Legendary audio engineer (don't call him a producer) and Shellac frontman Steve Albini eschews name-brand technology in the studio, despises digital. He's analog; this is common knowledge, championing the visceral over the virtual. As a stalwart traditionalist, he's as uncompromising in his opinions on music as he is about food. At the end of March, he started (or, as it's been revealed, wifey Heather started) a food blog to chronicle the dishes he serves her, as told in the canon of famed chef Mario Batali. The blog, mariobatalivoice, encapsulates the Albini tenets of good eating: to forgo the use of any extraneous ingredients or instruments and to respect the craft. Hell, he can spin gold out of copper coil; how hard can it be to eyeball olive oil and egg yolk to perfection? He spoke with us to discuss his stance on food, and though he finds no correlation between his cooking process and sound recording, there's something to be said about a man whose treble crunch is as fundamentally simple yet compelling as the culinary craft he's taken on.
What spurred the idea to document everything you cook for Heather on mariobatalivoice?
It came about in a kind of organic way. When I would make her dinner, she'd take a picture of the plate of food and post it on her Facebook account. And then I started adding in the comments section in her photos a description of what I had made her in a kind of mimic of the way Mario Batali would present his food on his TV shows. That's the way I would bring it to her. I would present the food to her and describe it, mimicking Mario Batali's voice. So on her Facebook page, I started using a little HTML tag to close the comments to signify that I was shutting off the Mario Batali voice. So it would be like "bracket slash Mario Batali voice bracket". It was basically an inside joke. I would imitate Mario Batali when I was presenting her the food, and then she started the blog one day. I don't really know why. Just as a place to take pictures of all the food I'd been making her. In almost every way, my wife is responsible for me having a food blog. This gives me an excuse to write a more detailed descriptions of the food I've been making for her.
And you skew more towards Italian foods; is it the Batali influence? What's with all the Italian food?
My heritage is Italian, and most of the foods I had when I was a kid growing up were Italian, so I see food through an Italian food lens. And also, pasta is just really versatile, very quick to prepare. Most of the time, I have to make a meal fairly quickly or, at the very least, I'm making a meal at the end of the day to feed both of us, and I don't want to drag the process out. I also just feel like there's a lot of room to work with pasta; all the different shapes of pasta have different utility. I don't feel like there's anything you couldn't do with pasta. You can make a soup or a dessert or a main course or a salad or almost anything. And I can serve it immediately as opposed to stuff that requires any preparation.
And you don't own any cooking tools; you just eyeball everything?
Yeah, I don't really own any measuring equipment. I suppose somewhere in the bowels of the kitchen there are probably a set of teaspoons or measuring cups that somebody sent me as a Christmas present, but I've never used them...
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