Gluten Intolerance
Gluten Intolerance
How my bagel obsession bloomed, plus a Q and A with Eric Reeves of Salt Spoon, one of Chicago's best bagel bakers
There was a girl. She was a child actor. She called me “white trash”.
That should have been the end of things, but as anyone who works in sales knows, this is called a “reverse negative”. Push back and the object of your derision, even if they’re the most secure person in the world will find that one kernel of uncertainty deep within their soul and engage you.
Sarah had been in a cereal commercial, some cookie commercials, wherever they needed juvenile-wonky-toothed-pigtailed girls to flash a winsome approving thumbs-up by the end of the jingle.
By the time she got to college (paid for in part by her acting royalties), she had an inflated sense of self, henceforth, like me, was on the Tracy Flick path, running for student government.
This meant early mornings wallpapering the residence halls before anyone else could take the precious ad space that would convert willing student voters. I got up early. Sarah got up earlier. I got up even earlier. The cycle repeated every day, because the university’s custodial engineers only suffered our curated littering for the day.
The two of us were the earliest birds fighting over the same worm. A grudging respect for the campaign hustle formed, and there was eventually a truce. Our mornings ended with us breaking bread in the dorm cafeteria by 7 a.m. I grabbed a donut. She grabbed a bagel.
She squinted her eyes at me like an anthropology major, eventually saying, “What’s with the donuts?”
I didn’t ask her about the bagels, because for at least half of my life in addition to donuts there was usually a Lender’s onion bagel slathered with chive cream cheese around at different times.
I am sure a bismarck did breach her lips in life, but right now, I might as well have been chewing on an iguana’s nuts.
She followed the first question with another question.
“Didn’t your family have bagels most mornings?”
I said, “Not often. We never really had doughnuts much either, except the few times my dad would buy some from the nuns fundraising in the vestibule of our Sunday school classes.”
She side-frowned and offered condolences as if I were someone who’d just lost their special pet.
The campaign poster-posting would go on. At one point while we were both jockeying for some prime real estate in the computer lab, she got frustrated and said, “Your parents don’t even love you. If they did, they’d buy you bagels. You’re white trash.”
I’d like to say I walked away with my head held high. But I was still a teenager so when she left, I ripped a bunch of her posters down and put up mine.
We both won spots on the student government which meant I had to stare past a gavel and engage in Robert’s Rules of Order with her for another year. We never spoke much after that, but her bagel comments rang in my gray matter long after.
They still do. I knew my parents loved me. But, also, what if she was right, what if my life had truly been bagel-bereft?
It was, because I lived in Chicago, where for decades New York Bagel and Bialy was the only middling-game in town. Kaufmann’s had a moment, but they gave up the ghost.
I had to get my real kicks in New York and Montreal. St. Viateur’s tout garni, aka everything bagel, called me like the “Lost Ark”, inspiring journeys across snakes (not really) and the Canadian border, for a taste. With each bagel bite I’d become whole.
As a lapsed Catholic, I am aware that the very best Catholics are the new ones compensating for the fact that they weren’t raised de facto in the faith. They must make up for their interloping with intensity. This is also my relationship with bagels.
And so, Baruch Hashem for the pandemic. Which sounds weird, but in all bad things, there is often also good. In this case the Chicago bagel renaissance of 2019-2023 happened. Even the modern Indian spot Superkhana opened a bagel window for a minute. Mindy’s bakery ruled supreme.
I did not bake sourdough, but I did bake bagels, dutifully dipping them in honey water and fire roasting them in my Roccbox pizza oven. What I learned is that I did not have the patience or the acumen to shape them without ending up with what looked like a chocolate milk-drunk toddler’s Play-Doh hijinx.
One spot I saw on Instagram during the pandemic was a pop-up dinner series called Salt Spoon that transitioned to bread baking including bagels. Because I’m too lazy to sign up for email lists and monitor “drops” at the same time like a sneaker-pimp, it took a minute before the chakras and crystals refracted the right call signals.
But they did, and while I was greedily loading my cart up with everything bagels, and a couple honey wheat for my oldest son, I scrolled down to find that if I committed to a half dozen bagels, which I was doing anyway, I could avail myself of a cacio e pepe-flavored set and a cup of black truffle cream cheese.
Because I gravitate to outliers like Barbie does the color pink, I did just that. And on a recent Sunday morning, I drove over to a location in Bucktown, sent a text, and had a box of bagels, not unlike a bag of weed, delivered to my car window.
To be fair Salt Spoon-proprietor Eric Reeves eyes were not darting furtively looking for the five-oh. Rather he very graciously and openly delivered the bread booty.
After a quick naked-gluten photo shoot (results below), I popped them into the oven for a quick refresh per the directions from Reeves. These directions were printed on a super-thick soft-brushed sharp-cut card stock. The piece was so substantial and satisfying in the hand, a ninja with the right hand speed could kill a dude with this thing. The attention to quality on what for most people would be a throw-away scrap printed on an inkjet was impeccable.
Just as impeccable, the first bagel bite where a crisp parmesan frico-crust gave way to an interior bubble pillow bursting with pepper fire. It was as advertised: cacio e pepe in bagel-guise, the kind of moan-inducing bite that coupled with a double espresso and a few chapters of this Harry Belafonte autobiography I’ve been working my way through made for one of the more satisfying Sundays I’ve had in a while.
It's not a stretch to say that Reeve’s bagels are some of, it not the best in Chicago up there with the ones from Mindy’s bakery (I have not recently had Bagel Miller since they shifted, but I suspect those are great too). Maybe more extraordinary, Salt Spoon bagels have more of a New York-vibe instead of my preferred Montreal-style. Their deliciousness has made me a convert.
Because I didn’t know much about Reeves, I asked him some questions. I had to know the person behind the magnificent craft. Enjoy the Q and A below, and if you want a taste of what I had, sign up for Reeve’s mailing list here.
How did you settle on the “salt spoon” as the identity of your business? I’ve always said culinary schools should teach salting alone as a full semester class as it’s the most elemental thing a chef does, and so many people get salting wrong. Does it have something to do with salt being the foundation of cooking? Or is it something else?
You are not wrong. I think it’s one of the hardest things to teach an amateur cook, but the brand is actually tied more to the physical object and its symbolism than a technique.
I started Salt Spoon in 2017 as an intimate pop-up dining experience - multi-course tasting menus for small groups in my space in the South Loop. I wanted the dinners to be a really refined experience in an unexpected setting so I knew that sitting down and finding all the details you’d expect in a high-end restaurant would really transport you. Intentional lighting, beautiful tablescapes and floral arrangements, playlists that ebb and flow with the energy, and thoughtful service which, among other things, included “re-marking the guests” (industry speak for changing and delivering apropriate utensils and serveware) between every course.
I was a 29 year-old restaurant worker so, as you can imagine, I was putting the whole project together on a pretty tight budget, but nice silverware is a hard thing to fake. You pick it up. You interact with it. You can tell when it’s cheap. I was sharing this struggle with my mother when she mentioned that she had, tucked in the back of her closet, a box of silverware that was gifted to her grandmother for her wedding in 1917!
It just had the perfect aesthetic and there are not many heirlooms in our family so it felt cosmic that this 100 year-old wedding gift was such a perfect solution for one of the last complications holding up the whole project.
And in that box was the Salt Spoon! It’s maybe 2 and a half inches long, and it has all of these really ornate details and intricate inlays… I just fell in love with the idea that, at one point in time, there was an appreciation for detail that would drive someone to create this beautiful item for something as mundane as serving salt.
You can see it on my website (also below), but when you hold it in your hand you really get the sense of this over-the-top effort. It felt like this perfect symbol representing my past as a family heirloom, and the detail I strive to deliver through experience and hospitality.
You reference a “shop down the street” from your childhood in NY as a bagel inspiration. Tell me about that spot? You can name it or not, your choice, but I would love to hear about what bagels meant to you as a kid. Also, lets say you’re back in New York this year, where you going for a bagel?
I think it was actually called Hot Bagels, but I’m not totally sure. I just remember tuna salad on an onion bagel! I was born in Manhattan, but we lived in Yonkers. I don’t remember much, but I almost feel like I could still walk the path from our house to that bagel shop.
We moved to Chicago when I was 5, but my dad had to stay behind for about a year and he used to overnight us Hot Bagels. I don’t know, they’ve just always been about “home.” I am surprised at how many people have a nostalgia for bagels from their childhood. I think maybe there is something about the bagel that makes it good for a parent to give to a child. It’s chewy enough to keep a kid occupied for a while. It’s dense and satisfying, and it doesn’t leave many crumbs, so it seems a lot of us have early food memories involving them.
You know, I haven’t been to New York in quite some time, but it would be fun to go to Bagel Talk and pick the owner’s brain. I read he has reluctantly eased up on his no-toasting policy and I just think this conversation is hilarious. It seems like such a small detail, but you try to convince people that the bagel is better the way you serve it and they just don’t want to listen.
You have to find the middle ground between knowing what you want the guest to experience and letting them have what they want. I make my recommendations about how to “properly” heat and eat a bagel (it’s all about the rip-and-dip), but the guest’s enjoyment is really the point at the end of it all.
Where you going for a bagel in Chicago if not eating your own?
Boy, I definitely don’t need to be eating any more bagels than I do, but Mindy’s bagels are pretty top notch. I generally try to separate the art from the artist, but it doesn’t hurt that Mindy is just such a powerhouse. I have so much respect for her. She was framed on the walls of the hallways at our alma mater (Kendall College) and I do not recall there being any other women up there!
I can’t imagine… coming up as a woman in the places she did, making a name as a pastry chef since at least ’05, and still innovating and pushing and mentoring and being at the top of the game for 20ish years. Dang!
Is your bagel a malt syrup boil plus bake situation? How do you get the circles so smooth and perfect and seamless? Or feel free to just tell me these are trade secrets.
I don’t actually find that malt syrup in a boil makes any difference. The starches gelatinize and set the skin pretty immediately so I don’t find it significantly affects the color or flavor. There is malt syrup in the dough for flavor, but I do the boil in a very alkaline solution that gives that signature skin and speeds up the Maillard caramelization on the outside.
You’ll see a lot of recipes for home bakers talk about using baking soda in the water for this same purpose, but I don’t think that’s doing much. Baking soda is something like an 8 on the pH scale and I use lye which is almost a 14. It’s in the order of 100,000 times more alkaline than baking soda and I think that chemical reaction is key to getting the proper bagel skin.
My theory about people saying (in regards to a NY bagel) “it’s about the water” is not actually about the mineral content of the water from New York that’s used to make the dough. It’s about that the water in the boil needs to be treated with an alkali to get the right texture. At some point New Yorkers turned that into a proprietary/marketing thing so that everyone felt like they couldn’t recreate a “proper” bagel without being in that city. That’s just my guess though.
The shaping was probably the most important to me. I can’t think of another pastry that gets touted as “delightfully misshapen” and I never understood why quantity was celebrated over quality in the case of bagels. I get it, it’s a “working person’s” food, but so is pizza, and nobody is hyped about a wonky looking pizza. You go to a place like Lost Larson and get a box of pastries and when you open up that box you almost don’t want to eat them because they’re so beautiful.
It makes the moment when you do eat them so precious, and I just wanted to create that moment with bagels. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I want to scarf down a burger or a plate of pasta and not think about anything other than how delicious it is, not everything has to be precious, but those moments aren’t what Salt Spoon is about.
I don’t exactly have any secrets with the shaping, but it isn’t easy to describe. It just came from what I know about baking bread. You create a consistent size and shape for the sake of quality. You need even tension on the surface of the dough to get an even rise and an even bake, so I just set out to develop a method of shaping that used the same principals as shaping any other type of bread. It takes a lot more time, but I think you get that precious moment when you open the box.
Speaking of perfect, from your website to your brand identity, the pics on Instagram to the thickness of your baking instructions card, you are very attentive to detail and quality? Where does that come from?
Well, I think I’ve covered a lot of it so far because it is just part of the ethos of the brand, but if I have a motto, it would be “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”
I pushed myself really hard when I ran my dinner series and there were moments where it might have been too much for me. Time would run short, my anxiety would run high. My friends and family would try to ground me in these moments saying, for instance, “nobody will notice if the linens aren’t ironed perfectly, Eric, don’t worry about it!” But I don’t think that’s true, people notice those things all the time and just don’t say anything, and that’s not entirely the point.
I’m not expecting someone to say “gee this linen is perfectly ironed Eric, good job!” I think we all know perfection doesn’t exist, so you can’t really notice perfection. What you notice is the lack of imperfection.
Like the seam in a bagel - It’s the same as a wrinkle in your linen. It’s not a cardinal sin, you’re not going to have your night ruined over it, but it’d be cooler if it wasn’t there. You’re supposed to walk away without anything to point to that could have been better. That kind of feeling doesn’t even happen right away and, what’s more, it lingers. I want you to get an overall feeling that you can’t quite put your finger on and that you’re left with for days.
I had a guest once at a pop-up whose only feedback was that I should get a soft-close toilet lid… At first I was thinking, “man, you just can’t please some people!” Honestly though, he was right! Every moment of the experience is considered and then you go to put the toilet lid down and it slams shut and startles you, and it interrupts a night that may have otherwise been void of any noticeable imperfections, well, you gotta change the toilet lid!
I wasn’t able to have people in my space for dinners during the pandemic, so I turned to baking bread because I could offer it for pickup or delivery, but it’s all the same. I want to carry that same level of intention to every experience I create.
You’ve worked for Boka Group, 16” On Center and Land and Sea – any key mentors locally. Or, I know you also worked in LA, maybe from there? Who influenced you?
I love Chicago and it’s dining scene, as good as any place in the world as far as I’ve seen. I’ve worked with a lot of talented and inspiring people here, and honestly seen plenty of examples of who I don’t want to be as a professional, but I think I had some formative experiences working at a place called Son of a Gun in LA. One of the chefs there, Vinny (Dotolo)…his attention to detail was inspiring.
There were no compromises. Didn’t matter if it was a meticulously plated Hamachi crudo or a fried chicken sandwich, nothing was done without intention and every bite was equally important. He and his partner, Jon Shook, would eat in the dining room once a week or so and they made changes every time, no matter how small.
Even if it went from 6 crackers to 7 crackers accompanying that smoked whitefish dip, because that was the right amount for the portion of dip. When you’re doing R&D and you create a dish and eat it with 3 other cooks hovering over a garbage can in the kitchen, it isn’t the same experience that the guest has. You are missing some crucial data. It doesn’t taste the same when you eat it in the dining room. You have to see what the guest sees if you want to improve their experience. They were always thinking critically about every system. It definitely had a lasting effect on me.
Are you still doing pop ups or is the Bakehouse your main thing right now? Do you want to stay as a pop up-style business or do you have an eye on a brick and mortar future? Is brick and mortar even a smart thing to strive for in 2023? It feels like the indie thing is where the future is headed, or maybe it’s just a short-term trend. Curious on your take?
I hope to bring the dinner series back. I moved to a new space in Bucktown and I’m still thinking through the new setup. In the meantime, the Bakehouse has really let me explore a passion for baking I think I always had, but I love being able to create more involved and personal experiences for people, too, so I don’t know for sure.
A brick and mortar shop would allow for some of both, but I have a really specific image in my mind and I’m in no hurry. It honestly depends on finding the right space.
You’re right though, it’s less appealing as time goes on… rents are outrageous and honestly Chicago doesn’t make setting up a really small operation very worthwhile.
I don’t want to go big because I have to. I’m also trying to be really intentional with my next steps. I don’t want to jump into a traditional path toward “success” just because it’s traditional.
Right now, I love where I’m at. I have a really awesome collaboration coming up that I’m very excited about. I’ve got balance and healthy boundaries with my work, and I’m just working on developing recipes and bringing consistent and delicious product to as many people as I can.
Chef Reeves celebrating New Years in 2022, via Salt Spoon IG
What’s your fun/passion outside of cooking/food and why is that a thing for you (if there is one)?
Haha - I love that when that question is asked of chefs it always comes with the understanding that they may not do anything else with themselves!
I definitely spend most of my time in the kitchen, but I really love camping and road trips. I’ll be honest. I’m definitely not roughing it out in the woods. We’re pretty comfortable when we head outdoors. I think it’s still related though. The sourdough starter comes with us for pancakes and bread. We’re out there shaking cocktails. I bring all the tools and gadgets to make everyone comfortable.… I can’t really escape it. It’s all about hospitality in the end!
You can find Reeves and his work at www.saltspoon.com