ⅔ cup (158 grams)
Unsalted butter ⅔ cup, or 1⅓ sticks (150 grams), softened
Peanut oil for frying 2 quarts (1680 grams)
1. In the bowl of a stand mixer, using the hook attachment, combine the flour, sugar, yeast, and salt on medium speed.
2. In a separate bowl, combine the eggs and water. Add to the flour mixture and continue mixing as the dough comes together.
3. Add the softened butter, a little bit at a time, as the dough continues to mix. Once you’ve added all the butter, let the dough continue to mix for 15 minutes.
4. Dump the dough into a large bowl and cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Let the dough proof in a warm, dry place until it doubles in size, at least 4 to 5 hours, possibly longer.
5. Place the dough on a well-floured cookie sheet. Press it down with your fingers until it is about ¼ inch thick. Sprinkle flour over the top of the dough and put the dough in the fridge to chill until it becomes firm.
6. In a medium deep-sided saucepan over high heat, bring the peanut oil to 350°F.
7. Remove the dough from the fridge and cut rounds with a 1-inch round cutter. (You can also make full-size doughnuts with this dough.) This dough cannot be rerolled, so work wisely.
8. Deep-fry the doughnuts until golden brown.
To serve: Coat in sugar and eat these right away! You can also fill them with Pastry Cream (here).
DOUGHNUTS: THE LA WAY
Yield: As many as you can make
Warm water 1¼ cups (425 grams)
Unsalted butter ⅓ cup, or ⅔ stick (85 grams), melted
Sugar ¼ cup (50 grams), plus more for coating
Salt 1 teaspoon (4 grams)
Active dry yeast 1¼ teaspoons (5 grams)
All-purpose flour 3 cups (382 grams)
Bread flour 1½ cups (220 grams)
Pure vanilla extract ½ teaspoon (2 grams)
Zest of ½ orange
Peanut oil for frying 2 quarts (1680 grams)
1. In the bowl of a stand mixer, using the hook attachment, combine the water, butter, sugar, and salt on medium speed until the mixture just comes together. Add the yeast and mix for a minute or so, until the dough just comes together.
2. Add the all-purpose flour, bread flour, vanilla, and orange zest, and mix for 10 minutes, or until you have a smooth dough. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit in a warm, dry place for 3 hours, or until the dough has doubled in size.
3. In a medium deep-sided saucepan over medium-high heat, bring the peanut oil to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper, dust it with flour, and set aside.
4. Turn the dough out onto the prepared baking sheet and press it into the shape of the sheet until it is about ¼ inch thick.
5. Cut out the doughnut shapes of your choice and deep-fry them until golden, or until they float to the top. (You can also store the portioned dough in the refrigerator, but you cannot reroll this dough, so what you see is what you get.)
To serve: Coat in sugar and serve hot.
The first thing I ever truly loved was Van Halen: Diamond Dave, Eddie, Alex, Michael Anthony (first and last name, always). My first love, absolutely.
Van Halen slugged it out in clubs in LA for six years before their first album, Van Halen, was released in 1978. I admire their pre-fame work ethic. Whenever anyone brings up Van Halen, I’m always quick to note that they worked really long and really hard before they achieved anything, like I have proprietary ownership of the fact.
There was a book at our house when I was growing up that I assume came as a freebie with a Columbia House offering. It had a blue cover and the title was embossed: The Year in Music, 1979. I pored over this thing religiously. Frank Zappa with a rubber cone on his head, Gilda Radner aping Patti Smith, and, of course, Diamond Dave in soft light, shirtless, chest hair aglow, wearing leather chaps and leaping into the air, just completely psyched and at the beginning of his notoriety. I was awestruck.
So as a seven-year-old, I discovered love. And by the time the album 1984 came out, I was an armchair Van Halen scholar, in the way that only a nerdy kid from the suburbs of Baltimore could be. I’d gleaned most of what I knew from The Year in Music, 1979, the older brothers of a few friends, and MTV VJs.
In fancy fine-dining New York restaurants, you call the person in charge “Chef.” But that goes for almost everyone in any position of authority or management in the kitchen. I had never experienced this until I started working at Del Posto. Yes, Chef! I got it, Chef! The formality wasn’t part of the kitchen vernacular in the restaurants where I’d worked before. You called the head chef by his or her name. That was normal. That made sense.
People started calling me Chef at Del Posto and it was incredibly weird. If I was standing next to Ladner, Tony (the chef de cuisine), and one of the sous-chefs and someone yelled “Hey, Chef!” from behind, we’d all turn around. It’s completely goofy. It’s silly.
It was extremely awkward at first—probably for a full year. But I love it now. It’s a total New York City thing. Everyone’s “Chef.” I am 100 percent into it. To this day I find it uncomfortable introducing Ladner to a friend outside of work and I’m forced to say, “Hey, this is Mark.” Goddamnit, he’s Chef! That’s his fucking name! It’s not unlike when I’d hear “Panama” on the radio while in the car with my mom in 1984 and that part where David Lee Roth sings “Reach down between my legs / Ease the seat back” would make me freeze with embarrassment. It’s a great song, though, so I would never have thought to change the station. A little less than a year later, my mother began cranking “Just a Gigolo” from Mr. Roth’s first solo endeavor every time it came on the radio.
Van Halen is the reason I could never with a straight face work under the talented chef Michael Anthony, currently of Gramercy Tavern. I don’t think I’d be able to introduce him to friends outside of work as either “Chef” or “Michael Anthony” without picturing him with a Jack Daniels bass guitar flying across a stage over Diamond Dave, Alex, and Eddie.
ROSA’S BISCUITS, OR “THE BEST THING I HAVE EVER EATEN IN AMERICA”
I have two rules for my staff at Del Posto.
One: Call your mom. Often. If you need a few days off to go visit her, no problem—I will cover your shift. When was the last time you called your mom? Call your mother, OK?
Two: Do not piss Rosa off.
Rosa is the master of the basement at DP, which is not nearly as brutal as it sounds. The basement houses the prep kitchen below the main dining room, is nicer than most professional kitchens, and is well equipped with all kinds of beautiful appliances. Rosa rules that roost. I suppose an org chart somewhere says that I’m in charge, but that is the most shameless sham: Rosa is the boss.
Rosa started at DP in 2005, the year it opened. Initially, she was the “linen lady,” meaning she’d iron tablecloths during the day and clean the bathrooms at night. There are a lot of bathrooms to clean, and tons of linens, too—it’s a crappy job. The pastry chefs before me had declined Rosa’s many requests to move into the kitchen. Why would I hire someone with no experience? It is a perfectly reasonable question.
When I started at DP, I was absolutely desperate for staff. No one wanted to work for me. I was a chucklehead, a beefsteak Charlie, a total loser. I was new to town and didn’t have any connections. So one super-depressing day, a day when I was particularly forlorn, a day yanked straight from W. Somerset Maugham that “broke gray and dull,” when “the clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow,” the banquet manager asked, “Hey, do you need people? I can transfer Rosa to pastry.”
I said yes and Rosa started working with me. This was in early 2008.
Rosa is from El Salvador. She came to New York to earn money to help her family back home. She lives at the northern-most tip of Manhattan—beyond Harlem, almost in the Bronx, some street in the 200s. Her palate is impeccable. She balances salt and acid seamlessly and perfectly, like an art cultivated in the womb. She just knows.
One gnarly March day a few years ago, the morning prep team called in sick. All of them.
Except Rosa. She showed up. Rosa always shows up. Always.
When I arrived at 11 a.m. after a stressful and slow-moving L train voyage from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the prep list was almost done, and Rosa had no fewer than five massive projects going simultaneously. I was floored. Her commitment to getting the job done, no matter what, is baffling. She consistently schools CIA grads and sous-chefs. Everyone who works at DP loves her to death, and she loves them back.
We don’t serve this recipe at the restaurant, which doesn’t make much sense because it’s probably the best one. For staff meal, Rosa’s biscuits are a contorni to Meat Loaf Day, Fried Chicken Day, even Veal-Scrap Curry Day. They defy gravity, light and delicious but somehow still hearty. I feel about these biscuits the way I feel about Black Sabbath, Vol. 4, and Jim Lahey’s pizza Bianca loaf at Sullivan Street Bakery.
But there’s a higher compliment. A few years back, one of the restaurant’s Italian-national managers—very Italian, very hard to please—grabbed a couple biscuits off the family meal table, took a bite, and said the most beautiful thing I have almost ever heard within the walls of Del Posto, flakes of biscuit guano spewing from his mouth and in the best Italianate English: “This is the best thing I have ever eaten in America.”
Yield: 12 biscuits
All-purpose flour 2½ cups (315 grams)
Baking powder 2½ teaspoons (11 grams)
Salt 1½ teaspoons (6 grams), plus more for sprinkling
Sugar ¾ cup (150 grams)
Unsalted butter, cold 1 cup, or 2 sticks (226 grams) cubed
Buttermilk ¾ cup (183 grams)
Melted butter for brushing
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
2. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Add the butter and combine using two butter knives or your fingers, being careful not to handle the butter too much. You want chunks of butter to remain. Add the buttermilk and mix with your hands until the batter just comes together, but no further.
3. Gently portion out the dough into twelve 1-inch balls and place them on the prepared baking sheet, evenly spaced. Bake until golden, about 10 minutes.
4. Brush immediately with melted butter and sprinkle with salt.
To serve: Serving them hot is all that matters.
