xxchef

Wood knife blocks are a BIG no-no in commercial kitchens (along with most things made of wood) and for good reason... they cannot be satisfactorily cleaned and sanitized. Despite all best efforts there is no way to completely keep dirt, grunge and food from getting in all those nooks and crannies. All it takes is for one knife to be put away in it one time that is not completely sanitized and dry (and I don't mean just wiped clean) and the block is innocculated for life. That said, they are quite common in home use and you surely don't hear about people getting sick from their knife blocks! I think I'd pour some boiling water through it to clean, followed by a 100-200 ppm solution of bleach (lots less strong than you think), air-dry thoroughly then rub down with mineral oil or other non-toxic oil (don't use vegetable or animal oils which will get sticky and/or rancid over time) to restore and protect the wood finish/appearance.

"Cow's dead!" or "Dead cow!" = waiter saying the milk dispenser is empty "86" (eighty-six(ed) = Out of something, or to throw something out, as in "86 the scallops" or getting fired/expelled/rejected. "GDB" (General Dog's Body) = Kitchen helper, grunt or jack-of-all-trades as in "Hey GDB, I need those potatoes peeled NOW!". "Honeymoon Salad" = lettuce (let us) alone with no dressing (get it?). "Best Part of the..." = The scraps or waste parts of the food, usually destined for "Family or Staff Meal". "on-the-board/ on-the-wheel" = in the order queue "all day" = total number ordered as in "We've got 10 sirloins and 6 scampi on the board all day" "out-sauced" = Pre-made, purchased items (that probably should have been made in-house) from salad dressings -or sauces to desserts as in "The chef out-sauced so much for that banquet a veal [see below] could have just heat-and-served it". "veal" = Newbie, trainee, intern/extern.

I'm not in the Chicago area but I do raise a few commercial slaughter hogs every year and with all due respect to budrichard my experience and recommendations are quite different. This is just not true. While in large confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) for hogs this is generally the case it is not necessarily true for smaller, diversified and/or free range operations like ours and certainly is not true for any organic operation. This, again, applies mostly to larger growers. Small and custom grower's often offer much larger hogs. We feed our hogs primarily the whey from our cheese-making operation so we grow some of them out for the whole cheese season. By then they are usually in the 350-400 lb "hot hanging weight" range (killed, head-off, gutted, skinned). Who is responsible for transport depends on the arrangement between the buyer and the grower (and sometimes the processor). It's a business transaction and should be treated as such with all parties understanding exactly what is expected/required of them. We do offer transportation to the local slaughter house but often have customers who prefer to have them taken to a different processor (or process them themselves) in which case transport is their responsibility. Our local slaughterhouse (USDA inspected) will custom cut any of the animals we bring in at a very reasonable cost. They offer everything from a "kill-and-chill" service (how we and most of our restaurant customers get them done) to hard-chilled (frozen) portion cuts in little white packages - and everything in between. Find a processor who is willing to work with you. Maybe you just need the carcass split to handle it effectively or maybe you'd like it broken down into the normal "primal cuts" to make your life simpler (or just so you can get it into your fridge). The processor should be willing to work with you. Custom butchers also often offer curing and slicing services for your bacon and hams. My impression from the original post was that Ian ws looking for a local farmer (not necessarily a major hog producer). I'd suggest checking out the Local Harvest and/or the Weston Price Foundation web sites as both can be good resources for finding local food growers. As important as finding your hog is finding a good processor for it so start that search early. Our local shop has a 2-4 month lead time for getting animals in to be processed! Picture below is me and 1/2 of the 350 lb (hot hanging weight) hog we kept for ourselves this year and I just finished butchering out. Does this guy look like a kid in a candy shop, or what?

We ship regular (if not large) orders of our candies to Belgium, Canada, and various islands in the Caribbean and occasional orders to Europe. We always use the USPS for international shipments. I'm fortunate in that, as a winter-Holiday-seasonal operation we don't have to worry too much about shipping in hot weather. Most of our candies are not particularly fragile either (lots of toffee, barks, caramels etc) so our regular packaging has worked well so far without too much fuss (maybe a few extra candy pads or the like). Dealing with customs has not been too onerous nor have any shipments been significantly delayed (knock on wood). The customs forms can be a pain in the butt, but doing them online: https://webapps.usps.com/customsforms saves time. There are basically 2 customs forms to use (with a different version of each for military addresses). The different forms are for different ship methods (Priority/Express) and package value. To figure out which form you need to use see this page: http://pe.usps.gov/text/imm/immc1_008.htm. Every country has its own mail prohibitions and restrictions for food/perishables which can be looked-up here: http://pe.usps.com/text/imm/immctry.htm Once you've done the customs stuff a few times it won't be too bad but remember that international shipments ARE more work for you and DO carry more inherent risks than domestic shipments. Be sure to charge enough to cover your extra time and be very clear to your customers as to who is taking the risk if the shipment gets lost, damaged or delayed. Insurance is, of course, available and it is reasonably priced BUT read the fine print carefully to make determine what is covered (often the value of perishable products are excluded and all you'll get is a postage refund). I think international business is an excellent opportunity but not without downsides. Good luck!

There's a nice little up-close-and-personal interview with Chef Thomas Keller (per se, The French Laundry etc) in the most recent (holiday 2009) issue of Sante, an F&B industry publication. I don't think that this magazine is particularly widely distributed but they do have an online version: http://www.isantemagazine.com/food.html. Here's the link to the Keller Article (pdf file): https://www.isantemagazine.com/merchantz/Products/application/pdf/QualityDeterminationandFate.pdf

My sister just returned from a trip to Belgium and brought me back sample boxes from two of what are being promoted as the ten best artisan chocolatiers in the country. Having just finished a particularly grueling holiday candy making season here I wasn't sure I would be able to enjoy someone else's chocolates but I was pleasantly surprised by the assortments. Each was clearly made from the highest quality ingredients and with quite a bit of skill. While all were obviously the products of semi-automated chocolate operations (large volume molding and enrobing work was evident), they were, for the most part excellent. Each of the chocolatiers was a member of BBCW, which I had never heard of before so I checked out their web site: http://www.bbcw.be/members.php . It has brief write-up on each of their members and each of them has a short video about their operations (to see the whole string of videos at once use this link: http://www.bbcw.be/content.php?id=89 ). It's about 41 minutes long and there are English subtitles if you dont speak Dutch or French and the videos are really quite good, with each chocolatier showing how they make one of their specialties. OK, watching the GIANT CHOCOLATE BABY being made at Marioca was a little creepy, but the rest were very interesting. Check it out.

I'd describe myself as a classically trained, "extreme from-scratch", professional home cook. I am extraordinarily lucky to be able to work with the freshest ingredients possible as we grow 95% of the food I cook including our own poultry (and eggs, of course), beef, pork, lamb etc, which we butcher ourselves. I make our own sausages and cure and smoke all our own meats from bacon and ham to pastrami, corned beef & BBQ ribs and brisket. We have an extensive garden and a greenhouse from which we harvest lots of fresh herbs and enough produce to last most of the year. We're a small commercial goat cheese dairy here too so naturally all our dairy products are home-made and top-notch too. I also worked as a restaurant baker and pastry chef (in a previous life!) and had my own candy company for a while so breads and desserts come pretty easily too. We're extremely busy with our diverse activities here so I'm primarily an "ala minute" cook, preferring to quickly grill or sauté up a meal over more involved procedures. Aside from some baking, I haven’t used a recipe in 30 years. I rely heavily on a supply quality base items prepared well in advance (like a variety of rich frozen stocks, glace de viands, custom spice blends etc), a well-stocked pantry of staples (my wife kids me that it looks more like I’m provisioning for the end of the world than shopping when I go to the grocery store – flour, sugar, dry beans, salt etc.). Mise en Place is my best friend in the kitchen. I work fast and keep very organized to maximize my proficiency while multitasking through a meal prep. I enjoy cooking highly-seasoned and complex foods and appreciate a good culinary challenge like friends showing up for dinner with an elk carcass, or a having to pull together a last-minute meal for an unexpected group.

I think specific food appreciations (or lack thereof) are too culturally specific to be painted with such a broad brush. "Criminally underappreciated" in one culture is a daily staple in another. My upbringing in rural USA did not leave me prepared for the first time I experienced an authentic Asian market. We are culturally horrified in the US by horse meat and dog meat but have you ever tried it? Is it underappreciated here or just taboo? Appreciations also ebb and flow with time. Not only can we look back and see foods we now hold dear being effectively thrown away in previous eras but the reverse is also true. I think that organ meats (offal, variety meats, guts or whatever you want to call them) were far better appreciated and much more widely eaten even a few decades ago. Calves brains, sweetbreads, boudin noir (blood sausage) etc were all considered standard fare on classic menus around the world just 30 years ago. Now (thanks largely part to BSE/mad cow fears) I can’t even get the brains from my own cattle, from my own butcher, for my own table. No wonder it’s difficult to find good variety meats in a restaurant today. Another thought: In today’s food industry, marketing as much as classic supply and demand dictates what is available on grocery shelves. We buy things because Oprah or the NY Times or the Slow Food organization (bless their souls) tell us that it’s good, interesting, different or just plain popular. Chef Paul Prudholm’s Cajun “blackend redfish” almost single handedly led to the extinction of a species. Now where is it? There are cuts of a beef that once were often ground into hamburger that today command prices just shy of the super-prime cuts in some cases (thinking here especially of the flat meats like skirt steak/flank/brisket etc.) because BBQ, churrascaria’s and fajitas are currently in wide vogue.

Well it would be just plain silly to enter into a business that makes exclusively one line of product that you can't make money with. That's why, once we had decided to concentrate on selling wholesale, it was incumbent upon us to include a range of products that would contribute to our success. That’s simply good business. I’m going to take your “Reminds me of Walmart!” comment as a compliment on our profitability, because I just don’t understand how offering the variety our customers want is a bad thing. What I said was that I lived in an “extreme rural location”, nothing about the local economy (which happens to be weathering the current downturn pretty well, thank-you!), but you are missing the point. By focusing on wholesale business one can take advantage of inexpensive real estate whereever your location. I see from your eGullet profile that you are in the process of opening a retail store (congrats!). For you to expect your venture to succeed you need a prime location for your store to ensure high traffic and good visibility. You will pay a premium in any market for such a location. A wholesaler can work out of a warehouse in the worst part of town (or as in my case a ranch 200 miles from the nearest metropolitan area). This can bring rent/overhead to an embarrassingly low point so as to be almost an insignificant factor. While a wholesaler can concentrate all his efforts and funds on building and maintaining a functional, safe and efficient workshop environment, a retailer needs to divide his energies and resources between the working areas and the “front-of-the-house” considerations. Ditto goes for staffing. There is something else I haven’t touched on regarding wholesale business that I meant to mention earlier. I love the fact that my wholesale customers are (as a whole) regular and predictable. I know that every Saturday, week in and week out I will have a stack of emailed orders sitting in my in-box. I can usually predict within in a few dozen pieces what my base customers are going to order depending on the season etc. That makes for a very organized and sweet work flow. While many retail stores count on repeat business for success I think that substantial, regular weekly orders from retail customers is rare. My YTD annual average sale, across all categories, is $271. My primary wholesale customer base (those who order regularly) is only about 40 accounts. Servicing 40 accounts is a TON faster and easier than what it would take to get that much revenue in retail sales so I don't see it as "twice the work" at all. Also, for the record, our wholesale pricing is actually about two-thirds of our retail price (not half!).

I wanted to support and encourage you on your decision to sell wholesale. I know a lot of people don’t “get it”, but I do. Our 8-year old business (not primarily chocolates, but they’re a part of it) is about 98% wholesale and has been from the start, by design. I didn’t notice you discussing your reasoning for adopting a wholesale business model but I can think of a handful of good ones without even trying. In our case it stems primarily from a combination of our extreme rural location and disinclination to interact regularly and up close with the public (go ahead, call me a grumpy old hermit, I can take it). Anyway, I speak with some authority in saying that choosing a wholesale core for a small business can be rewarding and profitable. On to pricing specifics… My background is restaurant culinary so I am inclined to look at our food product sales here in terms of “food-cost” as generally expressed as a percent of the sales price. I.E. if the ingredients for a product costs me $1.00 and I want to be running a 30% food cost (FC) I need to charge $3.33 for it. Of course FC is only a portion of your total costs (labor, packaging, overhead, etc). Another common way to look at pricing is by examining the “margin” (profit) of each product. There an old expression “you can’t put percentages in the bank”, but you sure can put margin/profit/dollars there. If you are selling a box of chocolates for $20 and all of your expenses come to $11, your margin is $9.00. Which would you rather sell a $30 box of chocolates with a 30% food cost that nets you $8.00, or a $20 box with a 40% food cost that nets you $11.00? Well, unless you are getting some other compensation based on either FC% or total sales $$$, you’ll almost certainly want to make that extra $3 per box. The next consideration is your sales mix. Chances are that over your whole range of products there will be some that cost more to make than others. There will be some that take significantly more labor to make than others. There may be some that have more expensive packaging, are more perishable etc, etc. You will also (as you have mentioned in your posts) want some type of incremental pricing with smaller boxes of chocolates costing more per-piece, than larger boxes. For the sake of your sanity and to avoid a lot of confused customers, you will probably not want to have as many tiers of pricing as all of these variables might suggest you might need. The way around this is through forecasting your sales mix and balancing your entire product line to cost-out where you want it NOT each item. In other words, it’s OK that if you want to be running that 30% FC if some of your items (especially slower sellers) are at 40%, or so, as long as there are some 25% FC fast-sellers to make up for it down the road. Our decision here was to base our pricing on a margin percent, averaged over the whole product line. In other words we said (something like), “At the end of the year, we want to have had half of every dollar we made in revenue we made be retained as profit”. Toward this end we cost out each and every recipe, calculated all of our related expenses for each product, made some projections on what we thought our mix of sales would be (both on a product-to-product basis and on a retail vs wholesale one) and came up with a pricing scheme that would give us the return we were looking for. Yes, some of our items don’t come anywhere close to giving us that margin but others do a bit better. We review our costs, mix and pricing at least once a year and pretty much have it down to a couple of hours with a spreadsheet now. The one last important pricing component to consider is your market. You may find that after doing all your calculations and forecasting, that your target prices are out of line with comparable/competing products in your market. If your target prices are too high you need to investigate either cutting your costs or cutting your profit to stay competitive. If your pricing seems too low you’re in great shape to decide if you want to 1) play the price war game and undercut your competition (be aware of the risks of appearing “cheap”), or 2) raise your target price a bit, and make a little more money at the end of each week.

In defense of Road Kill (Venison Mincemeat recipe at end) Many years ago I was at the wheel of an encounter between my pick-up truck and a large buck deer on a rural road in CT. I remember that it was the night before hunting season opened in the area and this lovely 8-pointer dove out of the corn field he had been raiding and into my path. I might have been going just a tad faster than prudent and there wasnt thing I could do to avoid him. When the dust had settled and I was pretty sure I wasnt damaged and the truck would still drive, I called my wife, to whom I was en route to pick up from work, to tell her I would be a little late. What are you going to do with the deer? she asked me. I dont know… leave it there?? NO WAY, she says you bring it here and well have the police tag it for us. Uh, OK dear, I reply. Apparently if you hit a deer you can keep the carcass if you want but it has to be tagged by the state police so you do get nabbed for poaching or hunting without a permit. Loading the buck into the back of the truck by myself was seriously ugly requiring lots of rope, levers and swearing but the job got done. Soon after getting to the Country Inn where my wife worked the Trooper arrived, looked at the deer, looked at the truck and wrote out a tag for us. Id never killed an animal for food before this and had no clue what to do next. Idea! I had an uncle who was big-time into hunting/fishing and general outdoors-y stuff. I called him and he gave me general directions for field dressing (which we did in the bed of the truck that night and was by far the most disgusting thing I had ever done to that point in my life) and hanging the carcass (for about a week in our wood shed). The butchering was pretty straight forward. I lost the better part of one rear leg do to damage from the accident (from the deer, not me!) but the rest looked fine. Because of freezer-space limitations we decided to bone-out the whole thing and ended up with just over 100 lbs of boneless steaks, roasts, cutlets and ground venison. The deductable on my truck insurance to get it repaired was $200 so we figured we did OK with a freezer full of meat at $2 a pound. The meat was fantastic but we ended up with lots more ground than we were accustomed to eating (not big burger eaters) and had to look for creative ways to use it. The absolute BEST was when I discovered a battered recipe card of my grandmothers for Venison Minced Meat Pie Filling. This was the real deal, with lots of ground venison, beef suet, apples and the rest. We made a bunch of it and our holiday season that year was filled with mincemeat pies, cookies and tarts. Here's my Grandma's Recipe... Venison Minced Meat Pie Filling Ingredients 4 Lbs Ground venison 2 lbs beef suet, 3 cups apples, peeled and chopped 1 whole orange, chopped 1/4 cup lemon juice 2 lbs dry currants 1 cup brandy 3 cups sweet cider 3 lbs raisins 8 oz chopped candied citron 2 pounds brown sugar 1 tablespoon salt 2 tablespoon cinnamon 1 tablespoon allspice 1 TBSP nutmeg 2 teaspoon powdered cloves 1 teaspoon powdered ginger Method 1. Combine all ingredients in large saucepan. Simmer 1 hour, stirring frequently to prevent sticking. 2. Prepare canning jars and lids according to manufacturer's instructions. 3. Pour mincemeat into hot jars, leaving 1" head space. Remove air bubbles with not-metallic spatula. 4. Adjust caps. 5. Process pints 20 minutes at 10 pounds pressure in a pressure canner. Yield: about 6 qts

I miss, From the IGA country store in the little town where I grew up: 1. Ice-cream, hand-packed into quart containers until it was over-flowing by the proprietor, wrapped in layers of newspaper and tied with butcher's twine like a present to help maintain the temperature on the drive home. 2. That huge wheel of “rat-trap” cheddar cheese that lived under the big glass dome on the store counter. The dome was hooked by a rope to a series of pulleys and a counterweight so when the store-keep applied the slightest upward pressure the dome swooped up and was held high above the cheese wheel for him to cut off a piece (or sample!). The health department would have an aneurism with something like that today. Other: 1. The milkman bringing creamline milk (not homogenized) to our door every few days and leaving it in the little insulated metal box on our front steps. 2. The fish man coming around in his bright red pick-up truck on summer evenings. The back was packed with fruits de mer of every description burrowed into huge mounds of shaved ice. He would fillet, debone or cut into steaks, anything you wanted right on the tailgate then weigh it out on a scale hanging from a hook on the back. As he drove off there would always a WHOOSH of briny water sloshing out the back of the truck from the melting ice. 3. Stealing the maple sap from the buckets my grandfather had placed on many of the trees around our house to collect for syruping. I would drill or break a hole in the ice with a stick then tip the galvanized bucket up to my mouth (always worrying about it freezing to my lips, but it never did) and drink the sap. Nectar of the Gods! I still have a wee bit of his 1966 vintage Grade A Amber syrup I just savor straight by the teaspoonful from time to time.

Another good reason (and its corollary) for trying new restaurants early… …To show support for a new venture and help the owners start paying the bills. This is more germane in “other-than-urban” locations where the pool of potential diners is relatively small, eating habits are hard to change, and all things new are viewed with a wait-and-see suspicion. The corollary: Because they might not still be in business if you wait too long. Restaurants fail all the time and new ones at a rate far exceeding well-established ones and often NOT because they didn’t have great food, service, or whatever. Sometimes a real gem that should have shot to stardom just doesn’t make it and if you hadn’t had the foresight to try it early – you’d have missed out.

I spend around $125 per month, including wine and beer, on food for two well-fed adults. Admittedly, that number is kind-of a cheat as we grow most of our own food (extensive garden and all our own beef, poultry (eggs), and pork - and a neighbor trades with us to supply lamb) and we do our own baking. We're a small goat cheese dairy so milk/cream/cheese is always at hand. I'm very much a from-scratch cook so we mostly buy just staples (flour, sugar, salt etc). I sometimes feel like I should be stocking a Conastoga wagon for a long trek West rather than just doing the grocery shopping. We also rarely eat out these days – not for lack of interest or means but more the lack of opportunity (we’re well out in the boonies) and motivation (why eat out when our own food is so good?(he asks modestly!)). I guess I could include the cost for the feed for the animals who feed us in my figure but they are mostly free-range-fed and get very little off-property feed so it wouldn’t change the number much. Then again, with the animals we sell to other for slaughter, our net food spending account would be solidly in the "income" not "expense" column.

I am 54 years old. I have lived in various places in the US. I have never seen a butcher shop. This is interesting. I'm just over 50 and have had quite the opposite experience. No matter where I’ve lived, there’s almost always been a real butcher nearby. The little New England town of about 1000 souls where I grew up had 2 butcher shops until about the time I went to High school when it (scandalously!) went down to one. I'm pretty sure I remember a butcher shop in Providence where I went to college. Admittedly that segment of my life was something of a blur, but I distinctly recall a small Italian shop a ways south of downtown where they made their own sausages and had all kinds of exotic (to me at the time) animals parts hanging on hooks and in cases. This was in the late 70’s. From there I went (indirectly) to Tucson AZ and soon discovered a fascinating ethnic butcher shop in South Tucson. After finding ways to bridge the language barrier, managed to get some unique and interesting cuts of meat (I think most of it was beef) to take home and play with. Despite their best efforts I never did become a big tripe fan. By 2000 my wife and I had moved onto our ranch in rural northern AZ near a town of about 10,000. We now raise most of our own food (and all our own meats) including poultry, heritage beef and whey-fed pork (we’re a small goat cheese dairy) and I do most of the butchering myself but there’s still a family-run butcher shop right in town. Not only do they process “boxed beef” on order but they are also a USDA-inspected slaughter facility taking in the locals’ home-raised livestock (or hunters’ bounties) and custom-cutting them into neat little white packages. I don’t think they don’t do much classic retail counter sales but you can definitely buy cuts of meats and sausages/jerky etc from them if you want. Maybe I’ve just been lucky but I can say with some confidence that while “on the ropes” the butcher shop is not “down for the count”. My hope is that with the resurgence of people interested in local foods and in knowing more about where their food comes from there may be a re-birth of the local butcher. There is no question that there is a growing interest in that segment of the business by food professionals and even home butchering is on the rise (witness the recent success of books such as "The River Cottage Meat" book, "Charcuterie", and Kutas's Sausage and meat curing tome). As a matter of fact, we have the crews from two different fine-dining restaurants in Phoenix making the 4-hour drive up here next month to butcher-out their own hog (after the requisite USDA inspection and slaughter, of course) to feature on their respective menus. Viva la Macelleria!

My Flagstaff recommendations… Brix Restaurant & Wine Bar BrixFlagstaff.com 413 N San Francisco St Flagstaff, AZ 86001-4613 (928) 213-1021 Casual Fine Dining & Wine Bar. Inspired menu, local ingredients, very good wine list, knowledgeable & friendly serving staff. Pasto PastoRestaurant.com 19 E Aspen Ave Flagstaff, AZ 86001-5220 (928) 779-1937 Italian Fine Dining. Very fresh and good food, romantic setting, service can be great (or not) Josephine's JosephinesRestaurant.com 503 N Humphreys St Flagstaff, AZ 86001-3055 (928) 779-3400 Modern American Fine Dining Bistro. Chef-owned. Excellent food, service usually very good, great cozy bungalow ambiance. Cottage Place CottagePlace.com 126 W Cottage Ave Flagstaff, AZ 86001-5588 (928) 774-8431 Fine Dining. Chef-Owner. Excellent food and service. Very good wine list. Cute historic cottage setting. Pricey.