Pleasant House

Pleasant House Bakery opened in May 2011, so as you might imagine, we’ve been mighty busy and haven’t posted much on this site, which is our blog. We hope you enjoy reading our past blog posts, as they offer background on our inspiration and ideas.

The website for Pleasant House Bakery–which is chock full of important details about our own Royal Pies, menu, hours, specials, and more–is located here (pleasanthousebakery.com). We hope to see you soon!

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Here’s an indication of how busy we’ve been this past couple of weeks: we forgot to post on our blog that we are indeed open now! Special thanks to one of our customers for alerting us of the need for an announcement here.

Full details of Pleasant House Bakery, including our current menu of Royal Pies and other specialties, are on the bakery website, pleasanthousebakery.com. We have been, admittedly, a bit better about updating our status on Facebook and Twitter. Follow us at PHBakery! Thank you!

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There’s been a real whirlwind surrounding the bakery these past few weeks. Chelsea and I are so proud of everyone on our team who has contributed their expertise to our project. We’ll be rolling out many more introductions in the future. This nice piece by TimeOut Chicago does a great job of telling the story behind the origins of our bakery and, more specifically, the introduction of our urban farming startup, Pleasant Farms, and its director, Morgan Kalberloh.

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digging horseradish, a photo by art and chel on Flickr.

It’s been a rough winter but things are coming back to life. Grass is turning green, seedlings are slowly stretching their legs, the weather is warming up, and people are coming out of hibernation–and they’re hungry. I know I’m hungry for a new chapter, new friends, new ideas, new collaborations, new recipes, new challenges.

The Pleasant House crew has been busy with spring cleaning. It won’t be long until the welcome mat goes out and our door is open to the community. Until then, we’ll be taking care of a lot of necessary and boring details and, for the first time, may be able to start thinking about things like icebox pickles, horseradish, syrups, and preserved lemons.

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I apologize for any confusion but just want to confirm that Pleasant House Bakery is NOT open yet. We’re trying our darndest to get it there though! Please stay tuned!

-Art

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Chelsea and I are excited to announce that we have embarked on an adventure to turn our lifelong dreams into reality. Together, with our family and team, we’ll be opening a small bakery and eatery, Pleasant House Bakery, in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. Our bakery will be specialized, churning out our savory handcrafted Royal Pies and fresh sandwiches filled with local meats and produce. These items will be partnered with fresh salads, sides, as well as sweets and artisan goods for you to take out or enjoy on premise. We will also offer creative and tasty daily dining specials. Pleasant House Bakery will be open morning, noon, and night, and we also look forward to bringing the party to you, wherever you are.

I’ve always wanted to bring the artisan spirit of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker to our community, and finally have a location and an eager team essential to beginning this mission. We hope that you are all as excited as we are to see our doors open. We look forward to telling you more about the bakery–its products, team, and neighborhood–in the coming months.

Until then, you can keep up with our progress here on our Pleasant House blog and stay abreast with up-to-the-minute announcements, location details, and other news on our Facebook and Twitter pages for both Pleasant House Bakery and Royal Pies.

Chicago Magazine: “The Life of Pie“.

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While reading the paper Twitter this morning, some meat folks that I follow linked to a New York Magazine “Restaurants” piece where gastropub chef April Bloomfield of the Breslin detailed the various cuts on a pig that she uses at her restaurant. The piece, “Know Your Pig,” shows hand-sketched drawings of the various cuts of pork that chefs such as Bloomfield use. You could say, “everything but the oink,” but rest assured that Bloomfield does use the snout, and there are even some chefs–cue Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck–who may very well have served the oink through some sort of recording and amplification device. The point is, to some chefs, there’s no such thing as “throwaway parts,” and they intend to show you just how versatile these off-cuts can be.

image credits: dailymail.co.uk

One of Bloomfield’s comments about a particular cut, the tenderloin, drew some attention. The tenderloin, Bloomfield said, has the least fat and flavor. “I never use it on its own, it goes into my sausages,” she said. This brazen approach to the highest-valued cut of the animal (monetarily speaking) is not surprising to me and can describe a chef’s attitude (“meat-titude,” to be cheeky) when it comes to his or her approach to meat cookery. It’s also important to note that “throwing into sausage” may not literally refer to grinding the tenderloin, rather, it could refer to dicing the meat or laying strips of it in the sausage to lend the finished product textural and visual appeal.

When I say “attitude” I could care less about the popular image that is attached to professional chefs these days. I’m more interested in the chef’s attitude as it is expressed in his or her work. The sketch of the tenderloin in “Know Your Pig” is slightly cryptic and bears resemblance to what is known in the industry as a butt tender. This is slightly confusing, though, because butt tenders are not a common specification. Pork tenderloins are relatively small, weighing on average between one and one-half pounds each. “Butt” this is besides the point. The point is that tenderloin, in general, whether pork or beef, is often the butt of head-to-tail chefs’ jokes.

If tenderloin is so popular, why is it poo-poohed by so many chefs? There are several factors that a chef and operator must take into consideration when deciding what kind of food, including meat, to serve the public. Such factors as trends, traditions, ethnicity, economy, resources, and arguably most important, audience, are all taken into consideration and will influence what ends up on a menu and what is cut up in the kitchen. If serving tenderloin on the menu makes sense, then that is what will be served. But assuming that a head-to-tail approach in the kitchen will be supported, why would the “most desirable” cut, like the tenderloin, be literally and figuratively drawn so poorly?

There are several explanations for this. Looking at the simple science of meat, there are only two tenderloins on an animal. On a pig the tenderloin amounts to two or three pounds of meat. Two beef tenderloins amount to about 10 or 12 pounds. That’s not much product if you are looking at the hanging weight of a couple hundred pounds for a hog or 1,000 pounds for beef. So right off the bat, simple economics will tell you that you are going to pay a premium for this muscle, which not only happens to be one of the smallest on the carcass but also happens to be the most naturally tender (aka, most desirable by the public). So, yield and price are two very real factors that can put limitations on the chef. If the yield is low, then the chef simply doesn’t have enough portions to serve in a busy restaurant. If the price is high, the chef may not want to put so much money into one cut.

Chefs don’t like to feel limited, and by saying that they “throw” tenderloin into their sausages, it may seem as though they’re being rebellious–and to a certain degree, they are. They’re saying, “I don’t need this expensive cut to define me.” Or, are good chefs just being smart economists themselves by making money off the other 90-plus percent of the carcass? Everything from skin to tails, ears, and sirloin? This awareness becomes even more apparent when you sit down at a head-to-tail restaurant and find your bill for this off-cut dinner is the same as those of a restaurant that serves only premium cuts. It could even be argued that head-to-tail chefs are a microcosm of the enormous beef industry, paying the farmer a per-pound price for a whole or half animal, and adding their own value to the meat however they choose. This is how a little muscle like the tenderloin could have the same value as ground beef. If the chef pays $3 per pound for a half steer, then every piece of muscle, bone, organ, and fat is $3 per pound.

I’ve spent many years preparing thousands of pounds of tenderloin. And just as many years preparing asparagus. People love it. Asparagus is the tenderloin of the vegetable world, by the way. Nobody can dispute that beef tenderloin and asparagus can be a delicious and profitable combination. I’ve been functioning in a tenderloin state of mind for a long time. Chefs may scoff at tenderloin because of its ease of preparation and mass appeal. It’s easy to prepare and easy to like. It’s a clean meat with little fat and little chew. And little character. Sure, there are creative ways to prepare tenderloin, and everything has its place, especially on the holiday table. But head-to-tail cooking, which is arguably just “the way we used to cook,” is about keeping an open mind when it comes to cooking and eating meat. A head-to-tail meat-titude is about thinking outside the box, both literally and figuratively.

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Damn. I had a lot of fun in this dusty, dirty, and sometimes muddy little patch. While the garden hibernates under a blanket of snow, I look forward to getting together with those who made it what it was to talk about the good times we had during our first season and to plan our adventures for the next one. I propose such a get-together over hot toddies. Or over cold drinks in a warm place.



My highlights:

New friends

New community connections

The overall transformation from derelict lot to fruitful garden

Salvaging of artifacts

Great yields

Many meals from the produce

Momentous meals at the garden with family and friends

Excercise

Limestone steps

Grass bench

Cinderblock rain barrel structure

Maggot the cat

Kenya the dog

Fourth of July

Snow

Knowing that we made a real effort to appreciate what we had while knowing that there are no guarantees for the future.

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John grilling some Chicago-style hot links

Originally uploaded by art and chel

Thought I should get around to creating some links. These are the blogs and resources that I have bookmarked for inspiration and reference. It’s a good start but not at all complete.

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Lemon and Ginger Bavarian

Originally uploaded by art and chel

Lemon and ginger Bavarian. Gingery crust, ricotta and lemon, candied lemon, lemon gelee.

Lemon and ginger Bavarian

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