Jason Sandeman

Author: Papa Sandemano

  • Basil Guild

    Basil Guild

    If you’re looking to buy basil, this ain’t it. We’re talking about growing basil by accident. 

    Last year I had a hot pepper guild — two jalapeños, two habaneros in an enormous pot, and they crushed it. I tried to overwinter the pepper plants — and I killed them. Classic.

    This year I went on vacation in late June and never got around to replanting the pot. When I got back, it was overgrown — except one thing was thriving in there on its own: a Thai basil plant, self-seeded from a bucket plant I’d let go to seed the year before. Nobody planted it. It just showed up and took over.

    The overgrown jungle before I touched it—can you see the Thai basil on the left?

    So I ripped everything else out, left the Thai basil where it stood, and planted a store-bought basil plant I’d divided. Mulched the whole thing with dried grass clippings. Then, mostly, left it alone.

    Thai basil isolated and the rest cleared out
    A store-bought overgrown basil plant—cost $6
    The new guild together – Thai basil with its basil buddies
    Dried grass mulch sets up this basil guild nicely

    “Mostly” is doing some work in that sentence. I’ve been pinching the tops and especially the flowers off both plants the whole season. My theory — which may be complete bullshit — is that basil’s basically a weed, and weeds get eaten by wildlife and just push out more growth to compensate. So pinching it is me doing the wildlife’s job. Keeps it vegetative instead of bolting to seed and quitting on me.

    A few days later after the plant had settled in, looking a bit haggard
    Aug 9 and the basil guild is looking beautiful

    Whatever the reason, it worked. The Thai basil came back harder than I expected — I’m honestly still a little shocked it’s there at all — and the divided basil filled in right alongside it. Two completely different flavor profiles sharing one pot, no drama.

    Aug 21 and this basil guild is producing nicely

    I’ve been using it hard this summer — cherry Roma tomato and zucchini braise being the one my wife and I keep coming back to. I’m also trying to figure out an Asian-style pesto for ramen night, alongside a regular one. If I’m growing it, I’m going to use it.

    Freshly picked basil ready to make the zucchini and tomato braise

    Next year? No idea if I run it back the same way or switch it up. But I like how this went, and honestly — this an example of what “being an artist” looks like from where I sit. A pot, an accident, and something worth eating at the end of it.

  • Garlic Bulbils

    Garlic Bulbils

    When I made the decision to “leave a few scapes go to flower,” little did I know that not only could I still use the garlic cloves, but the flower heads would produce these beautiful garlic bulbils.

    Garlic flower full of bulbils

    Here’s the game plan: (freshly researched through Gemini, Claude, vetted by YouTube videos and, well, whatever)

    I keep these in a dry space (my basement cellar should do) until I plant them in late October. It’ll take two years to produce full garlic heads. This is the long game, if Gemini is to be believed.

    Garlic bulbils in my hand

    Also, as an aside, I just learned you can use garlic bulbils in pickles — you don’t even have to peel them. Maybe worth exploring more bulbils for the future.

  • The Great Lacto-Fermented Pickle Experiment Begins

    The Great Lacto-Fermented Pickle Experiment Begins

    Every year it’s the same—I buy a bag of Mucci mini cucumbers from Costco (when they’re under $3, always a good idea in theory) and every year they go soft and sad on the counter before I actually do anything with them. They always end up like this:

    A closeup of a bag of Mucci mini cucumbers from Costco that have started to yellow and rot
    Unfortunately gone rotten despite Mrs Sandemano’s persistent inquiries on what I’m going to do with them.

    This time, no more excuses. Fermented pickles, finally, and a real question to answer while I’m at it: does a fancy Pickle Pipe airlock actually make a difference, or is daily burping just as good?

    So I set up two jars side by side. Same cucumbers, same brine, same everything — except one is a real canning jar that has a proper self-venting Pickle Pipe lid, and the other is a repurposed Putter’s jar with a plain lid that I’ll have to burp by hand. Whichever one wins, I want to actually know. (Also, it has absolutely nothing to do with the ongoing debate with Mrs Sandemano whether we ought to keep my collection of empty jars.)

    The setup (Day 0) :

    • Mucci mini cucumbers, ends trimmed about 1/8”
    Blossom ends of mini cukes?
    • One clove of garlic per jar, and not just any garlic — the first of the season from my own garden.
    A snap of a double bulb of garlic and the scape out of my garden on a black flat electric stovetop
    This is my first ever garlic I grew
    • A big pinch of pickling spice in each jar (scientific measurement: thumb and two fingers, roughly 1 tsp).
    Pickling spice I use this year
    • A few fresh dill fronds.
    A picture of dill from the refrigerator in front of the east facing window showing some are definitely going rotten
    Rescued from a bunch that was on its last legs, after diligently awaiting in the refrigerator for me to finally follow through on this project.
    • Two 1L jars: one repurposed pickle jar with a solid lid, one wide-mouth jar from Walmart that happens to fit a Pickle Pipe perfectly.
    One pickle pipe jar and a repurposed pickle jar

    The brine (and a small math incident) :

    Target was a 2.5% salt brine. I weighed the water from both jars combined: 744g. Then I did the percentage math and got 1.8g—a number so small it looked wrong. I consulted Gemini, and found out it was because I’d added an extra decimal place. No sweat, multiplied the result by 10, landed on 18.6g of pickling salt, rounded up to 19g.

    “Ah yes, precision.”

    —Papa Sandemano


    I dissolved the 19g into the full 744g of water in one bowl, whisking until it went clear, then split it back evenly between the two jars, leaving about 1cm of headspace in each.

    Lids on, jars tucked onto the counter out of direct sun.

    Day 1:

    Curiosity got the better of me, and even now the smell promises something amazing to come.

    Nothing to report yet — no cloudiness, no bubbles, nothing dramatic. Just me, checking on two silent jars like they owe me an update. Stoked. Almost impatient. This is apparently just what fermentation day 1 is: waiting for something to happen while a garlic clove sits there doing absolutely nothing to prove it either.

    Next check-in whenever the brine starts doing something interesting. Which — fingers crossed — should be soon.

  • Garlic Bulbils and Leftover Mint

    Garlic Bulbils and Leftover Mint

    Two things currently sitting on my counter that Mrs. Sandemano keeps bugging me about (and I’m not entirely sure what to do with.)

    The garlic bulbils are from my first year growing garlic, so they’re completely new territory for me. Eat them? Plant them? Pickle them? All of the above?

    And then there’s the eternal problem of buying mint: you need six leaves and somehow come home with a small shrub. It’s so much, I just threw half of it away.

    Compost bin open showing discarded half mint bunch
    Half of the bunch ends up here

    Surely there’s something better to do with the rest than watch it slowly die in the fridge. I’m thinking drinks, sauces, preserving it? Or maybe trying to propagate a few stems so I can stop buying the shit altogether.

    Some already rooting, and the rest for a zucchini salad later

    Experiments forthcoming.

  • Help Papa! You’re this garlic’s only hope!

    Help Papa! You’re this garlic’s only hope!

    Look, let me start off by saying that Hugel (short for hügelkultur—a complex German word that Siri hates) knows abuse in its five years. Last year’s tomatoes produced as much as my neglect could allow. I told myself last October (okay, early November) that the sixteen cloves of garlic would give me a great start. Of course, I neglected it completely, right up until June 19th, when I stood in the yard cutting scapes with one eye on the clock because I had a flight to catch. I made a conscious call not to pull the nettles — I wanted to see what they’d do, maybe forage them eventually.

    Anyway, after a 24 day vacation, I’m not sure what I expected coming back. How would me garlic fare, sir?

    Approaching the gate I did not expect the nettles I’d “eventually harvest” to grow nine feet tall in three and a half weeks. Standing at the gate, all I could think was: did I fuck this up? Again?

    Look at those stinging nettles! They’re like “I didn’t know they grew that fucking tall” tall.

    So, I’m no idiot, I know the Stinging Nettles gotta go, and a quick Gemini check tells me I don’t have to worry, it’s a good thing they’re there because it means Hugel is doing better than I thought. Sure. I’ll go with that. All I’d have to do to rescue that garlic? Just clear six inches around them.

    “Just clear around the garlic?” Hey buddy, can you find it? No sweat right? It’s somewhere in this epic clusterfuck!

    Okay—I had already pulled a garlic bulb a couple days ago, out of curiosity, before I’d even started this whole rescue operation. Now I know the garlic is doing alright in Hugel. But where was it?

    My first garlic—small, a little rounder than expected. I was so excited that I washed
    the dirt off, and trimmed the roots.

    No big deal cleaning out the “Ortiche.” (That’s the Italian word for Stinging Nettles and I’m using it so I can pretend like I’m growing them on purpose.) The good news? Now it was easier to see where that garlic was, they’re almost ready, and if we can save them from being choked out

    There’s garlic falling over in there so we’re on the right track.

    No-grow zone dealt with, less clusterfuck. All I had to do was mercilessly clear around each garlic plant. Oh, and keep some of the good Ortiche so they’ll regrow around Hugel.

    I’m not going to keep the Ortiche that grows along the old wood fence. I need to walk around Hugel.

    While removing the rejected Ortiche, I started thinking of how I learned that family back in Italy pay good money for it, but here I’m getting them for free. Also wild physalis trying its best to overtake everything. I’ve wondered how can I take advantage of both for free food. I had to come up with a plan.

    The plan. Yellow and red = no grow, blue is for Ortiche. I’ll figure out Hugel later.

    Seeing it’s a well-intentioned plan—it’s one-hundred percent “we’ll see.” NGL the progress at this point was enough motivation to tackle the next issue: That garlic needs six inches of cleared area.

    Give that garlic the six inches it so desperately needs!

    With the garlic’s competition weeded out (ahem), I left a couple physalis bushes, and Ortiche stumps. I don’t want to squander free produce, and Gemini has a couple ideas for how to best manage them.

    Bonus! Garlic + Free berries and greens!

    I like to get down to the ground level and give my growing area a good look. I read that we give that garlic six inches clearance so they dry in the heat. Apparently this will harden the bulbs.

    I repeat: Some of them are falling over, which is supposed to be a good sign. 

    I fucked up cutting the scapes—pre-airport haste— and let four go to flower. Apparently they make a pretty flower, and can attract some good pollinators. It’s fascinating to see the bulb sway in the wind. Shouldn’t be too hard to capture on my iPhone.

    No! The BULB! FOCUS ON THE BULB!

    I tried to get in a close-up so you’d see the flower bulb is starting to split. The wind was not cooperating, and this is the best shot.

    Yeah! Maybe if I hold it…COME ON!

    It’s hard to get a decent focus on the flower for this picture, and this was the closest I could get. You can see the tiny little bulbils, even if they are a little out of focus.

    The best focus I can get. Those little structures inside this flower are called bulbils

    These pictures are beautiful enough that I had to send them to Gemini for a deep dive. Now I want to use these bulbils to make even more garlic. I just have to figure out how.

  • Everyone Wants to Use the Same Knife

    Everyone Wants to Use the Same Knife

    While reading (yet another) discussion this week about whether food photos are “real,” I decided it would be way more entertaining to scroll through old Facebook albums.

    That’s when I found this dish from 2009.

    If you think you know what you’re looking at, you’re probably wrong. Keep scrolling.

    Looking at this particular photo brought back a memory I hadn’t thought about in years…

    At the time, I was running my first kitchen as an Executive Sous Chef, effectively acting as Chef de Cuisine under my mentor, the chef who became the Food & Beverage Director.

    Looking back now, I also laugh a little.

    My mentor and I prepared this dish for a food photography session, and everything had to be perfect. 

    Of course there were microgreens. (It was 2009.)

    While we were executing, he turns to me and asks me why I don’t have a nice Japanese knife like all the other cooks. (it would be easier to sashimi the Albacore.)

    Back then, Japanese knives were becoming the thing every cook bought. I remember commenting that I was taught those knives were something you had to earn. Those assholes buy these knifes but can’t even keep them sharp. What a waste of money. 

    Without hesitation, my mentor turned to me, hands me a Japanese knife, and said:

    “Out of everyone in this kitchen, you’re the one who deserves that knife.”

    I don’t remember what knife he handed me, or what brand it was.

    I don’t care—I remember how that moment felt.

    Yeah—the dish was styled. The photos were styled. The restaurant itself was styled. That’s part of hospitality. People don’t just pay for food. They pay for an experience.

    A rule I stubbornly defended: the photo still had to resemble the dish. The guest had to recognize what landed on their table. The goal was never to invent something that wasn’t there — it was to present what was there, at its best.

    Funny enough, that’s what made me think about this dish again.

    The featured image for this post isn’t the original photo. I quickly snapped the photo on my BlackBerry Bold before the plate left the kitchen.

    That BlackBerry gleefully flattened everything — the fish, the colour, the oil, the texture, all turned into the same orange-grey mush. The dish looked better than the camera could handle.

    Modern tools let me restore some of that. Not because the tool is magic — anyone can open the same app. But seventeen years of knowing what that dish was supposed to look like is what told me how far to push it, and where to stop.

    It wasn’t the garnish, or the photography, or even the food that stuck with me. It was the kitchen. The mentor. The curiosity that came with both.

    Same knife. In skilled hands.

    Funny how a seventeen-year-old photo can remind you of the things that actually mattered.

    The original. Taken on a phone that also doubled as a flashlight.
  • So I Bought a Bag of Green Onions at Costco.

    So I Bought a Bag of Green Onions at Costco.

    Look, I’ve bought these before and I’ll buy them again. 24 green onions for $6.99 is a better deal than 3 for 99 cents — you don’t need a Red Seal to do that math.

    The problem? I have a history with green onions. Specifically, a history of turning them into fridge slime before I get any real use out of them.

    So here’s what happened this time.

    I get home from Costco. These things sat on the counter for six hours while I put groceries away, butchered a pork loin, cooked supper, and played Tetris with the fridge. No room. Green onions lose.

    I managed to use some in a “vegan” kimchi Jjigae ramen. Chopped enough for a small container. That’s 2 out of 24.

    The rest? Spent the night on the counter. In the bag. Same bag they came home in. Same bag Costco had refrigerated before I bought them.

    They’rea in the fridge now. Finally. But the clock is ticking and I’ve got 22 green onions staring at me every time I open the door.

    Ever wonder—So what the hell do I do with these before they go sideways?

  • I Got Called Out for Arguing Instead of Building — They Were Right

    I Got Called Out for Arguing Instead of Building — They Were Right

    And why that changes how I use this site from now on.

    I got called out on Threads for arguing instead of building.

    They had a point.

    I’ve been:

    • arguing with people trying to prove they’re wrong
    • breaking down their logic in my head
    • thinking of ways to “show them”

    …and then leaving it there.

    Nothing captured. Nothing built.

    I’ve been doing the hard part—thinking.

    And skipping the part that compounds.

    Giving it all away to Threads.

    It’s draining. And it goes nowhere.

    This isn’t new for me.

    I’ve seen what happens when you focus on the system instead of reacting:

    • Ran a 250-seat terrace with two kitchens
    • Same menu, same execution, high volume
    • Staff included high school kids

    Everyone said it wouldn’t work.

    It did. Because we built a system that could handle pressure.

    I learned this early. Way back in culinary school.

    Chef Bishop never answered questions directly.
    It was always:

    “What do YOU think—and why?”

    If you got it, he’d point to his head:

    “Now you understand.”

    Annoying as hell at the time.

    But that’s the difference between following steps… and actually knowing what you’re doing.

    So here’s the shift:

    Every argument becomes something that lives on my site.

    Not just “who’s right”
    …but what system is behind it

    Papa Sandemano’s isn’t just recipes.

    It’s a kitchen where I break down:

    • why things work
    • where they fail
    • how to actually understand them

    Not just follow steps.

    If you’ve ever followed instructions and still messed it up—
    it’s not you.

    You just weren’t shown the system.

    Stick around.

  • Sure—skip the apprenticeship. Your tools won’t hide it

    Sure—skip the apprenticeship. Your tools won’t hide it

    Part of: Papa’s Sparks

    GET TO THE POINT PAPA—JUST GIVE ME THE IDEA:

    Tools don’t replace experience—they show it.

    You can know the recipe and still ruin the dish.

    That gap? That’s experience.

    That’s apprenticeship.

    Chef’s office—after shift (uh oh)

    My heart is pounding when I open the door and walk into the office. My sous chef is sitting behind his desk.

    He points to the chair, and says, “Sit.”

    He doesn’t raise his voice right away.

    “Tell me why you put whole peppercorns in the marinade.”

    Just looks at me.

    I’m explaining. Confident. Logical. Already halfway through justifying it.

    I strained the peppercorns. No big deal. Chicken tastes better this way.

    I think I’m being smart.

    He cuts me off.

    “Shut the fuck up.”

    And just like that, I realize I’m not being smart.

    Because I’m thinking about the one time I do it right.

    I’m not thinking about the system.

    The one time someone forgets to strain the peppercorns.
    The one guest who bites down on that peppercorn.
    The one mistake that doesn’t get a second chance.

    I knew what to do.

    I just didn’t understand why it had to be done that way.

    I’m being dangerous.

    And that’s the difference.

    Knowing how something works isn’t the same as knowing how to use it.

    I could execute—but I didn’t understand the system, so I got it wrong.

    That’s knowledge you earn through experience.

    That’s apprenticeship.

    That’s why I’m not apprehensive about AI.

    I’m proof that knowing how something is done doesn’t mean you know how to do it properly.

    That part is earned.

    AI doesn’t replace skill.

    It reveals it.

    You can have the recipe and still ruin the dish. Or someone’s teeth. Or your own.

    You can skip the apprenticeship, but your tools won’t hide it.

  • Chili Test #1: Replacing Cayenne with Home-Dried Jalapeños

    Chili Test #1: Replacing Cayenne with Home-Dried Jalapeños

    I had a hankering to make chili.

    Didn’t have chili powder.
    Didn’t have cayenne.
    Didn’t feel like buying cayenne.

    But I did have a couple jars of dried jalapeños from last summer.

    Dried jalapeños from Grove 2025

    (See: Grew These)

    So instead of grabbing a store blend, I built my usual chili powder…
    and swapped the cayenne for my own ground jalapeños.

    Now… the problem.

    My wife has a very different definition of “medium.”

    Costco salsa? Too spicy.
    She powers through it… but I hear about it.

    History suggests this swap was a risky decision.

    Anyway, here’s what I did:

    Used about 1 1/2 peppers:

    • some with seeds
    • some without

    First I tried using a mortar and pestle to grind them…

    Useless, no thanks, IKEA!

    Then I got fed up and finished it in a busted coffee grinder.

    What? I refuse to throw it out. It’s still good!

    Mixed, it looked rougher than my usual chili powder…

    Flavoured with the jalapeños I grew, dried, and ground myself.

    Which felt like a great idea at the time.

    Result:

    Medium heat.
    Nice warmth, not overpowering.
    Well, at least not for me.

    But the Food Critics’ verdict?

    Okay… yeah. It’s got bite.

    This is what I’m trying to figure out:

    • How much do the seeds actually matter?
    • How does grind size affect it?
    • How does this compare to store-bought chili powder?

    The goal here isn’t just to make chili powder.

    It’s to understand what the peppers I grow actually do in a dish.

    This is the start.

    Next test:

    • Remove jalapeños from the spice mix and cook them whole with the beans.
    • All seeds vs no seeds.
    • Toasted vs not toasted.
    • Maybe bring in some chipotle powder to round it out.