Dan's Introduction

As Frank said we both grew up in the early days of the California food movement. My parents were early adopters of foreign foods. They would buy cookbooks and try recipes. It started with Chinese, then Indian followed by Thai, Mexican, Korean, Japanese etc. Like them, I learned to cook through cookbooks. To be honest, there was some outside motivation. When I reached the fourth grade, I was given the choice of cooking dinner or cleaning the kitchen two nights a week. To this day I don’t really like doing the dishes.

In college I found that being able to cook really paid off. Friends would buy the ingredients and I would cook the meal. As Frank already explained we ended up waiting tables together after college, where my Political Science degree came in handy. This is where our culinary collaboration began, Cowboy Bob’s Gourmet Experience. We did two editions.

I moved on to work for Starbuck’s back when it sold coffee. Where one day a customer asked me “Dan, what do you want to be doing? Because you clearly don’t want to be here anymore” My reply was “I would love to be in a room somewhere working on a better non fat pudding.” So I left there to go into the restaurant world and quickly moved from that into product development. I landed an internship at a food development company. Within minutes I knew that I finally had the job I was supposed to have.

I have spent the last 12 years working in product development. I create food on an industrial scale. Truck loads of meat. Recipes that are measured in percent by weight and above all it must stay the same. Variety may be the spice of life, but variation is the enemy of food production.

This gives me a very different view of food than Frank and pretty much everyone else outside of the industry. But what this blog is for me is a chance to explore the fundamental principles of food and taste. As has been the case throughout our lives Frank and I will continue the dialogue that I have always found so personally enriching.

We are hoping that others will join the conversation.