The place is filled with regulars, and they all seem to want to talk Bezsylko’s ear off about their dogs, last week’s pastries or whatever. The dining room, mostly white and filled with several small tables and one large communal table, has a calming effect. That excellent smokiness, however, came from a non-local ingredient: shaved bonito, flaky fish fillet shavings usually added to miso broth at Japanese restaurants. Because the Cellar Door guys are trying to use as many local ingredients as possible, they subbed in pecans from Three Sisters. Romesco is a Spanish sauce often made of pepper, onion and almonds or hazelnuts. One evanescent dish I tried called peppers and potatoes ($12) featured frilly torn bits of kale from Three Sisters Garden in Kankakee, Ill., crisp fingerling potatoes and house-pickled peppers served on a rusty bed of smoky, creamy romesco sauce nestled alongside a gloriously runny poached egg. The menu, handwritten on brown paper near the cash register, changes daily. As those sheets hit my tongue and the crust dissolves, the process feels ceremonial, almost religious. It weeps cream, and the crust cleaves at my fork into mica-like sheets. Cellar Door’s quiche, which feels like it’s held together with nothing more than the tears of a baker, is so light that I worry a whisper would make it collapse. Most quiches you’ll encounter elsewhere are dense casseroles imprisoned in oily cardboard crusts. The Cellar Door quiche ($9), featuring light garlic notes and a side salad of local greens, is quite possibly the closest you will ever get to eating a cloud. It’s because that butter is also churned in-house from fresh Kilgus Farmstead cream and topped with a sprinkle of Jacobsen Salt Co. He also scooped most of the butter served with it straight into his gullet, savoring it for a minute, before asking why it was so good. He took one bite of the slightly tangy, bark-crusted, wheat-riddled sourdough slice and said, “What the heck is this?†and shoved the whole thing in his mouth. I took a friend of mine—a particularly finicky eater who only eats food that is white, slightly beige or from the cheese family—with me to Cellar Door. Amish bakers from 100 years ago would be impressed with the technique and dedication happening here. The dough is crafted with a 2-year-old yeast starter that Pikas created when the restaurant opened. Loaves ($3 for two hefty slices plus butter) are cooked in individual cast-iron pans in the oven. That being said, the process takes multiple days. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but Google it and you’ll find a great behind-the-scenes documentation of the process from my friend Nick Kindelsperger over at. Their bread baking process is even longer and more exhaustive. The canele wafts with spice and whiskey notes and is quite frankly one of the best pastries I have had in Chicago, ever. This effort leads to a deep mahogany-colored, crispy, crusted exterior and a bubbly, custardy interior that is reminiscent of a slightly wetter old-school French eclair. They pour the batter into the molds and bake it low and slow for an hour, and then infuse the cooked cakes with Koval single-barrel whiskey. They create a mixture of butter and beeswax and paint individual expensive copper molds with the formula and let the molds sit in the fridge overnight. They infuse the batter with bay leaf and then let it sit at least overnight, and sometimes up to seven days, to rest. In theory, you could mix up some batter with grocery store eggs and all-purpose flour, throw it in a silicon mold, pop it in the oven and soak it with Bacardi rum.īut the Cellar Door guys mix their batter with local farm eggs and Midwestern-sourced flours. Take their canele ($3, pronounced can-o-lay—not can-nell—the way I, an idiot in the ways of pastry, was pronouncing it), a fluted jiggly French egg-custard cake. I have to do so because when you examine the fastidious way they bake pastries, breads and cookies, it seems like madness. As I read about Cellar Door Provisions, the almost 2-year-old Logan Square breakfast and lunch spot, and interviewed its owners Tony Bezsylko and Ethan Pikas (the two met while separately procuring ingredients at the Dill Pickle Co-Op to bake recipes out of the “Tartine†cookbook), that’s what I keep asking myself.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |