Ben Ford

Why do you put on these enormous, handcrafted feasts?

I love feeding people and I love feeding people all at one time. I love giving up the inhibitions behind food. When someone comes up to my table after a wonderful meal and they have that magical moment when money and stress isn’t a factor anymore, it’s just about what’s happening at that table. Feasts are a great way to have that effect on a large group of people. The inhibitions go away when you have a turkey leg or you’re ripping apart crabs and boozing it up, having fun. All those inhibitions go out the door and that’s my favorite way of enjoying my time with other people. When you put a bunch of food at a table with a lot of people… good things happen.

Lefty seems like a man of many talents, why’d you choose him and ReRide Ranch?

I had a short list of people I wanted to grow from and he was probably one of ten different farmers I called. I do have relationships with some of those other farmers to this day, like one woman who grows kune kunes out near Ontario, but Lefty and I decided to work together and form this synonymous relationship that just works really well. Anytime you’re going into a tough business and building foundation and trust, you have to really like the people you’re working with. And to me, he was the consummate pig farmer. Yes, he’s a man of many talents… a blacksmith, an artist, a cowboy poet, musician, but he’s also a damn good pig farmer.

And that’s his real name?

Lefty Ayers, yeah.

That’s like a baseball player name.

It’s a cowboy name.

Why feed the hogs acorns?

I don’t know the chemistry involved, but they’re finished on these things for the flavor. It adds a sweetness to the meat that pigs finished differently just wouldn’t have.

Lefty was talking about someone who wanted almonds, too.

Yeah, almonds, same thing. It’s important, but the marbleization and the quality of the pork really has more to do with the breed and even more so the family line. Now we’re 4 or 5 generations deep into our pig farming. We know that we have good mothers and good fathers that have good children, as opposed to having stressed pigs. It’s based on family, on genetics. Our pork’s getting better and better every year.

It was interesting hearing you and Lefty talk about all that, about the family tree.

Yeah, but believe me those weren’t the conversations we having when we first started raising pigs out there. We were just wondering what are we going to feed these guys? Do we use any probiotics or treatments? Are we going to treat the water? It took a lot of work to get to this point.

Why are you fascinated with non-traditional cooking vessels like the one we found at the ranch?

You say it’s non-traditional but I think it is. I really am a traditionalist cook, I’m not a modernist. A modernist to me is a molecular gastronomy type, but I’m working with steel and wood, you know? Some real stuff. An animal, steel, wood, and whatever contraption I can find or build to cook it. It’s as old as man has been cooking with fire.

We’ve only been driven to indoor kitchens in the last hundred years or so. Before that there’s thousands of years of cooking history that took place outdoors. We don’t have a lot of written documentation for it, but I look at a lot of my techniques as old world techniques. I’m sure they weren’t using cold rolled steel and stuff like that, but it all goes back to what happens when you bury a pig in the ground. How do you use heat and moisture and your environment to cook whatever particular animal you need to?

That’s why, theoretically, my things work. For the cookbook (Taming the Feast) I didn’t really know if they would, I was building a lot of these contraptions for the first time. Should I build this fire 24 inches off the animal or 18 inches? But I found other sources for research, knowing it might take half an hour more or less—and we actually nailed the timing on most of them—but it took a lot of research in order to figure out how these materials are affected.

Who would you most like to cook for and why?

I don’t really have a bucket list, you know? I have cooked for some incredible people but I’ve never really kept a list. I think my favorite person to cook for was Larry Bud Melman. For some unknown reason he’s the one that comes up first in my head. I really enjoy cooking for musicians, in general. I wouldn’t say anyone in particular but musicians and chefs seem to have a kinship as far as the process we go through to develop what we do. Any foodie musician you put in front of me I’ll trade tricks with them.

But you don’t even have music in your kitchen! [Laughing]

We don’t in our kitchen because it distracts the cooks, but music is a very important part of my concept. We’re constantly hosting live bands and working on our set list here, trying to create that atmosphere. The music here is predominantly what I call “bohemian rhapsody blues.” It’s the music I grew up hearing in Southern California. It has a big “Bakersfield sound” influence with all the blues and stuff that was already here and it’s a great mix.

How many types of vinegar do you cook with?

[Laughing] Boy, the word’s out there, huh? I probably have over 30 types of vinegars in my kitchen that I like to work with. Many, many vinaigrettes involved. Two, three different acid combinations sometimes. I’m very much the alchemist. I try to work very intuitively with the ingredients and kind of look at them as being my paints, you know? If I find a very good vinegar that sort of stands on it’s own I consider it another paint that I have available and can start to work with.

Why not strawberry? Heard you don’t like strawberry vinegar.

I just don’t let a lot of fruit into my food. It’s just not something that really comes from the regions I cook from. A citrus influence does come into my food, but I just don’t have any Caribbean influences or Hawaiian influences or beyond. The only time fruit finds it’s way into my food is when it’s part of the ethnic mix of Los Angeles.

I’m a forager, generally a wild plant forager—but foraging takes you beyond wild plants. You have different neighborhoods inside Los Angeles, Old Latino neighborhoods where you can still find limes and lemons and avocado trees. You go into some old Asian neighborhoods and you’ll find guavas and figs and things like that. So it’s interesting to understand the foundations of California, what was here before, it’s really under our feet already.

So why’d you eat hot sauce made with termites?

I’ve done a lot of work with city schools and Conservation International and some of them have taken me to interesting places. One of them was working with Pimones Indians in Venezuela. They’re a tribe that’s very deep in the Amazon, living by the old ways and they taught me how to fish for termites and how to make a hot sauce out of them. They also taught me how to cook tarantula properly. These types of experiences are life changing. They’ve made me a more adventurous cook in a lot of ways.

You having any of those on the menu? [Laughing]

No, no. I tried to bring some back on the airplane but I actually lost it.

You lost a tarantula on the plane?

[Laughing] I left the hot sauce on the plane. I was going to chance it through customs and everything but it must of rolled out.

How important are local farmers?

Very important. One of the things I’ve been trying to do for the last few years as a chef is really bring an identity back to Southern California. I want this to be a destination to dine, I want people to say “I want some LA food while I’m here.” We have this great border right next to us, incredible things happening in Baja, great products here in Southern California. We have more farmers markets than anywhere in the United States, possibly the world, so it’s really important that we focus in on our own farmers. They work really, really hard. Some will drive 4 or 5 hours to get to a farmers market and they’ll do that 4 or 5 times a week. It’s amazing to watch them put the effort into bringing vegetables a little closer to us and it pays off for the customer.

When did food first capture you?

When I was in Japan, when I was a 12-year-old. I was living traditionally in Kyoto and we had a woman who would come bring my brother and I breakfast; a little bowl with a fish head in it and some soup. We’d look at it every morning and wonder “can we have bacon and eggs?” After about the third or fourth day we realized we had to start eating something and eventually we enjoyed it. I came up with the notion that putting yourself in the hands of a chef, a reputable chef, is always in the best interest of the diner. I learned that early on. I gave up all my inhibitions while I was there and really started to enjoy the food. I gave myself up to it and that had the biggest effect on what I do today.