Columbus Monthly / September 2011 / Artisans in the kitchen

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Artisans in the kitchen

Local food goes really local with house-pickled veggies, kitchen-smoked turkey and sausage ground on-site.

 

For the home chef, producing artisan-quality items sounds like an exciting lark: Could I possibly make . . . ? For the professional chef with a commitment to high-quality, fresh ingredients, making an artisanal item—say, zucchini pickles—is more often driven by the practical.

“We always made every single ounce of our mayonnaise since we opened,” says Kent Rigsby, chef/owner of Rigsby’s Kitchen, adding, “It just became a habit, doing that sort of thing.” The whole restaurant is driven by an artisanal philosophy, he explains, so why buy pickled vegetables or smoked salmon when staffers can create a superior version themselves?

Consider the humble smoked turkey breast sandwich at the Short North location of Northstar Café. Order a turkey sandwich at most restaurants, and you’ll be served a slice of mass-market bread topped with jarred mayonnaise and piled with purchased lunchmeat. Perhaps a few dill pickle slices from a jar will rest on top.

The Northstar version? The restaurant purchases fresh, free-range turkey breasts from Bowman & Landes farm in Miami County, brines them for three or four days, then smokes them over smoldering applewood for a couple of hours. Chefs then slice the meat, pile it high on fresh, housemade focaccia slathered with a made-from-scratch rosemary aïoli and top it with house-marinated red peppers and, upon request, house-smoked bacon. “In the end, there’s nothing fancy about it or complicated about it,” says Northstar founder Kevin Malhame. It’s just simple, flavorful food done well.

The desire to produce delicious food, rather than a “gee, look at me” attitude, seems to be the motivating factor behind the decision to produce traditionally artisanal items in-house. When asked why Z Cucina produces its own gnocchi, fresh mozzarella and other items, owner Rick Ziliak is matter-of-fact: “Definitely just for the freshness and the control and the quality.”

Malhame agrees. His restaurants (which include Third & Hollywood in Grandview) produce everything from ricotta cheese to breakfast sausage in-house. Doing so offers the opportunity “to work with the ingredients we want to work with and produce the quality of food we want,” he says.

Take breakfast sausage, which is notorious for its possible fillers and other mysteries within. Rather than risk serving a potentially sub-par product, Malhame decided to make sausage at the restaurant—grinding pork shoulder fresh daily and adding a precise amount of fat and just the right spices. Now, Malhame has exactly what he wants. Northstar diners apparently do, too: The sausage has been on the menu for the last seven years.

The commitment to producing super-fresh versions of artisanal foods isn’t easy, notes Rigsby. “What’s challenging about that is that it takes hand work. It takes people.” And there is a cost, of course, to those extra hands. “It definitely adds time and cost and complexity,” says Malhame, “but that’s also what makes the food at our restaurants delicious.”

It’s not really practical for a restaurant to produce every single item in-house, especially when so many high-quality, local artisans are ready and willing to provide them. “Sometimes it just makes sense to go to the experts,” says Rigsby.

When considering making artisanal items in-house, restaurateurs say, they must consider the practical side as well. Does the restaurant have the space and equipment to produce the item? Do the chefs have time to perfect the recipe and become experts on the technique being used? Will cost be a factor? And bottom line: Could an artisan committed to the craft make it better?

Food artisans, chefs point out, have spent years perfecting their skills and honing their recipes. It’s often hard to compete with experienced artisans. “You can’t be an expert on everything,” notes Malhame. Magdiale Wolmark, chef/owner of Dragonfly Neo-V Cuisine, concurs. “If someone can do it a lot better, then I tend to use someone else,” he says. Quality and practicality drive their choices.

At times, though, chefs decide to make an item in-house simply to ensure it meets their specific quality standards and menu needs. An artisan—who also is a committed and experienced chef—may be unwilling or unable to change an item to meet a chef’s request. “Sometimes it’s very difficult to get people to do things your way,” says Wolmark. So chefs head into the kitchen and start tinkering until they get a high-quality final product. “Then you get what you want, the way you want it,” he says.

That tinkering sometimes isn’t so hard. Take Andrew Smith, chef at the Rossi Bar & Kitchen. Smith makes several artisanal-quality items—everything from house-cured bacon to homemade eggless gnocchi to bacon jam. But when he wanted a recipe for a watermelon rind preserve, he didn’t have to look far. “I actually picked that up from my grandma,” he says. The preserve—which features the white part of a watermelon rind spiced with lemon, cinnamon and chili flakes—accents the pulled pork confit sandwich that has become a popular menu item.

There are times when a restaurant simply finds it can make a product superior to what can be sourced from the outside—and for cheaper than they could buy it. The smoked salmon at Rigsby’s Kitchen, for example, is cured and smoked in-house and has been since the restaurant opened in 1986. It’s not a hard process, but it is a bit labor- and time-intensive. Chefs start with 20 pounds of raw, sustainable-variety salmon each week. They apply a cure rub and let it sit for three or four days to draw out the moisture and slightly “cook” and preserve the fish. Chefs then smoke the fish in a smoke box to complete the process before highlighting it in pastas, sandwiches and salads.

For Rigsby’s sous chef Christine Li, it’s a win-win situation, despite the time that’s put in. “It’s just a better quality. It’s not something that’s hard to do.” And buying raw salmon is more cost-effective than buying it already smoked. The in-house smoked salmon is vastly different from any store-bought brands, she adds. Depending on the variety, the salmon has “such a nice, beautiful orange color,” or a lovely ruby shade in the sockeye variety.

Smoking food in the kitchen isn’t difficult, but that doesn’t mean it comes without its hazards. “I’m actually getting smoked out of the kitchen right now,” says Li during an interview. “It’s stinging my eyes.” Malhame can relate. “We’ve set off the fire alarm a time or two,” he says with a laugh.

It’s all in a day’s work for a chef committed to high-quality food. Creating artisanal items for a restaurant devoted to fresh, flavorful food is just “business as usual,” says Wolmark. (At Dragonfly, that includes in-house production of tofu, soymilk, bitters for the bar, jams, gelatos and more.)

But even with such an extensive in-house repertoire, Wolmark still sometimes feels the pull of culinary curiosity. Lately, for example, he’s been thinking about brewing his own kombucha, an effervescent beverage made by fermenting tea. And does the Northstar kitchen have any thoughts of future endeavors? “The whole world of artisanal food is pretty inspiring,” admits Malhame. Lately, he’s been pondering the notion of housemade kimchi, a Korean dish featuring fermented, spiced vegetables such as cabbage.

At the Rossi in mid-summer, Smith was putting the finishing touches on a new menu item—a housemade charcuterie plate. Smith has been perfecting his housemade duck breast prosciutto to star in the dish, which also will feature other markers of the kitchen staff’s in-house artisanal work: a deviled egg (the flavors of which will change seasonally), specialty olives cured in-house and a housemade pork rind.

Creating artisanal items in a restaurant’s own kitchen could be seen as an offshoot of the local-eating trend that has swept Central Ohio and the rest of the nation. After all, what could be more local than direct from the kitchen? For a certain type of restaurant, says Ziliak, “I think doing things in-house and getting things locally sourced has become the norm.”

For these restaurant folks, offering artisanal items (both made in-house and sourced locally) isn’t just about the taste or cost; it’s the proud badge of being a certain type of restaurant. Wolmark says chefs involved in the local-eating movement are making statements. They’re affirming, “We want the highest-quality food. We want the freshest food,” he says.

For Ziliak, the commitment to freshness and local flavors is more than a trend or a marketing ploy. “I think that’s what sets us apart from the bigger guy.”

When a customer recently asked what a sign with the word “local” hanging in Z Cucina’s window meant, Ziliak answered that it signified a lot of things. “It means that we’re a local, independent restaurant,” he says. “It means we use in-house and locally sourced items.”

The quality of locally sourced items sometimes even serves as an inspiration to creators of artisanal-quality foods. For Malhame, making ricotta in-house at Third & Hollywood is a way to honor the quality of the milk they get from Snowville Creamery in Pomeroy. They thought the grassy notes of the milk would translate well into the “simple and clean” flavor of ricotta cheese. The housemade ricotta now is the star of an appetizer at the restaurant. Complemented by truffle oil, braised garlicky greens and toast, the cheese is served in a potted dish to preserve the delectable truffle aroma until the last minute.

Some restaurants that are part of the “hyper-local” food movement need look no farther than their own backyards (or rooftops) for inspiration. Dragonfly is part of the growing trend of hyper-local food, or food grown on the premises or close by. Dragonfly’s 600-square-foot kitchen garden adjacent to the restaurant provides a number of fruits and vegetables for the kitchen, including pole beans, cherries and black and red currants. Wolmark says his desire to grow his own food grew from his commitment to eating seasonally. “The kitchen garden is really just sort of an evolution of that approach.”

One of the things Wolmark says he loves about his garden is “the way it embellishes a cuisine. . . . It takes it to a new level.” For example, throughout its growing season, the cherry tree in the garden is a veritable horn of plenty for Dragonfly. Wolmark uses its offerings to create every possible incarnation of the fruit. His restaurant may offer sour cherry pickles one day and sour cherry jam another—not to mention the sour cherry sauce and sour cherry gelato that are summer highlights.

Having a knowledge of the product from growing through processing gives him a “far more personal, far more intimate” understanding of the food, says Wolmark. “I want to know everything about my ingredients,” he adds. “It’s a relationship.”

Even restaurants that aren’t able to fully join in the kitchen garden movement due to space or financial constraints still can enjoy a slice of the hyper-local movement. Z Cucina, for example, grows several herbs—basil, thyme, rosemary and mint—in planters around the restaurant and incorporates them into various dishes.

Do diners notice the extra effort made to create food in-house? Well, yes and no. Malhame can’t think of a time when a diner has commented on a specific item being made in-house, but he does see an intangible response: “All of our restaurants are really busy.” Maybe diners don’t specifically point it out, Ziliak says, because “It’s just become what they expect—and what they should expect.”

Smith, on the other hand, thinks diners definitely notice the efforts. “I think that [items made in-house] taste better, and it means more to the customers, too. When they see you’ve done it in-house, they are intrigued.”

Whatever the motivation behind the decision to create certain items in-house, the result remains the same. “You get a better plate in front of you in the end,” says Ziliak. And that, says Wolmark, is what it’s really all about: “Nourishing people at the same time they’re having a decadent, theatrical experience.” 

 

Kerri Kennedy is a freelance writer.