Best Food Writing 2015 (20 page)

Serial Killer
Serial Killer

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IM
F
OSTER

From
KimFoster.com

          
Food, family, and theater intertwine in blogger/fiction writer Kim Foster's roller-coaster life. Since moving to Las Vegas with her circus/theater producer husband and their two daughters, her life has become marginally even more crazy. Roasting a whole pig in the backyard? Bring it on.

We get the pig from a farm.

I watch Luis kill it. He slams it over the head three times with a crow bar, and the pig slumps into the mud. Luis sticks the pig in the neck. Blood spurts out. The pig is dead by the time it hits the little truck that we ride out to the hog pens.

It's an awful, hard death, but a fast one. I feel a greater urgency that this pig comes out perfectly. It's our third pig roast, this one for 100 people from the casts of Absinthe/Vegas and Absinthe/Australia. Each of our pig roasts is a testing ground for the next, where we try to make the skin crispier, the meat softer, the cooking time just right—not too long to dry out the meat, not too short to get limp skin.

Perhaps it is all the bludgeoning and whacking with a crow bar, and the bleeding out right before my eyes, but I want this pig to be the one to come out perfectly.

I decide to cook hard. Out of respect and obligation.

I touch the pig on the truck. It is warm and still. I watch Luis pull it by its teeth with a crow bar into a trough with boiling water, where all
its hair is scalded off. And then it's hung, split, entrails pulled out and heaped onto the floor. Luis has done this a lot. He is all sweaty hard arms and rote memory and efficiency. He barely even needs to look at the pig to do this work. I see purple liver, something that might be a spleen, long eel-like ropes of intestine, the colors of which were veiny blue-purple, like one end of a kid's rainbow.

There is a lot of blood and a lot of washing the blood away with a hose. In fact, Luis is obsessive about washing away the blood—health code, I'm sure—but also as if he doesn't want me to see what this killing really entails. He tries to keep it pretty for me, because I am, he thinks, a farm tourist or a delicate female.

Whenever we get a pig to roast, I always feel like I am a serial killer, and David and I are secretly trying to get rid of the evidence. We heave the pig, this one a 60-pounder, over one of our shoulders, usually David's, and shove it inelegantly into the fridge. We slam the door, hoping it won't pop the door open and fall out, revealing our crime. When I am ready, we take the pig out, lay it on a table in the backyard, and mojo the shit out of it. I stick it with needles, inject it with a concoction of pineapple juice, lemongrass, coriander, thai chilies, star anise, garlic, scallions. I rub it down hard with brown sugar and copious amounts of salt.

I have my hands all over this pig. And even though I wash my hands thoroughly, often, when I pick the kids up from school I still smell the porkiness on my fingers, because I have been all over that pig's body, in and out of the crevasses and ribs, in its head, all my fingers feeling the sinews and the rubbery bands of fat, and the blood that still trickles out, reminding me I killed this thing. Really, I made that decision. I am in this pig's body. In it. I am the violator. I am both serial killer of pigs and a rapist. It is both soothing and lovely and violent and raw.

After I am done, we shove the carcass back in the fridge, again the criminals hiding the body.

The next morning, we open the fridge and the smell is like some exotic open market, just dreamy and pungent all at the same time. I want to bury my face in the pig. Another fucked-up violation of its body. Then, it's in the roasting box, split wide open and vulnerable, fully splayed out, dotted with slices of red chilies and the burnt browns of a few cinnamon sticks in its belly.

The coals go on, fat leaks out the bottom of the box in thick drips, the yard is hot with the pig smell. The neighbor dogs all congregate and sniff around. There is smoke, heat, there is excitement. Everyone loves a pig when it is a carcass. Everyone asks about the pig—how we got it, what its death was like, how I seasoned it, how long it cooks—and then the pig brings up some kind of memory or experience, where someone talks about another time they ate from a whole pig and they smile. They always smile.

It's 6:30 now. People are eating appetizers. I, and some kitchen helpers, put out fried shoshito peppers, heavily salted and oily, turmeric grilled chicken, chicken satay with a spicy peanut sauce, fried wontons with a mushroom and pea shoot filling, spicy-ass Thai-style chicken wings, agadashi dofu, on-fire corn fritters, and grilled beef salad cradled in romaine leaves. Simple food, lots of it, that is the strategy. Just platters and platters of food going out to satiate the performers and acrobats and crew arriving in crowds.

The pig has been cooking for eleven hours.

The side dishes are re-heating in the oven. I'm scratching off dishes made and served from the master lists taped to my cupboards. This is real MasterChef reality TV shit. The pig goes out on the table. It's the first time we've cooked a near-perfect pig. We are getting good at this. The skin is blackened and crisp as all hell. Maybe too black, but it doesn't really seem to matter because I pop a piece in my mouth and it tastes like crunchy, salty, fatty, balls-on, wild animal. The meat is soft and wet. David and I start chopping up pig with big knives in front of a crowd of onlookers, like we are putting on some strange theatre of butchery, but I realize after you get through the skin, you don't need anything that blunt anymore. I start pulling apart the meat with my fingers, and using the knife as a kind of spoon.

The muscle has completely given itself over to the heat. The pig just breaks down into heaps. Total submission. That it did what I wanted it to do is breath-taking. I never get tired of the surprises of cooking.

I look up and there is a long line waiting to be served, plates out. Someone wants the soft fatty cheek. Someone else wants the crispy ear. This makes me happy, all this longing. I set out the sides, Andy Ricker's Stir-Fried Brussel Sprouts with Garlic and Chile, and Stir-Fried Noodles with Shrimp, Tofu and Cashews from “Pok Pok.” There are
also two kinds of fried rice, Chinese sausage and no Chinese sausage, a huge wooden board piled high with spicy chopped salad, and a platter of brisket that I soaked in Bird's Eye chilies, coriander, cumin, garlic, onions, coconut milk, salt, and lime and cooked super-low for 12 hours.

People eat. People eat more. I hear that I remind someone of a Ukrainian mom in the kitchen, and I know this is meant as a serious compliment from young people far away from home. I make myself a “secret tequila,” from a bottle I have hidden in the kitchen, just for the cook and kitchen helpers. The tequila is good and hard-earned. When I go back to the yard, the carcass is a butchered mess, all bones, sucked down clean, scraps of fat that the dogs (yes, people bring dogs to our parties) begged for under the table.

Lucy, my ten-year-old daughter, is the first to remind me of dessert and we set out buckets of ice cream and cones, and people make their own. I am done. The pig is done. All I see in front of me is a little house crammed with people laughing and talking, a fire dancing in our fireplace, the doors swung open so the outside of the house and the inside are indiscernible, my floors slicked with mud and dirt from when it started raining, nice people coming to me and introducing themselves, kids weaving in and out of the legs of friends and strangers alike, laughing and chasing each other, and conversations with the acrobats and performers from the shows, and them telling me how excited they are to get their first or second big break, and how they just appreciate being here, how young and excited they are, how not jaded and cynical.

Young people are lovely. I remind myself to hang around with more people under 25 years old.

For all my obsessing about the food and the pig these last few days, what I realize most, standing there, is that the food is the most important thing, and the least. You can have a great party without great food—I mean, really you can have a great party feeding people nothing but Doritos and Coors Light—but really, good simple food, served to people you care about, says we give a shit about you enough that we want you in our house and we will go to this kind of trouble for you. It's the meta-message that means everything.

And this makes killing a living thing have some kind of value that maybe it didn't before.

Or this is what I tell myself when I feel the ghosts of our guests lingering, long after they've left. Them on us, us on them. I pour myself another glass of “secret tequila” now, although it isn't much of a secret. And I'm already thinking about the next party, the next people we get to see, the next pig to kill.

It's Not About the Bread
It's Not About the Bread

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K
IMBLE

From
Edible Baja Arizona

          
Author of
Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food
, Megan Kimble is also managing editor of
Edible Baja Arizona
, and a champion of local artisans and producers in the Tucson area. When it comes to locavore food culture, her subject Don Guerra ticks off every box on the checklist.

Don Guerra works alone. He spends 70 hours a week baking bread in a two-car garage–turned-bakery. His process is slow—the life cycle of a loaf is 24 hours—but his work is quick. He mixes flour into dough, shapes dough into loaf, bakes loaf into bread—time after time, 750 loaves a week. He has the build of an endurance athlete and baking 750 loaves a week—alone—is an endurance sport.

Don Guerra works with people—with farmers and millers, teachers and students, with Arizonans and with bakers from across the world. Twelve hundred people regularly buy loaves from Guerra's Barrio Bread and he knows all but a handful of their names.

Guerra has one employee supporting his work. He founded Barrio Bread in 2009 and ran it as a one-man show until 2011, when he hired his first employee, Ginger Snider, who now works eight hours a week helping with packaging and distribution.

Guerra has a community supporting his work. When the 44-year-old baker shows up at markets, customers rush over to his van to help him unload baskets full of bread. Two of his neighbors volunteer as delivery drivers. Others help him distribute at markets. “A huge part of my
success and how I can get so much bread out there is that people want to be a part of the process and lend a hand,” he says.

Don Guerra is a community-supported baker—almost every loaf of bread he makes has been pre-ordered online; he is a baker literally powered by consumer demand. Without a brick-and-mortar storefront, he sells his bread at four schools, one farmers' market, at the Tucson CSA's Tuesday and Wednesday pickups, and at River Road Gardens.

Guerra is supported by a community that buys his bread—and Guerra supports his community by envisioning a future for local food that extends far beyond bread. “The bread is a vehicle to connect community,” says Guerra. “To get people to be proud of where they live and invested in their communities.” He pauses. “I guess I say ‘community' a lot.”

Originally from Tempe, Guerra moved to Tucson to study anthropology at the University of Arizona. He dropped out after his junior year—“I ran out of money”—and moved to Flagstaff where, by chance, he got a job working the night shift at a bakery. “My first day there, I fell in love with it,” he says. “And that was it.”

He bounced around bakeries, learning from the best and honing his craft. He ended up at Arizona Bread Company, where he baked at night and took business classes at the community college during the day. The business plan for his first bakery was a school project. “I took it to a bank and they said, ‘Yeah, let's do this,'” he says.

Guerra was 26 years old when he opened the Village Baker in Flagstaff. Business boomed—“We were doing a thousand loaves a day,” he says. One of those loaves was usually claimed by a graduate student named Jen. “We'd chit-chat,” says Don. Eventually, Don and Jen started dating; eventually, she'd move with him to Ashland, Oregon, as he opened a second Village Baker and she finished her master's degree in special education. By then, Don had all but stopped making bread, consumed instead by running two bakeries in two states. “We realized that if we wanted to have kids, we needed to figure out a business model that was more conducive to family,” he says. “We missed Arizona. We missed our families. So we said, ‘Let's go home.'”

In Tucson, Guerra took a break from bread, enrolling instead in the University of Arizona's College of Education. “I realized that with the
bakeries, all I did was teach. I'd trained over a hundred people,” says Guerra. “It was so fascinating to learn about pedagogy, about meta-cognition—learning how people learn.”

He got a job at Miles Elementary teaching math, health, and physical education—in 2009, he was named Arizona's Elementary Physical Education Teacher of the Year. But he couldn't stay away from bread. “I loved teaching but the whole time I was dying to be a baker again,” he says. “That was how my wife and I met, and I wanted to be that person again. I thought, If I could just get back to that place, it would all come together.”

So he started making bread on the side; he started selling loaves in the parking lot after school. That model—selling bread at school—would eventually become a central part of Barrio Bread's business plan. “I chose accounts that fit my lifestyle,” he says. “I designed a business after my life instead of my life after my business.”

Today, Guerra bakes bread in the garage of his midtown home—the sweet smell of yeast and grain wafts out the front windows, permeating the air to the street. (The bakery is licensed under Arizona's Home Baked and Confectionary Goods program.)

Guerra's day begins at 4 a.m. He bakes until 7 a.m., when he takes a break to wake up his son and daughter, 10 and 12, and get them ready for school—and then it's back to the bakery, back to the flour, dough, and solitude. “It gets wonky in here sometimes,” he says, smiling and covered in flour.

On Fridays, the day before he sells 200 loaves at the Plaza Palomino farmers' market, he works from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., takes a break to eat dinner with his family, sleeps for a couple of hours, and is back in the bakery by midnight. The obvious question—“Do you sleep much?”—gets an obvious answer. “No,” he says, simply. “I've never been a big sleeper.

“The thing I like about baking is the physicality of it. It requires physical and mental endurance, plus art and science.”

The bakery is warm, not hot—76 degrees, year-round. Guerra slides eight Barrio baguettes into the Italian oven that anchors his operation. It's a deck oven, he says, peering across the 500-degree stone tiles to check on the bread. An exhale of steam lingers around the loaves.

The bakery smells like memory—like the first kitchen you remember;
the first restaurant where you earned your first paycheck. It smells like bread, of course, but what does bread really smell like? Yeast and Sunday; honey and home.

“What goes into bread is a lot of intangible things,” says Guerra.

Tangibly, what goes into bread is flour, water, yeast, and salt. Bread begins with fermented dough and Guerra's dough begins fermenting by way of a sourdough starter. Made of flour and water, a sourdough starter is how bakers capture and propagate wild yeast; most artisan bakers have what's called a mother culture, which they take from every time they bake, feeding and growing the culture to source the yeast needed for a batch of bread.

After he cultivates his starter, Guerra combines several flour varieties—say, Red Fife, White Sonora wheat, and Hard Red Spring—into a batch, along with water and salt. The dough “rests” for four hours, which is when it comes to life, as the yeast are activated and start munching through sugars and exhaling carbon dioxide into air pockets—the very process that gives bread its lift.

At this point, the dough is a bundle of creamy smoothness—it is a discrete thing, one you can pick up and shape. Guerra shapes the dough into loaf-sized portions and, after another hour of room-temperature rest, the dough goes into cold storage to proof for another 15 hours before it's baked. “Slow fermentation—that's where you get all the benefits,” he says.

Indeed, unlike with commercially produced bread, which goes from flour to loaf in as little as two hours, slow fermentation is the hallmark of artisan bread. During extended fermentation, an enzyme is produced that breaks down phytic acid, a nutrient blocker present in the outer layer of bran that can prevent a grain's nutrients from being absorbed into the body. Long fermentation develops flavor and texture; it creates a stable pH and increases shelf life. Hours of fermentation allow yeast and other bacteria to break down gluten—the protein that gives dough its elasticity—into smaller components that are more easily digested.

“The process is everything,” says Guerra. “People have been eating poorly processed grain. I could take a semi-decent grain and turn it into a great loaf because of my process.”

The fermentation is slow; the transformation, sudden. Flour, water, salt, yeast. Flour water salt yeast. Flourwatersaltyeast. Bread. Disparate
ingredients cohere into one sustaining unit. It is poetic. (Pablo Neruda: “Then life itself will have the shape of bread, deep and simple, immeasurable and pure.”) But there is also something so
not
poetic, not abstract nor artistic, about a loaf of bread—it is one of the most tangible things there is. Don Guerra is an artisan baker, but he is also just one producer in a web of producers that make up our local food system.

“I see Don's entrepreneurial capacity as extending beyond Barrio Bread,” says Matt Mars, an assistant professor in the UA's College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. “He has a vision for the whole local food system, one based on collaboration and community.” Struck by this vision, Mars spent two months interviewing Guerra, summarizing his findings in a case study called “From Bread We Build Community,” soon to be published in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development.

“From a purely entrepreneurial perspective, what's brilliant about Don's model is that he never has inventory. He always knows how much to make, and how much is going to be sold and who is going to buy it,” says Mars.

Another brilliance is folding fickle customers directly into the business—which, in turn, embeds the business in customers' lives. Rather than buy an artisan loaf once in a while, when they're in their “artisan bread phase,” says Mars, customers return to Barrio Bread regularly—“it's part of their routine. They've met Don, they get how he works, so they value the bread more.” It's precisely this sense of value that Guerra is trying to export to other facets of the local food system—the value he's working to collect and cohere into a local food identity.

“Local food systems tend to struggle with this, bringing cohesion to a system and a supply chain that is otherwise fragmented and not very well articulated,” says Mars. “Don is a connector, a hub. That's a special ingredient in a local food system—someone who can transcend their own business to understand that the local system is stronger when competition is put aside. Someone who can pull everyone along the supply chain together under a common vision that is relevant to the community.”

A supply chain is a narrative—it has a beginning, middle, and end. Seed to farm, grain to mill, baker to buyer.

“When you open the garage door to his bakery, it's palpable—you see the beginning, middle, and end,” says Pizzeria Bianco's Chris Bianco. “The bread comes from wheat that comes from a good place and good people.”

Since Guerra met Chris Bianco in 2012—since Gary Nabhan first introduced him to White Sonora wheat; since he met Jeff and Emma Zimmerman of Hayden Flour Mills, Steve Sossaman of Sossaman Farms, and Brian and Ralph Wong of BKW Farms—he's become an integral part of a collaboration between farmers, millers, bakers, and seed savers working to bring native and heritage grains back to southern Arizona farms and tables. As farmers have learned how to grow heritage grains and millers learned how to process it, Guerra has had to figure out how to make bread from that which is harvested locally.

“The challenge in working with local wheat is variability,” says Guerra. “We all learned about it together. What can you do with this variety? Well, let's try it and see what it does.

“Every bag of flour is different,” he says. “Baking with local grains offers some good life skills. If you push too hard on something, it's going to push back. If you push too hard, it's going to shut down.”

Guerra estimates that 100 of his 750 weekly loaves are made with local grains. Part of the challenge is the price point—Guerra is committed to providing his community with affordable food, which means he has to take the loss when he prices a loaf of heritage grain bread at $5.50. (He hasn't raised his prices from $4 to $5 a loaf in four years, even when the price of a bag of high-quality organic flour has more than tripled since he started baking.) “I'm growing a strong root system, so that when I need to change, the community will be there for me,” he says.

Chris Bianco made every pizza he served at his famous Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix for 17 years. “There's a vulnerability there,” says Bianco. “Say you're a professional athlete. There will be a day that comes when you won't be able to run as fast and jump as high. How can you still serve your craft? What will you leave behind?”