The Chef Apprentice

For weeks, the chefs at Oliveto have been waiting for the porcini to arrive. Now they are here, and these fresh mushrooms are wondrous - bigger and more flavorful than the norm, by far.

A staple of Italian cuisine, wild porcini grow profusely in California, particularly in pine forests. But you have to be an expert to differentiate them from lookalike varieties. They also require certain conditions -- rain and humidity -- at the right times. The conditions this year are producing a bumpercrop of porcini.

Chef Paul Canales jumps on these mushrooms when they arrive in the kitchen. With an expert eye, he uses his paring knife to cut off mushy chunks of the mushrooms that, if left alone, would quickly spoil the entire batch.

Chef Paul cleaned up a few boxes of porcini today. Then it was my job to cook up a portion for cannelloni filling. This was a delicious assignment, partly because my task involved seasoning and sampling the mushrooms all through the process.
 

Along with local farmers and foodies of all stripes, I spent part of an afternoon Tuesday in a Yolo County walnut grove with Alice Waters, the chef of Chez Panisse.

It was an emotional gathering for Waters and many in the crowd. More than three decades ago, Waters' drive to supply her Berkeley restaurant with fresh, local produce led her to Yolo County and other counties that ring the Bay Area. There she encouraged the growth of organic agriculture and, in turn, farmers influenced the foods that she served.

"She was the wild woman who drove around in her truck, looking for vegetables," recalls Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, an organic operation in the Capay Valley. "No one knew anything about her."

Now nearly everyone knows about Alice. In her own headstrong and serendipitous way, she's become an icon for the local food movement. Her recent book, Edible Schoolyard, chronicles her efforts to drive out junk food from the public schools of Berkeley, and replace it with fare that is "delicious," as she puts it, and is partly grown and prepared by the students themselves.

On Wednesday, Waters seemed more interested in paying homage to Yolo farmers and young people than in promoting her book or her causes, including a successful effort to bring a vegetable garden to the grounds of the White House.

"I cheerlead anyone who comes out in the heat and works in these fields," Waters said. "They are heroes. I am just so touched by the new population of young people who want to go into farming...They are reinventing farming."

Waters was in our neck of the woods Tuesday for a fundraiser to benefit the Center for Land-Based Learning, a non-profit started by Craig and Julie McNamara that seeks to interest young people with careers in agriculture. The event was held at the Farm at Putah Creek, a walnut grove near Winters that the McNamaras have dedicated to the center's educational activities.

I attended partly to meet farmers like Muller who supply Oliveto, the restaurant where I work as an intern. I also wanted to hear from Waters and meet Craig McNamara, who, as an agriculture leader and son of former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, is an intriguing figure.

Congratulations to Josephine Kao, a local eighth-grader who advanced to Round 3 of the National Spelling Bee on Wednesday by correctly spelling "mostaccioli."

Kao, who is in the National Spelling Bee for the fourth consecutive year, now advances to today's semi-finals, where we will be rooting for her in the Oliveto kitchen.

At Oliveto, some of the cooks struggle with the spelling of the "mostaccioli" while preparing cafe menus and labeling sheets of fresh pasta. So we were impressed when Kao, who is 14, nailed that one.

Mostaccioli is a smooth-sided, large type of penne that is popular in southern Italy, particularly Campania. Currently it is on the Oliveto menu cloaked in a silky pigeon sugo. (My favorite dish in the restaurant at the moment.)

Regardless of how she does this week, Kao is welcome at Oliveto anytime. I'd be proud to buy her a plate of mostaccioli. Just to be naughty, I might also test her on the spelling of strozzapreti.

UPDATE: Alas, Kao was knocked out of the National Spelling Bee today after tripping up on "gastaldo." But my offer of a mostaccioli plate still stands. Good job, Jo, for advancing so far and being such a great speller. I goofed on the spelling of "pigeon" in my original posting, but that has been fixed.

Photo by Robert Giroux/AP

My previous entry on preparing monkfish liver provoked a few responses.

Some readers wanted to know what the final dish looked like. I don't have a great photo (the chefs dug into this "tester" plate before I could get my camera focused) but the photo to the right gives you a general sense.

The sauce was dark and tangy, and the fava beans and frisee provided a nice contrast, in color and texture, to the sauteed livers.

One reader, Sancho, wondered if monkfish could be farm raised, presumably as a way to meet market demand without further pressure on wild fish.

The answer is no. According to a fact sheet updated this month by the National Marine Fisheries Service, "There is currently no commercial aquaculture of monkfish in the U.S."

I will continue my investigations on the status of monkfish. It could be my qualms on the commercial trade of this fish are misplaced. Perhaps not. I'll keep you posted.

Warning to all who are squeamish about certain foods.

If you don't like liver or fish, or if you don't care to see photos about preparation of a monkfish liver, then stop reading this post. Use your clicker to move on to a safer topic, such as preparation of an asparagus salad.

But if you are curious about seafood delicacies, or if you are a sushi fan who has been bold enough to try ankimo (steamed monkfish liver), then hang with me.

Until this past week, I had never tasted or handled the liver of a monkfish. But I'm willing to try anything once.

With any luck, the Chef Apprentice has challenged and broadened your palate with entries about goat sugos, green sauces and ancient Venetian fish dishes.

In that same spirit, I offer you a Torta di Verdura - a sweet tart made with chard and spinach.

Hold on, you say - leafy vegetables in a dessert? Is this a sneaky way to get kids to eat their greens?

Perhaps. Or maybe it's just an inventive use of chard and spinach. Torta di Verdura originated in Lucca, a proud and picturesque town in western Tuscany. Carol Field, author of "Italy in Small Bites" and other books, writes that this is a ubiquitous pastry in Lucca, and for good reason.

Torta di Verdura has a sumptuous texture and flavor, with a filling that includes pine nuts, candied fruit, cooked rice, eggs, sugar, Parmesan cheese, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and, of course, the greens that powered Popeye.

It is also popular in the Oliveto Cafe. Pastry chef Jenny Raven brought it my attention when, in an act of sympathy, she brought me a slice while I was slaving away. My taste buds and energy levels were quickly supercharged.

"Can I have the recipe?" I asked, and she soon produced a photocopied page from Carol Field's "Small Bites" cookbook, a followup to "The Italian Baker."

Go to the jump to read my version of this torta, which I modified based on ingredients in my home pantry. Instead of currants and pine nuts, I used Sultana raisins and walnuts. Instead of candied orange peel, I used Meyer lemon peel. And I reduced the sugar overall, to suit my taste in desserts.

This may come as a shock to you, but chefs have been known to enjoy a cocktail or two in their off-hours.

Being creative people, they sometimes invent cocktails or rediscover old ones. And sometimes those cocktails are so good they end up on the Oliveto menu.

To the right, you can see a bay leaf and lime martini, courtesy of Curtis Di Fede, a sous chef at Oliveto.

Curtis' cocktail is easy to prepare, with some advance planning.

Drop a fresh bay leaf into a mason jar filled with vodka, and wait at least three hours. Squeeze some fresh lime juice into a cocktail shaker (1/4 to 1/2 of a lime will do). Add two shots of vodka and a small drizzle of Cointreau. If you have a sweet tooth, add a half shot of simple syrup. (2 to 1 hot water and sugar.) Fill with ice. Shake, strain into a martini glass and serve with a lime peel.

As Curtis notes, "It's kind of like a margarita with vodka and bay leaf."

And it's delicious. If you get the right balance, there's a strong hint of bay leaf, a hint of lime and a tinge of orange liqueur lurking in the background.

When he is not cooking incredible food, engaging in kitchen pranks or making plans for his new restaurant in Napa, Curtis is also focused on one of his pet projects.

For the last four years, he's been collecting rubber bands from asparagus bundles at Oliveto, and turning them into a an ever-growing rubber band ball.

He is very proud of this ball, as you can see from the photo. Unfortunately, Chef Paul Canales is not equally excited. So Curtis only works on this project in the back pantry kitchen, out of sight of the chef.

Photos by Stuart Leavenworth

In my column today in The Bee, I lay out the procedure for making shaved asparagus -- a dish that requires no cooking, just some tender spears, fine slicing and the finest Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

This dish is a regular on the menu at Oliveto. Last night, I prepared it at home with some Riverdog Farm asparagus. It accompanied roast chicken and potatoes with rosemary.

This is what it the salad looked like -- at least for a few seconds.

Then it was gone.

On the jump is the text of my column, in case you have trouble finding it on The Bee's Web site.

One delight of spring is getting a call from my friend Judy Michalowski, who raises organic raspberries and other produce on land she owns in West Sacramento.

Judy is a certified producer for the California Farmers Market Program, and is a longtime advocate for local agriculture. Every spring, she calls friends to help with harvesting roughly 50 pounds of berries that spring from her well-tended raspberry patch.

It's a good deal all around. Judy gets help in harvesting her berries, which she sells to restaurants and customers at the farmers markets. We get to take a few baskets home, while sampling some as we pick.

Yesterday, on my day off from the kitchen, I spent a couple of hour picking berries with Judy and her friends. It's a prickly and challenging job. Raspberry bushes have thorns, like other berry bushes, and the berries tend to hide behind leaves to shade themselves from the sun. 

So you have to bend and stoop to find these little gems, but it is so worth it. Raspberries are rich in anti-oxidants, and there is no better accompaniment to vanilla ice cream on a hot day.

Or, if you are feeling festive, drop a few of these in a glass of bubbly Prosecco and celebrate spring, while it lasts.

Photo by Stuart Leavenworth  

A large crate of morels arrived at Oliveto on Thursday. Yesterday it was my job to prep these wild beauties, using the power of my lungs to clean them.

Nearly everyone at the restaurant was in awe of these mushrooms. The largest was as big as my fist. They came from the Mt. Shasta area, harvested by a mysterious forager named "Anthony," who dropped off a crate after previously failing to sell Oliveto a far less superior product.

Morels, also known as morchella, are often associated with French cooking, but they can be found all over the world, including California. They tend to grow in forests that are sufficiently cold in winter and humid in spring. Often they spring from the soil two or three years after a forest fire.
 

It's springtime. The hills are green. Herbs and leafy vegetables are abundant in the markets, and so a chef wants to paint from a seasonal palate.

The photo to the right shows what Oliveto calls a "chlorophyll sauce." Not the prettiest of names, but an apt description of a sauce made from herbs and fish stock.

It's actually fairly easy to make, and beautiful to behold. It also has a wondrous complexity that goes well with many kinds of seafood, such as scallops or halibut. Read on for instructions, which I've adapted from a restaurant-size recipe that was demonstrated to me by Oliveto's Paul Berglund:

The Chef Apprentice continues to receive a delicious array of responses from readers who are tracking my kitchen (mis)adventures.

One reader, Tim from Marysville, has invited me to work as a pit master at the International Pit Barbecue Cookers Association state championship contest, to be held June 5-7 in Penn Valley.

Should I do it?

Saddleshoos, author of A Rockridge Life, is jealous of my apprenticeship and has set up a poll to see if her readers are also jealous. Josh Morgan, author of Don't Eat The Shrimp, highlights my blog as some of "the interesting online content at The Bee." (Thanks, Josh.)

Steven Karoly, a Sierra camp cook who writes 'Round the Chuckbox, says "It's nice to read a blog where the author writes with the style and technique of a journalist, but has the heart of a cook." (Thanks, Steve!)

And then there are the skeptics. Tucker Shaw, food writer for the Denver Post, says my first posting was "soaked in optimism." (Whaaa? Wasn't that the post where I sliced into my thumb within my first half hour?)

Paolo, a blogger at SFeater, described my apprenticeship as an "experiment/stunt." (He's half right. It is an experiment, but not a stunt.)

And I have one big name reader in New York. After I wrote on item about "On the Line," the book co-written by Eric Ripert, chef at Le Bernardin, I received a nice email note from Ripert, thanking me for the blog item.

"Indeed you are so right. Chefs love cookbooks!," Ripert wrote. "A few years ago I brought my entire collection into the restaurant and we created a little 'library' in our offices."

That's a class act - further proof that not all chefs are the ogres depicted in "Kitchen Confidential."

But there I go again - soaking in optimism.

Has my home cooking improved after working for five weeks in a high-end restaurant?

Perhaps. Usually I am so tired by the time I get home that I ask my wife, "Trader Joe's pizza tonight?"

Seriously, my home chef skills have improved since taking an internship at Oliveto. I pay more attention to detail now. I have a more discerning palate. I am more adventurous in the kitchen (when I have the energy).

On my day off yesterday, for instance, I butterflied a chicken for the first time and roasted it with green garlic olive oil and herbs.

Yeah, I know. Butterflying a chicken is easy. But for some reason, I was intimidated by the prospect until I saw chefs at Oliveto do it regularly.

I've also learned other lessons -- and been reminded of old ones -- during my five weeks in a commercial kitchen:

-- Don't skimp on the olive oil or the butter. If you like to cook Mediterranean dishes, you should have at least one really good bottle of olive oil on your shelf. Drizzle a little on your pasta after it sauced and plated, or save it for a salad you really care about. You'll notice the difference. (In the photo above are some oils regularly used at Oliveto).

-- Use the right oil for the right job. Olive oil can scorch at high heat. That's bad news if you are sauteing something delicate, such as fish. At Oliveto, the chefs use grape seed oil for high-heat cooking. It has a neutral flavor that won't affect your lovely halibut.

Every Mother's Day, Oliveto co-owner Maggie Klein places a photo of her mother Marion Blythe on the bar at Oliveto, to greet patrons as they come in.

With the restaurant set to open in a few minutes, Maggie just pulled the photo out and placed it on the bar.

Happy Mother's Day to all.

Photo by Stuart Leavenworth 

The Chef Apprentice has now graduated to fish preparations at Oliveto. This week I prepared, from start to finish, an ancient Venetian fish dish known as a saor.

A saor is similar to a marinade, except that you add it to the fish after it has been cooked. The marinade is slightly sweet, savory and sour -- hence the name, saor.

The Venetians developed saor as a fish preservation technique, similar in concept (but not taste) to pickled herring. Handled with care, a saor is a sumptuous compliment to a delicate flat fish such as petrale sole.

Most recipes for saor, including this one by Mario Batali, use vinegar for the acid in the dish. At Oliveto, Chef Paul Canales likes to tweak with tradition. The saor we prepared featured grapefruits - ruby red grapefruits. Read on to learn how we made it.

To make the best pasta, you must acquire the finest ingredients.

Lately, Oliveto has been re-examining the flours, eggs and other ingredients in its basic pasta dough. In short, the owners and chefs seem to be in maniacal pursuit of primo pasta.

Take a look at these two eggs. The one on the bottom, with the brighter yolk, is from Riverdog Farm in Yolo County. The top one is from a neighboring farm. Which one do you think would produce a superior egg noodle?

It's not just the color that matters. The chefs cooked up both eggs to test their presumption that the Riverdog yolk, with its bright orange color, offered the superior flavor. There was no contest.

The Riverdog yolk was rich and intense - just what you want in a noodle. Apparently, the owners of River Dog let their chickens forage on a variety of leafy greens. That helps produce richer yolk than those produced by chickens that subsist largely on grain.

Not surprisingly, the Riverdog eggs are already getting marquee treatment at Oliveto. The chefs are currently featuring them in "Riverdog pasture-raised hen egg tagliatelle with garden rosemary and Oliveto prosciutto."

Photo by Stuart Leavenworth

I cook. I tweet.

Yes, I've finally broken down and signed up for Twitter -- under "sleavenworth."

If you sign up and follow me, you'll be able to keep track of nearly every dish I make and be instantly notified every time I stick a knife into my thumb.

Unless, of course, you have something better to do. Which I hope you do. 

Four weeks have passed since I took a leave from The Bee's editorial board to work as a kitchen intern. It's been a humbling transition.

Less than a month ago, I was an influential pundit - regularly courted by politicians and power brokers who feared the sharp edges of my editorials.

Now I spend my days in a crowded kitchen in Oakland, taking orders from young chefs and living in mortal fear of my knife edges.

In my previous life, I worked in a third-floor office with a comfy chair and a view of downtown Sacramento. I earned a respectable salary.

Now I'm on my feet all day, five days a week, in a windowless kitchen, doing exhausting work for no pay. Some days I'm standing in one place for hours, paring artichokes or cleaning squid.

Given the blows to my ego, my body and my income, you might think I'd be eager to hang up my chef's jacket and flee from Oliveto, the Italian restaurant where I'm interning.

You'd be wrong. This is the best sabbatical a foodie could imagine.

To read the rest of this update, go here.

Here's a way to rebel against misleading media reports that eating pork can lead to swine flu. Make yourself a homemade sugo -- an Italian meat sauce -- to go with your pork chop.

A sugo is a rustic and intense meat sauce that is regularly spooned on meat dishes at Oliveto, the restaurant where I am interning. Executive Chef Paul Canales developed this version for home cooks.

The recipe involves a lot of work and time, but the payoff is huge. The final sauce can be frozen in ice-cube trays and used for months. Try it on pork scallopine, pork chops or roast pork. If you don't like pork, make it with other cuts of meat, such as scraps of lamb or goat.

To read the full recipe, go here.


Photo of Paul Canales by Stuart Leavenworth.

Since its founding, Oliveto has cultivated relationships with dozens of farmers, fishmongers and other suppliers. Starting this year, the restaurant has attempted to showcase those food producers through a web site, the Oliveto Community Journal.

This web site is a response to the increasing erudition of restaurant consumers. Many diners don't just want to enjoy good food and wine, they want to know where it came from, and who produced it.

The Oliveto Community Journal includes profiles of farmers, ranchers and other suppliers. There are videos that track the current tomato season and the old-world practices of Mr. Espresso, an Oakland company that uses a wood-fired oven to roast coffee for Oliveto and other businesses.

Check out this Oliveto profile of Fully Belly Farm, a year-round producer of fruits and vegetables in Yolo County. The farm, which hosts an annual Hoe Down Harvest Festival (seen above), has been selling produce directly to Oliveto for 15 years.

One perk of interning at Oliveto is seeing farmers come through the back door with crates of produce or meat. Some clearly enjoy hanging out in the kitchen and deepening their relationship with the chefs that prepare the food.

This is not anything "new." In Europe and elsewhere, the first restaurants and taverns were started by farm families or people who wanted to sell produce or spirits produced by their friends in the community.

Responding to customers who are fed up by mass-produced, faceless plates of food, restaurants are getting back to their roots. 

It was only a matter of time before I got into a knife fight with a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Oliveto blows through several pounds of this imported cheese each week, and the kitchen staff doesn't use a mechanical grater. That means that someone must grate the chunks by hand, and if chunks aren't available, they must be cut from a wheel of cheese that, upon arrival, weighs about 80 pounds.

On Saturday, my task was to create chunks of Parmigiano-Reggiano from half a wheel of cheese. My only tools were a pair of knives that looked like they had been borrowed from a medieval dungeon.

Line chef Kelsey Bergstrom instructed me on the technique. "This can be a bit dangerous," she warned as we got started.

The first step involved scoring the outside of the wheel with a "rind cutter," a hook-tipped knife, which you can see in this helpful diagram. The hook has to be driven into the cheese fairly deeply, about half an inch.

Once the outside had been fully scored, I picked up a small sword, known as a spatula knife, and plunged it into the center of the line from which I wanted to create two pieces. Then I exerted pressure on the blade, and wedged it back and forth into the interior of the cheese, as you can see me doing in the photo above.

Because aged Parmesan cheese is crumbly, a wheel or half wheel will break evenly in a rough line if it is scored and wedged properly. I was successful on my first try, as you can see to the left. I felt like King Arthur pulling his sword from the stone.

Of course, my task wasn't complete. I had to employ similar techniques to create smaller chunks of cheese, and those had to be grated by hand.

After a half hour of grating, my wrists were sore, and my tongue was salty from all the bits of parmigiano I had sampled. But my job was done. The line cooks had all the cheese they needed for a big Saturday night at Oliveto.

There's an old myth that chefs don't read cookbooks; they only write them. The truth is that chefs are obsessed by cookbooks. They love to peruse them, debate them, loathe them and, occasionally, praise them.

At Oliveto, there's a small library of food books in the back office, where the chefs retreat for inspiration (or simply to get off their feet for a few minutes).

My latest discovery is "On the Line," a book that came out last year by Eric Ripert and Christine Muhlke. Ripert is the executive chef of Le Bernardin, one of New York's highest-rated restaurants. As you would expect, his book features the usual food porn -- gorgeous photos of his seafood dishes -- along with a few recipes.

But "On the Line" is so much more than a cook book. It is a graphic depiction of life inside a restaurant. The book includes a time line of the daily routine. It includes schematics of the kitchen layout, a glossary of restaurant terms, sidebars about each chef and their work stations and a list of "Cardinal Sins" that should be read by every restaurant owner.

In short, it is an overview of the minute details that separate a good restaurant from a great one.

"On the Line" is not what I'd consider a work of journalism. There's little or no mention of kitchen pranks, bloodletting or interns who nearly ruin an expensive dish. But if you want a book that explains a kitchen -- instead of just glorifying it -- "On the Line" is a fine one to add to your collection.