Bon Appétit

Wash U Champion Chef Competition Goes Local and Low Carbon

By Carolina Fojo, East Coast Fellow, Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation

 

 
Team North, from left to right: Alex Christensen (student), Joanna Perdomo (student), Tom Dixon (BAMCO manager), David Rushing (BAMCO executive chef). Team South: Patrick Thrower (BAMCO executive chef), Robert Jackson (BAMCO sous chef), Kara Hunerson (student), Andrea Hibbert (student)

At the Second Annual North vs. South Champion Chef Competition hosted by Bon Appétit at Washington University in St. Louis last month, competitors from opposite sides of campus came out in honor of Bon Appétit’s Low Carbon Diet Day and competed in an Iron Chef-style competition with a focus on low carbon cooking. (Read more about what that entails here). Composed of BAMCO chefs and student sous chefs, each team had exactly 30 minutes to cook the most delicious, low carbon meal for a panel of expert judges, which included area chefs from Winslow’s Home and Eclipse Restaurant, as well as Ligaya Figueras of Sauce, St. Louis’ premier culinary magazine.

After two weeks of practice and preparation, the two teams arrived with their knives brandished and ready for battle.

 
Chef David Rushing is ready for the competition to begin!

As the countdown started, the teams got to work before a crowd of enthusiastic WashU students and faculty. Each group’s meal had a slightly different twist: The team representing the north side of campus sourced 100% of its ingredients locally, and resolved not to use sugar or oil for any of their dishes. The South Side team also focused on local, with a theme of simplicity and really letting the ingredients speak for themselves.

Artisan Cheese Elevates an American Classic

by Cara Brechler, Marketing Manager, and Liz Sullivan, Project Assistant

Karen Giacomini Howard and Jill Giacomini Basch show off their family dairy's history and cheese

The grilled-cheese sandwich has come a long way; long gone are the days of butter-soaked white bread embracing a slice of American cheese. Entire restaurants dedicated to this comfort food have sprung up. Recently, the Bon Appétit Cisco team in San Jose joined the celebration by highlighting the melty goodness of a well-made artisan grilled cheese in the cafés.

Bon Appétit Farm to Fork partner Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company collaborated with each café, challenging the chefs to use Toma, their newest cheese. Toma is a semi-hard farmstead cheese produced by the Giacomini family on their third-generation West Marin dairy farm. Intended to be a simple cheese for those who don’t like blues, Toma has a creamy texture, buttery flavor, and tangy-grassy finish.

At the Market Café's “Say (Grilled) Cheese” event, sisters Karen Giacomini Howard and Jill Giacomini Basch hosted a farm table offering samples, selling retail-size wedges in a pre-packed take-home cooler, and educating patrons about what makes farmstead cheese so special. To be classified as farmstead cheese, the milk must come from the producers' own herd of cows, goats, or sheep. Much of the production of farmstead cheese is done by hand, and as it’s made in a single location from a single herd of animals, it develops a unique flavor profile based on the animal’s feed, the climate, and the natural microbes in the air.  

All those factors must be just right for Point Reyes, because patrons left happy and smiling, carrying their coolers.  Now they will be well-equipped to go home and develop their own one-of-a-kind sandwiches! 

Photo by Cara Brechler

Colorado Team Experiences Mobile Slaughter Unit in Action

 By Letina Matheny, Director of Catering

Mike Callicrate, Ranch Foods Direct owner; Lou Lathon, district manager; Letina Matheny, director of catering; and Randy Kruse, Bon Appétit director of operations, in front of the mobile slaughter unit

The area around Colorado College in Colorado Springs, CO, is ranching country. Yet most of the area’s ranchers find it impossible to sell their meat locally. The evolution of the meat industry has resulted in just a few massive slaughterhouses being concentrated in different parts of the country and very few that cater to small, sustainable ranchers.

Ranchers who raise their meat responsibly and humanely are increasingly hoping that small-scale mobile slaughterhouse units — essentially abattoirs on wheels — can help them stay in business. Instead of trucking livestock to processing facilities, ranchers schedule a visit from the mobile slaughter unit, thus helping to localize the food system while being more humane for the animals.

Interested Colorado College students, Bon Appétit staff, and managers recently had the opportunity to attend a live slaughter demonstration by Ranch Foods Direct at Venetucci Farm.

"Providing additional small-scale processing with mobile units is an important component in rebuilding local and regional sustainable food systems," said Mike Callicrate, owner of Ranch Foods Direct, a Bon Appétit Farm to Fork supplier. “For many ranchers, there’s little choice of where to sell your cattle if you want to control the distribution or sell the butchered meat yourself."

The Bravo Beat: Giving Cambridge, MA, students a taste of Senegal

By Bonnie Azab Powell, Director of Communications

Walk into any Bon Appétit kitchen, and you’ll find highly skilled, creative people with really interesting life stories. Many of our 10,000-plus employees have been with us for years, working their way up the ladder from hourly service personnel to head of the kitchen and even to executive staff. Their diverse backgrounds flavor our menus and our company culture.

In this new Bravo Beat series for the Bon Appétit blog -- named for our almost-quartlery company newsletter -- we’ll spotlight some of our star staff, starting with Hamidou Cisse (right), Bon Appétit sous chef at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA.

Born in Dakar, Senegal, the soft-spoken, genial Hamidou came to the United States in 1992 by way of Germany. While working as a dishwasher at a couple of Boston-area restaurants, he began “hanging out with chefs” and started cooking. In 2007, he stuck his head in the back door of Bon Appétit’s kitchen at Lesley to ask if they had any jobs.

“We need someone to make soup,” said then-Executive Chef Brian Dagnall. 

“I can do that,” said Hamidou. “I’m good on soup -- I can make the best clam chowder.”

He was hired as an hourly cook. Slowly, he began cooking not just New England staples, but Senegalese and other West African dishes as well, such as yassa (chicken with lemon sauce, olives and a lot of onions with white rice), and mafé (tomato stew with potatoes, carrots, peanuts, rice, and sometimes okra).

They have proven to be very popular. “Students come to the office to tell me how much they like my food,” Hamidou says proudly. It's become a tradition that once a month, the café features an African entrée made by Hamidou.

In 2010 he was promoted to salaried sous chef. Funnily enough, in Senegal, cooking is traditionally women’s turf — men aren’t even allowed in the kitchen, Hamidou says. So how did he learn to make these dishes? Easy, he laughs: “I just went online and found recipes, and practiced until it tasted right to me!”

 

Lucy's Rhubarb-Cream-Filled Brioche Doughnuts

By Vera Chang, West Coast Fellow for Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation

TASTE Restaurant Pasty Chef Lucy Damkoehler speaks with the Chef's Collaborative about her doughnuts

Lucy Damkoehler began baking way back in fifth grade, when she would help her father knead and shape dough for bread as a hobby. She’s now a distinguished pastry chef for Bon Appétit Management Company’s TASTE Restaurant in Seattle, where her desserts have captured the hearts and bellies of restaurant diners far and wide, including my own.

A few weeks ago, Lucy presented her latest doughnuts to a room full of chefs, farmers, and good food lovers at the Seattle Chef’s Collaborative Bakers’ Meet and Greet. Doughnuts cannot feign being a health food, but making them can be healthy for the community if the ingredients come from local, sustainable producers. Like the rest of the TASTE team (and Bon Appétit companywide), Lucy goes all-out to celebrate seasonal variety and bounty. She sources her organic pasture-raised eggs and bacon from Skagit River Ranch, butter and milk from the multi-species, “beyond organic” Sea Breeze Farm, and bread flour from Shepherd’s Grain’s no-till multi-family and -generational family farm cooperative. (See my post on my visit to their wheat fields here.)

Last summer, at the Olympic Sculpture Park Farmers Market, she made a different doughnut every week! Among them: red velvet (made with beets), corn fritters, and bacon brown sugar.

The rhubarb-cream-filled brioche doughnut I tried was delight at first bite. I couldn’t help asking Lucy to share her recipe with us. If you have a springtime sweet tooth, culinary ambition, and inspired sense of adventure, this one is for you. Otherwise, next time you’re in Seattle, stop by TASTE and sample her dessert menu.

Lucy Damkoehler’s Rhubarb-Cream-Filled Brioche Doughnuts
Makes 24 doughnuts

Duke’s Campus Farm Connects Students with Their Food

By Sarah McGowan, Marketing Manager

The new student-run Duke Campus Farm at Duke University in Durham, NC, broke ground in early 2011 with great promise. After a full year of planning, students began with a February work party and the following mission: “To educate the student body on sustainable farming practices, increase Duke’s sustainability, and reconnect our generation with its food.”

Starting a farm is one thing, but making it self-sustaining is another. The farm was initiated by students, who organized a feasibility study with Duke Environmental Sciences and Policy Professor Charlotte Clark’s “Food and Energy” class. The students researched the economics of the project, including details like space requirements, cost of production and maintenance, and crop sales. That’s where Bon Appétit came in. The students worked with Resident District Manager Nate Peterson and Marketing Manager Sarah McGowan on a purchasing agreement under which Bon Appétit agreed to purchase 100% of the farm’s production for use in campus eateries.

On groundbreaking day, the Bon Appétit team and a group of student ambassadors were eager to get their hands dirty. They spent the day installing posts for deer fencing, planting seeds, and finishing the greenhouse. Students were thrilled to see the progress made in a single day, and the Bon Appétit cooks are all very excited to feature produce from the campus farm in their menus.

Brocade Revives the Art of Butchery

By Toni Ansuini, General Manager, Brocade

Brocade Executive Chef Ryan Smith explains the fine arts of butchering a chicken. 

Bon Appétit chefs are not only skilled at cooking from scratch and using all parts of the animals, they believe in sharing that knowledge.

At Brocade in San Jose, CA, Executive Chef Ryan Smith recently led a culinary demonstration and class on classic culinary techniques of butchering for 25 guests. Butchery has become popular again as more people want to be assured of their food supply chain. The benefits of butchering meat at home include knowing the direct source of the meat and reducing risk of contamination from processing. But even dividing a whole chicken into breasts and thighs can be intimidating to people, so this was a chance for the audience to learn the necessary skills. 

Ryan demonstrated how to hold and sharpen a knife, properly handling and safe practices with a chicken, how to check for freshness, cleaning and trussing a whole chicken for cooking, and identifying different parts of the chicken. Ryan also explained the different cuts: breast, "airline breast," bone-in breast, thigh, thigh-leg combo, drumstick, chicken wing, chicken tender, and a half-chicken.

Even if guests didn’t go straight home to butcher, they will now be more aware of their options the next time they're at the meat counter.

The class was also an opportunity for Ryan to share Bon Appétit’s Kitchen Principles with the group and explain how butchering fresh meat fits in so well with our cooking-from-scratch philosophy.

The event was well attended and guests immediately started asking about the next class! Future class plans include canning and preserving, and making pizza from scratch. 

 

Making a Comeback: The Story of Tower Root Beer

By Carolina Fojo, East Coast Fellow, Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation

 

 
Tower Root Beer in its bottling truck, next to the tower which inspired its name!
Photo courtesy of Tower Root Beer.

The history of Tower Root Beer is one of growth, success, loss, and rebirth. It begins in Boston, 1914, when Italian Immigrant Domenick Cusolito decided that root beer was going to be his family’s ticket in the United States. Domenick took an old recipe and tweaked it, creating what the company now calls “root beer with an Italian spin.”

The secret? Replacing vanilla with anisette — a liqueur that gives the root beer a slight licorice aftertaste.

The business started out small, with Domenick, and then grew as he passed it on to his three sons (after World War II). By the 1950’s, Tower Root Beer was up to 160,000 cases a year. (This article by Genevieve Rajewski has even more details of Tower Root Beer's history.) The root beer became a family favorite in the Boston area. One customer commented, “My grandfather used to put chocolate ice cream in a glass of Tower Root Beer for me every time I came in his back door!”

But as Tower Root Beer grew, so did other companies in the soft-drink industry, and by the 1970s Pepsi and Coke had elbowed Tower Root Beer out of the market. After 60 years of business, Tower Root Beer shut down, and was not seen again.

…until now.

Oberlin College's Secret Local-Food Weapon

By Joan Boettcher, M.S., R.D., L.D., Campus Registered Dietitian, Oberlin College

Something magical is happening at Oberlin College in Oberlin, OH. No matter how small or dark or drafty the location, the vegetables and herbs planted by Bon Appétit Sous Chef Chris Brunst just keep growing and growing, producing food for Dascomb Café. 

Chris started out growing herbs in flats in a 8-foot by 8-foot space just inside the entrance to Dascomb. With an industrial-size grow light and a little magic, he’s got a few vegetables started and even harvested enough mesclun, radishes and micro-basil to provide a salad for each of the 64 guests at a recent Local Foods Dinner.

In addition to providing food for the café, the project inspires and educates students about where food comes from. Chris labeled the different vegetables and printed up explanations of his growing technique. He’s also always willing to talk to students and let them taste the greens straight from the garden.

It seems to have worked, because a group of students recently commissioned a local carpenter to build 21 herb boxes to be placed on the balcony of the Stevenson Café. They paid for them with various on-campus grants. As soon as they are completed, they will house herbs from Chris's garden. Just imagine what abundance he’ll have on his hands once these plants finally have fresh air and sun!

 

Artisan Bread Bakery Thrives at Bon Appétit at Oracle

By Bon Appétit at Oracle staff

The Friday bread display and menu at the bakery

Executive Pastry Chef Ian Farrell (right) was first bitten by the sourdough bug about five years ago, when he grew a wild yeast starter from the skins of organic grapes. Now he lives his passion for hand-crafted wild yeast breads daily at Oracle in Redwood Shores, CA. Almost all the breads, sourdough or otherwise, for every café on this campus are made from scratch daily at the Oracle Bakery.

Production starts at 4 a.m. with hamburger and hot dog buns and rolls. Then comes the pizza dough, and the focaccia and ciabatta, both of which derive their complex flavor from Ian’s carefully nourished sourdough starter.  

On Fridays, Ian bakes and sells loaves of artisan bread for customers to take home for the weekend. The program is so popular, guests have to reserve their breads by email in order to get what they want.
Each Thursday, he sends out an email with the week’s selections, which can include assorted braided challah, caramelized-onion-walnut bread, bacon sage loaves, olive rosemary bread, French country bread, whole-wheat pain du sol, Irish soda bread, ciabatta, and assorted slabs of focaccia.

Ian is now experimenting with artisan wheat varieties that are grown and milled nearby. One of his favorites is a nutty, flavorful wheat flour called Sonora wheat. Popular in California in the early 19th century, commercial production had all but died out in the 20th century, but today a few small California farms such as Full Belly Farms in the Capay Valley are growing and selling it locally.