Iron Brew Works

Four oyster knives. I live in the Texas Hill Country, and I found four oyster knives in one tub last night. We don't even have oysters here.

That's what disorganization costs you. Over the last decade I've char-broiled oysters in the wood-fired oven at Morris Ranch, and every time I went looking for the small oyster knife and couldn't find it, I bought another one. Four times. It's funny now. It wasn't funny when it was happening, because it was invisible – just a small, unnamed tax on not knowing what you own.

That's the whole story of where I am right now.

read more →

A Morris Ranch ribeye was not what most people picture when they hear the word ribeye.

The steaks we cooked out on the Pedernales River were large – classically cut, porterhouse-thick, often tomahawk-bone-on. The kind of cut that announces itself when you set it down. Over the years, we cooked hundreds of them over charcoal and open fire. Not dozens. Hundreds. They became the signature of the place, the thing people talked about on the drive home, the thing they called about when they wanted to come back.

I've been thinking about those steaks lately, trying to pin down what made them work. Part of it was the fire – real hardwood charcoal, river air, time. Part of it was patience: after you pull a large ribeye off the heat…

read more →

I’ve kept blogs before. Chef Dano ran for years — food, the ranch, French technique with a Texas accent. It was good. But a blog asks you to finish before you publish, and finishing is where most things go to die.

So this is a stream instead. Some posts will be a single line. Some a photograph with three words under it. Some a full essay like this one, and some a film. They all live in the same place, in the order they happened, because that’s how a life actually unfolds — not in tidy categories, but as one thing after another.

Austin Kleon calls this showing your work. You don’t wait until you’re an expert. You post the process, and the process is the point. If you start writing the story, sometimes the story starts writing you.

That’s the bet here. Build in public. Make often. Own the words.