What are they doing over there at the Palace Ballroom? Here’s a photo tour.
Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Jul 13, 2010 at 03:01PM
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All Photos by Jessica Voelker
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This lady is on her tiptoes.
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Douglas teaches a camper to string up the porchetta.
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Porchetta, breakfast of champions.
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“Do you need help?” Leslie Kelly, of the Al Dente blog, asked Douglas during a break. She soon found herself stuffing rabbit and bantering with the chef onstage. Kelly is well-practiced in Douglas-style double-entendre banter: she worked for in one of his kitchens for a spell as part of her research for a book project.
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When I went over to Palace Kitchen to check out the veggie-dish competition, the intensely competing campers were at the plating stage. The purple team placed their fate in the hands of some tasty-looking asparagus.
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This is what that dish looked like in the end. Very beautiful.
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Contestants picked veggies from the selection on this shelf.
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The yellow team is not messing around.
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The blue team is not messing around either.
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The blue team’s dish.
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I contemplated stealing one of the red team’s delectable-looking dishes from the table, hungry-dog style.
Every year, Tom Douglas hosts a week-long culinary camp at the Palace Ballroom.
The booze flows from 8:30am onwards. I arrived Monday morning to find the happy campers accessorizing their bloody marys and grazing the offerings of a Nordic breakfast—Swedish pancakes, smoked salmon, and lots of cheese—as they studied their daily challenge: 20 or so different roots set up on a table for them to identify. Over the speaker system, Sheryl Crow crooned loudly about her plans to soak up the sun.
Chef demos are a main attraction at culinary camp. When I stopped by yesterday, the buzz was all about chef Vikram Vij of Vij’s, the famous modern Indian restaurant in Vancouver, B.C. He was scheduled to come by in the afternoon to make savory raw jackfruit, a cream curry with sturgeon, mussels, and baby carrots, and a chicken curry. Other notables teaching this week include Holly Smith of Cafe Juanita, Christina Choi of Nettletown, and Armandino Batali of Salumi.
But the first demo of the day was by Douglas. Just after 9am, he divided the camp into two groups. The first group watched him break down a pig—the 65-pounder in question was a lean little guy, as you’ll see in the slideshow. The second group went next door to Palace Kitchen to compete in a veggie-based cookoff.
Douglas taught the campers how to butcher each cut of the pig, and volunteers came up and carved as well—one very likable little lady stood on tiptoes in order to reach around and lob off a hunk of ham. Douglas talked about butchering knives, “boners” as he calls them. Apparently flexible boners are good for quail, while stiff boners are best for lamb. Larger animals require a butcher boner.
When the poor piggy was all in pieces, Douglas ground up some of the porky bits for stuffing a porchetta —he seasoned it with garlic and fennel pollen, the latter is an amazing, potent ingredient I think you’ll want to buy as soon as possible.
Later, journalist Leslie Kelly joined Douglas on stage to wrap a rabbit in smoked pancetta and stuff it with whole herbs, onion, and lemon. Douglas cooked the rabbit on a rotisserie at 300 degrees F for about an hour. (He mentioned something about a rotisserie making him feel manly and virile.) As with all the dishes at Culinary Camp, the piggy rabbit was passed around for tasting. It was unspeakably delicious—juicy and tender from the rotisserie and augmented greatly by the smoky pancetta.
Meanwhile at Palace Kitchen, the second group of campers had broken into four teams. Their challenge was to create a dish using a selection of ingredients from the pantry—they could augment with animal products like bacon and smoked salmon, but vegetables were the focus. By the time I got there they were already plating, and the energy was Top Chef intense. Check out the end results in the slideshow.
Aside: Here are some random things I learned from Tom Douglas yesterday morning. Jade Garden, the dim sum restaurant in the I.D., is officially too dirty to be okay. “It was gross!” said Douglas of his last visit. If he goes to dim sum in Seattle, he goes to Harbor Village. The Yukon salmon currently on sale at Mutual Fish is the best he’s been able to buy for years. When buying salmon, by the way, the biggest fish are the best. Marcus Samuelsson—the recent Top Chef Masters winner—“could be a model,” he’s so good-looking, and Gordon Ramsey is just as mean in person as on TV.
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Tom Douglas,
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Palace Ballroom,
Tom Douglas Culinary Camp
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