1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium (about 250 g) yellow onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 1/3 cups (about 65 g) fresh breadcrumbs
About 1/3 cup (80 ml) whole milk, or enough to saturate the breadcrumbs
1 pound (450 g) ground beef
1 pound (450 g) ground pork
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
2 teaspoons fish sauce
2 large eggs, beaten well
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1/3 cup (10 g) minced fresh Italian parsley
1/3 cup (85 g) ketchup, plus 1/4 cup (65 g) for topping the loaf
* * *
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment or aluminum foil.
Warm the oil in a medium saucepan over moderate heat. Add the onion and garlic, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is softened and translucent but not brown. Set aside.
Put the breadcrumbs in a small bowl, and drizzle the milk over them, stirring to moisten. Set aside.
Put the beef and pork in a large mixing bowl, breaking up any large hunks. Add the salt, fish sauce, eggs, mustard, parsley, and 1/3 cup ketchup. Add the onion and garlic. Using your hand, squeeze the milk from the breadcrumbs; then add the breadcrumbs to the meat mixture (discard the milk). Holding one hand in a claw shape, press it down into the ingredients, and briskly stir with your hand to mix evenly. When the meat and seasonings are uniformly mixed, pick up the mixture and turn it over in the bowl, and briefly mix again. (Turning it over helps to ensure that no ingredient settles to the bottom and clumps there.)
Transfer the mixture to the prepared baking sheet, and use your hands to pat and shape it into an approximately 9 by 5-inch loaf. (If you find that the mixture is sticking to your hands, rinse them well and leave them slightly wet; the moisture will keep the meat from sticking.) Brush the loaf evenly with the remaining 1/4 cup ketchup.
Cook for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until a thermometer inserted into the center of the loaf reaches 155° to 160°F. Cool for at least 20 minutes before slicing.
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
10
It took almost twenty-four hours to build the wood-burning oven, not including the hour spent breaking into a semi.
Brandon could have bought the oven fully assembled, but getting it into the building would have required removing at least one of the two plate glass windows that surround the front door, and possibly a wall. Instead, he bought the oven in parts. And to make sure that he didn’t completely botch its assembly, he paid to fly in somebody from Mugnaini, the maker of the oven, to help. (Somehow, that was still cheaper than removing and replacing the window.) His name was Michael, and Brandon picked him up at the airport one night at the end of February. The next morning, a semi with two giant crates inside pulled up at the curb on Northwest 70th Street, and that’s when the excitement began: the back of the truck wouldn’t open.
They jiggled the appropriate handles. They pressed all available buttons. They tried to pry it open with a shovel. The driver announced his hypothesis: the cargo had shifted to lean against the door and was now keeping it from opening. So he restarted the engine, gunned the truck fifty yards up the street, and then abruptly slammed on the brakes, hoping to whiplash the cargo forward. That didn’t work. Someone brought over a tire jack. Using the shovel, they managed to wedge the tire jack under the door, and with a crack and a squeal, the door reluctantly slid up.
Inside, in addition to the two crates filled with oven parts, was a ship’s mast—which, as it turned out, had been the source of the cracking sound. It had been wedged diagonally into the truck, and it barely fit, so the slightest bump in transit could have caused it to shift, lean into the door, and pin the door down. I assume the freight company had insurance, but to the seafaring Seattleite who received a broken mast: We owe you a pizza.
In any case, once the door was open, they could lower the first crate to the sidewalk. That was easy. But the second crate—the one containing the six-inch-thick concrete-and-sand floor of the oven and the metal legs it stands on—was too wide for the lift gate. So they had to unpack the crate inside the truck and then lower the unprotected oven floor, teetering with each inch. They could then move it into the restaurant, using a piano dolly and a hydraulic hand truck that Brandon had rented the day before. Unfortunately, the floor and its metal stand were welded together, and they were too wide for the front door of the building. In order to fit, the entire 800-pound structure had to be turned onto its side, laid on the hand truck, and shimmied through the door. Brandon ran up and down the block, recruiting anyone he could find, and it took five of them—Brandon, Michael, the owner of the bakery next door, the owner of the café diagonally across the street, and a biblically unlucky friend who happened to stop by with a book for Brandon—to get it into the restaurant.
This all took a few hours. Then Brandon and Michael went to Home Depot for bags of refractory cement, perlite, and tools. It was time to build the thing.
The first task was to lay the hearth tiles, a dozen thick clay panels, on top of the floor of the oven. Once the hearth was in place, the arch at the mouth of the oven could be set, and then a domed ceiling could be built above it. The dome was made of wide, curving panels, like petals from an enormous stone tulip, and there were five panels in all, each weighing 200 pounds. They nestled against one another, each slightly overlapping the next, and on top went a final round panel, the crown. Getting the crown settled properly requires some maneuvering, and the best bet is for someone to army-crawl into the oven’s maw, turn onto his back, and, looking up, wiggle the crown into place. Michael had done it once on a previous job, and had gotten so anxious that he rushed to get out and broke a rib. So Brandon did it. I missed this part, and I am grateful for that, because I imagine it looked a lot like that scene at the end of Jaws when the professional shark hunter is eaten alive.
Once the dome was built, its seams were covered over and sealed with a spackle-like layer of refractory cement, a special type designed to endure high temperatures. By this point, it was around midnight, and a drunk from the bar across the street had wandered over. Grabbing the doorway to steady himself, he announced that he knew how to build wood-burning ovens, and that Michael and Brandon were doing it wrong. He was escorted back across the street. Then the entire dome was wrapped in ceramic fiber, and then it was enclosed in metal walls. Then began the cement mixing, which Michael taught Brandon to do by hand, kneeling on the floor over a bus tub, with a surgical mask, industrial rubber gloves, and a folded-up cardboard box under his knees for cushioning. “It’s like making pasta!” Brandon reported triumphantly: You dump a bag of powdered cement into the tub, make a well in the middle, pour in some water, and begin stirring from the center out. They did that a few times, or maybe a dozen times, because who could keep count, and then that cement got dumped, along with some perlite, on top of the dome, for added thermal mass and insulation. When that was done, Brandon drove Michael to his hotel, and then he came home to apply some thermal mass to his sore back. He now had a pizza oven.
Meanwhile, my book was coming out the following week, on March 3rd. I was at home during most of the oven-building, out of my mind with excitement and anxiety, fielding e-mails and making last-minute arrangements for my book tour. More than ever, I was in Book Land; Brandon was in Pizza Town. Most of our conversations around that time went approximately like this:
Molly: [Blah blah blah] the book.
Brandon: [Blah blah blah] the restaurant.
Molly: [Blah blah blah] book. [Blah blah blah] book tour.
Brandon: [Blah blah blah] restaurant. [Blah blah blah] pizza.
Molly: I’m sorry, what were you saying?
Brandon: I was talking about the restaurant. What were you talking about?
We laughed at ourselves and made light of it. I knew that Brandon was supportive of my work, that he wanted to hear about it, even if he was distracted. I wanted to b
e supportive in return. Or maybe I wanted to seem supportive. I wanted to be the kind of person who would applaud her husband’s hard work, even if the end goal scared her. He had asked nothing of me but my support. But in truth, I mostly wanted the restaurant to go away.
In any case, when I arrived with my camera the next morning, the oven was done. It was like magic, magic that leaves a dusting of refractory cement mix on every surface. Brandon and Michael had built the oven in the center of the room, because that’s where there was space to maneuver, but now, that morning, we had to move it to its proper location against a wall in the kitchen. And the move had to happen before eight o’clock, when the ventilation company would arrive to build the chimney and roof vent. This part of the story did not involve any magic, but rather me, Brandon, and Ben, still in pajamas—pajamas and leather jacket for Ben—inching the 3,600-pound beast across the room on the hydraulic hand truck.
The way the kitchen was laid out, the oven had to be positioned at a precise angle. Basically, we had to set it down at the correct point along the wall, and then turn it thirty degrees away from the wall. I’m sure there must be a tool that makes this easy, but we did not have it. The tool we had was a plastic protractor, the kind you use in high school geometry. I found the flattened cardboard box that Brandon had kneeled on to mix the cement, and I measured a tiny thirty-degree angle in one corner of it, extending the lines to make a large triangle. Then I cut it out, and while Brandon and Ben wiggled the oven around on the lift, inch by inch, I held the cardboard wedge between it and the wall, until they touched.
Then Ben left to get dressed for work, and the ventilation people came, and I went back to Book Land.
SRIRACHA-AND-BUTTER SHRIMP
Ballard, our neighborhood, is the historic center of Seattle’s Scandinavian fishing community, and the waterfront is still very active. (For you Deadliest Catch fans: Ballard is where a number of the show’s boats spend the off-season.) Delancey isn’t on the water, but it has customers who are commercial fishermen, and occasionally they bring by their latest catch. We made this dish for the first time using spot prawns caught by one of them.
Brandon and I got the idea for this recipe from a feature in Bon Appétit. A number of chefs were asked about their favorite uses for sriracha, the rusty-red hot sauce with a rooster on the bottle, and a chef named Sean Baker gave a brief description of a shrimp dish. Brandon riffed on Baker’s outline to cook dinner for us on a night off, and it’s become one of our favorite hot-weather meals. All you need to go with it is a loaf of crusty sourdough, a bottle of cold white wine, and a roll of paper towels. (Your hands are going to get very, very messy.)
For this recipe, you’ll want raw shrimp in the shell without their heads on. (Or, if you can get some with heads, even better! But they can be tough to find.) Shrimp are sized by how many it takes to make up a pound, and for this recipe, we like 21–25 or 26–30 shrimp (meaning that there are 21 to 25, or 26 to 30, per pound), also labeled “large.” Oh, and if you live in an area where you have access to spot prawns, by all means, use them instead.
Lastly, this recipe doubles well, serving four to six.
3 tablespoons (42 g) unsalted butter
1/3 cup (80 ml) sriracha
2 large cloves garlic, minced
1 pound (450 g) large shrimp in the shell (see head note)
1 1/2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
1 packed tablespoon minced fresh basil
1 packed tablespoon minced fresh mint
* * *
In a 12-inch skillet over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the sriracha, and stir to blend. Add the garlic, and cook for 3 or 4 minutes to soften its flavor. If you taste the garlic at this point, it should no longer taste raw. Add the shrimp, and raise the heat to medium-high. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 to 7 minutes, until the shrimp shells turn pink and the flesh is just cooked through but still tender. (If necessary, cut into one with a sharp knife to check for doneness: the flesh should be opaque, not translucent.) Add the lemon zest, basil, and mint, and toss to mix well.
Serve immediately, and be sure to set out an empty bowl for discarded shells.
NOTE: If you use spot prawns in this recipe, their shells will likely be pink when raw, so you’ll have to test for doneness by checking the flesh only.
Yield: 2 to 3 servings
11
With the oven built and installed, the central axis of the kitchen was now in place, which meant that Brandon could turn his attention to everything around it, like the industrial dishwasher, or the plumbing for the three-compartment dish sink, the prep sink, the two floor sinks, the mop sink, and the hand sink. Commercial kitchens are 90 percent sink. Brandon suggested that I write a post for my blog about this phase of construction, and that I call it “Sink or Swim.” He writes all my best jokes.
Most of the kitchen at Delancey is visible to diners, but to hide the refrigerators and storage shelving behind the wood-burning oven, Brandon built a wall along the oven’s face, essentially concealing everything but its mouth. Actually, he built the wall twice: once somewhat casually and imperfectly, since it wouldn’t be load-bearing, and a second time after an inspector gave him a hard time for it. With instruction from our friend Rebecca (the only master teacher of Pilates who also offers lessons in tiling and grouting for the price of a few cold Coronas) and her ex-husband, John (a saint who was at that point helping Brandon with construction work nearly every weekend), Brandon then covered the wall in brownish-gray rectangular “seconds”—slightly flawed tiles, sold at a discount—from Heath Ceramics in California. Sam came to help one day, and under the last tile, up in the highest corner on the left, they slipped a piece of paper with their names and the date.
Brandon is an avid thrift-shopper, and from the day that the restaurant was conceived, he’d been thrifting for supplies. There were about a dozen secondhand stores that he combed each week, and he devised strategic routes between them to minimize traffic and driving time. “I’m hitting the north loop,” he’d tell me one afternoon, and I’d know that he was starting at the Ballard Goodwill and would finish a few hours later at the St. Vincent de Paul in Kenmore.
Between late 2007 and the spring of 2009, when construction became a full-time job, Brandon brought in enough loot to fill two basements and approximately one-sixth of two different garages. Early on, he and Carla had bought Sir-Mix-a-Lot, the used thirty-quart Hobart mixer. Because it was too heavy to get down the stairs to the basement of our duplex, they stashed it in her garage, which already bulged with backup supplies and equipment for her own restaurant. Meanwhile, our basement was also growing a restaurant supply–induced gut. One corner was heaped with boxes, more than a dozen of them, filled with bowls, gratin dishes, and ivory-colored plates of every size. A shelf in another corner held skillets, saucepans, stockpots, lids, aluminum mixing bowls, two blenders, and three blender jars. On the floor was a cardboard pizza box stuffed with mixed-pattern silverware, purchased on eBay; a stereo receiver; two sets of speakers; and a pair of light fixtures for the bathrooms. To get to the washing machine, you had to pass through an obstacle course of cast-iron table bases. And what couldn’t be crammed into our basement was crammed into our friend Olaiya’s: more table bases, dozens of restaurant-grade food storage containers, and, for a while, the six sinks. All in all, Brandon spent nearly $10,000—a good portion of his income from Boat Street and teaching, minus his share of our rent and bills—on secondhand equipment.
The previous spring, in April of 2008, our neighborhood’s historic bowling alley had closed after more than fifty years in business, and there was an auction to sell off the furnishings and fixtures, down to the wood floor of the bowling lanes. Brandon went, and he came home with more than a dozen teak Thonet chairs. It was the buy of the year. But he had nowhere to store them—Delancey didn’t yet have a location—so our friends Shauna and Danny offered to keep the chairs in their garage. As it turned out, the chairs sat there for more than a year. One Saturday in
the spring of 2009, that spring of construction, we rented a truck and brought them to Delancey. With our friends Matthew and Laurie, a pack of sponges, and three dented dinner knives, we relieved them of chewing gum and tobacco residue. Before that weekend, I hadn’t known that cigarette smoke could, over half a century, harden around an inanimate object just like Magic Shell ice cream topping.
* * *
Now my first book was out, and that kept me busy. But when I was around, I would help where I could. Most of the time, this meant meeting Brandon at the restaurant in the early evening, when it got too dark to do construction work—he had only a couple of industrial clamp lamps to see by—and acting as his prep cook while he made test pizzas. He’d cured the oven—a multi-day process of firing it to increasingly high temperatures—and now he could start actually cooking in it. He’d learned a lot about cooking with fire from Carla, and from tinkering in Ruth’s backyard, and from YouTube videos of Chris Bianco, but now he had his own oven to get acquainted with. And with a working oven and a workable dough, it was also time to think about the menu and to test topping combinations. Thus began the period of our lives in which we ate pizza three to five nights a week—a period that I should, in fact, speak of in the present tense, because we’re still in it. Our diet is the envy of seven-year-olds worldwide.
The menu was something that I could help with, and despite my doubts, I wanted to. In our relationship, though we both cook, I’ve always been the main menu-planner, the one with a knack for piecing together the components of a meal so that they make sense, like a jigsaw puzzle. I like doing it. When Brandon wrote his business plan, the sample menu was the one section where I could make a contribution. Serving as Chief Menu Consultant, we decided, would be my role at the restaurant. When I announced on my blog, in late November of 2008, that Brandon was opening a restaurant, I wrote, “But I will be there too, helping where I can, and the menu is a real combination of his style and mine. It is inspired by two of our favorite restaurants: Zuni Café in San Francisco, and Boat Street Cafe. It happens, yes, that the emphasis will be on pizza, but there will also be wood-fired vegetables from local farmers, seasonal salads, charcuterie, and rustic desserts, the kind I like to make at home.” We wrote four seasonal menus for the business plan, with starters like halibut cheeks with brown butter, corn, and cilantro; or a salad of shaved fennel with aged Gouda and Asian pears; a pizza topped with salt cod brandade and slow-roasted tomatoes; another pizza with caramelized ramps, Gruyère, and bacon; and for a summery dessert, roasted apricots with almond cake and house-made mascarpone or, in the spring, roasted rhubarb with orange zest and fresh ricotta.
Delancey Page 7