What I Talk About When I Talk About Flavor

May 29, 2021May 29, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

“Look, I’m just saying it’s missing something. I don’t know what, but it needs something else.”

The conversation next to my bench had been going on for close to 20 minutes. Our manager had just tried a spoonful of soup that we were going to selling tomorrow. It was a spicy African Peanut soup- dried ancho peppers had been infusing the pot with a smoky flavor, carried on the fat of the peanut butter and oil the veggies had been fried in. There was a suggestion for salt, but the recipe already had a lot.

Black pepper, sage, garlic, more cayenne, it went round and round. The owner looked over the pot and called me over. “Matt, taste this- what do you think it needs?”

I grabbed a spoon and took a taste. Smoke, peanut, and fried veggies washed over my tongue… but no heat. The heat from the anchos needed something to cut through the fat. “It’s good, but dull… you need some kind of acid in there to carry the heat and brighten it up. Got some lemon juice?”

The hot pepper might give the soup bite, but acid gave it jaws to bite with. When you become a cook, you start learning a different vocabulary for flavor, which is itself the vocabulary of food.

Picture of someone in a striped sweater mixing paints on an artist’s pallet.

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The Right Hand Man- How To Be A Good Sous Chef

March 6, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

You would think that “servant leadership” would be immediately applicable to modern kitchen life, but as a leadership ethos it has yet to see the predominance it deserves. It is not at odds with the traditional brigade system as Auguste Escoffier envisioned it- though it is certainly at odds with the bullying and barbarism that has come to be associated with being “classically trained.” Hardly a terrible thing, since that “tradition” is itself at odds with little things like “health and safety of the worker” and “being a fucking human.”

“Servant leadership” is, at its core, an ethos that changes leadership from “Do what I tell you” to “This is what needs to get done- what can I do to help you do it better?” If you would like a masterclass in what that mentality can and should be like, look no farther than the sous chef– the second-in-command of a kitchen, and the chef’s “right hand man.”

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Snapshots of the Bakeshop V- “Last Man Standing”

January 30, 2021January 29, 2021 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

It’s been ten months since my day job changed to answer COVID-19. The last time I wrote one of these, the “A-Team” was in charge. We ran our asses off for 12-hour days, making ends meet for the dawn of the apocalypse.

Ten months later, and they’re all gone. Quit from stress and depression, walked out in a huff, or simply went on leave and never really returned.

It’s a new team now. Eager, curious, capable… and as a Great Old Sage of an employee at two years, I’m doing my best to help them keep their hands on the wheel. I thought being the “Last Man Standing” would be a heady, affirmative feeling- “I’m finally indispensable. I’m the one that could hack it.”

Instead, I feel beaten. Beaten, tired, and sad. The “last man standing” is usually pretty lonely.

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Baking 101: The First Lecture

December 19, 2020December 19, 2020 / The Black Hat Baker / 2 Comments

If you were to teach a semester of classes on something you do for a living, what would Day 1 consist of?

For the last year or so, especially as I’ve started doing Live Bake-along videos on Facebook, I’ve played with the idea that the next step in my culinary career might be teaching- and if the last two years of training and mentoring apprentices at the bakery has shown me anything, it’s that I’m apparently not bad at it.

The other day while chatting on my lunch break, my manager mentioned that she had taught baking at a community college for a semester as adjunct faculty. While she didn’t necessarily enjoy it (my manager confesses that she does not have the patience for teaching,) the $4000/semester paycheck made it quite a lucrative side hustle for one six-hour class a week in addition to a full-time income baking professionally.

After she brought it up, I found myself wondering what I would say on the first day to a class of new, inexperienced students. You can consider this a companion to my open letters to new culinary students and graduates.

Here we go:

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The Role of the Bagel

November 21, 2020November 23, 2020 / The Black Hat Baker / 1 Comment

There are precious few Jewish delis in Portland. That’s not surprising, as we only make up about .7% of the population. There ARE, however, at least five or six bagel makers in the city.

Everyone has an opinion about whose bagels are the best- the best price, the best flavor, the best texture, the closest to the “New York City” ideal.

They are all right, they are also all wrong, they are going to argue about it, and that is possibly the most Jewish thing I’ve seen in this city outside of actually going to a synagogue.