Is My Elvis Pizza Up To Michelin Standards?

Yesterday, I reported on my successful debut as a force to be reckoned with in the dog-eat-dog world of haute cuisine. As you recall, last weekend I entered my world famous Elvis Pizza in a local cooking contest. No one ordered me to leave. There were no reported cases of food poisoning.

Last evening, by sheer coincidence, I came across an article, Lunch with M, by John Colapinto in this week's New Yorker. The article was about the secret world of the anonymous inspectors who review restaurants for the legendary Michelin Guide. The author pulled a major journalistic coup by having lunch in an upscale Manhattan restaurant, Jean-Georges, with one of the inspectors, "Maxime" or "M". The prose is simply delicious:

She was tending toward the Arctic char for her main course but couldn’t decide about her second course. The waiter reappeared and asked if he could answer any questions.

“Can you tell me about the crab toast?” she asked.

“It’s Peekytoe crab, a chiffonade of tarragon as well as chives topped with white sesame seeds, toasted in the oven, finished with a miso mustard, and a pear salad on the side,” he said.

“It’s new?” she said.

“About a week on the menu.”

She asked the waiter to give her a minute and then leaned in to me. Inspectors love it when they ask a question and can tell that a waiter has made up an answer, she explained, adding, “That never happens here.”

I can so relate. In my cooking contest, one of the judges asked why I chose to use shredded cabbage as a side to my Elvis Pizza, and I immediately responded that the cabbage is traditional in pulled pork sandwiches. Am I ready for the big time or what?

The Michelin Guide started off in 1900 as a marketing ploy to encourage consumers to drive to restaurants in the French countryside, thereby increasing the sale of the company's new-fangled pneumatic tires. The Guide soon evolved into THE restaurant authority, with its famous three-star rating system. Just drawing one star is a huge honor. French chefs make it a life ambition to become a three-star chef.

Several years ago, in my email Newsletter I re-reported a story that was a front page scandal in France, concerning Bernard Loiseau, chef and owner of La Côte d’Or in Burgundy, who had once told a fellow chef he would kill himself if he ever lost one of his stars. According to the New Yorker account, based on Rudolph Chelminski's 2005 book “The Perfectionist”:

The food writer François Simon published a story in Le Figaro hinting that Loiseau was on thin ice with Michelin. Loiseau, who had suffered periodic depression for years, sank into despair. In early February, 2003, he was notified by Michelin that he would keep his third star. Still, Simon wrote another piece, in which he suggested that Loiseau and his third star were “living on borrowed time.” Two and a half weeks later, after a day at work in the kitchen, Loiseau killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head. He was fifty-two.

Michelin's entree into North America began with the 2005 launch of its New York Guide. The Guide was roundly criticized for being Francophobic, with no allowance for American tastes and sensibilities. That is changing, with the recruitment of American-born inspectors. Still, not just any American will do. A bit of M's background, according to the New Yorker:

“'I ate falafel at Mamoun’s and bagels and lox from Russ & Daughters before I’d even heard of a peanut-butter sandwich,' she said." A life in the food business plus intensive training by Michelin followed. The New Yorker describes her in action:

Her Arctic char arrived, on a bed of watercress rémoulade, and accompanied by a julienne of apple. She took a bite. “It’s perfectly cooked,” she said, excitedly. “I mean, it’s textbook.”

Were this an inspection visit, M would spend two to three hours filling out a report that would list "every ingredient in everything she ate, and the specifics of every preparation," then rate these according to such criteria as "quality of the products, mastery in the cooking, technical accuracy, balance of flavors, and creativity of the chef."

Then all the ambiance factors: “The salt, the glasses, everything about the experience you had from the second you made the phone call to book the reservation, to when you walked in the door, when the hostess greeted you—or didn’t greet you—to whatever little goodies you have at the end of the meal.”

So, the unique taste experience of my Elvis Pizza is not enough. It's also about the precise positioning of the shredded cabbage on the plate, the placement of the bottle of beer on the table, the meticulous attention to the way I tuck in my tee shirt and angle my Boston Red Sox cap on my head ...

Details, details. I have miles to go before I sleep.

I Enter My Elvis Pizza in a Cooking Contest

There are things I do at 3,500 feet up in the mountains that would never even enter my mind at sea level. Last Sunday at 5 PM I showed up at our local restaurant - Descanso Junction - ready to kick ass. I had entered myself into my first-ever cooking contest and I was determined to walk away with first prize.

I had my world famous Elvis Pizza ready to go. How could I possibly lose? I walked in the door, laden with my pizza gear. "I'm ready for you," I told the owner Tammy. "Are you ready for me?"

I set up in a spot in the kitchen in back. First order of business - pizza stone in the oven. A pizza stone looks like a manhole cover and weighs about the same. Out of my backpack and into the oven it went. The stone would need at least a half hour to absorb the oven heat. Second order of business - caramelize my onions. I had thin-sliced wedges of onions ready to go. Olive oil into a frying pan, then the onions.

I got them going, then dashed over to my corner of the kitchen to get set up. Onto the counter went my covered pizza dough (which I had made and brought to a rise back home), my pulled pork (from a six pound pork butt I had slow-roasted two days before), my barbecue sauce, Ranch dressing, shredded cabbage, a wooden pizza peel, it goes on and on ...

I flew back to the cooking range just in time to prevent my onions from turning into Cajun ashes. By this time, the other contestants were setting up. They had brought things in pots that only needed warming up. And here I was with my Manhattan Pizza Project that demanded precision timing. Rookie mistake. I should have entered my world famous cassoulet.

But no, think big, think pizza. Things in pots - that's for wimps. This is my Elvis Pizza, after all, inspired by the King of Rock 'n Roll.

"I thought that would have been peanut butter and banana," one of the contestants joked.

"That was my first version," I responded, almost with a straight face. Then I got smart. A barbecue pizza. Stand outdoors at Graceland and inhale and you'll see what I mean. Okay, I've never been near Graceland or Memphis, but I assume I'm striking a chord with every music lover who recalls hearing "Hound Dog" for the first time and comes to the realization that the world will never be the same.

Back in my corner of the kitchen, I sprinkled flour on the metal counter top and plopped on my pizza dough and rolled it out according to exact NASA specifications. My sauce and toppings and implements were right where I needed them to be. Then back over to the range for my onions. Sweet as candy. Into a dish they went and back over to my corner of the kitchen. Final assembly would come later.

The appetizer portion of the contest got underway. I took a seat with the other contestants out front. I think it was a soup that led off the contest. But not just any soup. This was family soup. Soup that the Crusaders had brought back from the Holy Land, soup that had traveled on the Mayflower, that had tamed the West.

Oh, crap! I thought, as the contestants reeled off their recipe narratives to the five judges at the table. I had come prepared with a crisp two-sentence delivery (or one long sentence with commas and conjunctions) and here they were expecting 500 pages of John Galt from "Atlas Shrugged."

The appetizer portion of the contest wrapped up, and the first contestant from the entree portion showed up with his wimpy pot. Time to go back and get crackin'. I was in the number four spot. Plenty of time, no rush.

Tammy poked her head in the kitchen. One of the contestants was a no-show, she informed me. I would be going on at number three.

Rule number one in any cooking contest: Only show up with things in pots, the wimpier the better.

"No problem," I shot back, lying through my teeth. My dough had been lying on the counter too long and I perceived the ugly possibility of a crust build-up. No time to worry about that, as I grabbed my box of corn meal and dusted my pizza peel. Then I moved the dough to the peel, crimped the edges, and started applying my sauce and my pulled pork and caramelized onions.

Thyme! Where's my fresh thyme? No time! I sprinted to the oven with my creation, opened the oven door, and slid my pizza onto the stone. The pizza took off on the stone like a vehicle on glare ice. A small portion of the pizza was drooping off the stone. I stuck my bare hands into a 500 degree oven and managed to pull the pizza back, but now it was no longer circular in shape.

A rustic pizza, I would call it, if worse came to worst. Here I was dealing with a strange oven, hoping like hell the dough wouldn't come out burnt on the outside and raw on the inside.

"How are things going?" Tammy asked. "Right on schedule," I replied in an unbelievably calm and reassuring voice. A good cook can handle any contingency. More than a year before, I had failed a driver's test when my brain went into panic mode and I nearly failed my second time out for the same reason. Now here I was, cool as a cucumber (and there just happened to be a cucumber in the kitchen for comparison). No matter how this contest turned out, I had already passed with flying colors.

Now I had my plating station set up. Onto five plates went shredded cabbage. I inspected my pizza. It was now or never. I slid in my peel and extracted my creation without incident. Then I set the peel with my pizza on the counter. I had found my thyme and began applying it. JoAnn, who works as a waitress at the place (and who had entered her jalapenos wrapped in bacon in the appetizer portion of the contest) walked through and exclaimed how gorgeous it looked. Another contestant said the same thing, then another.

My confidence was returning. Now the final touch, Ranch dressing. It wasn't coming out of the bottle like it was supposed to. I stuck in two fingers and began applying the goop by flicking it with my fingers, a la Jackson Pollock. That was the intention, for the Ranch dressing to create a Jackson Pollock drip painting effect.

"It looks beautiful," Tammy enthused. She suggested I take it out to the judges unsliced on the peel, then I could take it back to the kitchen for slicing and plating.

"Ready?" I asked.

All set, she replied.

Out I went with my pizza. I angled up the peel, edge down on the counter, for the judges' viewing pleasure.

During the appetizer portion of the contest, I had sort of assembled my Crusaders-Mayflower-John Galt narrative in my head, but I hadn't had any time to practice it.

"So this is what it must be like being on the 'Iron Chef,'" I opened. Pregnant pause. "Hi, I'm Bobby Flay."

Thank heaven everyone was laughing.

"Are any of you judges Yankees fans?" I asked, pointing to the Red Sox cap I was wearing. One of the judges raised his hand. I jokingly flipped my cap around, then flipped it back.

More laughs.

Then I opened with my original crisp two-sentence (or one long sentence) spiel: "This is my Elvis Pizza, inspired by the King of Rock 'n Roll, drawing from two great cooking traditions - Italian for its pizza and southern for its barbecue, re-conceptualized in Southern California, home of reinvention."

Now what?

"Think of pizza as an open-face sandwich," I continued. "Anything goes."

Nodding heads. A good sign.

"I came up with my first version about four years ago in New Jersey," I adlibbed. "We had company coming unexpectedly for dinner and I rounded up whatever was in the fridge." Left-over pizza dough, barbecue sauce, a single pork chop, some onions, Ranch dressing.

"My wife liked it so much," I went on to say, "that she divorced me."

That had them rolling in the aisles. For the record my former wife is a very wonderful person. Anyway, here I was in southern California, where I refined my original inspiration, much to the delight of my new neighbors. I then explained how the meat on this particular pizza came from a slow-roasted pork butt, with enough left-overs for pulled pork sandwiches for the next five months.

"Bon appetite," I concluded. Next thing, I had the slices on plates with my shredded cabbage (which is traditional with pulled pork sandwiches). Plus more morsels for the other contestants in the audience.

"Fantastic presentation," people kept telling me. Elvis would be proud. Of course, I knew before I turned up that the other contestants would be bringing their A-game to the event. Anyone who loves cooking at home has at least one dish that is worthy of a spot on the Food Network. We got the best of the best tonight. It was my time to applaud the winner, not take a bow.

Would I do it again? Yes, definitely. With a pizza? What, are you crazy?

Wait, the winner from the dessert portion of the contest is talking to me. A pizza with Cuban pork, she suggests. Yes! Cuban pork. Maybe we can team up. Maybe we can ...

Are Bad Times Actually Good For Us?

An article in the Oct 28 Business Week reports on a ten-year (1996-2006) study which found that, among other things, workers laid off from Boeing were happier than those still working there.

Say what???

The article reports that four researchers embedded themselves into Boeing during a decade of great upheaval when Airbus was giving the company a run for its money and when one-third of its workforce was shed.

According to Business Week:

With each round of layoffs, the survivors hustled to reinvent themselves. They re-proved, re-auditioned, and repositioned, only to watch yet another new manager — pushing the fad du jour — parade through the door. Employees who had once seen themselves in every plane that flew overhead were now trading in gallows humor. As in, "Dead worker walking."

Human resources specialist Frank Zemek was the researchers' main contact. In an interview, he recalled "the survivor's guilt of the people who were left, who were waiting and not knowing if the hatchet was going to fall on them. They experienced the worst stress."

Meanwhile:

Average depression scores were nearly twice as great for those who stayed with Boeing vs. those who left. The laid-off were less likely to binge drink, often slept better, and had fewer chronic health problems.

Earlier this year, I attended a conference where Stephen Bezrucha MD of the University of Washington knocked us over with a feather with the observation that mortality rates in the general population actually go down during economic hard times. One reason, he said, may have to do with people having more time to connect with their friends and families.

As if to back up the speaker, the Sept PNAS published a University of Michigan study showing that during the Great Depression rates of death went down while life expectancy went up. Suicides, however, did increase.

According to a Medical News Today account of the study, during expansions firms are very busy and demand a lot of effort from employees. This can create stress, reduce sleep, and change health-related behaviors. Also, more time on the job may translate into greater social isolation and less social support.

In contrast, during recessions, people slow down because there is less work to do. There is more time for sleep, and they cut back on alcohol and tobacco.

No doubt, this comes as cold comfort to those of you who have been laid off or are in fear of losing your jobs. But, as Business Week notes:

Thanks to the unceasing uncertainty inside Boeing, those who left felt as though they had escaped a bad marriage. At the time one Boeing employee told researchers: "You feel better when someone takes their foot off your neck."

Burn Zone - Another Look

Yesterday's blog piece featured a slide show of the aftermath of the devastating 2003 Cedar Fire that torched more than a quarter million acres in Southern CA. The photos were taken on my iPhone. This morning, I decided to see what would happen if I filtered out the color. These four stills provide a sobering view ...

Burn Zone

We've had rain. The winds are blowing in from a new direction. Santa Ana - the red wind, the devil's breath - is silent. For now, we can exhale. These iPhone pics taken today were shot on a walk less than  10 miles from where I live. In late October, 2003 as far as the eye could see was a raging inferno, the devastating Cedar Fire that torched 280,278 acres in Southern CA and took 15 lives. I moved here in 2006. In 2007, I held my breath as dense purplish smoke poured over the hills below us.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Respect, total respect ...

Eric Kandel - A Nobel Laureate Looks Back and Looks Forward

In the first piece to this series, I reported how a young refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria began studying Freud as a way to comprehend the brutality of man, but instead became a rising star in neurobiology. In the second piece, I reported how Dr Kandel's ground-breaking research (with his unlikely lab partner, the California sea snail) helped map out the biology of memory and how neurons communicate with each other. In this final installment, Dr Kandel reflects on his extraordinary life.

"Matisse had it right when he pointed out that life is a circle," 2000 Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel told a packed auditorium at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Atlanta in May 2005. In other words, if you follow your unconscious, you often find you come back to the themes that interested you in the beginning.

In 1990, while still working on snails, Dr Kandel returned to studying mammalian hippocampal neurons, mapping out the higher memory functions in mice. In the lab, he was able to reverse age-related memory loss in his animals.

"If you’re a mouse," he joked, "we can do a lot for you. For people, we’re not sure as yet."

Then Dr Kandel extended his focus to the amygdala, which governs fear. Fear, he explained, is the one behavior so far we can observe in animals. A mouse that receives a shock accompanied by the sound of a bell will soon crouch in fear to just that sound. Dr Kandel’s lab discovered that this kind of fear resulted in the release of the peptide GRP in the amygdala of the animals. Mice bred without the capacity to produce GRP lost their inhibition.

"Maybe in some disease states," Dr Kandel commented, "inhibitory restraint is compromised."

But that is not the end of the story. What would happen, he wondered, if you set out to investigate the mirror image of fear? This time, Dr Kandel’s team trained mice to associate a particular sound with safety. As expected, the animals’ sense of security dampened activity in the amygdala. But the investigators also discovered a circuit connecting the amygdala to the dorsal striatum (caudoputamen), an area of the brain associated with happiness and reward.

"We don’t like being miserable," Dr Kandel explained. "What we really want to do is to be happy, to be secure, to be confident." He quoted the first line of Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike …"

"That really is inspiring to a neurobiologist," Dr Kandel joked, "because if you find the gene it is going to be unbelievably universal." So as well as identifying new targets for anxiety drugs, he explained, we may also find targets for enhancing positive affect.

Dr Kandel has written extensively on integrating his first love – psychoanalysis – with his vocation, neurobiology. Despite some signs that psychoanalysis is joining the real world, however, he does continue to scold this branch of the profession for its insularity, disregard for patient outcomes, and lack of scientific rigor – traits not shared, he says, by practitioners in many other fields of talking therapy.

"A major need of psychiatry in the future," he stated, "is to put the psychotherapeutic arm of psychiatry on the same solid biological footing as the pharmacological aspect of psychiatry." He was very much moved by Kay Jamison who said if it wasn’t for lithium she would be dead, but that it was really psychotherapy that gave her a coherent view of her life, that allowed her to tie the various strings of her life together.

"We’re in a fantastic phase of psychiatric thought," he concluded. The biology of the mind is the central scientific challenge of the twenty-first century. Molecular genetics and molecular biology, he said, have given us insights that would have been inconceivable 20 or 30 years ago. These advances will revolutionize psychiatry, but hardly eliminate it. Instead, psychiatry will synthesize with molecular biology into what he describes as "the new science of the mind."

Dr Kandel - an avid lover of fine art, classical music, and opera - resides in the Riverdale section of the Bronx with his wife of 50 years, Denise. As a girl in Nazi-occupied France, Denise hid in a convent without knowing the whereabouts of her parents. Denise is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and School of Public Health at Columbia and a pioneer in the epidemiology of drug use in adolescents. They have two children and a number of grandchildren.

Writes Dr Kandel in his Nobel autobiography:

"In retrospect it seems a very long way for me from Vienna to Stockholm. My timely departure from Vienna made for a remarkably fortunate life in the United States. The freedom that I have experienced in America and in its academic institutions made Stockholm possible for me, as it has for many others."

A Nobel's Life - Eric Kandel and the Aplysia

Yesterday's blog piece focused on how a young refugee from Nazi Austria studied Freud as a means of coming to terms with the brutality of man, only to get apparently sidetracked into neurobiology. Oddly enough, it turned out he was on the right course, with a very strange lab partner ...

Following a brief stint at Harvard as a staff psychiatrist, Dr Kandel joined NYU in 1965 to start a new neurophysiology group devoted to the neurobiology of behavior. In France, Dr Kandel had discovered that chemical synapses are remarkably plastic, but had yet to establish that these changes occur when an animal learns something. But how can you tell when a snail - in this case the California sea snail (aplysia, pictured here) has learned something? One giveaway is that snails reflexively withdraw their gills in response to stimuli administered to the animal’s spout (siphon), an action similar to removing one’s hand from a hot object.

As with higher animals, practice makes perfect; repeated stimuli convert short-term memory to long-term memory. The team focused initially on sensitization, a form of learned fear. A person sensitized to the sound of gunfire, for instance, may become startled by a mere tap on the shoulder. A snail sensitized to stimuli to the siphon would also respond to stimuli to the tail. The conversion of short-term memory to long-term memory resulted in the synthesis of new proteins.

The team located and mapped the neural circuit in the gill-withdrawal reflex. To the researchers’ surprise, the cells and their interconnections were always the same. What changed in the learning process were changes in synaptic strength. The cell circuits may have been hardwired, but the effectiveness of their signaling could be altered by experience. These findings led to a series of ground-breaking articles published in Science in 1970.

In 1974, Dr Kandel moved to Columbia as the founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior (and later as senior investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute which has a site located there). There, he and his colleagues (many recruited from his NYU group) zeroed in on the fine points of synaptic change. This involves serotonin and other neurotransmitters acting on specific receptors located on presynaptic neurons.

The serotonin, Dr Kandel found, increases a "second messenger" molecule, cAMP, inside the neuron that sets in train the sensitization required to form short-term memory. Collaboration with Paul Greengard PhD, who would share the same stage in Stockholm with Dr Kandel, implicated the enzyme PKA in the process, along with a potassium channel regulated by PKA. Reducing the potassium current has the effect of ramping up calcium, which sends neurotransmitters on their merry little ways.

By now Dr Kandel and his team had perfected the art of experimenting on cell cultures grown from the larvae of their snails - in this case just two cells, a sensory neuron and a motor neuron. All the researchers had to do to simulate the tail stimulus effect of the snail was to "puff" micro units of serotonin into the culture. This was about as reductionist as even Dr Kandel could get.

This time Dr Kandel and his colleagues were hot on the trail of long-term memory. Repeated administration of serotonin, they found, activates PKA inside the cell. In response, PKA translocates to the nucleus where it recruits another enzyme called MAP kinase. Both kinases act on a gene regulator called CREB-1, which triggers the synthesis of new proteins (CREB) needed for the growth of new synaptic connections vital to long-term memory.

These and other findings were gradually revealed over a steady stream of articles spanning into this millennium. In his relentless investigation into the learned reflex of a simple sea creature, Dr Kandel had helped crack open the secrets of the neuron, including the discovery of a two-way dialogue between the nucleus and synapse. Neuroscience and psychiatry would never be the same. His marine lab partner, in the process, gained new respect, becoming to neurobiology what fruit flies are to genetics and rats are to behavior.

To be continued ...