ZMO Journal

Recent Reading

2012-01-19T19:31:00.004-05:00

Like most people in retail I've been following the surge of social couponing, flash sales and weekly sale websites. The new millenium discounters all have the same thing in common. They take something someone wants to sell at full price and sell it for less. My feeling is they're in a no-win game. If something is worth a certain price it should command the price. If it's not, it shouldn't. And while there's a huge amount of attention paid to Groupon, Living Social, Woot and they can be quite flashy, in the end I think they're all a version of the old Val-Pak coupons (do they still come in the mail?). They're just coupons. The way to a lower price is through innovation, not marking up to mark down. These folks are not creating value, they're reducing it. In time they'll fade. Here's some evidence for that: Groupon merchants aren't coming back.

Fall's Top 25 Sellers at ZMO

2012-01-11T11:39:00.000-05:00

Our top-selling foods at ZMO, August through December 2011.

Four Leftover Pasta Tips

2012-01-08T11:26:00.000-05:00

It's not hard to make leftovers into an ultra-tasty pasta dish. If you have anything from a couple odds and ends to a large, frightening buffet lurking in your crisper—it doesn't matter. Last night I made leftovers pasta (above) with so many different things it looked like my refrigerator threw up. But it tasted fantastic.

I've figured out four simple techniques that help make it taste great.

1. Have a Fat Strategy

If you've got a bit of hamburger or bacon that's headed for the dish, cook it first and use the fat for the rest of the cooking. Same goes for an old sausage or salami end. It doesn't matter what kind of fat you use, just think about how to get it in the dish at the beginning. Last night I had an old jar of peppers that were packed in olive oil. The peppers were long gone. I kept the jar with the oil; it's perfect for this kind of dish. Also, don't skimp on the fat. Its going to be the vessel for the flavor and the source of the mouth-filling texture.

2. Think About Salt in Things, Not On Things

I tend to cook on the saltier side but for this dish I didn't add any salt directly to it. Instead I added things that had some salt in them. This time they were capers, salt-cured limes and harissa. As for the pasta water, it should be salty like the sea. To learn how much to salt your water eat a noodle straight out of the water when it's almost done cooking. It should taste seasoned.

3. Re-use the Pasta Water

It took me forever to figure out that this was the key to making great pasta dishes (that weren't topped with tomato sauce). Don't throw out the water, please! Use it in the sauce. It makes a huge difference.

4. Don't Finish Cooking Pasta in the Water

Finish it in the sauce. If the pasta is not yet al dente it's still hungry for liquid. Switch it from the pot of water to your sauce and it'll soak up sauce, not water—and you'll have a more flavorful dish.

For leftover pasta, the order I work goes like this:

Set the water to boil.
Put a big skillet on the burner and start adding things: meats/fat first, then aromatics like garlic, onion, pastes like harissa. Maybe a little bit of leftover sauce—whatever sauce I have. More leftovers next, especially ones that need longer cooking. Spices, too, like a stem of some old herb or a chile pepper. Cook on low, don't worry about stirring too much.
When the water boils add a small handful of salt and the pasta. When the pasta is not quite done, strain it and pour a half inch of the water in the skillet simmering the sauce. Add the pasta to the skillet. Save the remaining water. Cook on high heat till the pasta is done. Add more pasta water if it starts getting dry. You want the pasta to be wet, the water will make the sauce.
At the very end I may add things that barely need cooking. Last night it was some frozen peas, corn and a mound of mangy arugula, all added just at the end, stirred and poured out into a bowl.
I usually finish with freshly ground black pepper, Marash pepper and a squeeze of lemon.

Practice this a half dozen times and I guarantee your homemade leftovers pasta will taste better than almost any pasta dish you can eat in a restaurant. It certainly helps to use a great noodles like Rustichella or Martelli. If you're going to spend some money, do it there.

More pasta cooking details.

Recent Reading

2011-11-25T17:38:00.000-05:00

Black Friday edition.

"If you don't have to put it on sale and people are still going to buy it, why put it on sale?"

What's the data say? Black Friday prices aren't the lowest.

Damn, that flash sale site might not be a better deal, either.

Recent Reading

2011-11-13T22:17:00.000-05:00

In praise of "lower grade" maple syrup.

12 pasta myths debunked. (Mixes well with my notes on pasta cooking.)

There's a website for everything.

And then there's this, from the annals of totally f*#%ked up:

What does it take to be a Victoria’s Angel?:

She sees a nutritionist, who has measured her body’s muscle mass, fat ratio and levels of water retention. He prescribes protein shakes, vitamins and supplements to keep Lima’s energy levels up during this training period. Lima drinks a gallon of water a day. For nine days before the show, she will drink only protein shakes – “no solids”. The concoctions include powdered egg. Two days before the show, she will abstain from the daily gallon of water, and “just drink normally”. Then, 12 hours before the show, she will stop drinking entirely. “No liquids at all so you dry out, sometimes you can lose up to eight pounds just from that,” she says.

Other Merchants...Darling

2011-11-08T15:31:00.000-05:00

I just bought something from an Etsy seller in Hong Kong — which is one of the amazing things about Etsy — and this was the note they included. Obviously English isn't their first language. But there's no way they looked up a translation and got "Darling" unless they wanted to say something that bizarrely intimate, which I think is kind of great.

I also like some of the cards from this seller in Indonesia.

Recent Reading

2011-10-27T11:52:00.001-04:00

Artisan: another good word becomes meaningless.

How many of the product reviews you're reading are fake?

Hospitals using kanbans.

GMO foods — you are eating them right now.

Will the Sikhs save Parmigano-Reggiano?

Unrelated to food or reading: where children sleep, in photos.
This gets crazy.

What if grocery stores were like websites?

2011-10-21T12:59:00.000-04:00

Other Merchants...J. Crew

2011-10-03T18:22:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of merchants I learn from, big and small. I'll write about some of them in a new category of posts (click "Other Merchants"). If there are any you think I should know about please shout!

J. Crew

I don't think there's a better clothing mass merchant these days than Mickey Drexler at J. Crew. He's like the Steve Jobs of moderately preppy. His taste, fit and overall merchandising are diabolically good. Their stores are fairly well run, which is saying a lot for a company that has over 200 locations, mostly in malls. Stylistically, Mickey almost never makes a wrong move and, eight years in, he just seems to be getting better. If I had to compete with him I'd be very scared.

I particularly like how he's picking iconic brands both popular (Timex) and somewhat unknown (Loro Piana, the legendary Italian fabric maker) and mixing them in. Sometimes they're sold as an item with a J. Crew twist. Sometimes they're part of a garment. In either case, he doesn't hide them, but he also makes sure you know it's J. Crew that's running the show in how they're included. He also uses facts and education to help sell clothes rather than just trend, which is how I've always tried to sell food.

Recent Reading

2011-10-02T19:09:00.000-04:00

Is junk food cheaper than good food? Bittman says no.

Is Groupon a bad idea?

Vinyl record sales are way up—and not just in the USA.

The guy who runs Zappos fines his employees for saying the words "Social Media." Also, he loves orders by phone.

The Parking Lot is a documentary on a group of parking lot attendants that turns into a pretty funny take on the metaphysics of the service industry. There are so few films that get anything right about work life. This one does. (For one of my favorites go see Office Space.) It left me wondering, do you need to be a hopeless romantic to enjoy being in service?

Nice view, beans. Enjoy it.

2011-09-19T17:06:00.000-04:00

Margot, Zingerman's Deli's chocolate maven, is traveling Italy and Sicily with Gioacchino, our source for many Italian foods. She took time away from sweets for this shot: a shipment of lentils from Ustica waiting for a boat to take them to America. Are these beans in for a shock. They're leaving the island where it's 80 degrees, bright white sun, to arrive in Michigan sometime in November where, I promise, they will experience neither of those things.

The lentils are an old crop on Ustica but new to America. Brad is bringing a batch in for the Culinary Adventure Society shipment this December.

Vintage Fruitcake, Ready To Get Dressed

2011-09-16T12:36:00.000-04:00

The Vintage Fruitcake packaging is done. It's a vellum wrap over an archival box. The shot of Robert on the car circa 1970 is screened behind the title. I think it looks kinda hot. Thanks, Nicole, Brad and Kristie.

Robert has sent the cakes so they'll be here next week. Meanwhile, he's finishing up this year's cakes. Here's some orange peel soaking up cognac in his kitchen.

Recipe: Fried Pickle

2011-09-05T22:27:00.000-04:00

Earlier this summer I had a long drink with Rick Field of Rick's Picks and he told me how much he'd been loving frying pickles. Why don't we make a Rick's/Zingerman's fried pickle kit? Maybe for the Superbowl? I don't usually trust ideas hatched under such conditions and, for some reason I can't explain, I've never had a fried pickle. So last Friday night we got to work.

A jar of Rick's People's Pickles has about 30 thick-cut slices. We fried all of 'em, save the six his daughters snagged for dinner.

Fried (People's) Pickle Recipe

Lay a paper towel on a plate. Put each slice on the towel and top with another paper towel. Let sit for at least ten minutes. (Reuse the leftover brine. Drop in a peeled hard boiled egg or green beans or some thinly sliced carrots. Refrigerate for a couple days before eating.)
Heat two inches of vegetable oil in a ten or twelve inch pan. We used a cast iron skillet.
Dust the pickles with flour on each side.
Beat two eggs in a bowl.
Dip the pickle slices in the eggs then roll in cornmeal. We used cornmeal Rick bought in Vermont, but I'm thinking they'd also be good with Marino's Polenta.
Fry for about ten minutes, or until they turn golden brown.

We'd been drinking wine so the timing could be off—watch the color for your cue. Also, it'd probably be helpful to know what temperature the oil was at but we didn't have a thermometer. (I pretty much suck at recipe development.) We threw some water in and it popped. The first pickle went in and Rick said, "That's a good fry." I took his word for it.

Later he explained, "You don't want to kill the pickle. Too many fried pickles are annihilated. We want to keep it juicy inside." Spoken like a man who's eaten a lot of fried pickles.

Douse 'em with a bit of hot sauce (I like Cholula, though I bet the new Piment d'Espelette hot sauce we just got in would be scrumptious) and eat 'em while they're hot. I thought they were pretty good.

If any of the crew at ZMO—or any other readers—try this, let me know how it turns out. I'm still thinking about it as a gift kit this winter.

A good fry.

Is there something wrong with farmers markets?

2011-09-02T17:30:00.000-04:00

Last year one thousand new farmers markets started in the U.S., an almost 20% increase over the previous year. Now, in a separate article, farmers fear a glut of too many farmers markets.

Why would someone who makes things worry that there are too many places to sell it?

The answer lies in what makes farmers markets tick. They are limited quantity events that allow farmers to sell food at a premium.

In general, though you can find lots of exceptions, farmers market food is slightly more expensive than standard grocery store food. I won't get into whether that's good or bad or what's behind it, but from what I've read it seems to be mostly the case. The big deal for farmers, though, isn't that their prices are higher than at Kroger. It's that they get a chance to charge retail prices, period. Usually they are stuck being wholesalers. Selling wholesale, farmers can only charge 50-60% of the price they get to charge at a farmers market. So they're making more profit at the market than they would wholesale.

The prices that farmers get to charge are a big reason why there are so many new markets cropping up. It's classic economics, a lesson taken straight from the upward-sloping supply curve. When prices go up supply increases. In other words, where there's an opportunity to make money, business will follow. It's kind of like how nature abhors a vacuum. Business abhors big profits. Where they exist they will be swallowed whole.

Since farmers can get higher prices at a market than wholesaling more farmers want in on the action, hence more farmers markets. So far the growth in markets hasn't meant an oversupply. But the farmers are right to worry that they might. Textbook economic says that would result in lower prices and lower profits. After all, there are only so many people who can afford—or maybe want to pay?—six dollars a pound for heirloom tomatoes. That's the reason you can find ten farmers markets within a fifteen minute drive of downtown Ann Arbor (pop: 114,000, median income $46,000) but only nine in all of Detroit (pop: 714,000, median income $30,000).

More Ways to Serve Cheese

2011-08-21T20:00:00.000-04:00

What cheeses should you get for a cheese course?

Until a few years ago I’d answer that question with what I’d learned as an event caterer. Go with a variety: a young soft cheese, an aged harder cheese, maybe a blue, maybe a goat or sheep’s milk option. Two ounces per person. That is still a safe and delicious way to go.

Spending time with cheese mongers and makers over the last decade, I’ve experienced a few other ways to serve a cheese course that are fun, educational and rather tasty.

Progressions

Two or three versions of the same cheese aged for different lengths of time. For example, a young and extra-aged Comté. Or three different ages of Gouda. This is also great if you have different vintages of the wine from the same region.

Threesomes

Three goat cheeses: one fresh, one bloomy, one hard as a rock. Three blues. You get the idea.

Old World, New World

Try two clothbound cheddars, like Cabot from Vermont and Montgomery’s from England. Or a classic Swiss Gruyère and a cheese inspired by it, like Pleasant Ridge Reserve. Gouda from Holland, Gouda from Wisconsin.

One Giant Piece

I don't know exactly why but big cheese is way more fun than small cheese. Splurge for a four pound hunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano and stab it with the old, weird knife you've had lurking in the drawer for all these years. (Bigger chunks last longer so you can continue to gnaw on it for weeks.)

Cheese as Aperitif

Cheese to start dinner, like the cocktail and cheese hour our parents knew, is a more American way to serve cheese than the formal, end-of-dinner French way. Try kicking the evening off with an unusual pairing, like cheese with a salty anchovy or a couple salt packed capers, where the cheese becomes the sweet part of the experience.

Cheese Dessert

A sliver of Raw Milk Stilton with shards of dark chocolate. A small marble of aged gouda with a shot of espresso. If you’re serving dessert with sweet syrup, save some and drizzle it on the cheese.

This article appears in Zingerman's upcoming catalog Fall Food Buyer's Guide 2011.

New American Country Ham

2011-08-17T15:14:00.004-04:00

The first hogs were brought to America via Virginia, raised on the appropriately named Hog Island in Surry County. Today, Virginia remains a center of American country ham.

To some extent Smithfield ham has become synonymous with Virginia country ham, but that’s more a case of branding than anything else. Smithfield is to Virginia ham as Kleenex is to tissues. They’re the most well known and the biggest. But they’re not the end of the story. There are many small smokehouses that create special hams. And in spite of Smithfield’s recent moves to eliminate confinement operations, commodity hogs remain at the core of their operation.

Sam Edwards’ family has been curing and selling ham from Surry since the 1920s. We’ve been selling it since the 1980s. He makes a classic Virginia ham, the same kind that was favored by Queen Victoria and sent to the French court for several hundred years. It's salted for three or four weeks, hung chilled for another month, smoked in hickory for up to a week at low temperatures, then hung to age for a year or more. The smoke is key and its part of everything you taste and smell at the smokehouse. Sam's sister used to call it her dad's cologne.

This is classic American country ham. Compared to even the most robust Spanish hams Sam’s cured hogs have a more forward flavor, in part because of the smoke. Italian prosciutto and its American cousins, like Herb Eckhouse's outstanding hams from La Quercia, are even milder still. While it's still a southern tradition to boil country hams like this, there's really no difference between them and the cured hams of Spain and Italy so I like to eat them as they do: sliced thin straight off the ham, served at room temperature. They go well with Virginia Peanuts, apples and a cold beer.

Several years ago Sam made the move to begin curing hams from Berkshire hogs, a breed of pig that is known for its extensive fat marbling and big flavor. Partly this was a practical decision. Berkshire pork had become a hit among chefs. They demanded restaurant cuts like loins and chops. The hams were left looking for a buyer so the price was fair. In part, though, Sam saw this as a way to make his cured ham taste more like what it used to, before pigs had the fat bred out of them to become “the other white meat.” (It's also raised like it used to be, the hogs are not confined and not fed hormones or antibiotics.) Because he's blessed with a marvelously acute funny bone he called the ham "Surry-ano," a play on Jamon Serrano, the most common cured ham in Spain.

When I visited Edwards salting room this summer it was easy to spot the Berkshire hams. They're much bigger than standard breed hams with a thick ring of fat on the haunch. They take smoke better and age longer. Sam started by aging them 400 days. This fall we're going to have a ham aged over two years (its DNA tag is the first picture on this post). Standard breeds would dry out if aged that long, but the fat on the Berkshires keeps them going.

More notes and photos of Sam Edwards smokehouse.

This appears as an article in Zingerman's upcoming Fall Food Guide 2011.

Recent Reading

2011-08-15T12:04:00.000-04:00

A batch of reading focused on creation and innovation.

Why does Kickstarter work?

A Kickstarter for books, kind of.

Turning an empty bottle of Coke into a shanty light bulb.

Malcolm Gladwell on why innovation genius is a false myth.
(I have the full article PDF if you can't breach the New Yorker's firewall.)

Lloyd Dobler wanted to be an innovator.

Recent Reading

2011-08-07T13:57:00.000-04:00

A fascinating look inside 36 people's refrigerators. Read the captions.

Will that hot dog kill me? More on confusing "natural" nitrate meat labels. (You can read my notes on nitrates here.)

A new food journal from McSweeney's, Peter Meehan and David Chang.

One hell of a bullshit job.

The U.S. military has a $20 billion air conditioning bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. Here's why:

Free-standing tents equipped with air conditioners in 125 degree heat require a lot of fuel. To power an air conditioner at a remote outpost in land-locked Afghanistan, a gallon of fuel has to be shipped into Karachi, Pakistan, then driven 800 miles over 18 days to Afghanistan on roads that are sometimes little more than “improved goat trails,” Anderson says. He calculates more than 1,000 troops have died in fuel convoys, which remain prime targets for attack.

Final Art...Iowa White

2011-08-05T22:30:00.000-04:00

Ryan's final art for Iowa White, the new pork spread from La Quercia. Coming in the fall catalogs.

Final Art...Fall Buyers Guide

2011-08-04T13:40:00.000-04:00

Ian's final cover art for the September catalog.

Final Art...Earlybird

2011-08-03T11:20:00.000-04:00

Ryan's final cover art for the October catalog.

Recent Reading

2011-07-26T20:58:00.000-04:00

A new part to the blog: I'll post things I've read recently that I think are worth sharing. Since this is primarily a food entrepreneurial blog most of them will be related to commerce and eating. But not all.

1. How much money would your state earn by taxing sugared sodas at one cent per ounce? Try this calculator. (I checked Michigan's number against the 2011 budget. The tax would earn twice what the state spends on community colleges, five times what it spends on primary education.)

2. Harold McGee on how to make cold-brewed tea or coffee at home. Did you know cold brews contain less caffeine than hot brews? I didn't.

3. San Francisco wants to ban animals you don't eat.

4. 10,000 Parisians randomly have dinner outdoors in white clothes—on the same night.

5. St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, a surprising book of short stories.

Scenes from Wakefield and Virginia Diner

2011-07-25T11:47:00.000-04:00

Hamland

2011-07-14T19:20:00.000-04:00

Surry, Virgina. July in eastern Virginia, it's 94 degrees, the atmosphere is nearly liquid. Inside Sam Edwards' smokehouse the air is perpetual hickory. The wood perfume leaks out of the concrete smoking chambers and drifts down the halls, entering every orifice of the building. The walls are bronzed by it, the pine ham racks, some decades old, are nearly black. Hours after my visit, hundreds of miles away, I still smell the dark scent on my skin.

A few pictures from Sam Edwards' smokehouse.

Sam Edwards III.
Numerical coincidence: he's also the third generation to run his family ham business.

Salted hams stacked on pallets.

They'll salt here for three to four weeks.

The salt makes the floor look like January in Michigan. Sam calls this the "winter room."

Mold is a sign of age. Customers used to request hams with mold still on. Today it's washed off.

Two full pine racks, side by side. Each is about four feet square, six and a half feet high. Once a ham is hung on the rack after salting it spend the rest of its life there—up to two years, sometimes a little more.

The toe end of hoof-on, bone-in Berkshires, aged for over two years. These are the hams I'm ordering for this fall.

Heirloom Pork George Foreman

2011-07-13T00:04:00.000-04:00

Fancy Food Show summer 2011. Today La Quercia cooked thin slices of rolled pancetta on their George Foreman grill. Pancetta is similar to the cut we use for bacon in America, but it's cured with salt and herbs (rosemary and bay) not salt, sugar and smoke. It's rarely served as is and, in Italy, I'm guessing never ever off the George Foreman. Too bad—it's tasty.

Horse Chocolates

2011-07-11T23:47:00.001-04:00

Fancy Food Show 2011. Katrina at Vosges bought bound books of 1932 Argentinian newspapers. She served samples of her chocolate directly off them on a five hundred pound iron table she got from Buenos Aires. It was the most visually interesting space at the show.

It All Ends

2011-07-10T16:22:00.000-04:00

A four foot tall framed portrait of Harry Potter, done in Jelly Belly. Either the looniest or awesomest thing I saw today at the Fancy Food Show in Washington D.C. Didn't check to see if they used Earwax flavor.

Sardinewich

2011-07-08T10:39:00.000-04:00

Toast a thick slice of farm bread. (Better yet, grill it). Rub a peeled clove of garlic on one side, then douse the bread in good olive oil. Mound up a pile of arugula leaves. Top with Portuguese sardines, spines removed. Season with sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, Marash red pepper flakes, another swig of olive oil and a generous squeeze of lemon.

I've also made this, variously, with salt preserved lemons, chopped onion, cilantro, fresh tomato, harissa, chopped hardboiled egg.. Whatever the ingredients a sardinewich tastes best when it waits on the counter for an hour.

For readers who noted past recipes were going too Virgo, I offer this, from a series of late night dishes I call Old Man Food.

Water Signs

2011-06-28T22:00:00.001-04:00

A short bike ride takes me to Valentino pier in Red Hook, the western edge of Brooklyn. From there I can look across Buttermilk Channel into the belly of New York harbor and, on the hazy opposite shore, New Jersey. The coast of Jersey is littered with port cranes, the four legged monsters George Lucas imagined into AT-AT walkers.

Today there were a dozen container ships paused in port waiting to relieve their cargo. They're off in the distance in my photo, island shaped blips on the horizon. They don't really look like boats in the photo—or in real life. More like boxes, inside of which are more boxes, the metal shipping containers that carry ninety percent of ocean trade today, including our food imports. The boats will sit silent and still for hours or days. At some unseen signal one will start to edge toward shore.

Like San Francisco who forfeited her port traffic to Oakland, New York City's boats have also left for the opposite harbor. Brooklyn and Manhattan's piers are now being converted to parks. Last year I remember the water a lot emptier, far fewer boats waiting for port. Maybe it's a sign the economy is looking up?

We have a land yacht

2011-06-27T16:18:00.001-04:00

We've been hunting for an old airstream trailer for months. (Well, really, our Chief Junk Hunter Kristie has.) Today we bought one. It is undeniably awesome. Look for it outside our buiding in a matter of hours, provided Kristie and Jay have a successful haul.

It's a 1970s model with a sweet action stripe.

Our plan is to rip out the guts and replace it with new birch paneling and a patently offbeat office. They did the first part for us—the walls are gone.

Alfajores in Exile

2011-06-20T21:25:00.000-04:00

We started selling dulce de leche alfajores cookies of the indomitable Maite Zubia last fall. In two weeks she moves back to Chile. I've met some expats who fell in love with Ann Arbor before—nothing quite like this. That's her new tattoo.

(Don't worry, kids. She found another Ann Arbor-based Chilean expat who will continue to make the alfajores for us. Look for them in September.)

Vintage Fruitcake

2011-06-16T22:24:00.000-04:00

The official start of summer is still days away and Robert Lambert just started making our holiday fruit cake order. We ordered a few hundred. They'll arrive in early fall.

Besides the new season's cake we're also going to have fifty cakes he made last year and cellared for us. Vintage fruit cakes. It's kind of a play on the joke that no one ever buys a fruit cake — we just keep regifting them. Jokes aside, aging fruit cake is not a sign of latent madness. The British have aged fruitcakes for, well, ages. Robert has aged them too, for fun, not profit. It was a taste of a cake he'd aged for seven years old that made me decide to do this. The results should be rather awesome. Like with aged wine, all kinds of new flavors erupt. Plus the texture changes, getting denser but also more moist, like gravity is turning the cake into a new material.

Above: a picture of Robert taken in the early 1970s. He'd just arrived in Southern California from Wisconsin. It was winter in Hollywood. I love it. It made me think: I totally have to get this on the vintage fruit cake packaging. I think we'll make it the cover of the box.

Below: this year's fruit cake garnish. Candied seville orange slices, cut with a mold, paired with fresh bay leaf.

Fall cover, first draft

2011-06-12T11:29:00.000-04:00

Ryan's first draft is quite fetching.

Why aren't you on Facebook?

2011-06-11T14:09:00.000-04:00

Internet Week festival is on in New York. I took part in a panel of entrepreneurs speaking about technology and its impact on small business.

The room was full of mild mannered media and IT types. At one point someone asked how we were using social media. The other panelists were all over it. They posted on this, streamed that and in general had it going on. I told the room that my mail order business didn't have a Facebook page, had no real blog to speak of and I didn't Twitter. Sweet Jesus, was that the wrong answer. It was like I claimed the internet was a series of tubes and farted in the church punchbowl at the same time. There was a collective choking sound. Some laughed because they thought I was joking. Others barked in disbelief. Everyone else just stared. The panelist next to me took the microphone away from me.

I guess telling internet week that my business didn't use social media was like being invited to a convention of dairy farmers and admitting I avoided milk. I wasn't trying to be a contrarian for its own sake, though. My feeling was — and is — that the long term vision of your company and a new opportunity need to meet, hold hands, and fit with each other. If they are not in sync then you should pass. After all, in small business we have incredibly limited resources. Managing is a constant case of editing, of choosing one thing and not another, of saying No.

For a long time I didn't think Facebook and ZMO were right for each other. I told Facebook "No." While many opportunities are simple and quick to test, this wasn't one of them. I knew it would take time to do well. I knew we'd need to devote people and resources to it. We'd need to learn a new way to talk to Friends that honors our high level of service. We would need to solve problems in a new way since everything is aired in public. We would need to learn how to fold it into our day-to-day work. To do this we would need a champion and a vision of success that works with other Zingerman's Facebook pages. We would need a way for us to measure whether we're doing well.

I saw all those things but it wasn't clear what Facebook would add that synced with our vision of selling food at a profit. It wasn't that I was against social media. We just had to weigh the real costs and service issues it would create with the benefits — and put all of that under the light of the vision of our business. When I said all this I got some nods. One person silently mouthed, "Thank you." Several who'd gasped earlier said they wished more businesses had such a long-term strategic approach. I'm sure many still thought I was hopelessly out of touch and just making excuses.

Later, after the ruckus died down, I admitted that we're starting a Facebook page this summer. We have a vision, we posted for the champion position, we're going to hold hands with social media and see if we can be with each other. The room sighed in relief.

The imports arrive

2011-05-12T13:47:00.000-04:00

Today a truck hauling a forty foot container pulled up at our back dock. Inside were pallets of food from Italy, Spain, France and about six other countries. We directly import these ourselves, which means we send our order to the food maker abroad. It starts with an email. A few weeks later they get their food to a consolidation point near port. At that point the inscrutable, unfathomable machinery of the international shipping industry takes over. Four to seven weeks later the truck arrives with us.

It's always a very exciting day for me. These are some of our most interesting foods. For many of them we're the sole source in America. And there are always new things on the boat, like this shopped-icefish-and-red-pepper-spread from Calabria.

I'm sure we'll either sell none of it or we'll sell out of it in two days. This is one of those no-middle-ground foods.

Joe and Lisa got the honor of checking the container in. That means they get to see firsthand the creative ways the foodmakers package for an ocean voyage. Here Lisa found a case of twenty dollar jars of Sicilian pistacho paste were tossed in loose among stryofoam peanuts. Amazingly, they survived the voyage.

One of the baffling labels that Italians attach to boxes.

No address needed, apparently.

Fra-gee-lay. That must be Italian. In fact, it is.

The best polenta I've ever had, sent in bags like on a pirate vessel.

We stopped everything to crack open a bottle of olive oil. This is the first we've tried the latest harvest. At this point the oils are still young. They can have quite a personality. The Castello di Cacchiano from Tuscany was practically vibrating. Tasting it was like slipping a razor blade across my tongue. It's an exceptional beast.

Beef in the Afternoon

2011-04-20T10:31:00.000-04:00

Last week we brought in steaks from five different suppliers for a big tasting. I've been thinking about offering meat for sale through our catalog and website so I thought we should taste some of what's out there. We were tasting strips and sirloins. There was beef from cows that had been fed only grass (Lasater and La Cense) and from cows that had been finished on corn (Niman Ranch, Omaha and Roadhouse farm). Some was dry aged in meat lockers and some was wet aged in cry-o-vac.

Brad and Kristie continue snacking.

We cooked them on wood fired grills and they came out in waves, twenty steaks in all, over two hours on a Wednesday afternoon. I'm sure everyone went home and took a nap. It was a gout-a-thon.

We do tastings all the time, at least once a month for dozens of foods. This was different, more complex, because there were so many moving parts. The steaks were different ages, from different animals, different thicknesses, some had bones, and they all had to be cooked to come out at the same done-ness.

The real complication was grass fed beef. Unless you've been to Argentina chances are you've never had beef that comes from a cow entirely raised on grass. For many decades we've finished American beef on corn, which means that the animal eats grass for some of its life (all cattle start on grass) and ends up eating corn at the end. The corn adds weight to the animal up quickly, some of it as intra-muscular fat that's desirable for its texture. Corn, it turns out, makes steak soft and luxurious.

In contrast grass fed beef is more chewy. This is not a big deal to some (ribeye lovers!) but to others (petite filet aficionados) it's less desirable. In the end, though, grass feeding is the most traditional way to raise cattle. And, in terms of the health of the environment and the cow, it's the most sustainable. People always say that we're not ready for grass fed beef. Supposedly we're all suckers for soft marshmallow steaks raised on corn and we'll never turn back. After this tasting I'm not so sure.

At the end, the Roadhouse's beef was a favorite and it is finished on corn. But several of us also thought La Cense's 100% grass fed beef was very promising. I'm going to continue to work with them since they can ship.

After tasting, we visited Chef Alex's meat locker behind the Roadhouse where they store beef cuts that are dry aging.

Chef Alex in the meat locker.

When beef dry ages it forms a soft white and green mold on its surface. It is washed off before being cut into steaks and cooked. The dry aging concentrates and expands flavors as well as changing the texture. Many describe the taste of dry aged beef with words like "mineral."

Each cut in the meat locker is dated by this simple, ingenious method. The beef we tasted had been aged about five weeks, which Alex things is just about best for the cattle he gets.

Two Recipes for Fava Beans

2011-04-05T21:48:00.003-04:00

Fava beans are coming in season. Fresh, they're delicious, but they're also a pain in the ass. You've got to shell them — twice. First, from their large pods (pictured above). Secondly, from their individual wrappers after boiling for about five minutes in salted water.

Favas with Olive Oil

Start with four pounds of favas in their pods and you're left with a half pound of edible beans if you're lucky. Is it worth it? Whether the labor is what you want to spend your evening doing is a personal choice. But for me, spring favas, just boiled, glowing green, warm as lips, swimming in a glossy olive oil with a cover of coarse sea salt are totally worth it. It's not a dish I make often. But the first time each year is a bright sign of spring. I know the mud is receding and the earth will soon be littered with grass.

Fresh favas also go well in pasta. Here's a dish I recently made with favas, spring peas and Martelli maccheroni. It's worth mentioning since it incorporates a lot of good things you find at their best in spring.

Tender Young Thing Pasta

Chop some fresh mild sausage into small bites (I like one my butcher makes with fennel seeds). Brown it in a deep skillet, then put the cooked pasta and some of its pasta water in the pan. Add the favas and fresh spring peas (already parboiled very al dente), then a few spoons of ricotta. Stir. Add fresh young arugula and pea shoot leaves, some freshly grated lemon zest. A couple turns of the spoon and count to one hundred and it's done. Top it off with more ricotta dollops, freshly grated black pepper and Parmigiano-Reggiano and a small handful of shredded mint leaves. If you are able to nab some spring morels they'd also be welcome. I guess pretty much any tender young thing is fine to add.

Spring cooking like this can be fussy, a lot of work. There's lots of shelling and an annoying tangle of trimming since arugula and shoots are very stemmy at this time of year. But do the work and, with it, know you've broken winter's back for good.

Education is a Push

2011-04-01T16:03:00.004-04:00

In lean terminology, there are pushes and there are pulls. Pushes are bad and to be avoided. They're when you make something for a customer — or the next process in your sequence — regardless of whether it's needed. Pulls are good. They're when the customer — or the next process — asks for something and then you make it.

Classroom education is largely done as a push. The process usually pushes a class identical units of information — lectures, homework and reading — regardless of any individual's specific need. (Sometimes you get time for questions and answers, which is an example of pull.) Anyone who's dozed through a class knows push education can be boring as hell. And often not terribly effective.

Here's some interesting news about a school that's trying to make education a pull process, one that responds to what the student needs when they need it. They are creating classes that are customized daily. It's an interesting experiment.

I see batches: The Death Star

2011-03-25T09:53:00.000-04:00

In Star Wars the Empire batched their military like crazy. For example, they created the Death Star. Like most batching, it was probably sold in a meeting with the Emperor as "an efficient choice." After all, why do lots of small attacks one at a time when you can do them all at once out of a laser beam as big as a planet?

We all know how that story goes. A typically tragic tale of batching. One mistake—that thermal exhaust port—was multiplied by a zillion.

More on batches here.

This is how the phone call goes when you have to tell your boss the Death Star blew up.

I see batches: Nuclear Power

2011-03-23T21:15:00.000-04:00

In lean operations terminology a "batch" happens when you're not producing something one at a time. It's when you make multiples of something identical all at once. Usually batching is done to be more "efficient," efficiency being defined as the lowest production cost per unit.

Like binge drinking (another form of batching), batches have strange side effects. One is that when things go wrong they go really wrong. Any error is multiplied by the size of the batch. The bigger the batch, the bigger the error.

You can spot batches everywhere. For example, electricity is often created in large batches. Whether it's made from coal, natural gas, or hydroelectricity, almost all electricity is made in the biggest batch possible. And nuclear power plants are the biggest batchers of them all. It's not one home making electricity for itself. It's one plant making electricity for multiple cities. A typical nuclear plant produces enough power for nearly a million homes.

The nuclear crisis unfolding in Japan made me think about batches and how, when you batch radioactive power generation, you can create some horrific errors, multiplied.

Peace Corps Food Entrepreneurs

2011-03-04T15:55:00.000-05:00

The Banaue rice terraces in the Phillipines are over two thousand years old.

Over the last few years I’ve noticed a number of folks enter the food industry after stints in the Peace Corps. Of course there are far fewer of them than there are artists and musicians, the clan who form the rank and file of the food world. But the Peace Corps folks I know are entrepreneurs and, without exception, they are driven like maniacs. They start with a mission. They develop really cool food businesses from scratch. Their undertakings are almost comically difficult (making and exporting chocolate from ultra-steamy Madagascar is one). These folks show the positive side of globalization that too many in the food world overlook.

One ex-Peace Corps food entrepreneur is Mary Claire Hensley. She was in the Corps in the Philippines, circa 1976. She was the first white woman to ever set foot in her village, called Uma. Almost 30 years later she started a company to bring some of the three hundred indigenous Philippines rices to America.

The rices she focuses on are sun dried, mostly organic (though not certified), grown on a stunning series of terraces. The terraces are ancient. They look like glowing green and gold puzzle pieces, stacked in tectonic layers. The work of Mary’s company helps repair them, helps keep them in use, and helps get farmers a meaningful price for their rice.

Some numbers are important to the story. The poverty line in the Philippines is $250 per year and subsistence farmers—which this area has a lot of, since rice is the number one business—usually fail to achieve that level. The standard price for their rice is 20 cents per kilo. Mary’s company pays $1.35-$1.80 per kilo. Her price immediately guarantees a wage above the poverty line.

Mary tries to make a market for this rice. Last year she sold all they made. They’d like to make more. That’s where we come in. We’ve committed to buying a farm’s worth of rice this year between two types: Tinawon White (Mary's favorite) and Kalinga Unoy, which has a ravishing brick orange color. We just got them in and put them on the website.

JFK announced the Peace Corps from the steps of the Michigan Union in 1960.

Check out the hats.

I don’t know if there are significant numbers of Peace Corps volunteers starting food businesses. I hope there are. I know I’m kind of biased, being in a food business located in Ann Arbor, where JFK gave the speech announcing the Corps. But the social mission of the Corps plus the social mission of great, traditional food seem like a natural match.

Mountain Cheese Bloodlines

2011-03-02T11:45:00.001-05:00

Mountain cheeses, no matter what country they’re made in, often share traits. They’re cousins, united by geography, climate and the techniques these harsh places demand. You can easily taste their bloodline connection.

Mountain cheeses can be big. In the hills among the Emme valley, two hundred plus pound wheels of Emmentaler, the original Swiss cheese, are produced. In the Jura region of France, northwest of Geneva, eighty pound wheels of Comté are turned out. Note that these are their finished weights, when they’re over a year old, after tremendous evaporation. When they’re first formed they can weigh up to fifty percent more.

Why are they so big? The answer, in large part, is winter. Mountain cheeses were traditionally a source of protein during cold months. They needed to be durable, they needed to last, since winter’s length was unpredictable. An eighty pound wheel of Comté will easily last until spring without spoiling. An eight ounce wheel of Camembert will not.

Mountain cheeses are sweet and floral. The sweetness is partly due to the bloodline process they share during making, where the curd is cooked. The floral aromas are thanks to the bloodline of the milk, which in the best cheeses comes from summer mountain pastures, called alpage in French. The L’Étivaz we sell is alpage. It is only made during summer, when the cows are in the mountains, eating an array of wildflowers the likes you and I haven’t seen since the Sound of Music. Imagine how good you’d feel if you ate flowers all day. That’s what happens to the cows. Their diet directly affects the flavor of the milk, which in turn flavors the cheese.

Most mountain cheeses melt beautifully, thanks to the curd cooking process. In spite of Courtney Love's advice to the contrary, I highly recommend it. Mountain macaroni and cheese is grand, and, grated on top of boiled potatoes and set under the broiler for a minute, these cheeses make a delicious bubbling cheese blanket. Try a Comté grilled cheese, made on buttered, griddled farm bread, with a grind of Tellicherry black pepper and maybe a couple thin slices of radish. If you have a vintage fondue set—available right now at your local Salvation Army for under a dollar, I'm sure—mountain cheeses are the ones you want to use.

Embracing the Middleman

2011-02-28T12:18:00.000-05:00

Middleman: it has bad connotations. Someone who’s taking a cut when a deal is made. Someone who’s not really adding value, just making sure business passes through them. Advert after advert impugns the middlemen. Factory pricing—We go direct to save you money! We are taught that middlemen are economic parasites.

In that context it might seem odd that two young artisan cheese makers would want to enter the middleman business. After all, even if there’s money in it—and what cheese maker doesn’t need money?—for Andy and Mateo Kehler there was very little soul, cachet, or fame, three things they’d achieved modest amounts of with their dairy, Jasper Hill, and its justifiably popular cheese Bayley Hazen.

Toward the end of the last decade, however, just as the housing bubble was leaking gas, they took the leap into middlemandom, building an underground cheese warehouse on their property in Greensboro, Vermont. Warehouse is a poor word since, in the middleman’s world, it signifies a place where inventory sits until people need it, all the while getting progressively worse. In the Kehler’s warehouse, on the other hand, the inventory gets progressively better.

In the seven vaults the Kehlers built, the cheese transforms. It ages. Moisture evaporates, concentrating flavor. Enzymes multiply and work, creating complex amino acids. And people tend the cheese, scrubbing, washing, scraping and turning the wheels so they don’t get too dry, too wet or too moldy.

This activity, along with taking customer orders and coordinating shipments, is a distraction for most cheese makers. They don’t want to do it. They want to make cheese, full stop. The activity also costs a lot of money. To have a room for storage is one thing; it costs some money. To sit on the cheese for six months to a year and a half with no one paying you for it; that costs real money. As Ed Behr wrote in the Art of Eating, “in cheese making the biggest profit lies in the initial transformation from liquid to solid. Much less profitable is aging, because it takes so much labor and ties up money.”

This is not something unique to American cheese makers. European makers have had the same problem for over a century. They created a similar solution. Comté is sold from a middleman. Gruyère, too, and many other mountain cheeses. So is Parmigiano-Reggiano. The middleman allows the cheese maker to do what they do best. The middleman solves the cash flow issue.

The Kehlers have another goal in being a middleman, a goal with a bit of soul, so to speak. They want to grow the number of Vermont cheese makers. Right now there are less than a handful and it’s expensive to start a cheese making business, especially for a cheese that needs to age. Mateo said, “We want to lower the barriers to entry, so we’re taking out the biggest amount of labor.”

The Kehlers buy young cheeses from Doug and Debby Erb at Landaff and Marcel Gravel at Cabot Creamery, among others, age and care for them in their caves, then select wheels for us. You can find both of them here.

It's time for my close up.

2011-02-25T11:42:00.000-05:00

From a series of articles in the upcoming Zingerman's catalog featuring American cheese.

American Cheese Takes the Stage

Twenty years ago you could count the number of great American cheeses on two hands. Maybe that’s exaggerating, but not by much. Back then, being a small-scale cheesemaker was like being a beekeeper—a strange hobby, with little reward or recognition. Half the cheesemakers crafted nearly identical tiny wheels of goat’s milk cheese, which, given that we had no American goat cheese tradition to speak of, cheese shops insisted on calling chevre, the French word for goat. If you went into any serious cheese shop in America in 1994 chances are the only American cheeses you found were chevres and cheddars.

Have things ever changed.

At Zingerman’s Deli, cheesemonger Carlos now offers over a hundred American cheeses, almost half his total inventory. At the American Cheese Society’s annual conference judges had to wade through nearly 1,500 American cheeses to pick winners in 22 categories. In July, I attended a cheesemonger’s event in a warehouse in New York that had all the buzz and fun of an illegal, underground concert. It was packed with people watching other people cut cheese.

What has happened?

It’s impossible to point to one thing that’s given cheese such a spotlight. There is, however, a network effect among cheesemakers and cheesemongers that is different than any other I’ve seen in the food business. For the last two decades, dedicated merchants have educated a gang of cheesemongers. They’ve taught customers what good cheese is and how to buy it. The customers, in turn, have demanded better cheese. The cheesemongers have given feedback to the makers, who’ve improved their cheese. Cheesemongers and makers are thick as thieves. When I go to trade shows or food trips the cheese people all hang out together. They’re like a mafia. They have their own language and customs. They aren’t exclusive, though. Anyone can join. Just make or sell cheese, take it seriously, you’re in.

I give credit to our currency for the transformation, too. The dollar was relatively strong through the 1990s. It made great European cheeses relatively cheap to import. John Loomis, who made Great Lakes Cheshire—unsuccessfully—at that time told me, “Great imported English cheshire, made by people with decades of experience, retailed at $20 a pound. I was selling a local cheshire, made in Ann Arbor for 8 months, and it cost fifty percent more. I couldn’t compete. I quit after two years. But now, I started making it again, and with the British pound what it is, my cheese seems like a relative bargain.” That begs the question: what happens when the dollar rises again? It might make tough going for American cheesemakers.

What about the move to buy local? It certainly hasn't hurt. Many cheesemakers have found they can make ends meet just by selling at a few farmer's markets. (I've seen the same story unfold in England, too.) Still, if the the dollar gets stronger the cheesemakers will have the same problem John faced: experienced imported competition at low prices. At that point customers may be less concerned about having something nice and local and will look for something great to eat, something that makes them return to buy more.

Meanwhile, as eaters, all this is our win. We are in a golden age of American cheesemaking. Like Hollywood in the middle of the 20th century there is a glut of great talent. I just realized Oscar night is Sunday so — cheese and red carpet? Seems about perfect.

Citrus Salad with Olive Oil and Marash Red Pepper

2011-01-23T21:14:00.000-05:00

It's high citrus season. This is the time of the year oranges, grapefruits and their cousins are at their best. You can really smell them from the outside — scratch and sniff the rind for full effect — and, inside, their fruit is at its most luscious.

I like to make this salad, which is simply fruit (here grapefruit, blood orange and mandarin), olive oil and Marash red pepper. Which fruit you choose isn't that important. But it's key to peel, segment and seed them, in the process getting rid of as much white pith as possible. Scrape at the pith and get all the stringy bits off. This is quite a pain. Set yourself up with a very sharp knife and some 1950s Calypso music, to make it go easier, for it will take a while. To serve, lay the fruit on the plate, in a colorful jumble, douse it with long pours of rustic, fruity olive oil, then crop dust it with the pepper. Since Marash pepper is already salted you don't need to add any. Leave it to rest for a half an hour to let the flavors mingle and the fruit to warm up.

I stop there, but you could go further, perhaps adding thinly sliced onion, a small handful of capers, a squeeze of fresh lime.

Backing up a bit, you might want to zest the fragrant peels first and save the zest for pasta or salad dressing.

Salt Pyramids

2011-01-18T22:59:00.000-05:00

The Fancy Food Show in San Francisco just wrapped up. Alison from Anglesey in Wales was there with these salt pyramids. They're inch square crystals that form on the top of the salt baths. They float like inverted icebergs, the tip facing down. They're considered defects because they're so big. The crew picks them off and they're discarded. I think they're totally cool. I have no idea what to do with them but I asked her to save some for us and we'll take them on our next import.

Another highlight of the show was La Quercia, where Herb had some of the grossest looking stuff I'd ever seen. He called it Iowa White. It's the ground up pork fat trimmings, spiked with herbs and spices. It was sealed in a plastic bag and looked like lumpy oatmeal. You don't want to see the picture so I'll save you from it. Put all that out of your head, though. It was damn good. Think spread, like pimento cheese, but made of meat. We'll get some later this year.

During the trip I visited Kermit Lynch—the shop, and the man. It was the first time I've met him, though I've been a fan of his wines and newsletter for ages. We got to taste some wines together with his right hand man, Dixon and when they went looking for something in the employee break room fridge this is what I saw.

Blue Bottle Coffee is doing some space age Japanese coffee brewing at their spot on Mint Street.

Four Barrel coffee on Valencia sells these mugs with drawings of their baristas. Each had a nickname, like "The Viking". I thought they were great.

I am posting this while flying on an airplane, which kind of blows my mind.

Heritage Radio Interview

2011-01-04T22:13:00.000-05:00

Out back of Roberta's restaurant in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn there's a retired thirty foot freight shipping container. On top of it there's a hoop garden where they grow vegetables. Inside of it is the studio for Heritage Radio Network, an internet food radio station. I was there today, interviewed by Michael Harlan Turkell for his show, The Food Seen. It ended up that we talked very little about food, but a lot about operations and our recent holiday season at Zingerman's. For some reason I was especially serious during the interview. Maybe it was January setting in.

The full 35 minute interview is here.

I visited last year and did an interview with Heritage's founder, Patrick Martins. The link is here.

Good Night

2010-12-24T22:09:00.000-05:00

Friday. The holiday mail order season always ends the same way—a calamitous rise and then utter quiet. After going nonstop for two weeks, every hour of every day, with four hundred people opening and closing doors and shouting over food, the hollowness at the end of December 24th never ceases to feel eerie and strange. It's desolate inside the building. The shelves are empty, their contents shuttled to other peoples' homes, scattered across America. There, people are noisy. Here, our phones are silent. This is the view out the darkened windows of our Service Center, where our holiday lights are still hanging. Good night.

Signs

2010-12-23T23:21:00.000-05:00

Thursday. We wound down the last shipping day before Christmas, taking orders up to 2pm, shipping out 2,000 boxes. As the building emptied of food and treasure, once invisible things returned to view. Like signs. Every business has them. There are the "Please!" and "Don't!" appeals meant to save you from a terrific accident. There are the location signs that let you know It's OK Dear, You're in the Right Place. And there are my personal favorites, the arcane checklist and process signs that make sense to locals only. Out of context they read like poetry.

Last Big Day

2010-12-22T20:51:00.000-05:00

Twenty four hours left before the last box leaves. At this point J and Shalette speak only in code, a secret language that warehouse leaders everywhere understand. Ask them how it's going and the answer might be "I'm waiting for recomb to finish so the PL can take off the holds then I can run tomorrow's sheets and start the first prep slice." Exactly.

Scenes from The Line, Two Days Left

2010-12-21T18:41:00.000-05:00

We've been packing boxes twenty-four hours a day for the last ten days. There are two more days, another seven thousand boxes, and we're done for Christmas. People are very tired and getting slaphappy. Here are scenes from the warehouse this afternoon, just before today's final orders left.

Sugarplum Fairy

2010-12-20T21:40:00.000-05:00

Monday. The sugarplums arrived. I had a case FedEx'd from Portugal to solve some customer problems we had created. The phone call with the receiving agent was funny: "There's a lot of no English on this box. I need to ask you a few questions about what exactly these things are." Yes, Virginia, sugarplums are real. And, apparently, very in demand. They're made by nuns. Maybe that has something to do with it.

The view outside our warehouse as the moon rose.
Tonight there will be an eclipse.

French Roasting

2010-12-19T19:44:00.000-05:00

Sunday. We placed a large order for French Roast coffee today. I took a few pictures of Asa roasting it this afternoon in the Coffee Co's red roaster. French Roast is our darkest roasted coffee, cooking the longest at the highest heat.

When he opened the chute blue smoke came out and it crackled as it poured.
He said, "It's practically on fire."


The freshly roasted beans are "stirred" by these arms while a fan sucks air through, cooling them rapidly.


Cooled, the coffee rains into large garbage-bin sized tubs where it's held till it's bagged.

Now in the bin. Just-roasted coffee does not smell like the lovely coffee we know.
It smells like carbon dioxide, which it's exhaling at a tremendous rate.
It takes a couple days for the aroma to appear.

Totally Baked

2010-12-18T20:20:00.000-05:00

Saturday. We're going to ship about 30,000 loaves of bread this week. That's meant record baking levels at Zingerman's Bakehouse. They've scheduled 12 hour shifts and are making more loaves today— 9,000 — than ever before. They're still all made by hand with an attention to detail that is hard to fathom. Below are pictures I took today inside the bakery. All the while I shot there was a single man hand peeling New Mexico roasted chiles for the Chile Cheddar bread. He was the only one standing still. Everyone else was practically running from table to oven.

Some forgotten trivia I remembered today: the first year I worked at Zingerman's Mail Order we did our holiday shipping out of the Bakehouse. Every day I dusted flour off of all the food. Our biggest day was 113 boxes. This year it's 9,500.


8 Grain 3 Seed going into the second oven.


Tubs of Chocolate Sourdough mix, forming it into rounds at the bench.


Chocolate Cherry, ready to go on the rack to the oven.


Chocolate Cherry, slit with a razor on top, heading into the stone hearth oven.


Pecan Raisin getting slit with a razor before heading into the oven.


Farm Bread baskets, before they're floured and the dough is added.


Farm Bread proofing, one stop on its 18 hour journey from flour to finished loaf.


Shawna, Bakehouse bread leader, figuring out how many loaves her crew can bake tomorrow.

Frank, the Bakehouse's founder.

Late Night Tinned Fish Tasting

2010-12-17T22:52:00.000-05:00

Friday. It's 10:30 at night, time to taste some Spanish tinned fish in the Service Center. Albacore and Yellowfin tunas from Ortiz. You wouldn't think that this kind of thing would generate a lot of Oohs and Aahs. You'd be wrong. I previously wrote about the maker, Ortiz, here and here.

Views From Above

2010-12-16T21:27:00.000-05:00

Thursday. The last picture is our bread bagging station. We still haven't found a better way to bag bread than by hand. Actually, that goes for almost everything we do. It's all done by hand. It's just that with bread you really feel it. When you bag fifty thousand loaves in a month you can't help but notice. These days, a little over a week before Christmas, our warehouse smells like a bakery.

Moon Shot

2010-12-15T20:38:00.000-05:00

Wednesday. Yesterday did break Monday's record: we took $293K in sales bookings. Things have been selling out like crazy. We cleaned out moon pies in no time and have stayed sold out since. I snapped this shot at the bakery during a quiet moment, before our moon pie order onslaught hit.

Seriously

2010-12-14T22:42:00.001-05:00

Tuesday. Our 11:30 am check-in. Everyone looks serious. That's because we just got news that yesterday was the biggest day for sales bookings we've ever had. Plus this morning we were on the Today show. Matt Lauer ate a palmier and the camera made love to our over the moon pie. That means all kinds of capacity issues to think about. Do we have enough people? Enough boxes? Enough moon pies? The answers were Yes, It Depends, and No. Betty said, "Find me two more hours in the day and I can ship anything."

Biggest day ever. This shot is from Monday night before today's meeting. It was two hours and ten minutes till midnight and we were $32K away from our forecast. We ended up missing forecast by just $1K, coming in at $281K. As I write it's Tuesday, an hour and a half till midnight. We're already at $276K. Welcome to the new biggest day ever.

Stuck

2010-12-13T21:52:00.000-05:00

More than half the boxes leaving our warehouse in December contain a gift box. The gift boxes have stickers that, for the moment, we print in small batches ahead of time. This is the station where they reside. We make our boxes to order so, every time an order goes by—every ten seconds or so—the picker needs to find the right sticker for the box. When you work this station for hours you find your dreams are filled with product codes.

Snow Day

2010-12-12T18:07:00.000-05:00

Sunday. The weather finally came. This is the view through my windshield on the way to the warehouse. As far as weather goes, though, a Sunday snowstorm is just about as good as we can hope for in the mail order business. Nothing is scheduled to be delivered today so UPS can't delay boxes and claim Act of God—an unrefundable offense.

Warehouses are always chilly.

The view out our service center window.

On Pause

2010-12-11T20:05:00.000-05:00

Saturday afternoon—one of those rare spaces during the holiday when the warehouse is almost empty, totally silent. Nothing ships today. This is our sixty foot pick line, completely still. One hundred people will arrive at ten tonight. They'll send a box of food out the door every ten seconds.

A Lot of Coffeecakes

2010-12-10T23:07:00.000-05:00

We'll ship something like 14,000 cofffecakes this month. They're stacked up all over the place, ready to depart. This afternoon we got a huge delivery of gingerbread coffeecakes. You can smell the ginger and cloves from outside the building, through the snow.

Holiday Cover Winner

2010-11-23T20:49:00.000-05:00

The winner of our catalog cover contest begins arriving in homes this week. This was the voters' favorite—and mine. Ryan let go and Saul Bass got a little bedazzled.

How To Enjoy Cheese

2010-11-20T14:32:00.003-05:00

"If you're gonna eat cheese, take it out on a picnic, cut it up carefully, and really taste it—with wine or something. Don't melt it on shit."

Courtney Love

Olive Oil: Do Not Heat Before You Eat

2010-11-19T15:27:00.001-05:00

I've always thought it was good advice to save your best, most fragrant olive oil for the end of cooking, not to use it during sautéing or frying. Heat drives away aroma, which is what your paying for in a great oil. Harold McGee confirms the logic in this article where he heats different oils and holds a taste test.

McGee finds that all the oils pretty much end up tasting the same after heating. He doesn't talk about texture, though—better oils have a luscious, not greasy, texture—so I'm not sure if that changes. He also fails to clearly underline that olive oil's unsaturated fat is better for your health than the saturated fat in some of the other oils. You may want to stick with olive oil, just use a less expensive one for cooking.

> Read the article.

McGee's landmark book, On Food and Cooking, is one I recommend without hesitation. There is no better book on science in the kitchen that I know of.

Writing about Flavor: Problems with Subjectivity

2010-10-24T21:46:00.001-04:00

This note by Ed Behr in the Art of Eating summarizes a specific way of writing about flavor. Rather than a flowery story or purple prose, Ed's wine reviews are attempting to get at the non-subjective elements of drinking a particular bottle of wine.

Our wine reviews are a direct reviews are a direct response to the failure of conventional ones to provide a reader with practical, more or less objective information that will help at the table: capacity to refresh (weight, especially percentage alcohol and how evident), acidity and sweetness, the intensity of taste together with an idea of key flavors (more the broad indisputable area than subjective metaphor). Some comment on aroma and taste is required in any useful writing about wine for consumers, but we try to avoid "tasting notes," which are often so dangerously close to satire.

It may not the most romantic way to write about wine but that's OK. I think too many writers assume that food is so subjective that they quit trying to give useful information. Their reviews are entirely subjective, entirely useless. And the 100 point scale for wines, which gives a false sense of objectivity, is, in my opinion, a farce.

I like Ed's practical wine reviews. That said, I'm not against romance. For a slightly more lovely side of wine writing I opt for Kermit Lynch's newsletter. Someone put my name on the mailing list ten years ago and, for some reason I can't fathom but greatly appreciate, Kermit still mails me an issue every month. In my view it's just about the best sales driven writing on wine—or any food, for that matter—in America.

A Different Way to Look At Unemployment

2010-10-13T20:46:00.004-04:00

Unemployment Rate by Income Level
On the left, unemployment rate as a percent (.1 = 10%, .2 = 20% and so on).
On the bottom, income level (<20K = earning under $20,000 per year)

This graph tells a much more interesting—and stark—image of unemployment than the usual 10% number you hear. Lower income levels are far more likely to be unemployed. In fact at the lowest income levels, under $20,000 per year, the unemployment rate is over 25%. That's almost the same as the average rate during the Great Depression.

We've been starting to think about how to offer job skills classes to the 300 people we hire each holiday at Zingerman's Mail Order. This picture makes that work even more urgent.

The graph is from a study by Andrew Sum and Ishwar Khatiwada, with Sheila Palma, of Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, funded by the Mott Foundation of Flint, MI.

A Case for Trade: Learning from Each Other

2010-09-19T21:25:00.000-04:00

The growth of good-tasting, small-production food in America—and parts of Europe—over the last decade has been great to witness. Eating here is so much better than it was twenty years ago. In restaurants alone the change is staggering. On recent trips to Italy I've found myself wishing I was eating pasta in New York, something that would not have occurred to me in 1990.

I’ve also seen several food making communities blossom where before there had been only large industrial operations. The number of small cheesemakers in the Northeastern U.S. and England has exploded. America’s Midwest is littered with excellent new artisan chocolate makers. So is most of Italy. Craft beer has had a solid run and craft distilling is coming on strong, especially in New York. Charcuterie and butchers are next. They have been growing in number, first in London, now New York and California. They will be headed inland.

This has all happened alongside a growing interest in locally made food.

To some extent it’s easy to think of the local food movement and international trade as opposite sides of the same coin. The perceived wisdom is that Local is small, worthy, good and environmentally sensitive. International trade is thought of as large, unsustainable, evil and environmentally harmful. I’ll leave most of those arguments aside for now (though I’d be happy to discuss them since many economists and food writers like Michael Pollan have shown that foods made farther away—those made in the best suited climate—can be more environmentally responsible than those made locally).

The case I want to make for trade is this: a lot of our excellent, local, American food wouldn’t be here today without trade. The expertise, the learning, the standards, the give and take—all were a product of trade. Great American food became that way as quickly as it did because we had superior food from other places to learn from and build on.

I’ll use one example from my own experience. Neal’s Yard Dairy is our London connection for handcrafted, farmhouse British cheese. They’re not just Zingerman’s connection, though. Many cheesemongers in America have visited them to learn how to do affinage (cheese aging), to select cheese, to learn their time tested processes. That has made American cheese shops much better. The cheeses that we import from Neal’s Yard have set a standard for excellence that has also inspired American cheesemakers. Many of them, most notably, Andy & Mateo Kehler of Jasper Hill have visited England to learn from the British, to design their new American cheeses and to build their own caves for aging and selection. Before Neal's Yard, American cheese was at a lower level. They're certainly not to be given all the credit for its revival and surge in quality. But to say they did nothing wouldn't be true either. They played a very meaningful part, especially through trade.

For me, trade and local are part of the same coin. Choosing local food doesn’t mean you have to opt out of the global economy. If you choose good companies to trade with, be they across the globe or next door, the food will be better and more sustainable. Great food companies, no matter where they are located, feed each other, teach each other, learn from each other and, if done right, make each other, and the world, better off.

What's Breed Got To Do With It? La Quercia's Radical Take on Ham.

2010-09-12T15:03:00.001-04:00

At Becker Lane Farm in spring the piglets roam outside their huts.

Talk to Herb Eckhouse, the founder of La Quercia, and you might forget that he cures ham for a living. You’d be forgiven for confusing him for a winemaker since he uses a similar vocabulary. He calls pig breeds “varietals.” He refers to his standard cured ham as the “house blend.” And he describes ham aroma and flavors like he’s got his nose perched over a prize vintage, using words like “beguiling,” “fruity” and “perfumed.”

This may come off as frippery—until you taste the ham. Trust me, he's not being over the top. This is ham that deserves a rotund vocabulary. The similarities with wine are not just show. They illustrate something that La Quercia is doing that few others are: focusing on breed. Herb feels the breed of the hog is the main conributor to prosciutto flavor in the same way the variety of grape contributes to wine flavor.

This may seem obvious but it's certainly not standard wisdom in the cured meat world. While living in Italy in the early 1990s Herb visited prosciutto makers to learn what they did. He was regularly told that he would probably not be able to cure ham in Iowa because there was something special about Parma’s air. To them, that was a key factor. Breed was never mentioned. Being American and scientifically skeptical (a trait we share), he thought air might not be that important. But he kept his mouth shut.

Truth is, I hear this kind of thing all the time. You can’t make bagels outside New York because New York has special water. You can’t make bourbon outside Kentucky because Kentucky has a special climate AND special water. Far more often than not, in my opinion, these kinds of claims are more atmosphere than fact. Like with Herb’s hams, it’s the ingredients—in this case, the ham itself, the breed of pig—that influence the vast majority of the flavor. How much is the air affecting a four inch thick dense chunk of meat coated in salt? Probably not much. Herb cured his first ham in his living room. He told me it tasted delicious.

While nearly all Italian prosciutto makers and American ham curers use standard breed white pigs, La Quercia focuses on heirloom breed Berkshire and Berkshire cross hogs. Berkshire hogs have been bred for flavor. They are renowned for their distinctive “porkiness.” Standard breed white pigs haven’t exactly been bred for lack of flavor, but their flavor-enhancing characteristics have been downplayed to market pork as “the other white meat” and to encourage fast growth and consistent, large litters.

Berkshire hogs were rediscovered by chefs in America about ten years ago. Until then most were sent to Japan. (Sometimes it seems like you can build a successful food business by simply researching what we export to Japan and sell it back to Americans.) Today, Herb works with Paul Willis, Jude Becker and other Iowa farmers who raise heirloom pigs humanely, with outdoor access, common social area, and no sub-theraputic hormones. The cured ham we've just started carrying, exclusive to ZMO, is all from Jude Becker's farm, 100% organic, 100% Berkshire.

Italian and Spanish cured hams have long ruled the roost. That may change. After all, European wines had a nearly exclusive hold on greatness until thirty or forty years ago. In 1976 Californian wines went to Paris and famously won a blind tasting against some of France’s most prestigious vintners. There hasn’t been a comparable international ham tasting. But if there is and La Quercia is among the contestants, I woudn’t bet against the Americans.

Vote for Zingerman's Holiday Catalog Cover

2010-09-06T20:21:00.000-04:00

The Fall Buyers Guide catalog is in homes next week. Ryan Stiner illustrated the cover, above. If you're a graphic design buff you might recognize the debt to Saul Bass. He was an iconic American graphic designer who's probably best known for his work with film posters like these:

We're going to pick up on Saul's theme again for a catalog that comes out near Christmas. The cover will feature holiday cakes (gingerbread coffeecake, stollen, panettone and so on). We're down the road a bit in the process, near final approval. These are Ryan's two latest sketches.

Care to cast a vote for your favorite?

Do it in the comments section at ZMO Journal.

COVER A

COVER B

You've Come a Long Way, Baby

2010-08-28T18:02:00.000-04:00

Brooklyn, 2010

The American Cheese Society conference is this weekend in Seattle. Some of the best U.S. cheesemakers will be there and many of the most serious, dedicated cheesemongers. There will be hundreds of excellent, hand crafted, all-American cheeses to taste. Makes me think about how different cheese counters in the states looked twenty years ago.

In Brooklyn, of course, it can seem like another era on any given block.

Why Food Miles are Misleading

2010-08-26T22:40:00.000-04:00

The New York Times just printed an article titled Math Lessons for Locavores. It points out some of the flaws in focusing on food miles to improve the environment.

Link to the article here.

Food miles are one of the places where arguments for local food and environmentalism overlap. If you haven't heard the term before it refers to how many miles a food has to travel from where it's made to where it's eaten. Proponents say fewer miles are better.

The main thrust of the article is that food transportion costs are a small percentage of our nation's energy bill overall (2%) and that reducing energy in our home kitchens (refrigerators, appliances, etc) would have much greater environmental effect.

It also points out that a crop grown in a suitable environment, then shipped to where people who eat it is often a more environmentally sound practice than growing a crop in a place that isn't suited to it just because it's local. I talked about this in my post on sugar.

Fair enough. Yet I think the author misses an even larger point. We shouldn't ignore food miles because there are other ways to do better by the environment. We should debate food miles because they may just be plain wrong. That's because nearly every time you see them they're discussed as a whole number. But they're really a fraction. Let me explain with some maths.

You'll usually come across statements about food miles that read like this: "California strawberries travel 2,500 food miles to be sold in Michigan."

That's a big number. It makes you think each strawberry traveled 2,500 miles to get to you. Yes, it did. But it was in a train car with thousands of other strawberries. To really understand the environmental (energy) impact we need to calculate the miles per strawberry. As soon as we say that — add the word "per" as in miles per strawberry— we've created a fraction.

So let's go back to the statement. California strawberries travel 2,500 food miles to be sold in Michigan. Then let's add another key fact: a train car holds 250,000 strawberries.

Now the food miles per California strawberry are:

2,500 miles / 250,000 strawberries = .01 miles per strawberry (about 52 feet)

Now, as a point of comparison, let's take Joe Green at the local Farmer's Market. His strawberries travel 40 miles to be sold. (20 miles each way, and we have to count his return trip because while Joe goes back to his farm with an empty truck train cars return to California full.) Let's say Joe sells 4,000 strawberries.

Now the food miles per Joe Green strawberry are:

40 miles / 4,000 strawberries = .01 miles per strawberry (52 feet) -- identical to the Californians.

I guess "Food Feet" don't sound as compelling as Food Miles. And 52 feet sounds pretty boring next to 2,500 miles. The fact that Californian strawberries may actually travel the same distance as a local one from Michigan -- well, I think it's interesting, but I'm not seeing a lot of articles written about it.

And of course trains are a lot more fuel efficient than Joe's old Ford Ranger. But that's another post.

Final caveat: food miles aside, there are plenty of reasons to buy from local farmers, not the least of which is the food often tastes better.

I explained a similar situation to this in my post Does Buying Local Reduce Fuel Consumption?.

Things That Should Be Invented

2010-07-22T00:22:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago Microsoft announced a new invention. They patented a special cartridge for batteries. It allows you to load batteries into a device either direction. No more — What the hell!?! — figuring out which side is positive, which side is negative. You put the batteries in either way and the power works. Microsoft is licensing this, which means if you want to use this invention you pay royalties.

Besides the obvious question — Why is Microsoft in the business of inventing and licensing battery cartridges? — there's an even more immediate reaction I had. You mean this was always possible? What the hell? Why did it take this long to invent?

In that spirit, here are a few inventions I've been waiting for. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Microsoft.

Credit card swipe machines that don't care what side the magnetic strip is on. I always end up swiping it the wrong way the first time. And those helpful images that tell you which way to swipe — undecipherable! How much more expensive can it be to make a machine that swipes a credit card on either side?

An alarm clock that I can program the duration of the snooze. Every alarm clock I've had is either a five minute snooze (too short!) or a nine minute snooze (too much math!). Let me program my own snooze. For your information, I want fifteen fat, luxurious minutes.

Better beeps. Almost any time you interact with some electronic gadget there are beeps. They register something happened. They're necessary to give feedback but they are painful. You swipe your card at the subway, the turnstile beeps. You punch in your pin at the ATM, beep beep beep beep. You work at a cash register, you get beeps all damn day, every time you punch a key. If you start listening to the beeps you'll realize that they are the most annoying pitch and tone imaginable. Contrast them to bells on old cash registers. Why did going digital mean we had to lose rich, interesting sounds? I know early computers might not have been able to handle great sound. But my ATM today can read handwriting on a check — a brilliant invention that I didn't expect this year, thanks Chase! — so I know they can make a sweeter sounding beep.

Untangle-able power cords. Or how about power with no cords whatsoever?

Also: flying cars? They are a long expired promise that leaves many of us waiting for closure. Just say it GM. Or Tesla. Yes or no.

Choosing Less Choice

2010-07-17T20:10:00.000-04:00

Customers “are paying us to make these choices."

- Steve Jobs

Sometimes Steve Jobs succinctly says shit that just make sense. With this quote, specifically, he's talking about the choice Apple made to not offer Adobe Flash on the iPad and iPhone. What's Adobe Flash, you ask? Who knows — it doesn't matter. The point he is making is more general. He's saying Apple's job is to make choices for customers. The task of the company is to edit, to select things for you instead of you selecting them for yourself. In other words, he's saying it's Apple's job to give you less choice.

How many times have you heard that logic? — If you want to be a successful company, learn how to give your customers fewer options?

My guess is approximately never. It's not popular business wisdom. Take the business we're in, retailing. There are successful companies like Wal-Mart, Dell and Zappos, who are lauded for giving endless choices. One of the most successful in the last ten years is Amazon, the ultimate choice pornographer. Jeff Bezos even chose the name for its evocation of immense abundance.

The endless choice strategy has its strong points. To be honest, I shop at Amazon a lot. But I think the strategy fails in many ways, too. Shops with lots of choices have critical product gaps. There are many companies — often ones making very interesting products — who don't want to sell to Amazon and Wal-Mart.

Also, when a shop has "everything" you need help to decide what to buy. Most endless choice companies help by crowd-sourcing opinions, letting previous customers review products. But who do you trust more: hundreds of pseudo experts you don't know, one expert who's trained and whose tastes and values are clear?

In the end, besides shopping at Amazon for things I already know I want, I shop at many places to find something I didn't know I wanted. I look for shops that have finely edited collections. Shops that are designed and curated by someone with a strong set of tastes. It's there I find surprise.

The point of business isn't that one strategy is better than another. It's just that you can't have conflicting strategies. You can go broad and shallow and offer loads of choices and be successful.You can also choose less choice and succeed. Apple chose. So have we.

Here other retailers who have chosen less choice. They are some of my favorite shops, curated by a very strong vision. Online they might not be much, some are too small they can't afford great websites. Go visit if you can.

Kiosk
Erie Basin
Paul Smith
Moon River Chattel
826 Valencia

Post links to your favorite shops if you'd like.

Scenes from a Food Show

2010-07-08T14:40:00.001-04:00

Ortiz, the great Spanish tuna firm, got this display idea for the Fancy Food Show display from Brooklyn's Diner, one of the founding members of the Unfancy Food Show.

The Fancy Food Show has almost no competition. If you run an American specialty food shop or website you're essentially obligated to go. If for no other reason than there's no place else you can find as many decent foods as this. If you're located on the west coast you might skip the summer show in New York. If you're east coast you might skip the winter show in San Francisco. But more often than not you go to one of them.

That's not to say that all the food here is decent. Some of it dips below that bar, not qualifying as "Fancy Food" at all, a word which makes nearly no sense to me but sounds delightful in the twenty-first century, doesn't it?

Every food trend comes here to roost and, eventually, die. Hot sauces. Low fat. No fat. High fiber. Energy drinks. Flavored water (still going strong!). No carb (dead as a doornail). This year, welcome to Gluten Free America. And several other food sensitivities I didn't know existed. "Local" has even come to the Fancy Food Show, albeit in the form of a competing show in Brooklyn called the Unfancy Food Show. It featured local NYC food makers, including Rick's Picks. Appropriately, it was held at a bar.

It's at the Fancy Food Show that the fantasy and the reality of the retail food business come to one of their most spectacular collisions. The fantasy people have about the food biz — that we find our treasures by roving the world, eating fabulous dinners, meeting earthy yet sophisticated farmers — butts up against the reality: we go to trade shows. We don't find all of what we offer at trade shows, but we find some.

In New York I walked the trade show for three days, tasting and talking. Afterwards, samples will come for more tasting. Working as a team we will cull, curate, make a lot of decisions. about which products we'll sell, which products we won't. (More on that idea — that our job is to make decisions like these — in my next post.) In the end if all this results in a couple dozen new foods I consider it a good show.

On the other hand we do find some new foods by traveling. Just not all of them. So keep your fantasy alive. The fantasy of renting gleaming silver Fiats, of wearing extravagant scarves, of touring the European countryside, of eating five hour meals under Cypress trees. That does sound fun, doesn't it? I have to do that some time.

This year's food show happened during the World Cup. There were giant TV's in the Javits Center. This meant, for hours at a time, you couldn't find a European working anywhere.

Acres of luggage checked on the final day of the show.

Crisper Box Pasta

2010-07-04T22:31:00.000-04:00

This is an easy dish I make to use up leftovers. Scour your fridge for vegetables. It doesn't matter what condition they're in. If they're edible they can make it into this dish.

The version I made today had

Leftover blanched asparagus, cut into two inch pieces

Leftover blanched broccolini, cut into two inch pieces

Half a nasty old carrot, chopped into dime size pieces

Half a limp stick of celery, chopped into thick fingernail wedges

Corn, cut straight off the cob

Fresh peas

A pickled artichoke, cut into small pieces, stem and all

You get the idea — anything works.

The basic technique

Boil pasta in heavily salted water (see my pasta cooking tips here) till it's almost done — you'll finish it later in the skillet. What shape of pasta? As a general rule, if you have chunky pasta sauce like this, short shaped pasta is best, but don't worry. Here I've cooked it with Rustichella Spaghetti that I broke in three parts.

Meanwhile, sweat some finely chopped onion and garlic in extra virgin olive oil in a big skillet.

Add all the chopped vegetables to the skillet and warm them. Season with salt, black pepper, and some red pepper like Marash Turkish red pepper flakes.

When the pasta is done save a glass of pasta water then strain the noodles.

Dump the strained pasta into the pan with vegetables.

Add the pasta water, about a cup or so for two people, stir. Don't worry if you add to much, it will evaporate.

Add some grated cheese like Comté or Parmigiano-Reggiano or a few dollops of fresh cheese like Zingerman's cream cheese.

Serve topped with some fresh parsley or cilantro leaves if you have them, a grinding of black pepper, and a squeeze of lemon for sure.

Cheesemonger Invitational

2010-07-01T23:27:00.000-04:00

The first Cheesemonger's Invitational was held in Queens last Saturday. It felt like a culinary early 90's rave throwback, in part because it was Saturday and I was with hundreds of people in a remote warehouse. Also it was hosted by a former DJ (Adam Moskowitz), one of the judges was a former DJ (Jason Hinds) and at least one cheesemonger is a current DJ (our own Carlos Souffront). Plus there was music — from a DJ. (DJs seem to infest the cheese business like bike people do coffee.)

Ann Arbor did represent. I counted three of the nine cheesemongers with A2 connections. Anthea from Bi-Rite worked at Zingerman's. Matt from Rubiner's went to school in Ann Arbor. And Carlos is Zingerman's current and longstanding ace cheesemonger.

The competition ranged from cutting pieces to weight without a scale to identifying cheeses by taste. Congratulations to our man Carlos who pulled off third place.

Uniqlo: Using Toyota Style Systems to Sell Clothes

2010-06-25T12:19:00.000-04:00

Uniqlo is a low price rather stylish clothing company that, if you don't know by now, you probably will soon. They've been a certain kind of phenomenon in New York since they landed in Soho a couple years ago. Now they're set for expansion across America. There is an excellent article about them in New York Magazine.

They're from Japan. I don't know if that fact — that they're from the same country as Toyota — has some influence, but they have some key similarities to the car maker. They use operations to drive sales. They have lean style systems to make, buy, stock and sell clothes. They experiment and expect to have lots of failures. They have open book management — every employee can see the sales every day, down to the number of each item sold. They also have a freaky clone army approach, which, when you read about it, may give you the heebie jeebies.

In the end, the article is mostly fun, especially if you are interested in fashion. But it's got some good ideas to steal for anyone who manages operations, too.

Full disclosure: I am a fan. I'm not going to lie, their stuff is pretty good.

Link to the full article here.

iPad Instruction Manual Success in Barely Existing

2010-06-23T10:05:00.000-04:00

"Each page of an instruction manual is sign of design failure."

I'm not sure where or when I heard that phrase. I know it was a long time ago and it was about VCR's, which, nowadays, seem like the 8 tracks of the video world, don't they? VCR instruction manuals were bound volumes dozens of pages thick. Do you remember trying to set your VCR to record a TV show? It took a PhD to read the manual, the instructions were pages and pages long, and it was an anxiety provoking exercise that never seemed to work right.

Wherever I heard the phrase, the idea that instruction manuals mean design failure has been guiding light for me for a long time. Great design should make things intuitive to use, ideally without a manual or SOP. Being a guiding light means instruction-less design is where I'm headed but I don't expect to get there. You can't necessarily eliminate instructions. But some have come very close. Apple, for one.

Pictured here, the instruction manual for Mac's iPad. It's a single index card, printed front and back. Even at two tiny pages it's probably overkill. You pick up the machine and it's obvious how to use it from moment one.

The Power of the Probe

2010-06-16T23:37:00.000-04:00

I've been cooking for long enough -- more like overcooking for long enough -- that using a probe thermometer felt like I was giving up. Like I stopped caring and started wearing sweat pants out of the house. I told myself I should be able to do better. I told myself I had experience. I should be able to put my thumb on a piece of meat, immediately gauge how firm it is and declare: medium rare! Then I would deliver it to the table and there would be deafening applause.

I got over it. I use a probe thermometer regularly now. I can vouch it works; when you don't overcook things they taste way better. The pork loin. The hunk of salmon. The chicken parts. I even used it on the first steak to pass through my door in half a year and it came out perfect, though there was a distinct lack of applause.

Invest less than ten bucks in one of these. It'll make you look like you know what you're doing. It did for me. Finally.

One note. Most thermometers recommend cooking pork to a temperature that renders the meat criminally overcooked and tough. I cut it back by several tens of degrees, and, while I have yet to catch a fatal disease, the pork has been way tastier.

Recipe: Whole Baked Fish

2010-05-02T15:23:00.000-04:00

Baking a whole fish is supremely easy. It's easier than cooking a whole chicken. It's easier than cooking a whole cauliflower. It's easier than cooking almost anything. Making a salad is orders of magnitude more difficult. I wouldn't even call it "cooking," but for the fact there's an oven involved.

Whole baked fish is also super tasty. It's one of those rare triumphs in cooking where the reward in flavor seems utterly divorced from the effort required. It shouldn't be this easy to make something this good.

While we're often used to fillets and fish parts in America, going whole fish is very common in the Mediterranean and, I'm sure, many other places I've never visited. I've had whole fish in Italy and Spain and, most memorably, on Greek islands where tiny unnamed species not much bigger than bluegills are served on a warm plate, taking hours and liters of wine to pick through.

Whole Baked Fish Recipe

Have your fishmonger clean a whole fish, leaving the head on. Yes, leave it on. It makes a difference.

My favorite fish to bake whole these days is branzino. My fishmonger was out of it this week so I got bream instead, pictured above. To give you an idea on size, this one was a little over a pound before cleaning. It makes a light meal for two.

Heat the oven to 375. Cover a baking pan with a sheet of aluminum foil (it makes clean up easier).

Wash the fish out. Stuff it full of whatever herbs you have. There's parsley in this picture. Cilantro is also good. Any herb more intense than these, go easy. Slice some lemons and shove them in every orifice.

Slather the fish in olive oil, lay it on the baking sheet, into the oven it goes. As it cooks, you can baste it once or twice with its juices. Or not—it won't change things much if you forget.

You can tell it's done when the flesh flakes after it's flicked with a fork. If it's undercooked it will be very wet, the flesh layers indistinct. Don't overcook it, that's criminal. Slightly overcooked will be moist but have a tacky, sticky texture in your mouth. Way overcooked will be dry and nearly tough. I baked this bream about 30 minutes.

Serve as is. I don't even add any salt. Just maybe another drizzle of olive oil—a good one, you'll taste it—a squeeze of fresh lemon. Deliver it to the table whole. Use a fork and knife to peel back the skin and gently remove the flesh.

Bream, ready to serve.

In Greece, with fish smaller than this, you may eat the eyes.

What should a box say?

2010-04-28T13:52:00.000-04:00

Moosejaw likes stickers.

We're going to reprint our exterior packing box this year. There have been a lot of ideas floated on what we should do differently than the basics we have now — logo, telephone number, URL. One problem we're trying to solve is when recipients don't open the box soon enough and perishable items, well, they perish.

Digging around I came across these folks who bought from 137 different mail order companies and took a picture of every package that arrived. You can download the full list; most are frightfully boring.

I'm not surprised to see that they praised our friends at the outdoor apparel retailer Moosejaw (they're not photographed in the report since they're not a UK company — they're from Michigan). They have loads of fun.

Any ideas? Add a comment below.

Traffic Lessons: How Slower Can be Faster

2010-04-26T18:48:00.000-04:00

In his book Traffic, Tom Vanderbilt tells a story that I think helps explain how doing things slowly and metronomically by takt — the measured rate of adding work to a queue — can actually make a process faster.

Imagine you are going to pour a bunch of rice through a funnel into an empty jar. You can pour it in all at once. Or you can pour it slowly, in a measured way. Which method gets the rice through faster?

The answer is the second one — because the rice doesn't get jammed.

The analogy doesn't exactly translate to orders on a conveyor line. Still, it's an interesting visual way to think about how doing something slowly can be faster overall.

Bonus! From the for-what-it's-worth-department, here are two other things I learned from his book, answers to timeless questions we've all pondered and argued about. Or, at least, I have.

Is it faster for traffic overall if, when faced with a reduction in lanes, drivers merge early or at the last minute?

Answer: last minute.

Why? Because both lanes are used to their full capacity up to the last minute.

Why is talking on a cell phone — even if it's hands-free — more dangerous than talking to someone who is sitting in the same car?

Answer: primarily because the person in the car can see the traffic that you see. They change what they're saying to you -- how fast they talk, when they pause, whether they scream -- based on what they see.

Some Pricing Confuses Me

2010-04-25T13:21:00.000-04:00

I don't know about you, but sometimes the way businesses do things completely baffles me. Take these pricing games. They probably make sense in some way I don't understand, but I am left confused so excuse me while I rant.

Why is almost every song on iTunes the same price? Also, why is every new CD at a music shop essentially the same price? It doesn't make sense to me. As a comparison, take another product like clothes, Do we expect every pair of jeans — regardless of who made them or how good they are — to have the same price? Why would we expect the same of music?

Why do book stores put hardcovers on sale the day they are released? After all, they're new. Customers are excited. They want to buy them. They'll buy at full price. Why give them a discount? Isn't this like a movie theater selling a movie's opening weekend tickets at half price? Or a clothes store selling a newly released spring fashion line at a discount while last fall's collection sells for full price?

Why do publishers print the price on a book? Why not let book stores sell it for whatever price they want? After all, if a book store has better service, better trained employees, a nicer shop, shouldn't they be able to charge more? Isn't that how it works with virtually every other product we buy?

Why do airlines charge to check luggage? Isn't it in their interests to have passengers board the plane faster? Carry-ons slow boarding. Now every passenger takes more carry-ons because checking luggage costs dollars. Also, passengers now game the system: they bring a carry-on and when it can't fit it in the overhead bin it's checked anyway — free!

Business Plaid

2010-04-16T17:45:00.000-04:00

Checking Your Change is Building in Quality

2010-04-15T12:29:00.000-04:00

While I was at the bodega today, buying Bubble Yum and popcorn, I counted my $1.34 in change and thought about order checking and error proofing. Wow, do I sound boring. But listen.

Counting your change is essentially checking a process. It's the same as a check process for order taking, a check process for picking, and so on. It's checking the change-making process. The clerk tells you the price. You hand them the dough. The clerk tells you how much the change is. They put it in your hand. You count it. Is the amount correct? If it's correct you say Thanks and leave. If it is incorrect you say Whoa immediately and get it fixed on the spot. They key thing here is that the check is immediate.

Imagine another scenario. Instead of immediately checking your change you saved it to the end of the day. You did that with every transaction all day long. At the end of the day you reviewed all the transactions to check if they were correct. How much extra work would it take? How much paperwork and extra record keeping would you have to create? How much extra work would it take to fix the correction, to go back to the clerk and convince them that there was an error?

Now imagine you saved it till the end of the week. Or the end of the month.

This is essentially the concept behind building quality into a process versus confirming quality at the end. When you build quality in, it's not that you don't check. It's that you check immediately. Reducing the time gap between the action and the check has the largest effect on quality. It also has a tremendous effect on cost since it usually requires a lot less paperwork and bureaucracy.

New York City Butchers: Turning Operations into Marketing

2010-04-09T14:34:00.000-04:00

Today, an article from New York Magazine on the city's prince of hamburger, Pat LaFrieda. Pat's third generation family business wholesales meat to restaurants in New York. He's the man behind the meat for many famous burgers in town, from Danny Meyer's Shake Shack burger ($7.25) to Minetta Tavern's Black Label burger ($26).

It's a really interesting article that you can read from many perspectives.

From one angle it gives insight into the service levels, fulfillment obligations, and straight up wack madness it takes to run a wholesale operation for Manhattan restaurants.

From another, it makes most restaurateurs look like lemmings, which might not be far from the truth.

Third, it shows you how totally apeshit NYC is for hamburgers right now.

Fourth, and the reason I'm sharing it, is the business side. This article has a Harvard Business case buried inside, deep below the intent of the story. There is a butcher who sells hamburger. What was once a completely undifferentiated product, a commodity, he has successfully differentiated. He's no longer tied to the standard market price for hamburger that every other butcher sells for. If you buy the prices in the story — I don't, but I bet they're not that far off— he's getting six times the price for his hamburger than normal. That's a tale in itself.

But I kept waiting for the story to tell me why the price was higher in the terms I'm used to, the terms of provenance. Who was the rancher? What did the cattle eat? How long did they live? How were they slaughtered? Surely that must be the reason prices are higher? I got few answers there. It's not because they have secrets. It's because the answers are not special. Their source for meat sells corn-fed cows just like everyone else. Pat doesn't sell get his high prices because the cows are special.

So how does he get to sell for such high prices?

The answer is that he creates custom blends for each customer. You want your restaurant's own blend of chuck, sirloin, cheek, jowl, dry cured, wet cured —whatever — for your hamburgers? No problem. LaFrieda meats will do it for you every day. Order tonight, you get it tomorrow. As Pat says, "“What we do, basically, is become a different supplier for every restaurant.” He even does it if you're a little guy who doesn't order much. In fact, he seems to like little guys. In the article two big guys call him — the legendary steakhouses The Homestead and Peter Luger — and he essentially tells them "Nope."

In other words, it's LaFrieda's operations that get him a higher price. It's his operations that perform his marketing. Operations drive the sales. How does he get to sell for such high prices, how does he get in all the best restaurants, how does he get this magazine article written about him? Basically, it is because he works in small batches with short lead times and customizes selection for all customers. Sound familiar?

Two Kinds of Checklists

2010-04-06T13:54:00.000-04:00

Tabbed pilot checklist book for Cessna.

In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande discovers an interesting distinction among checklists. He divides them into two camps, based on studying airplane pilots.

One type of checklist is called Do-confirm. The other is called Read-do.

Do-Confirm checklists are basically what we call SOP's, Standard Operating Procedures. They are shorter than a full set of instructions — it would be hard to train yourself how to do something if you just read them — but they have sentences and detailed notes. They can be used by an auditor to watch someone performing a task. They can be used by an individual who is managing a series of tasks over a long period of time, checking off boxes as they go. The important point is that Do-Confirm checklists do not work well when a task is very time sensitive.

Read-do checklists are a different species altogether. Read-do checklists are the checklists pilots pull out when, say, an engine blows up while in flight. They are precise and only contain the most critical steps. For pilots, most Read-do checklists are less than ten steps long and some of the steps might be a couple words long, like "Fly plane!" They require an expert to use them because the expert must be able to perform the step without hesitation. The expert must also fill in missing steps — read-do checklists are never 100% complete. They are meant to be used in the moment for short tasks. These checklists are tested over and over in flight simulators to make sure they really work. There is an entire organization devoted to creating and re-testing these checklists so pilots won't refuse them for being too cumbersome. In other words if pilots say "The checklist is too long, it's not useful," the checklist maker considers it a fault of the checklist, not the pilot.

To me, this was a small revelation. A pilot will use both kinds of checklists. But they don't use a lot of Do-confirm SOP's while flying. At that point they use the Read-do checklists -- something very brief, something that doesn't distract them from the task of flying. The Do-confirm SOP is too long, too detailed. They use that before or after they are up in the air.

Pilots would say if you're trying to use a detailed SOP to manage a time-sensitive task —like checking an order or packing a box — chances are people won't use it regularly. It's not because it's broke. It's because it's too cumbersome. The pilot would say you are probably using the wrong kind of checklist — switch to something shorter.

Good Signs: Potholes in NYC

2010-04-04T17:20:00.001-04:00

I thought this was a nice use of a sign. It's a big sticker affixed to a pothole on my street in Brooklyn. Well, more like a potcrater. It lets us know several things:

Someone who can fix this knows about it
Don't bother them because they already know about it
You can rest assured something is happening
If you want to let them know about more things like this there is a phone number

That it's attached to the thing it's informing on is key. There's no confusion about what the problem is, even though the sign doesn't say what it is they're "looking into." That allows the sign to be generic. NYC city services doesn't have to make a new sign for each problem. They just drive around with a stack of these stickers in their trunk.

Sugar in America, or What can go wrong when you legislate localism.

2010-03-25T22:38:00.000-04:00

Last week the difference between what America and the rest of the world pays for cane sugar hit a ten year high. America pays almost forty cents per pound. The rest of the world pays less than twenty cents.

The reason is America protects its ten thousand local cane sugar producers with legislated import restrictions. We can't buy the sugar that the rest of the world does. It's an old system, one we've had in one form or another since 1816. And, with such a long history, it's a textbook issue of how things can go strangely, bizarrely wrong when you legislate localism.

One bizarre effect has been on corn. Faced with high cane sugar prices engineers went to work to figure out how to reduce other foods to sugar. They found corn. It converts to sugar relatively easily, turning into corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup. However, it was still more expensive to harvest and convert it than to buy cane sugar.

Lucky us. Corn is subsidized by taxes. The subsidies lower the cost of corn by so much it makes business sense to replace cane sugar with corn syrup. Corn, it's useful to note, is usually grown with chemical fertilizers.

Now, in a bizarre turn of events, corn growers love high sugar prices, too. They support the import restrictions because it means there's more demand for corn.

The thing is, there's no need for us to be growing sugar cane. It could even be bad for us to do so. There are very few places in America where the environment is suited to it. Ecologically speaking, it doesn't make much sense to grow something in an inhospitable environment. As James McWilliams wrote in his book Just Food, "An environmentally sound food system is one in which productive endeavors naturally gravitate to geographical locations where the impact on resources is minimized. In other words, producers prodce in the right places."

The Caribbean and Africa, however, are perfect environments to grow sugar cane. That's the right place to produce it. In fact they grow tons of it. They sell it to everyone else in the world. Except us. It's worth noting much of it is organic because poor farmers usually can't afford fertilizer.

So here's the final bizarre effect. Most of the places in the Caribbean and Africa that grow sugar cane are impoverished. They would love to do business with us and sell their natural, ecologically sound product. We don't let them. What we do instead is refuse their sugar but give them a significant amount of humanitarian and economic aid.

When you follow up these bizarre turns it may hurt your head. First we prohibit poor nations from selling us sugar. Then we use our taxes to subsidize corn growers for a substitute. Then we use more taxes to send aid to the poor nations.

How much more effective would it be to just let us do business with Africa directly, to not give handouts?

I wrote a previous post on sugar here.

Free Tickets, Italy in the Fall

2010-03-21T12:23:00.000-04:00

The village of Castelvetro.

When I was setting up our 10th annual spring balsamic blowout sale I checked in with Roberta, one half the husband-and-wife partnership that make up La Vecchia Dispensa, our longtime source for balsamic vinegar. I usually hit her up for a wholesale discount that I then double or triple to pass along for the sale.

This year she came back with a better idea. She had some funding from the regional government. She would give us tickets to Italy with a stay in her village, Castelvetro, and tour of Vecchia Dispensa's acetaia (vinegar factory). She told me to figure out how to give them away.

So here's how. Two pairs go to winners of a video contest. One to a customer winner, one to an employee winner. (You' don't have to be a customer—anyone can enter.) Shoot any video you'd like, three minutes or less. Just make sure it has something to do with balsamic. The connection can be paper thin. We're looking for creativity and fun, not film or acting talent. It's due by March 31, 2010.

The prize, I must say, is pretty awesome. Two tickets to Bologna, Italy. You set the terms of your stay as long as its between September 1 and November 30 this year. Stay the whole time if you'd like. Go wherever you want. You just need to fly in and out of Bologna.

Let me stop for a second and say, while it's nice to visit Italy any time of year, I'm particularly partial to fall. The food at harvest's end is great. There are wild mushrooms and game. The tourists have gone back to their holes. The temperatures are cooler but not icy. You can buy a couple sweaters and, guaranteed, you're a year ahead of the fashion cycle in the U.S.

OK, back to the prize. Roberta will give you a private tour of her acetaia and put you up in a swanky little hotel. You'll also visit a Parmigiano-Reggiano maker, incredible on its own right. After that you're on your own.

There are three minutes worth of more details on the contest here.

The videos from the current competition are here underneath Lois's video about the rules.

With ten days left to go I think the contest is wide open. I can't wait to give this prize away.

Van Halen: Operations Experts

2010-02-20T18:53:00.000-05:00

I'm reading Atul Gawande's latest book, The Checklist Manifesto. It's about how checklists have enabled incredibly complex tasks, like flying airplanes, and how they've improved results in other tasks, like surgery.

Checlists are essentially SOP's (Standard Operating Procedures). And they suffer the same flaw. It is easy to skip a step or mis-perform an action. If a mistake happens when you're following a checklist it can be very hard to catch.

Turns out David Lee Roth had thought of that already — and figured out a solution.

When Van Halen was touring in the 1980's they had a massive checklist. It was over 100 pages long. They toured with a huge stage set, way bigger than most rock acts. The primary purpose of the checklist was to tell each stadium's contractor what to put where. Stage microphones here. Amplifiers there. The case of Aqua Net over there. Etc. Problem is, on such a tight rock and roll schedule, what with being drunk most of the time and carrying on, how could they tell if their instructions were followed?

Roth, the lead singer, would slip an item in the check list. Deep inside, buried among the tasks, somewhere on page 55 or so, would be Article 126: "There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."

When he arrived at the show he'd check for the bowl of M&M's. If it had brown ones he'd demand the contractors review the entire checklist.

It's not a foolproof fix, of course. But as far as quick visual cues I think it's kind of brilliant. A trick worth borrowing.

It reminds me of the wise words of Homer Simpson. "Rock stars. Is there anything they don't know?"

Does buying local reduce fuel consumption? Redux

2010-02-17T09:17:00.000-05:00

In November I wrote this post about how long distance shopping may use less fossil fuel than buying locally. I created scenarios on the back of the proverbial envelope but I felt they were probably in the ballpark.

If you don't want to trust my half-assed calculation it turns out someone else with far more cred has done the math. They reached a similar result. A chap from Carnegie Mellon wrote a paper on the topic in the Journal of Environmental Science & Technology. No, I'm not a subscriber. He was interviewed in Celia Barbour's recent Oprah.com article about online shopping (which mentions Zingerman.com having "the perfect Reuben"). Here's an excerpt:

I couldn't reconcile my growing habit with my purported support for sustainable eating.

Then I talked to Christopher Weber, research assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who recently co-wrote a study on the carbon footprint of e-tailing and found that it's surprisingly modest -- if you buy direct from the producer.

"The biggest reason you see greenhouse-gas savings is that you don't drive to and from the store," he says. Indeed, "customer transport" accounts for 65 percent of the energy spent on traditional shopping. "Then the store itself needs to be lit and heated," he said. Add to that distribution and warehousing, and the UPS guy starts to look more and more like Al Gore.

Here's a link to Chris's entire paper. If you want to lower your food carbon footprint he gives this advice:

...dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG [Green House Gas] reduction than buying all locally sourced food.

Last but not least, the caveat I gave in my last post still stands. There are many good reasons to buy local foods—especially vegetables in season. For one, they usually taste better.

Behold the Power of Cheese

2010-02-13T10:39:00.000-05:00

Last time I got punched in the eye protecting someone's virtue I put a raw steak on it. Now there's a vegetarian solution. Turns out I could have used cheese.

From the annals of awesome, here's an article on how Olympian Lindsey Vonn is treating her skiing injury with what amounts to cream cheese.

Auteur Design

2010-01-31T15:18:00.000-05:00

Today, a link to an article from the New York Times about Apple and design that, at least to me, has words that ring true. While I think the author is misrepresenting wisdom of the crowd and he completely ignores customers and users—the only ones we design for, after all—he shines a light on the very idiosyncratic, weird, personal parts of creativity that I think are very important. The strange combination of data and instinct. The power of one person to make an impact. The thoughtfulness and deliberation. And to some extent, the loneliness.

For me, during the process of design, there is constant tension. It's a three way tug of war between what I learn and hear from others, what I know exists, and what I want to be. All three change my mind, change the thing I'm designing. That's not just when I'm working on the website or catalog. It's during any act of creativity. Writing, cooking, even, I daresay, designing a training program. After all, when it's done well, I firmly believe business is an act of creativity.

F ull link here .

Excerpts:

The fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days emphasizes a kind of Internet-era egalitarianism that celebrates the “wisdom of the crowd” and “open innovation.”

In the auteur model there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created.

Mr. Jobs, of course, is one member of a large team at Apple, even if he is the leader.

Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.” And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.”

The Jobs formula, say colleagues, relies heavily on tenacity, patience, belief and instinct.

He is also a skilled listener to the technology to judge when an intriguing innovation is ready for the marketplace.

Underployment

2010-01-06T13:49:00.000-05:00

Unemployment figures — currently running around 15% in Michigan, about half that in Ann Arbor — count people who are actively looking for a job. If you stop looking you're no longer considered unemployed. If you have a job that's not full time, or not as full time as you want, you're not considered unemployed either.

The last group are the folks who, in my personal lexicon, I call underployed. They'd like to work more but they can't. The work isn't there.

This December, if you you talked to the temporary crew who worked at ZMO, you probably found lots of the underployed. I met a few:

There was a self-employed man who ran his own moving, cleaning and landscaping business. It was slow so he came to work for us (plus he wanted to see how we did what we did).

There was an Michigan MBA who has her own consultancy. It was a little slow. She also wanted a peek inside Zingerman's.

There was a graphic designer whose own business was a little slow. He always thought it'd be interesting to see how we worked.

There was a person who worked for a major resort hotel on Mackinaw Island. December is a slow season for island resorts on the Great Lakes.Guess why she applied? Same story: she knew about Zingerman's and wanted to work "inside."

We were certainly blessed, in a sad and perverse way, with an abundance of riches in our crew this December. Unemployment and underployment were rampant. In the next few years, unemployment may subside. But when you’re a good company you can often find the underployed. They're interested in who we are, how we work. The experience they had this year may mean some come back. Or they’ll tell other underployed friends.

My favorite crew story wasn't about underployment, though. There was one man who had a full time job. He worked for us for only one reason: to buy a ring so he could — in his words,"properly" — ask his girl of ten years to be his bride.

What do fake hamsters have in common with food sales?

2009-12-20T00:36:00.000-05:00

I ran across this article today and thought it was worth sharing. It's about Toys 'R Us and their approach during the economic downturn. While they're certainly much different than ZMO in many ways, their CEO's take on managing during the downturn dovetailed with a lot of what I think is important.

The merchandise is what people want. If it's fun and interesting and good, people will buy it. Focus on that.

Don't get lured into fighting price battles. That's a zero sum game.

Innovate. Be exciting. Do things your customers don't expect. When things are bad, try to figure out how to give more service, not less.

Don't be dour and constantly tout "recession special" bunk. It's depressing. No one wants to buy anything from someone who's depressing.

Link to the full article here.

Live from the production floor.

2009-12-17T13:53:00.000-05:00

ZMO Alumni: Robert Johnson

2009-12-07T21:10:00.002-05:00

Robert Johnson probably hates that I used this as his picture.

The holiday rush is here, like it is every year. It always brings a surge of amazing, unexpected people to our business. I’ve met some of you this year and it’s no different—what a cool bunch of folks you are. There have been so many fabulous people come work for us during the holiday it’s hard to even comprehend. Many have stayed. Jackie and Brad, for example. They were some of our first holiday staff. I remember that I was late to Jackie’s interview. I remember that because she never lets me forget it. Brad — I never remember interviewing. It’s like Brad was always here.

I thought I would share a little ZMO history with at least one alumni profile this holiday. It may seem a little personal for the biz blog but I think it shares a sense of the spirit we’ve always had. Plus it’s a peek back in history at a company that, not long ago, was much more tiny and fragile than it is now.

ZMO ALUMNI PROFILE

Robert Johnson

on the phones circa 1995-6

When I hired Robert everyone called him Bob. It was 1995. It was near Christmas. In the dark basement of my brain I knew that I needed help to run Mail Order for the holiday. At that time we were a staff of two. We would need two or three more—at least! It wasn’t until late November that the light turned on and I realized I needed to post, interview, hire, train...you know, that kind of stuff. Frankly I’ve never been a terrific planner.

I called Bob because I knew him as a friend of a friend. More importantly, I knew he’d worked in phone sales. Being an, ahem, business man, I calculated his experience would help cut my training expenses (which were also unplanned for). His experience came from a previous company, name unknown. To call it phone sales might have been a stretch. Bob’s employer wasn’t exactly a legitimate organization. Telemarketing of some sort, positioned as "donations." It was basically one of those companies that the national Do Not Call registry was created for. I remember a line he used to give little old ladies who asked him if he worked for the fire department: “Well, I’m sure not a policeman!” I knew Bob was recently unemployed. He had told me recently that he was walking to work in Ypsilanti, coffee in hand, saw a newspaper with a headline announcing a police raid on his employer, turned around and headed home.

Bob worked two holidays at ZMO. In between he sold cheese at the deli with Debra Dickerson. At the holiday, equipment-wise, we were pathetic. We had two ten dollar touch tone phones from K Mart. Our voice mail system consisted of three fifteen dollar answering machines from someplace worse. No 1-800 number. The fax was at Zingerman’s deli, across the street, and it was always running out of paper. We’d forget it was there for a day or two.

All I remember from those two seasons was my phone plastered to my ear all day, non-stop. Never a break, almost nothing to eat. Bob and I were the entire sales office. When we caught our breath and were off the phone at the same time we'd be in a daze and couldn’t think straight. Our conversation was childlike and profane, like a dirty Dr Seuss book. “Mo, Did you get the fax from Fox?” “No, but I just got the shit from Mr Schatz!”

When we closed at 5pm we hit play on the boom box, took a 10 minute break, then rang back all the voice mails. By 7 or 8 it was all over. Oh, except for the pick sheets. We wrote those by hand and it took half the night.

Like many of the folks working in the service center now Bob had a fan club. He has a deeper voice than I do and I think there were people who called just to listen. Before he left he gave me advice about working the phones that I’ve never forgotten, but, for obvious reasons, hasn’t made it into our training manual. “Mo, the secret to great service is just talk to everyone like you want to have sex with them. Woman or man, doesn’t matter. Everyone.”

In 1997, Bob moved to New York. He worked at Murray’s Cheese in the Village and walked quarter wheels of Parmigiano around the corner to a young chef named Mario Batali, who was really starting to make it at a restaurant named Pó. After that he worked in one of those atrociously-named internet start-ups circa 2000. His stock shares went in the shitter, like everyone else’s.

Soon afterwards Bob got into the music business and he’s stayed there ever since. For years he worked at The Knitting Factory, a great little 3-stage club in lower Manhattan. At this point I should probably say I love rock and roll and everything about it so it has been awesome to stay in touch with Bob and, once in a while, get a chance to sneak into some great sold-out shows.

For the last three years Bob has worked with a partner in his own company called Scenic. He books rock shows for clubs in New York, mainly in Brooklyn. Some cute tiny shows like the Trachtenberg Family Slide Show Players. Some old punk bands like Fear. Some unknown heavy metal bands with moody names like Unearthly Trance. Some up and coming stars like Kurt Vile. And once in a while, some bonafide stars like Andrew W.K. and Big Star. (Andrew W.K. is from Ann Arbor and played a recent Scenic show in a Fleetwood Diner shirt.)

Whenever I see Bob, I try to remember to bring him a brownie. He still says Zingerman’s was the best job he ever had. (I barely believe him, but it was fun.) Now he is his own boss, which is something I hope everyone gets to try one day. If nothing else, for meeting awesome people like him.

Moonlight Oil

2009-11-27T17:11:00.001-05:00

Daphne and Amalia

After Thanksgiving expired I spent the following morning at a café with Daphne and Amalia Zepos, the two sisters behind our exclusive Kokoraki olive oil from the island of Zakynthos, Greece. Amalia was in from Athens, visiting Daphne in Brooklyn for Thanksgiving.

It'd been two weeks since the olive harvest finished. Amalia shared details. All the olives were picked and pressed from October 27 to November 13. It's a blend of one part dopia (Greek for "local") and five parts Koroneiki olives. Yields were slightly lower than last year, which to her is a good sign for the flavor. She brought a bottle, the color was electric. She says that's typical for oil from Zakynthos. A minty phosphorescent green that surprises people from elsewhere in Greece, where oil is almost always yellow.

It's the first time I met Amalia. She is poised, calm, relentlessly precise. She's new to oil making, having taken a seminar with author Judy Ridgway last year and learning otherwise by trial and error and constant discussion with the farmers. She keeps a notebook with each day's pressing notes. Kilos picked, olive oil pressed, rain or sun, temperature, and so on. This year she sourced a special filter tray from Crete to remove stems and leaves on the farm because the machine at the olive press doesn't work well enough for her standards. She's adamant about pressing without the addition of heat (cold pressed) so she waits at the local olive press until all the other farmers are finished and the press is washed and cooled. That often means pressing at 2 in the morning, by moonlight.

If pressing olive oil by moonlight sounds enchanting it's worth noting that it's just the latest chapter in the romantic history of this particular olive grove. Amalia holds a letter that details the ownership of the small farm since 1820. At that point it was bequeathed as a marriage dowry. Even then it was considered valuable, worth enough to win a lifetime commitment between two lovers. Many of the two hundred eight trees are from that period — or older. The newlywed family of two centuries ago would have had oil that's very similar to what we have today. Since then the grove has had four owners, the last being the family of Amalia's husband.

We currently offer 2008's harvest, the first bottled for sale outside Greece. It's a rare example of an estate bottled Greek olive oil. (Almost all Greek oil is made for personal consumption or sold to co-ops and blended.) The flavor is vibrant and bright, like the color. The 2009 harvest will be with us in late spring. The flavor now, intense and green since it was just pressed, promises to be delicious. Both harvests are certified organic.

Amalia is a documentary filmmaker. Here's a short piece she created during 2008's harvest.