When you’re making brunch for 25 starving artists, you better have a lot of bacon. In a kitchen like the one at the Headlands Center for the Arts, where I’m currently living and working as a kitchen intern, everything counts in large amounts, and nothing’s more beloved by the artists we’re feeding than the house-made meat products we grind, cure or smoke.

Bacon, pancetta, breakfast sausage, spicy link sausage, salmon gravlax, and more: most of them require only salt, sugar, spices, and time to transform fatty, tough cuts of meat into savory staples that can richly flavor any dish. (The exception is the salmon, of course, caught for us in Alaska by a friend of the chef’s and sent to us in pristine vacuum-packed sides. Still, even this great stuff emerges silkier and more aromatic after a few days’ curing with salt and dill.) It helps, too, that Damon Little, my fellow kitchen intern, spent some months last year working as an apprentice in the stainless-steel surrounds of esteemed salumi-makers Boccalone in Oakland.

Making bacon takes time, it’s true—eight days to cure, a few hours in the smoker, another hour or so in the oven to finish—but very little of it requires our hands or even our presence. It doesn’t take much time to weigh out a handful of salt and spices, rub it into a slab of pork belly, slap the belly onto a baking pan and pop it in the fridge. A turn and rub every other day takes maybe two minutes, tops.

Cured bacon slabs in the smoker.

Then there’s the smoking, a couple of hours, but during almost all of that time, the bacon-to-be is quietly, smokily minding its own business while we go about ours. At the end, well-smoked, the slab goes into the oven to finish cooking. (This last step may not be necessary, depending on how hot your smoker gets; the main thing is getting the pork's internal temperature up to 150 degrees.)

Bacon slabs, just out of the smoker, ready for the oven.

The result, eschewing all modesty, is fantastic. Right out of the oven, the slabs are deep red-brown, lacquered like a Peking duck, with an outrageously appetizing aroma. Because our bacon doesn’t have to last for weeks in a butcher’s case or grocer’s fridge (we freeze it immediately and defrost it chunk by chunk as needed), we can make our cure lighter on both the salt and “pink salt” than most commercial versions. Enough to cure it safely, of course, but light enough that you can taste the flavor of the pork and aromatics as well, without your tongue being clubbed by salt. (What is pink salt, you ask? Also known as curing salt, DC cure, or DQ cure, it is a mixture of 6.25% sodium nitrite and 93.75% sodium chloride, or table salt. The nitrites in the salt mixture help prevent bacterial contamination and also preserve the meat's color during the curing process. It is dyed pink to prevent it from being confused with regular salt.)

This last time we made bacon, we added maple syrup to a simple salt-and-pepper cure, to make something straightforward and breakfast-y out of half the meat. The other half became pancetta, cured without syrup but with more spices and aromatics, including plenty of rosemary. After curing, the meat was rolled and tied but not smoked, to make a savory bacon in the European style, useful as a base for sauces, stews, and ragus.

Damon LIttle tying pancetta.

Any pieces of the bacon or pancetta not immediately fried up for brunch quickly find a home: turned into lardons for salad, sautéed with onions, carrots, and celery to give a backbone to lentils or duck-and-bean soup, or simply cooked up for a kitchen-crew snack on yesterday’s sourdough bread, piled with sliced tomatoes and a smear of leftover garlic mayonnaise or Caesar dressing.

Pancetta

Given that we generally cure and smoke four big slabs of organic Berkshire pork from Idaho’s Snake River Farms at a time, the savings in the kitchen budget are significant. High-quality, organic bacon like this would probably cost us four times what the plain pork belly does. When you’re a non-profit cooking daily for 25 to 30 people, sometimes for twice that, making your own value-added products in house is just good sense.

Good organic jam, free of high-fructose corn syrup and made with more fruit than sugar? Expensive, especially when one brunch can empty 3 or 4 fancy jars. A flat of organic, locally grown plums, a pound or two of organic sugar, a handful of lemons and a couple hours of my time? A much cheaper, and much more delicious, way to fill a pantry shelf. The apples from a staff member’s backyard tree are tasty but misshapen and pocked with holes, useless for out-of-hand eating. But a little time with a paring knife, an afternoon’s slow baking in the oven, and we have three quarts of autumn apple butter ready to be slathered on this Sunday’s waffles.

Waffles served with bacon, naturally. Having come to bacon late in life (my parents’ one nod to traditional Jewish dietary laws was no pork in the house), I’ve never felt confident cooking it, especially since every bacon-lover seems to have a different bacon ideal—rigid or floppy, nearly burnt or just sizzled. Here, I’ve learned a good trick for when you’re making bacon for a crowd, when frying up a single panful just won’t do. We cut our bacon in fairly thick strips, laying them out side by side on parchment-lined sheet trays and popping them into the oven to cook until just crisp. Take the slices off the trays and lay them out on cooling racks to drain; this keeps them from getting soggy with grease and steam while you go about prepping the mimosas and flipping the frittatas. Pour the excess grease off the baking sheets (into an old jar or bowl, not down the sink, since it will thicken and harden into a drain-blocking sludge as it cools). To reheat, slide the bacon, still on its racks, back onto the baking sheets, and return to the oven until crisp and hot. Serve immediately, if you can bear to let any of it leave the kitchen.

Final bacon

Recipe: Smoked Maple Bacon
Summary: The following recipe is adapted by Headlands kitchen intern Damon Little from Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing, by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.

Prep Time: 60 minutes
Cook Time: 4 hours
Total Time: 5 hours, plus 8 days' curing time
Yield: About 4 lbs

Ingredients:
2 tbsp red pepper flakes, crushed in a mortar
1 tbsp freshly ground black pepper
1.75 oz kosher salt or sea salt (not iodized)
1/4 tsp pink salt (curing salt)
1/4 cup maple sugar or packed dark brown sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup (grade B has the most flavor)
One 5-lb slab pork belly, preferably from a pasture-raised animal

Instructions:

1. Combine the chili flakes, pepper, salt, pink salt, and sugar in a bowl and mix well. Add syrup and stir to combine.
2. Rub cure over both sides of the belly, making sure to work it under any flaps and into any crevices. Seal meat in a 2-gallon resealable plastic bag, or place in a non-reactive (glass, ceramic, stainless steel) container a little bigger than the meat. The salt and sugar will pull liquid out of the meat as it cures; make sure the meat stays bathed in this brine throughout the process.
3. Refrigerate meat, turning and rubbing the belly to redistribute the cure every other day, for 7 days.
4. Remove belly from pan, rinse it thoroughly to remove any remaining cure, and pat dry. Put belly on a rack over a rimmed baking sheet and refrigerate, uncovered, for another 12 to 24 hours.
5. Smoke the belly in a hot smoker for 2 hours. The finished internal temperature of the bacon should be about 150 degrees F.
6. If, after 2 hours, your bacon has not reached this temperature, remove from the smoker. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Place belly on a metal roasting rack over a rimmed baking sheet and bake for 60-90 minutes, until the internal temperature reaches 150 degrees.
7. Remove bacon from oven and let cool. When cool, cut into one-pound pieces, and wrap tightly in plastic. Refrigerate or freeze until ready to use.

Kitchen at Headland Center for the Arts

Sometimes, being a single, freelancing, non-home-owner with an old car and no kids can have its benefits. Like the opportunity to move into a tent in Santa Cruz to be an apprentice farmer at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UCSC for six months; couldn't have done that with a mortgage to pay. Or now, my latest adventure, being a live-in cook-intern in the kitchen at the Headlands Center for the Arts, just across the bridge in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

For those of you who haven't made the fifteen-minute drive over the water lately, the Headlands Center for the Arts is an artists' residency program occupying a collection of former military buildings in the Marin Headlands. Built in 1907, the buildings were abandoned by the military in 1972. In the late 1970s, an intrepid group of local artists began to renovate them for use. By 1982, the Center had a board of directors, and by 1985, it was granting commissions for renovations of everything from the latrines to the Mess Hall to the storage depot. Now, nearly 30 years later, the place is a well-recognized part of the Bay Area art scene, attracting artists from all around the world for its residency program.

Mess Hall Dining Room

There are lots of good things about being an artist in residence here. Time, unfettered time, time to breathe and think, look and hear and create. A studio for work, an airy room for sleep, the folded, elephantine hills of the Headlands and the whole Pacific ocean laid out at your feet. The rattle of the eucalyptus leaves and the shriek of the wild turkeys at night, the deer browsing under the fog-dripping cypress branches in the early morning. Support and appreciation for your work and its whims, wherever it takes you.

And, of course, you get fed, an organic, made-from-scratch, sit-down dinner cooked for you, your fellow artists, and your guests four nights a week, plus a mid-day brunch on Sundays, cooked and served in the Mess Hall, itself designed into a particularly warm community space by artist Anne Hamilton. Nearly everything on the table is local: those frilly, multi-colored little lettuces picked yesterday at County Line Harvest in Petaluma, the whole-wheat sesame-sourdough bread baked in the kitchen twice a week by Eduardo Morell in the wood-burning brick oven designed by Alan Scott. When you get peckish, or bored, in need of coffee and conversation (or wifi), you can dawdle in the Mess Hall, foraging for last night's leftovers (mmm, salmon! Mexican wedding cookies!) and chatting up the kitchen staff: myself, fellow intern Damon Little, and head chef Keith Mercovich.

Wood-burning brick oven designed by Alan Scott

We'll probably be chopping huge piles of chard, skinning halibut, shucking oysters or hulling strawberries for tarts. We might be making things from scratch that you didn't know could be made from scratch, like macaroni, or hot dogs, or bacon. We might be laying out sides of salmon on a bed of fennel for gravlax, kneading dough for Tuesday's pizza night, slicing multicolored, palm-sized tomatoes, or stirring up caramel gelato. Whatever we're busy with, you'll be having it for dinner in just a few hours.

Stephanie Shares Pizza-Making Tips from the Headlands. Video: Laiko Bahrs

Of course, I feel a little guilty writing about this, since the artists' dinner at the Headlands isn't open to the public. Only artists, staff, and a limited number of their guests can attend a typical weeknight dinner, much to the chagrin of the hikers and hostel-stayers who wander in, draw by the smells and conviviality. But there are ways to get a seat at the table. You can become a member, which gets you invited to the quarterly members' dinners with the artists. You can come to one of the Headlands' public programs, which often include an optional dinner or brunch. You can do what I did, and volunteer during one of the public programs, which earns you a meal. (Naturally, I volunteered in the kitchen, but there are always varied volunteer slots open for any given event.) This Sunday, in fact, I'll be one of a group of artists leading a series of hikes, each with a different theme around the area, followed by brunch in the Mess Hall.

Such will be my Sunday: up early to make Jonagold apple coffee cake for 75, lead my hike for an hour, then return to the kitchen, put my apron back on, help finish cooking and serving, eat, then wash dishes and help clean the kitchen, getting it ready for dinner prep the following day. In between, deep breaths of the clear, ocean-scented air, particularly lovely now that our equinoctial summer has arrived, banishing (most of) the brooding fog at long last. It's part supper club, part dinner party, part co-op (dessert doesn't appear until after everyone has pitched in to help with the dishes), but it all comes together to make a community.

Stephanie Rosenbaum will be leading "Plants of Pleasure, Plants of Pain," a visual foraging hike about the area's edible and poisonous plants as part of the Desire Trails program on Sunday, Sept 25, at 1pm, followed by brunch at 3pm. The hike is free; brunch is $15 for Headlands members, $20 for the public.

QUEST Science on the SPOT Feature produced by Jenny Oh

Eduardo Morrell monitors the internal temperature of the bread to gauge its readiness. Photo: Jenny Oh.

Since the Gold Rush days when prospectors baked loaves in their encampments, sourdough bread has been a beloved favorite of the Bay Area. But what is true sourdough bread? It's more than just the tangy flavor. Science on the SPOT visits with Maria Marco of UC Davis and baker Eduardo Morrell to learn more about the secret science of sourdough.

Producer's Notes: Secrets of Sourdough
Learn more about the history of Morrell's Bread and check out a slideshow of Eduardo Morrell's typical 16-hour workday.

Eduardo Morrell

It's muddy, it's rainy, it's cold...so what better way to come together on a wet winter weekend than in celebration of a big wood-burning oven? The Headlands Center for the Arts is hosting Brick Oven Lovin' Again, a night of dinner and music on Saturday, February 21st, at 6pm. All donations go towards recouping the costs of renovating the center's massive wood-burning brick oven.

The benefit is the brainchild of Eduardo Morrell of Morrell Breads, who bakes all his naturally leavened hearth breads in the center's oven. For the last 8 years, Morrell has been baking breads for both the center and the Berkeley Farmers' Market, using the oven created by master oven-builder Alan Scott. While a separate memorial is planned for March, the benefit will also honor the life's work of Scott, who passed away in his native Australia on Jan. 26, 2009, at the age of 72. It will be a locavore's delight, with a focus on the produce & meats donated by Morrell’s fellow Berkeley market vendors, including Happy Boy Farms, Pomo Tierra Orchards, Happy Girl, Highland Hills Meats, Full Belly Farm, Riverdog Farm, and more.

Photo by Christina Z. Libertini

Served family-style in the arts center's dining room will be caramelized-onion and margherita pizzas, grass-fed beef stew, wheat-berry pilaf (made from Full Belly wheat), squash and citrus salad, sauteed kale and miso, green salad with goat cheese and apples, breads, pickles, spreads, and more, followed by apple crisp and chocolate ganache tart. In the kitchen will be alums from both Millennium Restaurant and the Headlands kitchen, including Morrell, Vince Peterson, Stephanie Hibbert and Ari Derfel. Playing jazz after dinner will be John Ingle (sax), Lisa Mezzacappa (bass), and Kjell Nordeson (drums).

Photo by Christina Z. Libertini

But what's so special about this oven? Built 17 years ago, the oven was part of Scott's first generation of quality ovens. It worked, but it wasn't perfect, something Scott freely admitted as he became the Bay Area's foremost authority on hand-built, wood-burning brick ovens. So, last year, under Morrell's supervision, the oven got a full revamp, preserving the decorative elements created by Scott along with the concrete foundation but installing all new insulation and firebrick. Scott's own apprentice, Quill Chase did the work. Now, says Morrell, it's much more efficient, using less wood, heating evenly, and holding temperature throughout hours of baking. It's an oven that honors Scott's work as it continues to feed another generation of artists and Bay Area bread lovers.

Headlands Center for the Arts, 944 Fort Barry, Sausalito, CA 94965. Saturday, February 21st. Dinner at 6:30pm, music at 8:30pm. A donation of $50/per person is requested for dinner and concert (children 7-13 $10 each; under 7 free); $15 donation for concert only. [ Map ]

Attendees are asked to RSVP online for the dinner. For directions and additional information, go to Headlands Center for the Arts.