Sky Full of Bacon


EXTRA! Before we get to the business at hand… check out and sign up for The Local Beet farm dinner next weekend (but you have to sign up by this weekend). It couldn’t be a more perfect time to eat stuff straight off the farm, on the farm. Check out the details here.

Got a nice fan email from a fellow named Kevin Speck in Japan:

Just a quick note to say I get your podcasts religiously here in Japan and although I watch many food podcasts, in English and local things in Japanese, most of them seem to `miss the point of food as I would like to see it` and that point being,  I really love it when people have that ability to take us back to the origin of the food morsel that we put into our mouths and make us think about that.

Although I work in the metals industry I really love food and although I did a 6 month culinary school night class I don`t have the dedication to detail or the ability to stand on my feet for 15 hours a day non-stop to be a professional in the food industry. So I content myself with night-time baking and bento box preparation and watching your show.

P.S : My partner here in Japan (she is Japanese), doesn`t understand why Westerners would be interested in a show about pigs or fruit farmers. But we live in a country where people order their meals out of tanks of live fish and beef packets in supermarkets have a cartoon image of a smiling cow showing you the part of him/her that you are about to eat. hehe.

O.K … longer than a quick note I know. But thanks for the podcasts. There are people all over the world who appreciate them.

Cheers
Kevin

Thanks for the nice words, glad you enjoy them!  But you know, Japan isn’t the only place where cartoon animals happily give themselves for food.  Well, not entirely happily in this case (from Carnitas Uruapan; photo by Gary Wiviott from the long ago Short-Notice-a-Thon):

* * *

Meanwhile… more than a year ago, when I had no idea what I was doing and I was shooting my second podcast in a Chinese restaurant, the woman who was planning to take over the restaurant with her siblings, Kelly Cheng, told me about their plans for moving into a bigger, better space around the corner.

It seemed as far off as, well, 12 completed podcasts, but that eventually happened and now Sun Wah is about to make that move. Their last day in the old space will be the 15th (Tuesday); they should reopen around the end of the month. Then the only place the old Sun Wah will exist will be… in Sky Full of Bacon #2:


Sky Full of Bacon 02: Duck School from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

An Orange Cream Hershey’s Kiss to everyone, as we tick off some happy milestones (feel free to jump to review of Taxim below if this insider stuff isn’t interesting): first off, the new podcast about La Quercia just passed 1000 views after about two weeks of being publically viewable.  And it’s chugging right along, so I expect it to be one of the more widely picked up and viewed in the end.

The first of the There Will Be Pork videos just passed 1000 too, and the second one is almost there.  (I knew those would draw a smaller audience because many would be turned off by the meatcutting and slaughter footage, but it’s satisfying that they’ve finally reached that milestone, or will shortly.)

And not too long ago, the urban foraging podcast passed an astounding 6000, which so far as I can tell makes it the most-watched piece of online food video journalism anybody in Chicago has done, especially impressive in that it’s just little old me and most of the others have the backing of some larger media outlet.  (Big big thanks to the many media outlets who have supported me even though I’m not in house, especially my most constant supporters Mike Sula and Kate Schmidt at the Reader, Helen Rosner at Menu Pages, Chuck Sudo at Chicagoist and Michael Morowitz and Rob Gardner at The Local Beet.)

All in all, that means Sky Full of Bacon is closing in on 20,000 views in its first year, which if not beyond my wildest dreams, is certainly firmly among them. Also highly encouraging is the fact that the videos keep steaming along; they don’t die off in interest after a month or two.  In fact, as planting season came round again and interest in Earthboxes and that kind of container gardening continues to boom, the very first podcast, How Local Can You Go?, popped up again and has drawn about 25 new views a week.  That’s really motivating to me, knowing that these things have a life that just keeps on running.

Here’s the ten podcasts so far ranked by views to date on Vimeo (each one also has a certain 100-ish number of iTunes views, but this is the easy way to track actual viewings by actual people):

1. 07: Eat This City (6,086)
2. 03: The Last Brisket Show (3,344)
3. 01: How Local Can You Go? (1,752)
4. 04: A Head’s Tale (1,462)
5. 02: Duck School (1,056)
6. 05: There Will Be Pork pt. 1 (1,020)
7. 10: Prosciutto di Iowa (1,006)
8. 05: There Will Be Pork pt. 2 (991)
9. 08: Pear-Shaped World (888)
10. 09: Raccoon Stories (737)
(to see them, click Video Podcasts in Categories at right)

Thanks to all who have participated, supported, and last but not least, watched and enjoyed.

P.S. Dozens of you have asked about the Sky Full of Bacon totebag I’m seen holding below in the post about the Printers Row Lit Fest. Dozens? Okay, so the actual number was zero, but anyway. Since it’s farmer’s market season, what could be cooler than a bag from your favorite food podcast? Get them here.

If you’re new to the site, either because of the La Quercia email or hearing about Sky Full of Bacon at the Printers Row Literary Festival, you can see the La Quercia video here or all the video podcasts here.  Then check out the blog for eclectic food commentary, and get my Twitter feed here. And, if you have a blog of your own, you’re invited to embed the podcasts at your site—just click the Embed button to get the code.  Welcome!

Some pics from Printers Row:

I wouldn’t have paid any attention to Amelia’s if Martha Bayne hadn’t reviewed it for the Reader. First off, that’s because I would have mistaken it for this Amelia’s, a onetime blight on the Mexican food landscape which (in a victory for truth in advertising, I suppose) now has an even more blatantly inauthentic name like Fiesta Sombrero or Cantina Cucaracha. David Hammond reviewed that Amelia’s thusly:

I’m awe-struck, however, by the transcendently sensation-free salsas. I’m bummed by the Disney-version of mole negro – tasting as though squeezed from a bottle of Bosco. I take a scoop of beans but can barely believe it: there’s weight on my tongue, I feel it, I know there’s something there and yet…there’s just about no flavor, there’s barely even a hint of grease, there’s no there there.

This new no-relation Amelia’s has a far more promising, if also somewhat checkered, Mexican food pedigree: the couple who owned Mundial Cocina Mestizo, an upscale restaurant in Pilsen, divorced, selling it to the third partner in the business; now they are each opening separate businesses. The ex-wife plans to open a bakery, the ex-husband has opened this attractive restaurant in… Canaryville.

And that’s the second reason I would never have noticed this restaurant: it’s in the middle of freakin’ nowhere. This may have seemed like a repeat of the successful urban pioneer strategy Mundial employed, the first high-end joint in Pilsen just as it gentrified. But Pilsen was at least full of life if not entrees over $8; this is in an attractive building facing a vast empty lot that was once stockyards, with next to no housing in its immediate vicinity. You’re going to have to want to go to Amelia’s.

So do you want to go to Amelia’s?  You do, I think.  Chef Eusebio Garcia worked at MK before opening Mundial, and his thing has been high-end Mex tinged with Mediterranean flavors.  My feeling is that the former are much, much more promising than the latter.  Oysters topped with spinach, hot sauce and Asiago cheese reminded me that Asiago cheese should be banished to Panera by now, and it didn’t help that no two seemed to have the same proportion of those ingredients.  A gorgonzola polenta on the side of a ribeye was a bowl of warm blue cheese goo, like baby food for gourmet babies.

But the straight-up Mexican things were quite good, especially scallops in a chipotle sauce with onion marmalade and some grilled vegetables.  And the steaming homemade tortillas were impossible not to want to instantly grab and wrap anything at hand in. Generally, in most of the upscale Mex places I think you’re better off ordering off the appetizer menu, where you’ll find simpler and more authentic things like tamales rather than entrees consisting of a large hunk of protein in a sauce with vegetables on the side, which is not really the way Mexicans tend to eat; and Amelia’s is no exception to this rule.

So the next time you’re facing the prospect of a long line at Mixteco, Frontera, or whatever Geno Bahena’s opened this week, consider being a real food adventurer and making the hike to Amelia’s.  Since there’s basically no traffic for a mile in any direction, it’s an easy shot down the Ryan to 43rd from the north side; the neighborhood is no scarier than, say, Humboldt Park and probably safer just by virtue of being so empty.  You’ll get the personal, relaxed attention those other places are too busy to provide, and you’ll help sustain, for at least a little while longer, a very attractive and pleasant restaurant which probably made the mistake of opening at the end of the universe.

Amelia’s Mexican Cafe
4559 S Halsted St

Chicago,
IL 60609
(773) 538-8200

P.S. Chuck Sudo has reviewed it here for Chicagoist.  Note that he had exactly the same things I had!  (Yes, I was his extra ordering power.)

It’s been a busy month or so at the Sky Full of Bacon headquarters.  So I thought it might interest all two or three of you to know a little bit about what’s ahead.

The picture above is from what will be the next podcast.  Hey, those don’t look like fish, you say, if you remember that the raccoon dinner podcast ended with a preview for one about fish.  Well, you’re right.  Right as the raccoon podcast went up, I went to Norwalk, Iowa to shoot at La Quercia, makers of some of the best prosciutto in the world.  And as it happens, that one’s in better shape to be finished sooner, so it should be up within two weeks or so.

Sky Full of Bacon has gotten tagged with having a locavore bent, which I’m fine with, although to a certain extent that’s accidental— hey, you go and shoot producers in your area, the result is you’re doing a story on local food whether you meant to or not.  But La Quercia is the kind of midwest-foods story I really want to spread the word on: some folks in Iowa seeing the potential of making a traditional food (prosciutto) using Iowa pork, and as a result producing truly world-class product which has been hailed by chefs nationwide, not just in the midwest.  This isn’t a story about local being better because it traveled less, this is a story about local being better because it’s the best of its kind on the entire planet.  (Arguably, of course, but you’ll hear from prominent chefs who feel that way.)  California has lots of stories like that, but the midwest is just starting to create them.  So that’s what’s coming next.

At 5:45 this morning, I was standing on a dock in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, waiting to ride 3-1/2 miles out onto Lake Michigan to catch whitefish.  This was something of the climax of a series of events that started when Carl Galvan of Supreme Lobster contacted me some months back about the possibility of shooting at their distribution center/big building kept cold and full of fish in Villa Park.  I shot out there a couple of times and interviewed him and a fish buyer without knowing exactly where the story was going— but I figured that was okay as long as I knew we’d have cool fish house visuals.  Then Carl came up with another possibility— going out with a whitefish boat.

Previous podcasts have mostly involved people whose stories I already knew.  These two are really examples of finding the stories as I shoot.  In the case of the fish house one, I’ve been interviewing chefs about what they and their customers want when they’re thinking about fish for dinner, and that’s provided a broader context that connects what we’ll see in the fish house with how we eat.  In the whitefish boat one, it quickly became clear that the fishermen have big issues with how they’re being managed by the various state agencies, and so part of it will be looking at how this profession, which some of these people have been in for generations, is changing today under regulatory pressure.  If that sounds like a simple story of overfishing fishermen versus purehearted conservationists, it’s not at all, far from it.

In both these cases, getting these additional interviews has taken up more time and, perhaps, slowed production on the next one a little, since the editor is still out shooting.  But still, it’s encouraging to me to know all the good stuff that I have in the can and the time I have to really pursue the fish stories and get all the pieces that will make them solid and thought-provoking videos.  (And I even have parts of a fourth in the can— about an ethnic deli/restaurant in an old-time suburb.  I shot interview footage out there but need to go back and shoot them making food.  And then I need to figure out if it’s a standalone piece, or if I need a second segment on the same theme within the same video, something I haven’t actually done since the very first one.)  So, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the works here— watch for it.

Meryl Streep looks like fun. Amy Adams, unfortunately, looks drippy as she does kitchen slapstick (eek! a lobster) we’ve seen a million times before:

Mike Sula, boss hog on The Whole Hog Project which has also made Sky Full of Bacon a Beard co-nominee or whatever (soon to become inevitable co-loser to Ruth Reichl; it’s like being up against Daniel Day-Lewis for Best Actor) at the James Beard awards, which I believe I may have mentioned here once or twice, is interviewed by Menu Pages about all that and scatters lies, utter damnable lies about Sky Full of Bacon. (He knows the actual percentage is 37.5%, not a third.)

Thanks also to Monica Eng, who gave SFOB a shoutout in her and Phil Vettel’s interview piece the other day.

UPDATE: Monica Eng’s nominated slaughterhouse piece (which, again, is highly recommended reading) has a new, more readable link here.

As I found when I did a book on movie awards some years ago, the same organizations that make such a fuss over their ceremonies for awards often give short shrift to anyone’s ability to see what was considered award-worthy, or even to know what it actually was— there were titles from the major foreign film festivals, for instance, which had vanished completely (what were you, Golden Harvest of the Witwatersrand, that Venice gave you an award in the 30s?)

So I’m going to try to track down a bunch of the Beard-nominated food journalism and give you the chance to check it out for yourself.  Someday, online award lists will have links. Until then, here for starters are the newspaper nominees.  Enjoy some good eatin’-readin’.

NEWSPAPER FEATURE WRITING ABOUT RESTAURANTS AND/OR CHEFS

Monica Eng, Phil Vettel
Chicago Tribune
“Big Night. Big Mystery: Why Did Michael Carlson Vanish the Day After Serving Dinner to the Greatest Chefs in the World?”

WINNER: Katy McLaughlin
The Wall Street Journal
“Sushi Bullies”

Tom Sietsema
The Washington Post
“Sound Check” (I think this piece is the correct one, though it has a different title here)

NEWSPAPER FEATURE WRITING WITHOUT RECIPES

Monica Eng
Chicago Tribune
“Morality Bites: Mustering Some Sympathy for the Bedeviled Ham and Beef”

WINNER: Kristen Hinman
Riverfront Times
“The Pope of Pork”

Craig LaBan
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“The Tender and the Tough”

NEWSPAPER FEATURE WRITING WITH RECIPES

WINNER: Rebekah Denn
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“High on the Hairy Hogs: Super-Succulent Imports are Everything U.S. Pork Isn’t” (abstract onlyfull article now!)

David Leite
The New York Times
“Perfection? Hint: It’s Warm and Has a Secret”

Kathleen Purvis
The Charlotte Observer
“The Belly of the Beast”

NEWSPAPER FOOD SECTION

Chicago Tribune
Carol Mighton Haddix

San Francisco Chronicle
Jon Bonné and Miriam Morgan

WINNER: The Washington Post
Joe Yonan

Incidentally, Monica Eng’s ham and beef piece is the one about slaughterhouses which I linked to when I posted the “There Will Be Pork” podcasts, it is definitely worth reading (not that most of them aren’t). The one that’s a mystery to me is David Leite’s one about aging your cookie dough overnight before baking cookies. One, it hardly seems a journalistic breakthrough, two, I tried it and I didn’t see what the big fuss was….

Other Nominees:

Magazines
Miscellaneous print/online
Broadcast

In getting rid of a particularly bounteous crop of spam comments one morning, I think I zapped all the legit comments for a few day period at the beginning of the month.  So if you happen to notice one of yours has vanished… it’s nothing personal, it’s just collateral damage from sparing you having to read about Die Beste Online Gambling Seite and Great name for a blog! Would you like info about Free Viagra? and my oldest and most constant friend, An*l Clip Download.

Read the beginning of this lardoblogging saga here.

After three months I started to get pretty curious about my lardo.  I mentioned it to Rob Levitt at Mado, saying I wasn’t sure how to tell when it was done, and he had a really novel suggestion: “Taste it and if it’s good, it’s done.”  (It was very kind of him not to end this sentence with “ya moron ya.”)

David Hammond was stopping by the other day so I took the opportunity to break the lardo out and try it, slicing it as thin as I could:

I toasted some bread and we both had a piece:

This is definitely the best thing to do with lardo, it softens up as it half-melts on the bread, though it never melts like butter, retaining a chewy, almost meat-like texture.

We both agreed that it was pretty nice as it was— supple, tasting of the salt, garlic and herbs. That it was hard to imagine what more it might pick up from another three months of laying in the salt mixture.  Somewhat impulsively, I decided it was done.  (I must admit I kind of regret this now, not sticking out the full six months, although I really do doubt it would have made a real difference.  Maybe packed into a true conca full of brine expressed by the fat, but this was just sitting on dry salt by now.)

I divided the lardo into two groups.  One I went ahead and vacuum-sealed into small bags, for presents or door prizes or whatever.  But the three largest pieces I took and wrapped in cheesecloth:

and hung from an old roasting pan rack in my wine cellar which, at least this time of year, should be as reliably cool as any Italian root cellar.  I may pick up a wine fridge sometime so I can ensure more precise control of more sensitive cured meats like the coppa I plan to make, but for this, which basically doesn’t have any meat, just fat, it’ll be fine (though humidity probably won’t be high enough, in the long term).

By the way, one of the problems serving lardo is that it can be tough to slice it thin enough to do the melting on bread thing.  But I discovered a cheap and perfect solution: use one of those new peelers that everybody has that you hold like a Gillette razor.  You get perfect thin slices.