Red Mill Totem House is being honored tonight by Historic Seattle, a group dedicated to preserving “Seattle and King County’s architectural identity,” for “preserving a unique Ballard community landmark” reports My Ballard Blog. Congrats on receiving this honor, Red Mill Totem House!!

At last Saturday’s event, School the Chefs, an event supported by Tom Douglas Restaurants as part of our work with the Seattle Public Schools, celebrity chefs teamed up with kids to create healthy, delicious, and cost conscious lunches.   School the Chefs got some press love from both the Seattle Times and the Nosh Pit.

Kudos to Cuoco and Seatown!  Cuoco’s luscious lasagna and Seatown’s English muffin egg sandwich with fried egg and Dungeness crab both made the 100 favorite dishes list at Voracious blog.

Joy of Cooking’s new blog (check out “Blog Buddies” to the right) has an excellent “Building a Better Pantry” series that demonstrates how to make your own fresh butter, creme fraiche, buttermilk, yogurt, ricotta, mozzarella, and, impressively,  even your own cheddar!

The most fun to read Food-in-the-News of the day is the New York Times T Magazine’s report on Foodieodicals.  This program, which was part of New York’s Food Book Fair, focused on indie food zines from around the country.  These quirky, arty, and cerebral magazines are extraordinary, and they’re not about pretty food photography. The food magazine, White Zinfandel, for example, is described this way:  “Imagine Marcel Duchamp guest-editing Bon Appetit.”

This year our annual Baconopolis- where all things bacon are celebrated- merged with our annual Colander Cup, where all the chefs of the Tom Douglas Restaurants compete on a particular culinary theme to take home the coveted Colander Cup Award.   So, last week all the Tom Douglas Restaurant chefs and their teams, representing all the TDR  joints, competed with each other to come up with  the most amazing bacon-y tastes and sips.  Because this was Baconopolis- the event was open to the public.  (Colander Cup, on the other hand,  is typically a staff event that takes place in the late evening when the joints are mostly closed.)

The pig was well represented in many forms, both artistic and culinary.  Such as the Catering Department’s bacon porchetta (photo above left).  And the Dahlia staff member (Sonia) dressed in a pig costume. (photo above right)

Among the many Tom Douglas staff spotted at Baconopolis: Pastry Chef Stacy with bacon eyebrows (photo left), Etta’s and Seatown Chef Adrienne knocking back  a beer (middle), and Palace Chef Desi serving Hangtown boilermakers (right).

Among the many baconlicious tastes: Brave Horse Tavern’s peanut butter stuffed pretzels with bacon jam (left), Lola’s bacon baklava with bacon ice cream and “smoked out dirty Greek pig” cocktail (middle), and “the Corner’s” (ie Etta’s, Seatown, and Rub with Love Shack) pork belly bahn mi with bacon cream puff (right).

The audience did the judging and the competition was tough with so much creativity and deliciousness on display.  But the verdict was: DAHLIA LOUNGE WINS BACONOPOLIS/ COLANDER CUP!!  Chef Brock Johnson was the Ringmaster (left) presiding over some amazing stagecraft (a porky circus tent from the darkside) servng bacon cotton candy, bacon “popcorn,” and an astonishingly delicious cone (right) of bacon caramel ice cream!  Well done team Dahlia and all the Tom Douglas teams!!

Last Thursday….Waiting to plate up 400 or so lunches……

Ever wonder what it’s like to wander around NYC with Tom Douglas and Eric Tanaka?  Over the next several days, stay tuned for tidbits from our lucky group of managers who got to be at Tom’s side for his James Beard Outstanding Restaurateur win!

Cool stories will be posted by:

Eric Tanaka, Executive Chef

Lauren McCullough, Seatown Asst Manager

Jonah Smith, Roving Manager

Tony Catini, Serious Pie Westlake Chef and GM

Colleen Kennelly, Lola GM

Devony Boyle, HR Manager

Yep, Tom Douglas Catering is cooking lunch for the President Obama fundraiser at the Paramount!

Last week, Joseba Jimenez demo’d the Spanish bread, Pan Candeal, for the bread bakers in the Dahlia Workshop. In the photo above he is shaping a round of dough with Head Bread Baker Wendy Scherer.  The dough, made with flour, water, yeast, and salt, was nice and soft and bouncy- easy to work with.  Bakery Production Manager Gwen LeBlanc had to make some adjustments to Joseba’s recipe to account for differences in hydration for American and European flours.

Next Joseba patted the dough into a flattened round.  The fun part was slapping it on the counter a few times.

Next, for this particular bread (he showed us a few different shapes),  a hole was formed in the middle of the round of dough.  The fun part here was twirling the round of dough on your wrist a few times to give it a nice, even shape.

Next the loaves proofed for about 20 minutes in a warm proofing box until doubled in size.

Then the loaves were patted down and Joseba used a razor to slash the dough.  Different types of bread have different patterns and markings- which may indicate where the bread is from.

And finally the bread was baked, at about 375°F with steam, to a golden brown, with a crisp crust- not too thick- and a white crumb.  Traditionally, this bread would be baked in a wood fired oven.  Often the bread is baked in the same oven as potatoes, which gives flavor to the bread. This is a good neutral tasting bread which is meant to be eaten with olive oil and cured sausage.  Also, in Spain, the bread may be allowed to stand for a day then broken up and used in soups and to thicken stews.  The density of this bread is also perfect for making bruschetta or Spanish tomato rubbed toasts.

Editor’s note: Formerly of Seattle’s Harvest Vine Restaurant, Joseba Jimenez has spent the last 3 years living and cooking in Thailand.  Recently, he has been giving a series of cooking demos, in both European and Asian techniques, for Tom Douglas Restaurant cooks and chefs.

Kudos, Kudos, Kudos

Did we mention that Tom Douglas won Outstanding Restaurateur at the James Beard Awards on Monday?  Maybe we did, but if you missed it  you can read about it here.

Our wings are hot! hot! hot! Palace Chicken Wings rated as one of  Seattle’s best by Voracious.

Saveur gives a glowing review to Paris restaurant,Verjus, run by expat Americans Laura Adrian and Braden Perkins, who is a TDR (Tom Douglas Restaurants) alumnus.

Columbia City Bakery makes Bon Appetit’s 10 Best Baguette list.  (Owner and head baker, Evan Andres, is also a TDR alumnus by the way.)

A good friend to TDR,  Brad Parsons, won a James Beard Award for Best Beverage Cookbook for his outstanding cocktail book, Bitters. (By the way, the photographer of Bitters, Ed Anderson, took the photos for our new book, The Dahlia Bakery Cookbook, which will be released by Morrow in October 2012)

Katie O here!  This past weekend we talked about our opinions on the best bakeries in Seattle for bread and some ideas on how to utilize the beautiful artichokes that are in the stores right now. Not to mention I take some of the listeners questions to the chefs for some fun answers!

Our social media guru, Herschell Taghap, normally posts these radio blogs for me, but he’s busy gallivanting around Europe (poor Herschell) so I’m left to my own devices… which means at this moment I don’t know how to embed audio.  So just click here to listen on KIRO’s site!

If you’re iTunes equipped, you can subscribe directly to the podcast here and get Tom and Thierry in your ear anytime, anywhere.

Again, if you want to continue the conversation “off the air” or have any questions on anything food-related, like us on our Facebook page or follow us @SeattleKitchen,@TomDouglasCo and @TheChefInTheHat!

The Old Fashioned

The Old Fashioned is a cocktail that has come back into style lately.  I’m seeing more and more ordered everywhere I go.  The one thing I don’t see though is a consistency in the way it is made.  There seem to be two schools of thought in the creation of the Old Fashioned. The first is the classic way, a bit of sugar, a few dashes of bitters, and some whiskey stirred to proper dilution and strained over fresh ice (more on each of these steps to come).  This style produces a clean, balanced, and beautiful cocktail that consistently has bar patrons coming back for more. The second method is what many have probably seen somewhere along the way, and to be honest, is the way that I was taught to make this drink at my first bartending gig.  Muddle a maraschino cherry, half an orange slice, and a sugar cube, add bourbon, shake and strain onto fresh ice and top with soda.  For my personal taste this style misses the mark.  The cocktail doesn’t come out clean, rather cloudy and chunky.  It’s too sweet and far too diluted.  Just to make everyone happy at the cocktail workshop, I made a cocktail in each of these styles.

As each bartender tasted the juxtaposed cocktails, we came to a few conclusions: Method 1 is classic, strong, delicious and what we’ll call your average bar patron may not be expecting.  Method 2 is watered down, chunky, and too sweet, but probably what the standard is in your run of the mill American bar. This being said, I think that it is always imperative to politely discuss with your guest what type of drink they want rather than impose your will on them.  If the guest is game to play with something they are unfamiliar with, then by all means go down that road and take the chance to really wow them.

Though there were some in the crowd that prefer Method 2 for personal reasons, I intend for Method 1 to be the standard for our Old Fashioned.  Now for the fun details.  For the sugar component of this drink I really like to use a 1:1 simple syrup.  This makes for a no mess, no stick affair.  Angostura bitters are the best and most classic option, though once you’ve mastered the classic, branch out and try some fun new combinations.  Rye whiskey is the best way to go, for our experimenting we tried both Rittenhouse 100 proof and Old Overholt.  Overholt was the crowd consensus because the Rittenhouse was just too hot (for everyone except me).  I think that bourbon is generally too sweet for this cocktail.

As far as the method goes, I like to take a nice sized orange peel and gently press it in the bottom of the glass. This lends the pleasant aromatics from the oils and a delicate touch of sweetness.  Then build the cocktail on top of this: 1/4 ounce of simple syrup, 3 dashes bitters, and 2 ounces of rye whiskey.  Fill the glass with ice and stir to about 2 ounces of dilution.  Strain the drink into a glass with fresh ice and garnish with a fresh new orange peel.  Some classic recipes call for lemon peel instead, but I feel like using an orange peel gives a nod to the muddled variation of the cocktail.

Another fun thing to keep in mind and to inspire some variations on this drink is that an ‘Old Fashioned’ cocktail in the classic sense is a style of cocktail rather than a specific cocktail.  Try this method with gin, Peychaud’s bitters, and a lemon peel to deliver a surprising and wonderful cocktail.

Cheers!

The Coco Pie Princess, Kelly, selling coco pie bites for only $2 at the Dahlia Bakery today!!