THE COOKBOOK TEST #0044: THE CHEF CAMP COOKBOOK
Dear Readers,
You may have noticed by now: I don't take a vacation. THE COOKBOOK TEST comes out weekly without fail; my other project, The Heavy Table, comes out six times a month without missing a beat. I've maintained both newsletters through sickness, broken bones, major holidays, long-planned trips, you name it. It's not so much that I don't allow myself a break; it's more a fear that if I let myself slip once, I'll fall out of the habit and the whole house of cards will come tumbling down in a noisy implosion.
It's the height of summer here in Minnesota, and my family is all set to go blueberry picking tomorrow at our favorite spot, Rush River Produce. Rolling hills, sunshine, acres of blueberries and decorative flowers, cheerful owners (the house rule is: eat all you want! right off the bushes!) - it's functionally heaven on earth. As a result, while I can't allow myself a week off, I'll give myself a bit of an easy week - and hopefully, in the end, you won't resent me too much for it.
This week's cookbook: The Chef Camp Cookbook. It's a slightly vintage title (circa 2016), and it's not terribly long. Also, confession: I wrote some of it, and I edited the whole thing. So I'm not going to pretend to be critical, and I'm not going to recommend that you buy it.
Instead, I'm going to give it to you, for free (in PDF format.)
Here it is! THE CHEF CAMP COOKBOOK, HOSTED ON HEAVY TABLE
At any rate, this raises the question: "What am I looking at, here?"
For about four years, I worked with a team of partners and friends to produce an event called Chef Camp here in Minnesota. Producing it was fairly simple in concept:
1. Rent an entire YMCA camp, beautifully situated in the woods by a lake
2. Book five or so extremely talented and prominent Minnesota-area (or even national-level) chefs to serve as instructors to give live-fire cooking lessons
3. Organize a series of delicious meals using local meat and produce, including a 5-7 course meal held under the outdoor pavilion and a major lunch catered by a terrific local restaurant
4. Sell 80-120 tickets to campers willing to make the drive from the Twin Cities metro and spend Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon eating, drinking, cooking, learning, and generally hanging out with us
There were lots of gorgeous little extras, too. Mushroom foraging (Camp Miller was sometimes rich in chanterelles when we had Chef Camp.) Stargazing with a professional astronomer. A canoe bar in the lake - canoe out to a professional bartender serving drinks in, yes, another canoe.
Fireside parties with Swedish torches (massive burning logs split and standing vertically.) Live music. Grilled octopus. Bread made with wild yeast gathered on site. A South American-style buried grill called pachamanca.
Freshly made baked goods made by professional bakers, served dockside at sunrise with a gourmet coffee service. A massive pizza oven that we built on site. Were these the best of times? They may have been the best of times!
I don't even mind that I was working for much of the time - somehow the job was so joyful that it still felt like vacation when I was up there. (Especially after I'd unloaded the $5,000+ of groceries that I'd purchased and loaded onto a refrigerated truck for the journey north. It's too bad that "professional grocery shopper" isn't a viable career, because I'd be fully qualified.)
At any rate: that's the background. Four years, six different camps, 110 or so guests by the end there - we were going great guns. All it took was a pandemic, the loss of our two major sponsors (management turnover and an end of marketing spends, respectively), and my business partner taking off to open a restaurant to do us in. Maybe I'll come back to it again - I'd like to, and now that the kids are older, it's looking more and more reasonable every year.
at your service,
James
THE CHEF CAMP COOKBOOK
BY JAMES NORTON, DAVE FRIEDMAN, AND ROSE DANIELS
CHEF CAMP | 2016 | FREE/OUT OF PRINT
What The Chef Camp Cookbook lacks in length it makes up for in context, I think - we let our chefs or sponsors really wind up and tell the stories behind their dishes, so you know why a dish is special and how to make and serve it so that it fits into your life. A couple of my favorite recipes come from Chef J.D. Fratzke, a tremendously skillful cook who once took me and Becca into the Boundary Waters one frozen March to enjoy an eight-course meal, a day that we commemorated with a story called Feasting on Frozen Waters. Fratzke, more than any other chef I've known, was a man of letters, constantly reading, writing, quoting books, and living a life that seemed directly inspired by Jim Harrison's Brown Dog stories.
I'm including a Chef Camp Cookbook recipe here (my biscuits, which I made 160 of and served dockside during an early iteration of camp) but there are a few others I want to call attention to when you flip through the PDF.
Ryan Stechschulte's pine cone bread starter is a unique story - this guy was a serious fine dining chef, and when we invited him to do Chef Camp, he made a trek up to the camp - MONTHS BEFORE IT STARTED - to gather pinecones as a way to harvest and harness hyper-local yeast to make his sourdough bread starter for camp. Above! And! Beyond!
Noah Barton's chilaquiles are a personal favorite, because I knew Noah when he was the chef at the legendary/infamous Chino Latino, and he introduced me to this dish at a brunch. Once upon a time, chilaquiles were not a universal brunch staple, and the simplicity and deliciousness and anti-hangover properties of this terrific dish were stunning and delightful to me.
And Sarah Master's seafood boil is a really terrific recipe, not just because it tastes quite good, but because it reflects her own biography as a chef equally at home in Minneapolis and New Orleans, the two major metros on either end of the big, bad Mississippi River that runs through the center of our big bad country.
MORE THAN LEGENDARY BUTTERMILK BISCUITS
I've published this recipe in more places than I can think of, and I have at times flirted with the idea of getting it tattooed on my arm so that it's always in easy reach. (Ultimately I'm siding with Leviticus when it comes to tattoos, so no dice. But if I decide to anger God, this might be how I get the job done.)
This recipe is so delicious that we had to declare "Biscuit Tuesdays" as a thing in our household so we would only make and eat them once a week, rather than constantly. They're great with jam and butter, or with scrambled eggs and bacon, or just as is.
BUTTERMILK BISCUITS
Yields about 10 2-inch biscuits
1 ¾ cups unbleached all-purpose flour (more for shaping dough) (or, preferred: 1 Cup White Lily flour plus 3/4 Cups regular AP flour)
1 Tbsp. granulated sugar
2 ¼ tsp. baking powder
¾ tsp. kosher salt
¼ tsp. baking soda
8 Tbsp (1 stick) very cold salted butter (or, preferred: 4 Tbsp of regular salted butter and 4 Tbsp of fancy farmhouse rolled butter)
¾ cup very cold buttermilk
Heat oven to 500 degrees F. and position a rack in the center. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. Put dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl and whisk to distribute them evenly.
1. Cut up butter and toss with flour
With a sharp knife, cut the cold butter lengthwise into 1/4-inch-thick slices. Stack three or four slices and cut them into three even strips. Then cut the strips in half several times to make many butter bits. Toss butter bits into the flour mixture. Continue cutting all the butter in the same manner and adding it to the flour. Then use your fingers to separate the butter bits, coat each one with flour, and distribute them all throughout the mixture. Don't rub the butter too hard, or it will melt.
2. Give it a little stir
When all the butter is evenly distributed, add the cold buttermilk and stir until the flour is absorbed by the buttermilk and the dough forms a coarse lump, about 1 minute.
3. Pat and fold dough
Dust a work surface with flour and dump the dough onto it. Dust the top of the dough and your hands with flour, and press the dough into a 3/4-inch-thick rectangle. Sprinkle a bit of extra flour on the top of the dough. Fold the dough over on itself in three sections, as if folding a letter.
With a metal spatula, lift the dough off the counter and dust under it with flour to prevent sticking. Dust the top with flour and press the dough out again into a 3/4-inch-thick rectangle and repeat the trifold. Repeat this procedure once more.
4. Cut biscuits and bake
After the third trifold, dust flour under and on top of the dough, if needed, and roll or press the dough into a 1/2-inch-thick oval. Dip a biscuit cutter or a glass into flour and start cutting biscuits, dipping the cutter in flour between each biscuit. Transfer the biscuits to the baking sheet, spacing them about 1/2 inch apart. Gather any scraps of dough, roll 'em out again, and keep pressing biscuits until the dough is gone.
Put the baking sheet in the oven and reduce the heat to 450 degrees F. Cook for about 4-6 minutes, and then rotate the sheet, and then bake for another 4-6. The biscuits are done when they’re nicely browned.
THE VERDICT ON THE CHEF CAMP COOKBOOK
(***BUY IT*** / BORROW IT / SKIP IT / SCRAP IT)
It's delicious, it's gorgeous looking, it's free. Come on, there's literally nothing at stake here. Give it a look.