Food Interviews

Patric Chocolate - Meet Chocolate Maker Alan McClure

2008-10-29T20:24:00.000-07:00

Alan McClure of Patric Chocolate

You can't really know how special Patric Chocolate is until you taste it. However, after you read about owner Alan McClure's passion for chocolate and the care he personally takes with every step of the chocolate making process, I think you'll have a pretty good idea.

I've devoted two posts to Patric Chocolate. In this post, you'll learn all about Alan and the history of Patric Chocolate. In the second post, you will get to join me for a tour of the chocolate factory! You'll see where and how Patric Chocolate is made!

To make the experience a little sweeter, Alan is offering Food Interviews readers a chance to win up to $100 worth of fine chocolate! Every 10th person who places an order on the Patric Chocolate online store using coupon code 3FLMDE will get their entire order for free! That’s 1 in 10 odds of getting free chocolate!

In addition to the chance to win, your code also gets you 10% off of any purchase (including any already reduced items) and two additional complimentary chocolate bars on any purchases over $50.

The fine print: The contest and coupon code is good only through midnight (CST) on Wednesday, November 12, 2008. The “1 in 10” free chocolate prize applies only up to the first $100 of any order. You’ll be asked to pay at the time of purchase. However, on Thursday, Nov. 13, I’ll announce who the winners are and if you win, up to $100 will be refunded to you.

How did you start Patric Chocolate?

One thing that has always been a constant in my life is that I’ve always liked food. I wouldn’t say that all the time that it was gourmet food or fine food or even decent food necessarily, but I enjoyed the process of eating. As I got older and started learning more and having food from different countries, I started to appreciate diversity in food and then I’d start cooking more and more. I kind of thought about being a chef, but that falls into one of those things that I was like, “I don’t know if I want to do that.”

I lived in France for a year and I tracked down some really good chocolate while I was there. I actively tracked it down because I knew I wouldn’t be there forever. I got back here and I couldn’t find it and so I said, “Maybe I can make it. I can cook. I can bake bread or whatever. How hard can it be to make chocolate?” Little did I know. But when I first started, I didn’t know that. I just bought some small table-top machinery , which seemed expensive at the time, but in reality, it was nothing compared to the cost of my current machinery, and I just started experimenting. As I did that, I first got my taste of the bottomless void of potential chocolate knowledge.

I’m sure people in other fields say the same thing about what it is that they enjoy doing. But I don’t know. I’ve just never come across anything like this before where just no matter what aspect of the process you look at, it just seems infinitely complicated.

How much time went by between when you got interested in chocolate and when you sold your first bar?

I got interested in chocolate in 2004. In 2005, I first experimented with Mexican chocolate. I got some cacao beans online and I roasted them in a skillet and then winnowed them by hand one by one - I got blisters on my thumbs and fingers. Then I transferred that to a food processor. That was my first experience making chocolate. I used it in mole.

That was my goal, traditional mole. Toast the seeds and the spices and the chilies and grind them as I did. It was great.

Then after that, that’s when I really started entertaining the idea of fine chocolate, bar chocolate, and that was still in 2005. In early 2006 was really when I first was able to make something that was on its way to being fine chocolate. 2006 was also when I started the company on paper. So there were four months after I had first made something that I considered to be on its way to being fine chocolate where I was like, “Should I do this? Should I not do this? Do I know anything? Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”

This is when I got a hold of Steve De Vries (from De Vries Chocolate), who was already doing things and I told him , “I want to try your chocolate.” He wasn’t really selling it yet, and he told me, “Well, yeah, I only sell it here.” I said, “Oh, tell me where, I’ll have my dad pick it up. He lives in Denver.” Then he just said, “Oh, I’ll just send you some.” Additionally, Steve asked me what I had read so far I was like, “I don’t know. Chocolate Alchemy, and a couple of industry manuals.” So, he said “Okay, write these down.” So, I wrote down five books that he recommended. They are all old books from the early 1900’s, late 1800’s. But, I tracked them down on a used book website.

Anyway, so I bought those books a couple of days after that--got them and read them a couple of times and then I called him back. It was in a space of three weeks or so. I told him, “So, I got the books and I read the books.”

He could hardly believe it. He said, “I’ve recommended those books to a lot of people and no one’s ever read them.” So I asked him, “What else you got? I found this too, and this too.” “Those are good,” he said.

So, I just kept reading and then the summer of that year, 2006, I went to Mexico. I just felt, “I need to go somewhere and see cacao being grown and talk to farmers and see it fermented and see it dried.” If you’re going to be a chocolate maker or you think you might want to be, I feel you’ve just got to do that. It’s got to be an experience that you have. There’s so much that’s hard to understand without having that experience.

That was in the summer. About a year later, in 2007, I finally sold my first bar.

What’s your goal for the future of the company?

I don’t know. I’m just playing it by ear. I’m just trying to stay connected to every part of the company and try to really feel, “Am I going in the right direction? Do I need to slow down?” Because above all is the issue of quality, and if you feel like there’s risk of it deteriorating, then there’s a problem. So then it’s like, “Okay, can I keep this quality and change a few things and then do what I was thinking about doing? Is that possible or not?” I haven’t even come to that point. I feel like that question is way down the line for me.

Do you believe that it’s better to be smaller?

I made one metric ton of chocolate last year. Even the bigger guys, like Amano (and when I say bigger, I mean bigger than me, but still small), I don’t know what they made, but we’re talking two metric tons, maybe five metric tons, maybe more, but not 4,000 metric tons like some companies that are considered moderately sized

I just feel like there’s room for different companies to be doing different things and we should just be clear about what it is we’re doing so that people can know and see what’s going on. So, that kind of bugs me. I don’t expect every company to be so transparent that they tell you everything. It’s not going to happen, and I certainly won’t tell you everything either. It just feels like we need to be more open and honest with people as companies and with each other as companies as well.

I believe that there’s a limited amount of excellent quality cacao in the world. It’s limited and you can not make 4,000 metric tons of chocolate and have it all be of excellent quality - even if you have the expertise. When a certain Bay-area-based chocolate company first started up, their chocolate, from many reports, was excellent. Over time, though, some people thought that it decreased in quality . The reason is, their capacity increased over time. It wasn’t that they forgot how to make good chocolate or they didn’t care anymore, it’s simply that there’s a limited supply of what I would say is fine cacao. They needed to start bringing in other stuff that kind of bulked up the chocolate that they were making and it wasn’t necessarily as flavorful. That’s what happens.

Cacao

As people have more interest in quality cacao, do you think there will be more grown?

I hope so. It’s possible. That’s tied into something else that I’m always telling people, which is everyone is very concerned about fair trade, and I understand why. The reasons why people are concerned about fair trade are good reasons to be concerned, but when you start talking about fine chocolate, to give you an idea, I paid more than twice fair trade price for my cacao - more than twice! That is often the case. Why? Because when we’re selling products for six, seven, eight, ten dollars a bar, we can pay more for excellent quality cacao, it drives the price up because there’s only a limited amount. It’s just supply and demand right there.

The fact that this is twice fair trade price tells you something about where the demand is going. But, what’s not happening is that people aren’t growing more excellent quality cacao quickly enough to keep the price stable. They could be, but they’re not.

One of the things that I think is negative about fair trade is the fact that it gives people a feeling like that’s the best thing that could be done for farmers, when in reality if we wanted farmers to make even more money, we would say, “Grow better cacao.” Think about it in terms of some other crop. Are you going to tell a farmer growing bad apples that the best way to make more money is to become fair trade farmers, or are you going to say, "Grow better apples and you’ll make more money?" So again, I don’t want to attack fair trade. I think that they have a role to play; I think that in some cases, especially like the Ivory Coast where there’s been child slavery, it’s especially important. But I think in most cases, consumers who care about chocolate need to start buying better chocolate.

Buy chocolate that tastes better. If you buy chocolate that tastes better, it’s from better cacao. That cacao is bought for a higher price; the farmers are making more money. There are very few cases where that does not work out exactly like that. But there are cases where fair trade prices are paid and farmers don’t make anything more than commodity cacao prices.

What about organic?

This cacao right there is organic, by the way. That’s the thing, it doesn’t say that on my box and that’s a whole other issue. I have some retailers in other countries now who are wanting to carry my chocolate. Well as soon as I put organic on the box, I get into a whole other tangled mess because organic rules and regulations in the EU, for example, are not the same as they are in the States.

I’ve looked into it - I’ve spent a lot of time, and it’s not worth it right now because most people buying this chocolate are going to be fine with it not saying organic on the front, even though the cacao is organic. I feel like people should know that it just doesn’t make sense. It would be expensive for me with little return.

That’s one of the frustrating things (not to go on a rant here) about being a small company. Large companies can blow through that stuff. They have a team of lawyers and they have all the money possible to make that happen. Small companies don’t. It actually is kind of a burden, these new rules and regulations, though again I understand why they exist. But, they are kind of a burden on small companies just for doing what they would like to do. I don’t have sleepless nights about it.

Are you able to learn from other chocolate companies, or it a very competitive industry?

It’s a little bit of a mix. At the end of June in New York, there’s a Fancy Food Show. I wasn’t going to go because I had something scheduled in St. Louis at the Kitchen Conservatory and they called me the day before and said they only had five people signed up and they were canceling it. For a moment I was like, “Oh man,” then I thought, “Wait a minute. Fancy Food Show!” So I got a ticket with my frequent flyer miles, went up there, stayed with a friend, and I was glad that I did that because Steve De Vries was up there, Art was there, Shawn Askinosie, the guys from Taza, even the TCHO people. Everyone was there. I was like, “Okay. Perfect opportunity for us to finally meet face to face and be nice to each other and we don’t have to be dicks to each other. We can be cool and helpful.” That’s what happened, thankfully.

It was the start of a small artisan, chocolate organization in the United States. It’s something we’ve talked about and we’ve been emailing each other back and forth. I think there’s still a feeling of competitiveness. Though from the beginning I’ve said, "There are seven of us. Seriously, we’re not competitors with each other, there’s seven. There are 50 states, 270 million Americans or something like that, we aren’t competitors."

Let's get back to Patric Chocolate. Am I correct that the only people working with you are your wife and a part-time employee?

Yeah. I just hired a part-time employee and my wife is only here for the summer because she’s not teaching over the summer. She’ll go back to teaching. She has a PhD.

Does your wife like being here making chocolate?

Yes, but I can’t afford to pay her at this point. She’s making money out there, whereas if she’s in here, she’s not making that money, plus I have to pay more for our bills at home. So it’s still not quite working out. She would like to be here all the time and I would like her to be.

What parts of the business do you feel comfortable having other people do? You seem like you want to have your hand in all of it.

The things that I have other people do right now are sweeping, mopping, dishes, cacao cleaning, the winnowing process. That’s what other people are doing right now. I would feel comfortable with other people doing accounting or sending out literature and samples and getting orders together and stuff like that. In fact, my wife does some of that, but I just don’t have an employee to do it yet.

But, I’ll need to hire another part time person before the summer is over, though I’m not quite sure what they are going to be doing yet. Usually the people who want to do manual labor, they don’t want to do accounting also, and vice versa.

I would love to find someone who knew how to and was willing to do accounting and also pack up orders and also do dishes, but I don’t know if it will happen.

Roasting would be one of those things that I wouldn't feel comfortable having someone else do. You can’t have someone just go roast the cacao, it just doesn’t work. The same applies to understanding the tempering process. You can’t train someone to do that easily. You have to understand it yourself. I might be able to get the proper machine set up and going and tell someone, “Stick these molds under there and then put them on the tray,” that might be possible. But, I would still have to have a pretty large role to play in this process. Even wrapping the bars, I still do 95% of that myself.

It would be great to have someone who is as excited about chocolate making as I was and wanted to learn what I’ve learned and the things I’m still trying to learn. That would almost be like an apprentice type situation. I’ve never even had anyone come to me about that, so I’ve never even thought about it.

Alan is always thinking about chocolate.

What is your favorite part of chocolate making?

I’m still learning every day. Every day I read something - I go back to some book or some paper or I sit there and I think of something and often I go home from work and I can’t focus on anything else because there’s some problem I encountered and I just can’t get off of it until I think I’ve figured it out.

I guess you could say I’m obsessive. It’s probably true. I think there’s so much about chocolate that no one knows right now. Aside from the fact that I love chocolate, that’s what really drew me in to wanting to make chocolate, because every time I sat down to deal with it or think about it, I learned ten more things and it’s still like that today. There’s so much to be learned still. How can you go wrong with something like that? I can imagine a job where you learn everything there is to learn about that job - you get so bored you want to hang yourself. This job is never like that and I can’t imagine it ever will be.

Were you obsessed with something before chocolate?

No, in fact, that was my problem. Before chocolate, I had no obsession. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I had a religious studies degree and I didn’t really want to do anything with that. Prior to that, I was never quite sure I even wanted a religious studies degree. That is really the story of my life, that I was just always unsure. There are those kids that want to be a doctor and they go to school to become a doctor and then they’re a doctor. That was not me. I wasn’t a six year old saying I wanted to be a chocolate maker when I grew up. Absolutely not. But now that I’m here, I really love it.

Wade Groetsch: Noble Juice

2008-10-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

Listen now:

Right-click to download this podcast.

Welcome to the very first Food Interviews podcast. I would LOVE your feedback on this format. Please take a moment to fill out the short four question survey at the bottom of the post or leave your thoughts in the comments.

In this interview, Wade Groetsch shares the "juicy" details of running Noble Juice. OK, it's not all that juicy, but he answered a few questions that I have always wondered about - like what makes one 100% orange juice different from another, and what happens to the pulp that isn't used in pulp-free juice.

The best part about Noble Juice (aside from how tasty their juices are) is that their bottles and label are 100% compostable. They are the first juice company to be able to say that. In the interview, you'll hear all about how Wade is a huge recycling advocate.

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Marisa McClellan: Food Blogger Extraordinaire

2008-10-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

Marisa at Coney Island from her Flickr account.

Marisa McClellan writes Apartment 2024, does a food podcast called Fork You, and is the lead blogger at Slashfood. As if that wasn't enough, she also holds a full-time job. In this interview, she shares her path to becoming a prominent food blogger. I'd be curious to hear how other Food Bloggers out there relate to her story. As I talked with her, in some ways, I felt like I could have been talking with myself.

How did you get into blogging?

I got into blogging about a little over three years ago, in late Winter 2005. I had been reading blogs for about a year before I started one, and I was desperately unhappy in my job. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and almost the kind of person I wanted to be.

I decided that I would create a blog and write my way to figuring out what it was I wanted to do. In the process of writing the blog, I realized that what I wanted to do was write. It’s been a pretty big life-changing experience for me.

What kind of work were you doing before then?

I was working as an Administrative Assistant. My titles were things like Staff Assistant or Program Coordinator. One job was at a non-profit and then I had two different jobs at universities here in Philadelphia where I was doing support work and hated it.

It sounds like your blog was almost like a journal at first.

Basically, yeah. I moved to Philadelphia six months after graduating from college because I had this feeling like I should move. Both of my parents are originally from Philadelphia and so I have a ton of family and family history here. There I was in my early twenties when my mom had been in Philadelphia in her early twenties and my grandmother had been in Philadelphia in her early twenties and my great grandmother and even my great-great-grandmother, so this feeling of being connected to these generations of women was also something that I wrote about a lot.

Did you have a lot of the same experiences that they had?

I don’t know if "same" is the right word, but I feel like there are certain foundational coming-of-age experiences that everyone begins to have as they move along, so I feel like I had similar experiences to my mom in that we were both similar on a very sentimental sense. We were walking the same streets and experiencing the city.

Did you initially have a focus on food on your blog?

Not at all. I liked food, I was interested in food at the beginning, but my personal blog never started out as a food blog. What would happen is that as I moved along, more and more of what I wrote about was food. I became known to friends, people who read my blog, as someone who could be depended on to write interesting things about food or tell fun stories about different food items. I started carving out a niche for myself.

How did you move to writing more than one blog?

Well, the way it grew at first was I became the city captain for the Philadelphia Metblog. I was in charge of Metblogging Philadelphia. Metblogs are a world wide chain of blogs - a blogging network that focuses on different cities. I helped get the Philadelphia one started. It’s sort of fallen apart a little bit since then though.

I found myself writing a lot more about restaurants and food out in the world. Then, my friend Scott and I decided to start making a cooking podcast. That was really how things started to take off in terms of doing things on the Internet related to food.

Scott was the movie blogger for The Unofficial Apple Weblog and so he was already all hooked into WebBlogs, Inc. Last summer, I was towards the end of my grad school experience, and I was desperately needing to be making some money. I was getting a Master’s in writing and what I really wanted to be doing was food writing. He connected me up with the folks at Slashfood and they hired me and I started blogging. That’s how I got into Slashfood.

The thing that I found remarkable about that experience is that it took about two weeks before the rest of the food blogging and food writing world looked at me as a legitimate food writer. It was amazing how little it took for the world to be like, "Oh yeah. Marisa’s a food writer." Whereas, I had been struggling and striving and scheming, trying to figure out how I could convince the world that I was a food writer. It happened in about five minutes all of a sudden, which was a relief and also sort of, "Wait, that’s all it took?" It was an interesting experience.

Marisa and Scott doing a live podcast of Fork You.
Photo from Flickr user dragonballyee.

Let’s talk some more about the podcasts.

The initial process to create a pod cast started in February, 2006. It took us about three months to figure out what to call it. You never think about naming as this vital and time-consuming thing, but just figuring out what to call this thing we were creating took us forever. Finally, by sometime in May, 2006, we were like, "Okay, we’re going to call it Fork You."

We initially had thought we were going to call Peaing Soup. It’s the punch line to a joke. You can roast beef, but can you pea soup? Scott thought it was the funniest thing ever to name a podcast after the punch line to a joke. But, I determined that I couldn’t live with Peaing Soup as our name. So, we finally went with Fork You. It was about food in Philadelphia and Philadelphia can have a little bit of an attitude, so that was it.

We filmed the first half of the first episode in that summer - July, 2006. Then, it sat around and we finally finished it and got the first episode up in November, 2006. Then, oddly enough, we kept doing it. We were as surprised as anybody that we kept it going. We kept making episodes and a couple of our friends got involved to run the camera and do sound and sort of be support for it.

We had a thing in Philadelphia last summer called Blog Philadelphia, and that was the first time I ever went to anything where I was meeting people who actually watched it and who enjoyed it and it was sort of shocking. Here was this random little thing we would make in my kitchen or a friend’s kitchen and suddenly I was exposed to a whole world of people who watched it and liked what we were doing. That was really fun; it was sort of validating. This isn’t just some crazy crackpot thing that we were doing. It was actually something that people were finding value in.

We’ve just continued and we’ve tried a bunch of different formats and settled on these two different formats that we do. The two minute Quick Fork and then the standard episodes, that are never longer than ten minutes. They really look at just one or two dishes because you can’t really fit more than that in and get all the information across and keep it interesting. On the Internet, people don’t want to watch more than ten minutes. That’s really pushing it. They like it better if it’s eight.

We’ve learned a lot and we’ve actually made several cooking show podcasts for Slashfood which they paid us for (which was pretty crazy because I can now say that I’ve been paid to make food online video content). It’s turned into something that people really watch. We get about 10,000 views an episode now, which isn’t huge but it’s certainly respectable in that little wacky online world.

In the process of making Fork You and being friends and all that, Scott and I actually got together. We are living together now - that was an unexpected bonus. It’s been a really fun experience. I keep talking about wanting to do a Fork You cookbook because we’re coming up on 50 episodes now. I’ve made a lot of food for this show in the course of the last almost two years now and I think it would be really fun to pull all that together and add Scott’s humor and my recipes. But, that’s just a dream right now.

Some podcasts take longer than others - like when you have to cook a turkey.
Photo from Flickr user Blankbaby.

How long does it take you to produce a ten minute episode?

Well, it takes me brainstorming to come up with what we’re going to cook and then having to do all the shopping and the prep. That can take anywhere from two hours to five depending on what I’ve signed us up for that day. Then, we film the episode, which again varies depending what we cook. One time we made corned beef and cabbage, where there’s not a lot of active preparation, but we had to hang around for four hours as the damn thing cooked. Then, it takes Scott between two and four hours to edit. So, a ten minute episode of Fork You can take eight to ten hours, which might sound like a crazy amount of time - but we do enjoy it, so it’s not that terrible.

We also do a monthly live episode at Foster’s Homeware,a local cooking supply store. Those episodes typically take me three hours to get ready for and we film for an hour. We do the cooking show for an hour and there’s a lot of footage there, so Scott ends up spending about five hours editing it down. It’s a time commitment, but it’s also fun and interesting and has given me a really good opportunity to feel comfortable in front of cameras, in front of groups, and develop this very random skill which is cooking in front of people.

How has the live experience been for you?

It was hard at first, but it’s also been really fun. It’s exhausting. You never realize how exhausting it is to be on constantly for an hour until you do it regularly because you’re like, "Oh you know, it’s just talking. I’m just cooking." But, I actually did my very first solo cooking demonstration recently and I realized how much easier it is to do it with Scott and have someone else who I can hand the conversation to at times so that I can focus on something else. It’s really fun, though. I’ve always been someone who’s been comfortable talking in front of groups, so it hasn’t been one of those things where I’m facing fears or dealing with my demons. It’s given me newfound respect for people who do live television and who do stand-up comedy.

Have you always cooked?

I have always been interested in food. My mom hated cooking with kids. So, when I was growing up, I would beg to be around to help in the kitchen and it just wasn’t her thing. She was busy. She just wanted to be able to get dinner done and move on. So, I didn’t, as a kid, get much opportunity to cook, except when I was staying home sick from school or something. I would always grab those opportunities to experiment making things like hash browns or whatever I could find. I didn’t really start developing any skills as a cook until I moved to Philadelphia and was living on my own and really was forced to make food for myself.

I spent a lot of years looking for a creative outlet. When I found food and I found that I was good at it and it satisfied that need to be creative, I grabbed onto it and really have, ever since then.

When you were hired on at Slashfood, were you initially the lead blogger or did you get a promotion at some point?

When I was first hired at Slashfood, I was just a plain old blogger. I got promoted to be the lead blogger last November. Sarah Gim was the lead blogger and she just didn’t have the time to do it anymore so they asked me to move into the role.

What is your job as lead blogger?

My job is to coordinate the work of the team - make sure that different columns are being maintained, that everybody gets paid the right amount, that we develop new and interesting content, that the team list gets seeded with new ideas. I do a monthly, end-of-month report so the other lead bloggers and the higher-ups know what’s been happening on Slashfood. I recruit the new writers. Basically, in a lot of senses I’m responsible for the feel and direction that the site takes.

Marisa has written 94 Slashfood posts in the past 30 days!

How many people are on your team now?

There’s something like 19 or 20 people on the list on the site at the moment. But a couple people have left recently and there are some people on the team list who don’t really blog regularly, so I would say we have about ten active people. I’m waiting for three more people to join the team. We’re going through the contract process right now, which as you know can take forever.

When I first started the site, we had maybe three or four active people and it was really tough because it meant that I wrote a lot of the site. Right now, I’m writing more of the site because a lot of people have vacation or they just have other commitments and that happens. But, what I really try to do is make it so that mine isn’t the dominant voice on the blog, because that gets boring for our readers. The whole point of having a group to write is to get different perspectives, different feels, and different voices talking about food on the site.

We’re actually bringing on someone to write about beer and another who is going to be a hot sauce blogger, so he’s going to write primarily about hot sauce - which is going to be the coolest thing ever. Someone else will be writing about southern cuisines and I’ve been talking to someone to come on who will write about wine. We’re kind of going in a direction that will have more people who write less but are specialists in their fields and that way, we become even more of an authority site than we are.

How do you see Slashfood fitting into the giant world of food blogs? What role does it play?

I struggle with that sometimes because I feel like Slashfood is more of a blog in the traditional sense where places like The Kitchn or Serious Eats have become food channels. I look at what other people are doing and I start to beat myself up about it. "Oh my gosh. All these other people are doing these amazing things to their sites and we’re just still chugging along at the blog." I never know what our traffic is like in comparison with other sites, so I really don’t have any idea of how we’re doing in comparison to everybody else.

I really try to frame Slashfood in my head as a site that is trying to cover the food world, cooking and eating, and food shopping in sort of a generalist manner (even though we’re bringing in all these specialists). I see Slashfood as hitting the high points - being a site that gathers the best food from all over the Internet, all over the world, and bringing it together. I don’t know if we’re actually achieving that.

I wish we had more recipes and sort of home cooking and real cooking contests because that’s actually my first love. But, sadly, the amount we pay makes it really hard to produce that kind of content because it takes time to test a recipe or create a recipe and it’s hard to get that on a daily basis. I guess I just look at it as we’re all just doing the best we can. We were one of the original food blogs out there, so we have that to hold on to and we just keep doing our best.

How much say do you get in the direction of the blog?

I used to get more say, but we integrated with AOL Food about five months ago and it’s not that they have more say over the blogs, but there are more people to take into consideration when making decisions having to do with the blog. I can’t necessarily implement some of my wild ideas, but I’m okay with that. Mostly, because, this will sound terrible, I don’t really have time to do a lot of the really crazy and creepy stuff I’d love to be doing, mostly because in addition to being the lead on Slashfood, I have a full-time job. I don’t mind the fact that we can’t get wild and crazy, because if I said I wanted to get wild and crazy then I’d actually have to do it. With Fork You and my job and my boyfriend and friends and still trying to cook on my own and all that stuff, I’m sort of maxed out.

How much time do you spend on Slashfood in a week?

I spend as much time on Slashfood than I do on my regular job. I would say that I probably spend, between writing posts, doing reports, talking to bloggers, recruiting bloggers, communicating with the folks at AOL Food and the rest of the WebBlogs, Inc. folks, 35 hours a week if not more on Slashfood. It really could be a full-time job.

I have another job because they don’t pay enough at Slashfood for it to be a full-time job.

That’s a shame.

It’s very sad, but it is the way it is and I’m still happy to be involved in it. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish that this is what I do full-time.

What do you do full-time?

I work as a web producer for the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing. I work on the site called Gophila.com, which is the official tourism website for the city. I write itineraries and I produce web content. Basically, I do the same stuff at my regular job that I do for Slashfood - only I’m more passionate about Slashfood.

I love Philadelphia, but I’m not in charge of anything there. With Slashfood, even though there are lots of people that work on it, in one sense, it really feels like mine. I have a great deal of ownership and so I have more passion for Slashfood than I do about my regular job, which my bosses probably shouldn’t know.

Do you not want me to print this stuff?

They’re not going to read it. It’ll be fine.

What kind of changes have you seen on Slashfood since AOL took it over? What do you think about the direction they’re giving it?

I think it’s really positive, actually. I know I said that I have to take more people into consideration, but I actually think, in the long run, taking more people into consideration makes a better website. There are more people looking out for the site trying to make it better. The team over at AOL Food couldn’t be more welcoming and warm and passionate about food, too. So, they’re fantastic.

Also, it gets us more content because they share their content with us and they get more traffic for us which is always good because more traffic means more revenue and means that Slashfood has that much more importance to the whole Weblogs network. Traffic is king when you’re working for a site that is owned by a large corporation that makes money from advertising.

Kat Kinsman is the editor over there and she’s terrific. I met her when I went up to New York for the Fancy Food Show and it was so nice to finally meet someone who I had talked on the phone with, emailed with and had worked with. She really gets it. She really cares about the site and she really cares about food. Smoking meats is one of her passions in life. When someone is so passionate about a little particular area of food, it’s impossible not to like them and understand that they’re only going to do what’s in the best interest of the site.

What’s your dream job? Where do you see all of this going?

If I could create a job for myself, here’s what it would be: I would have my own food site or I would have a site that I helped run where I had a little bit more freedom and I could do it full-time. I really would like to stay in this food blog, food writing world. I would be making some money off of Fork You and doing that full-time and writing some cookbooks and spending most of my time amidst the food content world, basically.

Basically what you’re doing now except making money?

Exactly, and not having to work the other job to have health insurance.

Does Scott also have a full-time job and work for Weblogs, Inc.?

He does. Scott left The Unofficial Apple Weblog in July and is now freelancing for Macuser and Macworld).

Do you guys ever leave your house?

When we have downtime, we don’t do much else but just sit and veg out. Most evenings, you’ll find us sitting on the couch together, both glued to our laptops. He’s working on his projects and I’m working on Slashfood. We’re watching TV as well, so we’re inundated with media. That’s how we spend our downtime, which is kind of sad.

The one thing I want to add about my ideal job is that it wouldn’t absorb my entire life. I feel like right now, with everything I do, I don’t have much in the way of downtime or true relaxation time. I do miss that. But, I feel like I’m in sort of a time where I’m building what I want and so it takes a little bit more time, a little bit more energy, and a little bit more work to get there. But, eventually, I’ll be there.

If you could interview one person about food, who would it be?

It’s going to sound really silly. I would love to talk with Deb of Smitten Kitchen someday. I have a bit of a blog crush on her site. I’ve never communicated with her. I’ve posted about her stuff. I even know people that know her but I’ve always been afraid it’d be too weird if I got in touch with her and been like, "I really like your blog."

Then I actually just started reading Real Food by Nina Planck. It’s an amazing book and so she’s another one that I would like to sit down with.

Ariel Diamond, Food and Liquor Project

2008-10-02T09:31:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been in that little bodega around the corner from you? Do you even have one? What do you buy there? Do they sell food? Do you know the owner?

Ariel Diamond is one of the founders of the Food and Liquor Project, which is part of Neighbors Project, based in Chicago. The Food and Liquor project aimed to “encourage people to buy fresh produce from local corner stores, bodegas and liquor stores that stock it, and encourage more neighborhood stores to sell fresh fruits and vegetables.”

In this interview, Ariel talks about the value of bodegas in a community and what her organization did to try to support them. You’ll learn about the challenges Food and Liquor Project faced and what small steps you can take in your own community to support small, local shops.

What got you interested in bodegas?

A lot of them have really crazy stuff, even if they don’t have produce. I live two blocks away from a Whole Foods and I shop there, too. But, I also live one block away from the bodega/corner store that started it all. This is the store that made me realize that bodegas are awesome, and it’s called Alta Vista Foods.

It’s the size of a very small storefront and it goes all the way back with two aisles with food stocked up to the ceiling, including produce and meat. I’m not going to buy the meat, no offense to them. But, they’ve got tons of produce and all these soups and spices and ice cream and TV dinners and an entire Mexican section and an entire cleaning products section. They have pet food, they have baking supplies, they have dry beans and canned beans, dried fruit, and it has pretty much everything that you need.

If you really need saffron or something, they’re not going to have that, but if you need milk, this place is literally attached to the train station so you don’t have to go outside to go there. It’s at the Sheridan Red Line stop and it’s amazing. It’s so nice to have something like that that is on your way home and you don’t have to make a grocery store trip.

There was an article in the Trib, maybe three weeks ago, about how the CTA and the city are trying to figure out how to develop more grocery stores in the train stations. I don’t think that had anything to do with us, but I think they realized that those things are great and we should have more of them.

Do you do a large percentage of your shopping at bodegas?

I do a fair amount, but my other issue that I deal with is sustainable food. I like organic, local, seasonal foods, and so I’m not going to lie: I shop at farmers’ markets and Whole Foods. I want the foods that I buy for myself to be organic and local (local probably above organic). Long story short, no, I don’t buy a ton of food at bodegas, but I do buy some. I go in that store frequently because I always need something. I don’t want to go the other direction, away from my house, to get a lemon. So, I’m going to go to Alta Vista Foods and I’m going to get this lemon. Or, I need some milk. I don’t do my main shopping there.

That’s the idea of the corner store and what you should expect to do with a corner store. Yeah, there’s always going to be a need for big grocery stores, I think. But, these ones are the in-between shops, like, “Oh crap, I ran out of bread,” and you can get it there. So, I think if you think about it (I don’t have a car so this doesn’t even occur to me), from a global warming perspective, does that save you an extra trip to the grocery store if you usually drive? If a lot of people start doing that, it would be another positive thing that bodegas provide: transit-oriented, neighborhood-oriented grocery stores.

What did you hope to achieve with the Food and Liquor project?

The Food and Liquor Project started in June of last year and the activity wrapped up in May of this year. There were about nine of us working on the project. It started when my friend Arline Welty and I realized that some of our bodegas were just treasure troves of awesome food. Then, there were other ones that had absolutely nothing. - only Gatorade and Cheetos and cigarettes.

We were interested in what the difference was between those two, and also how the ones that had all this awesome produce and awesome food got that way, and how to make that happen with more stores.

With support from Neighbors Project, we started doing walkabouts. (I lived in Australia for a year, so that’s where that came from.) We would just walk around our neighborhood on the main strips, because they had the most bodegas on them, and just go into stores and say, “Hello. It’s awesome that you have food.” We just started to develop a relationship with them, figure out what they were doing, and see if they were open to getting more produce in their stores. If they weren’t, we wanted to know if they had tried it before and what the reasons were for why they didn’t want to, or why they stopped before.

How did the store owners respond when you asked them about having more produce in their stores?

Well, a lot of them said, “Why are you asking us this? I don’t understand.” Actually, a lot of the ones we talked to had tried it already. We had numerous encounters with people who told us, “We tried that and it doesn’t work. Sorry.”

One of the most important things that I think came out of those walkabouts was talking to these store owners and figuring out what the problems were and why they don’t have produce. Because a lot of them said, “Yeah that would be great, but we can’t do it.”

What stopped them from bringing in more produce?

The reason that was most common was that produce is perishable, so if they buy a case of bananas and they only sell half of it before it goes bad, then they have to throw out the other half. Then, they probably lose money on that purchase.

Along with perishability is low turnover: people don’t think about shopping at a place that usually just sells Gatorade as a place to buy produce. You also have a low profit margin. With some things, I bet if you only sold half, you’d probably be fine; with produce, you’re probably only making a couple cents off of each sale, and if you lose even some of it to spoilage then you lose money on it.

Also, they’re not really marketing that they have produce, so people don’t recognize it. People don’t think of it as a place to go to buy produce.

What did you do to try to get the consumers more interested in bodegas?

In January, we decided to switch our focus a little bit to the consumer end, trying to send the message that your corner store is a great place to shop. It’s not just a place to buy cigarettes and you should be able to buy food here. You can support these local businesses and keep these businesses that were here before the gentrification started in this community.

We decided to hold a cooking class at a social service agency called Inspiration Café and invite all the residents of Uptown to it. All the food we cooked there was bought from corner stores. So, it was all very simple, adaptable dishes where you could buy the ingredients at most bodegas - pasta and sauce where you could buy the pasta, you could buy tomatoes, and put some mushrooms and sausage.

Did the cooking class have an impact on the community?

We got a lot of really good press for it. I feel like it really connected us even more with these store owners, because they knew that we were buying stuff from them and we were encouraging people to shop at those stores. We had a fairly low turnout for the event, which was a disappointment, but the good press we got counteracted that.

The best thing, to me, that came out of it was that we were covered in multiple media outlets, including one in Spanish, La Raza, the biggest Spanish language newspaper - we had a full page spread. They just talked about what is at your corner store and why it’s a great place to shop. It had a little sidebar about seasonal food, because we also had a nutritionist at the event who talked about healthy eating and eating well on a budget and things like that. If you buy food that is in season, it’s cheaper because it’s abundant, like apples in the fall, berries in the summer, stuff like that. If you want to buy berries in the winter, you’re not going to have much luck. So, that was really exciting and I feel like that reached a lot of people and a crowd that would be very difficult for us to reach.

Though, if we were to do it again, there would definitely be some things that we would improve on in terms of outreach and partnering with organizations to improve attendance.

Were any of the owners interested in bringing in produce?

A lot of them also were like, “Yeah it would be great, but we can’t afford to buy a cooler. I would love to do that, but you tell me where the money is going to come from to buy a cooler.” So, that would be yet another problem. The ones that we worked with were really pumped about it. They were like, “I would love to have green peppers and cilantro!” They would get really animated about it and they wanted to do it, but there were these obstacles in the way. That is what makes you think that there is hope that it could happen. It was just that we didn’t have the resources at our fingertips to really help them with that.

We put them in touch with the aldermen because the aldermen had some small business grants that they could have been eligible for. But some of them don’t have good relationships with the aldermen for whatever reason, so that kind of fell through.

If you were to do this again, what would you do differently to make the project more effective?

We would have the aldermen involved from the beginning and more in the loop, and probably have a specific contact who knew that we were working on this. We were dealing with the aldermen’s office but they’re always slammed. They are dealing with everything. So they were like, “Yeah, yeah. Great. Cool. Later.”

The other thing would be to partner with a church or a community organization that had constituents and they would help put on the cooking class. I think the cooking class would be very successful. It was really, really fun. Everyone had an awesome time. We did it with Share our Strength. One of their subgroups is called Operation Frontline, they put on these cooking classes that are either free or cheap for low income families to talk about nutrition and also teach people how to cook well on a budget. The issue was that we didn’t have enough people at the event.

I think that if we had worked with Uptown United Church, or another community group, and they knew what kind of food that their congregants would want at this event, and they talked about it all the time at services, and were helping us put it on, we would have had an established base of people who were going to attend. Also, it would root us more strongly in that community. That is number one on our list of things that we would do over, that we would be involved with, with those kinds of community groups from the beginning, not just when we were already planning the cooking class.

Is the hope that this will take off in other cities?

Food and Liquor Project is a pilot with the intention of it starting other people in other neighborhoods and other cities doing something similar to try to see what the bodega landscape is and if it can be improved. So, that is the next conversation we’re going to have. There’s definitely been interest expressed. We made an Instructable of how to do this and we are deciding, probably at the next board meeting in the next month or two, are we going to try to actively recruit people to do it or are we just going to put out our resources and say, “Contact us if you want to do something like this. We will support you and help you.”

If I wanted to start something like this in St. Louis, what advice would you have for me?

My advice would be to just start walking around and talking to people. See what your community has and what your neighborhood has. Figure out what you would like to see and if the store owners would also want those things, or if other consumers you know would want those things. In addition, before you launch in fully to the project, do an environmental scan of the other efforts in your neighborhood - the other community organizations. Connect with them and find out what’s going on - is there an existing effort that you can help out with that is already working on this? If there is not, then start figuring out what it would take to make your corner stores be a little healthier and a little more worth shopping at.

I think the really big thing is that you know it is going to take a fair amount of time, and I would encourage either partnering with another organization or at least some other person. I don’t think its something that a single person could do by themselves. But, if it was just you by yourself, an individual can make an impact by shopping at those stores and then talking to the guy at the counter and be like, “I would really like to be able to buy apples here. Can you do that?” That’s not even a project, you just have to say it and it would take 30 seconds. But, they respond to that, they are small and they can add things that you want quickly.

What are you working on now that Food and Liquor is done?

The next step for Neighbors Project is the Bodega Party in a Box. It’s kind of taking our cooking class, our cooking parties if you will, and making it so that lots of people can do this. The Bodega Party in a Box is a box with a cookbook that we developed with lots of food writers all over the country with recipes that have ingredients that you could buy from your corner store. It talks a lot about bodegas and what to expect there and how to interact with the owner. Then, it has invitations and little flags to decorate so that you can have these parties where everybody makes a dish with food from their bodega. So, it’s a really cool idea and it’s really well done. It’s encouraging to people who just might go to Whole Foods or go to Jewel to check bodegas out, because they can look really intimidating or, “I wouldn’t want to shop there because it looks dirty,” or something like that. But, they are great! They’re awesome!

How can someone get the Bodega in a Box kit?

At the moment, you buy it online, but you can always use it for an idea and you can have a party without the Bodega Party in a Box. (Shh!) You can have your own invitations. That is at the Neighbors Project website, neighborsproject.org, and also at bodegapartyinabox.org. We’ve been getting really good responses on it so far, and a fair amount of coverage on it. People are interested.

Does your day job have to do with food?

When I started it, it did, kind of. I was the business manager of a non-profit called The Land Connection, a non-profit that works on sustainable agriculture issues. We were training new organic farmers and generally doing outreach mostly in central Illinois, but I was based in Evanston.

Since then, I have switched jobs and careers and I am now a chef. So, I’m still working on food, but I don’t buy food for the restaurant from the corner stores. I actually just got a new job at one of the best sustainably-minded restaurants in the city, Uncommon Ground. It’s fantastic. It’s delicious. They have local, seasonal specials that change weekly based on what’s in season, and they have a roof garden that grows vegetables. I feel really lucky because I just started working as a chef in March and I’m at a place that I really support this early. I’m working on food, but I’m not necessarily working on food access issues at the moment.

If you could interview one person about food, who would it be?

I have all these names running through my head. I love Anthony Bourdain. So, I would interview Anthony Bourdain. Though, that would not be very political.

If I wanted to talk about food issues and things we talked about today, this is probably cliché, but I would interview Alice Waters. She was doing this before anyone was thinking about it. I don’t know how she had that foresight before anyone was really on this stuff.

If I could interview a person who was dead, I would interview J. I. Rodale, who is the guy who started that whole organic gardening and farming empire. His company still publishes the best books about organic agriculture and they have a fantastic center, newfarm.org, in Pennsylvania. He was doing it way before Alice Waters. But again, that’s all sustainable food stuff, so that’s the other side of my passion.

You may also be interested in this video of a corner store in action from the Neighbors Project:

Deborah Hamilton (Biggie), Lunch in a Box

2008-09-15T16:04:00.000-07:00

Are you looking for a way to make lunches that are cheap, healthy, and fun for your kids or for you? Bento lunches might be your answer. Deborah Hamilton (Biggie) writes all about bento lunches at her blog, Lunch in a Box. In this interview, she shares some bento basics and lets us in on how bento has worked for her family.

Biggie making a bento.

Why do you go by Biggie?

It’s been my nickname since Junior High School because I have big feet. We made this big foot club and you had to have size 10 or above to be in it. My friends shortened it to Biggie. That’s all - I am not a gangster rapper!

What is a bento lunch?

A bento lunch is a compact, balanced, visually appealing lunch in a box. It’s pretty straightforward. It doesn’t have to be all Japanese food. It can be really anything you like, although some foods really lend themselves better to being transported.

What makes bento lunches different from typical American-style lunches?

One thing is that they tend to be waste-free lunches and you’re using a reusable container -the fact that it’s a number of different things in one container as opposed to “I’ve got a snack pack here; I’ve got a sandwich in a baggie over there.” It focuses more on incorporating things into one or two containers in an attractive manner.

Aside from having less waste, what other advantages are there to a bento box?

For me, it’s less clutter in the diaper bag. Also, I think it’s a portion control aspect. If you use, for example, a 600 ml box and pack it compactly, without junk food, candy, or greasy and oily foods, then it’s a one-to-one ratio of calories to the capacity of the box. So, if you’ve got a 600 ml box, you should be packing, basically, a 600 calorie meal.

It’s easy portion control if you just have the one container and you use the bento packing guidelines. That way you can lose some weight, make sure that you're not overeating or undereating, and make sure that you get a balanced lunch. I think it makes portion control easier.

What are the bento packing guidelines?

Bento packing guidelines can be found on Biggie's blog.

I’ve got them on my website. It's three parts carbohydrates (usually traditional Japanese bento style would be rice, but you can do pasta, muffins, bread or other grains), two parts fruits and vegetables, and one part protein. That’s basically it.

Also, they should be packed compactly without a whole lot of empty space in the box. So, you use gap-fillers. Gap-fillers are small, tougher things like cherry tomatoes. Something that’s going to squish like a raspberry would be a rotten gap-filler. Gap-fillers help you keep the bentos stable during transport so you don’t have an avalanche of food when you open up the lid at lunchtime.

Do you typically heat the whole bento lunch up in a microwave?

It depends on how you pack it. Again, I’ve got a post on this. If they have a microwave where they're going to be eating, some people might like to pack a bento that only had microwavable foods in one container, and maybe pack another container with fruit or something that is not going to be microwave friendly, and keep that aside.

My son's preschool does not have a microwave available, so all the kids eat room temperature food. Or, if you use thermal bento containers, then the food stays warm in the thermos. One thing to keep in mind, though, is the food safety issue.

I think the food safety federal recommendation is to keep everything cold if it’s going to be held for longer than two hours at room temperature. So, that's when it's a good idea to look into an insulated lunch bag with some ice packs. There are also some foods that have natural antibacterial qualities to them (for example, oregano, cilantro, or wasabi). If you spice your food more heavily when you know you're going to be carrying it at room temperature for a longer period of time, that will help prevent food spoilage.

Is lunch the only meal that you would do bento style?

Mini pancakes, bento style.

It just depends what our schedule is really. There’s no reason that a bento needs to be specifically a lunch. Occasionally, I’ll do a dinner. We’re not often out of the house for breakfast, so I don’t do those. But really, it’s just a meal in a box.

You can put any meal that you like into a box. Sometimes we do breakfast for lunch where I make little tiny mini pancakes. You can freeze those too, so I’m not making them from scratch in the morning. But on the weekends, when I’m making pancakes anyway, I’ll just take the little extra batter and make tiny pancakes and mini sausages. Bentos are really fun for miniature food.

Speaking of cute food, why is there such a focus on the presentation in bento lunches?

Biggie typically doesn't focus on food art, but check out this cute fish she made!

If I were packing lunch just for myself, I don’t think that I would really focus on the attractiveness at all. But when I'm packing for a preschooler or for a child who might potentially have eating issues, I think if you make it attractive, it’s sort of like a surprise in a box. They are more likely to try foods that they wouldn’t otherwise want to, just because it’s interesting.

You can do that with a balance of colors in a lunch, you can also do that with hardware by using little animal toothpicks or a little cute container or something like that. Some people take it to the extreme and make food art. People sculpt cartoon faces out of little pieces of food, which is altogether really too much effort for me. I’m kind of the lazy mom's bento.

It doesn’t sound to me like you can be lazy and make bento lunches.

Actually, you can. There are a lot of speed techniques and the freezer is your friend. It's possible to make a speedy bento in about 10 minutes, max. I aim for 10-15 minutes on the blog. The way that you can do that is by freezing leftovers or freezing cooked things in individual portions (like rice, muffins - you can do all kinds of little side dishes).

If you have leftovers from dinner, you can pack up the leftovers and freeze them in little individual servings and pop out one at a time later. Or, you can get a head start on packing the next day's lunch with leftovers when you're cleaning up from dinner. But, it really doesn’t have to be a time consuming process. It’s basically just lunch in a box.

How does your three year old son respond to the lunches?

Well, he’s in a Japanese immersion preschool where pretty much everyone packs a bento lunch. So, it's the norm where he is because he's surrounded by kids all eating bento lunches. I think I fall on the spectrum smack down in the middle between the super-achiever moms who are making food art and the moms who are maybe throwing a sandwich into a bag.

For him, it’s very run of the mill. It’s pretty normal. He does get excited on the rare occasions that I do make some food art or if he finds his favorite food in there. But all in all, we don’t make food an issue in our house. If he eats it, fine, if not, that’s okay too.

I've found that I've had success personally in getting him to eat different foods just by not making a big deal out of it. I try not to show him how happy I am if he eats something, or if I'm unhappy that he didn't finish. Honestly, oftentimes if we're at dinner and we're eating something, he might turn up his nose initially. Then we're like, "Okay, fine, then don't eat it. More for us." Then when he sees us eating happily he decides to try it.

I don’t make special children’s food for him. He eats what we eat. His bento lunches are just leftovers from what we had for dinner. Maybe I’ll make one additional dish in the morning.

How did you get interested in bento?

I speak Japanese and I worked at Japanese companies, but bento weren't really on my radar. I really got into it in 2004 when my husband was misdiagnosed with celiac disease, which is an intolerance to gluten found in wheat, barley, and rye. Basically, having celiac disease makes restaurant meals rather perilous - kind of dangerous to your health - because of the cross-contamination issue.

I decided rather than having him be depressed at the office while he watched his colleagues go out to lunch, I would make him something where he would feel, “Aww, I have just as good of a meal as everyone else does.” So, I went to a Japanese book store here in town and got a couple books on bento. I was sure that there was some kind of a technique to it. I didn't have any idea of what kind of dishes might pack well so I just started hitting the books.

Then, about 9 months later, my husband was undiagnosed. It turns out he did not have celiac disease after all, so we went back to gluten.

A couple of months later, Bug, which is what I call my son online, was eating solid foods and my diaper bag was just filled with Tupperware containers and snacks. So I realized, “Why am I doing this when I know how to pack something really compact?”

Do you still make lunches for your husband?

No, he's on his own now. Actually he wound up working from home for quite a while. So I'm not going to pack a lunch for someone who's just upstairs. He goes to the office sometimes and he can go to a restaurant. I don’t feel quite the level of caretaking that I did when he was misdiagnosed.

Do you eat bento lunches or is it just for your son?

I eat them on events or if we’re going to have a play date around lunch time. This weekend I made some because we went out to the beach. Once a week, we have a running club and I make bento for all of us then. On a day-to-day basis, I don’t make them just for myself anymore - only if I’ve got some sort of an outing or an excursion.

Do people need any special products to get started making bento lunches?

Not really. You can make it as small or as simple as you’d like - even just like a Rubbermaid box or Tupperware. Actually, my favorite containers are Lock 'n Lock. I have no commercial affiliations with Lock 'n Lock, but they have these great locking lids that go on plastic or glass Tupperware-like containers. They have a really good, secure, water-tight seal, and they are really cheap. I think Target or Wal-Mart may carry them. They’re very cheap, like $3.

What's important is that that food container be shallow because it's difficult to pack a deep box with a variety of different foods at once. So you'll have more luck if you get a shallow container. If you want to go all out, then you can go the route of buying bento accessories or thermal lunch jars, like the Mr. Bento. They have bento kits; there's really no end to the way you can spend money on this kind of thing if that's what you want to do. But it does not have to be expensive. Packing lunches will wind up saving you money over restaurant meals.

If I were just going to have a few containers, I would say a small one for my son, like a one-tier 360 ml box for a 3-year-old. Maybe a one-tier or a two-tier 600 ml box for an adult woman, and an 800 ml box for an adult man. Then a thermal food jar that you can find at stores like Target or Wal-Mart. The metal ones have very good heat retention and allow you to pack things like soup, curry, or stews, and even keeps something like rice warm and soft.

How many bento boxes do you own?

Do I have to say? Too many, but I’m very cheap. So, I try to get bargains and I usually don’t spend much money on any one individual box.

What is your favorite bento lunch that you’ve made to date?

This cold soba bento is one of Biggie's favorites!

I guess it would be a cold soba lunch with a dipping sauce where I curled all of the individual little bits of noodles into little nests. Once you let them get cold, they start sticking together. So when you eat, you take a little bundle of the noodles, dip it into the sauce, and it's really refreshing summer meal that takes very little time to make in the morning. Also, it hits my nostalgia button for my time in Japan.

When did you decide to turn bento lunches into a blog?

I guess in May of 2006, I just started snapping some photos of box lunches and loading them up onto Flickr so that I could participate in the bento communities on Flickr and also on Livejournal. I had a blog on Livejournal, but that was more repository of all the posts that I made in the Bentolunch community. I didn’t try to drive traffic there. It was just more my personal record.

Then, in February of 2007, I was going through my Japanese-language bento cookbooks and finding all kinds of really ingenious tips and tricks to speed things up. I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is so interesting.” I started trying them out and writing about them on Flickr and on my posts, but then I found that I needed to refer back to more complicated explanations of techniques.

In June of 2007, I got this stand-alone site, lunchinabox.net, and I just moved everything over there.

Was the blog what you expected it to be?

I had no idea what I was doing. My readers have been very patient and have stuck with me through my technical issues. It’s been a blast. It’s been very interesting from the technical standpoint and the blogging standpoint. My passion for the subject matter really keeps me motivated to keep going on the blog.

Do you find that your readers are really into bento or are they just people who are checking it out for the first time?

I'm finding that my readership consists of parents who pack lunch for their children, people with food allergies or food intolerances, dieters, environmentally conscious "green" people, Japanophiles, and also the frugally minded who want to save money by not eating out.

What is your day job?

This is my day job. I was a stay at home mom, and then I started making money off of the blog. That allows me to really spend time with my son, and it gives me some flexibility with my schedule that I'm really enjoying. It’s a luxury for which I’m very grateful. I used to be in public relations.

That probably helps you in terms of promoting your blog.

Well, I haven't actually done any media outreach at all (bad PR person!). It does give me a sense for the importance of understanding your readers and getting the word out.

If you could interview one person about food, who would it be?

It’s impossible, but I would just love to sit down with M. F. K. Fisher for hours and talk to her about food. She wrote a bunch of different food books. I just really enjoy her storytelling and her passion for food. She seems like a real, approachable person with a passion for food that I respect.

Jason Lewis, Lollyphile

2008-09-09T15:58:00.000-07:00

Jason Lewis of Lollyphile currently sells two kinds of lollypops: maple bacon and absinthe. How did he end up with those flavors, and why lollypops? Jason tells all in a candid and fun joy ride into the world of candy making.

~~One random commenter on this post will win a box of Lollyphile lollypops! I will draw the winner on Thursday, September 18th.~~

Update: The winner of one box of Lollyphile lollypops is Toontz from Okara Mountain • Okara recipes, vegetarian recipes!

Jason Lewis checking himself out. He didn't have a single photo of himself with a lollypop. Shocking, no?

How did you get started making lollypops?

Do you want the real version or the marketing version? The real version is more fun.

About two years ago, I started making my own absinthe because it was illegal and kind of fun. Then, some friends of mine up in Seattle started an illegal speakeasy where they had actual in-house gambling and a dress code (you had to wear 1920’s-style clothes or they wouldn’t let you in). They served liquor at all hours and the guy at the coat check was selling pot. It was a totally amazing speakeasy!

My friend came to visit and he was like, "Oh absinthe, can we buy from you?" So, I was like, "Sweet!" I was selling cases of absinthe, just scads of it. Wow, I shouldn’t be telling you this. They [the speakeasy] got busted, because that’s what’s going to happen. Suddenly, I was left with cases of absinthe at my house, which is just an obscene about of absinthe for one person to have. I didn’t know what to do with all of it.

Then, Halloween came around and I’m kind of crafty. So, I made it into lollypops to pass out to my friends. I throw events sometimes. I think about a third of my friend group are all French immigrants and they went nuts for them and loved them. Then, I started selling them at warehouse parties and art shows and stuff around town and people were buying them. That was fun.

Miette is a super fancy candy store here that literally has gumdrop trees. They’re wonderful! In fact, if Miette and Lollyphile were people, Lollyphile would have a huge crush on Miette, but would be kind of embarrassed to ask her on a date. Miette asked, "Can I try a few cases of this?" I was like, "Cool, totally! A retail store wants to carry me, that’s fun."

Then, I threw up a website that just sold those. It was an ugly-ass little website. I was doing it for a class project. That started doing really well. Then, what happened was I kept getting these phone calls from people like 16 year olds in Texas where they would be like, "If I buy some lollypops from you now, would there be any way I could get them in like two days and how fucked up would I be?" I had to explain that, one, you don’t hallucinate from absinthe and two, if you are going to be eating something that makes you hallucinate, you probably want to pay more than two bucks for it. It’s a you-get-what-you-pay-for kind of situation.

Then, I realized that I had to have something else that was not liquor-based or psychotropically-based. So, I thought of bacon - that’s fun, right? Then, I figured out how to do the bacon and I kind of test marketed it at a R. Kelly sing-a-long night. I was passing them out to strangers at this R. Kelly thing and then the next day, on my Yelp page, this one girl had written a 10 stanza poem about the maple bacon lollypops. So, they did well.

Then, Lollyphile got picked up by Daily Candy and I went from being a full-time marketing whore to a full-time confectionery pretty much in the course of three days. Now, that’s what I do.

How did you get interested in making absinthe in the first place?

I went to Burning Man a bunch of times and then one of the camps was just an absinthe camp and they made all these different kinds of absinthe. I was like, "You make this, that’s crazy!" I found a few different recipes and some of them made like 151 proof poison. The first batch I made of it, my girlfriend at the time and I (and this isn’t why we broke up) each had a glass of it, and the next thing we remembered we were waking up on the floor with headaches.

I just kept making it because it was fun, and once I start doing something, I get kind of obsessive-compulsive about doing it really well. I started making it really well. Now, I don’t make my own anymore. I just buy it because I don’t have the time or the wherewithal. Also, it’s legal.

How do you make lollypops?

You make lollypops with sugar and corn syrup and water and a little bit of cream of tartar to prevent crystallization (which I had to learn). I would be selling lollypops and people would be like, "Why are these turning white?" and I would have no idea. Apparently, cream of tartar is an acidic by-product of making wine and it does some chemical magic that I don’t quite understand. But, it does its job well.

So, you mix it all together and you heat it to about 300 degrees and then you have it in a hard crack and you pour it in the mold and then you package it. And, you don’t burn yourself, because if you burn yourself with sugar, it’s insane. It’s not only really hot, but you know how you get boiling water splattered on your hand and you’re like, "Oh, that sucks," and then it’s cool again? You react as though it was boiling water: "Oh that sucks. Oh my god, it still sucks. Oh my god, it still sucks." Then, at that point you have this massive sugar burn on your hand.

I take it you’ve experienced the burn more than once?

Yeah, a couple of thousand times, but not anymore really. Although, I do find myself doing things like I’ll see like sugar dripping over the edge of a pan and my initial instinct is, "Oh, that should be cleaned," and then I run my hand over and then I just sort of curse at myself for the next half hour. Because, it was nobody’s fault but mine.

Jason based the shape of his lollypops on this picture from Lolita.

Why did you decide on lollypops versus doing something else with the extra absinthe?

I was thinking about regular candies which would actually be a hell of a lot easier to make, but lollypops are sexy and they are kind of fun. You have this stick hanging out of your mouth and you get to play with it in your hand. You can sort of hold it.

Then, I decided on the shape for these because of the kind of iconic picture of Lolita from the 1970’s movie where she’s got the heart shaped sunglasses and they’re halfway down her nose and she’s licking lollypops. I was like, "Okay, that’s what I want my lollypop to look like in people’s heads."

Do you make the lollypops at home or do you have a lolly-factory?

I made them at home at first and then once it became a business-business, I realized that I had to be professional. So, I have a kitchen that I rent out in Hunter’s Point. I don’t have a factory yet. Apparently, for the equipment that I would need to get for it, if I could find it used somewhere, it would be a minimum of $100,000 outright, which I really don’t have just sitting around yet.

It’s not just that, it’s just like buying a baby. Then, you have to get a warehouse, then you have to deal with this thing forever, and then also you feel bad about having bought a baby, because that’s apparently illegal in most countries. That was a bad joke. So, no, I don’t have a factory just yet, but someday. It’s my little dream.

Do you still do it all by yourself?

I have part-time workers that come in and help out. I haven’t quite 100% figured out how to hire people. It’s a matter of being able to give them a set 20 hours a week that are definite. I’m really enjoying being self-employed. Like you saw though, getting me to do the interview was a pain in the ass, so imagine me trying to schedule you for work hours. So, again I do have people that are employed, but it's part-time and pretty much just me.

Tell me more about the work that you did before Lollyphile.

I run another business too, it’s called Swapsf. Me and my ex-girlfriend run it. It’s a large-scale clothing swap. It’s 500-1000 people at any given moment, and everyone gets drunk and gets a whole shitload of new clothes and it's really fun.

So, real life before this - I did marketing for a number of different industries, PR, and graphic design. And then, I sort of learned how to do what I think is real marketing, which is actually effective marketing rather just sort of lying for the CEO (which is kind of what marketing is, I guess, just lying to people).

I started doing real marketing, which is sort of actually communicating with people and finding out what’s actually up and making them feel like they are doing it with me - which is what Swapsf does. That’s the marketing I’ve been approaching with this.

When I send out newsletters, I make a point of being 100% straight up. If initially I was like, "Oh, I’ll come up with a new flavor every month," it couldn't work because the reality situation is that if I did that my life would completely collapse due to too much business.

My next flavor comes out in a few weeks. Recently, I sent out an email saying, "Hey, sorry I made everyone wait this long." I had a little sale and it was fun and it’s really cool. Because I’ve been doing it in that direction, I get fan letters - not like "Oh my god, I love you," but kind of like people feel a connection and they really get off on different kinds of candy.

I had this one letter from a lady - she and her husband celebrate every single major event, like their anniversary, engagement, whatever, with absinthe and he is currently overseas in the Army so she mailed him a bunch of lollypops. That was her way of having that moment with him. I thought it was the sweetest thing ever and I was like, "Can I put this on the website?" She said, "Please do." I loved her.

Are you a general foodie?

I’m kind of a food snob. I only buy from farmers’ markets, and for a minute, when I was younger, I was a chef at a pretty fancy restaurant in Seattle. I cook a lot. I make the best matzah ball soup in history.

Do you do make floaters or sinkers?

Floaters. Good question. Way good question! Are you Jewish?

I am. I ask because my husband likes matzah balls that you have to cut with a knife. I’m not a big fan of those.

Yeah, mine are floaters.

Jason said he wanted a Kosher is Binary shirt, so Jonathan designed one for him.

Wait! You’re Jewish and you make lollypops with bacon?

I know. There was a magazine called Jewcy, get it? I noticed on my website stats that there were a lot of hits from there. They were like, "This guy is selling like the least kosher lollypops." Which incidentally, I found out that saying something is the least kosher is kind of a misnomer because kosher is binary. It either is or isn’t. I could essentially make it on Saturday, cover it with blood and serve it with cheese and it wouldn’t be any less kosher than it is now. Kosher is binary. I kind want a T-shirt that says that.

They were like, "You should do a chicken soup version." I was like, "Okay, the meat has to be cured or everyone will die." And then my friend, James, said, "How Jewish would it be if everyone died from lollypops?" So, I made a deal with them that at some point in the future I’m going to make a genuine kosher lollypop and it’ll be like Manischewitz or like hamantaschen with cookie in it. I still have to figure that out.

I think you should make charoset lollypops. Those would be yummy.

Charoset is definitely one that’s been coming up a lot. I just think there’s a lot of moving parts involved with that so it has to be a super short run of like 2000.

Jason recommends the book Candy Freak.

Do you eat a lot of candy?

Not really so much. I’m kind of like a vain health nerd, so I can’t take in the sort of sugar that I used to. For a while, I was finding myself just sort of randomly shoving lollypops in my mouth while I was cooking, and then after a really quick period of time, I got sick of sugar.

I’ve got a thing right now where I’m trying out candy bars. I read Candy Freak. It’s really good and you’d probably like it considering what you do. He was talking about all these small regional candy bars that don’t really get outside like a two state area, like Valomilks and Idaho Spuds and whatever. I kind of get snobby with candy bars and so I’m the guy who shows up at a party with stuff that no one's ever heard of. So, that’s the candy I eat - weird and rare candy bars.

Is the next lollypop flavor top secret information?

No, in a couple weeks, I’m coming out with a Wasabi Ginger.

That sounds really good.

Yeah, it is. I’m just getting the last few kinks out, because I don’t want people saying it actually blows. But it’s really close, like a couple weeks off. Then after that, I’ve got some other stuff. But, I’m keeping that as kind of close to the chest for a minute.

How do you test new flavors?

I make them to where I think they are good. Then, I make a few hundred and I pass them out to friends who have no problem telling me whether they suck and then I go out to big parties and pass it out to strangers and see how they react. If it’s pretty much good across the board, then I’ll sell them.

Aside from the flavors, is there anything that makes your lollypops different than any other lollypops?

It’s a novelty, no one’s ever heard of them. But also, people like buying things that were made by somebody. It kind of has the mystique that they know that I made it. It’s not like it was mass produced by some machines that were watched over by people getting paid minimum wage and kind of hating life. It was made by a guy who was getting off on making them.

If you could interview one person about food, who would it be?

I’ve been reading a lot of Michael Pollan, but I guess that’s too easy, especially because I live in San Francisco. The next one I would say would be Alice Waters, but that’s also pretty easy, because I live in San Francisco. I’m going to go with Alice Waters. She’s pretty awesome.

Why’s that?

She’s kind of, I guess, the godmother of the Slow Food movement. She’s amazing. She helped San Francisco be even snobbier about food than it already is.

Dale Janzen, California Tree Fruit Agreement

2008-09-06T14:13:00.000-07:00

Do you ever wonder what the best way is to peel a sticker off of a peach or do you ponder the best way to tell when a plum in ripe?

Dale Janzen is the Director of Industry Relations for the California Tree Fruit Agreement (a government organization that allows growers to share knowledge, resources, and money to promote tree fruit, do research, and perform quality control functions). Dale has been involved in growing tree fruit (peaches, plums, and nectarines) since he was a kid. Grab a fresh piece of fruit and join him as he gives you an inside look into the industry and shares some important lessons about fruit.

Dale Janzen in a video courtesy of the California Tree Fruit Agreement

What is your background?

I tell people, basically, agriculture through osmosis. My father was a career businessman. His hobby was even business and he would buy ranches that were run down a little bit. My brothers and I would work on the ranch, prune the trees or the vines, improve the irrigation system, and bring the ranch back up to snuff. Then, he would sell that ranch for a profit. That wasn’t his full time business. That was just a hobby he had.

In my high school days, I would work in packing sheds. I’ve pruned trees. I’ve picked trees. I’ve packed the fruit. I’ve done every job on the way up to the point where I started working for the inspection service. I was inspecting fruit and certifying the fruit and the maturity as far as federal standards and marketing orders standards. I did that for ten years.

Then, I started working for the CTFA. Actually, at first I worked for the Kiwi Fruit Marketing Order. I was their first field agent for three years. Then, I worked part time at CTFA and now I’ve worked for them for 21 years.

Since you’ve done it all, can you walk me through the steps from starting to grow the fruit until it gets into the store?

The first thing you do - you want to make sure that you have the proper soil profile. Peaches and nectarines like a very well-drained soil (people call it sandy soil). Plums can actually take a heavier soil. They are not as particular.

Once you pick a place, then you shop around for the type of variety characteristics that you know can be marketed. In other words, you’re looking for fruit that will size to a good size, that’s got a good shape, and red color. You want fruit that’s full of good sugar and good flavor. Then, the last thing you look for is fruit that will ship well so that it doesn’t get bruised in transit. Also, you look for the timing. There’s a lot of aspects about growing fruit that come into play. It’s not as simple as just planting trees in the ground and watering them.

Does each tree only have one harvest per season?

Right. Exactly. That’s the thing, farmers work 12 months out of the year, but they only have one harvest of that tree (which always amazes me). Another thing about it is that all the fruit does not mature at the same time.

Maturity is what happens to the fruit as long as it’s attached to the tree. Once you pick that (once that umbilical cord to the tree has been separated), then you start the ripening process. Maturity is the fruit sizing up - the fruit is filling out at the shoulders and getting its sugar and its flavor. Once you pick the fruit, the fruit is not going to size up any more and the sugar content is going to be the same.

In the early spring, you might have 5 times as much fruit on the trees (more fruit than the tree could size up). Every tree has only so much energy to it. It can only give so much sugar, flavor, and sizing to the fruit. Once you’ve decided to grow a variety, then you need to learn that variety to know how many pieces of fruit you should fit on that tree. Early in the season, you might only fit 350 pieces of fruit on the whole tree. Later in the season, it might be 800-1200 pieces of fruit. Later in the season, the fruit has had so much longer to grow and size up.

It is important to control how many pieces of fruit are on the tree at a time.

Photo courtesy of the California Tree Fruit Agreement

How do you control how many pieces of fruit are on the tree?

By thinning the fruit. That’s what the process is called - simply "thinning" - because you’re thinning out the number of pieces of fruit on the tree. All of this is done by hand.

In the springtime, you can walk into an orchard and you hear this. It’s almost like somebody practicing a percussion instrument. The people who are thinning the fruit are pulling it off the tree and the fruit is dropping on the rungs of the ladder and you hear this "dip, dip, dip, dip" and you hear people singing as they like to do. It helps the day go by fast.

During the Spring, you hear this constant patter of the fruit being dropped. It’s really intensive hand labor. It’s very expensive, but if you don’t do that, the fruit won’t size up to the size that the retailers demand.

Is fruit grown to a specific size simply because retailers prefer it?

Sure. Right. But, then also going back to what I said earlier, the tree only has so much energy to deliver the size, sugar, and flavor. If you have a lot more pieces of fruit on the tree, you’re actually diluting the sugar and the flavor of the fruit. In the early season, because there’s only so many days from bloom to harvest, that limits how big the fruit can actually get before it’s harvested. Whereas, late in the season, that fruit has been growing on the tree since April. That means that fruit has been on the tree for 4 months sizing up and so you can have more fruit on the tree.

Does each variety take the same amount of time to mature?

The timing of varieties comes off at specific times. When you plant a variety, that variety will come within two weeks early to two weeks late of the same time period every year. So, here again, a grower (in order to use his people that work for him in the orchard), wants to keep them busy and wants to make sure that they get a constant paycheck. So, he will plant varieties so that the varieties come off sort of like a string of pearls in the summer - to keep his people that work for him busy throughout the summer. Those are factors about growing the fruit that all have to come into play.

You mentioned that the thinning was done by hand. Is all of the picking done by hand?

Oh, yes. The thing about the picking, I just mentioned briefly, is that not all the fruit comes off at the same time. Today is Thursday and maybe the farmers determined that this group is mature and ready for the first pick. The crews will go through and they’re gauging by the size and the color that the fruit is mature and they’re picking that piece of fruit from the tree and they are bypassing other fruit that isn’t mature yet and leaving it on the tree. In 3-5 days, the farmer will have the workers go through again and do a second pick. Then, they can do that a third time, a fourth time, even a fifth time. There are some growers that will keep picking and keep picking to get a very uniform maturity, but usually picking is done anywhere from 10-14 days.

These buckets are long and not tall so that the fruit doesn't pile on top of each other and dent the pieces on the bottom.

Photo courtesy of the California Tree Fruit Agreement

Where do they put the fruit when they pick it?

Generally, there are two ways. One is that they might have a picking bag. This bag is open at the top and at the bottom. It just has straps that go onto velcro tabs so that the pickers’ hands are free. He’s got shoulder straps to this canvas or nylon bag and he is just picking the fruit and putting it down in front of his chest into this bag. His hands are free to go up the ladder to pick the fruit. Once the bag gets as full as he wants with fruit, he walks over to a tractor that has bins. He will lower this bottom of the bag to the bottom of this bin, un-hatch these velcro ties, and then the fruit is gently put into this bin.

The other way of picking is they will have either a bucket or a tote (and here, again, its got shoulder straps so he/she has their hands free) about 16" long by about 12" wide and about 12" deep. They will just pick into the tote until the tote or bucket is full and then they go to the trailer behind the tractor and then they stack those up. The reason that people pick into totes and into buckets is they’ll pick a more mature piece of fruit. In a bin, you’ll have fruit that is stacked on top of other fruit and if the fruit is too mature, the compression or the weight of the fruit on top of it will actually dent the fruit. You certainly don’t want that to happen because that’s going to be a bruise on the fruit.

All the thinning is done by hand, the pruning after the harvest is done by hand, and all the picking is done by hand. It really is labor-intensive work.

Dale Janzen is typically responsible for removing the stickers from the fruit in order to take pictures like this.

Photo courtesy of the California Tree Fruit Agreement

How does the fruit get from the tractor to the store?

The tractor will take that fruit out of the orchard. There will be a forklift and a truck waiting. They’ll either use bins or pallets for the totes. They lift those onto the truck, and then the truck takes that into the packing shed.

Since the fruit is coming out of the hot orchard, they want to cool that fruit down. They will either hydro-cool it where you have a cold water bath that the containers of fruit (either totes or bins) go under to cool or they have cold storage that they put it in. They want to take that field heat out of the fruit as soon as they can because that gives it longer shelf life.

Then, once that fruit has cooled down, they run the fruit over a sizer, which sizes the fruit. It stickers the fruit and then it gently drops that into different pack lines by sizes so that all of the fruit is uniform.

Why does all of the fruit need to be stickered?

The sticker is demanded by retail. If there is an organic peach right next to a commercial peach, the organic peach looks exactly the same as the regular commercial peach, but they're going to have to charge a lot more for it. Retail has come up with this whole system of stickering the fruit in order to know what to charge. They might be charging $1.99/lb for one and the other might cost $3.99/lb and it looks like the same piece of fruit, but one's organic and one's not. The consumer doesn’t like stickers and really the packers don’t like the stickers.

I find it hard to remove the stickers.

It really is. Another one of my functions is that I’m always there on the photo shoots for our web site. I select the fruit for the photo shoot to make sure it’s portraying the fruit in a realistic and appealing way. As a result, I’ve taken off thousands and thousands of stickers.

The easiest way is look at the sticker. On 99.9% of the stickers there will be a wrinkle because the sticker is flat going on a curved surface of the piece of fruit. If you can see that little wrinkle and use your fingernail, that part of the sticker will come up. If you look for that wrinkle and just work that wrinkle up then you can remove the sticker. Tips from Dale!

Sometimes, I’m cutting fruit and doing slices and all that. I’ve even gotten dental tools that I can use to flick that little wrinkle in the sticker right off if I need to do huge quantities of it.

What happens during the ripening process?

Once you start the ripening process, what happens is you’ve got enzymes in the piece of fruit that are going to start breaking down the acid content in the piece of fruit. It might taste sweeter (because you don’t have the acid competing against the sugar on the palate), but actually, the sugar content is going to stay exactly the same from the day that you picked it.

What’s the best way to know if a fruit is ripe?

I always say, "Gentle palm pressure." Automatically, what I was doing is I had one open hand and I put my fist in that open hand and I pressed with all of my fingertips in the palm of my hand right by my thumb. That’s the way you want to test if the fruit has a little bit of give so that you’re not making actual fingerprint indentions in the fruit. You don’t want to use your thumb and first finger, you want to use your whole palm to gently squeeze the fruit and see if there is a little bit of give.

Then you take the fruit and smell it. A peach should smell like a peach, a nectarine like a nectarine, a plum like a plum.

There are some people that like a crunchy piece of fruit and then some people like a very ripe piece of fruit. Since I was young, I always called the ripe fruit leaners because a very ripe piece of fruit is so juicy that you bite into it and it runs down onto your chin. If you’re not leaning over, it’s going to go down the front of your shirt. When people ask how I like fruit, I say, "I like to eat leaners!"

I gave our promotional people a tour and they liked that term and so we have posters out to help educate the consumer about what types of food they like to eat. The poster says, "Cruncher, Leaner, In-Betweener." There are people that genuinely like a crunchy piece of fruit. I like a much riper piece of fruit. To me, a perfect piece of fruit runs down your chin and it’s just a real wonderful, delicious, juicy mess.

Can you tell from the color if the fruit is ripe?

The red color on our fruit is more about sunlight and the plant breathing than it is about actual ripeness. What happens is the red pigment that is exposed to the sunlight through the leaves of the trees will turn bright red.

Have you seen pieces of fruit that are red and just sort of have flame type patterns in the fruit that are yellow? Those flames are actually the shadows of leaves on the fruit. It’s sort of like back when I took tape and on my chest, I taped "DJ" and then went floating down the river and at the end of the day, I had a suntan everywhere except the white "DJ" on my chest. Boy, I thought it was so neat! It’s the same type of thing in that you get flames of shadow from the leaves that will be the yellow color that you see on the fruit.

Now, some pieces of fruit develop just about 100% red and in those cases, you can look down into the shoulder where the stem is and you don’t want to see a hard green color - you want to see a yellow to yellow-orange color. What we call those yellow spots or looking down into the stem well is background color. The red is the primary color, and anything that is not red is the background color. The background color tells you more about maturity and ripeness than the red color does.

To ripen your fruit, Dale suggests leaving your fruit in a bowl away from the sun.

Photo courtesy of the California Tree Fruit Agreement

If you buy a piece of fruit that is not ripe, what is the best way to ripen it?

The best way to ripen fruit is to ripen it at room temperature away from sunlight. Some people say, "It grew its whole life in the sun, I’m going to put it on the windowsill to ripen it up," but that’s not correct. Sunlight, once the fruit has been picked from the tree, actually will break down the fruit.

The best place is some place room temperature, away from direct sunlight, and not inside a plastic bag. A piece of fruit is still respirating – it’s still breathing through the skin, even though you picked it. If you put it in a plastic bag, it will get moist and start to break down and you might see decay start forming on the fruit. The classic putting the fruit on the dining room table is fine for ripening up fruit.

Once that fruit has gotten ripe or soft to the point where you want it, you can go ahead and put it in the refrigerator and that will stop it from ripening further. If you’re a cruncher, you can pick out the very solid ones, the ones that might have a little bit more of a greenish background color; if you’re like me, you’ll look for fruit that has a definite yellow background color and appears to be a little bit riper. Even if it’s not as ripe as I want it, I can sit it in the fruit bowl for a couple of days until it gets to the ripeness I want it. You put it in the refrigerator and that stops the process and now you’ve got a lot more time to eat that bowl of fruit.

California fruit is marketed all over the world.

Logo courtesy of the California Tree Fruit Agreement

Can you give a brief overview of the California Tree Fruit Agreement?

The California Tree Fruit Agreement is celebrating our 75th anniversary. Basically, the start of the California Tree Fruit Agreement was motivated because growers were not getting compensated for the cost of producing their fruit. So, they petitioned their politicians to come up with the Federal Marketing Order Act. Farmers could get together and vote to have a marketing order to share knowledge, resources such as statistics, and also to pool the money together to promote the fruit, do research on the fruit, and perform quality control functions. Those are the three functions of the California Tree Fruit Agreement.

Part of it is federal and then another part of it is the state of California. It’s the two marketing branches of CDFA (California Department of Food and Agriculture) or USDA on the federal side of things. We’re both federal and state to get the most bang for the buck out of the program and we do promote our fruits worldwide.

I produced a video which is on our website and just the other day, the president of CTFA was in Taiwan and she sent me a photograph of me on a big screen TV in the produce market in Taiwan, speaking Cantonese. I never knew I spoke Cantonese. What a big wide wonderful world it is!

Are all of the California fruit growers part of your organization or just the larger ones?

Every grower of fresh peaches, plums, and nectarines in California is a member. The key word is fresh (if it goes to the cannery, if it goes to the dry yard, that is not included in the CTFA). Every four years we have a referendum, and every grower gets a ballot and he/she votes whether or not to keep us in business. We have a heck of a report card every four years that determines whether or not I’m going to have a job.

How is the program supported?

Per package assessment. For every package that is shipped, we get money back from that in order to fund all these programs.

So, the growers themselves are paying for it?

Exactly. The great thing about it is that it is self-funded.

Are there similar programs in other states?

Yes. One that just comes to mind is Vidalia onions in Georgia. That’s a marketing order. The three things about a marketing order are quality control, promotion, and research. Some marketing orders are only promotion. Some are just promotion and research. We happen to be all three.

What is your role in the California Tree Fruit Agreement?

I am the Director of Industry Relations. What that entails is relations with the growers, with the packers, with the marketers of our fruit, and with inspectors that inspect our fruit. I also do a little bit of compliance work if I find that somebody is not meeting our quality standards.

What are some things that California growers do to ensure food safety?

We have a food safety trace back system so that every box has the number of the packer and the date it was packed. If I found product on the market that didn’t have these trace back numbers on them, I would follow that back with the actual packer and make sure that he started putting those on every single box.

We have never had a food safety issue - knock on wood. We have the definite advantage that our fruit is grown on trees and never touches the ground. A lot of the problems that leafy greens, tomatoes, and peppers have, we do not have because the fruit is grown on trees. Another advantage of fruit grown on trees is that our workers have access to ready-made shade at any time (which if it’s going to be 99 degrees is definitely a factor).

Do you think the fruit from California tastes different from the fruit in other places?

You know, that’s really subjective. I believe so, just because we have our tools of the trade. Our access to varieties are greater than in any other growing area. Because of that, I believe that yes, we do have the advantage as far as flavor and sugar. But, Stefani, if you interviewed somebody from South Carolina or Georgia, I would be truly amazed if that person wouldn’t tell you the same thing.

Here in California, we are blessed with such great soil. We have the Sierras that catch water for us in the form of snowfall and we have reservoirs that deliver that water to the San Juan Valley which would actually be a desert. Because we have those desert conditions, it’s a much drier condition to grow the fruit. Because of where we are, the trees go into dormancy in the winter and they have plenty of cold temperatures in the winter to go into dormancy. That’s when the trees get their beauty sleep so that they wake up nice and strong in the Spring to develop all that fruit.

California also has the advantage that we have peaches grown from mid-April all the way through September and into October. With such a wide growing season, we have many different varieties to choose from. Also, because we have such a dry climate, we don’t have some of the plant diseases, like fungi, that are caused with a lot of moisture. So, California really does have a lot of advantages.

How has California’s focus on being green affected the CTFA?

The plant breeders are just geniuses. Nothing as far as peaches/plums/nectarines is genetically modified. It is not being improved. It is all done with open pollination, so it’s all a natural process.

In California, our regulations of growing practices are stricter than anywhere else in the world. Here in California, the growers are very, very aware that the consumer wants as healthy and clean of a product as possible. Part of the marketing orders is the growers have a research committee that votes on the research projects that should be funded. We spend half a million dollars a year on research and a lot of that research is how to grow a healthier product to try to come as close to organic as possibly can be done. The whole story of the California peach/plum/nectarine growers is focused on a healthier product and it’s just getting better.

What are some of methods used to protect the trees from bugs?

When I was working in the orchards as a teenager, you didn’t see insects in the orchard - you didn’t see ladybugs, you didn’t see spiders, you didn’t see praying mantis. These are all predators of bad insects. You didn’t see them because pesticides were generally sprayed on a regular schedule. Now, part of the whole research here in California is that we have researchers that are entomologists, which is the study of insects, and they have one huge success story which is the use of mating disruption.

Researchers have developed pheromones which are the sexual attractant that insects use to find each other. They are just like little twist ties like you would use to twist a plastic bag except that they are a tube that has the pheromone inside. Here again, the pheromone never even touches the tree. It’s just given off like a vapor. They’ve only got so big of a brain and the eyes aren’t used as much as the sense of smell. So, the male insect hunts down its mate by smell.

The male moth comes into this orchard and he smells the pheromone and he goes, "Oh boy." He’s fooled into thinking there’s a mate in there, but he flies around and he never finds the mate because he can’t tell a female from the pheromone that’s everywhere in the orchard. Here you have a very clean method of deterring these very destructive moths.

This practice is used extensively in California and it’s backed up. We hired University of California researchers. They monitor the actual life cycles of the insect to know how to protect the fruit against it. It used to be, "Let’s just go in and spray." Now, they have pheromone traps in the orchard and as long as they are getting so many moths per trap per day, they know that the damage isn’t going to be too great by the time of harvest. In the past, they would spray, they look at this and go, "Okay, we think we might have one to three percent damage before harvest. That’s acceptable. Let’s just live with it."

The grower is so much more sophisticated and he’s hiring these entomologists to check traps in his orchard so that he does not have to use anything against the insects. It’s a wonderful system and growers have adapted this system for two reasons: one, the health of their product, and two, sprays are expensive.

Also, here in California, they have all these regulations: what you can spray, when you can spray. Your workers have to be monitored for their health. All the aspects of spraying are such that they want to shy away from that if at all possible and so it has opened up this huge business of entomologists that are going around checking orchards and making sure that it does not have to occur. What a great system!

And here’s another thing, just for your own knowledge. Sulfur (which is a naturally occurring product) is used by organic growers, but that is considered a pesticide. Pheromones, because they are artificial chemicals that mimic the sexual hormones of the insect, are considered a pesticide. Even some of the good practices are lumped into recording of practices that seem worse than they are. But, here in California, spending half a million dollars a year in research is just a tremendous tool for the California grower to deliver a healthier, pesticide-free product.

What kind of challenges do California growers face when growing organic fruit?

The organic fruit is held to the same quality and maturity standards as the conventional fruit, but the thing about the organic is because you cannot use the same materials that you do with conventional fruit, you will have some losses due to insect damage or just decay. There’s just a lot more handwork that has to be done on organic fruit.

At home, I do an organic garden as much as I can, and it’s a lot more work because you do have the pressures of nature. I love fruit, well so do the worms, birds, and moths - they all love it. With organic, your losses and your risks are greater. Therefore, they deserve to be paid more.

How often do you eat fruit?

My people are Mennonite people and so I grew up in this whole tradition of canning peaches, making pickles, and making jams. I still do the cooking. My wife is a good cook but I’m an inspired cook. Just about every week, I’m making peach pies, peach cobblers, and peach jams. So, I really handle the fruit.

I really love fruit. If you offer me a Snickers bar or a peach, nectarine, or plum, I’ll choose the fruit every single time. Growing up, I think I did 11 batches of jam, then I’d give jam away for Christmas, when people came over I gave jam at birthdays and all of that.

Aside from canning and making jams, what else do you recommend to save your fruit?

If I have too much fruit, I’ll slice fruit (like about 5-7 cups of fruit) and put that in a Ziploc bag with one cup of sugar. I let it sit there for 20 minutes or so and the sugar dissolves with the juices of the fruit and becomes like a syrup. I’ll take that bag out and put it in the freezer. Then, during the winter, I take that out and defrost that and I’ve got a ready made cobbler or peach/plum/nectarine pie from the freezer. If I’ve got an abundance of fruit or there’s this fruit that just is especially delicious, I make sure I put some away and that way I can have some in the winter.

Dale had the opportunity to meet Julia Child.

If you could interview one person about food, who would that be?

I got to meet one of my heroes with food: Julia Child. I met her and her husband, Paul, and there’s an interesting story. I’d only been working for CTFA for a couple of years and we got a letter from Julia stating that she was really unhappy with these peaches. She said, "How can you call them sweet, juicy, California peaches? They were really horrible."

We wrote her back and asked her where she bought them and what time period. She said she bought them in February and so we informed her that California does not produce in that time period, so it had to be imported peaches. I said, "If you would allow us, because you’ve taken the time to write this letter, I would really like to deliver some boxes of peaces to you this summer."

I arranged a date and a time and I took Julia Child six boxes of peaches. When I rang the doorbell, she filled up that doorway. She was a large woman! Her husband, Paul, was more my shape and size. I’m 5’8" and I think he was probably about 5’7".

She was just charming and gracious and very down to earth - easy to talk to, very approachable. If you look at some of her old shows, a towel would catch fire on the set and she wouldn’t cut that, it was part of the cooking process: "Oops, did that again!" She made it fun and she made it look like I could do this. There’s fun in the kitchen. It’s not drudgery. I think that’s why everybody likes Julia Child.

In her later days, she would do shows with Jacques Pepin and Wolfgang Puck - all these chefs who really wanted to spend time with her, because she was such a tremendous influence on their lives. She was just a charming woman - signed a couple of cookbooks I had. What I admired about Julia Child is that she brought French cuisine into everyday cooking. To me, she was just a really dynamic person in that she demystified French cuisine and made it fun.

Amy Casey and Karen Tedesco, Personal Chefs

2008-09-01T19:07:00.000-07:00

Amy Casey (Dinners for a Year) and Karen Tedesco (FamilyStyle Food) are both personal chefs and food bloggers. Amy's personal chef business, Eat! A Personal Chef Service, is based in Sparta, New Jersey, and Karen's, DinnerStyle, is based in St. Louis, Missouri. In this interview the two, who have never met, share the secrets of being personal chefs. You'll learn why you might need a personal chef or be a personal chef yourself.

Karen Tedesco loves cooking fresh, creative meals for her clients.

What is a personal chef?

Karen: A personal chef usually is a person you hire to come into your home, do your shopping, do all your meal planning, meal preparation, and clean up. They package your food and put it away, so it’s all there waiting when you need a meal.

Amy: You can focus on different aspects of being a personal chef. Some people do more of a catering type of business where they prepare dinner parties, baptisms, graduation parties, that kind of thing. Some go to client's homes and prepare people's daily meals. I’ll go in a make three different dinners for the family to enjoy during the day and they heat them up as they want when they get home. Some are private chefs that exclusively work for one family. So, you can focus on whatever you want to do as a personal chef - whatever fits in with what you like to do.

Who are the main people that use personal chefs?

Karen: The people that I targeted and the people that have been hiring me are busy people with families, with kids. Actually, my two clients now don’t have kids, but they are professional people. They love to eat, but they just don’t want to cook or they hate to cook or they don’t have time. So, they hire me to do that.

Amy Casey works with her clients to come up with personalized menus.

Amy: In my area, the main clients are busy families with two parents that are working and are tired of eating processed, frozen foods. They are looking for something nutritious and do not want to go to drive-thrus or purchase take-out all the time. I also have other clients who are busy families who also don’t want to go out to eat all the time. The families have kids who are in a lot of activities and they are running around most evenings at dinner time. They don’t have time to come home at night and make a good dinner, so they hire me to prepare their dinners for them.

Basically, my clients are people who want to eat healthier, but don’t have the time to cook, just don’t like to cook, or don’t have the desire to figure out what they want to make. I provide the service and make it easy for them to eat nutritious foods without spending an arm and a leg.

What is a typical day like?

Amy: I usually leave my house in the morning about 8:30 to do the grocery shopping for my client (it usually takes half an hour to 45 minutes to do the shopping), drive to the client’s house, and depending on the number of meals I’m making for them (it’s usually 3,4, or 5), I’m there for between 4 and 6 hours. During that time, I am cooking two or three things at the same time to keep everything moving. It’s not like I cook one dish from start to finish. I usually have a pot of water boiling for the pasta, I have the oven on with vegetables roasting, and the grills heating up outside that I’m going to do shrimp kabobs on. I have numerous things going at once to keep the process going.

Why cook in someone’s house versus bringing food in from your own home?

Karen: Because of the way the business is set up. I don’t have a commercial kitchen to work out of. If I did, I would be more of a caterer and my insurance would be different (my liability and everything).

The beauty of doing what I do is I have no overhead, but I’m also required by law to cook in the client’s kitchen because that’s how my insurance covers me. I’m almost like domestic help. Although, I hate to say it like that, because a private chef would be different. That’s a person who works for one family and that’s what they do - that’s their job, to be employed by that one family.

Amy: For health regulations, I have to cook out of someone’s house when I prepare their meals. Some personal chefs cook out of commercial kitchens so they can prepare meals for their clients and deliver them.

Some people prefer that I prepare their meals in their own homes because they know their kitchen and they just feel comfortable that I’m coming into their house to provide this service. They know exactly where the food is from start to finish. If they are home, they can see how the food is prepared.

Do your clients typically watch you cook?

Amy: Sometimes they watch me cook. But, when they watch, it usually slows me down because of talking as I’m preparing. A lot of times, they’ll come in, talk for a few minutes, and they usually have to go about their business. Sometimes, I have clients that aren’t even home. I have a key to their house or an access code and I just go in, cook their meals, clean up the kitchen, store their meals in the refrigerator or freezer, and leave a menu with heating instructions. At the end of the day, the client comes home to a homemade dinner.

How often do you typically visit a client?

Amy: It varies. I have clients that I cook for weekly. Some are every two weeks. I have one client now that is once a month, so I would make more meals for them. It just takes a longer day for me. But, they have more food that I put into their freezer. Clients that I cook for weekly usually just keep everything in their fridge and just heat it up over three or four days.

Karen: Usually it is once a week. Although, I have a client who has me go every other week because they divide their portions up. I’ll cook 4-5 meals for them with four portions. They’ll have half of it in the refrigerator for one week and the other half is in the freezer for the next week.

The challenge for me has been (because I like to cook fresh) coming up with things that will freeze well. You can’t freeze a salad, obviously.

Amy's manicotti crepes

How do you decide what to make for your clients?

Amy: When I first have a potential client, I meet with them and do a comprehensive interview. I ask them if they have any food allergies or any health concerns like diabetes or high cholesterol that they want me to take special note of, and any cuisines that they like (Asian, Thai, Mexican).

Then, I go through a whole list of all different kinds of foods and ask them, "In general, does your family like chicken? Do they like chicken on the bone? Do they like chicken with skin?" It’s like a 5 page survey that I go through with them and then most times, the clients want me to pick their menu.

About a week before I go to their house, I will decide on a menu for them and either mail it or email them my suggested menu for the week and they’ll say, "Great. That looks fantastic. We can’t wait to eat those five meals," or, "You know what, we really don’t like eggplant parmesan. We’ve had it before. Can you do a traditional lasagna for us instead?"

It just depends on the client. Some clients want me to pick all their meals for them, other ones like to pick and choose on their own and have me throw in an occasional different dish for them. It’s just kind of a learning process. After I’ve cooked for them three or four times, I get to know the family’s tastes. If they have kids, what do the kids like and do not like?

A lot of times, people like a personal chef because they get to try new foods that they generally would stay away from. I have one client where I make a snack for their kids each week that I go and she has the kids try it and generally it has some food in it that the kids said they didn’t like. But when they find out that I made it, they try it and find out, "Yeah, maybe I do like enchiladas with spicy sauce on it," and before they didn’t like it. So, it’s kind of a learning process between the client and me to find out the foods that they like and don’t like.

Karen: I want to focus on doing more like fresh, creative meals and I customize menus for people depending on what they want. When I meet with a client, initially, we have a long assessment. We go through everything they like, they dislike, they’re allergic to, whatever, things that they want to eat. Then, every week, I craft a menu just for them.

I don’t have a set menu. I think it would be a lot easier. A lot of personal chefs just have a menu that they’ve come up with and that’s what you choose from. But what I do is every week, I create a new menu and I send a list of choices and my clients choose what they want. So, I have more control over what I’m cooking and also I get to use more seasonal produce. I want to use more local rather than just having a set menu that’s always the same. It’s a lot more work to do it that way because every week I have to sit down and write a whole menu and it’s different for every client.

Karen's Grilled Steak and Roasted Tomato Flatbread with Fresh Basil

Do you ever get clients that put in specific requests?

Karen: These people haven’t yet. I’ve got these great clients that are just like, "Whatever you want to cook," and obviously they get to choose within this range of what I’m going to cook. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve got clients who start requesting things that they like: "I love that lasagna you make. Can you make that again?"

Amy: Oh yes! One client this last week asked, "Can you make me brussel sprouts next week?" The beauty of having a personal chef is that I personalize the menu to them. It’s not like you’re going to a restaurant and they have twelve choices available. My menu is limitless for the client. If they like all chicken dishes, I can make them all chicken dishes with all different preparations. If they like a variety of foods, there’s no problem, I can make it. It’s not limited by just one menu, I have a limitless menu that I can go through and just pick and choose what they like.

What do you bring when you go to someone’s house?

Amy: It depends. I have everything I need to cook and package the meals. In the beginning, it sounds daunting that I need to have a whole set of pans and knives and measuring cups and all these utensils, but you can figure out the basic items that you need. Also, most clients say, "Just use what we have here. If you need to use this stock pot, don’t carry your own here. You can just use our stock pot." It’s usually a combination between the items that I bring and the utensils and pots and pans the client has at their house.

Karen: I bring everything. I have wheeled coolers. That’s like my traveling chef. It has all my pots and pans, all my utensils, and pantry ingredients like olive oil and spices and I have a knife rack for all my knives - everything I need. Then, I do the grocery shopping the day of. When I’m supposed to arrive at a client’s home, I’ll go to the grocery store and do all the shopping and then I’ll bring everything to the house. Then, I set up and start cooking.

What is it like to work in other people’s kitchens?

Amy: Well, that’s the first thing. You go into a house and you see a kitchen and you’re like, "Oh, is this going to work?" But, you can just make it work. A lot of times, people have beautiful kitchens, but they’ve never even used it, so it’s like I’m going into a brand new kitchen when I go into this house. But most times, I just need the basics, a cook top, an oven. I usually don’t use the microwave or if I sometimes grill something for them, that’s all I need. It’s not like I need a gourmet kitchen to make their meals. It doesn’t matter what their kitchen really looks like, as long as I have working appliances.

Alice Waters has been an inspiration for Karen.

Karen: It’s interesting, and I think I’m adaptable. I think that’s why I really enjoy this. I know a lot of people that would find it hard. Sometimes when you go into a new kitchen, you have to get your bearings. "How does the stove work?" or, "The sink doesn’t work." Everything is different. But after an hour in somebody’s kitchen, I become accustomed to it and I get myself set up so I can work efficiently.

Everyone’s kitchen is different. Some I’ve worked in are really incredibly gorgeous kitchens that are like you wouldn’t want to touch anything or leave smudges anywhere. Most people’s kitchens are just like normal kitchens. All I ask is that their stove tops are working, their oven has to work, and they need a sink and clean counter space. That’s all I need. And a refrigerator, obviously.

Has the downturn in the economy affected your business?

Amy: There really hasn’t seemed to be a change for me. Once I start cooking for my clients, they see how invaluable the service is to them, because actually I’m saving them time and money by doing this service for them. A lot of times, they are buying food that is less nutritious, that’s at a take-out or at a restaurant. They are spending more money than they want on the food, or they are buying groceries at the store and since they’re so busy, they never get to make them and they are throwing out groceries before they even prepare the meal.

On average, I’m probably saving somebody between 10 and 15 hours of their time by preparing the food for them, and they know that the food is going to be there when they get home and it’s already prepared. I’m saving them shopping time, I’m saving them clean up time, and prep time. Once they try the service, they are pretty much hooked.

Karen: I started my business in November and it was kind of slow just getting started. So, I don’t really know because I have nothing to compare it to by seeing how business was a couple years ago. I think if people are busy enough and they are working, this is something they are going to do. But, I think it does cost a lot of money. I like to tell people that if they’re not cooking at home (they’re going out to eat a lot), then they’re spending a lot of money on food. People have to eat. But, I’m sure there is some sort of impact with the economy. I don’t need that many clients, because there’s just one of me. If I have three clients or four clients a week, I am set - I’m done.

How much does a meal cost?

Amy: It varies. I charge a fee for my services and then I add the grocery cost on top. Those are separate. If someone is always ordering fish and steak, that’s more expensive than the family that’s eating pasta and chicken. So, I’m not going to charge the same amount for everyone. It’s just my fee when I come to cook for them plus the cost of the groceries that I buy for them.

Karen, do your clients also pay for their own groceries?

Karen: Yes. I bill them separately for my fee and then I give them a receipt for the groceries they bought.

What about pantry basics, like olive oil or spices?

Karen: I consider that part of my pantry and so that’s built into my service - things like olive oil, butter, spices that I use.

Amy: I have a spice kit that I can bring. I can take it with me to the client’s house (like spices, olive oil, salt, pepper, that kind of thing). But if it’s a fresh good, I need to buy it the day that I go cook for the family. The cost of these items is built into my service fee.

What do you do with leftover groceries?

Amy: I’m pretty good at buying the right portions that I need, but if I have to buy a dozen eggs and I only use 8 of them, I only charge the client the prorated portion of what I’ve used and those other eggs come home with me or I ask the client, "Do you want me just to leave these for you?" Some clients just say, "You know what, we’ll just keep that half a bag of rice and we’ll cook it at another time" or they say, "Just take it home with you" and I just prorate the cost to them. Sometimes with dry goods, such as rices and spices and pasta, a client will have a space dedicated in their pantry for me and I keep track of what I have at their house. The next time I cook for the client, I don’t have to go buy something. There’s different ways you can handle that situation.

Karen: That depends on the client. Sometimes I do try to buy in bulk because if I need a cup of rice, I can’t just buy a cup of rice. If it’s something like pasta or any pantry ingredients, some clients don’t want to have any of that in their house. They’ll just say, "Take it home." Something that’s unopened that I didn’t use, I’ll just put it in their pantry for next time. But my clients pay for groceries, so they own it. They’re their groceries.

Do you have any advice for someone who is just starting out as a personal chef?

Amy: Do some research on the internet. There are different personal chef organizations that can help you get started. I joined the Personal Chefs Network . They have a free forum online where you can ask questions. One of the most beneficial experiences I had was when I worked in a gourmet café. It gave me confidence to start my own business and make a career of it.

It’s fun. It’s one of those jobs that I finally found something that I really love to do. It doesn’t even feel like work to me.

What’s the Personal Chefs Network?

Amy: The Personal Chefs Network is an organization that has about 600 chefs that belong to it worldwide. It basically offers you support for being a personal chef.

Basically, I’m my own boss and the organization provides resources to help me find answers to any of my questions I have - anything from being ServSafe certified, insurance questions (I have to be insured as a personal chef), and recipe questions. It's a support group of personal chefs from all around the world.

That’s great.

Amy: Oh, it is great! You don’t feel so alone, because working as your own boss, sometimes you feel like you’re all by yourself and this is like your coworkers that you can rely on for answers to questions.

Karen, what advice do you have for aspiring personal chefs?

Karen: I think the biggest piece of advice and the biggest challenge for me has to be being really organized. The cooking comes easily for me (that’s something that I can do when I get in somebody’s house). The part that I have trouble with is making a list to make sure that I have all the tools I need and all the groceries that I need that day because you don’t want to be in the middle of cooking 20 portions of somebody’s food and realize you forgot something. You are in charge of this whole business because you are doing basically the bookkeeping, the marketing, and the shopping. It’s really important to be organized.

What do you do when you forget things?

Karen: I forget things almost all the time. I’ll improvise. If it’s not something I can improvise, I’ll just talk to the client and say, "I forgot this ingredient," or, "Can I borrow your blender?" It usually works out fine. It’s never like a tragedy. I’m well prepared enough that everything I really need is in my kit, all ready in my car. I guess you should be flexible as well as being really organized.

Amy: Sometimes, I forget to bring something or the client doesn’t have something that I need, and I’ll just have to improvise and try to figure out the best way to create their meal for them.

What is your culinary background?

Amy: I am self-taught. I have always liked to cook since I was probably ten or twelve years old. I started out watching Julia Child and The French Chef and went from there. I just cooked for my family and my friends and really enjoyed it. I read cookbooks, Bon Appetite, and Gourmet magazine - anything I could get my hands on.

I just taught myself and little-by-little got the confidence to go out and tell other people, "I’ll cook for you."

Karen: I’m mostly self-taught. I’ve worked in restaurants since I was 17 (all over, front and back of the house). I decided after college that I really loved food and wanted to go to cooking school and I looked into cooking schools, but it just wasn’t the right time for me to do that. The schools I was looking at (we were living in South Florida) were in New York or elsewhere, so I just got jobs working in restaurant kitchens and kind learned on the job. I did that for a while. Then, I started selling wine because that was something I was really interested in, so I did that for a couple of years too.

How did you decide to become a personal chef?

Amy admires Ina Garten's recipes. She used them as the basis for many of the dishes at the gourmet cafe where she used to work.

Amy: I’ve always liked cooking. I was a commercial real estate appraiser for about 10 years, then I took some time off for having my kids. After my kids started grade school, I decided I would like to do something else. I was working at a small gourmet café and was trying to find something different that would fit in with my family where I could still work and cook.

I actually found the Personal Chefs Network and just started reading about being a personal chef. I found out that it could fit in well with my lifestyle. I can cook for other families during the day and still have time for my family at night when they are home.

Karen, how did you decide to become a personal chef?

Karen: I was ready to do something. I’ve done dinner parties over the years for friends or fundraising events. My youngest, my son, started first grade and he was going to school all day, and I knew that I wanted to start getting back working. It’s been about ten years since I really worked outside the home and did something.

I’ve always been involved in food and cooking and I initially thought, "How could I do dinner parties?" because that’s what I was doing. I love doing dinner parties like up to twelve people where I design the menu, the table, and do the flowers - the whole thing. That’s how I found out about this whole personal chef thing. I didn’t even know what it was. I thought that this could work for me, because I could make my own hours. I employ myself. I get to be creative and so far, it’s been good.

Do you often cook for yourself?

Amy: Yes. This is how it all started. I would make so much food for my family that I would be passing it out to friends, and I needed someone else to cook for. This is a good way for me to share my love of food with other people. I also keep a blog about the meals I prepare for my family. Hopefully it will help people who do like to cook but have a hard time figuring out what to make for dinner. That’s the central focus of my blog - that they can go there and find dinner ideas that may be a little bit different than they are used to, but still easy to prepare.

I have three kids who are all active in sports and activities and my husband and I need to get them where they need to go. But it is also important for us to still have a family dinner. I like to provide that for my family. I like to also tell other people how you can make a good family meal - maybe something a little different, and it does not take four hours to prepare it. 30 minutes and you’re done and you’re sitting down.

Karen: Some days it’s really long - if I’m cooking five meals for a client I’ll be gone for six hours or more - so I’ll come home and be really tired but also, because I’m in that work mode, I’ll just start cooking something. I still cook.

Do you make yourself the same kinds of meals at home that you make your clients?

Amy: Yes, pretty much. Sometimes I practice recipes that I make for my clients on my family to see if they would like them. Because a lot of my clients have a similar makeup as my family, I’m always practicing new recipes and trying things out.

Karen: I think the way that I cook at home is a little different from the way I cook for clients, just because of the types of meals that are going to present well after being in the refrigerator (something that they can assemble - you can’t do seafood that well). I don’t like to freeze fish.

There’s certain ways of cooking that I wouldn’t do for clients. I love to do real simple things at home with fresh vegetables on top, like kind of serve a one dish thing. When I cook for clients, I get a chance to think more about what I’m cooking, as opposed to, "What are we having for dinner tonight?" That’s more how I cook at home. I throw together a meal.

What’s you’re favorite meal to prepare?

Amy: Well, my favorite meal is a seafood boil: mussels, clams, lobsters, sausage, red potatoes, fresh corn on the cob - that kind of thing. We’ve already had it twice [this week on vacation]. We’ve eaten so much seafood here, it’s crazy. Last night, we had 15 pounds of lobster and I just made them into lobster rolls for lunch today.

Karen: The way I love to cook is Mediterranean, Asian, Latin kinds of foods (really big flavors, but freshly made). I use a lot of whole grains and vegetables and lean protein and things like that.

There’s not a favorite thing you make?

Karen: Not really. I have favorite flavors. I love Mediterranean food and I love spicy, Middle Eastern food. I use a lot of spices in my cooking, and fresh herbs. That’s really important to me, but I love to cook everything.

Tell me about your blogs.

Amy: Oh, I love doing the blog. I’m on vacation now. I’ve gotten some recipes from my family that I’ve put on there. It's interesting to see people from all over the world reading my blog and commenting. It’s nice when someone says, "I made that recipe you had on your blog. It was really good. Thanks for the recipe."

I like helping other people try new recipes. Making something a little different doesn't need to be an overwhelming task. A little planning goes a long way. My blog provides the recipes and reviews from my family. Hopefully, my readers will give a few new recipes a try.

Karen: One thing I want to pursue more is food writing. A couple of years ago, my friend Alanna called me. I hadn’t read it before, but she had a blog. I didn’t really know what a blog was and I kind thought about it and was thinking of pitching an idea for a column to a local newspaper. I thought, "Why don’t I just start a blog? That way I can just write whenever I want to and I can sort of start practicing and working on my writing and cooking."

I started the blog and it’s become a habit. I can’t devote that much time to it, but I have joined this other world of people. It’s amazing how many food bloggers there are. It blows my mind. With my blog, I want to show the way I cook because, obviously, everything that’s on my blog is something I do cook. But, I want it to be recipes that are easy and appealing to people. Sometimes I think that might hinder me in terms of posting more. If I posted everything I cook, you wouldn’t want to look at it, probably. I like it to look good and be appealing.

Has it helped with your food writing like you thought it would?

Karen: Oh, I think definitely. I think the self-editing part can be hard. My husband’s an editor and sometimes he’ll look over a post after it’s up there and he’ll say, "You spelled this wrong," or, "Change that." I think that part is hard, but I think not having any restrictions on what you write (you really can talk about anything you want) has been a good exercise, definitely.

If you could interview one person about food, who would it be?

Amy: I would like to interview Julia Child, but that would be kind of difficult now. She was a big influence on me. I actually got to meet her once at a cookbook signing. She told me to follow my dream.

I might also want to interview Ina Garten. Her recipes were the basis of my cooking when I started cooking at the gourmet market. I like her straightforward style of cooking with easily accessible ingredients. She makes preparing great food easy.

Karen: I always really revered Alice Waters. She’s the person that really got me interested in cooking the way that I love to cook with fresh ingredients. She was sort of my inspiration way back when I first became interested in food.

Emily McDonald, The Picnic Site

2008-09-01T07:58:00.000-07:00

Emily McDonald is an expert on picnics. She runs The Picnic Site, a site that (as you might guess) tells you everything you might want to know about picnics. Emily lives in the south of England, on the Hampshire/West Sussex border, which she says is the perfect place for a picnic. Get your picnic basket ready because after this interview, I bet you'll be ready to head outside and enjoy the day.

Emily McDonald doing one of her favorite activities - picnicking!

Why picnics?

Well, I love cooking. We travel around a lot and so I find I'm making picnics quite often. When I wanted to make a website, I brainstormed topics and picnics sort of came out trumps! I also remember thinking they were difficult when I had a young family.

I always got in a bit of a panic when we decided to have one, and so I thought I'd help others who maybe feel this way. There are lots of cooking sites on the Web, and when I started out, not so many about picnics - now more though!

What's the first picnic you can remember being on?

Newcastle beach, County Down, Northern Ireland with my sister and parents and another family. I must have been about eight. I know there were others before that because I've seen photos, but I don’t actually remember them. I remember playing in the sand dunes, after eating, which I found enormous fun. I also remember a family picnic when my uncle and aunt visited from Canada - that was in a park somewhere. I've since been to Canada and picnicked there!

Did you picnic a lot as a kid?

I guess. We didn't have a lot of money, so picnics were a cheap and exciting way of having a day out. Then, when I was a teenager, I used to go camping or picnicking with friends.

What makes a meal a picnic?

Just not sitting at the table in the dining room or kitchen - I'm about to write a page on the site about a desk picnic - basically a packed lunch! I suppose that most people would say it has to be outdoors, but is that really necessary? Kids enjoy a picnic on the floor with a blanket if it’s a rainy day. In the dictionary, however, it does say it's an al fresco meal.

Would you say that any packed lunch not eaten at a table is a picnic?

Well, I would probably not always describe it as such, but it could be!

What’s your best picnic story?

The picnic I remember the most is when my husband and I first got together and I had to meet his kids (then 3 and 11). I decided to make a picnic. We'd take them out once we'd picked them up from their mother. I remember cooking chicken drumsticks among other things, but it isn't the food that I remember.

My husband was rather unpracticed at looking after the 3 year old (a girl) and when he helped her do a "wee wee" they managed to get her knickers soaking wet. We drove home with them attached to the car aerial to dry before we handed her back to her mum. Now, I look after our granddaughters (4 and 5) when we take them out!

Another picnic I remember well was when my husband and I had a romantic meal in Windsor Great Park and then I had to drop him off at the airport. I had a car crash on the way back and ended up in hospital with all sorts of broken bits! Firemen cut me out the wreckage - I like firemen! Nothing to do with picnics really, I'm afraid!

I'm fine, now, but maybe that broke my ears, too!

Was your hearing fine before then?

Yes, but it has just got gradually worse and worse - could be the loud music I listened to as a teenager, too! My mum is 82 and can hear better than me.

Emily recommends keeping your picnic simple: bread, cheese, wine, and fruit.

What advice do you have for a person going on his or her first picnic?

Keep it simple - bread, cheese, and a nice bottle of wine - maybe some fruit. It depends what sort of picnic really - just partner, or kids. Kids would want different things, but always keep it simple. The kids won't be much interested in the food anyway - they want to run around and play.

Simple, but with quite strong flavours because outside food needs to compete with the al fresco sensations such as the smell of grass or sea, wind or sun. etc.

Is there any food that is a definite picnic no-no?

You should always be careful with things that will spoil easily and create harmful bacteria - such as mayonnaise. But, with today’s modern cool boxes, it is easier to keep things fresh. Things that break easily too are difficult - like meringues. Even chocolate - loved on a picnic - obviously can be horrid if it melts all over the place!

Some cheese is better than others. A runny Brie or Camembert can be wonderful, whereas a hard cheese can sweat and be nasty. I'm sure there are others - I'll think of them when we sign off!

A picnic backpack is a great item if you are going to walk to your picnic.

What's the easiest way to keep things cool?

Keep food in the fridge so that the food is cold before you start. Then, wrap in wet newspaper if appropriate - then a cool box with lots of ice or ice packs. Don't keep opening it at the picnic site. Know what you have in each box and try and only open once or twice at the moment you need it - just before eating.

Water bottles can be frozen and used to keep things cold as well as to drink when they melt. I was warned by someone that this might be toxic and put a warning up on my site. Then, I was told that this was a hoax e-mail and it isn't toxic so I'm still hoping that this is true! Anyway, I do it!

I live in the UK and we don't have a big problem with heat! Other countries may need to be even more careful.

Do you prefer a cool box (cooler) to a classic picnic basket?

I use both - a cooler for things that have to be kept cold, but a classic basket or hamper for bread, fruit, and of course the plates and cutlery, condiments, and napkins can be in the basket. Also, it depends on the transportation. Is it by bicycle, by backpack, or in the car? There are so many variables.

Some picnic sets are in backpacks so that you can walk carrying the picnic and then eat before you walk home again!

This handy gadget, WineStem, lets you easily keep your wine glasses upright.

What is your favorite picnic accessory?

Corkscrew!

Seriously, there is a great little gadget that you stick in the ground which holds your picnic wine glass so you don't lose a drop! Obviously, you can use it for non-alcoholic drinks as well.

Also, a cushion - you have to be comfortable when you eat! We don’t always have foldable table and chairs along with us, so waterproof blanket and cushions.

What do you do about bugs?

Swear! But, apart from that, I take covers to keep food safe from flies and wasps. Ants can be a problem sometimes and they say it helps to draw a line around the tablecloth or blanket with talcum powder - that is supposed to keep them away. But, I must admit I've never done it.

I also have on my patio a thing called a Waspinator! It looks like a wasp's nest and so the wasps don't come near - it does seem to work fairly well. You could take it on a picnic and hang it in a nearby tree - it's very light. I found it at a camping show.

What about garbage?

Always take a garbage bag to clear everything away, and then put it in a convenient garbage bin or take it home. I also take extra plastic bags and paper towels to wrap dirty plates and cutlery in before replacing in the basket.

What do you like most about picnics vs. a meal at a table?

Just being outside - whether in a field, park, or on a beach - you're close to nature. It's just fun! Maybe more relaxing - slower pace. But, I also love giving dinner parties round the table.

Here in the UK there are only a few weeks a year when a sunny picnic is possible and then you never know whether it might rain or not. We are having the worst August in my living memory so I think very few Brits will be picnicking this month!

If you love picnics, you have to be prepared with wellies, macs, umbrellas, etc. Not everybody's cup of tea, I admit! But hey, it keeps you smiling - you have to laugh or you'd cry with our weather sometimes!

Excuse me being an American - but what are wellies and a macs?

A wellington boot (rubber boot) and a macintosh (raincoat).

Thanks!

Funny language, isn’t it?!

Is the picnic site your full-time job now?

Well, I couldn't possibly describe it as a full-time job, but I don't work in the traditional sense anymore, so I guess it's my part-time job! It's more fun than a job. I'd never do it if I saw it as a job. I just love adding to it and getting comments and messages from visitors.

I made the site like "painting by numbers" - just followed instructions and had no idea what I was doing really! It's just grown.

I don't pay anyone to do anything. Correction - I have just paid someone to set up my USA eBay site. I did the UK one myself but couldn't quite get my head around it again to do the USA one.

If you could interview one person about food, who would it be?

Lots of modern day chefs I'd love to talk to, but perhaps Mrs. Beeton would be interesting from a picnic point of view - way back then picnics were sooooo different!

Who's Mrs. Beeton?

An English writer who wrote one of the very first cookbooks of all time, including how to make picnics - in those days (Victorian I guess) picnics were a very lavish affair which must have been so much trouble for all the kitchen staff.

She wrote a book of household management including a picnic menu for 40 people - I can quote some of it: A joint of cold roast beef, a joint of cold boiled beef, 2 ribs of lamb, 2 shoulders of lamb, 4 roast fowls, 2 roast ducks, 1 ham, 1 tongue, 2 veal-and-ham pies, 2 pigeon pies, 6 medium-sized lobsters, 18 lettuces, stewed fruit well sweetened and put into glass bottles, well corked, 2 dozen fruit turnovers, 4 dozen cheese cakes, 2 cold cabinet puddings in moulds, a few jam puffs, 1 large cold Christmas pudding (this must be good)... and so on!

Text from Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management.

These English picnics then became part of colonial life all over the world in the days of servants - who were sent ahead to prepare tents and get the provisions all ready! Those were the days!

Now, with no servants to hand, I have to go and think about what I'm going to cook for dinner tonight!

Jonathan Bloom, Wasted Food, Part 1

2008-08-20T21:22:00.001-07:00

Jonathan Bloom writes the food blog Wasted Food. He is also writing a book on wasted food in America. In this two part interview, Jonathan talks about how he became interested in wasted food, how it has affected his life, and what individuals and companies can do to create less food waste.

Jonathan Bloom has discovered that an occupational hazard of being a food waste expert is that dinner parties can get a bit awkward.

How did you get interested in the topic of wasted food?

I come from a background and a family of appreciating food. Growing up, in my nuclear family, we’d all have dinner together every night and go out to eat a fair amount. Sometimes, we even planned vacations loosely around where we’d end up eating. I have that love of food ingrained in me.

When I started working as a journalist, I gravitated towards food, and then more specifically food waste. Volunteering at a food bank in D.C. called D.C. Central Kitchen really opened my eyes to how much food isn’t eaten in this country. As a journalism student at the time (I was getting a Master’s in journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), that was a topic I latched onto and have been working on ever since.

What was it that you saw at D.C. Central Kitchen that motivated you to action?

Just looking at the bulk donations and talking to some of the people working there, I figured out where the food was coming from and that it was really nice stuff. It was food that would have otherwise been thrown out if there wasn't a food recovery group in that area. Seeing a real positive, progressive organization like D.C. Central Kitchen made me think about all the places that don’t have a group like that in their area and all the food in that area that would be thrown away. Specifically, it was ribs and meat and really high quality stuff that restaurants and hotels would be donating that they wouldn’t have a use for - either stuff they had prepared and didn’t serve or excess that they had ordered and wouldn’t be able to serve in time before it would go bad.

On your blog, you talk about how when you first became interested in food waste, you took a job in a supermarket for a little while. How did that come about and what was that like?

I hadn’t had much luck talking to supermarket people about this issue and I wanted to learn more about it. Fresh out of journalism school, I thought, “Hey, let’s get out and see things from the inside.” It was a good experience - hard work - and it was definitely tiring working in the produce department. It’s a lot of time on your feet, like most service economy jobs. But, it was definitely eye-opening and gave me a lot of insight into how supermarkets think about their business and how waste is just a cost of doing business. The other thing that really stood out for me was that individual pieces of produce were just commodities - it’s not a pear, it’s just one unit at $3/pound.

They wouldn’t think twice about throwing out that pear. It’s not seen as something that’s grown by someone to feed someone, it’s seen as an opportunity to make money. If they can’t sell it to make money, they’ll throw it out without a second thought. They know that to have their stores be viewed as the paragon of freshness at all times, a lot of food won’t get used. Some of the progressive companies will donate the excess, but a lot of them won’t.

Are you now doing this project full-time?

I also have a job working for a renewable energy company that is looking to build facilities that create energy from food waste. I write the blog and have been working on the book in addition to that.

That sounds like a perfect fit.

Yeah, it was something that was almost too good to be true. I was real excited when I saw that opportunity.

As you’ve done research on food waste, what have been some of the surprising things that you’ve learned?

Well, I guess the most surprising thing that I’ve learned is just how prevalent and omnipresent food waste is. I’ve tried to look at all aspects of the food chain and there really isn’t a part of that food chain that doesn’t have waste built into it. People always ask me, “Where is the biggest example or the most glaring example of food waste?” I never point out one specific place because I think that would kind of do a disservice to the issue and also I’m not sure that there is such a place. I usually say it’s everywhere.

Is that what’s surprising to you?

I hadn’t considered it really. These days the issue of food waste is coming to the forefront a bit more. But the last two years that I’ve been looking at it, it’s almost like this giant topic that everyone refuses to even discuss.

I remember reading this article in the New York Times about a labor shortage in California with the pear crop. They had these pictures of these really distraught farmers and piles of pears that didn’t get picked at the right time, so they just have to be composted or tilled under. It never once addressed the issue that this was a food that wouldn’t be eaten or that these beautiful pears would just become fertilizer, basically, at best, or compost.

The picture totally told that story but the words didn’t. I think it’s a topic or issue that is in the back of people’s minds. Many people have these questions and have always wondered about what happens to that half plate of food that they declined to take home from the restaurant. I’ve just been trying to answer that question for people on the blog.

Have you changed your personal habits a lot in the past two years?

I definitely have. I guess I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t. Not to say that I’m perfect or anything (some food waste is going to be inevitable), but I’ve definitely become better at planning and making detailed shopping lists, and I can play it pretty close to the zero waste line.

Jonathan warns that packaged vegetables often lead to waste, joking that that bagged spinach seems to go bad about two hours after opening.
Photo from Flickr user Nickster 2000.

What do you find is the hardest food to not waste?

I guess it’s probably produce. I don’t end up cooking a lot of meat. I’m sort of a lazy vegetarian or a vegetarian out of laziness in some ways. When I do eat meat, it’s usually when I go out to eat. But, things like lettuce and cucumbers (salad ingredients) sometimes don’t end up getting used.

Sometimes store selection will push me into waste. I was trying to buy spinach for a recipe and the fresh spinach they had just didn’t look good, so I ended up buying a bag of spinach (which I hate because that has a half-life of about two hours after you open it). So, that’s just one of those things that happen. I try to avoid it, but I’m not perfect. No one is.

What have you gotten out of writing the blog?

A lot of things. I guess, primarily, a sense of purpose and community - a purpose to spread the word. I don’t know that too many other people are out there doing that and that’s partly why I’ve grown so fond of it. I think it’s an area of need and I did see an opportunity to shed light on a topic that few others were discussing. On a day-to-day basis, I get some kicks out of the stories I find or people send me.

It’s definitely a little bit awkward at times to go to dinner parties or family functions or any kind of gathering involving food. It’s not something that I try to wear at all times, but I find it’s something people have a hard time ignoring. Sometimes I worry that people see me as this big wagging finger of scolding and I show up everywhere looking to snicker and poke and prod and scold people for wasting food. That’s not exactly my outlook, just a tiny bit.

Do you give people advice when you go to their homes?

No, I definitely do not give unsolicited advice. It’s sort of like a job, one that doesn’t pay. I try to leave work behind in my social life. But, it comes up a fair amount.

Tell me about your upcoming book.

The book is in the works. It’s not imminent. I’m talking to publishers now. There’s a process that has to happen. I wouldn’t expect it within the next year, unfortunately, but hopefully soon after that. From what I hear, there’s about a year, sometimes less, but publishers take a while after you hand in the manuscript to work on all the stuff that they have to do. I’m not close to handing in the manuscript. In terms of what’s going to be in it, it’ll be a light-hearted romp through the world of food waste.

Will it be a similar style to your blog?

Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. I say that sort of tongue-in-cheek, the light-hearted romp through food waste. That is kind of the approach I take. I realize that now, I do feel strongly about this issue and I think there’s a great chance to effect change and get people to cut down on this real issue, cut down on this real problem of food waste. But, I realize that no one wants to be lectured.

Continue to Part 2

Lisa Baer, Baer Design Group

2008-08-17T19:52:00.000-07:00

Lisa Baer is the president of Baer Design Group and president of the Chicago chapter of Women in Packaging. In this interview, Lisa talks about the process of package design and branding of food products.

Immediately after Lisa got off of the phone with me, she discovered that Guy Fieri from Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives was outside of her office. She, of course, had to get a photo!

What is your professional background?

I have owned the Baer Design Group for thirteen years. We are a branding and packaging firm and we have a focus on food packaging. We do a lot of coming up with product names, tag lines, telling branding stories and creating all the graphics that go on the packaging to get them sold at the shop level.

I don’t do any of the design. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree so I have a great understanding of the art but I do the sales and account development, meeting clients, and talking with my clients - that kind of thing.

When we opened our firm, we had some creative background in packaging and we had a couple clients right in the food packaging area and we worked on it ever since.

Why did you decide to have a focus on food packaging?

My mother studied cooking in France. She was a cooking teacher and a food writer and editor. So, I spent a lot of time around food, a lot of time around chefs, going to big restaurants, and being drug around to specialty farmer’s markets and Italian sections of town. Growing up with a foodie, I was exposed to it quite a bit.

What goes into the packaging decisions on a food product?

I think food packaging is unique from other packaging that we do that’s non-food oriented because we really have to have enough trust with someone that you don’t know to be able to put something into their mouth. There really has to be a visual and verbal understanding on the packaging of what you’re going to get; a really good description of what’s in the package and what you might need to do with it. You have to spend a lot of time visually on how to sell it and make it really taste good. I think that’s where some of the packaging fails. It seems like that taste sense may be forgotten. We spend a lot of time matching visual cues and words with what is actually in the box.

What do you mean by the packaging making it taste good?

Making sure that we really deliver the message of what it’s going to taste like - to meet someone’s expectations of what it’s going to be like, what it’s going to taste like, either with photographs, with illustrations, or with great descriptive words. Because, they have to purchase it before they are actually going to taste it or eat it.

What makes a really good package?

I think simplicity is something to consider. Clients will come to you with many, many benefits of their product. One of our biggest things that we do is help clients sort out what the biggest benefit of their product is, what we can play up in the front to get it sold, and then how to structure and organize the other benefits that there are.

We do a lot of natural and organic packaging. There are some obvious advantages there and it’s an obvious trend. But sometimes there are other benefits, other uses, even health benefits that your client will want to incorporate into the package, but you just have to put it in the right order.

I think that a good package has that sexy, sell image right away. It draws you in and makes you want to read more about it, learn more about it, and get it in your cart.

What kinds of trends have you seen over the time of your business?

When we first started about 13 years ago, natural and organic was definitely a newer trend. We were exposed to a lot of work in that area. We had done some natural and organic packaging. We’d also done some work for Blooming Prairie, which is a big distributor of natural products. So, I got a really good understanding of how this movement came to be, starting with the smaller food co-ops (really as a smaller micro-trend), and then building into the mainstream as Whole Foods kind of grabbed hold of the world and everybody started to take it much more seriously.

That trend is still going strong. In the past two years, we’ve got the green packaging trend. I don’t think it should even be called a trend. I think its here to stay. Most of our clients are coming in with not only their marketing agenda, but trying to be as friendly to the environment as possible. Some brands stake their whole positioning on the green packaging and how green their product is. Others are really starting to listen. Our more mainstream grocery store clients are asking about materials and what they can do to make better use of what they use and treat the environment much more friendly.

Last year, Wal-Mart put out their scorecard where they asked their vendors to look at their packaging and reduce their packaging. I think it spread very quickly beyond that.

What are some things that you’ve done to make packaging more green?

There are a couple of things that you can do. Smart structural design can make things more efficient. You can really use less packaging. Less packaging plus smart design can equal lighter weight and more in a shipment, which would use less fuel, which would essentially really reduce your cost.

We have seen a lot of attempts to use recycled paper board and tin. Actually, we’ve been using a lot of tin. It’s the ultimate recyclable metal. It can always be melted down and used again.

We’re seeing from the packaging on the shelves to the shipping containers a lot of change being made. It’s being taken really seriously and I have to say it’s exciting and it’s fun to be a part of.

Are there any other trends that you see moving into the future?

I think we’re all getting much more sophisticated about our food. I think that people are much more comfortable with different ingredients, flavors, than they were - much more accepting of trying new things. You just take a look at any tea shelf, for instance, there is just about every flavor you can come up with in your head. I think people are willing to explore that, and I think there is a new level of sophistication out there in food packaging.

How does that willingness to explore new things come into play in the packaging?

I think it really can help a whole line offer some different varieties, keeping your customers interested. Even if they may not buy it this time, they know that it’s out there and they'll come back. Keeping them interested with your brand all the time, I think, is always a good thing.

What is the connection between the packaging and the overall branding of the product?

Usually, the retail packaging is all you have at the shelf level. We don’t have the benefit of print ads. We don’t have a salesman standing there. Sometimes, you can use some shelf advertising but, primarily, the front of that box is all you have and, generally, you have three or four seconds to get your message out and become interesting and attractive to someone. So, I think it’s very key.

Some people in the industry don’t think it’s as important as I do. But I think that when you’re in the store, we have a group of people making decisions and there’s an opportunity to persuade them or dissuade them as they’re going down the aisle. So, you really have to take the front of your box extremely seriously. If they’re drawn in, they’ll pick it up, they will read.

I do see that consumers are spending a lot more time reading labels and getting interested in that, so you have to make sure you draw them in and get them to pick that up. That’s really all you have at the shelf level. As we all know, we’re inundated with messages through the Web, through TV, and radio. It takes a lot of advertising to get through, so there are some unique opportunities at the store level.

Lisa used a wedding picture of her own grandmother for Frontier Soups International Collection Italian wedding soup package.

What has been the most rewarding packaging that you’ve worked on?

I always love to see our packaging with great designs selling for a client. It’s very rewarding in itself. We’ve launched a couple of brands. One is the Sommer’s Organic meat line. They were able to take off at one single trade show and meet all their sales goals and get into the distribution that they wanted to - based on the image that we created. That was extremely rewarding. It’s always good to see your customers being successful. I see it on the shelf at Trader Joe’s when I do my own grocery shopping.

Recently, we just launched an international collection of soup mixes where we talked about travel. It has some nice travel images and it has some unique people on it. The Hungarian goulash has a great image of a woman in traditional Hungarian wear from the early 1900’s. For the Italian soup, we were searching for a great image of the Italian bride (because it's Italian wedding soup) and our creative team was really struggling to find a great image. It just so happened that my grandmother is Italian and we have this great wedding picture of her and it was actually used for the front of the packaging. It’s rewarding for my family to be able to go out and take a look at her. It definitely worked out. We showed it to the client; they loved it! Then, I let in on that it really was my grandmother and that we couldn’t come up with anything else. It’s fun. We have a good time.

It’s good to be in the food industry and sometimes you get to eat your clients’ stuff. Right now we’re doing a lot of meat packaging, so we don’t eat too much. But in the past, I’ve gone to a new client meeting where I’ve come back with a 5 lb. bucket of chocolate and things like that.

I end up doing a lot of plant tours and spending a lot of time with my clients, really understanding their whole process. My love of that probably started with Mr. Rogers and his factory tours when I was small, but I still enjoy going through their plants and understanding how things are done, how things are made, how things are taken care of.

Lazy Days Tea tried a completely new way of marketing tea.

Has there been any product that has been particularly challenging?

I think being a business owner in itself has its own unique challenges. As far as a food product, at this point, I feel like we’re up for any challenge. Sometimes its fun. It’s probably most challenging when we get a client that wants to kind of go against the grain and do something in their own unique way.

We recently created a line of tea called Lazy Days Tea. It was a new product line, beautiful teas in tins. She wanted to come in and be this anti-coffee and really have a completely different method. We started out by looking at the industry, seeing what’s going on.

We surveyed about 200 tea products and found a few different categories. There were some high design categories, there were real stuffy, stuffy conservative categories, and we found some that were just driven by health benefits that claimed weight loss and all kinds of things (their packaging was real medicinal looking). But, she really wanted to come in as something for the tea drinker.

If you’re a tea drinker, you don’t drink coffee. It causes coffee gut rot and all bad breath. She also wanted to bring in men.

We came up with great names that were just not out there in the industry, like BFF, best friends forever, is a tea name and this great name, Cup of Jane, where we have a girl kind of spitting her tea out. We have a guy in a hammock and some other images that just were really not out there. It is challenging and exciting to work on something when somebody has an idea that they want to go in a different direction than everybody else. That was challenging and successful, but fun to work on. We even went so far to give out tattoos that said “Spout it Loud” at the tea show. It really stood out in what is a kind of stuffy and conservative industry and it’s becoming pretty popular, but still finds a way to stand out. It was cute and fun and it worked really well.

Do you do a lot of product testing before bringing a product to the market?

It really depends. We do a lot of new concept work. When someone’s coming up with a totally new product, we’ll create a new image (a new brand story) as part of the new product development process. Some of those things end up not working out. There are some things that we really work on in concept, that just end up being test dummies.

Do you have a testing team that you bring in to run tests?

We don’t. That would be something that we would have done with a marketing research firm. Some clients do old fashioned taste testing with staff or with friends. The clients have their own unique way of handling some of that. Sometimes the product is ready to go, already formulated before we get there, and sometimes it's happening side-by-side while we’re working.

Thinking outside of your company, what do you think is the best food package on the market right now?

There is so much I look at everyday. I recently was at a trade show and I looked at Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day, it’s a line of cleaning products that you can find in Whole Foods and Target. She does a really nice job with her image, her branding. The way she’s got her products branded, if you like the lavender scent, you can find the lavender dish soap, the lavender laundry soap, and the lavender wipes in a category instead of having all the dish soap lined up together. If you want your whole house to smell like a certain scent, you can go through your whole cleaning area and do it that way.

She’s done a really nice job with her image, her brand, and her product line. It all relates. The packaging is really consistent. I do see that as really challenging for companies and I like to see when it’s really consistent and ties together. That is one that I think has done really well.

There’s a new little product that I just found where I think the packaging is really well done. You may not have heard of it. It’s called Mary’s Gone Crackers. They are more health-oriented. I think that they’re no flour, lots of seeds. Maybe there might be some rice flour. They really did a nice job with their packaging. It’s got a beautiful design. There’s a cut-away in the box so you can actually see some product.

There’s a new line of Plum baby food products that was really well done. Its packaging is beautiful. It’s got some nice photography on it that is more baby-driven than the traditional big pictures of food on plates and food in big cups, so that’s really nicely done as well.

Can you say what brand that is?

Plum.

I thought you were saying that was the flavor.

Oh no, I know, it’s Plum. I’ve seen it in a couple of design trade magazines and I’ve seen it on the shelf. It looks really nice. There is so much that this is a difficult question. There are a lot of nice designs, a lot of nice packaging. I think the people who do it really well are the ones who are consistent in the way that all their products relate to each other. Once you’ve got that consumer trust and they can find your product right away, it becomes a much easier sale and you get to go back and try something else.

Tell me a little bit about the Women In Packaging Group.

I’m president of the Chicago chapter. I think this is my third year. We actually have people that come from Michigan because there’s a big school of packaging there at Michigan State University with a great packaging program.

We have a great group of women and actually our focus originally (when the organization started several years ago) was to help women specifically in the packaging industry that was once pretty heavily male-dominated. Right now, actually, when we have events, we’re about 50% men and 50% women.

We have a great group of people in the Chicago area that work in all aspects of the packaging industry. We have branding firms and packaging firms, like ours. We have people who are in the packaging manufacturing area (for instance, someone from a paper board packaging company and a plastics packaging company). We have people that are just from traditional CPG (consumer product goods) companies. There is a great mix of people who are looking to network, to grow their network, to really understand all aspects of the packaging world and what’s going on.

We offer meetings where we try to offer some cutting edge information. We’ve been having green packaging events once a year where we bring several people to talk about what green packaging is. Last year, we tried to articulate what that means: how you do it, how you can make changes, how these changes are starting to come to be, what materials may be available in the next few years that we can use, and how we can incorporate those into our work. Those have been some of our most highly attended events. We’re all just trying to make sure we know as much as we can about it.

I think there’s a very healthy market in food and in packaging in general in the Chicago area. It's nice to be able to come out and network and really meet people. It’s been an extremely valuable network for me. We do have a blog where we highlight stories and highlight things that we’re talking about. We also highlight some members on there. Whenever I need the answer to a question or whenever there’s a discussion, I have a great network of people in all different areas to talk to.

How many members are there?

Right now, about 35. But our meetings can be a little bit higher in attendance, depending on what there is.

If you could interview one person about food, who would it be?

I probably would have said Julia Child, but it’s too late for that. You know, maybe Paul Newman. I’m so intrigued by what he and his daughter have done with their organic food line. Probably sounds like a funny answer. But, I’m really impressed with their products and the work that they’ve been doing and it would be great to talk with them about their food line.

You know, for someone who’s made their money as an actor, his food line is really good. I think, probably, the first time I bought it, I may have been motivated by the benefit of doing something charitable, but I’ve gone back for more for years. Their Italian dressing is one of the best ones on the shelf. It just really is. It tastes really good and it would be good to talk with him about his relationship with food and running a company.

Janice Bissex and Liz Weiss, The Meal Makeover Moms, Part 1

2008-08-11T16:00:00.000-07:00

Janice Bissex and Liz Weiss, otherwise known as The Meal Makeover Moms, teach moms about how prepare nutritious foods for their families. They do so through their book (The Moms' Guide to Meal Makeovers), their website, and even a weekly podcast. In this two part interview, the moms reveal what they do to make over meals, share how they became the Meal Makeover Moms, and provide some tricks for moms looking for ways to get their kids to eat healthful food.

Leave a comment on part 1 or part 2 of this interview for a chance to win a copy of The Moms' Guide to Meal Makeovers! If you comment on each post, you will be entered twice! I will randomly draw two winners on Tuesday, August 19th.

Janice and Liz doing one of their podcasts.

What is a meal makeover?

Liz: That’s a good question.

Janice: It’s basically taking family favorite recipes and making them over to be healthier, kid-friendly, tasty, and easy to make. That’s what we do as the Meal Makeover Moms. That’s our goal.

Liz: We know that families struggle to eat a healthy diet. So, as dieticians and moms, we’re not sitting here saying, “You need to eat a perfect diet.” What we’re saying is, “Eat your favorites, but make them healthier.” You’ve got to keep them kid-friendly and like Janice said, you've got to make them taste great because that’s the number one priority.

Janice and I are both classically trained in the culinary arts, so we understand food. But, we also understand nutrition and that’s really the top priority because we know that kids don’t eat a healthy diet these days. We incorporate nutritious ingredients into everything we make. We don’t sneak them in, we incorporate them.

How did you two end up working together and becoming the Meal Makeover Moms?

Liz: I was working in Atlanta and I was a producer and reporter for the daily nutrition segment and the weekend program "On The Menu." It doesn’t air on CNN any more but this was back in 1987-1992 that I did that. I had a great experience there covering nutrition stories and food stories around the country.

I was at a conference, at a breakfast meeting, and sitting at my table was Janice. She, it turns out, was working for the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C., as their dietician, making sure that the dining rooms for the U.S. Senate had healthy offerings and working with the senators and their wives on getting rid of those big bellies, I guess. Janice, is that right?

Janice: Yeah, sort of.

Liz: And you can’t reveal what John McCain ate or Ted Kennedy, or anything?

Janice: Nope.

Liz: I thought she had the coolest job and I wanted to interview her for CNN but they wouldn’t let us in. The White House doesn’t let you in. I don’t know why. Anyway, Janice and I just became friendly and when I moved back up to Boston, I looked her up.

From there, we got to talking one day. She had kids, I had kids. I mean, years went by, and we were talking about how we can’t walk two feet on the playground without a mom stopping us and saying, “What do you give your kids for dinner? All my kids eat is mac n' cheese and Chicken Nuggets. I don’t know what to do.” This is back in the year 2000 or 2001 when obesity was just starting to make front page news - when the epidemic was really getting a lot of publicity.

It was very apparent that kids were eating an abysmal diet and parents had absolutely no idea what to feed their children and the school lunch was really bad. I mean, they were selling the worst foods. This was before a lot of attention was paid to this. We just said, “My gosh, we’ve got to write a book,” because we were successful feeding our kids and we wanted to help other moms and dads.

How long did it take to get the book written?

Liz: It wasn’t really that long once we had a lunch together and really talked about it.

Janice: And at first, I thought, “Oh, she’s out of her mind. I can’t imagine writing a book.” And then, I thought about it some more and said, “You know what? Maybe she’s on to something.” So, it took us probably a year. We wrote a proposal and got an agent and went to New York and met with publishers. It probably took a year to a year and a half of research and recipe testing and a lot of back and forth before the book was written.

Liz: And then we launched mealmakeovermoms.com as a companion website. We really took our book and we married it with the site so that people didn’t just have the book as a resource, but they had the website where they could communicate with us. We get emails all the time. In fact, right before our call with you, I started crafting a response to a mom who emailed us about our podcast. We’re constantly reaching out, building our platform, and being a resource for parents. We get a lot of questions and we answer every single one of them personally.

Janice: We started the blog about a year and a half ago, I’d say. Then, we started the podcast just a couple of months ago. So, we’re just sort of trying to expand our region - get our message out to more moms and dads and caregivers.

Liz: We’ve got cooking videos on the website. We’re really trying to take advantage of what the Internet has to offer and all the new technologies.

Grab-and-Go Granola Bars
Makes 16 Bars

These bars are perfect as an on-the-go breakfast, lunch box snack, or dessert.

1 cup Mom’s Best Naturals quick oats
1 cup Mom’s Best Naturals Toasted Wheat-fuls
1 cup walnuts
1 ½ cups dried fruit (we like a combination of dried apricots, dried plums, dried cherries, and dried cranberries)
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1/3 cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup mini chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly oil or coat an 8 x 8-inch baking pan with nonstick cooking spray and set aside.
Place the oats, cereal, walnuts, dried fruit, cinnamon, and salt in a food processor and pulse until the mixture is finely chopped (the dried fruit should be the size of a dried pea or lentil).
In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, honey, and vanilla. Add the oatmeal mixture and chocolate chips and stir to combine. Transfer to the baking pan and flatten down gently with the back of a spoon or spatula to spread evenly.
Bake 18 to 20 minutes until the edges turn golden brown and the bars are done. Let bars cool completely in pan before slicing and serving.

TIP: These bars freeze really well. So, if you have leftovers, wrap individual portions in plastic baggies or aluminum foil and freeze.

Nutrition Information per Serving: 170 calories, 7g fat (1.5g saturated, 0.7g omega-3), 85mg sodium, 26g carbohydrate, 3g fiber, 3g protein

Do you each still have independent jobs outside of this?

Janice: No. It’s a full time job.

Liz: We do consulting work on the side, we write for magazines, and we’re doing consulting work with Mom’s Best Naturals, a cereal company. It’s really been a great partnership for us. We do recipe development for them; we’ve done some media work for them where we’re able to communicate with the public about the fact that there’s a lot of so-called healthy and natural products out there but they aren’t necessarily nutritious or affordable.

The greatest thing about Mom’s Best Naturals cereals is they come in a family-size box and so you pay a lot less but you get more because they’re all whole grain (which is a huge thing for us) and very nutritious. They also take cereals kids love and give them a makeover, which is like what we do, by adding the whole grains.

We’ve connected with them and we’ve got some really awesome recipes. In fact, I would say the hardest recipe we’ve ever developed was our Grab ‘n’ Go granola bar [see recipe to the right], a homemade granola bar. It took us like 10 tries.

Talk about taste testing! We had a lot of neighborhood kids try it and we used Mom’s Best Naturals Shredded Wheat in that recipe and their oats. The other thing we love about them is it’s all about sustainability with that company. They use wind power to power the plant so the cereals are made from the energy from wind farms. They have a guy (we met him) who works for them on staff who actually is all about sustainability and reconfigured how they pack boxes so it’s more efficient when they are traveling around the country. It’s really cool stuff.

I think a lot of families today are eating with the environment in mind, not just kids and nutrition...

Janice: ...and cost.

When you created the recipes for the book, how did you divide the responsibilities?

Liz: That’s a great question. We actually started doing stuff individually at home and we realized that was just not going to work because I would say to Janice, “Well, why don’t you do this?” And she’d say to me, “Why did you do that? How many did it serve?” And I’m like, “Well, in my family….” So we decided we’re going to do all recipe testing together. We’d sit down, we’d brainstorm, and then we’d get cooking. We rarely get it right the first time. We often will do 2 or 3 times, or 10 times in the case of those Grab n’ Go granola bars. But, it’s much better when we’re together.

What we do is we sit down, type up the recipe, and Janice does nutrition analysis. She’s doing the math piece and I’m doing the writing piece. At that point, I’ll write a little intro, we’re sitting in the office together, and I’ll say, “Oh, how should I say…..” and we’d go back and forth. That’s where we divide and conquer, but together we do the cooking.

Have you grown to be really close friends?

Liz: We hate each other. [laughing]

Janice: When its 11:00 at night and I’m still working and we’re emailing back and forth, that’s really when I don’t like her very much at all.

Liz: Yeah, the podcast getting edited. You have to edit that thing and that takes a while.

Janice: But when we’re eating an avocado for lunch with olive oil, then it’s a little bit easier.

Continue to Part 2

Debby Fortune, Fortune PR, Part 1

2008-08-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

Debby Fortune and her husband, Tom, own Fortune PR, a PR firm that focuses solely on food. You may not have heard of her, but you have almost definitely heard of some the products she represents: Amy's Kitchen, Annie Chun's, and Amano Chocolate (Amano Chocolate was featured in a Food Interview).

In this two part interview, Debby talks about how food product companies and restaurants use PR firms, the role food bloggers play, food trends she has seen over the years, and the joy and fulfillment that she has enjoyed from owning a successful home-based business doing something she loves.

Debby Fortune loves working in her home office.

Tell me a little about Fortune PR.

We’re a boutique food agency in the San Francisco Bay area. We’re actually in Berkeley and we decided to be a home-based business a long time ago. We built ourselves a fabulous home office before it was popular to do so and now everyone’s jealous of what we have.

All we do is food because we felt that it’s what we both love and we also felt like you just can’t be too much of a generalist. You can’t really know everybody in this media world and we really like knowing the food people, so that’s where we focus.

I do products and Tom does restaurants. We offer a whole variety of services that way without being in each other’s hair too much - which is important if you want to stay married, of course. That’s kind of the secret to making it work. We both like to be the boss and that works out really well.

For people who don’t know, what is the difference between PR and advertising?

Advertising is something that you totally control because you pay the publication for space or time and you put what you want in there. It can be very, very expensive to buy a half-page ad or a full page ad or thirty seconds on NBC - huge, huge money.

PR is a whole different ball game. Essentially when you hire a publicist in a PR firm, we’re here to help you share your message and your product with appropriate journalists who actually write about things like what you do - to offer them samples to try for journalistic purposes and information about what your product is so that they can then write about you.

We’re sort of your lobbyist. There are people who can’t take samples, but usually the food writers can and that’s a good thing because they need to taste things and get things into their mouths and try them. Often, they need it way in advance to meet their deadlines so that it can come out in their magazines in a timely way.

We’re sort of the information packagers and we try to keep it really simple and give all the facts about your product: the price, what it’s made out of, where you can buy it, how it’s made, what’s special about it - to get it to people who are interested in it. That’s what a publicist does. We’re not spin doctors. We’re not about any kind of emergency or crisis management.

We’re about sharing interesting, delicious foods that small purveyors or medium-sized purveyors make with journalists who are interested in them. That’s really what it is. We don’t do advertising. There’s never any guarantee with PR. We can just share the information and it’s up to the journalist to decide whether he or she is really interested or really going to write about it. We’re kind of like reference librarians. We can get the information and the product to them within their deadlines/schedules and communicate with them in a way they like to be communicated with and hopefully you’ll get lucky and they’re going to like what you have to offer.

I’m really into the food part of how it’s made and how it tastes. In the kind of PR that I do, that’s what really matters. I mostly work with the magazines and bloggers, just like you, who care about good, quality food.

We have to go through crazy, careful processes to make sure, for example, that for our clients that make frozen products, they get there on time. A lot of detailed coordination goes into that like making sure your chocolate doesn’t arrive melted. We count on FedEx to do a good job for us. I won’t comment on when they don’t do a good job, although, that does happen occasionally.

I can only do so many clients at a time because we’re small and also because they can’t have any crossover. It’s so important to have no conflict of interest at any current time. I can only do one frozen meals company, one Asian foods company, one ice cream company, one bakery company, one chip company. I have to spread it around like that so that each one is unique and gets all the attention that it deserves.

Fortune PR is very careful about choosing which companies to represent. Here are a few companies on their client list.

Do most PR companies represent only one of each kind of company?

I think they should. Conflict of interest is really important. Think about it - Amy’s would never want me to be working with Seeds of Change or Kashi Frozen. It would not be right because I would then be offering up two similar products to the same writers and I have to be fully focused on taking care of the one brand that I can really work for.

I’m not sure how it works in a larger company, but I do think they have to be careful about that. We’re ultra-careful about that because we like to make sure that we’re giving all the attention we can to each specific type of food. It makes our clients feel like they’re number one and they should be because they are paying us a lot of money to do a good job for them. I think that’s important and we do have one chip company, one ice cream company, one Asian food company, one bakery company, one frozen foods company, and one chocolate company.

We sometimes work with retailers. We worked with Andronico’s Market which is a small really nice chain of groceries and we’ve worked with coffee, we’ve worked with meat (we don’t do any meat right now, but there was the sausage company), we’ve worked with Noah’s bagels (back when there was a Noah’s bagels – they were a big national chain), we’ve just about done everything.

We do a small Italian company A.G. Ferrari that imports foods from Italy - beautiful vinegars and oils and cheese. It’s named after Paul Ferrari’s grandfather that started the business. They are really cute little stores. They are here in the Bay Area, not national yet, but you can go to their website and order anything to be shipped. If you like Italian food, it’s a great place to go. The farro that they import is to die for! It is so delicious. Italian farro rocks! You just cook it up like would spelt or pasta or you can make it into a salad for a risotto. I can’t think of a better way to get a whole grain. It’s is absolutely delicious!

How is the PR process different with restaurants?

With the restaurants, it’s a little different and Tom has his special way of doing it. It's essentially the same thing, but what Tom will do is make sure that he knows everything that he needs to know about the restaurant - when its going to open, information about the chef, information about the menu, in advance.

Particularly with restaurants, I think the local newspaper food sections really want to know what’s happening in their local community. It’s about knowing when it’s going to open and then making sure that the people who do reviews are aware that it’s open. There’s no control on the reviews, but just making sure they know about it. Sometimes there’s a ‘What’s New?’ section. They really like to get in there quickly. I think they count on people like us to let them know when the actual opening time is so they can get a photographer in there and have it in their food section within the first week or so and let people know about it. Often they’ll send people in to dine who just give you some of the details, not necessarily a review, but to let their readers know what’s happening.

Then, later on, the reviewers come in - after they’ve been open a while to reach their potential when they are really working at their best. You don’t want to go in and review them in the first week, it’s just not fair and they usually come in several times to get a good review.

Tom will create a press kit that has all the things a journalist needs: menus, fact sheets, hours of operation, a bio on the chef, where the chef came from, maybe who the owners are, historical property (what they need to know about that), sometimes pictures of food - just every detail that you’d read about in an article or in a review and making sure that all that is super easy for them to get in press release format.

He works with journalists like John Mariani and reviewers who write for national publications and invites them to come in when they can or when they come around to be sure to drop by. So, it’s kind of the same thing. Being a good librarian of all the information of your clients and making sure that everyone knows what’s new. Everyone wants to know what the new, hottest place is in the Bay Area.

There’s usually not as long of a sustained relationship doing restaurants. You get them open, you help them through the opening parties, make sure all the local reviewers know, make sure national reviewers know, and then after that, it kind of fades out. Sometimes there are maintenance things to do like sending chefs off to the James Beard House to do events or to Aspen Food and Wine and helping them field calls. When you have a really famous chef like Nancy Oakes, a lot of people want information continuously.

With a product company, we’re always dealing with new product introductions and that’s a really, really important part of the PR spectrum. Often, that’s coordinated with different shows like the Natural Products Expo. A lot of companies will introduce their products in coordination with those shows. It just kind of makes sense.

Hungry Girl is a blogger who works with Debby. Debby says that Hungry Girl's Cookbook rocks!

When did you begin to use food bloggers for PR?

I really believe in my core that the food bloggers are the future. Over the last 20 years, we’re seeing newspapers disappear. One big company buys up all the local papers – here in the Bay area we get a whole bunch of different newspapers – 6, 7, 8, 9 all have the exact same food section every day, because they were all bought up by one. It’s like the USA Today effect where it’s all the same news, the same story. The economy of newspapers is going down and as they sadly disappear, the food bloggers are rising. Talk about variety and special interest and interesting characters and great writers! I think it’s absolutely the future.

We started this [working with food bloggers] maybe 2 years ago. We started it with Amy’s. Because of Amy’s being a vegetarian company and being great for weight loss and special diets, Amy’s had a variety of products that are friendly to people with Cesoliac Disease and children who had food allergies. We noticed that these particular special interests are really represented in the blogs, because people are trying to help each other. We started reaching out the same way we would to food editors, offering samples and information, and we saw it was growing and happening.

We had another client that made allergen-free foods and there’s a huge amount of people being supportive to one another - bloggers helping with raising children with food allergies and people with Celiac Disease. So, the special interest sector is sort of where it started for us and then from there.

We have hugely made efforts to get to know as many bloggers as we can in as many different categories that’s appropriate for our clients - ones we enjoy reading, ones we think are doing a really great job. A really good one is Hungry Girl. She’s done an amazing job. She started this really fun food blog. Talk about a funny turn – what happened then is some of her stories ended up getting syndicated in newspapers. Now, she has a cookbook out which just rocks and is enjoying incredible, deserved success.

We’re noticing, too, that other media sources like magazines and TV shows such as the Today Show and Martha Stewart that often have on a guest editor who will talk about an article like, “Great Foods to Power Up Your Diet” with the Food Editor from Body+Soul. They are now having bloggers come on to talk about food and fashion.

I was just on Southwest Airlines yesterday and picked up the magazine Spirit, and lo and behold, there is an entertainment article on fun things to do, TV shows not to miss, DVDs to buy, and great blogs to check. One of them is called Cupcakes Take the Cake. We emailed Rachel (who I’m sure you know) and she didn’t even know – and she was like, “Oh my God, we didn’t even know!” so we scanned it for her and sent it to her. It didn’t seem to be in the online version.

It’s interesting how the newsmakers are now news. It’s telling us how powerful these blogs are and I’m so on-board with it. I so believe in it. I find new ones that I like every day, I wish I could spend more time on it. We’re just building up our database of special interest bloggers and food bloggers.

How does working with the bloggers compare to working with people in traditional media?

It’s funny that you would ask that. Other people have asked that and I didn’t really understand. I don’t know that other publicists are embracing quite this as much and I hope that they will.

Frankly, I don’t see it any differently than working with a food editor. We treat them with respect and offer information and offer product samples and they want all the same information: Where can I buy it? How much does it cost? What’s it made of? What does it taste like? I just see them as freelance writers and food editors just the same as anyone else out there.

We treat them the exact same way - hopefully, respectfully and on time, on deadlines. They need photos just like everybody else and they need samples to arrive at their doorstep on the correct day. It’s the exact same - they’re just delightful to work with.

One of the only problems we may have is that sometimes there will be a blog that won’t give enough information on how to reach them. That’s frustrating because sometimes we have something that they would really love but they don’t even have an email on there on how to contact them. But, usually there’s an email address and that’s all you need we just send a query saying, “We work with this. Would you be interested?” and they either say, “No thanks,” or they say, “Yes.” Mostly, they say, “Yeah – we want to know,” and that works out really well. It’s pretty easy. They’re obviously super email-savvy people and that makes our lives really great.

I never even mail out press releases any more. Everything is email. We are wasting a lot less paper these days.

Are there a lot of PR firms that specialize in foods?

I don’t think there are. There are some, but they usually have a mix of food and consumer products. I think we’re unique. There are some that do mostly food or mostly restaurants. They’re probably small shops, like us – boutique firms. You might find one or two of them in every major market.

You can’t build a really big firm on that, because you have to have so much more. You have to have a big base to be really safe – just like so many of the firms that were dot-com only. They aren’t even around anymore. They are long gone.

You have to think about the sustainability of your business. You can totally sustain a small business on food. I could probably do this in New York. But, I don’t know if I could do this in any other location in the US. The San Francisco Bay Area is so foodie-savvy and there are so many companies here. I may be wrong. I don’t really know. I think you can build a little firm, but you can’t build a big firm.

Ketchum is an example of one that’s pretty food-focused, but they are also an advertising agency. They do so much more with marketing and things that we just don’t do. We’re really, really, specialized in our little niche that we do and we can do that because we’re really small. We really have no desire to be big. For us, bigger is not better. It’s really about just having a great, sustainable business for ourselves and the few people that freelance with us.

We love working at home and with the price of gas right now, it is really nice to not commute anywhere. It’s the best! We’ve raised two kids and it’s been really satisfying for us to have them turn around (now that they are 19 and 16) and say to us with no prompting, how lovely it was that we were always around, that we weren’t commuting long hours away, that they knew we were here.

It was fun for them to see us working and to help us out in the office, whether it was fixing the computer or stuffing envelopes or packing boxes of chocolate or something. They’ve always been part of it. It’s been a really fun thing for them to grow up that way.

I’ve definitely raised two pretty intense foodies. Charley is learning how to cook now and I call Henry my sous chef in the kitchen.

Someone else who’s raised her children in the food industry is a writer, Bonnie Tandy Leblang. She’s wonderful. She’s a writer for Parade. She’s has her own email newsletter called Bite of the Best she writes also for the United Press Syndicate a column called Supermarket Sampler – she still writes that with Carolyn Wyman. She’s built an amazing business.

She has two sons and now her two sons work with her on Bite of the Best and they are total foodies. It’s really cool. She’s really an interesting lady.

It is possible to create your own little niche that you feel like you can do and then live it. I feel really lucky. I’ll never be really wealthy, but I feel grateful for what we’ve been able to do. It’s certainly provided us with a great life. I have a lot to be very thankful for.

Continue to Part 2

Stephanie O'Dea, A Year of CrockPotting, Part 1: How It Got Started

2008-08-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

Stephanie O'Dea writes A Year of CrockPotting where she tries a new CrockPot recipe every single day. In this three part interview, she talks about how she got started with CrockPot blogging and why. She describes the benefits of cooking in a CrockPot and lets us in on some of her favorite recipes. Lastly, she talks about her recent experience as a guest on the Rachael Ray Show.

Stephanie O'Dea loves her CrockPot!

How did you get started with CrockPot cooking?

I really wanted to start a blog and I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of sharing too much family information. I really enjoyed reading the food blogs, but I’m not much of a cook. The only way I know how to cook is in the CrockPot.

I was joking around with my husband and said, “You know what I’m going to do - start a CrockPot blog. The only way it will work is if I turn it into a New Year’s resolution." Instead of telling me I was mad, he said, “Hey, that’s a good idea! You should do it!” Then, it turned into a challenge to see if I could really do it.

Are you saying that the resolution was a tool to make the blog a success?

I knew through BlogHer [Stephanie works for them] that in order for me to answer bloggers' questions, I needed to know what I was talking about. I had to start a blog and it just happened to be all happening in December.

Also, I like writing. I have a book coming out in the Spring on household organization for moms, and I knew that I wanted to have a presence online, but I couldn’t necessarily write about that kind of stuff because I was trying to sell it in the book form.

Tell me more about your book!

The working title is “Totally Together: A Daily Organizational Journal for the Busy Household” or something like that. It will definitely have the “Totally Together.” I’m now in the second rung of editing it.

I had been trying to sell this book for quite a while and the book got sold. It had nothing to do with the blog. It’s just interesting that it sold when I let my focus relax and stopped being so uptight. Depending on my mind frame, I can look at it as the universe needed me to relax.

I am excited about the book and it looks like when the year of CrockPotting is over, I’ll start a blog related to that. I have the URL.

Let’s get back to the blog.

I was intrigued by the idea of moms making money from home without spending any money. So, I purposely started a Blogger blog and didn’t put any money into buying a URL or upgrading any of our computer equipment or camera equipment. I was just interested to see if you could start something from nothing.

If you look at my first month or so of recipes, they are pretty lame - like open a can of chili and put it in the CrockPot. It wasn’t until the ads were up and I started making a little bit that I started becoming more adventurous with the ingredients. Now, it’s just fun. I have people constantly emailing and suggesting things: “Hey – my grandma used to make this. Can you do this in the CrockPot?” “I don’t know. I’ll check it out!”

Are you able to make money with your blog?

I have two small children and so I do work from home. I have a few different freelance writing jobs that I do. I like the idea to show moms that if you are staying home, you can make a little bit.

This is definitely supplementing our grocery bill. Although, we are cutting even because I am shopping more. But, we are also not eating out this year.

One other thing with getting the blog started - Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes had posted on BlogHer about how to have a highly trafficked blog. I followed her steps. I chose to spell CrockPot wrong in order to get the misspelled Google searches. CrockPot is actually spelled Crock-Pot. I spell it wrong. I figure if you type it in correctly, you’d get the actually crock-pot website. I figured if people were Googling, spelling it wrong, maybe they would end up on my page. I get probably half Google searches and half people who I guess are bookmarked.

Are there any recipes that you tend to avoid?

Most of my recipes try and steer clear of the cream of mushroom type soup. Many CrockPot books have that as a base. Because they’ve already been done, it just seemed a little bit like cheating: "Hey, let’s cover pork with a cream of mushroom soup. Now, let’s cover this with cream of mushroom soup. Everything tastes good when covered with cream of mushroom soup!"

I did make our own cream of mushroom soup in the CrockPot and I froze it in little baggies and that’s quite flavorful and delicious. It’s brown, which is a little off-putting if you grew up with white.

Also, everything we do is gluten-free, so we have an additional hardship. Does this not work because it’s gluten-free, or because we did it in the CrockPot? You never know.

Readers don’t seem to care if it tastes good or not, as long as you’re honest: “Good for you! You gave it a go!” They are very sweet. The blogosphere is very forgiving to honesty!

Why are you doing gluten-free?

My three year old has Celiac and we decided as a family to all eat gluten-free.

Do you ever make last minute meals?

I have a pretty elaborate schedule and checklist. I do plan ahead for meals. We always have the makings in the house for quesadillas and for sandwiches and salad stuff, so we’re not going to starve.

Some of Stephanie's readers said she was cheating when she repeated recipes for a CrockPot party.

Do you ever make recipes more than once?

There are times when we’ll make a dinner that’s really good and I’ll repeat it for the kids for lunch or if we are having company. I’ve made the desserts and appetizers quite a few times for company but I don’t repost them. If you read the resolution, all I said is that I would use it every day. But, once I posted a CrockPot party and I had all of my different CrockPots lined up. I used the same recipes and I had a few people email me telling me that I was cheating (which is pretty silly, since it’s my own thing), but I feel like they actually want 365 recipes.

One other thing that is a bit of challenge is that I can’t perfect recipes because I don’t have time to try them two or three times to see if I only cooked it this long or added this spice, what it would be like. I wouldn’t call it a challenge, but it’s something I’m aware of that I feel I need to be very honest with people and say, “If I made this again, I would probably do this and this different. But, I don’t have time to make this again, so you do this for me and tell me what it’s like.”

Have you ever wanted to stop?

There have been a few times when the kids will roll around on the floor and say, “I don’t want to eat out of the CrockPot!” But, they kind of rally around it. They know that it’s just for a year and it’s fun. They joke around and they’ll make up things. My 6 year old keeps bringing me things she has made up to put in a CrockPot – like a pound of butter and two apples. I think in their brains, they think that anything you put in there turns into a magic machine and it will taste good.

I made macaroni and cheese the other day and it was really tasty.

Stephanie’s child in the background: Dad threw it away.

Stephanie: Yeah, Dad threw it away. We left it out on the counter overnight and we had to throw it away.

I don’t like to cook. I don’t miss the stove at all. I don’t like oil splatters on the stove. Little things like – I’ll put on a pot of soup for lunch for the kids and then I wander off and all of a sudden it boils over. That doesn’t happen in a CrockPot. I feel like it was made for the absentminded chef (which is apparently what I am). I have a bunch of things happening all at the same time – always. I can put this on and walk away for six hours and not have to constantly check on it.

What do you do if you need to go on a vacation?

There’s been a few times where we have needed to travel that I’ve cooked two or three things at once in different CrockPots. We’re halfway through and I haven’t had too much of an issue with getting it done.

Continue to Part 2

Chris Reed, Reed's Inc.: Part 1, About Reed's Inc.

2008-07-27T20:32:00.000-07:00

In this four part interview with Chris Reed of Reed's Inc., Chris talks about the growth of his company from a small soft drink start-up to becoming one of the top 100 beverage companies in America with products in over 100 supermarkets nationwide. Chris also talks about the process of learning to make ginger ale, and more recently, developing Virgil's new Real Cola. You'll see that for Chris, ginger is not just a tool for cash, it is a passion. Although I interviewed him over the phone, I could almost see the joy in his face each time he talked about his favorite herb.

Chris Reed thought that Ginger Brew would be a good way to "dose people up on ginger."

Can you give us a brief history of Reed's?

I am a chemical engineer by trade. I designed oil and gas refineries. Also, I got into cryogenics with refined natural gas – L & G, they call it. I had what they call not a midlife, but a third life crisis, and got the heck out of it.

I decided that I wanted to start my own company with alternative energy. That was very appealing to me (it still is) and natural food, since I had been studying a lot of herbology out of India. I thought, “We need more ginger in the U.S. diet.” It’s good for digestion and lots of people, especially in natural foods, were eating a lot of what I consider to be indigestible stuff. I said, “Okay, this is a help for digestion and would be really perfect.”

I decided to set up a business around ginger and then I settled in on ginger ale because it was the least gingery ginger product out there and a wonderful vehicle for dosing people up on the herb ginger.

I started off very altruistic, idealistic. I wanted to change the world. I wanted to improve everybody’s health and I thought it would be through soft drinks. I spent two years researching and developing the recipe. I spent time at UCLA, all pre-Internet, because I am an old fart now (I turned fifty this year). This was like ’87, ’88, ’89.

I would go over there and study, use their computers, and go into old recipes for making ginger ale and eventually stumbled upon pre-commercial sodas and found the homebrews people used to make for root beer, ginger ales, and cream sodas back before there was any soft drink industry.

I started brewing up. I was totally fascinated, especially as an herbalist. It made total sense that you would use the whole root and get the whole benefits of the root. I was very passionate about this and we are the first and only commercially brewed soda in the world that makes soda the way sodas were made a couple of hundred years ago, and commercialized for our economy.

I launched and we went to a small brewery in the San Fernando Valley. We brewed up the first batch of Ginger Brew. I went home, labeled the bottles, put them in my Volkswagen Bug, and put them out into the marketplace and we had people reorder within hours.

I didn’t know it would be accepted. I was going to make an authentic drink and those hardcore users would drink it. But, it actually ended up tasting better than the commercial ginger ales. It started out in eleven accounts and by the end of ‘89, I was running batches every month and distributors were asking me if they could have more product and start expanding the stores they were in - putting it their customers’ stores.

I got my first distributor at the end of the year and quickly ran out of production, so I moved production to Boulder. I went to the first natural food industry trade show at the beginning of ’90 and I picked up three new distributors and for the next year and a half, I could not keep up with sales. They were doing all the distribution.

The following year, I picked up a huge brewery in Pennsylvania and my products had already within in a year and a half made it through the whole natural food industry and I was in key accounts across the country - Whole Foods, etc. But during that time, the natural food industry went from two or three billion to 50 billion, today. So, I basically was pulled along.

They said, “Look, you have a very popular product. We are growing. Could you kindly give us more product?” So, I put out more products - acquired Virgil’s Root Beer, got up to six of my Reed’s Ginger Brews, got into ginger candies and ginger ice creams, and bought China Cola, a natural cola company. In ’02 or ’03, it became apparent that all of the category leaders in natural foods were going into mainstream and doing very well, like soy milk from Silk and White Wave out of Boulder. I jumped into that. I said, “I am going to test this out.” I had the number one selling drink in natural foods. So, I decided, “Okay, I’m going to try my hand in mainstream.”

We did really well in California. So, I went public in the end of ’06. At the end of ’07, we went on to NASDAQ. And now, we’re in about one hundred supermarket chains around the country, growing rapidly, and we’re just having a great time.

Were you surprised by the growth of your company?

It’s been a long haul. You’re very surprised when your kids go off to college and you remember them as a baby, but on some level it’s kind of a natural outgrowth of being there for your kids and feeding them and driving them to school and soccer practice for twenty years. I mean, we babysat the company - we showed up and worked very hard. It is a miracle still. There is no guarantee that everything will fall into place.

The products are extraordinary. I’m sure better entrepreneurs would have taken this a lot further than I’ve done so far. People like Darius at Vitamin Water or Seth Goldman at Honest Teas. Both of those guys would have moved this thing further along a lot faster. But, I’m not in a hurry. I’m not in a rush to go retire.

I’m just impressed. When I started this, I was just a weird cat with a weird product and they just did not get what I was doing. Now the whole culture that was pooh-poohing natural, making fun of yoga and meditation, has embraced what was fringe hippy stuff from the ‘60s. On some level, the world has caught up to where we were twenty years ago. That is shocking, surprising, and wonderful.

Has a lot changed since Reed's went public?

Yeah, now I have to clean my T-shirts and I have to tie my hair back into a ponytail. We have been pulling back from the Wall Street part of it. We spent a lot of time dealing with that and we said, “You know, the hell with this.” This is a tough economy and we are having a lot of success within it. We are so focused on the business of it. We just figure that at some point, Wall Street will get what we are doing and see the results there. But, we are very results oriented right now, and it’s not been as much of an impact as people normally think. But I will say this - it’s opened a lot of doors for us. I personally think for myself and my business, this was a better choice for us than other choices, like venture deals or just staying small.

How many employees does Reed's have right now?

I have about thirty-five. We outsource a lot. We have people produce for us. We use a lot of brokerage firms. I think if we had to do everything ourselves, we would be up to seventy or eighty people.

You have two colas, China Cola, and Real Cola. What’s the difference between them?

China Cola has been a staple in natural foods. It’s done well. China Cola was developed by someone else. But with the Real Cola, Whole Foods said, “Give me a cola with Virgil’s, and you’re in.” So, our salespeople kind of beat me up and made me do it. But, we had a lot of fun. We tasted every cola we could find until we blind tasted our stuff and it came out better than anyone else’s by a long shot. That’s when we launched it. The cola aficionados are really loving it.

China Cola has its fans and it has herbs in it which are important, but Virgil’s cola was about making the ultimate cola. Blind taste, hands down, this is it, whereas China Cola is different. I think a lot of people appreciate it over Coke or Pepsi. But in blind taste tests, it wasn’t beating Coke or Pepsi.

It was very hard to beat Coke or Pepsi. They are very good colas. In our blind tests, people really chose them more often than you’d think. There were one or two of the smaller brands that did a good job. There weren’t very many good alternative colas. A lot of people stay away from cola when they go designing a product because it is such a scary territory, but we didn’t really care what Coke or Pepsi would do. We wouldn’t have put it out if we couldn’t have done a better job. I’m quite prepared to leave it to other people if they do a better job at it. There’s only one reason for me to launch something: it’s that it’s just not being properly done.

How has the downturn in the economy affected your sales?

We probably are having trouble with sales because of the economy, but that aspect of our business is blurred by the fact that we have one hundred supermarket chains that we’ve never said hi to. So, our guys are going in there and saying, “Let’s do business.” And these guys are saying, “Well, maybe we can go up five or ten times this year.” Sounds good. So, you take the economy which has probably hit us 25 percent, then you take never doing any marketing properly and finally executing with some top people from Pepsi that we’ve hired, and you get good growth - if not great growth. We are concerned about the economy, but not seeing it reflected in our business.

Continue to Part 2

Chuck Cordray, Delish.com

2008-07-24T12:30:00.000-07:00

Delish.com (to be launched in the Fall) is a partnership between Hearst Magazines and MSN today. Their July 8 press release stated that "MSN and Hearst anticipate that Delish’s traffic numbers will immediately place the site into the top 10 food-related destinations online."

In this interview, Chuck Cordray, vice president and general manager of Hearst Magazines Digital Media, talks about what will set Delish apart from the other food sites already available and why he thinks it has what it takes to immediately be a top food site.

Can you give us a brief overview of Hearst Digital Media and your role there?

Hearst Digital Media, with the launch of Delish, will be at twenty-four sites and those are a combination of sites related to our magazines Goodhousekeeping.com, Redbookmag.com, etc. as well as pure digital sites that we have launched or acquired like Thedailygreen.com, Realage.com, and Kaboodle.com. Our total is twenty-five milion uniques a month. P&L, sales, and content engineering report in to me.

How did the idea of Delish.com come about?

I think it was an opportunity for both MSN and for Hearst. Each party obviously brings something different to this. Hearst has a long heritage through our magazine brands with food, recipes, and entertaining content. As we looked at the experiences online, we thought there was an opportunity to create a brand online that is a little bit different - to use the latest technology to make a really interactive experience for home cooks.

Home cooks have a whole range of interests that they are trying to serve – some nights it’s, “I want to get something on the table in 30 minutes,” and other nights it’s a very different experience of a dinner party where you want to really impress everybody. It’s different needs at different times – different interests from, “OK, this is my healthy meal,” or, “This is my indulgent meal.” We wanted to make it really easy for people to find what they want when they want it and be part of the food community.

Both in our editorial approach and our technical approach, our goal is to deliver that experience in a way that people are really loyal to the site. Most people who look for food today start in a search box. We want to get people thinking, “Wow! The best place for me to go for food and entertaining is Delish.com,” and to start with us.

Over time, we want that delightful experience to bring people back. As for Hearst and MSN working together, obviously as one of the largest portals, MSN has huge reach. Their ability to distribute this content out to a massive portion of the online audience was a great pairing with our content capabilities and our abilities to design user experiences. So, it was natural evolution of the deals that we had already together for content syndication that has continued to expand.

What can we expect the format of the site to be like?

There are certain things that are basic, that you have to have if you want to be a food site. Obviously, we will have a significant base of recipes from both Hearst and from other parties – partners that will be syndicating content into Delish. The basics we have covered, and then to that we are adding in very significant customizations and community functions.

On top of a really solid base of user generated recipes and our edited recipes, the recipe finder has new and innovative meal planners, interactive shopping lists, and event planners, all built into it, making it really easy for people to filter back and forth from one to the other. They are integrated in a very user friendly way. We’ve really worked hard on our recipe tools to make them intuitive and to build in community.

We are also focusing the content in somewhat different ways. There is a lot of focus on the fun and entertaining aspects of food; for example, firehouse food. We are going to do “Hunky Firemen – What do they do to feed the firehouse?” It’s fun. It’s interesting.

We really want people to participate as part of the community - sharing with friends (either real world friends or people you meet online). There is a huge community around food and we think there is a real opportunity to use technology to enable that in new ways. Rewarding people who participate in the food community will be a central part of what Delish is all about.

In what ways will people be able to build community on Delish? Are you referring to discussion forums and commenting on recipes?

All of the above and more. We will allow people to version our recipes. For example, in a Good Housekeeping recipe you say, “I like this, but I like nutmeg instead of cinnamon.” Then, great, create a version and make that version available to the community. Share your version with some people or share it with everybody. We think those sorts of easy interactions are critical to really making the site differentiated and why people will want to come back to it.

Will there be a print version of Delish?

This is strictly online. Obviously, we hope the brand will grow dramatically and who knows where it will go. Where we are starting, it is a online property for the foreseeable future.

Your press release states that you expect Delish to be one of the top ten online food sites at the time of the launch. How will this happen?

Well, this comes back to the power of MSN’s distribution as one of the largest portals. Food is now part of a lifestyles channel within MSN. To get to food within MSN, you first go to lifestyles and then find recipes as a part of that. With the launch of Delish, food and entertaining will be its own channel and obviously that will then receive significant promotion from the Hearst side and then, obviously, significant promotion from MSN. Given the distribution power of MSN, we anticipate that we will launch as a top ten site.

Who is your target audience?

We do have our expectations of who the property will attract, but I think in many ways, part of the key is the mindset of the user. We expect it to be more female than male, but we don’t want it to be exclusionary. The site is for, frankly, a wide range of cooks and cooking interests. Part of what we are trying to do in terms of design and reach in content is to make it easy for people to find the things that they need about a food experience, so theoretically our audience is anyone who is interested in cooking at home.

There will be restaurant recipes as well, and the fun elements of food and entertaining will also be part of the mix - interesting facts about food, great restaurants, and celebrity chefs. Whether it’s part of the recipe you are going to cook tonight or not, it is part of the food experience and part of the interest that we will serve with Delish.

What have you enjoyed about working on Delish?

For me, the fun is in designing a user experience that sort of surprises and delights people. If we can anticipate what people need next and give them that better service of: I’m cooking with buttermilk. The recipe calls for buttermilk. I only need half a cup in the recipe. Here are five other buttermilk recipes to use the rest of that quart you had to buy.

That kind of useful advice that helps people in their daily lives is fun – trying to figure out how we do that in an easy way so that it’s not overwhelming. It’s easy to overwhelm people with too much information so how do we do it from a design and technology standpoint so people feel like there is an endless depth, but not problems in terms of accessing that depth.

What has your biggest challenge been in developing Delish?

The biggest challenge is always doing something on a timeframe. We have worked very quickly and very well with Microsoft on combining our ideas and needs on how to serve these audiences. It has worked really well, but we’ve been on a tight timeframe.

What was that timeframe?

It’s probably a six month timeframe for the majority of the real site work. For a site that will be a top ten food site, that’s fast.

What is the size of the staff on Delish?

We’ve had different people from Hearst Digital Media working on this, so we’ve drawn from existing staff and then also we are bringing in new staff devoted specially to Delish. As a private company we have the luxury of not revealing financials and statistics on staff, so we just don’t do that. But, what we have done is use some of the existing Hearst Digital Media staff from the other twenty-three sites to fill in as we staffed up for Delish.

Are you talking about hundreds of people?

No, no, no. More in tens than hundreds and much closer to ten than a hundred. Part of that also is because we have a base of infrastructure at Hearst Digital. There are obviously basics that we can reuse, so we can scale more quickly because we already have an existing infrastructure.

Who will be writing for Delish?

That’s something that we are not comfortable saying yet. As we get closer, we’ll be doing more unveils about people who are participating. Some are already signed up and some are already in negotiation. But, we do plan to have a great deal of contributors beyond the Hearst and Microsoft contingents. There will be significant outside contributions to the site.

Are you a foodie?

I am kind of a foodie. It depends on how you want to define foodie. I love to cook. I am not an esoteric, gourmet cook, but I really like food and I like the cooking experience. I like trying new things, so this has been a fun project for me.

If you could interview one person about food, who would it be?

I have such a range of interests in food because I like a little bit of all of it. I think I’d have to go with Julia Child. I’m sure that’s the safe answer. But, she did so much for how America thinks about food and I love the fact that she really didn’t cook until I think 40. She was in her late 30s or early 40s when she decided, “This is something I want to learn about.” She just explored it and made it work for her - made it work for the country in a way nobody else had to that date. She was pretty amazing.

In a lot of ways, she really started it all. I’m sure some people would disagree with that, but it’s kind of amazing to me what she did – from I don’t know about this and I want to learn, to let me help everybody.

People think she did it forever - of course, she was the authority. No she wasn’t. She just started teaching herself and started getting instruction. It’s sort of the - anybody can cook, like Ratatouille. Julia Child started late in life and decided this was going to be a passion for her. I respect that.

Nupur Kittur, One Hot Stove: Part 1

2008-07-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

Nupur Kittur moved to the United States from India in her twenties. In this two part interview, she talks about Indian food. We learn about kitchens in India, Indian customs, her thoughts on Indian food in the United States, and whether we should even be using the term "Indian food." Nupur has been writing the popular food blog One Hot Stove for the past three and a half years. She plans to take a break from food blogging in August. She will be missed by many!

When did you move from India to the United States?

I moved here when I was about 22. I lived in India the whole time before that - in western India. I was born in Bombay and I grew up in a small town, about a St. Louis sized town, which is about an overnight journey from Bombay. Then, I moved to Bombay again after I finished tenth grade. I lived there for a few years going to college before coming to the United States.

What is your first food-related memory?

That is a really strange memory actually. It’s an Indian custom. I don’t know where it comes from. When you are little child, they have a little ceremony. They have a little pot of puffed rice, something that looks like Rice Krispies, and you have some berries in there and some sugar crystals. It’s this big pot of yummy stuff and they pour that on the baby's head. I don’t know what the significance is, but it’s a little ceremony.

I remember having the ceremony with the neighbor’s kid who was the same age as me. I was really happy and alert and interested the whole time and he was crying his head off. We were toddlers, maybe a year or two years old or less than that.

Were you always interested in cooking?

My family was a little different from most families in India. In most families that I grew up looking at, girls were sort of expected to learn how to cook as part of their growing up. Some of my girlfriends’ moms would say things like, “If you can’t cook, you won’t be able to take care of your family when you grow up.” But, I grew up in a family where nothing of that sort was ever expected of me: “Do what you like, cook if you like, not if you don’t.” But, it was a family that was always very interested in food.

My mom was an excellent cook. My parents would collaborate to bake our birthday cakes. My grandfather was a dentist, but his family owned a bakery – this was way before my time - so I never saw that. But, they knew how to bake bread and cakes and all of those things and my grandfather helped my mom learn how to make cakes. The whole time I was growing up, my mom would bake a cake and my dad would sort of plan the theme of the cake and ice it/decorate it. It was such a wonderful thing that they did year after year.

It was a household where food was really enjoyed a lot and it was never a woman’s thing or a man’s thing. It was just really enjoyed.

My mom [who is a doctor] had this wonderful lady come in to cook lunch every day the whole time we were growing up (even now she does). The kitchen was sort of the center of the house, as it is for most households, I guess. We’d wander in and she’d be cooking and she’d say, “Shell these beans" or, "Shell these peas." We’d watch her and sit there and chat and then she’d give us little tidbits from what she was cooking. I never officially learned to cook. I just picked it up from watching my mom and this lady.

I guess when I really started cooking was when I moved to Bombay and I was living with an Aunt, my mom’s younger sister. This was somebody who hated to cook and she had a kitchen that had absolutely nothing - she had no pantry. She would order take out all the time and we’d go out to eat. She had a great job, so she enjoyed not having to cook. I loved getting to go out. What teenager wouldn’t? But at some point, I just missed home-cooked food.

I started cooking in her kitchen (just little things here and there) because I wanted to eat home-cooked food once in a while. That was when I really think I started cooking on my own, in my mid-to-late teens.

Tell me more about these birthday cakes.

Birthday parties are mostly a Western import in the last few decades - when you had influences from other parts of the world. That’s when the concept of the birthday party came about, with cake, candles, and balloons. It’s now typical that we have that in India as well.

Most families that I knew of wouldn’t bake cakes at home even if they had a birthday party for their children, they would usually get the cake from a local bakery. But, my parents did it at home because they had this know-how of baking because the family had a bakery at some point a generation ago. Also, when my mom got married, her classmates from med school all got together and pooled their money and got her a nice oven, sort of a plugin tabletop oven.

What is a plugin tabletop oven like?

Indian kitchens don’t have built-in ovens like American kitchens. The tabletop oven is like a toaster oven. It is a device that you can place anywhere and plug in. A standard 9x13 pyrex dish wouldn’t fit in there. A cookie sheet wouldn’t fit in there. What would fit in there is like a round cake tin.

She had a few little baking tins that she knew would work in there. There was no temperature control. You just plugged it in. It was just a metal box with a heating element that you plugged in and it had a little glass window at the top so you could peer in and see. It’s this aluminum thing that is so dented after thirty years of use, but it works. She still uses it!

It’s put in a storage place in their little store room and she pulls it out a couple of times a year to bake something. Baking is not something that you do on an everyday basis in India. The recipes are all stovetop – you only have the burners. Most of the other things you see that you may think of as Indian food like the naans and the breads and the tandoori chicken or whatever, those are mostly restaurant dishes. Even in parts of India where they come from, you have communal village ovens rather than each home having an oven.

This is from northern India where all of these tandoori recipes come from and they would have one big oven in the village, like the brick oven you use for pizza. It heats up to 800 or 900 degrees; the way your home oven never can. It’s a wood oven. Now, some people have their own ovens. But, the average person would not have an oven. If people can afford it, they can buy ranges that have ovens built into them (American style), or they can have what my mom does which is a stand alone oven that you can plug in and use whenever you need to - or she has something else called a tandori oven.

Can you describe the tandoori oven?

The tandoori oven is a vey funny device which sort of sits on your stovetop. It is sort of a container that makes an oven like atmosphere. It’s a cone that is on a flame. It has a dome so all together the space becomes likes an oven. Then, you can use that. It’s made of metal. It’s a very funny device, but it gives you that sort of hot space because it has the cone and the heat just comes up. You have a little mesh on top that you can place your food on and it has a domed lid which creates the air circulation with it on.

Note: Live to Cook has a photo of the stove top tandoor.

Nupur created this Gallery of Dals to demonstrate "the amazing variety; in size, from the wee moong dal to the gigantic butter beans; in color from the pale urad dal to the dark lentils; in shape and indeed, taste."

What differentiates Indian cuisine from other cuisines?

One of the main differences that really comes to my mind is that it’s not as heavily meat based. Indian food is based on grains and vegetables and beans whereas most cuisines that I’ve come across have meat as their focus and all of these other things as sides.

Indian food is based on plant foods – it’s vegetables, it’s grains, it’s a lot of beans. Go into an Indian store and just count the number of different beans and lentils that you have there. In an American supermarket, lentils are just the brown lentils - there is just one type.

Ever since Mexican food has come into the US, you have garbanzo beans. Some other types of beans have been introduced, but really you have very little variety. In India, every pantry will have 20 different types of lentils.

How would you compare the flavor of Indian cuisines to that of other cuisines?

Indian cooking obviously uses a whole variety of spices and seasonings, but so do most cuisines. I think in American cuisine and some European cuisines the seasoning is sort of salt and pepper. This is more unusual than the norm. There are so many herbs used in Mexico and in China. Indian food does have a great number of spices, but I don’t know about the reputation of Indian food as spicy food. I think that doesn’t make that much sense to me at all.

For instance, in India, American food is burgers and pizza - it begins and ends with burgers and pizza. That’s not really the truth, is it? It’s just like that when you talk about Indian food being spicy – yes it is spicy, but that’s hardly what I would call the one defining characteristic of it, personally.

How would you introduce Indian food to someone who has never tried it before?

Whenever I have people over to dinner or lunch that haven’t had Indian food, my personal way of doing it (because I really think that vegetables are celebrated in Indian cuisine) is to ask them what their favorite vegetables are. Any vegetable that you name has a delicious Indian way of making it. If you are a person who loves western ways of bread, go try some Indian bread. If you love meat, go try an Indian form of meat. Go with what you really know and love and try an Indian way of making it and you’ll see that it may be similar and different all at the same time.

Continue to Part 2

Chuck Lai, Food Gawker

2008-07-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

Chuck Lai started Food Gawker just days after the popular food porn site TasteSpotting temporarily closed it doors. It was a copy of the orginal, designed to fill the void, but it has found a style of its own and continues to thrive even after TasteSpotting's return. Chuck also writes a popular food blog, Sunday Nite Dinner.

How did Food Gawker come about?

We were big TasteSpotting fans obviously and we submitted an image two days before it actually stopped updating. We were monitoring it and wondering what the heck was going on. Finally, when the note came up saying that it was going down, we were kind of in shock like everyone else.

At that point, we just started speculating about the reason behind it going down – “legal issues” – what does that mean? Our first thought was copyright infringement, images being taken from other sites. They had issues in the past with that.

I was thinking to myself, I could build something within a couple of hours. I didn’t think too much about it. I went online on Thursday to find a registered domain name and stumbled on Food Gawker as an option and thought, “This sounds pretty good, let’s give it a shot.”

Before that evening, that Thursday, I thought, “I probably don’t want to get involved in this because if TasteSpotting ran into legal issues, then why wouldn’t I run into legal issues." I put that thought to bed and didn’t think anything else of it. Then, the next day, I was reading different forums and someone mentioned that they were planning on building a replacement to TasteSpotting. I thought, “What the heck! If they are going to do it, I think I can do something better.”

I almost gave up halfway through because I didn’t think I could do something well in terms of the image cropping stuff, but then I found something that was able to do it. Twelve hours later, on Saturday, while I was watching Tiger playing in the US Open, I launched Food Gawker. It was more of experimentation on my part, seeing if I could actually develop a TasteSpotting replacement quickly. It was a fun project to do, looking back at it.

You mentioned a “we”, who is “we”?

We is me and my girlfriend, a.k.a. Hungry Bear, on Sunday Nite Dinner. She is definitely more on the private side, so we try to keep her anonymous. She is sitting here listening to the conversation and raising her arms (silent commentary). Basically, it’s, "Don’t mention my name."

What is your background?

I’m not a developer - let’s get that out on the table first and foremost. I moved to San Francisco about ten years ago and I’ve always been involved in some type of web development or consulting. I worked for the big five at the time when I first moved here. I’ve worked for smaller Internet consultancies and ad agencies specializing in web application development, but definitely more on the project management side of things, leading teams of developers and designers and so forth.

I have a pretty strong background in developing web apps for typically large Fortune 500 companies – Microsoft , HP, Sprint, Continental Airlines, and other big websites. I quit my job with CNET about two years ago and went more into an entrepreneurial mode. I started my own online comparison shopping site called Sprenzy – like shopping.com or mySimon. It’s basically a notch above shopping.com API and Amazon.com.

I started that about two years ago and it went well the first year and then my partner kinda flaked out on me. It’s on the back burner at this point, but it’s still out there generating traffic and some revenue for me. Ever since then, I’ve been more doing consulting gigs and trying to figure out what my next step was in terms of this entrepreneurial mode that I’m in.

I think the funny thing is the whole reason I got into the food blogging community is my partner. I was waiting for him to finish some stuff up and I needed something to do. We were talking about starting a food blog for the longest time and I had time last year and needed to fill the void of work, so I started the food blog. I guess I have to thank my old business partner because if he didn’t flake out on me, then I wouldn't have started Sunday Nite Dinner and then I wouldn’t have been involved and I wouldn’t have known about this whole TasteSpotting thing.

Is Food Gawker a money-making venture for you?

Initially, when we first started going into this, money was not an objective. We just knew that it was going to be a void for food bloggers because we had the perspective of being on the other side - of realizing on a TasteSpotting-like site to build awareness and generate traffic for us. So, we knew immediately that people were going to miss it. I didn’t realize that the uproar of it going down was going to be that phenomenal.

Our intent was to build something to fill the void. It was kind of an overwhelming experience because we had no idea what the response was going to be like. As you know, I just threw it out there in the Twitter world, “Hey, I put up a site, check it out,” and next thing you know, you were the first one to submit, and then the avalanche of submitters came on. It was a fun, wild experience because we didn’t really have time to think things through.

I think we knew within the first four or five days that TasteSpotting was coming back online, but given legal issues, we didn’t know how long it was going to take. It could have taken a week, a month, or two months – we had no idea. I was just taking it day by day, filling the void and just giving an outlet for people to submit their photos and generate traffic and awareness to their sites.

Over the last couple of weeks, the response has been really positive for us. Now we are thinking about long term, but we are still taking it day by day and seeing how people react and if they continue to submit, then we can improve the site.

What do you see as the main difference between Food Gawker and TasteSpotting?

As I mentioned earlier, we were on the other side of the TasteSpotting site because we are food bloggers and we relied on it heavily to build traffic and awareness. We took the things we really liked about TasteSpotting and then tried to do some things differently to make it better than the original TasteSpotting.

One of the things that we noticed immediately that we were going to do was transparency. I know that we always thought that TasteSpotting was this big black box. You submitted your images and hoped they would get accepted and there were times when other images on the post were taken or things of that nature.

We decided that one of our goals was to keep people informed and be transparent in terms of when we are updating, what we are selecting, getting feedback from users, and responding immediately. Our transparency is in talking to the end user, whether it’s someone who is browsing the site for recipes or new food blogs.

That’s one thing. We’re still really in the process of trying to differentiate ourselves from TasteSpotting. I don’t really know how it is going to play out. We are really taking it day by day and really trying to improve the site in terms of the user experience for both people who submit and people who browse. We are trying to make it a good site for people who to look at recipes and look at pictures and find food bloggers.

What are your thoughts on some of the other food porn sites that have popped up, such as FoodPornDaily or FP Daily?

I think they are really cool. It’s just kind of amazing to watch. In the first couple of days that TasteSpotting was down, all of these different sites just popped out of the blue - there’s RecipeMuncher, NewTastings, tastefix, and I can just go on and on.

It’s been really interesting to see what the different spin was and how they would decide to not replace - to just offer us other food porn pictures to see. I think I really like what the two food porn dailys are doing because they weren’t a direct copy or clone.

What’s kinda cool is that people were going to new sites that offer great food images to see. I thought that was really very interesting. I underestimated the whole food porn crave – food porn need. I didn’t realize that it was going to be this big of a deal.

On Food Gawker, you mention that you’ve received tremendous support from Jean of NOTCOT. What has her association with Food Gawker been?

It is more of just encouragement. I was kind of surprised when she reached out to us within the first week of launching because I didn’t know exactly what the legal issues were at that time. She sent us a note just encouraging us on, saying that she was impressed by how quickly we got it up and the quality of the selections of the pictures and things of that nature - just support, which was really great since I just basically copied her TasteSpotting site. Obviously there was some worry about how someone is going to react on that.

When I got that supportive email from her, it just validated to us what we were doing and made us feel good. If she’s accepting Food Gawker as a replacement for TasteSpotting, let’s move forward. Ever since then, it’s just been back and forth emails with her just kind of encouraging us on and giving us advice where she can – it’s very minimal at this point, but her support has really been more of a validation for us.

How do you select the photos on Food Gawker?

Well, I think first we consult a Magic 8 ball on each one. I think people are going to kill us if you actually write that down.

We have certain criteria, obviously. I think our first reaction is: Does this look good? Is it appetizing? If it does, then we pass it through the other criteria. Is it lit well? Is the composition done well? There are a whole bunch of factors. We are pretty picky.

We are trying to be picky to maintain a consistency and quality of the images we select to go on the site. We run through a list of the basic things on food photography. Is it styled well, composed well, exposed correctly, and is the lighting good? But ultimately, our first question is, is this appealing - does it make you say, "I want to try this recipe."

Does the page the photo links to come into play in your decision?

Absolutely. I think that’s the first thing we check. Does the picture actually belong to the post? Is it going to the right link and right post? The picture may belong to you, but if it doesn’t actually show up on the post, we may not accept it.

We’ve seen in the past on the old TasteSpotting where people were putting the wrong attribution and that caused a lot of issues with some food bloggers and we are very wary of that.

What about the caption?

We are not too concerned about the captions. It’s up to the people submitting to describe and sell their image. We really don’t evaluate that part very much. We’ll definitely change it if we see it misspelled, but for the most part, we’ll leave the caption as it is. It’s kinda like their photography. It belongs to them. It’s their description, so we don’t want to change it, we don’t want to get questions like, "Why did you change my description?" It’s your food, you know it the best, so you can describe it the best.

What percentage of photos make it on Food Gawker?

Right now we are running just under fifty percent that get selected and approved to go on the site. I guess it’s fairly tough to get on the site. I know that people are disappointed when their pictures aren’t selected, but when they do get selected, it is an achievement for them and we like that. We’d like to accept everybody’s pictures and I think that the worst thing that we do is to say no. But, I think to keep the quality of the site up, we kind of have to do that.

How much time do you spend working on Food Gawker?

The actual reviewing and moderating of images doesn’t take much time, it’s more the site enhancements and the redesigns. Those types of things are eating up lots of time. Right now, it is more than a full time job. I am fortunate that I wasn’t involved in a client project at this time to have the time to do this. The timing worked out well for me.

How large is Hungry Bear’s role in the site?

She’s one of the moderators – maybe I shouldn’t have said that, now people are going to stalk Hungry Bear. She’s definitely very involved. If she wasn’t very supportive, then I don’t think I would be able to do this. Without her support, this wouldn’t have been a success.

Do you have a team of moderators?

We have a very small team. That is one of our goals right now - to keep small. Ideally, we’d have a large team so we could spread the workload amongst many people, but I think quality suffers at that point. It’s a very subjective process. No matter what criteria you put down on paper, it’s going to be very hard for people to select the same exact images. The smaller the team for us, the better it keeps the quality and consistency up.

Because of your transparency, have you had to deal with upset people whose photos weren’t selected?

Obviously, we monitor pretty much everything - Twitter , blogs, we get direct feedback through comments and through our contact form - and there are definitely people asking why their pictures haven’t been selected. There have been some frustrated people and I understand because being on the other side, I know exactly what people are doing. They are putting their love and energy into making food and taking photos and they are doing the best they can. The majority of these people are just regular home cooks who take great joy in their food and photography.

It’s hard to say no because we know the energy and the time that goes into doing that, so we try to encourage them by saying: “Keep on trying, keep on submitting. It’s a very subjective process. Here’s our criteria. We see plenty of great pictures on your site so keep on submitting pictures.”

Many people have said, “My pictures have always been selected by TasteSpotting, why aren’t they being selected by Food Gawker?” We try to be nice and we tell them that it’s a very subjective process and we have a different team of editors than TasteSpotting. That is probably one of the biggest reasons why their pictures may show up on TasteSpotting and not on Food Gawker and vice versa.

It’s been interesting getting those types of comments. That’s probably the hardest part of the whole process - to answer those types of questions - because you can make someone really happy or you can make someone really sad by selecting or not selecting their pictures.

We’ve seen people where they’ve submitted a whole bunch of pictures and finally (I hope they’ve been looking at other pictures and getting tips on what angles or how to light the picture) they’ll send a picture and we’ll be blown away by it and say, “Wow! That’s a great improvement.”

Every time we preview an image to look at it, we are really rooting for that person to have a great picture. It is much easier for us to accept it than to reject it. That is one of the rewarding things. We have gotten messages, “I’ve submitted a whole bunch of pictures and you selected one and I kinda understand why you chose that, so thank you.”

That’s the best part of the job right now, getting that kind of feedback. It makes us happy that they are happy and we know exactly how they felt.

What is your favorite food to gawk at?

I don’t do well with those types of questions. Hungry Bear always asks me, “If you could pick one food to eat for the rest of your life, what would it be?” Those types of questions are just so difficult, because I like going to the buffet or having a smorgasbord. I want a piece of everything. I don’t have one particular thing. This is my way of not answering your question. I pretty much like everything and anything.

If you could interview one person about food, who would it be?

Two people. One is Thomas Keller. Obviously French Laundry is awesome, but Ad Hoc, his kind of a more casual family-style restaurant, is my favorite restaurant in the Bay area. That’s the primary reason I would want to interview him.

The second person is my mom. I’m a self-admitted momma’s boy. She’s the one that has definitely influenced me the most in terms of getting into cooking and enjoying food. I’ve been exposed to that my entire life through her. She amazes me because she has all of these recipes in her head. Probably like everybody’s mom, you ask her how she makes a dish and it’s always, “Just a little bit of this, a little bit of that.”

It just amazes me how she can keep hundreds and hundreds of recipes in her head and produce things so well. I’d want to figure out what my mom’s influences were in terms of her cooking. It may sound a little cheesy.

It’s funny that I didn’t really appreciate her cooking until I went to college. Growing up, she was always making Vietnamese food. We came over to this country when I was fairly young (four years old) and from that point going forward, I always wanted to fit into the all-American lifestyle. My mom was always making these Vietnamese dishes and I always wanted meatloaf or pizza or something. It wasn’t until I went to college that I really appreciated her cooking - after eating all the dorm food.

Rob Polevoi, Cabaret Brewed Chocolate

2008-07-15T14:47:00.000-07:00

Rob Polevoi is the founder/owner of Cabaret Brewed Chocolate. In this interview, you'll learn all about brewed chocolate and how Rob plans to re-introduce it to the world.

If you leave a comment for Rob, you will be eligible to win a sample of Cabaret Brewed Chocolate. Three winners will be selected on Thursday, July 24th. Good luck!

How did you become interested in chocolate?

I was always interested in chocolate. I was actually in the tech business. I was very knowledgeable about chocolate and made some money in chocolate confections. I had invented a new kind of filling for bon-bons that was extremely flavorful and rich and extremely creamy -that became the basis of the Cabaret dessert chocolates which was our initial product. It was very unusual, very dense, very creamy – like a ganache but much thicker and richer than chocolate ganache (that is usually used to fill truffles), almost like a chocolate cheese.

Yum! Where can we try it?

We don’t make it anymore. It was really, really, really difficult and really, really good.

How did you got from there to brewed chocolate?

I founded this company originally with a couple of other partners back in 2003 to produce some very fine bon-bons. We produced the fine bon-bons for a few years, and then one partner went off to do chocolate manufacture and I continued with another partner to develop a completely new conception of chocolate beverage and the development of it took a very long time.

It took well over two years, almost three years, and we went through everything trying to figure out how to develop something that would really return chocolate to its origins.

Brewing cocoa beans is actually how the ancient Mexicans and Mayans enjoyed chocolate. The word "chocolate" is derived from an Aztec word that means "chocolate water," or "cacoa water," or "bitter water." It actually meant a drink – brewed chocolate. We went through many, many, many different passes of the product to get it to a point where it revealed the psychic (the psychoactive) qualities of chocolate in a clear way.

We had discovered from historical sources that the ancient Mexicans seemed to value chocolate even more for how it made them feel than for how it tasted. They often referred to chocolate as a kind of a wine. They definitely didn’t conceive of it as a dessert or as a sweet confectionary. Only the aristocracy drank it and it was drunk very much like wine is drunk, at banquets as part of a social lubrication social environment.

This was all very striking - how it affected their mood and their emotional state. That was the primary reason why they drank chocolate and this is what we were working on and searching for all of this time until we finally came up with the final recipe for brewed chocolate – the product now.

Why brewed chocolate?

Everybody who’s significantly involved in chocolate is familiar with these historical facts about the ancient Mexicans and how much they valued chocolate as a mood elevator, as a relaxant. It just made them feel good.

We all know that chocolate does make people feel good, but the idea here was to say, how can we take all of the best things out of chocolate from an emotional and physical health standpoint and allow chocolate to be presented as a basic beverage - an alternative to coffee, to tea, or even to wine. All of this stuff came out of thinking about the way that the ancient Mexicans actually used the drink.

Do you know of anyone else brewing chocolate in modern times?

No – not really, and that’s actually quite remarkable. I’ve always been surprised that we are the only people who are doing it. One would think that with as many people as are aware of this, that other people would be doing this, but they haven’t been.

On your packaging, you ask, “How does it make you feel?” Have you done studies to see how brewed chocolate makes people feel?

Before we released the product, we did very extensive testing. We put up a website and we invited people from all over the country to become testers for the product. We got many, many thousands of requests of which we only needed a couple hundred. Over a series of three different test batteries, every time improving the product, we determined that about 60% of the people typically would respond that they felt psychic effects from the drinks. Typically half of these would use words like "calming," "relaxing," or "mood elevating," and the other half would use words like "stimulating," "energy," or "alert."

The interesting aspect of the chocolate is that to different people, it had different effects. Some people find it relaxing – some people find it very relaxing, actually; it put them to sleep. Other people find it very stimulating, almost like a cup of coffee, without the jittery quality that you find in caffeine. The primary psychoactive ingredient in chocolate is not caffeine but theobromine, a cousin of caffeine that shares some of the stimulant quality but is milder, longer lasting, and less jittery. Theobromine also has a kind of a general mood elevating quality that is associated with chocolate.

Essentially, the idea was to create a theobromine beverage, just the way that coffee is basically a caffeine beverage. There are lots of other compounds in chocolate and the effects of those are very interesting and very debatable, but nothing is as clear as the effects of theobromine.

So yes, we did do extensive amounts of testing and we did determine that the substantial majority of people do feel the effects.

Why is brewed chocolate presented as a syrup versus a ground or whole bean like coffee?

Because it takes very, very long to brew compared to coffee. When you brew coffee, it takes minutes or seconds. Brewing cocoa beans takes hours and the process is difficult because of fat in the beans and all kinds of things. To do it at home would be enormously difficult.

Making the product the way that we do makes it easy to use and also provides a certain flavor that people are more used to than the flavor directly from the bean. We brew the chocolate first using the whole bean (the bean is raw). This is a very interesting aspect of it.

Chocolate is always made from roasted beans. We wanted to try using the raw bean. The raw bean is so much higher in antioxidants. After doing a lot of testing with people, we discovered that very few people could taste the difference between the raw and the roasted beans when the bean is brewed. It enabled us to use the raw beans for the much better health effects (antioxidant effects) of the chocolate.

We brew down the beans until we get a regular brew just the way that you would drink, and then we reduce it by evaporation until it’s thick and we add a little bit of sugar to it, also, so you don’t have to sweeten it. You can sweeten it more, but it comes out with some initial sweetness to it. People really are uncomfortable with chocolate with no sugar in it at all – it’s too difficult for them.

In its highly reduced form, it’s possible then to make a cup instantly. It’s a gigantic difference. If you tried to brew these at home, you might do this once every couple of months as a kick - spend hours brewing beans. But, if you have a jar of Cabaret Brewed Chocolate, you can use it anytime you want. You just grab it, stir it up, and it’s done in seconds.

Does brewed chocolate need to be refrigerated to stay fresh?

No, actually we have never experienced anything going bad yet, and that’s with jars that have been over a year old. The real reason why we say to refrigerate it is (the package really means refrigerate after opening) because we’ve discovered that what people will do is lick the spoon and put it back in the jar, which will introduce mold into it. But quite frankly, refrigerating is a good caution; but in fact, I've never actually refrigerated a jar that I’ve opened and nothing ever happens to it.

Does the quality of the beans play a large role in the quality of the brewed chocolate?

No. Actually, that’s one of the more interesting discoveries. While the quality of the bean is incredibly important in making chocolate couverture, its impact on brewed chocolate is much much, much, much less. That doesn’t mean you can use really bad beans. We have been using Ghanaian beans which are definitely high quality beans, but we have determined that you can use much higher quality beans, like the highest quality you can imagine, like Ocumare Criollo and you wouldn’t even really be able to taste the difference.

The reason appears to be the fact that the brewing process leaves the fat (the cocoa butter) behind in the beans. It doesn’t come out in the liquid as part of the brewing process that we use. Over one period of time, we had lots of issues with fat being brewed out of the bean and then having to get rid of the fat to create a clear beverage. The idea is to create a coffee-like beverage. People can already drink regular hot chocolate if they want. This is a totally different kind of drink that’s like coffee or tea. There is almost no fat in brewed chocolate.

The primary taste difference between the different types of chocolates appears to be in the fat quality - the quality of the cocoa butter. Therefore, if you are not using the cocoa butter, the difference between the different beans is much, much less.

We use high quality beans, but we’ve mostly determined that we can use beans that are 7 on a scale of 10. We don’t need to use beans that are 9 or 10 on a scale of 10 because there is no obvious taste difference.

Do you think your brewed chocolate tastes similar to the way it used to be made in ancient times?

It used to be drunk like that [like we make it], but they used to pile the fat on top of it like foam. They used to eat the foam off of it as fat. I guarantee you that people today would not like to do that. I tried the fat. In a society where they had very little meat and very little forms of fat, I’m sure they got a tremendous kick out of eating the chocolate fat. In our society, I don’t think we would.

How has the interest been in brewed chocolate?

We have just literally been getting started. We just introduced it a couple of months ago and we are getting our first sales. People have been finding us on the website and it’s in its first few stores. It’s brand new, brand new.

How many people work at Cabaret?

Three people.

Will you expand Cabaret to other products?

I want to focus on this right now because I don’t see this as a confectionary product. I see it as an opportunity to introduce a basic beverage to the world. It’s a very fundamental cultural change. It isn’t just like a new kind of candy bar or a new bon-bon. It’s a chance to introduce chocolate to the world in a way that it's never thought about before - as a basic drink alternative to coffee or tea or even to wine. That is what interests me and excites me, something that brings back the original reason why people used chocolate.

Have you seen people using brewed chocolate for things other than drinking?

You can’t prevent people. That’s one advantage of making it in syrup form. They can use it any way they want. They use it to make desserts, to make cocktails, or as a syrup on ice cream - it’s expensive but really nice. All of those uses are definitely possible for it and people do that and are welcome to do it.

Have you seen anything done with brewed chocolate that really surprised you?

Nothing that I didn’t expect. I think what some people have done with it with fruit sort of surprised me. I could have easily imagined it with berries – like dipping strawberries and stuff into it. But, I’ve seen some fancy stuff done with fruit desserts. It really adds tremendous punch to a fruit dessert.

If you could interview one person about food, who would it be?

I would have said, while he was alive, Robert Mondavi - that would have been the guy I would have loved to talk to the most. He’s someone who did something similar to what I’m trying to do. He tried to get people to completely rethink what California wine was. When he started, people thought California wine was some kind of chump wine that nobody took seriously and couldn’t be compared to French wine or European wine in any way. When he was done, he had managed to achieve this complete reassessment of this basic drink that he had been working with.

Lis and Ivonne, Daring Bakers, Part 1: About Daring Bakers

2008-07-13T14:52:00.000-07:00

Lis (La Mia Cucina) and Ivonne (Cream Puffs in Venice) founded Daring Bakers, a group of approximately 1000 bakers that take the Internet by storm once each month when they reveal a daring recipe that they have all made. In this two part interview, we learn how Daring Bakers started and how it got to where it is today. More than anything else, it's a story of friendship and community.

What is Daring Bakers?

Ivonne: Basically, the Daring Bakers is a huge group of bakers that are connected virtually. The basic premise is that once a month we all present a challenge that we have baked. The challenge is hosted by one or two or three people - they choose whatever recipe they want and we have a private forum set up where the recipe is posted. You have the whole month to try it out and then on a given date everybody unveils the recipe to the world.

In a nutshell, that’s what we do. It’s actually about a million times more complicated than that. From the organizational point of view it’s a lot of work - it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of work. We’ve got about 1000 members now, so it’s a big job to keep everything organized and running smoothly. But it’s huge fun, and it’s hugely rewarding, so in the end it’s all worth it.

How did Daring Bakers get started?

Lis: Ivonne and I just wanted to bake the same recipe together because we’d never baked soft pretzels before. Once we posted, we had so many comments and emails from people that we really had just started to get to know from blogging, wanting to join in. It started off with three the first time, then two, and then probably for the first four or five months there weren’t really that many joiners and then, boom, we started to get slammed. It was fabulous and amazing and blew us away!

How do you know each other?

Lis: My father used to make this Christmas sauce that we loved and none of us idiots paid attention. I went around looking around for Italian-based blogs and hers was the one that caught my eye. I just emailed her and said, “Hi, I love your blog and by the way, how did my dad make his sauce?” We just started talking from then on.

Ivonne: When I went to her blog, it was like an instant thing. I was like “Oh yeah, I feel like I know this person!” It’s really funny that the connection was instant considering we’ve never met in person. It’s pretty amazing to think how closely we work together, but again it’s because that connection was there right away.

Lis: I seriously consider her like a sister. We tell each other everything.

Ivonne: Not to be corny or anything, but it’s so true. It’s like I’ve known her my whole life - like she’s a member of my family. She can’t get rid of me.

Do you use phone, email, and IM?

Lis: Sometimes all at once!

How do you distribute the work between the two of you?

Lis: I think we are equally as important. We both work our rears off. It’s pretty much split right down the line.

Ivonne: I think the reason it works so well is that we both bring our own skill sets to the table. Lis (like I say all the time) is like the organizational queen. She can organize anything in no time flat and she’s on the ball. That’s not necessarily one of my strengths. It just works, we complement each other.

Is there ever a problem with the recipe that the members select?

Lis: We are probably excited every time. Every time it’s something that normally she and I might not bake ourselves.

Ivonne: I think that’s been one of the keys to Daring Bakers' success. People have chosen things that you wouldn’t just wake up on a Sunday morning and be like, “Oh - I think I’ll make croissants from scratch.” Lis is right that for the most part, we are always excited to see what the challenge is.

As we’ve existed longer, what we see more and more is that hosts might ask us for some advice, but people are free to choose whatever they want. The reveal day is always an exciting day for the Daring Bakers.

Lis: And a busy day!

What is involved with the reveal day?

Lis: The day of the reveal is the day when so many people want to join. They all email us on that last day. We always cut it off on the day of the challenge. If you get your request in that day, you’ll be in for the next month, if you don’t get your request in until the following day, then you are in for the following month.

Once they become a member, they are a member until they decide to leave. The only little thing is that we have to cut it off at some point or we won’t be able to keep this organized - so the day of the reveal is the last day to become a member for that month.

Ivonne: We’ve had months where there are like 150 new members, so logistically if we don’t have a cutoff it would be insanity.

What do you do about members who don’t bake the challenges?

Lis: You have to bake eight challenges through the twelve month calendar year – the year starts and ends on the month you join. You get four months off. If you skip two in a row without giving us a heads up ("something is going on and we’ll be back in a few a months"), we have no choice but to assume you don’t want to be in it anymore. You decided it’s too much of a commitment or whatever. Then, we take you off of the blogroll and out of the private forums.

Other than that, though, it’s just a big party!

Do you make money from Daring Bakers or is it a labor of love?

Lis: It’s a labor of love. We of course would love for this to become a business one day. We would love to be Martha! We are not going to lie. We want to be Martha! Of course, we see some opportunities to make some money and we are going to try. It costs money to keep this going. We are having a new website built so it’s going to be more for the public as well as our members.

We want to make it so non-members don’t have to have the stress of joining, but if they’ve got baking questions, they can come ask and our members will answer them as best they can.

Even people that write to us and say they couldn’t bake themselves out of a paper bag end up with beautiful stuff because you get so much support throughout the month. I really do think that the public would benefit from being able to play around with us a little bit more other than reading our things once a month.

Are your forums very active?

Lis: Yeah! But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Most people just come and read, but with all of the activity going on, you would think that everybody is participating. We’ve got some great people that are just always there helping out and giving suggestions and tips. Our alternative bakers (people who can’t normally use regular wheat, flour, sugar, things like that) are fabulous! These people are amazing.

Ivonne: We call those people our alternative Daring Bakers because they always have to come up with an alternative to the main recipe. They have to find ways to substitute whatever it is that they can. I think Lis made a very good point that as much work as we do, a huge part of the Daring Bakers' success is the help that we get from our Daring Bakers. It’s amazing how all of these people who don’t know each other will band together to to help each other out. It’s pretty incredible.

Lis: They talk about everything you can think of.

Ivonne: They’ll be talking about the specific recipe, other things, or cookbook suggestions. It’s really become a social forum - like the Facebook for cooks, if you will.

Were you surprised that so many people joined?

Lis: Oh God, yeah – we just thought it would be me and her.

Ivonne: Just the other day, I emailed Lis and said, “When we baked those pretzels, did you ever think that in August, 2008, we’d be signing up our 1000th member?" In a lot of ways, it’s unbelievable, but in a lot of ways it isn’t. I don’t think people that aren’t in the food blog community realize what a force it is. I think with the Daring Bakers, it’s a combination of the novelty of trying something new and the idea of being in a community of people where all are doing the same thing and it’s all kind of like a secret. People enjoy it.

Lis: Another good point is that we really do offer a fabulous service to so many people that they can't get anywhere other than possibly having to sign up for classes. They can get every single recipe, technique, or ingredient question answered virtually in minutes. What I like the best about all of it is the novice bakers. The emails they write us – they are shaking in their boots, they don’t think they are worthy, but in a month or two, they are baking stuff just like our professionals. I’m not going to say that it’s because of us (all the members) but we are definitely helping bakers that weren’t so sure of themselves to gain confidence in the kitchen.

Is there an average member?

Lis: No, we have really a wide variety of people.

Ivonne: We have people from literally every corner of the earth. People that blog, professionals, and stay-at-home folks.

Lis: We have men! Wonderful men bakers!

Ivonne: Yes, Lis. There are men in our group. I guess maybe the one thing everyone has in common is that they like a challenge.

Continue to part 2

Interview with Art Pollard, Amano Chocolate, Part 1: The Beginning

2008-07-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

Art Pollard is the founder/owner of a bean-to-bar chocolate company, Amano Chocolate. I recently reviewed Amano Chocolate on Cupcake Project and was excited for the opportunity to interview Art. From Monday to Friday, we'll journey with Art from chocolate epiphany to chocolate company. Along the way, we'll travel with him to Europe to learn about chocolate and to remote tropical areas to source beans. We'll learn about the long hours of hard work in the factory to make Amano a success and the downtime Art spends with his family building model rockets.

Leave your questions and thoughts in the comments. Art will be available to comment on anything you have to say. Even better - Art will give away one of each of his Amano chocolate bars to five random commenters - one winner per post. All winners will be drawn on Saturday morning, July 12. All comments are eligible up until the time the winners are posted. While you may leave multiple comments on a post, only one comment per person per post is eligible to win. Sorry, but only U.S. residents are eligible to win.

Photo by Amano Artisan Chocolate

How did you become interested in chocolate?

I’ve always been interested in cooking - especially things that are difficult. I was working in the physics department at the university. I designed and built equipment for them for quite a few years. One day, I made an offhand comment to a friend of mine, "Hey - it would be cool to make my own chocolate!" They said that you can't do that without millions of dollars of equipment and so forth and so on. I said, “Well gee, that sounds like it must be really interesting.”

I just filed that away with a lot of other projects that deserved looking into at some point - things to build and things to do. Then, a few years later, I got married and we were out in Hawaii (I used to live in Hawaii for a bit) and we found an outlet for a Belgian confectionery company. It was one of only two in the United States. The lady there convinced me after quite a bit of prodding to spend two dollars on a truffle. Now, keep in mind that I had just gotten out of school so two dollars was two dollars – especially when you are on your honeymoon and every penny counts.

She convinced me to buy one of these truffles. I'd had plenty of chocolate from overseas before and it was good, but it wasn't really spectacular. Of course, these were the days when it was a lot harder to get the good quality chocolate from Europe. I had one of these things and it was an epiphany: “This is what chocolate is supposed to be!"

When I got back from my honeymoon, I immediately called my former boss in the physics department and said, “Hey, I'm going to go ahead and start making my own chocolate and I’m looking for some machinery I can adapt." I gave him a list of some machinery that I was looking for.

My former boss found what I was looking for and it didn't work. For a while, I just kept buying and adapting various machines. Some things worked and some things didn't. There were some that I decided to design and build on my own like the refiner and conche and so forth. I have fairly extensive machine shop skills. I designed and built a lot of machines for the physics department. However, I actually had a software company at that time.

You worked in a physics lab and you also did software design?

I do anything that's interesting! I write search engines. I design the underlying search technology and write the code. I license the code out to larger companies that integrate it into their products or websites. I have code running on a good portion of the computers around the world at this point in one form or another. It's all part of other people's projects and nobody ever really sees who wrote it. It's on a pretty sizable percentage of everybody's computers.

We'd all be coding in one room and you could hear the chocolate refiner going in the other room. The really great thing about doing it this way rather than having all the information handed to you is that you learn why things are the way they are and it's a really great learning experience. All of a sudden, you see that there are certain reasons why things are done a certain way and you start to get a real understanding of the flavor development process that you wouldn't otherwise have if you just went out and bought a machine to do it. A lot of the nuances would be totally lost.

Eventually, I ended up creating some great chocolate. My business partner [in the software business] started to encourage me to commercialize it and I told him that it was foolish.

You weren't selling it?

I was giving it to my friends and neighbors.

Lucky friends!

It wasn't altruism. I had to do something with all this chocolate. At that point, I was giving it to friends and some local chefs. Everybody started clamoring for it. Clark, my business partner, said we had to commercialize it. I thought it was a really bad idea because making really fine quality chocolate (which was really what I was interested in) is a terribly difficult proposition. Doing it on a commercial scale is exponentially more difficult than that, but people kept hammering on me, and Clark kept pestering me to do it.

Eventually ideas just grow on you, and so we decided to go ahead and do it. If it worked, that would be great - and if it didn't, we'd have one heck of a story to tell at the end.

I started traveling to Europe and studying chocolate manufacturing there and visiting factories around Europe and getting to know people. A couple of people took me under their wing and started teaching me the things that I was missing. I started hunting down equipment and running test batches on the various machines I was looking at buying and finding out how to import them into the U.S.

A lot of the things we have are antiques dating from the 1930's and 40's. We're always on the hunt for great old machinery. The more modern machines don't have the same sort of quality characteristics, but there are some things that you can do better with a more modern machine. It's a matter of keeping everything in prospective and choosing the right machine for the job. It's easy to get caught up in the nostalgia, but in the end, it's all about making great chocolate so it’s really important to choose the best machine for each job and to use it to its fullest potential.

We'd be coding in the day and over in the factory painting the walls and refurbishing the machinery at night. Clark's wife and my wife were incredibly patient because we weren't home much and when we were home, we were completely and totally exhausted. I’d go home and sit down on the couch and take a breather and six or seven minutes later I’d be totally out and I’d wake up in the morning still on the couch - maybe my wife would have thrown a blanket over me in the meantime.

How much time went by from when you started making chocolate until you had a commercial product?

It was a full ten year process. After we got all the machinery refurbished, we started firing things up. Then, you find all the things that were wrong with the machines that you didn't detect the first time. You get to tear them apart again and some things only show up once you're in full production. Once we got all the machinery working, we were at least on our way, but every day is really, truly an adventure.

Continue to Part 2.