Boris

Posted on 12 August 2010 by Mr. Pratt

I walked into the ballroom of the historic Southgate House, not yet too smoky. The final opening band was on to their third song of the set, but it was difficult to determine where one ended and the next began – it was the kind of voiceless, heavy, undulating music that you imagine could be the score to a European psychological thriller.

At the bar I ordered two Rolling Rocks, one for me and one for my friend who picked up the charge at the door. Joining him and his wife at the back of the crowd, I toasted him and took a long pull off the distinctive green bottle.

It was good. And cold.

Already I could feel the sweat starting to bead between my shoulder blades. The room was loud and hot and energized, brimming with anticipation for what would happen next… Whatever it was. The wall of sound enveloped them all, occasionally forcing them to take a step back or shift their weight away from the emanations. The crowd was surprisingly large, a dedicated group – no scenesters here. Dotted throughout were the principals of the indie record shop industry and other local bandmembers, proof that this was the place to be on an oppressive August Wednesday in America.

The headliner was from Japan – Boris – and they rarely toured the states. To see them in a venue such as this was a special treat for the true believers – intimate, loud, overwhelmingly close to the band. Other acts had come through the city, played the ballroom, and made sure that regardless of how successful they became, would only play there whenever passing through town. It has the rightful reputation as an artists’ venue. First-timers would talk to fans after the show, in the crowd, telling the folks how lucky they were to have a place like this in their backyard. The audience always knows, here, what they’ve got. They appreciate it. This is not a place for trends or big labels, it is for the rising young stars from Earth.

This crowd demands authenticity. They lust for it. Posers will be destroyed.

I had only heard of them, never heard them, so they could have been from Madagascar or Kuala Lumpur for all I knew. The drummer was a madman, fit and trim – all muscle and mallets, sinew and sticks and bones. His upper body was marginally covered by a silver-sequined vest, vaguely Solid Gold-ish. He would occasionally point his right arm straight above his head, raising it like an antenna to heaven. The crowd would follow his lead with gusto, and at the end of the night, he would reward them with a stage dive.

I determined that drummers who perform with shirts on have no heart.

The lead guitarist stands stage left, looking like he’d be just as comfortable coding at a bank of computers or leading a meeting in a board room as thrashing an Epiphone – bespectacled, tidy, conservative. He is a mad six-string scientist, coercing otherworldly sounds from the guitar at impossible speeds.

He is a stark contrast to the Japanese girl on rhythm guitar and keys who sings what may or may not be English in a high voice, half-heartedly strumming along. It is on the slow songs that she lulls you into a false calm, only to be cut deeply by the yelps and screams of the animal-drummer. This is what they came for, the audience, to be taken out of their comfort zones of Midwest Americana by these visitors from the East.

Once again, the wall of sound crashes down on them like thunder from god. This is what they came for.

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Backyard Experiment #1 – DIY Maple Syrup

Posted on 6 August 2010 by Mr. Pratt

I’m not really good at saying No when people want my insights on different topics or want me to attend a meeting or need me to head up a committee. Nor am I good at saying no to myself when it comes to backyard / DIY project ideas.

So when Suzanne asked me to share my experiences as a first-time independent boiler of maple syrup, I definitely couldn’t pass it up (whether I wanted to or not). I began thinking about how I might go about presenting this in a manner as edutainmental as possible (“As long as there are pictures – you have pictures, right?”). The whole thing was richly satisfying, and quite tasty, but it was a genuine learning experience.

To wit – Every great idea starts somewhere, and mine started like this, sometime in the Autumn of 2009:

Jeff Lester, Professional Tree Guy: “You’ve got some beautiful old sugar maples back here. When I cut down these other dead trees, they’ll have a lot of room to spread their canopies. They’ll be a lot healthier in the long run.”

Adam, Professional Enthusiast of Impractical Ideas: “I have sugar maples? Like, the kind I can drill a hole in and collect sap and make syrup?”

Jeff: “Yup. ::pointing:: That one, that one, that one, and that one.”

Adam dials his wife: “Honey! I’m going to make maple syrup! We have sugar maples! Prepare to make a whole lot of breakfast!”

Stephanie: “That’s great honey. Let me know how all that goes.”

See, back in the day, my school district owned this enormous woods behind our high school, and with our town being located in upstate New York, the woods was naturally heavily populated with sugar maples. Traditionally, the biology / botany teacher would clean up the sugar shack and the students would help with tree-tapping, sap collecting, boiling and finishing. I did this, sometime in my sophomore year, I think. The timing now is vague, but the memory of a sweet-smelling and sticky shack on the edge of the woods remains.

I knew I didn’t have a sugar shack on my property – yet – but I did know that I have a killer stone barbecue and fireplace that would serve as an ideal place to boil some sap. I just had to get said sap out of the tree.

Stone fireplace

Beautiful in any weather.

A lot of sugaring is timing – get that one week in winter when things start to warm up between 36 & 42 degrees (Fahrenheit) with a fair amount of sun, and the sap starts running. I ran myself over to the Hamilton County Parks facility to purchase some spiles (cast aluminum, Made in Canada, of course), grabbed my cordless drill, and made sure my collection apparatus was ready to roll.

Back in the day, we used the old school galvanized buckets – while tried and true, they inevitably led to bugs or leaves or twigs in the sap that would have to be filtered out. I needed something a little more practical for the purposes of my backyard sugaring operation. After a little research and a lot of pondering, I decided on a collection system using hoses and gallon water jugs from the local grocer. An X-shaped incision in the screw-tops made for an ideal place to insert the hose, and the handles made for easy transport to my central collection container.

You might initially think, “Well, recycle yo’self and just use milk jugs.” Wrong-o, reindeer: the milk leaves a residue from proteins that even soap & water won’t completely eliminate. Besides, you ever try to really wash a milk jug? Right, not so much. Water jugs are perfect and cheap and have no residue.

Once the weather was right and the sap was running – which, coincidentally, all happened on one of my days off from work – holes were drilled, spiles inserted, hoses were attached and inserted into jugs and sap ran and ran and ran. I’ll be honest, those first few hours of bucket monitoring were pretty exciting, as I had nearly a half-gallon from one tree by the time we got back from dinner. The first part was done. The patient collection of sap would follow.

Sap jugs on the tree

I kept them high so the dog couldn't pee on them.

My fanaticism manifests itself in different ways, depending on the time of year: From October through late Spring, I bleed Buffalo Sabres blue & gold and I’m often found screaming at the television in The Man Den; from April 3 until the Reds are mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, I’m often found screaming at the television in The Man Den; in late July and August, I put on my headlamp before bed and inspect the vegetable garden to make sure my deer netting is firmly in place and my precious tomatoes are safe from varmints.

One summer, I lost sleep while having nightmares about walking out one morning to behold  a devastated crop from ne’er-do-well deer that had turned my garden into a smorgasbord. I did not sleep soundly until 8 foot tall deer netting was in place.

This is the kind of crazy that I am.

Sap season was no different. With the sun going down early, as it is wont to do in the winter, I was forced to check my gallon jugs in the dark after work each day to prevent overflow and loss of precious potential syrup. My trusty headlamp – the most practical Christmas gift my mom ever gave me – now became a true year-round tool. When the sap was really running, I’d come home during my lunch breaks to empty jugs, then empty them again before bed. That’s the kind of sap flow I was dealing with, and I was (dare I say) giddy with delight. I even roped my buddy Nick to help with the collection while we were on vacation, because as anyone knows, fanaticism is so much better when shared and spread as wide as possible. There’s a joke about religion in there somewhere, but this is neither the time nor the place. We have bigger fish to fry.

Sap jugs

Collecting sap at night.

After collecting somewhere in the neighborhood of 38 gallons of sap, I decided that it was time to start boiling. Now, there are two different schools of thought when it comes to boiling or evaporating: the first is that it should be boiled in batches at regular intervals, as to ensure freshness. The other is that a certain period of storage can actually help to develop flavor and character in the final syrup product. I unwittingly chose the latter, and I did so mostly out of ignorance, but also out of necessity.

I’ve had random people and French-Canadians tell me that a little bacteria in your sap actually adds to the complexity of your maple syrup. I’m not entirely sure I believe them, but until someone dies or proves them wrong, I’ll go with it. Having a full-time, 9-to-5 kind of job is not really conducive to active boiling, as the evaporation process takes a long time and a lot of fuel. I decided that I was impervious to whatever nature had to throw at me, and I’d boil when I could, bacteria be damned.

So bright and early on a Friday morning, having acquired my giant galvanized boiling bucket, 2 smaller transport & preheat buckets, candy thermometer, strainer and slotted spoon, I set out into the backyard to start my fire and get boiling.

A whole hell of a lot of heat is lost in the addition of new sap at ambient temperature to the already boiling

Sap pre-heat

Pre-heating the sap.

sap. I knew in order to be as efficient as possible with the process, I’d have to use one of my smaller galvanized buckets to “pre-heat” smaller batches of sap. This worked quite well, as the addition of 2 gallons at a time only caused me to lose approximately 15 degrees off of my boil.

Large sap boil bucket

Boiling awesome sauce.

I will say that this is by no means the most efficient method of evaporation – large, shallow pans over a large, consistent heat source are ideal. I had none of this. Several hours and a hell of a lot of split maple logs later, however, and we had a large vat of caramel-colored, thickening liquid. It wasn’t syrup yet, but it was sweet and it was getting there.

That night, I went out to Chalk for my birthday dinner with some dear friends smelling of smoke and maple and life was good – I even had a maple-bacon Manhattan as an aperitif. But I didn’t yet have syrup, and even after 9 hours of boiling, I knew it would take a lot more time to get to where I needed to be.

Day 2 of Operation Boil got us there, despite rain and wind. 7 more hours over the open flame with a total of 25 gallons of sap boiled town to approximately 2 gallons of near-finished product. I filtered it a few more times through my series of mesh and cheesecloth sieves and took the warm amber into the house for finishing. Over the power burner on our gas stove, I could carefully control the heat when the syrup got into the sugar supersaturation zone between 212 and 219 degrees Fahrenheit.

This step is crucial to not wasting all of your time and efforts of the previous two days. Patience and constant vigilance (“CONSTANT VIGILANCE!”) are your allies in the finishing process, as is a good instant-read digital thermometer. When you hit that magical number – 219 – there’s something that takes place that evokes a certain euphoria. You have created an elixir, a sweet draught of natural goodness that is nothing short of sorcery (well, actually, it’s chemistry and thermodynamics, but whatever). MAGIC!

Bottles were acquired from The Container Store (where else would you get containers?) and sanitized. According to my dear friend Virginia, in Vermont, friends and neighbors all contribute to the all-night sap boils by bringing half-empty liquor & wine bottles. The remnants are consumed by those in attendance, and a heady buzz permeates the area. In that tradition, I utilized a bottle of Hunt Country Vineyards Cream Sherry and a bottle of Screech, my favorite Canadian Rum. Both seemed fitting for the occasion.

Tasty the first AND second times they got emptied.

The final product was dark and sweet and rich and beautiful. It was christened “Blackened Voodoo Dark Magic 2010 – An Organic Single Origin Maple Syrup – Pleasant Ridge, Cincinnati.” As learning experiences go, it was truly epic. As tasty backyard DIY experiences go, it was a rousing success. It inspired me to continue my vegetable gardening and explore the possibility of other urban backyard experimentation: beehives, chickens, ducks, goats, grapevines.

All that stands in my way is a disapproving wife and a full-time job.

SO:

If I’m not judicious in the selection of my next experiment, I’ll end up with no wife, no job, and a whole lot of DIY projects.

Like I said, I have a hard time saying No.

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Finding the Sweet Spot in Pleasant Ridge

Posted on 15 February 2010 by Mr. Pratt

The following first appeared in the Winter 2009 edition of the Pleasant Ridge Informant.

Pleasant Ridge is one of those neighborhoods where it pays to be a regular customer. Home to such long-standing institutions as Pleasant Ridge Chili, Everybody’s Records and The Gaslight Cafe, it has been easy for residents to become regulars during the last 20 or more years.

But my favorite place to be known as a regular is the Ridge Donut Shop. This summer, Ridge Donuts celebrated their 20th anniversary as the place where residents and commuters alike can gather at the counter to share stories and talk politics, or for sales reps and teachers to pick up dozens of doughnuts on the run to take to eagerly awaiting appetites. Regardless of the hour, Miss Hill or Mr. Ron is always around to offer a friendly face or a piece of sage advice to go along with a glazed crueller and hot coffee.

I was recently invited into the nerve center of Ridge Donut Shop to see where the magic happens – and I don’t use the term ‘magic’ haphazardly here. The process Mr. Ron goes through while we wind down our days and then dream of the day to come is painstaking and labor intensive. Some observers might even call it lonesome or tedious, but to watch huge batches of yeast dough get cut into soon-to-be custard-filled doughnuts or braided into twists is a genuine skill and art form.

Mr. Ron takes a great deal of pride in his work and his schedule, one that begins around the time we sit down to watch “House, M.D.” and usually concludes around 4 in the morning: “If you want a fresh doughnut, this is the place – that’s why I start as late as I do. If you want a stale doughnut, there are lots of other places you can go. Those get made before midnight and then sit out all morning and all afternoon.”

Everything Ron learned in this business came from his brother Tom, with whom he opened Ridge Donut Shop in 1989. After Tom became ill and could not continue with the day to day operations, Ron became a one-man production line, cranking out the multitude of doughnuts through the wee hours of the morning.

The assortment appears to be many and varied, whether they be peanut sticks, clunkers, chocolate honey-dipped, or cinnamon twists. But in the end it comes down to two basic varieties: yeast doughnuts and cake or batter-based donuts. There is a type, however, that stands alone in the crowd – the Crueller.

To me, there are few delicacies on Earth as wholly satisfying as a well-executed crueller. Whether it be coated with a light glaze, or dipped in white or chocolate icing, the sensation of biting into a crisp, melt-in-your-mouth exterior, only to find an airy, slightly eggy interior, never fails to delight the senses and send your tongue into spasms of sweet-savory ecstasy.

“Be quiet a second and let me do this batch – I can’t talk and drop at the same time,” Mr. Ron advises me. It is only in the last few months that I came to understand the keen eye and practiced hand required to produce the perfect crueller. Fortunately for all of us, Mr. Ron possesses both.

Imagine, if you will, a World War II-era bombardier – his pilots guiding him over enemy territory while he perches in the bomb bay, sighting the target in his scope. Accounting for velocity, distance and windspeed, he releases his payload at the precise moment to score a direct hit. Such is the calmness and steely resolve necessary to create this kind of doughnut.

The apparatus required is relatively complex, by baking and pastry standards: a collapsible arm, mounted on an adjacent proofbox, suspends a batter bucket over the hot fryer. Operated by a hand crank on the side of the bucket, the perfect dollop of batter is extruded and twisted and propelled into the fryer with each turn of the crank. The amount of batter in the bucket is crucial, because gravity helps to ensure that enough pressure is generated to create the signature twist of the crueller.

After a six-minute dip in the fryer – during which time each crueller will be flipped twice – they are lifted out and left to cool before being twice bathed in a waterfall of glaze. I can assure you, dear reader, that there are few epicurean joys greater than biting into a freshly glazed crueller from Ridge Donut Shop.

But remember well – they’re only available on the weekends, which, for the sake of our waistlines, is probably for the best.

Tuesday through Sunday, Ridge Donut Shop is open from 6 a.m. – Noon, or earlier, if they run out. Late nights, Mr. Ron will be open from 9 p.m. until around midnight if you have the craving (or, like me, you just want to talk politics and current events).

So the next time you have a big meeting and want to impress the boss with delicious breakfast pastry, know that there is one place to go. Or maybe you’re making your way home after the Reds or Cyclones game, and a jelly doughnut and a cold glass of milk sound like a great way to cap the night with your family. Don’t be afraid to stop in and take advantage of the late-nite deals – 3 for $1, while supplies last. Mr. Ron will be there, as ever, making sure his doughnuts are ready for your morning.

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