Up Your Culinary Game With These Locally Made Virtual Cooking Classes
Brush up on your trussing skills or learn to butcher a whole hog. Foster your fermenting techniques or ghee-making prowess.
By Eve Hill-Agnus
Published in
Food & Drink
February 25, 2021
1:05 pm
The ice has disappeared and the snow has thawed. The temperatures seem to indicate one thing. Spring is coming. Do you remember last spring, when you scarcely knew if you would be able to cook at home?
We’re still cooking from home one year later. While you may have started uncertain if you could boil an egg, the sourdough revolution and DIY dalgona coffee phases have intervened, and you’re now ready to make kombucha and butcher a hog.
Eleven months have passed since Dallas dining rooms closed in response to the arrival of the coronavirus. Some of them still haven’t reopened.
A small group of restaurant owners have declined to resume dine-in service, instead sticking to takeout, curbside pickup, delivery or outdoor patios. Most of them operate very small businesses and are guided by concern for their employees’ and customers’ health.
That stance is backed up by science that suggests we should still be avoiding indoor dining. The government of Washington, D.C., found that over a four-month span, 14% of the district’s virus outbreaks took place inside restaurants and bars. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, found that cooks work the single most dangerous job of the pandemic, with bakers in fourth place, “chefs and head cooks” in 11th and bartenders 24th.
Petra and the Beast Sous Chef Gets Funky With Fermentation
Jessica Alonzo s Native Ferments is part pickling school, part pantry shop, and entirely for nerdy aficionados and funk newbies alike.
By Eve Hill-Agnus
Published in
Food & Drink
February 4, 2021
1:32 pm
Sous chef at Petra and the Beast, Jessica Alonzo is the fermentation queen, and she’s going out on her own with Native Ferments, which will allow her to venture solo into a whole new realm of virtual workshops and purchasable jarred goods. From her, you can learn how to make striated beet pickles or half sours you can throw into your sandwiches. Become versed in the craft of kimchi making that will up your dinner game. If that’s all a bit too hands on, Native Ferments will also showcase jars of Alonzo’s own pickles.
Susan Benoikken sits in the empty, sunny dining room of Medina Oven & Bar in Dallas. It’s been a little over a year since she took over the restaurant, and months of struggle and grief show themselves in her rounded shoulders and melancholy eyes.
Across from her sits her accountant surrounded by stacks of bills and receipts. The numbers don’t look good, he says. While the restaurant is open for dine-in, patio seating and takeout, customers are sporadic. Sales are still too slow to keep up with the costs of running the restaurant, and while operating with a skeleton crew and getting a break on rent from the landlord have helped, it’s not enough to pull her business off a dangerous ledge one thousands of restaurants are teetering on as the pandemic continues to ravage the industry.
Petra and the Beast sous chef to launch Native Ferments shop
Chef Jessica Alonzo is selling fermented goods, kits and virtual workshops.
Jessica Alonzo with her Native Ferments at Petra and the Beast in Dallas(Lawrence Jenkins / Special Contributor)
Lovers of all things pickled and fermented have something to celebrate in Jessica Alonzo.
The sous chef at Petra and the Beast restaurant in Dallas is turning her fermentation expertise into a side business and launching Native Ferments, an online shop of fermented goods and kits, condiments, pickles and a series of virtual workshops for fermentation enthusiasts.
Alonzo got her start in fermentation while working with Dallas chef Matt McCallister at the now-closed FT33 restaurant after leaving a career in hospital administration. What started as a fascination quickly turned into a focused specialty with the help of stacks of books, hours of research, and an apprenticeship at the Cultured Pickle Shop in California.