Tag Archives: cooking

January 19, 2018 · 12:01 pm

Deglazing

This Foodie Friday I want to talk about deglazing. It’s a very basic technique for sauce-making but it’s also a word that scares a lot of people when they see it in a recipe. As it turns out, it also has something to do with business.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, deglazing is nothing more than using some sort of liquid to loosen the bits leftover in a pan (called fond) after you’ve cooked something in that pan. Say, for example, you’ve made a roast and after you pour out the accumulated fat and juices, you see a lot of crispy bits clinging to the pan. You would deglaze the pan by heating it and pouring in a liquid. It can be as basic as water but wine or stock is preferable because you’re going to use the resulting liquid as the foundation for a sauce or gravy. You’re doing yourself a great disservice if you don’t deglaze your pans!

I suspect some of you out there just toss the fond – you scrape the remnants into the trash. Well, as the saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and that’s where the business thought comes in. How many businesses have been built around taking what someone has discarded and finding a new or better use for it? The entire recycling industry is built around that notion. While we’ve been recycling things for centuries, especially during shortages of raw materials created by war, the modern industry is just about 50 years old and is a $500 billion enterprise.

The point today is to get you to ask yourself what might be incredibly useful and productive in your business that you might be discarding. It could be a person, it could be a product that’s underperforming because it’s not sexy and no one wants to work on it, or it could be an unexplored portion of the data you gather. These things might just be fond, and with a little deglazing they can be transformed. What do you think?

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December 29, 2017 · 9:31 am

Most Read Foodie Friday Post Of 2017

It’s only fitting that we end the week of most read posts published in 2017 with the food-themed post that was most read. After all, we end each week with something of that sort and I kind of like ending not just this week but this year with one. This post was published last October and was originally called “They Don’t Make It  Like That Anymore.”  Have a healthy and happy New Year and we’ll see you on the other side. Enjoy!

This Foodie Friday I am going to run the risk of sounding like the grumpy old man I’m slowly becoming. Rather than admonishing you all to get off my lawn, I want to share the sentiment I had a week or so ago as I fired up my smoker. My smoker, or as it’s lovingly known, “The Beast”, was made by the New Braunfels Smoker Company at least 20 years ago, How do I know that? Well, that’s today’s food and business thought.

The Beast is made of heavy steel that’s quite thick and it weighs well over 100 pounds even without my usual load of meats inside. As I was cleaning up the old Rancho Deluxe to get ready for its sale, the smoker was one of the very few things that I was adamant about saving for the move. Why was that, especially when I also gave away or junked a Caja China and two other grills? In a sentence:

Because they don’t make them like that anymore.

The New Braunfels Smoker Company was sold to Char-Broil 20 years ago. Almost immediately, the quality of the products went downhill, and this was especially noticeable on the gauge of the steel. The steel was thinner and didn’t hold heat as well. When a rust spot developed, it was difficult to sand and paint it without almost going through the area that has rusted. The products were similar in design and name, but that was about all that was the same. The bbq forums, home to serious meat smoking aficionados like me, were deluged with negative comments and, more importantly to the business, better alternatives to what had been a superior line of smokers.

This is something from which any business can learn. We’re always under pressure to improve our margins. Some folks look to cheaper materials, other to cheaper, less-skilled labor, and still others to cutting customer service. Sometimes we just skimp on quality control. While margins might improve, there is a strong chance that revenues will decline as the customer base figures out that “you’re not making it like that anymore.” As an Apple user, I recently switched to a Chromebook because my Mac OS isn’t as smooth and there are glitches that were never an issue before. For you cooks out there, Pyrex changed their formula and “new” Pyrex is not as good. Recent Craftsman tools, once the industry standard, are now made in China and aren’t nearly as good. I can go on and I’m sure you can as well.

If you’re successful, resist the temptation to cut corners. People notice (so does your staff). Don’t be part of a conversation that claims you don’t make it like that anymore.

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December 15, 2017 · 1:51 pm

Cookies And Caster Sugar

It’s Foodie Friday! I’ve written before that I’m not much of a baker and only do so when a guest is counting on some sort of baked dessert. It’s not because I don’t have a sweet tooth though. One weakness I do have with respect to baked goods is cookies. The blue guy on Sesame Street has nothing on me and I suspect if I didn’t exercise some sort of self-control I’d weigh 300+ pounds.

I love me some cookies and take a vicarious thrill in looking at various cookie recipes even though I will only consume them through my eyes and not my mouth. One thing that I noticed popping up in a number of recipes was caster sugar, and an article on Food52 yesterday helped me understand what it is and why it’s used in baking. This is their very fine explanation:

Caster sugar goes by a variety of names, including castor sugar, baker’s sugar, and superfine sugar, the last of which alludes to what exactly it is: a finer granulated sugar. If a grain of granulated sugar is big and a grain of powdered sugar is tiny, caster sugar would be somewhere in between.

Which of course got me thinking about business, and about data in particular. Just as the more granular nature of caster sugar makes cookies a better product (they’re softer and lighter), so too can refining your data yield much better results. You’ve probably heard about the need to segment your data but if you’ve never done so or have never gone beyond basic age/sex or other large groups, you’re really missing out. Refining your data makes it possible to address each segment in a way that’s meaningful to them. The more personalized you can make your messaging, the more effective it will be. Getting beyond “first name” and into where in a purchase cycle a customer might be as a data segment will make for a better outcome. Special offers by segment only yield great results when the specificity of those segments make the offer truly special.

Caster sugar is more refined but not overly so. That’s a great thing to keep in mind as you analyze and use all the raw data you collect every day. The fact that the data isn’t fattening is a big plus!

 

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