Star-Telegram Staff Writer, food editor
The Outlaw Chef has a lot of branding irons in the fire these days.
Terry Chandler is working on a couple of cookbooks, teaching the occasional cooking class at Central Market and waiting to hear whether the footage that a New York talent director filmed of him will spark enough interest to make him a TV cook.
He'll cook you gourmet grub on the river or range for a fishing or hunting adventure, he'll cater your wedding cowboy-style, and he's thinking about launching an online corporate-catering venture.
Bearded and bandannaed, pigtailed and pleasingly portly, red-cheeked and usually smiling, Chandler is one of the city's most visible characters. You'll see him in vintage cowboy garb, cooking at fundraisers, cowboy gatherings and catered events around the region.
But he's most likely to be found at his own joint: Fred's Texas Cafe, the venerable little dive loved by lawyers and slackers, brokers and bikers, where Chandler turns out the likes of smoked quail with a reduction of red wine and chile de arbol along with the burgers and fries.
Fred's is going to have to do without him for the next five or six weeks, though. This week, the 41-year-old Chandler embarks on his first extended job on a working ranch -- the storied Four Sixes, established in 1870 by Samuel Burk Burnett and still running thousands of head of cattle on a quarter-million acres between Lubbock and Wichita Falls.
He has done brief guest-cooking gigs on some of the big ranches around the state, but "this is the real deal," Chandler says. He'll be the wagon cook for the Four Sixes cowboys for a month-and-a-half when they round up and work the cattle, he says.
When the roundup's over, Chandler figures, "I'll have my Ph.D. in chuck-wagon cooking."
BEFORE COWBOY WAS COOL
Chandler comes from a family of cowboys who worked on Texas ranches -- "the Matador, the Pitchfork, the Four Sixes, the Spur Ranch." "My grandma did a little bit of cooking on the Pitchfork," he says, and one of his childhood memories is family reunions in West Texas where his uncle Guy Goen, "a renowned chuck-wagon cook, would cook for the whole family."
"He had an International Harvester pickup with a chuck box on the back," Chandler recalls. Goen did his cooking over a 20-yard-long ditch; "he'd build a mother fire at one end and shovel coals into the ditch and cook over it."
But Chandler had no childhood ambitions of being a cowboy cook, or a chef of any sort. Although he started cooking young, "I just cooked because I liked to eat."
Nor did young Terry, when his father, J.D. Chandler, became the proprietor of Fred's 30 years ago, harbor any dreams of cooking there.
In 1986, Chandler joined the Marine Corps to get away: "I was going to go see the world and be gone," he says. "I didn't want to work here." By 1990, Chandler was back in Fort Worth, with a job in his dad's kitchen. He kept on seeing the world, though. "I was into traveling and eating food and bringing it back. I'd twist it and make it my own and serve it here," he says. He started creating dinner specials, and flavors from Vietnam, Thailand or Mexico began showing up at Fred's alongside chicken-fried steak.
Then Grady Spears came to town to open Reata, and suddenly cowboy cooking was cool.
"I said, 'Man, people are buying this,'" Chandler recalls with a grin. "And I really know how to do this. I'm the real deal." Chandler began researching cowboy cooking, working on recipes. He made trips to West Texas to cook on his cousins' chuck wagon, and he hooked up with the Ought Zero Land & Cattle Co., which owns a chuck wagon from the late 1800s. The Outlaw Chef was born.
FUEL FOR THE RANGE
For the next few weeks, Chandler will be using the Four Sixes wagon -- not the Ought Zero -- cooking with fire and propane, cast-iron Dutch ovens and enameled pots; the cowhands will get three meals a day. Breakfast starts at 4:30 a.m., pretty early for someone who owns a bar. The wranglers eat first, he says, and while they're catching the horses for the day's work, the other cowboys get their breakfast. There'll be eggs, bacon, biscuits made from the sourdough starter he maintains at Fred's. "I'll change it up; next day, I'll have breakfast tacos, or sausage and pancakes."
In the mornings, the cowboys will be rounding up the cattle and penning them, he says; after the midday meal, which is called dinner on the ranch, they'll work with the penned cattle -- "immunize, doctor, catalog, brand, dehorn, wean, separate, castrate."
For dinner, Chandler says, "I might do fried potatoes, smothered steak, green beans, cucumber salad and sweet tea -- sweet tea's a big deal on the wagon. "You have to have some kind of dessert every meal," he adds. The chuck-wagon job "goes beyond a cook," Chandler says. "You are responsible for the morale of the whole outfit. You've got to make it fun. You can't keep morale up with creamed corn and oatmeal."
He won't be doing the spicy specials he's known for at Fred's, though: "You don't like to surprise your system with exotic foods when you're in the saddle all day," he says with a certain delicacy. "It'll be basic cowboy food," he says. "High-carb, high-protein, high-fat.
"Everything that a supermodel would shun, a cowboy uses for fuel. And they're both just as skinny."
A 'BADGE OF HONOR'
Although Chandler has had experience cooking for cowboys -- "I've worked on every major ranch in the area," he says -- it hasn't been on a day-in, day-out basis. In chuck-wagon circles, this is a job that counts as a major badge of honor. "For the Four Sixes to invite him to do that -- they've done their checking, and he's passed," says chuck-wagon authority Tom Perini, owner of the Perini Ranch Steakhouse in Buffalo Gap and author of Texas Cowboy Cooking (Comanche Moon Publishing, $24.95).
"Big ranches like that are very particular about who does their cooking," he says.
"There are a lot of chuck-wagon cooks who do these competitions, and they may be good cooks, but it's different" cooking three meals a day for working cowhands, Perini emphasized. "Cowboys are hard-working people, and when they come in, they're hungry."
FRED'S TO STAY FUNKY
Chandler's absence from Fred's may fuel the rumors that it could fall victim to the rush of high-end development all around it. What was once a somewhat gritty industrial area a couple of blocks south of Seventh Street on the eastern fringe of the museum district has become hot property. Chandler, however, takes pains to dispel the rumors: Fred's will remain right where it is, thank you.
Don't expect it to stay preserved in amber, though. Chandler doesn't want the place to lose its raffish soul, but "I can't pass up an opportunity when it knocks, either."
He says he's planning "to totally enclose the patio and go full liquor [service]."
But "we'll keep Fred's, Fred's," he vows. "Fred's isn't the building; it's the people that walk through the door and the people that work here. They'll still be here."
VEGGIES WITH GOAT CHEESE
Chandler doesn't give exact cooking times for the vegetables because "every fire is different."
Serves 6-8
1/2 red onion
1 large portobello mushroom
2 ears sweet corn
1 yellow squash
1 zucchini
12 asparagus spears
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
Salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup marinara sauce
1 teaspoon dark ground chile (not chili powder)
1/2 pound goat cheese
1. Build a hot fire in a grill.
2. Prep the vegetables: Skin the onion and cut off the ends. Slice the onion into rings about 1/2-inch thick, being careful not to break up the slices, keeping them a solid disk as much as possible. Cut the stalk off the mushroom level with the gills. Peel the husk from the corn. Cut the ends off the squashes and quarter them lengthwise. Cut the white part off the bottom of the asparagus stalks.
3. Drizzle about a tablespoon of olive oil over the onions, corn, squash and asparagus and season them with a little salt and pepper. Toss the vegetables a little to distribute the oil; not too hard, though, or you'll tear the heads off the asparagus. Drizzle a fair amount of oil into the gills (the underside) of the mushroom cap. Now rub in some oil on the top and salt and pepper the mushroom.
4. Place the vegetables over the hot fire in this order: the onions and mushrooms, the corn, the squashes and lastly the asparagus. The mushroom should be over the hottest part of the fire, gills down (right-side up). As the mushroom cooks, it will start to wrinkle at the edges. These wrinkle rings will start to make their way to the center of the mushroom as it cooks. When there is a spot in the center about the size of a quarter with no wrinkles yet, it's ready to flip; flip and cook for about 20 seconds more -- no more -- and remove from the fire.
5. For the other vegetables, char them well. Don't be afraid to get a little color on 'em. Use a good hot fire. Too cold a fire, and the vegetables will turn to mush and have no color. You want them al dente in the middle and charred on the outside. The asparagus should be cooked very briefly; you just have to show it the fire and it's done.
6. When the vegetables are charred, remove them from the grill and cut the corn from the cob. Cut the other veggies up a little bigger than a dice. Mix them up in a bowl with the marinara sauce and the ground chile and place in a Dutch oven or a cast-iron skillet. If cooking in a conventional oven, use a casserole dish if you don't have a skillet.
7. Now spread the goat cheese over the top. I just pinch off pieces of cheese into little balls and drop 'em on top. It's prettier, as you can see all the colors in between the cheese. Now brown the cheese on the top ever so slightly, and it's done. When I use traditional Dutch ovens, I only put coals on the lid. In a household oven, I use the broil setting.
Nutritional analysis per serving, based on 6: 316 calories, 24 grams fat, 14 grams carbohydrates, 15 grams protein, 40 milligrams cholesterol, 225 milligrams sodium, 3 grams dietary fiber, 65 percent of calories from fat.
BLUE CHEESE-GARLIC MASHED POTATOES
Serves 6-8
8 good-sized potatoes of your choice (at least baseball-size; use more if they are small)
12 cloves fresh garlic
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup crema Mexicana (Mexican-style sour cream)
1/4 pound (1 stick) butter, melted
1/2 cup blue cheese crumbles
Salt and pepper to taste
1. Peel the potatoes, cut them into cubes of about 2 inches, place them in a cooking pot, cover them with water and put them on to boil.
2. Place the garlic in an 8-inch skillet or saute pan with the olive oil and simmer the garlic cloves slowly, until they are mushy. Don't brown them or they will be bitter.
3. When the potatoes come to a rapid boil they should be done, or pretty close to it. Don't overboil the potatoes or they will be grainy and runny. Drain off the water.
4. Mush the garlic up a little with a fork and throw it and all the remaining ingredients in over the potatoes. Now mash them with a masher. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Nutritional analysis per serving, based on 6: 481 calories, 41 grams fat, 25 grams carbohydrates, 6 grams protein, 58 milligrams cholesterol, 332 milligrams sodium, 2 grams dietary fiber, 75 percent of calories from fat.
Fort Worth Star Telegram
May 26, 2008
