Entries associated with the tag "Rick Bayless":

It's not online yet--ah, there it is--but in June's Chicago mag former Reader boss man Mike Lenehan has a nice piece on Indiana natural-pork producer Greg Gunthorp and his ten-year rise to meat supplier to the (local) culinary stars.

In it, Gunthorp confronts the dilemma of the demand for pasture-fed animals, which are really best eaten seasonally, when the grass they're living on is green. He's decided that it's OK, preferable even, to freeze them at their peak deliciousness rather than sell fresh meat year round. On its face that's a stand that seems like sacrilege for any self-respecting chef, but in fact it's endorsed by Gunthorp's best chicken customer, Rick Bayless:

"I think the freezer is a really good tool," he says. "We went through this period back in the seventies, eighties, when people would say if you had anything frozen in your place, you were an awful restaurant. And if you're talking about frozen prepared foods, or choosing frozen ingredients when you could get the best stuff fresh, then, yeah, that is awful. But we have huge freezers. . . .If you know how to use a freezer and you understand that you can only freeze certain things, and you know how to defrost slowly at the right temperature, you can serve great local food all year-round."

Chefs were crawling all over the Green City Market this morning, hauling away flats of purple asparagus, young garlic, and spring greens, which dominate the produce selection this early in the season. Always nice to see that happening outside the context of a photo op.

The usual non-veg vendors supplemented the offerings; beautiful stuff at the Bleeding Heart and (newcomer) Delightful Pastries tables. I got some spring lamb tongues from Mint Creek Farm and some 15-month-old bandaged cheddar from Wisconsin's Brunkow Cheese. Over at the demo table Sarah Stegner was plating it with dandelion greens, and Bruce Sherman put together some radish, asparagus and Prairie Pure Cheese crostini. All in all a typically shiny, happy start to the season, with strangers peeking into each others bags, swapping recipe ideas, etc. Check out the attached pix.

This Saturday Rick Bayless is leading a sustainable ag pep rally at the market. Rah spring!

One of the many reasons I love my neighborhood Cermak Produce is the regular availability of housemade salsas, usually guacamole, salsa verde, and picadillo but occasionally an oddball, such as a malevolent dark red "salsa diablo." I'd suspect they're an economical way for the store to use up over-the-hill produce if they didn't look and taste so bright. The other day I came across a new one--salsa de cacahuate, or peanut salsa, a vibrant orange solution of ground peanut and red chile flecks that finishes with a slow burn and has only a very slight resemblance to southeast Asian peanut sauces. Before I did any investigation I topped some leftover pork roast with it, and it considerably revived the meat, which by then had become a little dry. In My Mexico Diana Kennedy has a recipe from Veracruz, made with chipotle moras, that she recommends spreading on plain tortillas, over rice, or in chicken stew. But there are definitely no chipotles in Cermak's. Over on the CIA's Web site Rick Bayless gives a version using guajillo and arbol chiles. He says it's traditionally used on fish tacos in Acapulco and Guerrero, but he likes it on roast duck too. Cermak's is not quite that complicated but seems similar.

Ruben Beltran, who worked for years with Rick Bayless at  Frontera Grill, has opened Maya del Sol, his own spot in Oak Park, in the space once occupied by the late and not-at-all lamented Slaton’s Supper Club. A more complete review is forthcoming, but on our first visit, we concluded: it rocks! Though I was ready for missteps in what superficially seems a trendy scene (by Oak Park standards), the food struck me as authentic and delicious. Cochinita pibil, the pulled pork in achiote from Yucatan, was served with requisite pickled onions and house-made tortillas . . . and thus my heart was stolen. There are also nuevo Latino options, like perfectly prepared salmon in light sauce and nachos covered in pot roast (!). Cocktails include a pan-American range of pisco sours, caipirinhas, mojitos and others. This is one to watch. 144 S. Oak Park Ave, Oak Park, 708-358-9800

You know the proliferation of food blogs has hit critical mass when former Reader staffer and Alternadad Neal Pollack gets into the game.

Pollack will be blogging about "Family Matters" on the nifty new Epicurious blog, which so far seems to mean reporting on little Elijah's precocious food tantrums.

Pollack has august company, joining wine critic Natalie MacLean, cookbook author Melissa Clark, and our own Rick Bayless, who so far has contributed a quick guide to eating in various Mexico City neighborhoods, an update on the rooftop garden at Frontera/Topolobampo (where he's using Earthboxes), an ode to tacos al pastor with a significant shout out to Maxwell Street's Rubi's, and tips on making your own hot sauce.

The Heart of Italy's Annual Festa Pasta Vino starts Thursday. This massive scrum in "little" Little Italy (Oakley and Cermak), runs through Sunday and features eats from La Fontanella, Bacchanalia, Haro, and Ignotz’s, and a host of Italian American crooners beginning with Dino's daughter Deana Martin.  

The Rotary Club of Elk Grove's Styx, Stones, and Bones Ribfest runs Friday and Saturday and features 40 teams competing for a total of $10,000 in prizes. And there's a Styx cover band. That's next to Elk Grove High School, 150 Lions Dr. (Arlington Heights Rd., between Higgins and Beasterfield.)

Saturday at 3 Christine Busby of Busby Bakes Cookies will provide samples of her baked goods during the regular Saturday wine tasting at Provenance Food and Wine.

Saturday at noon at Evanston's annual Custer's Last Stand, the Food Network's Michael Chiarello is doing a cooking demo. On Sunday at the same time our own Rick Bayless takes the stove.

Monday at 6 PM Halsted Tastes Better is a 14-restaurant graze at Aldine and Halsted. The $30 admission gets you 12 tastes at Yoshi’s Café, Arco de Cuchilleros, the Chicago Diner, and more.

If you had more than the usual trouble getting a table at Blackbird, Avec, Alinea, Frontera, Hot Doug's or any other local celebstaurant last week, it's likely because they were already booked up by thousands of out of town chefs, food writers, marketers, photographers, and entrepreneurs here for the International Association of Culinary Professionals conference. The four-day schedule of talks, workshops, tasting, tours, and dinners was thoroughly interesting, convivial, and so huge that it was damn near impossible to do anything without missing three or four other really cool programs.

This was particularly painful on Thursday morning, as I stood in the Hilton lobby trying to decide between cod, raw milk cheese, and butter tastings, a discussion on herbs and spices with Madhur Jaffrey, and a localism panel with Erika Lesser of Slow Food USA. I settled instead on "The Doctor is In" a Q & A with food science gurus Shirley O. Corriher and Harold McGee, in large part because ten years ago I'd been given Corriher's demystifying Cookwise at a formative time in my life (I'd forsworn vegetarianism), and it quickly became my best friend in the kitchen. The jolly, cherubic Corriher and gaunt, wry McGee had a winning Julia and Jacques-like chemistry as they fielded tough technical questions about brining, natural and unnatural transfats, and what it means when chopped garlic goes green (it's really fresh from high protein soil). Someone asked about how to work with flours with unknown protein content and Corriher said that in the old days German bakers would thrust a sweaty arm in the barrel. If the flour stuck to the arm they knew they were dealing with low protein stuff. The session provided the first of many we're-all-in-this-together, geek-out moments when Italophile Faith Willinger, in large metal cow earrings, rose from the crowd to ask what she could do to improve her zabaglione when she couldn't get Italian eggs (the answer: use extra yolks). 

I followed that with Going Underground: Roots, Rhizomes, and Tubers in Asian Cooking with Viet World Kitchen's Andrea Nguyen, Saveur editor James Oseland and Elizabeth Andoh, whose presentation on konnyaku, "the ugly duckling of the Japanese kitchen" was bizarre and fascinating. This highly fibrous, zero-cal "elephant yam" is extremely labor intensive to produce; it requires three transplants over three years before it's mature, it smells repulsive when it's pollinating, and it has to be processed with an alkaline liquid before it can be digested. If you buy a package that smells sweet it's spoiled--if it's fresh it smells bad. At some point I realized that I had eaten this last year, extruded into noodles. The flavorless end product has a good chew, is an ideal flavor absorber, and has been used for centuries in Japan--there were 82 recipes in a 1864 cookbook and 80 of them are still used. But as Andoh marveled, "Who had the courage to think you could eat it?"

For me, Friday's panel with Rick Bayless and Donald Bixby of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy about the Renewing America's Food Traditions project (RAFT), and cooking heritage breeds was the most hopeful and inspiring segment of the conference. Bixby explained how the heritage breed movement got its start in the 70s, when bunch of agricultural historians working on bicentennial commemorations discovered that they couldn't find any any of the breeds our forefathers raised. Back then their few stewards were hobbyists who just thought it was cool to raise Buckeye chickens, Pineywoods cattle, or Mulefoot hogs, and for whom the thought of eating the endangered (but tasty) animals was counterinterintuitive. But eventually the idea that "You have to eat them to save them" prevailed--an idea Erika Lesser called "eater-based conservation. " Bayless explained that people will reconnect with these animals first through restaurants, so chefs have a serious responsibility to work with farmers, and learn how to properly prepare the animals before foisting them on to the eating public. And it ain't easy. You can't just throw a Buckeye into the pot and expect it to taste right. Bayless said his kitchen tested chickens from Lagrange's Gunthorp Farms for nine months before they appeared on the menu at Frontera (gotta brine them first). It took a year before they could figure out how to get grass-fed beef on the menu--but it was worth it. Now the grass-fed (and more expensive) carne asada outsells the the regular one, which he said was the biggest selling weekend item for 20 years. Bixby summed it up: "Education starts with the chefs." 

Bayless, incidentally, won the IACP's 2007 Humanitarian Award, recognizing "individuals who have contributed significantly to improving conditions for the underprivileged in our society," for his work with the Frontera Farmer Foundation.

Whiskyfest sells out every year and this one's no different, but there are a number of attendant side events open to the public, starting tonight at 5 PM with a 150-whiskey tasting at Binny's, 3000 N. Clark. It's $30; call 773-935-9400. At 7:30 there's a Bulleit Bourbon-marinated pig roast at Chief O’Neill’s. The $10 admission benefits the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation; call 773-583-3066. Later still, at 10 PM, Delilah’s introduces its new signature Highland Park Single Cask Single Malt, while over at the House of Glunz (1206 N. Wells) there's a "Wild Scotsman Tasting" with John McDougall "the only living man to have distilled whisky in every region of Scotland" at 10 PM. Call 312-642-3000. Finally, if your liver hasn't fallen out after Friday's main event, Delilah's hosts the always rollicking afterparty starting at 10:30 PM.

Meanwhile, for tonight's whisky-free entertainment, San Francisco Chronicle food writer Linda Furiya reads from her food memoir Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America, about growing up in Versailles, Indiana, as part of the only Japanese family in town. It's tonight at 7:30 at Women & Children First.

Over at the International Association of Culinary Professionals confab, more than 60 authors are expected to represent at Friday's open-to-the-public Cookbook Expo. It starts at 4 PM at the Chicago Hilton and Towers, 720 S. Michigan. It's free but you have to register by e-mailing IACPCookbookExpo@hqtrs.com.

Saturday morning at 9 the Culinary Historians of Chicago present Anne Willan on "An Exploration of the Best and Worst of Historical Recipes," at Robert Morris College Institute of Culinary Arts, 401 S. State. It's $10; call 708-788-0338.

Also on Saturday, Slow Food Chicago conducts a walking tour of La Villita. The group meets at 9:30 at Panadería La Baguette, 3117 West 26th. Reservations at Brown Paper Bag.

Meanwhile at 10 AM there's a Discovering Devon tour led by the American Institute of Wine and Food. Tickets ($65) can be had here.

And, elsewhere on the street: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is holding a Carnaval & Parade for Fair Food, Real Rights and Dignity beginning at 10 AM at Federal Plaza.

The talented Louisa Chu of Moveable Feast announces the first ever molecular gastronomy seminar in the United States with one of the giants in the field--Herve This. Its starts at 9:30 at the Union League Club of Chicago. 65 W. Jackson. It's free, but reservations are required and "business casual attire or chef's coat are requested. (No jeans please.)" Call 312-435-4822 to register.

Sunday, April 15, the Chicago Foodways Roundtable presents Robyn Eckhardt and David Hagerman of Malaysia's Klue Magazine, on palm sugar in Southeast Asian cuisine. In 2003 Eckhardt, under the screen name FoodFirst, was the first person to translate the Thai language "secret menus" at Spoon Thai and Forest Park's Yum Thai, ushering in something of a local revolution for true Thai food. It starts at 10 AM at Kendall College, 900 N. Branch, and it's $2; call 847-432-8255.

Monday, April 16, Felipe DiBelardino, director of fine wines for Banfi Vintners, is the special guest at Osteria via Stato's monthly winemaker dinner. The four-course meal with pairings is $65 and starts at 6:30. Call 312-642-8450.

Also on Monday at least two restaurants are attempting tax day promotions. There's a tax relief special menu at 200 East Supper Club, 200 E. Chestnut--four $10.40 entrees and two martinis at $5.20 each. Call 312-266-4500. Meanwhile Pops For Champagne is offering three premium sparkling wines--Domaine Carneros Brut 2003, Domaine Carneros Le Reve Blanc de Blancs 2000, and Domaine Carneros Pinot Noir--for, you guessed it $10.40 a glass. They're also putting out four $10.40 dishes, and each guest will get a $10.40 gift certificate when the clock strikes 10:40. Call 312-266-7677.

Tuesday night at 5:30 there's a Wines of Portugal tasting and seminar at the InterContinental Chicago, 505 N. Michigan. The $25 donation benefits Share Our Strength's Taste of the Nation. Call 800-871-9012, ext. 22171#, to register.

Lastly, on Wednesday, April 18, Fiddlehead Cafe holds a tasting of at least 30 "Wines of Spring and Summer." It's $35 and starts at 6 PM.

For a lifelong Chicagoan and food enthusiast, it’s a genuine tingle to hold an actual menu from Briggs House, a Chicago hotel restaurant, dated January 1, 1859.  Looking at the yellowing bill of fare opens a window onto the eating habits of an era.

It turns out that the Chicago History Museum has archived several hundred such menus, from as far back as the middle of the 19th century, when you could go out to eat and tuck into dishes like loin of bear, quail pie, and snipe. But, needless to say, the menus aren't aging well. To raise money to digitize this slowly deteriorating bit of culinary history, the museum's hosting an event entitled “Endangered Treasures” in the restored dining room at Roosevelt University, in what was once Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Hotel, this Friday. Presenters include Bruce Kraig, emeritus professor in history and humanities at Roosevelt, and Rick Bayless,  who'll talk about developments in Chicago’s culinary history.

According to Kraig, there were no freestanding restaurants in Chicago until the late 19th century. Many of the earliest menus at the CHM are from eating establishments located within hotels. Kraig explains that these early menus “follow a 17th-century French model, going back to La Varenne, starting with something like oysters or terrapin soup, then moving on to fish, meat and dessert.”  You can see the French influence in Briggs House dishes such as Westphalia Hams with Champagne Jelly Parisienne Style and Bread of Goose Fat Liver a la Richelieu (a dish our current foie gras ban would outlaw).

Many European wines were also on offer, including French bottles from the great vineyards like Chateau Margaux and St. Emilion.  Kraig explains that this Euro-style of eating was popularized in the States at New York places like Delmonico’s, and the French cooking tradition--and French-trained chefs--spread from the Big Apple to Chicago, along with .

As the old menus make clear, early Chicago dining establishments looked to France for guidance, but the Chicago dining experience has been modified by successive waves of immigration from countries like Germany, Italy, and Poland.  As Bayless explains, “One of the reasons I chose to open a regional Mexican restaurant in Chicago is because of the ethnic diversity of this town, and how this diversity has affected the availability of foodstuffs as well as the respect of Chicagoans for other cultures.”

There aren't any menus from Mexican restaurants at the museum, but Bayless did discover that, in the years before Topolobampo and Frontera, small mom and pop taquerias were offering the kind of authentic Mexican cuisine that isn't common even in cities such as Los Angeles. “Our city’s food scene has changed a lot in the last 20 years,” he says, “and we’re going to see many big changes in the next 40 years.”

Selected items from classic Chicago menus will be served at the reception following Friday's talk. Here's a partial list:

·        Terrapin Soup (Palmer House Hotel)

·        Oyster Patties (Foster House)

·        Planked White Fish (Rector’s Oyster House)

·        Venison Pies (Briggs Hotel)

·        Frog’s Legs (Congress Hotel)

·        Curry of Young Lamb with Rice Pilaf (The Pump Room)

·        Boneless Turkey Wings (The Auditorium Hotel)

·        Rumaki (Trader Vic’s)

·        Hoppel-Poppel (Red Star Inn)

·        Turkey Pot Pies (Toffanetti’s at Greyhound Terminal)

“Endangered Treasures” starts at 6 PM on April 13, at 430 S. Michigan. E-mail tgribbins@hqtrs.com to get tickets; they're $100, but hey, you’ll get to meet Kraig and Bayless, and there’s the big dinner, and it’s at least partially tax-deductible.