Placebo

Yes, Uli's down at Pike Place has Andouille. Nummy!

I just attended my first class last night. It was on Northern Italian cuisine - part of a 3-part series on regional Italian cuisines. It was great fun and the food was delicious. Everyone there was friendly and jovial and the food was fantastic. I am, in fact, making one of the dishes again at home tonight because it was so tasty. I hadn;t planned on going but a spot had just opened up and I had just gotten paid so I decided what the hell. The only issue for me (and it's not much of one really) is that getting between Crown Hill and West Seattle is a bit on the slow side. Actually, West Seattle now feels much more reasonable to me which means I'll probably finally make it to Mashiko sometime in the next month or two. Oh, and I am now in the throes of severe kitchen envy. *sigh*

I like chard sauteed in olive oil with crushed garlic, a pi8nch of crushed red pepper, some chanterelles and some slivered almonds.

My roomie has taken a bunch of their classes and loves em. I'd like to take some as well when I can scrape some spare cash together. I've chatted with Gabe a couple of times when he's been in the shop - seems like a pretty swell guy.

My friend Joyce just opened a cheese shop called Cheese Platters. It's right on Lake Washington, a few blocks from where Madrona hits it. I will attempt to dig up the address. She has a nice selection of imported and domestic cheeses as well as some rather lovely chese serving boards and platters.

Well, the problem with ultrapasteurization is that once you get above about 167 degrees it starts to denature the proteins. This will make it a lot harder to build a good fat-protein-water matrix in the cheese which means the texture will suffer. Additionally, once you get into that temperature range (and UP is done at a higher temp than that by a fair amount) there's a pronounced cooked flavor that can get into the milk. The milk doesn;t need to be raw but it should not be ultra-pasteurized. Mozz is a good starter cheese as it's usually just acid-curdled - no mucking around with cultures. Chevre is an easy started because you just set it, let it sit and then drain it. I'd need to know more details to be able to be able to say more than that.

Yup, out of the blue. I was unable to find goat milk that was not ultrapasteurized when I used the kit. It still made ok cheese, just a bit bland. Made a great ricotta substitute in a couple of lasagnas, though (as attested by an Italian friend who is very picky about her lasagna). Listeria should be easily avoidable as long as you keep everything clean and sanitary and away from the drains. I will happily attempt to answer questions with regard to issues you run into with home cheesemaking. I'm hoping at some point soonish to do a bunch of home cheesemaking experiments so as to be able to teach some, and ideally make it a little different from what's in the already well-established books on the subject. We don't do anything with the whey right now as we have no way to chill it nor is it practical for someone to try and get a tanker type truck into pike place around mid-day when we drain the curds. That said, the brewmaster at the downtown Seattle branch of the Rock Bottom brewery has made a stout with our whey (which apparently has a lot of history as the whey adds more nutrition to the beer - primarily protein). Likewise, we made a couple of wheels of cheese with a reduction of some of a porter of his. The cheese was very bready - I almost wanted it to have caraway seeds in it. More such experiments will likely be forthcoming.

I love the butter. I've been grating black truffles into it as well to make truffle butter for gifts. Good butter appears to be usable as hard currency with good-food enthusiasts. The stuff does carmelize wonderfully too. I will never be able to go back to supermarket stick-butter again. I tried a goat butter (might even have been raw milk) at the Pike Place Creamery butter tasting a month ago or so and it was pretty amazing as well. Now I need to make dinner and then get my posting caught up - I'm still a full day behind.

I got mine at Sur la Table. I think that the kitchen place at Pike Place that's having the going out of business sale has some as well.

I haven't but have not heard any positive first-hand reports on it. I find it pretty quick and easy to just use the tray dealie that I have. Roll out the dough, slip the base under half the sheet, indent it with the plastic insert, pop a heaping teaspoon of filling into each one, fold the other half of the sheet of pasta over it and hit it with the rolling pin. Takes me less than 5 minutes per dozen to form, fill and seal them. Add a couple minutes to roll the dough out first and that's it. I think that whole project, start-to-finish, took me less than 2 hours and a fair amount of that time was spent actually making and adjusting the flavor of the filling.

So far, this foodblog hasn't really dealt with cooking as such too much. First a bit about my kitchen setup. After far too many years of narrow galley type one-ass kitchens I've recently moved into a friend's house which, along with being just geenrally a lot larger and nicer than my previous apt, also has a nice roomy kitchen. My housemate is a foodie as well and between the two of us we have a pretty decent array of cookware and books. The knife situation pretty rapidly got out of hand and at this point there's pretty much a full pair of 12" magnetic strips devoted to them. There's some overlap as well, including a pair of 8" Wusthof Grand Prix chef's knives, a pair of 6.5" santokus (hers a scallopped Wusthof, mine a Shun) plus some nice complements (I have a 10" Wusthof chef's knife and she has a little Wusthofd paring knife), plus some extras like my two japanese knives shown above. This means we pretty much have 2 prep areas that each has a solid set of knives within arm's reach. Tres handy. We're pretty well stocked for appliances either and I am overjoyed at once again having a KitchenAid mixer on hand (for the first time in nearly a dozen years). Yesterday's first kitchen project was a breakfast of scrambled eggs with finnochiona from salumi and some nice chanterelles. First I peeled the chanterelles into strips (I'm continually amazed at how meaty their texture is) and coursely chopped the salami. Tossed em into my daily use non-stick pan with a bit of butter and started em cooking. Onve the chaterelels felt cooked enough I tossed in the eggs along with some half and half, salt and pepper. Nummy. After breakfast I started on making some ravioli. Ever since I first read the eGCI course on stuffed pastas I've been making them once a month or so. My last ravioli were stuffed with fresh porcinis and year-old gorgonzola made by my boss. This time it was to be spinach, roasted red pepper and year-old Rogue Creamery Crater Lake Blue gorg. The idea was inspired by some similarly-stuffed fatastic crepes at a cafe called the Joe Bar near my old apt. I adore the crepes and ravioli seemed like a reasonable step to take with the idea. In the food processor I made a half batch of the basic dough from the eGCI course and then put it aside in the fridge. The filling was about a pound of fresh spinach, 4 roasted red peppers and gorgonzola to taste. I needed to add a fair quantity of bread crumbs to make it a biut less wet as the spinach and peppers add a lot of moisture. I used a ravioli shaping tray to make a dozen ravioli at a time. On the occasion of my first ravioli attempt a few months ago I tried doing it all by hand with a rolling cutter but found it very difficult to do decently. The tray makes all the difference. We have not one but 2 hand-cranked pasta rollers in the house. I have a Marcato and my housemate has an Imperia. I definitely lkike my Marcato better - feels like I have more granular control over the process. Filled my little ravioli, sealed em, rolled them in coarsly-ground corn flour and then wrapped them a dozen at a time in parchment paper and tucked them into the freezer. The last set ended up only having enough filling to make 7 or so. Thise, after a quick frying in sage butter, became dinner. More cooking will be happening tomorrow and Tuesday evenings. Next, however, is cheesemaking...

Sorry for the lag in posting. I've not had the combination of available time and net access to post in the last day and a half. I have quite a bit to catch up now and will get as much done as I can tonight before I keel over. Stay tuned...

The photo after the packaged curds is Blank Slate (aka fromage blanc) with dill and chives added, ready to be mixed and packaged. We add flavored oils to our curds at packaging time (though we also sell them plain). Right now there are 3 flavors: Market Herb, Italian Herb and Chipotle. Interesting. We make the curds as part of the process of making our Flagship and flavored cheeses and just pull them out before flavoring or hooping. That said I know there are a few places that make curds on their show floors and keep actual hard cheese production seperate. I would love to get my hands on some sheep's milk as I love sheep cheese.

Yesterday I started my morning by heading out to Capitol Hill to hit Victrola, which is my favorite coffee shop in town. My friend Tony roasts coffee there and I've been meaning for a while now to make it over in time to watch the roasting process and yesterday I finally managed to do so. Before the roasting began we first did a cupping of nearly a dozen roasts of different varieties of coffee. Cupping is essentially a tasting to determine what sorts of qualities have come out during the roast, how future roasts of those beans might be adjusted to better optimize the flavor profiles of the beans and how the beans might best be used in final products. Tony brought me to a previous cupping a few weeks ago so I felt a bit better prepared for this one. The flavors and moutfeel charateristics that one is looking for with coffee are rather different from those for cheese so despite the amount of tasting I do at work, this was essentially starting from scratch for me. The cupping starts by grinding up samples of all the beans to be tested and putting the grounds of each in their own cups. The beans we were cupping came from Inidia, Sumatra, Ethiopia, Brazil, Uganda, El Salvador and Mexico. Each person picks up each cup, gives it a little shake to release the aroma and takes a good sniff to get a general sense of the bean. Often large problems witht he bean or the roast can be picked up at this point. Each cup is then filled with water and steeped for a few minutes. The grounds generally float to the top so after the steeping time is done a spoon is used to break the crust of floating grounds. They'll then sink to the bottoms of the cups over the course of a minute or two. Another aroma check is done at this point to see how it smells freshly-steeped. The tasters then go from cup to cup tasting spoonfuls of each one and evaluating the flavors, slurping them to spread them across the whole palate and mouth, much like one might swish around a wine sample. The tasting is reapeated over and over to get a sense of how the coffee tastes as it cools and sits for a few more minutes. Much like wine or cheese tasting, coffee cupping has its own terminology for describing flavor and aroma with talk of flavors like caramel, tobacco, pepper and suchlike. After the cupping we proceeded on to the roasting. Yesterday morning the roasting list was decaf, Indian and Central American beans. The first round of beans were dumped into the hopper and the roaster fired up and brought to its starting temperature. The beans were dumped into the roaster and off we go. The roasting process involves pretty careful temperature control and Tony tracks the temperature in pretty tight intervals. Periodically through the roast he'd pull some beans out of the drum with a trier to check their color and aroma. Once the first round of beans was done, they were dumped out o the roasting drum into the cooling tray below and the next batch is started. While roasting I snacked on a delicious rosemary and cheese scone and had a lovely little macchiato that Tony pulled for me. If only there was coffee of this caliber (and baristas who know how to pull it properly) near my home or workplace. For more detailed information on coffee roasting I recommend starting with this post of Tony's. The above pics are a mostly Tony's plus a few of mine. From Victrola I hopped on the bus and headed downtown to Salumi. I'll go easy on the Salumi description since little ms foodie did such a great job of it a couple of weeks back. Suffice to say, I <heart> Salumi. Armandino and the whole crew there are just the nicest folks and make such wonderful wonderful food. As luck would have it I ran into heyjude there, along with cookbook author Joyce Goldstein, whom she was taking around town for the day. Had me a porchetta sandwich (as seen in little ms. foodie's post) and some wine and took home a bit of lamb prosciutto, which I suspect I'll use once I pick up some more chanterelles on Sunday. I had other food-related plans (I tend to do much foodie stuff on my days off) but they were cut short due to having to get home to finish dealing witht he water heater, which sprung a leak the previous night. Dinner was leftover porchetta sandwich and some fantastic chard and mozzarella quiche that my housemate (a consummate cook in her own right). Now I'm off to make some lunch and start on a food project I've been meaning to get rolling for days. Details as they come in, film at 11.

Well, it's hard actual work. I'm generally on my feet all day and on days that we make cheese I'm lucky to catch more than a 5 minute break here and there through the day. Lunch tends to be scarfed down whenever I can find a few minutes to do so. On days where I run the cheese-make I'm in the door at 6 am and working non-stop until probably 9:30 before I can even take 5 minutes to relax. It involves a lot of multitasking. I've become very sensitive to the sounds of all of our equipment and can generally tell each pump by the particular hum it makes and have to consantly be listening for the doudns of any sort of problems with any of the equipment. Additionally, as the production room is walled on 3 sides by nearly floor-to-ceiling plate glass (we are a display facility as well as an actual production shop) the place has to look immaculate at all times. So whenever we aren't doing other stuff we're usually hosing down the floor, scrubbing equipment, etc. There's also a good deal of straight-up manual labor. Stirring a vat full of curds and whey with a large stainless rake, flipping, stacking and tossing 15-20 pound slabs of curd, carrying cheese molds (called hoops) that between the stainless of the hoop and the cheese itself weigh in the neighborhood of 60 pounds a piece. There are days where I've carried and moved 1600 pounds of cheese in 40 pound blocks before 7 am. Ove tthe first six months I slept very soundly when I got home. In the first month I pretty much went to bed within an hour or two of getting home because I was so exhausted. Sore as hell too, at first. It's quite different fromt he desk jobs I'd held the previous ten years. There was a second apprentice who started with me and she had to quit after a month because her wrists couldn't take it. Even so she was in wrist braces for 3 weeks after leaving. It's just downright strenuous. People who saw me 3 or more months after I started the job consistently told me that I lookd fantastic - much stronger and leaner. I felt it too. At this point I've reached something of an equilibrium and need to start seeking out more exercise. What sorts of cheese have you made? I'm always curious to hear about people's home cheesemaking experiments. I was jsut brought some cheese curds from Wisconsin last wekend. They were not, in my opnion and those of my coworkers, as tasty as ours. They were also bright frickin orange. I've gotten so used to cheeses that have no added coloring that suddenly being handed this piece of annato-colored cheddar curd was very strange. Like it was radioactive or something.

Today was pretty relaxed at work. Two of the other guys made cheese while I dealt with packaging with another coworker. We packaged flavored cheese curds and Blank Slate for use in our store as well as for distribution to Pasta & Co., PCC and Zoopans. Lunch was a roast beef sandwich and a cup of french onion soup, both from the Beecher's cafe. Dinner tonight consisted of taking some leftover cheap chicken teriyaki from a couple of nights ago and turning it into cteriyaki chicken fried rice. Also tossed in a handful of chopped mizuna, some shoyu, rice vinegar and Sriracha hot sauce. Tasty and easy. I had planned on some pretty extensive ravioli-making for this evening but when I returned home from work I discovered a huge puddle of water in the basement where it seems the water heater had been leaking for quite some time. By the time this was dealt with there was no way I was geting into an extensive pasta project. That will have to wait a night or two. Tomorrow and Saturday I have off. I'll be spending a bunch of the former hitting some fun food spots around town and doing more cooking, though the details of my plans won't be finalized until I know when the work on the radiator will be happening [note to LEdlund - Dale is my hero].

Well, the pay hit definitely hurt but I've spent enough time out of work in our delightful economy that I can live pretty decently on not too much though of course I prefer the option of more extravagant living. I've also recently moved to a much cheaper abode. I can no longer walk to work but I'm paying $300 a month less than I was at my old place. Additionally, the Market itself makes things a bit cheaper. I can generally get better produce for less money there than at the stupidmarket. Additionally Market workers generally get a discount at other shops in the market and in general the folks working around Pike Place, well aware of how low the pay tends to be, tend to be pretty generous with the rest of the Market community. Once again, my perception of Pike Place Market has changed quite a bit since I started working there. Up till this job I thought of it as purely a tourist area, just there to pull some cash from visiting travellers. Now, don't get me wrong, in many ways that is very much the case, especially as the general hours of operation there preclude most working Seattleites from actually being able to shop there. But beneath that, there's a pretty interesting and varied community, very much like a small town of its own. There have been a couple of nasty vehicle accidents over the last year that have left a couple of market workers or their immediate family in the hospital for extended stays. Both times the whole market rallied together to raise funds to help them with their living and medical expenses. I realize that I'm digressing here but I guess what I'm getting at is that it's greatly improved my quality of life. I love what I do and get to work with people who feel the same way. The job is very physical and very active. I'm in much better physical condition than I was a year ago (from cheese - who knew). I also just enjoy this a lot more than the computer work. A few months after I started this job my father remarked that I sounded happier than he'd heard me in many years. So, there are trade-offs, certainly, but it's been well worth it to me.

The veggie shop was a stand from organic wednesdays. I forget the name of the farm that she was from but I think this was her last week here until the season starts again in the spring. We do have aged cheeses as well. I'll go into more about the store when I post this evening. Just taking a quick break from work for a few right now. The gyros place is called Takis Mad Greek on 15th Ave. NW and 85th. Did she really beat me to that news? ← No - my memory ws mistaken. It was you. I've added an editorial correction in this regard to the original post as well. Sorry about that.

Yup. It's a bit of a hazard to me, as with my food worker's discount their prices become relatively reasonable. I have to actively force myself to not go in. The other day I caught myself eyeing marble slabs for use in making pasta and tempering chocolate. It's bad, I say, very bad.

I also did a bit of shopping at the market during the day. Hit my favorite wednesday veggie stand (though this was her last week of the season, alas). Picked up some of those cute leetle brussels sprouts, some garlic, mizuna and some beets. I usually buy chard from her as well and kale but I already have a tremendous quantity of leafy green goodness in the fridge.

Dinner... After work I moseyed up to a neighborhood just north of downtown called Belltown. It's rather up-and-coming and such. Dinner was at a Caribbean restaraunt called Casuelita's. I've been there once before and the food had been excellent. They appear to specialize in rum and have a rather extensive list (at least to me, though I've not yet spent time at our own Ministry of Rum). My apologies for the blurring. I'm using a rather old digital camera and it sometimes pauses for a couple of seconds before actually taking the pic so the camera is often already in otion befoe the shutter actually releases. For any Seattle-ites reading this Casuelitas is in Belltown at the corner of Vine and Western. My dinner consisted of tapas and some rum. Here's the happy hour tapas menu. I started out with the Jerk Chickin Chop-Up and a flight of 3 rums called the Island Tour. The chicken, which I've had before, was fantastic. The jerk sauce was rich, earthy and a little fruity - almost leaning towards a mole. Pretty spicy too. The flight of rums (shown left to right in the picture above) consisted of a shot each of Appleton Estate VX (Jamaica), Mt. Gay Rum Extra Old (Barbados) and Cruzan Dingle Barrel Estate (St. Croix). I'm a big fan of the Appleton and tend to keep some around the house. The Mt. Gay had a bit morew of an alcohol bite to it. The Cruzan was, I think, my favorite and was the first glass to be finished. I then ordered the conch fritters. The fritters were conch plus a bit of shrimp cooked up ina tasty batter with a chili jelly and mango slaw served over some wild greens. Delicious.

I'm going to break my day into two sections (read posts). The first will be my day up until I finished work and the second will be dinner. So, I live in Seattle. I live a few miles north of downtown in a neighborhood called Crown Hill which seems to be largely Scandinavian. It's a bit lean on the food side, though there's a lovely Scandinavian bakery (which will likely appear here in more detail in the next few days) and a good souvlaki joint nearby. They both feel a lot more 'back in the old country' to me. People come intot he bakery and speak Swedish with the staff. The owner of the souvlaki shop appears to have done some sort of world bouzouki tour in what I'm guessing (based on his pants in the pic of him on the record they have pinned up on the wall) were the late 60's. I like that. The greek places I've been to in more hip neighborhoods are prettier and more comfortable but this place feels more real to me. There appears to be a Moroccan restaraunt preparing to open a block away as well. I cannot wait and hope dearly that it's good as I do loves me some Moroccan food. My workplace is located down at Pike Place Market. Pike Place is an interesting spot. It's a historic market that acts as a combination year-round farmer's market, tourist spot, craft fair and general shopping area. Little Ms Foodie posted some lovely pics in her photoblog a couple of weeks ago. Here are a few more of my own: Before working at the Market I was almost never able to shop there due to not having time on my hands when they were open. Now, though, I can no longer shop at supermarkets. Supermarket produce horrifies me at this point. There's nothing like having 5 or 6 stands allr carrying the same item, each of varying freshness and quality and all fresher and cheaper than at the supermarket. I also like getting to know the people from whom I buy my food. I feel a lot better about the stuff I eat when I know the person who sold it to me and trust them to help me pick out the best stuff. Bourdain gets into this int he Les Halles cookbook as well - building relationships with your butcher, fishmonger, etc... They keep an eye out for the stuff you want and make great recommendations. As such, my experience of Pike Place as someone who's worked there for a year is very different from my experience of it as someone who just pipped by for a quick bit of shopping a few times a year. It does get horribly mobbed with tourists and closes relatively early so it's sadly not so useful to regular working folks in Seattle. When I got to work I was feeling a bit hungry so after gettign a cup of coffee I headed over to Piroshky Piroshky and browsed their baked goodness for something quick and savory. I decided to go for a chicken-mushroom-onion piroshky. It was rather tasty. The first thing to do at work was to deal with yesterday's cheese. Yesterday we made a batch each of our FlagshipFlagship and Blank SlateBlank Slate cheeses. Flagship is made in the same manner as a cheddar but with a somewhat different mix of cultures than is traditional for cheddar, giving it a more fruity and nutty flavor akin to alpine cheeses. Blank Slate is essentially fromage blanc and is made the same way as fresh chevre but with cow's milk instead of goat's. I will get more into the processes for making these cheeses as this blog hits the days in which we do it. The Flagship had been in the cheese press all night in order to squeeze out the excess whey and turn loose curds into a nice solid block of cheese. Each of those stainless boxes contains a roughly 42 pound block of cheese. I'm training a new employee so he and I dealt with the Flagship (more details on this will come later in the week after we run through a full Flagship make process) while my coworker Blain worked on the Blank Slate. Fromage blanc, like fresh chevre, has a very simple manufacturing process. The only cheese I've ever made at home was a fresh chevre from the New England Cheesemaking Company kit and it was made in pretty much the same manner. The milk is innoculated with starter cultures and then set with rennet and allowed to ripen overnight. It's then sliced into rough cubes and dipped into large square bandages which are then tied at the tops. Traditionally butter muslin would be used for this but our bandages are made from the same finely-perforated plastic material that's actually used on the inner layer of bandages. It drains as well as muslin but is much easier to keep sanitary. The bandages, now laden with cheese, are tied to a bar to drain under their own weight all day. Once they've drained enough they'll be cut down and chilled. Tomorrow the Blank Slate will be salted, flavored and packed into tubs for sale. On to dinner... [edited to fix stupid coding mistakes]

Meanwhile, back in Seattle... I have to admit to feeling a bit daunted following up slkinsey's feast of a Thanksgiving as well as our own little ms foodie's romp through the Emerald City. Still, I will do my mostest. I'm gonna start this up with a bit of an intriduction and some background and will then post on today's actual food and suchlike a bit later this evening, once I finish rooting through today's pics. So, a bit about me and where this foodblog is headed. For the last year or so I've been a cheese-maker here in Seattle. THis came kinda out of the blue for me, as up to that point I'd spent the previous ten years in computer systems and netowrk administration. Maybe two years ago I started to give real thought to leaving IT for some sort of wortk in food. I attribute this desire to a mix of my love of sharing good food with people. In college my best friend and I threw dinner parties for anywhere from eight to twenty-five people very nearly every friday night for over a year. My cooking at the time was rather rudimentary but still impressive enoug to my college peeps. In any case, as I started pondering the idea of food work in that sort of distant hypothetical way (i.e. "boy, it'd be neat to be doing XYZ for a living") one of my closest fgriends , who was also considering such amove, loaned me his copy of Bourdain's delightful Kitchen Confidential. I tore through the book and found that it really humanized the wholke prospect a lot. Showed me the real workaday side of it rather than the pipe-dream what-ifs I'd been podering up till then. So, I started poking around the net for more, stumbled upon this delightful site and was immediately sucked in. About six months later I finally bagged my lousy job at the Evil Empire across the lake in Redmond and decided to search in earnest for work in foodland. I came, naturally, to eGullet for advice and got it in spades. I mentioned that I'd made cheese from a kit and dig it as I've been a cheese-o-phile for many years. I was then told by a certain ms ramsey [ed. actually it was tsquare] who shall remain anonymous that down at Pike Place Market there was a sign up that said "looking for cheesemakers." A month and a half later I was hired and here I am a little over a year later making cheese for a living. Well, cheese, butter and sometimes ice cream. Needless to say, I love it. I see Kitchen Confidential (and as such Bourdain) as the catalyst that started the ball rolling. The rest was serendipity, luck and whatever else makes the world go round. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to thank him in person when he did a signing to push his Les Halles cookbook a few weeks ago in town. It pleased me to no end that night, upon starting to read the book itself, to see him use phrases like "renegade cheesemakers." I am heartened by this sort of encouragement. This sort as well: As such, this blog, along with being a peek into my daily cooking and eating, will also present a look at the day-to-day workings of a new little cheese company. The company is Beecher's Handmade Cheese and at this point my role is assistant cheesemaker and essentially second in command with regard to the day-to-day workings of the production side of the business. I'll post again shortly with today's meal goodness as well as a bit of cheese-production goodness. The title of this blog is a bit of an accidental tribute to Evan dorkin's classic Milk and Cheese comic series. [Edited to correct an attribution]

I love my Shun 6.5" santoku. The day I bought it it prety much completely replaced the 8" Wusthof Grand Prix chef's knife that had been my primary every-day knife for the previous 4 years. It's sharp and thin as hell, well-balanced and as a bonus is pretty as well. I like the short blade length as I tend to like piling my ingredients on the cutting board as I prep them and it leaves me a lot of room to maneuver.

I tried out Via Tribuani a few days ago and I must say it's the first pizza in this city I've liked. It's still not quite to the standard of Grimaldi's, which is, to my mind, the perfect manifestation of the true nature of pizza. The crust was delicious and thin, though it got a little soggy in the center. The sauce is good and the mozzarella fresca tasty though not quite as rich as I'd like. I was a little dissappointed that the mushrooms on my funghi were simply buttons - I seem to be spoiled now with my constant supply of chanterelles. Overall I'd say the crust should be a hir thicker (still thin but just thick enough to stay a little more solid and crispy in the center) and the whole pie could stand to spend perhaps another minute or so in the oven. Maybe 2. Stil-l, it is the only place I've been to in Seattle that has actually scratched the pizza itch for me, though I still need to get to tutta bella. All other pizza I've had has either been complete garbage (pagliaccis) or pizza-like creations that are tasty but fail to really satisfy a true pizza craving for this NY pizza snob (i.e. hot mama, toscana and il forno). I will definitely be back to Via Tribuana again - I must try their salami pizza.