MY THOUGHTS AFTER A SAUSAGE SANDWICH SIZZLE

MAY 10, 2023

Last minute hauls before we run a gig….we’re gig workers now.  Ice and a mini grocery cart of wood.  I told Cade that morning it felt like we were going camping…..when you wake up early, layer on the clothes for all kinds of weather, pack the coolers, grab some ice, firewood.  I’m sporting a visor now because you can keep your hair up in a bun and the sun off your face.  Sparkling Topo Chico and peanut M’n ‘M’s for breakfast.

We are working a gig at a time now.  Taking things in stride as we learn our ways.  The sausage sandwiches are a thing.  I finally tried one and yes, they are delicious.   We are baking our sandwich bread right around the sausage filling in our trailer drawn wood burning oven.  So it comes out hot……dressed with arugula salad and vinaigrette it finds a nice balance and we wonder about other future possibilities…..maybe a meatball next time?

Pizza dough scaled small, stretched and laid out on the prep table.  Seedy mustard, pepper jack cheese. Throw a sausage on it.  Fire cooked till dough puffs like pizza crust, leopard spots and good color on the sausage.  Garlic dill cream sauce, arugula, red onion sliced thin and honey mustard vinaigrette.  Fold that baked dough right over like a taco shell or pita bread sandwich.  Couldn’t be better!

It’s funny to find myself doing other things, random things……food as whim or experiment.  For years I ran the same baked goods…..for years hours and hours of work and a table load of breads and croissants.  What people don’t realize or don’t want to know is that you don’t make money working like that……not if you are making bread.  Yes I’d like to bake, but I”m getting smarter now and I just can’t kill myself in the kitchen for pittance a loaf and days with no sleep.  In France bread bakers are subsidized by the government so everyone can get a baguette for $4….bakers can maybe afford to live.  They are clever like that but they also believe that France is not France without a baguette.  The culture means that much, the tradition, the history.  I’m not sure we’ve found that in the United States.  Goodness, it’s hard to convince people around here that a loaf of beautiful bread won’t kill them!

Pizza is a lot easier to make.  We can whip out dough for a hundred pizzas in no time flat.  It takes three days to make croissants, first mixing the dough, second laminating the dough with butter and third shaping and baking.  It is a feat that finds you loosing the plot when the butter temp doesn’t match the dough temp and you’re making a mess of everything.  I have found myself tearing up when it bakes off so horribly, as I have found myself tearing up when in bakes off so well.  It’s an emotional roller coaster working pastries and bread.

I told someone today that I’m having to think outside the box.  Outside the bread box that is.  How do you work smarter and not harder?  How can you do the job with as little overhead as possible?  How do you make food for people with soul and spirit and not loose yourself to the toxic frustration and stress of the food industry?  How do you feed people in a way that resonates with your morals and values?  How do you prove to people your worth is more than hours in a hot dirty dish sink or elbows deep in bins of dough?  That perhaps your experience and knowledge is more valuable now than brutal physical labor?  These are questions I ask myself as I take a gig or project or find myself whipping up a run of a hundred cinnamon rolls or hot sausage sandwiches.

I used to sell my bread for $8 a loaf.  The going rate is actually closer to $14 a loaf in most places, but it’s hard to convince people it’s worth it.  I wonder if people ever really liked my bread or maybe it was just the cheapest sourdough in the neighborhood.  Someone mentioned maybe I sell each loaf with a shot of tequila and charge the twenty dollars bread is actually worth…….just hide it in the alcohol.   They used to hide alcohol in the bread during the prohibition.  Sneaky suckers….found their ways.

prohibition era alcohol hidden in hollowed out loaves of bread 1924

I’m not complaining…..no complaints as they say.  It’s a lifelong lesson, me and bread.  It’s my companion….my heart….partner in crime…the bane of my existence….my foe, my friend…..frenemy?

Well, no matter.  I work dough into most things I do…..and a sausage sandwich can hit the spot.  Our pop ups bring feels of that old family bbq.  We burnt our necks in the sun.  All the ice melted in the wheel barrel drink bin.  Breeze picked up in the afternoon and guys took to their beers at the round tables in the garden.  Jo says the mulberry tree will be fruiting soon and wouldn’t it be lovely to have a dinner under the mulberry tree.

Taking it all a step at a time, a breath at a time.  Smiling as we go.