More from our conversation with Eleven Eleven Mississippi’s Carl Hazel

In this month’s Five Questions column (page 50), we spoke with Carl Hazel, who left his post at The Scottish Arms to head up the kitchen at Eleven Eleven Mississippi earlier this year, about suckling pigs, venison and one very strange family tradition. Here, in the full interview, Hazel talks more about the changes he’s making at Eleven Eleven, his favorite ingredient to work with and his new Thursday night routine. What changes have you made at Eleven Eleven thus far? Taking the menu we had and tweaking some things and trying to elevate the cuisine *=(which was good, but we’re always trying to improve) a little at a time so we don’t shock our regular customers. We do a porchetta every Friday and Saturday night: a whole, young, suckling pig, boned-out and cured and roasted whole. When I came on board, I slowed that down to take care during the curing process. We’ve tweaked a few sauces to do them in a slower, more traditional, Old World fashion. We eliminated dried pasta – now we make all our own fresh pasta, which goes hand-in-hand with the bread we bake fresh here every day. Italian Tuscan food is Old World food, and [Tuscans] take great pride in their methods and taking time to render things down and build flavor profiles back into things. The Tuscan style seems to be rustic, simple and healthy. Which is great. For quite a few years I’ve been into the Slow Food Movement and supporting local foods and local farmers. The ability to use light, fresh, local ingredients is great. The less processed food, the better. It’s healthier. What are some ingredients you’re enjoying using now? Since I’ve gotten back into the Mediterranean thing, I’ve started working again with fennel pollen, saffron, phyllo pastry, katifi – which is basically shredded phyllo, couscous and farro. Is there an ingredient you find yourself going back to again and again? It’s got to be pork. I like to do pâtés and terrines. We’ll save our heads from the porchetta hogs until we have four in the freezer and do a nice headcheese or a pulled-pork-head terrine. Pork fat is something that I think is really, really awesome. You can do so much with it. The amount of fat in a dish, that balance, can make or break it. You grew up on a farm, right? Yes, in southeast Missouri, just outside Cape Girardeau. We raised soybeans, and we always had a couple of hogs, ducks and geese running around. The biggest thing I took away is that work ethic, to not be lazy. I didn’t have the conveniences a lot of my friends in town had, like being five minutes from the mall or the skate park or whatever. I learned the value of work and how to entertain myself. I could jump out in the creek and do fishing and canoeing. I would go hunting. A lot of my fun was more solitary. Did hunting wind up helping you later, as a chef? You do kind of get a sense with game animals, which we’re doing a bit at Eleven Eleven, what the animal’s habitat is, its diet, its habits. And that gives you something to draw from when you’re doing recipes and pairings. You know that venison was once eating berries, hanging out at the edge of the cornfield, etc. You know what works regionally, too – the venison from Missouri and Arkansas [are] different from the venison of the Pacific Northwest, as far as what they eat and the marbling, for instance. It helps with flavor profiles. Tell us about what you’re doing on Thursday nights at Eleven Eleven. Every Thursday, we have a Wild Game Trio, where our culinary staff will feature a three-course dinner. We’re looking at doing some bison short ribs. We’ll probably also do some rabbit and pheasant. Last week we had some wild-boar loin and some elk. People have begun to get into it. Do you have any fun or unusual kitchen rituals? Well, there’s the 4:30 p.m. pounding of the Red Bull or a quad-shot of espresso to get the juices flowing again and get ready for a big night of service. What’s your end-of-the-night drink? Always a neat shot of vodka, and sometimes a cold beer to chase that down with. What do you like to do in your spare time, away from the restaurant? My wife and I garden quite a bit. We have a pretty large garden at home. That’s a nice, relaxing, Zen-like hobby, and you get inspired by fresh ingredients. Every morning, it’s a cup of espresso and a cigarette in the garden and then tending to my pepper plants or whatever. My wife is a vegetarian, so I get my fill of red meats at work, and on our days off, my goal is to use the garden to avoid the expense of eating. So we’ll do like a salad for lunch and then a fish with slaw or relish made from ingredients from the garden for dinner. What are some of your favorite things about St. Louis? Culture and food. There are so many different things you can do here, as far as restaurants -- Mediterranean, French, Italian, African, South American … Yemanja Brasil is a great little place, for instance. People where I’m from have no idea of all the things that are accessible here. We really take it for granted. My wife and I also love the zoo and letting the dog run in a park while we hike. Any quirky hobbies of note? I have just recently started collecting old copies of The Joy of Cooking. You find them at garage and estate sales. I just found one from 1968. I enjoy digging into older versions of the culinary world. You flip through them and you find a little note that someone put beside a recipe, how a woman thought she could improve it – that’s cool. Describe your wildest moment in the kitchen. My first big disaster as a young line cook happened when I was changing out a fryer, and I had my hot oil in a big stockpot, and I filled it back up with cleaning solution, and I wasn’t thinking and I dumped the cleaning solution into the pot of hot oil and it exploded all over the kitchen. It cleared the whole line out. Of course this was at 4 p.m. in the summer and we were getting ready for a big service. We just had to wait for it to stop bubbling over and then clean it up. What’s your favorite pizza at Eleven Eleven? The poached pear and fig. You’re at a Paul Hamilton restaurant now. Is there any trade of ideas with the staff at his other joints, Vin de Set and PW Pizza? I do check the Vin de Set menu to make sure we’re not overlapping, and Paul and I discuss menu development, of course. We also work together sometimes on special events, like a booth at a big fundraising party. What was your favorite food growing up that mom made? My family was always really big on sausage gravy. My great, great grandfather came west on a horse and buggy, and the family has an old photo of him, and on the back is a recipe for sausage gravy. My family has always eaten it over cantaloupe. I can’t get behind that combo, but at every major function in the Hazel family, there is fresh, sliced cantaloupe with sausage gravy. Now, melon and prosciutto works, with the fruit and the saltiness, but this is just the weirdest thing, and my whole family loves it. I promise you will never see it anywhere else.