I am speaking to you in Maine not Los Angeles, what are you doing there? I'm here to organise a new section of an existing kitchen with its open faced wood fired pizza oven, cooking and teaching staff how to use it. Meanwhile having fun experimenting with it between house orders and teaching. I mastered Montreal style bagels last week. So its not just about you cheffing then, what is involved in your teaching? It is fundamentally Neapolitan Pizza Making 101 but the basics are all about working with wood fire and heat. How to be organised before the cooking even begins, knowing your wood, firing the oven, watching and understanding the temperature. Then we get to dough making, the character of flour, yeast. It is very hands on experiential learning and then finally it is about shaping pizzas, creating sauces, choosing toppings and bread making. I have a bit of a flour fetish too. We used Italian flour until I discovered Canadian flour in Toronto which became my … [Read more...]
Delphine Lippens – from Brussels to Los Angeles: ‘Working with clay was never part of my plan’
An illuminating discussion with Belgian-born, longtime Los Angeles resident Delphine Lippens, currently a successful ceramicist. We met in February at her studio, proudly located in South Central Los Angeles. Artisan Block Los Angeles (A B.L.A) is a collective of artists, artisans and makers located in one single block in this area of the city. Lippens created Humble Ceramics in 2010 and what you see today is the evolution of an exploration in clay. Delphine where are you from originally? Brussels but I came to live in Los Angeles, in 1982. when I was almost 13. Have you lived in California ever since? Yes primarily but I also spent time and years going to and fro from Europe when I was a little older. So where does Humble Ceramics begin? I am sitting with you in a vast warehouse surrounded by ceramic filled shelves in all degrees of readiness. How did you get to be here? Working with clay was never part of my “plan”. So this is a very unexpected evolution. After … [Read more...]
New contributor for Food and Wine Gazette: A reader writer
“Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change" - Heraclitus I have been a reader as long as I can remember. Encouraged I believe by my father, who smuggled me into the local library on Adults only nights. There I was, a five-year-old scurrying into the children’s corner and roaming the shelves alone and in silence. Despite the rules, Mrs Beech, the librarian, always stamped my books with a slight smile part privy to the secret. Since then I have had this thing with books and libraries, books shops and news stands. You could say it is a fixation and an ongoing obsession with words and what happens when they are strung together. I chase words not only in the usual places but on wrappers, signs, tickets, on buildings, hoardings, travel brochures, DIY pamphlets, online blogs, credits in movies, labels, packets, where to them words is limitless and their meanings unequaled. It doesn't take much leap of imagination to see that quite possibly reading a lot can lead to writing a … [Read more...]