Lesson 5

Lesson 3

Week 4

Butchery Worshop at Marksbury Market, Lancaster Ky

A slideshow of some of the action at the butchery workshop I assisted in Lancaster Ky. Many thanks to workshop leaders Kate Hill, master butcher Dominique Chapolard, master stonemason turned state-of-the-art abattoir proprietor Richard McAllister  and UK Ag's rainmaking Special Projects Manager for sustainable agricultural efforts Chef Bob Perry!
These are some impressive people working at the edge of the envelope of contemporary agriculture and gastronomy. In a domain that is loaded with fanatics who give the impression that they will float into the sky if they remove their shoes,  these folks are the soul of sober pragmatism and I consider myself honored to have been invited into their cohort.

Some of these photos are beautiful, a few even appear to reach the level of art. Suffice it to say that I had nothing to do with making them.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Nice Tutorial on Emulsification

Week 2

Meat Me In Kentucky

Between April 19-21 I will be assisting at a butchery workshop at the amazing state of the art Marksbury Market  in Lancaster, Ky and cooking with Chefs Justin Dean of the Relish Restaurant Group and Napoleon Ridge Farm ,  Bob Perry of the University of Ky  and other members of Chef's Collaborative 2013 at The Winter Kitchen at Shaker Village.

It's all happening in the great State of Kentucky where the grass is blue and the true Bourbon flows through one of the most beautiful landscapes in all of creation.

Kate Hill

Dominique Chapolard (right) 

The Butchery workshop is being led by author, educator and cuisinier  Kate Hill of the Kitchen at Camont and Dominique Chapolard, a Gascon farmer and butcher who is the former head of Butchery & Charcuterie at the British School of Artisan Food, and the founder of  the  innovative and necessary Grrls Meat Camp. 

Alas the Kentucky workshop is sold out. However there are still slots available at some of the other workshops that Kate and Dominque have scheduled for their Spring tour. (See below).

Dates & Locations: all events are open to the public.

• April 12-14 2013 SPECIAL Grrls Meat Camp Butchery and Charcuterie for Women with Kari Underly & Kate Hill- http://grrlsmeatcampworkshop-es2005.eventbrite.com/ (check out the page on the toolbar above)
• April 16-17 2013         Oklahoma City, Oklahoma- Francis Tuttle School of Culinary Arts in a brand new dedicated butchery classroom kitchen- http://francistuttle.edu/culinaryarts       Book here: http://thefrenchpig.eventbrite.com

• April 20-21 2013  SOLD OUT!       Lancaster, Kentucky- Marksbury Farm.  Book  here: http://marksburyfarm.com/

• April 23-24 2013         Woodbridge, Virginia- Stratford University School of Culinary Arts http://www.stratford.edu/culinary                                   Book here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5692065120 

• April 27-28 2013         Montville, Maine- Claddagh Farm Cookery School For booking fill out form here: http://kitchengardenfoods.com/ask/ 

A Bit About Me

My grandfather Giovanni del Grosso(2nd row, 2nd from left)

Like so many of my generation who found their way into the professional culinary establishment, I did not set out with the intention of making a career out of cooking. In fact, at about the age of 12, I'd settled on the idea of becoming a professional scientist- and it almost  happened.

In 1980,  as I approached the award of  an undergraduate degree in Environmental Science, I decided that I really wanted to to study paleoclimatology with an eye towards exploring how variations in paleoclimate may or may not have influenced the evolution and distribution of species across time and space. Towards that end, I worked with my undergraduate thesis adviser to refine my thesis for publication and applied  to doctoral programs that I hoped would help me get the skills I needed to satisfy my research interests.
 the time the thesis was published, I'd been accepted into a doctoral program, declined to attend and had moved on to what became the career that became my life's work.

I remember having mixed emotions when I heard that my paper had passed peer-review and had been published in the journal Micropaleontology. I should have been thrilled to have the "stamp of approval"  of a prestigious scientific journal, but while I was certainly pleased, I'd become so deeply involved in learning and practicing the craft of cooking the news felt like a sucker punch. It was as if I was being told that  someone pretending to me was being honored and that I was supposed to be excited for someone I didn't know.
Seen from the vantage point of middle-age, I have no trouble accepting that the objects of the intellectual passions that rule my life could shift so dramatically, but back then, well, it didn't set right.

It also did not help that in those days cooking was still regarded as a low prestige job and I had not completely adjusted to the idea that for the foreseeable future my daily routine was going to include mopping floors and being screamed at or hit with a spoon by a sclerotic old frenchman who had abandon his formal education at the age of 15 to apprentice in the kitchen of a hotel in Nazi Germany (no joke!) But I'm getting ahead of myself here. I haven't told what made me decide to choose cooking as an alternative to pursuing a career in science.

It really boils down to genealogy.


See, my paternal grandfather and several of my great-uncles (4 out of  5 of his brothers) were professional chefs who got their training after immigrating from Italy during the first two decades of the 20th century and most of them were married to women who were every bit as talented and serious about cooking as they were.

As a kid I never got to see my grandfather at work at the Hotel Pierre even though  he had worked there since its opening in 1930 until he retired 1961. Kids weren't welcome in the kitchen and I was pretty young. But I did get to see him cook on special occasions when he would cook dishes in the manner of the  haute cuisine of the hotel. I should add that the hotel's kitchen was organized and staffed by Auguste Escoffier, one of the most important chefs ever to emerge from France and who is often given credit for making it possible for the globalization French classical cookery by publishing the most comprehensive and widely read accounting of the classic repertoire to date (1903) Le Guide Culinare . I don't think that my grandfather ever worked directly for Chef Escoffier (he worked for the chef Escoffier trained and placed on the job as chef de cuisine), but there is no question  all of the  dishes he cooked at home for special occasions were straight out of the master's version of the classical  repertoire.

So when I began to have doubts about continuing on to a doctorate, I remembered my grandfather and his brothers and their skill and how it seemed to inform everything they did and said. And I thought about my grandmother and my Zia (aunt)Tonietta and how much respect they all received from everyone in the family for their fine cooking and for keeping alive the dishes from our ancestral villages of Borgo val di Taro and Pocigatone in Emilia Romagna.

 Then there was the depression thing.

When I was a kid, my father liked to make the point that because my grandfather cooked very high-end french food at a very high-end hotel that catered to wealthy people from all over the planet, he had been able to hold a job and feed his family when other people with better educations were standing on bread lines during the Great Depression.

As I wrestled with the decision to go on to grad school and the financial hardships that would entail and very mindful of the fact that the future was likely to bring a  decreased demand for people who specialized in the use of microfossils as indicators of paleoclimate (long story but the short of it is that cheaper, more reliable methods have all but replaced it), my mind kept returning to the notion inspired by my father that "a chef who cooks at a very high level will always have work."

So there you have it:  genealogy and depression caused me to become a chef -and I couldn't be happier.

Here's a photo of another relative who lived and breathed cooking. This is my uncle Arthur Fenaroli from the Porcigatone side of the family. He owned a restaurant in New Jersey. It was up on a bluff overlooking the place where the George Washington Bridge ramp is today. He was pretty famous among Italian ex-pats for his rendition of the cuisine of Parma, among them Arturo Toscanini was a regular customer.

Okay, this post is already too long. But hopefully I've given you enough to get an idea of where I'm coming from so you have sense of what to expect from me. Hey, if it helps, here is my resume.

Week One, Lesson 1: An Introduction to the Class