The Culinary Historians of Southern California are sponsoring a used cookbook sale in two weeks at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. This food historians’ group is based at the Los Angeles Public Library, so my guess is their used book sale will be pretty good. Disclaimer: I haven’t been to one of their book sales, so save the hate mail if it turns out I’m wrong.

Go buy more books you don’t have room for. Better yet, donate some of your cookbooks that you don’t love any more, and send them off to a worthy new home. Proceeds support the Culinary Historians of Southern California.

For more information call 213-228-7201

Sunday August 26, 2007
8 am - 1 pm
Hollywood Farmer’s Market at Ivar & Selma Avenue
(between Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards)

Free parking available:
1) Doolittle Theater parking lot (1623 N. Vine St).
2) Cinerama Dome: 1 hour free or two hours for $1 with market validation
3) L.A. Film School: $3 parking (at NE corner of Ivar & Sunset)
4) Street parking is free on Sundays

19th century California cattle ranchers threw massive beef barbecue parties that lasted for days and fed hundreds of thousands of guests. At a time before refrigeration allowed for distant shipments of fresh meat, California ranchers raised cattle primarily for their hides and tallow. The meat was a byproduct, and these parties were a way to get rid of all of it in one big, beef blowout.

The Culinary Historians of Southern California recently threw a picnic for their members at the Palomares Adobe in Pomona that recreated the mostly lost art of earth pit cooking. Californios brought this technique from northern Mexico, where it is still practiced today, but in America, it’s a rarity to see people cooking this way. Charles Perry, the Historians’ President and an LA Times food writer, invited me to help tend the fire the night before the picnic.

John Rabe of KPCC covered the event for his weekend radio show, Offramp. Listen to his podcast (RealPlayer format), or my audio file of Charles Perry describing the pit and the cooking process (wav format).

The Palomares Adobe, a historic preservation of a prominent 19th century cattle rancher’s home, built an area for the specific purpose of cooking earth pit barbecue. It’s on the left of this photo. Here, culinary historian Richard Foss makes kindling.

The pit is five feet deep, and lined with steel. We’d eventually fill this hole almost all the way with burning logs.

Over the course of the night, we burned down most of the oak logs in the background.

After five hours, the pit is mostly full of flaming logs, and the red hot steel indicates a temperature near 1100 degrees F.

Meanwhile, the oregano and garlic seasoned beef roasts (top round and shoulder clod) have been double wrapped in cotton sack cloth and burlap, and marinate in vinegar.

We laid down a steel grate on top of the burning logs, and added the meat to the pit. The steel plate, at left, covers the pit and smothers the flames. A layer of earth is placed on top to seal out most of the air. Managing fire temperatures in a hole in the ground is a whole different game than using modern barbecue equipment!

After ten hours of slow cooking over a smoldering bed of oak coals, the beef is ready to serve.

The meat is unswaddled…

… and has cooked so tender that it falls apart with a nudge. There is no smoke ring, but it’s absorbed an almost tannic, oaky, smoke flavor different from any Southern barbecue I’ve eaten.

Slow cooked barbecue isn’t just about the food that ends up on the plate, but all the things that happen when people slow down, tend a fire together, and cook for hours on end. Before webcams and YouTube, strangers sat around fires and entertained each other with great conversation, and I enjoyed this other lost art with the Culinary Historians. Sitting next to an unlikely campfire set a few hundred feet from Pomona’s busy Arrow Highway, we travelled back in time to glimpse how Californians from another era might have socialized and feasted.

See the rest of my Flickr photo set here.

Tracy, California is a formerly sleepy agroindustrial town that’s slowly turning into an exurb for Silicon Valley train commuters. This growing community seems to update the tired, run down hole in the wall restaurants in its older neighborhoods with crappy chains in the newly developed areas. On the surface, Tracy’s food scene appeared bleak.

But then I drove past a storefront that caught my eye. “Lake of Fire,” the sign said, baffling me from the back of a strip mall.

“What the hell is a Lake of Fire,” I wondered? A brimstone burning evangelical church in a strip mall? In fact, it’s an Italian inspired restaurant where I ate twice during a recent weekend in Tracy. It’s been open since November 2006 under chef Kevin Conway, who adds depth and layers of flavors to his straightforward pizza and pasta dishes by roasting the vegetables in his sauces. Roasting intensifies the vegetables’ natural sweetness, and this simple rustic kitchen trick makes all the difference in the final dish.

Roasted pepper puree, for example, flavors one of their Tuscan Flat Breads, a house specialty. There are several iterations of this salad-on-a-pizza-crust, but the chicken version comes with with a salad of baby spinach, roasted red peppers, mozzarella, garlic puree and dressed with a citrus vinaigrette. The pizza crust combines surprisingly well with the salad on top, although it cracks into pieces if you try to fold it like a pita bread. You’ll have to figure out your own way to eat this lovely carb-rich salad.

Roasted tomatos enhance the robust bolognese sauce in the Rigatoni, served with chunks of fennel sausage, sauteed fresh mushooms, parmesan and mozzarella. All the big flavors melded into a rich pasta dish that was one of our table’s favorites.

The spaghetti with meatballs, however, was not well received. The noodles were inexplicably cut into shorter pieces, and the meatball congnoscenti in our group gave them a major thumbs down.

But the pizzas here are the standout. They serve a crisp, thin crusted version that would lead you think there’s a wood fired oven in the kitchen, but there isn’t: only a gas fired oven and a chef who runs it at blast furnace temperatures. The crust has a cracker like bottom layer, with just enough breadiness to absorb the juices of the strongly flavored ingredients on top. The Margherita pizza has a restrained and proper balance of crust, sauce, and topping, meaning it’s not excessively overloaded with goopy cheese. Cheese is a seasoning here, not a choking hazard.

We tried two pizzas: the classic tricolored Margherita with tomato sauce, fresh basil and cow’s milk mozzarella. The Neapolitan pizza police will get their knickers twisted because they’re not using bufala mozzarella, but after all, this ain’t Napoli, it’s Tracy. It’s not damn good DOC (Denominazione di Orgine Controllata) pizza, it’s damn good BFT (Bum F*@k Tracy) pizza. It’s the closest to authentic Italian pizza you’ll get this side of San Francisco, and a welcome change from the same old, American doughwad pizza.

While the Margherita appealed to the minimalist in me, better still was the Carne Combo pizza, topped with tomato sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni, fennel sausage, prosciutto, pancetta & sauteed fresh mushroom. Somehow, they manage to put all that meat on this thin crisp crust, and not overwhelm it with a sodden heaviness. Must be that blast furnace in the back that crisps the bottom of the pizza dough regardless of what’s sitting on top.

The most expensive item on the dinner menu is $12.95, and most are less than $10. Accessibly ambitious in a town overrun with mediocre chains, Lake of Fire elevates relatively humble ingredients to greatness, and that’s a measure of the cook’s skill in any rustic cuisine. The restaurant has plans to start growing its own herbs hydroponically in a converted salad bar fixture, but hasn’t had the time or money to proceed with the project. Let’s hope Tracy’s continued growth encourages brave independent restaurants like this one, which deserve the support.

Lake of Fire
2503 N. Tracy Blvd. (>1 mile south of the Tracy Blvd exit on I-205)
Tracy, CA 95376
209-839-9600
Open 7 days a week

Nothing says Independence Day like slow smoked barbecue, American style. Hope everyone had a good Fourth. Beside the requisite burgers and dogs, I cooked brisket and pork ribs on the Komodo Kamado to celebrate our glorious release from British tyranny.

This is the best brisket that I’ve ever made, thanks to the steady temperatures held by the Komodo. I haven’t cooked all that many briskets in the past because my Weber Smokey Mountain doesn’t accomodate their large size, but with the Komodo, cooker capacity isn’t an excuse to avoid cooking this most difficult of traditional barbecue cuts.

The second session on the Komodo fared far better than my first. Dennis, the owner of the Komodo company, gave me some tips, and the cooker stayed pegged at 200 degrees F for many long hours.

I’m taking the next few days off. Going to race cars up in Northern California. Keeps tabs on my race team at the 24 Hours of Lemons!