The Chef Apprentice

You've read about my matriculation in making pasta. You've seen the photos. Now's your chance to have me as your pasta cooking slave for a weekend lunch, following a joint shopping spree at the Sacramento Farmers Market.

To raise money for local garden and hunger charities, the Slow Food Sacramento chapter is holding an all-day event on Saturday, July 11 that will culminate in an AgFest Dinner at Fremont Park. At the dinner, foodies can bid on several different items, including a pasta lunch that I will prepare for you and your friends on a future Sunday. All proceeds benefit the Sacramento Hunger Coalition and the Sacramento Area Community Garden Coalition.

This should be a fun gathering, one that will feed your both brain and taste buds. The Slow Food Chapter has scheduled a day of farm tours, movies and workshops to help bring together local growers, gardeners and chefs. The dinner menu, prepared by Magpie Catering, features grilled Petaluma chicken and roasted corn with patty pan squash.

Speaking of grilled foods, I will also be sharing my meager cooking skills with a barbecue pit crew this Friday and Saturday, at the Way Out West BBQ Championship in Stockton.

Tim Mar, who owns Mar's Mobile Grill in Marysville, has been hounding me for months to join his pit crew at various competitions. I had a scheduling conflict for the state championship, in which Tim and his crew finished third. But now I am ready to take the challenge.

The Way Out West competition is part of the July 4 Taste of San Joaquin event at the Weber Point Events Center in Stockton. Stop on by the Mar's Mobile Grill camp if you want to see a BBQ apprentice in action. 

Weeks before starting my internship at Oliveto, I began researching the knives I would need to be a swashbuckling chef apprentice.

I owned an old set of Wustof knives, but like a lot of home chefs, I had mistreated them. New knives were essential. They needed to be sharp. They needed to be versatile. They needed to feel comfortable in my hand.

My first step was to consult Paul Canales, the executive chef at Oliveto.

"You need four knives," said Canales. "A 10-inch chef's knife, a paring knife, a seven-inch utility knife and a semi-stiff boning knife. That will get you started."

Like many restaurants, Oliveto owns a number of cleavers, cheese knives and other specialty tools shared by all kitchen employees. But chefs and interns are expected to have their own personal knives. Most wouldn't want it any other way.

Chefs tend to be picky about how their blades are used, sharpened and stored. If all knives were used communally in a kitchen, the skirmishes would be epic. Fights would break out -- knife fights.

To examine the options, Canales graciously allowed me to try out the personal knives that he and other Oliveto chefs were using. In one afternoon, I was able to handle and slice food with a few dozen blades, while picking up tips on knife shops and Web sites.

Go to this continued post to see the knives I purchased that week, along with a few others I've since added. And send me your thoughts. Do you have a favorite knife, or a set of knives, that you consider extraordinary?

Photo by The Bee's Carl Costas

I'm about to go off on a long weekend of bicycling in the High Sierra. But even after a few mountain passes, I'm doubtful I'll burn off the calories I consumed last night at Oliveto.

Along with another intern, I polished off seven dishes, not including the two deserts, wine, bread, etc. Two of the dishes came floating on a pond of fonduta, the decadent sauce I helped prepare Wednesday with 45 egg yolks.

Above was the night's prize dish - a pastry stuffed with braised porcini mushrooms, topped with fried leeks, floating on a small pond of fonduta. It's called a vol-au-vent.

If that sounds French, you are not mistaken. Chef Canales is known to have a taste for fussy French food. But by adding porcini and  fonduta, he pulled the vol-au-vent back to the Piedmontese side of the border. Or so he claims.

I could wax rapturous for several more paragraphs describing the other delicious dishes at last night's Barbaresco Dinner, but I don't have time. I need to hurry off now to pump up my bike tires, and check my cholesterol.

Yesterday I helped Chef Paul Canales prepare a fonduta, a delicious and decadent form of fondue from the Italian region of the Piedmont (or Piemonte, as my Italian-American wife correctly pronounces it).

You can find recipes for fonduta here and here, but Canales' version is more refined and made in larger volumes. The batch we prepared yesterday, for instance, required five pounds of the finest imported fontina cheese and 45 egg yolks.

The cheese is soaked in milk and slowly heated on the stove. Cubes of floured butter are added. Then some of the warm milk-cheese mixture is added to the beaten yolks, to bring up their temperature. Canales added this back to the pan, and we carefully stirred it until it was smooth and thickened, but not cooked to the point that it became scrambled eggs. We then strained it into a hotel pan, as you can see in the photo above.

The final fonduta was rich, creamy and irresistable. The chefs immediately pounced on it with pieces of bread, which we topped with minced truffles soaked in oil.

Yes, there are some perks to this job.

The fonduta will be featured tonight and tomorrow at Oliveto's Barbaresco Dinners, which will feature Piedmontese food that compliments Barbaresco, one of the region's finest wines. Chef Marco Forneris, who schooled the kitchen on making gnocchi a few days ago, has worked with Canales on planning and preparing the menu. The wines were selected with the help of Aldo Vacca, Director of Produttori del Barbaresco, who will also be on hand for the special event.

I have a reservation to dine tonight, so I will get a second crack at that fonduta. Molto buono.

If you are feeling bored about your life, your job or your marriage, it's probably because you are not taking chances.

You are not challenging yourself to break out of your rut, and no one is challenging you.

The same thing can happen with cooking. Many home cooks and restaurant chefs make the same food over and over. They play it safe. If a dish is easy to make and popular with family or customers, why mess with success?

After nearly three months at Oliveto, I've been forced to challenge my food sensibilities. I've tried and savored dishes I'd never considered before, such as sea urchin flan.

And I'm pushing myself at the marketplace.

The other day, I stood in the freezer section of a discount grocery, looking at a package of frozen squid. While I've long enjoyed calamari and other squid dishes in restaurants, I had never prepared them at home. Why? I don't know. So I bought the squid.

As it happened, Mark Bittman had just published a recipe in the New York Times for sautéed squid with garlic, chili flakes and bread crumbs. I decided to give it a try.

Bittman's version -- which you can find here, scroll down to the third recipe -- was a stand-alone dish. I decided to marry it with pasta. So I increased the amount of garlic and chili flakes in his recipe, substituted fresh oregano for basil, and added pasta water to emulsify the sauce.

The result was delicious and so easy to make. 

To read the full recipe, go here.

It's hard to imagine a more challenging peasant food than gnocchi.

It should be simple. It's just potatoes and flour, or some other starchy combination, which you quickly shape before tossing into boiling water.

Yet if you get the proportions wrong, or knead it too much, the results are disastrous. Either the gnocchi falls apart or you end up with lead pellets instead of light pillows.

On Saturday, an experienced maker of gnocchi -- Marco Forneris of the Osteria Lalibera, in Alba, Italy -- visited the Oliveto kitchen.

After watching Marco make many pounds of gnocchi, I feel far less intimidated by this peasant dish than I once did.

I've been making meat sauces for years, but only now - after two months as an apprentice at Oliveto - have I learned some of the secrets behind a superlative ragu.

A ragu is a basic meat sauce for pasta. The first authentic version I tried was years ago, in Emilia-Romagna, the region of Italy that invented the classic Bolognese sauce.

That first ragu was bold and brooding - much like a Pavarotti opera. The sauce was entangled in a nest of perfectly cooked tagliatelle, with the flavor infused into the noodle.

Numerous cookbooks offer suggestions on making a Bolognese sauce and other forms of ragu. Yet nearly all of these recipes, in my opinion, are flawed. Most suggest cooking a mixture of diced onion, carrots and celery before adding your meat to brown it. The sauce that results tends to be lifeless or, even worse, infused with chunks of burnt vegetables.

At Oliveto, the chefs have reversed the sequence. First they brown the meat and then allow the vegetables to steam, or "sweat," on top of the meat. This process produces a dark layer of caramelized meat solids at the bottom of the pan -- a foundation of flavor. This foundation, or "fond" as the chefs call it, is then deglazed by the natural juices of the vegetables when added on top. This is allowed to cook down so the fond is rebuilt and deglazed two or three times.

Paul Bertolli, the former head chef at Oliveto, describes the technique in his 2003 book, "Cooking By Hand." Bertolli's successor, Paul Canales, who had a role in developing this technique, has continued to refine and perfect it since becoming executive chef.

Cooking a ragu in this manner is not difficult, but it cannot be whipped out in an hour or two. A ragu is truly slow food -- time-tested and refined by Italian grandmothers over many centuries.

For a recipe and more photos, go here.

Unlike many restaurants, Oliveto buys entire animals -- whole pigs, lambs and young cows, known as vitellone. To age and store all this meat, the restaurant installed a meat locker in the basement a few years ago.

In this video at the Oliveto Community Journal, Chef Paul Canales gives us a tour of the meat locker, along with a quick lesson on aging grass-fed beef.

As he notes in the video, grass-fed beef tends to be very lean, and not very tender, when fresh. But with proper aging, enzymes help tenderize the meat, and add flavor.

The meat locker also is a storage and curing spot for salami, pancetta (cured pork) and other parts off the animal, all of which are used at the restaurant. In the photo, Sous Chef Curtis Di Fede hangs up some meat.

Photo by Stuart Leavenworth

Early readers of this blog might remember the mishap of my first week. I over-salted nearly 20 pounds of lamb shoulder before browning it, unaware that the lamb chunks and sauce would later be reduced, intensifying the saltiness of the sauce.

I then hustled to help save that dish, by adding wine and cream until the sauce had the right seasoning. The damage to the dish was less than the impact to my ego. I was sure that Chef Canales would relegate me to duties befitting my talents, such as cleaning out the grease traps.

But two months have passed, and I've gradually redeemed myself. With task after task, I've demonstrated I am reliable -- no drama, no whining -- and won't repeat a mistake twice. That has helped me win back some of the trust I nearly squandered.

Earlier this week, Sous Chef Brian Murphy asked me to repeat the task I flubbed before -- seasoning and browning more than 20 pounds of lamb shoulder. This was my big moment. Would I screw up again?

As a home chef, I've cooked hundreds of batches of pasta over the years and dreamed up an equal number of sauces.

The final product was often good. But only a few achieved greatness.

Part of my problem: I was cavalier about marrying my pasta and sauce together.

Now, after two months at Oliveto, I am starting to learn how these elements should be married. My pastas have improved. I am starting to hear wedding bells.

To read the rest of this column, go here.

In an editorial notebook today in The Bee, I rant against certain Amtrak passengers who carry on loud, lengthy, inappropriate cell-phone conversations within the train cars.

"These are people so focused on themselves that they have no moral qualms about sharing their most intimate conversations with everyone else," I write.

The column is already generated lots of feedback. One reader, "Doc," offered this suggestion on how to deal with such narcissists:


Great idea, Doc. Your approach demands chutzpah, but I think I'm up to the task.

One of the best parts of this gig is hearing from food lovers so daring they'd try a recipe I suggested.

And they continue to do so.

Dave from Sacramento wrote me a week ago, wondering if he could use a mandolin instead of a knife to make a shaved asparagus salad. That dish was featured in this column and a blog entry a few weeks ago.

"Why not?," I replied.

So Dave used the 1/8 inch setting on his mandolin, and then dressed the asparagus shavings with lemon juice, extra virgin olive oil and salt and pepper.

"My wife thought the results were delicious," he wrote, and he even sent along a photo, which you can see above.

Bill from Carmichael was interested in the pork sausage I helped make with the restaurant's chefs, described in a recent column and a longer blog post.

"What I liked about it was that they varied their ingredients to make a slight twist on a standard recipe," Bill wrote. He also offered what he called "one of the best sausage sites on the internet," which you can find here.

Jock from Sacramento said he also enjoyed the sausage column, and not just because I used it to make fun of state legislators.

When I was a small lad, I would sit in the kitchen and watch as my mother would grind chunks of the pork by hand and stuff the meat into hog casings through a funnel resembling a small, much abused trumpet. My job changed over the years from pricking the air pockets with a small needle at her direction, to tossing an occasional slice of onion into the grinder, to cranking the grinder handle myself.

Ah, yes. I'm glad someone can remember the days when families made food by hand, with kids and parents spending time together in the kitchen. Jock clearly is dating himself. When were you born, dude, in the 1920s?

Just kidding. 

Christine from Sacramento had this comment about the weekly columns. (She says she is not a regular reader of the blog.)

It's fun to read about you, an accomplished journalist, pursuing an interest you (and many of us) enjoy. I can imagine myself in your shoes--you're taking this adventure on my behalf...

My suggestion is to keep writing about the very unique food Oliveto creates or interesting techniques. Also, throw in some information we might be able to use at home (like unusual/fresh/in season produce we haven't considered).

Thank you, Christine. I will keep writing about Oliveto techniques and seasonal produce.

And if anyone else out there has comments or questions about recipes or the life of a restaurant galley slave, please send them along. You can comment below or email me at sleavenworth@sacbee.com.

Make no mistake about it, Oliveto is in business to make money. That's why the restaurant holds its Oceanic Dinners and other special events each year. Chef Paul Canales knows these dinners will pack the dining room with customers who want a delicious taste of the unusual.

But that's not the only reason Canales puts his kitchen through the stress and glory of these seafood fests.

He and his chefs are fascinated by marine life. These cooks relish the challenge of preparing fish that many of their counterparts have never touched.

All this week, the kitchen buzzed with anticipation as Tom Worthington, the co-owner of Monterey Fish, delivered box after box of incredibly fresh fish, mollusks and other seafood.

By the chef's calculation, some 65 different species of seafood were served this year. All were chosen based on several considerations, such as whether the fishery was healthy. (If not, it was left off the list. Thus no California salmon).

The restaurant also went the extra mile by publishing footnotes for each menu item, describing where the fish was caught and its method of harvest.

This was a tough week for the kitchen and its workers, including this galley slave. But let's face it, this week was tougher on the fish. So, in their honor, I offer a photo gallery of some of the seafood that shined in this year's Oceanic Dinners.

Photos: Top left, sea bream, filleted; Above right, Chef Paul Canales with his knives and Tsukiji Fish Market apron, both souvenirs from a recent trip to Japan; Left, razor clams that were featured in a crudo platter in the next photo.

We now interrupt our ongoing coverage of Oliveto's Oceanic Dinners to sing the praises of Corti Brothers, Sacramento's beloved Italian grocery.

Corti's has the city's best butcher shop, and I frequent it regularly. I especially like the lesser-known cuts of beef they offer, such as hanger steak and skirt steak.

In the photo you see a Corti skirt steak I grilled at medium heat for 5 minutes on each side. All I did was salt and drizzle olive oil on the steak before grilling. It needed nothing more.

You can buy cheaper skirt steaks elsewhere, but even at $7.99 a pound, the Corti's version is a bargain. I've never found another so flavorful and tender, yet capable of holding together on the grill.

The accompaniment was some steamed Yukon gold potatoes tossed with olive oil, tarragon vinegar and fresh tarragon from the garden. The green stuff? Beet greens sauteed with some minced green garlic.

This meal took about 15 minutes. This is the kind of food my wife Micaela and I make at home - simple, straight-forward fare.

Fancy stuff? Heck, I can get that at the restaurant.

Every so often, a dish comes along that challenges your palate and slaps your food sensibilities right out the door.

Last night, on the first night of Oliveto's Oceanic Dinners 2009, I sampled such a dish.

"Green sea urchin flan with old aceto balsamico."

I know what some of you are thinking. Flan? With sea urchins? How could such a combo possibly be edible?

That was my reaction when my dinner partners spotted this menu item. I had tried sea urchins before - the first time, while living in Japan many years ago -- but never warmed to the taste and texture.

But as I've noted in previous posts, I am willing to try anything once. And so I appeased my friends by letting them order the flan, thinking I might try a nibble.

All I can say is thank you, Anders, Maria and Elise. Thank you for changing my life.

Speaking of seafood, food writer Mark Bittman has published a thoughtful reflection in the New York Times today on how his seafood choices have changed over the years, in response to over-fished oceans.

Bittman wrote a 1994 book "Fish" that popularized the notion of buying then-unusual species - mackerel, whiting, fresh tuna, squid - and preparing them simply.

He used to ate seafood regularly, and he would eat anything that was fresh. Not anymore.

Here's his current thinking:

-- I don't buy or order the common fish I can easily keep in mind as being super-troubled -- most cod, for example, or bluefin tuna, most species of shark and skate. When in doubt, I move on.

-- With rare exceptions, I don't buy or order farm-raised fish, except clams and oysters. Farmed mussels and shrimp don't seem to come with egregious environmental consequences, but neither tastes like much, either.

-- I don't eat fish as often as I once did. (I don't promote eating it as I once did, either.)

-- And I keep re-evaluating these "rules," and thinking about them. The "safe" lists are difficult to understand, impossible to remember and change frequently. When the fishing of a species is well managed, it can recover and become sustainable. When it's not, the stocks of that fish disappear, sometimes quickly.

Bittman's approach aligns with my own. At Oliveto, the chefs ask me to prepare seafood like swordfish and monkfish livers, and I do so, because I am there to assist them and learn from them.

That said, I don't order such fish when I'm eating out. Although stocks of monkfish and swordfish have improved due to better ocean management, they still are not at levels that make me feel comfortable.

Everyone must make their own choices about consuming fish and other foods. And, as Bittman suggests, a serious eater should be constantly learning and reassessing those choices.

In the days before Oliveto launches its yearly spectacle of seafood specialties, the chefs must pull off a logistical extravaganza.

The restaurant prepares and serves hundreds of pounds of fish, mollusks and crustaceans during its annual Oceanic Dinners, which start tomorrow.

Some of the fish is salted or cured beforehand. But Monterey Fish, the restaurant's supplier, delivers much of the seafood on the day of the dinners, or a day before - like today.

When I entered the restaurant slightly after 10 a.m., the normal morning rhythms of Oliveto had been obliterated.

Nearly all the line chefs - the young hot shots who normally come in at 2 p.m. or so - were already there. Several interns were flitting about. Every portion of counter space was taken, as you can see. People were peeling artichokes and shelling fresh garbanzo beans, but most were involved with filleting, scaling, shucking or cooking various kinds of seafood.

I ventured into the dining room, and found Chef Paul Canales with some of his sous chefs around a table, checking off the status of fish that had been delivered or ordered.

Not content to write one blog, I am now producing two.

Today, the first installment of my culinary odyssey appeared on Bay Area Bites, a food blog published by KQED, the public broadcast corporation based in San Francisco.

Bay Area Bites includes a stable of 16 bloggers, who post daily recipes and observations on Bay Area food issues and events. I am grateful to be part of this crew.

While there be some initial overlap between the two blogs, you'll see differences over time. The Chef Apprentice will focus on my day-to-day challenges and triumphs as an intern. My postings for Bay Area bites will focus more on the classic techniques of Italian cooking I'm learning at Oliveto.

Think of it as a multi-course meal. Appetizers, entree, etc.

In my normal gig, as an editorial writer for The Sacramento Bee, I've been known to make disparaging remarks about state legislators "making sausage."

This is an apt description of the legislative process. But it is an insult to the sausage.

"Making sausage" suggests deception, with chefs throwing together suspect ingredients for the sake of expediency.

To be sure, there are sausages (and legislation) made in this fashion. But Oliveto has higher standards.

Yesterday, the chefs trained me in Sausage Making 101. Equipped with fresh pork shoulder, several superlative spices and some impressive machinery, I turned out more than 42 pounds of sausage in just a few hours.

Garlic scapes are another culinary revelation that the chefs at OU - Oliveto University - have added to my curriculum.

Scapes are the stalks that shoot up from the center of the garlic plant. As you can see from the photo, they are a snaky form of flora, which makes them a bit tricky to dice.

To force more energy into the garlic bulbs while they are growing, many gardeners and farmers simply cut them the scapes and throw them away.

Merde! The scapes from garlic are delicious! (Not so for scapes from onion and leaks.) The trick is finding scapes that are tender and not tough, and knowing how to prepare them.

On Saturday, I cut up a few cups of garlic scapes for a salad dressing that line chef Kelsey Bergstrom was preparing. These were added to an equal amount of walnuts that I mortared, and Kelsey then tossed in some salt and olive oil.

Later that night, she added champagne vinegar to the mixture. (Adding it earlier, she said, might have discolored the scapes.) The final dressing was spooned over a salad of avocado and red beets, adding some bright color and texture, along with a hint of garlic.

Sorry, I don't have a photo of the final dish. But trust me -- it was a winning combination.

Two months into my apprenticeship, I'm starting to get accustomed to the daily rhythms of Oliveto.

But in just one week, those rhythms will be washed away by the restaurant's annual "Oceanic Dinners."

From June 10 to June 13, the normal menu will be replaced with one that features seafood in nearly every dish. So the kitchen crew is now gearing up for a seafood extravaganza that will challenge their skills and their imagination.