Toledo Tin Chefs

A Little More About Our Story

// May 17th, 2010 // Blog

OK, now for a little background. Toledo Tin Chef’s has evolved from several ideas and interest that the three of us share. My name is Chuck Gbur, I am an interventional cardiologist from Toledo, Ohio. Josh Wagy was my neighbor a few years back. Steve Hockenberger’s wife Lydia was a pharmaceutical rep who called on my wife and I (My wife, Carolyn, is a cardiologist too). Lydia and Carolyn became friends, and it turned out they lived just down the street from Josh and I, eventually Steve and I became friends as well. As it turned out, all three of us enjoyed cooking. Josh’s girlfriend is Emily. Her parents own Caper’s and she runs the show there. More about Caper’s later. One summer night we decided to grill out as a group and voila, the next thing you know I am typing this blog. Of course, something good always happens when you mix 1 part charcoal, a splash of charcoal lighting fluid, 1 part meat and 2-3 parts beer.

I recently have gotten into the weird science stuff… Now I am no Ferran Adria, but I am finally putting all of those years of chemistry class to use. By the way, if you are interested in trying this stuff, the best reference by far is “Texture“. It is a free recipe collection and can be found by click on the link above. It is really pretty cool and there seems to be no limit on what you can do. It does take a little practice though, I have some really good looking caviar that didn’t taste so well, and some globs of goo that tasted wonderful, but was too ugly to take a picture of.   By the way, Josh and I both are also into photography.  Josh also does the majority of graphic design stuff. He is definitely much better at food presentation and all that artsy stuff.

This weekend I made it downtown to The Farmer’s Market. If you haven’t been there, you really need to go. I spoke with Mike Billau from Billau Farms in Ottawa Lake. Mike and his son Shawn are 4th and 5th generation farmers. There family has been selling locally grown produce for 5 generations.

The market is just getting ramped up for the season, but it really is worth visiting. We will be holding a cooking demonstration sometime later this summer, so look out for us.

We did get together to cook this weekend.

I am showing my deconstructed martini, but I have a lot more that I will post later. I also plan to publish a review of a few cookbooks that I recently finished reading and I feel are well worth reading. Of course, the free one (Texture) listed above is a great reference source, so make sure you download the file. The molecular stuff is a lot harder than it looks, so don’t get discouraged. I made several batches of vodka flubber way before I came up with anything that was worth a picture. Of course, not wanting to waste good vodka, I ate my mistakes, so that may explain why it took so long to come close to an acceptable result.

Anyway, much more to come, so please pop in often. Make sure you twit us on tweeter or tweet us on twitter, what ever. I still need to tell you how I came up with Toledo Tin Chef’s and what we are trying to do. To be honest, I am not sure any of us know where this is going to take us. For now, we are just 3 regular guys who cook, like to take pictures, and know enough about computers to get this thing up and running. Anyway, more pictures and recipes to come, but for now I need to get back to my day job… CJG