Doc-- Out on the West Coast our shell fish population was devastated by that cute furry little Otter and Indo China Immigrants that poached Abalone practically out of existence on the California Coast. Shell Beach and Cayucas were loaded and we used to pry Blacks off the rocks on minus tides. Word is that there are still a few on the Big Sur Coast and up North in the Fort Bragg/Noyo area. There was and still might be an Abalone farm near Cayucas. Once had a long phone conversation with Candy Calhoun about Abalone. She lived up in Cambria and was an expert on shell fish. My girlfriend says she won’t eat anything that eats with it’s foot. But bring em on. Mussels, Pismo Clams, Long Necks, Crabs. Love em all. I got a package of Long Neck in the freezer right now. Right off the beach from Seaside Oregon. Panko Flakes and the deep fryer in wait. Lowel
Okay, combining replies to both you and Lowel here, but I’m gona tackle yours first-
Yeah, orange zest, it’s a Spanish touch, or maybe French mediterranean , but it works. Chicken stock rather than fish stock too- and yeah, I just go with Minor’s stock base paste.
Cookbooks are cheap, and good used are fine. Which ones do I like? Jacques Pepin of course, his technique is just a joy to watch. Elizabeth David, Julia Child, the classics. A paralell example: any dip with some money can set themselves up as an ‘arteest’, doing what some might call ‘individualistic’ and I call self indulgent crap. Yeah, Picasso went off and did some very different things, but he could draw and paint with a near photographic skill. Master the essentials, you can go from there. Develop a sense for flavors, so you can have a flavor-picture in your head and play with it, thinking about what it would taste like with lime zest rather than lemon, say, the earthy tones of lime versus the bright tones of lemon and how they’d go with what you want it to taste like.
But you get there through practice, practice and poverty helps too. Poverty so good or bad you have to eat it. Kinda drives you to get it right.
Now, some do really really amazing food, or surfboards. They combine ability they were born with with experience and learning from people who were good at it as journeymen. I mentioned Thomas Keller and Eric Ripert and I’ll add the guy at that place in Denmark, Rene Redzeppi. His wife, by the way, wrote a cookbook that’s great but more accessible to the likes of you and me. Anyhow, the three I mentioned, they have gotten to a point where they have a giant staff of highly motivated and highly skilled people, who can put in that last tiny detail and a scene where they can charge what that costs. Adria too, if cooking has a Picasso it’s Fernan Adria.
And yeah, it is attainable. If you want to put in the man-hours on one meal that they do, them and their staffs. Or, don’t, instead do a great soup, or a stew, or that damned Japanese grilled chicken thing that slips my mind, cannot for the life of me remember the word.
In surfboards- Jim Phillips comes to mind. Lovely, lovely work, when he has the right customer he does things that blow me away.
Heh- knives. I have my issues, but I haven’t gone overboard. Japanese, I have globals, their sashimi knife made me a lot of money, their santoku is my go to right now, I have some others but I don’t know why sometimes. Also some lovely od French thin carbon steel stuff some idiot threw away because they rusted, I get in a mood for those now and then, and then there’s the German pattern heavy knives Tramontina makes that float my boat sometimes. Like, say, beers, sometimes you want a canned run of the mill ( but never an Anhauser Busch product) and sometimes you want an ale with the grapefruit hops singing at you and sometimes it’s bag beer, a dry still hard cider does it for me. Oh, and, a plain $15 Dexter Russel ‘stamped stainless cooks knife’ works fine too. I look at the Damascus knives, lovely, but I have a buddy who collects Filipino swords, rich guy, I have access to a forge summers, might be fun to make one, in my copious spare time.
Anyhow- umm, I kinda dread anything that has ‘art’ involved. Best example I can give, well, shop I worked at sold Plastic Fantastic surfboards. Mostly they were amazing, functional, well made, went like hell. But there was one we got in, and the airbrush fairy had definitely waved the wand at that one, hard. Gorgeous work on it, the universe in many dark, dark colors, stars and moons and planets. I have never seen an airbrush job to compare with it. But the board itself sucked. Rails were just not right, outline shape strange, rocker…yeah, it was a canvas, not a surfboard. Stoners would come in to sit on the sand ( we had a sand floor) and stare at it and mutter ‘cosmic’ a lot. I hope it’s hanging on a wall somewhere. And that I don’t have to fix it. That really deep dark sky deck would delam in one good July day in the sun.
Now, what I’m thinking about is just what does your art friend bring to this church supper? Yeah, she can throw design at it, but overall does it justify itself? If you’re repairing boards, adding all that on, what does that get you to make it worthwhile and who’s gonna buy them for what it has to cost? I knew a guy from Florida, what, 30-40 years back, only surfer I ever saw wear a toupee in the water. It didn’t go well. He built boards…for displays, for the entertainment industry as props. Saw one he built as a surfboard, and it made a great coffee table, it absolutely sucked as a surfboard. He had his market, he knew it and he was specific on what he did. If you’re aiming for a market like that, well, buy blanks, sand them a little and glass them smooth and spray paint them for further paintwork. Nothing wrong with that, it’s like doing the catering for an art gallery. The food doesn’t have to be particularly good, just non-poisonous and priced right. Gallery owners are cheapskates, they give out low end box wine at those things. Art types eat ramen out of styrofoam cups and overload it with Sriracha or else go to big name hipster places when somebody else is buying, they don’t know the difference.
Dunno if that makes sense- in any event, yeah, staying safe, I’m old and fragile, at least in this scene.
Lowel- you waded through that, thanks - me, I like just about anything that comes out of the ocean. Just about, mola I think I’ll skip. Just a question of what you do with it. Here, things come and go, some of them. Lovely little sweet bay scallops, mussels, couple flavors of clams, some years they’re here and some they are not. And some are here all the time. Oysters are getting so cheap that I’m getting out of them, everybody and their brother Fred is growing the things and the high end half shell market is saturated, price has dropped so that I’d be better off stocking shelves, going over to a couple of varieties of clams instead, maybe some high end niche mussels , maybe see if I can grow laver seaweed to make Nori out of. Gotta roll with the punches.
Myself, I think my favorite is the good old blue mussel. At the risk of sounding like an out-take from Forrest Gump, I like 'em steamed, sauteed, smoked, roasted - versatile little guys, and the ones we get here are extra sweet and meaty, a function of the particular plankton blend they get here. And cheap when they are plentiful. Oddly, deep frying them doesn’t really work.
Anyhow- I need to get on the road, want to load up the pantry, it’s gonna be ugly for a while and I want to limit my exposure
doc…
Hey Doc, sorry for the super late reply, life…
I usually have a prepared stock in the fridge, but Minor’s stock base sounds awesome based on some of the reviews I’ve read. I’m always looking for those kinds of things but never find them until I talk to the right person. I’ll definitely give that a try.
Great advice as usual on how to approach cooking. As far as cook books, I don’t own a huge collection. I have a bunch of family recipes, mainly Italian and Uruguayan cuisine, the classics you mentioned (as well as the ones you recommended, (Saucier’s Apprentice and Provincetown Seafood Cookbook) which I’m super excetied to read, just haven’t had the time. I have a two year old and he sucks up all the free time I have (in a good way). I don’t know how I manage to squeeze in surfing, but it’s the only thing that keeps me sane so it’s a must.
Heh- Knives, is right. I have my issues too, as in I can’t afford more knives. I own essentially the ones I use in the kitchen, they’re functional knives, whereas some guys I know (cooks, chefs, kitchen knife collectors) collect them and their collections run up into the tens of thousands of dollars, and that’s not even counting what it cost to maintain such knives which is generally natural japanese stones. When swords were abolished in Japan many swordsmiths took up knive-making with the same crafstmanship and attention to detail, so you can own a kitchen knife that will set you back a grand but it’s also a work of art. It gets pretty nutty.
Doc, you’ve given me a lot to think about regarding the business idea my friend proposed. We haven’t discused it in several weeks and I feel it losing momentum. It sounded interesting at the time, and she’s a little flaky, so we’ll see. Loved the bit about the surfer in florida that wore a tupee, and it didn’t go well. That’s in my brain now and no one can ever take it from me.
My experience is that color matches in Epoxy are much more difficult. If you are using Slow hardner, you can put in you pigment after mixing Part A and B. Otherwise you have to shoot your pigment into your Part A and then add Part B. Quick Kick and 2000/2100 are just too fast to add pigment after the fact. The only possible solution is to add the pigment to Part A before Part B. In which case you will need to add more to get it dark enough. At 2:1 ration, the Part B will definitely dilute or lighten the final color. So you need to add almost twice as much pigment. Poly is easy. So little MEK is added that it makes no difference in the final color.
Because the “Coffee Stain” is transparent, you’ll never be able to hide New foam completely. Just makes it less noticeable. That’s where a cup gun and a little Swiss Coffee or Navajo White Flat Interior paint come in. I have fogged over foam and fiberglass many times with Interior Off Whites. Most of the time undetectable.
Hey
Not at all, ‘having a life’ is a really good thing, two-year-old included. Me, I have The Goddamned Cats and while they’re entertaining enough the conversation is nonexistent. On the other hand, in 16 years or so, I won’t be sending them to college. Life is full of tradeoffs.
Minor’s, yeah - Culinary Products | List | Nestlé Professional (nestleprofessional.us) - they do a ridiculous number of different bases, I keep the Beef, Chicken and Pork in 1 lb tubs in the fridge along with a fish stock base from somebody else, saves room and sanity. Amazon carries them or your friendly neighborhood restaurant supply. Pretty cheap too, and they keep a long time.
Oddly, knives- see, we have some glacial iron deposits here, what they call bog iron. They used to smelt it over charcoal and make things like ship fittings from it and that gave me a rather inane idea. I’m affiliated, sort of, with a local tool museum and among other things they have an old forge that coincidentally belonged to one of my brothers on extremely long term loan. ‘Extremely’ on account of the fool went and got a glioblastoma, I think it was, he won’t be asking for it back. In any event-
If you ever saw that PBS special on making Japanese swords, well, yeah, similar process. They take iron-rich sand from river beds, cook it for a long time to smelt it and then that’s what they make the really nice steel from. Then forging, folding, onwards and upwards, shaping, polishing and so on. I’m theoretically retired, why the hell not? Get some sort of cultural grant to pay for the charcoal.
And it can’t turn out worse than some of the Shuns I have seen on the used/eBay market that are coming apart, sections falling out.
Surfboard-relevant tie-in. On the one end of the spectrum, you can buy a mostly preshaped blank, all the other fixings, send it out to be glassed and make yourself a board with little more than finish sanding. Perfectly legitimate, nothing wrong with that. You can also shop between a really wild number of blanks meant to save time and effort for a production shaper, that’s why they came into existance rather than everybody working from great big foam billets as I’m gonna assume they did in the 1940s.
Likewise, you can glue up a blank out of wood you felled, dried, chambered and so on, or anything in between. Or blow your own foam. Though if you want a board next week, it’s not gonna happen. Everybody uses different levels, depends on what they want to do and enjoy doing or what they hate doing.
And then there’s tools. Like stuff for sharpening. I myself like the Norton waterstones, reasonably priced, but you can go the gamut from Japanese super expensive stuff to stones, and I say that advisedly, that remind me of a cheap brick or powered setups that can, in the right hands, do a great job really fast and in the wrong hands utterly botch the job, turn good steel with a proper temper into useless scrap iron. You pick what you work well with and the job ahead of you dictates.
Surfboard tie-in. Everybody wants a Skil 100, light and has some zip to it. Yeah, well, Phil Becker used a heavy ol’ monster of a Rockwell 653 for major day in day out production work. Use makes master. You have your Pacific Rim planers, mostly plastic, modifed or not, you have hand tools of varying qualities and so on.
For boat work, my basic trade, I have one of those Rockwell planes. Brute of a thing. I also have a broad hatchet and a couple-three adzes. There’s some overlap in what they can do and faced with something that’s in that overlap, well, what I use depends on my mood. Any of them is the legit right tool for the job. What, then, is the right ‘me’ for the job anbd a particular tool? Kind of a Zen question.
Anyhow, before this becomes a book- It bears on some high end knives and on that art project your friend threw at you; a definition of ‘art’ I read someplace is that it cannot have any function. It is without use except being something to look at. There was an ‘artist’ who literally crapped in a can, sealed it up, labelled it “Genuine Artist Shit” and sold several for big money. I really hope it has no use, wouldn’t want to be the guy with the can opener.
I know some interesting people who build boards. In their day to day lives they deal with intangibles, things like the law and such, and I could speculate that they might want to make things that they can hold, that do something. I’ll emphasize that’s speculation on my part, never asked. My thought? Not a bad thing to do. We all need some reality in our reality.
and on that note, have fun. Uruguayan cooking? Interesting
doc…
At two years old there’s lots of what and why questions so the conversation can be a little one-sided, but I work from home and my wife goes to the office, it’s challenging at times. I though working from home and rasing a kid would be the easy choice, I was wrong.
Minor’s- I ordered a quart. I noticed you mentioned getting your fish stock from ‘someone else’ chuckles I know the technique for a fish stock is similar to a chicken or beef stock, but it’s not something I usually prepare, and I’ve never been thrilled with store bought fish stocks. I’m curious…
When I was a kid my grandfather made a furnace in his garage and attached a leaf blower to get the thing hot enough to heat steel for forging. He used it to make steel parts for tools, but I used it to make a steel knife, and a crossbow, among other things. One memory that’s still burned in my mind is the shade of orange hot steel turns before it’s ready to plunge in water to temper it. A 40 ton hydraulic press to shaped the steel. When he first built the press, it was under so much pressure that it sprung a leak and oil sprayed all over his face. Looked like he dipped his face in a bucket of melted chocolate. I couldnt stop laughing. If I lived in your home town I’d probably ask to borrow that forge.
I’m having serious doubts that I’ll ever work as surfboard shaping industry, I just like it as a hobby at this stage, and mainly to repair my own boards to save me some money. I’m also good at sharpening kitchen knives by hand, and my younger brother asked once why I don’t do it as a business. He runs a car shop, I guess some of his customers are chefs and were looking for someone to sharpen their knives, but I didn’t like the idea of turning that particular hobby into a bussiness in fear that it might kill all the joy I get from sharpening knives, it’s one of those zen things, especially when you work with Japanese Natural Stones. I just get curious about ideas, and I get into these loops, for example I’m fascinated with your boat work trade, and I wish I knew how to ‘do that’ just becuase you mentioned it.
BTW- yea, Uruguayan cooking. That’s where I’m from. Our main export if beef so we grill a lot- but we eat every part of the cow. Intestines are my favorite, but they have to be crunchy on the outside and creamy on the inside, empanadas, cow tongue in vinaigrette sauce, gnocchi, puchero, are some of our traditional foods. There’s a big Italian influence, so you’ll find a lot of pasta based dishes as well. I haven’t been back in over 15 years, but it was the first stuff I learned to cook from my grandmother so I make it all the time, but finding internal organs isn’t always easy.
(chuckling) - never had kids, figuring that while I’m pretty much a carbon copy of my father, still, my mother figured into the deal and how she raised me isn’t something I would inflict on anybody I cared about. Now that ship has sailed, as it were, but my nephews and nieces and their kids, I like answering questions, teaching them what I can. As for ‘why’, well, I did a degree in philosophy, ‘why’ is a wonderful question, it never ends.
I forget what brand of fish stock paste I use, comes in a black jar around 12 fluid ounces, I’d have to look. Again, the refrigerated case in a restaurant supply place is where I’d go. Let me look it up, the interweb being cool like that the brand is Custom Culinary, Gold Label - Custom Culinary - 9520 - Gold Label Fish Base . There’s a lot of others out there, of course, but the chef where I worked liked it and he knows his stuff. To make fish stock, well, yeah, like any other, roast bones with a little metat on them, heads too if they look good, simmer, strain. Don’t roast as much as you would beef bones, of course. Lobster stock, you just roast the shells lightly, crush and simmer and strain.
Heh- steel, and making tools, now there’s another thing like 'why, you can go on forever. Tempering, heat treating, forging. Making tools, I think that’s what distinguishes humans from bacteria. Lots of creatures use some sort of tools, but mostly they are found things, sticks lets say. Modifying those things to make better tools or new tools never seen before, that’s something else. Repairing them, something else I get a kick out of.
I understand about shaping surfboards. I always figured that by the time I got good at it, well, the materials I ruined, blanks and glass and resin and all, I could be working on something I am actually good at and make decent money at and buy lots of boards made by somebody who knew what they were doing.
On the other hand, dings- and finally we wander back on topic.
Like your brother and knife sharpening, one of my sisters tried something I did, may have been salad dressing. And she starts going on about how I should make it for sale. I don’t think so. If you want to do it for real, well, it’s not scaling up your one quart recipe to a gallon, or five gallons, it’s scaling it up from a quart to a thousand gallons or several tons. Having access to a bottling plant and a factory to go with it,leasing time there, figuring ever diminishing profit margins and…you’re better off now and then making a few gallons and giving them away. Especially if the making of it is the fun part for you, rather than the business end of it. ,
Dings, though. It’s hand work, by its nature ding repair is small scale. Every ding is different, some are tricky and most are not and as you get better, less is tricky and more is routine. You can’t make an industry of it but you can make yourself more efficient, line up several boards and do them in parallel. Fill them all, one after another, shape or trim that, figure ways to make that less work, sand as need be and you start getting into sanders like the random orbit sander I mentioned a while back and maybe you get a few broken boards that involve a lot of sanding so you buy a good disc sander, variable speed with the soft pads, You start getting gallons of resin, yards of cloth, boxes of brushes, cheaper that way. Dust and fumes start to be an issue so if you’re smart you get an organic vapor mask so you don’t wind up like me, old and coughing crud, Then you start to get good with the big disc and you can really start doing things quickly and well, polishing wheel for that too, it gets to be fun, having a fine touch with something big and powerful. You build a few jigs and fixtures, better repair stands, And it starts to make you some much welcome money in what is really not that much time.
I liked it. Might get back to it in my old age. The tools I still have, after all. Even got myself a nice new full-face respirator on sale before the virus hit and they became like gold.
But- like many, I’m curious about food. What little I have learned about Urugyay I liked. Tongue, yes, and I have been wanting to learn how to make a good empanada for the last couple of years. As for the innards-
You would have to know someone at a slaughterhouse to get them, those that are not common like liver and heart. You’d have more luck in Florida than I would here, pretty good beef industry there. Here, there’s a few who raise a few hogs, maybe a few goats, and thinking about that when I realised something- had a little conversation with myself as I walk through the living room. Namely, there’s these guns, shotguns and hunting rifles. Oh, and a really nice compound bow.And it occurred to me that ‘hey, I wonder if deer would work? Smaller, yes, but…’ Do you prepare those like you do, say, something that’s going to be a sausage casing?
The fun goes on
doc…
Kids are great but they take a lot out of you. I’m definitely not father material, but hey, it’s my responsibility, and this world doesn’t need another screw up. If you’re not a complete sociopath you’ll want to lead them so they turn out better than you did. Not that I’m a screw up, but I could use improvements. I don’t know about your mom, but you didn’t turn out too bad.
I’ll try that fish stock, why not. Coulda used it yesterday I can never get my brussels sprouts to taste exactly how I envision them, but yesterday I sauteed them with homemade fish stock, chilli peppers, honey and balsamic vinegar and they turned out great.
You know, one of the food items I just suck at making is a proper salad dressing, with the exception of caesar. Maybe you can school me on that. Caesar IS my favorite though, but gotta use pasturized eggs. The dressings that always impress me are from certain Japanese sushi places, they’re always so savory AND sweet.
Doc, this thred is turning into a food discussion haha. But yea, dings. All my boards are pretty much ding-free, but I’m waiting for some rice paper to arrive in the mail. I had to recreate some logos and decals which I’ll print on rice paper and slap on my board before doing the final hotcoat. That’s also new to me. Luckily there’s good info on the process here in the fourms. And it’s much cheaper than going through boardlams if you do it yourself.
If you’re into empanadas I can share two recipes, one traditional and the other a modern take. I favor the traditional but it uses a cut of meat that’s sort of like flank steak, and you can get away with flank steak, but the actual cut of meat is called matambre, taken from between the skin and the ribs. People use it to make all sorts of dishes in uruguay, my grandmother used to make this meat roll thing that was amazing. So not just for empanadas. The other recipe is what you’d find in 99% of resturants that serve empanadas. The key is equal amaounts of onions and meat to maintain moisture, then regulate with stock. For fat use lard, both in the mix and for the dough. Empanad dough is very easy to make, but harder to work than pizza dough. I don’t even know why people buy the store bought crap.