April 2019 Feast Magazine by Feast Magazine

Inspired Local Food Culture

midwest

april 2019

PATIO ALERT The Garden Patio at Katie's is Now Open! ROCK HILL TOWN+COUNTRY 2

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9568 Manchester Road, St. Louis, MO 63119 • (314) 942-6555 14171 Clay ton Road, Town and Country, MO 63017 • (636) 220-3238 katiespizzaandpasta.com

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AnnuAl wine beer & spiritsociAl TaSTES FROM:

g ET TS E k c i T nOw!

Adam’s Smokehouse Barcelona Tapas Restaurant BEAST Craft BBQ Cleveland-Heath Favazza’s Lacelles Granite City Bistro LoRusso’s Cucina The Last Hotel The Stellar Hog Three Sixty & many more

Sunday, May 19

General Admission 2 to 5pm VIP after-party 5 to 7pm

FOuR SEaSOnS, 6th floor 999 n. Second St., St. Louis $40 Regular General Admission $85 Vip GA and After-Party TOaSTS FROM: 4 Hands Brewing Co. Chaumette Vineyards & Winery Cooper’s Hawk Winery Ketel One Korbel LaChance Vineyards Montelle Winery Perennial Artisan Ales Pinckney Bend Distillery Sonoma-Cutrer Schlafly Beer Snow Leopard Vodka Urban Chestnut Brewing Co. & many more!

For more information: biT.Ly/TaSTE-TOaST

Inspired Local Food Culture /

midwest

april

2019

Volume 9 / Issue 4 contributors

Vice President of Niche Publishing, Publisher of Feast Magazine

Catherine Neville, publisher@feastmagazine.com

jason dailey

sales

ART

project manager

Art Director

Michele Russo, sales@feastmagazine.com 314.475.1297

Alexandrea Povis, apovis@feastmagazine.com

account manager, Kansas City Region

Kelly Glueck, kglueck@feastmagazine.com

Morgan Cook, mcook@feastmagazine.com 417.619.0131

Contributing Photographers

in either 50-pound bags or 2,000-pound containers. Great Plains Custom Grains [products] make fantastic

Liz Miller, editor@feastmagazine.com

Michael Allen, Zach Bauman, Neil Burger, Julia Calleo, Tessa Cooper, Jason Dailey, Judd Demaline, Dean Groover, Travis Howard, Mark Neuenschwander, Aaron Ottis, Spencer Pernikoff, Anna Petrow, Drew Piester, Elaine Rohde, Madison Stringfellow, Jennifer Silverberg, Starboard & Port Creative, Mabel Suen

Managing Editor

Contributing illustrators

Kansas City, Photographer “Starting on a cold day in Wellsville, Kansas, [was a challenge]; when beautiful landscapes aren’t available,

production designer

special projects Editor

Bethany Christo, bchristo@feastmagazine.com

EDITORIAL Editor in chief

Nancy Stiles, nstiles@feastmagazine.com

Tyler Gross and Michelle Nahmad

Digital director

FEAST TV

you gotta get creative with whatever is on hand. What I now know: Grains for beer and spirits are delivered

beer and spirits, a difference you can taste right away. There's a sense of pride in using Kansas crops to help create magnificent products [like the ones] at Blind Tiger Brewery [& Restaurant] and Lifted Spirits distillery." (Field to Fermentation, p. 61)

Shannon weber St. Louis, Writer "I love the food-geek vibe of Crash Course. There’s just

Heather Riske, web@feastmagazine.com

producer: Catherine Neville

Kansas City Contributing Editor

production partner: Tybee Studios

Jenny Vergara

St. Louis Contributing Editor

Mabel Suen

Feast Media, 8811 Ladue Road, Suite D, Ladue, MO 63124 314.475.1260, feastmagazine.com

fact checker

Rose Hansen

something about taking a standard, everyday thing and breaking it down to give you a whole new appreciation for something that you maybe otherwise wouldn’t think twice about that I gravitate toward. I’ve baked bread for years, and have a decent amount of confidence about it, but researching this month’s article really took what I knew about the process and art behind it to the next level. There’s something for everyone here: If you’re intimidated by bread, hopefully this helps you conquer that fear so you can get started. If you’re an experienced

Proofreader

Distribution

Erica Hunzinger Contributing Writers

Christy Augustin, Julia Calleo, Tessa Cooper, Gabrielle DeMichele, Amanda Elliott, Natalie Gallagher, Juliana Goodwin, Hilary Hedges, Rogan Howitt, Justin Phelps, Lillian Stone, Jenn Tosatto, Shannon Weber

To distribute Feast Magazine at your place of business, please contact Eric Freeman for St. Louis, Jefferson City, Columbia, Rolla and Springfield at efreeman@post-dispatch.com and Jason Green for Kansas City at distribution@pds-kc.com.

baker, I hope this will inspire you to branch out and explore different methods and techniques – something I plan to do in the near future." (Crash Course, p. 44)

tyler gross St. Louis, Illustrator “Working on this full-page illustration was super fun. Art director Alex Povis had a tight vision for the concept and composition, so I just focused my energy on executing a mean-looking tornado, some tasty textures and a scared little tractor."

Feast Magazine does not accept unsolicited manuscripts, photographs or artwork. Submissions will not be returned. All contents are copyright © 2010-2019 by Feast Magazine™. All rights reserved. Reproduction or use in whole or in part of the contents, without the prior written permission of the publisher, is strictly prohibited. Produced by the Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis, LLC.

(A Step In The Rice Direction, p. 54)

Lillian stone Springfield, Missouri, Writer “As a college student in Springfield, Missouri, I hid from mountains of journalism coursework in Commercial Street's dusty thrift shops and quirky eateries. Now, a few years later, I realize that those urban explorations gave me a front-row seat to C-Street's revitalization. It's one of my favorite districts in the city for a lot of reasons, but the diverse food scene is at

on the cover Great Plains Custom Grain by Jason Dailey table of contents Go Out: Farina in Kansas City by Anna Petrow; Stay In: Midwest-made granola by Judd Demaline; Features: Josh Galliano of Companion holding an oatmeal-porridge loaf made with Brian Severson Farms' rolled oats and whole-wheat flour by Spencer Pernikoff

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the top of the list. Working on this story allowed me to revisit creative concepts like That Lebanese Place and Cafe Cusco, which have broadened the local dining scene. It also let me reflect on spots like Pizza House and Big Momma’s – cultural touchstones for Springfield natives like me.” (Hot Blocks, p. 22)

Go Out

Stay In

/ 15 /

/ 13 /

DINE & DRINK 808 Maison, Rhone Rum Bar, Great Escape Beer Works, The Cheesecake Ninja, Ni Hao Fresh, Farina, Agave Neighborhood Grill & Bar

/ 16 / On TREND Brewing with spelt / 17 / one on one Tony Saputo of The Midwestern Meat & Drink / 18 / SHOP HERE Tantara Farms / 20 / one on one Alex Pope of Local Pig and Pigwich / 22 / HOT BLOCKS Commercial Street in Springfield, Missouri / 24 / HOMETOWN HITS Ashley's Apple Basket Cafe, Chicken Annie's Original, Bistro Saffron / 25 / one on one Lacy Adamson of Maritime

Features

/ 32 /

/ 27 / sweet ideas Lemon-cornmeal shortbread / 28 / how-to Risotto / 30 / the mix Rhubarb & Bubbles / 32 / midwest made Local granola / 34 / mystery shopper Job's Tears / 36 / the dish Farro-quinoa grain bowl with roasted mushrooms and scallion aĂŻoli / 38 / one on one Kyle Claypool of Lifted Spirits / 40 / healthy appetite Coconut-pomegranate overnight kasha / 41 / culinary library Craig Crosby of The Artisan's Oven / 42 / quick fix Stuffed grape leaves with pomegranate molasses / 44 / crash course Bread basics

/ 66 /

54 61 66

a step in the rice direction After a devastating tornado, McKaskle Family Farm rebuilt into the only organic rice producer in Missouri.

field to fermentation In Wellsville, Kansas, Great Plains Custom Grain grows wheat, barley and corn used to make some of your favorite local beers and spirits.

back to the grindstone At Brian Severson Farms, heirloom wheat, oats, blue corn and other grains are grown organically and stone-ground into nutritious flours and cornmeal.

In Every Issue / 8 / from the PUBLISHER Local grains / 9 / events / 10 / feast tv Frozen Assets / 74 / back burner

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Letter

from the

Publisher

hen you pick up a bag of flour at the grocery store, do you ever stop to think about where – and how – that wheat was grown? So many of the staple items we consume, from sandwich bread to crackers to cereal, are made with grain, and yet most consumers don’t think about where that grain comes from. Grains, wheat in particular, are grown in great abundance by farmers who sell into the commodity market for whatever price the market allows. As with other commodity items, like dairy, grain farmers who grow within the industrialized system are beginning to look at ways to diversify their crops and create value-added products. They’re experimenting with heirloom varieties, milling their own flour and grits on-site, creating direct relationships with chefs and consumers. In other words, local grains are making a comeback.

In the Great Grains episode of Feast TV, I visited Martin Rice Co., a multi-generation rice farm in Missouri’s Bootheel region. You’ll find the video in the Feast TV section of feastmagazine.com.

This issue is dedicated to grain, from rice and wheat to hulless oats. Editor-in-chief Liz Miller is well known (around the office, anyway) for her love of savory oatmeal. So of course, when she visited the Severson family in Dwight, Illinois, to profile their organic grain farm, she was eager to try their hulless oats. These oats, unlike the grocery-store variety that is steamed to remove the hull, naturally shed their hull, allowing the bran to remain intact. When Liz made a bowl of Brian Severson Farms’ oatmeal, it was rich, nutty and complex … A far cry from the instant stuff that comes out of a package. And that’s just one of the diverse grains that the Seversons grows. Turn to p. 66 to meet this farm family and get to know their grains.

We round out our grain issue with a look at Great Plains Custom Grain’s impact on the craft beer and spirits industry (p. 61). In the Kansas City area, the company is working directly with brewers and distillers to offer heirloom corn, wheat, millet and barley. These relationships are helping to support a local grain economy, something we lost many, many years ago as our food system industrialized. Today, these direct relationships between growers and producers are helping to create business opportunities for small farmers and better, more exciting varieties of grain to bake into bread, pop into popcorn and ferment into beer. Cheers!

And did you know that Missouri is a leading rice producer? It’s true. Down in the Bootheel, farmers plant acres upon acres of rice in a part of the state that once was home to forests and swamps. After McKaskle Family Farm was destroyed by a tornado back in 2006, the once-organic cotton operation was transformed into the state’s only organic rice farm. Sold under the Braggadocio label, the McKaskles sell 11 products including brown and white basmati rice, rice flour, popcorn, polenta and white corn grits. Turn to p. 54 for managing editor Nancy Stiles’ profile.

Until next time,

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Catherine Neville

publisher@feastmagazine.com

Fr om fo od fe st ival s + to re gi on al fo od , gs in st Dr in k ta pl an th e mo nt hs ah ea d w it h fe as t

CALENDAR STL | 4/24 Schnucks Cooks: Stuffed Grape Leaves With Pomegranate Molasses Wed., April 24, 6 to 9pm; $45; Schnucks Cooks Cooking School, 12332 Manchester Road, Des Peres, Missouri; 314.909.1704; nourish.schnucks.com/ schnucks-cooking-school

In this class, you’ll learn how to make fattoush, a hearty Lebanese bread salad with mixed greens and vegetables. You’ll also learn how to season chicken with sumac, which has a tangy, lemony flavor.

�

mo | 4/27 Taste of Tanglefoot Sat., April 27, 6 to 11pm; $25; along Main Street, Festus, Missouri; 636.543.3341 or 636.937.3738; facebook.com/events/489200181575808

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Tickets are on sale now for the first-ever Taste of Tanglefoot! Along Main Street in Festus, Missouri, revelers can spend the night tasting some of the finest food and drink from local Twin City-area restaurants, perusing and purchasing art from local artists, and enjoying music from two bands: Naked Rock Fight and Dawn and the Electro Funk Assembly.

STL | 5/19 Taste & Toast Sun., May 19, 2 to 5pm, 5 to 7pm after-party; $40 GA, $85 VIP; Four Seasons Hotel St. Louis, sixth floor, 999 N. Second St., Downtown, St. Louis; bit.ly/taste-toast

Celebrate the best of the Midwest at the fifth-annual Feast Magazine Taste & Toast! Guests will taste from award-winning wineries, breweries and distilleries from across the region, sample dishes from top area restaurants, enjoy live music, interact with local vendors and more, all inside the Four Seasons Hotel St. Louis. VIP includes free valet parking, Champagne upon entry and an exclusive after-party with live music, a dessert bar and exclusive drink offerings.

FOREST PARK | MAY3 & 4, 2019 SAMPLE OVER 600 BEERS FROM 125+ CRAFT BREWERIES

BENEFITING

LIVE MUSIC • FOOD VENDORS

HELPING CITY YOUTH FOR

VIP TENT • HOMEBREW CLUBS

LIFT FOR BREWER OLYMPICS LIFE GYM DEMONSTRATION TENT 31 YEARS

Tickets Available @

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episode: frozen assets Check your local listings

to watch feast tv on these networks:

Sweet frozen treats are a hallmark of summertime fun, and this episode will give you a taste of everything from snow cones to ice cream. Host Cat Neville’s first stop is at The Soda Fountain, which serves up old-fashioned favorites from a 1940s soda fountain. Another flavor that defines summer comes from Rio Syrup. If you’ve ever had a snow cone, you’ve probably had Rio Syrup drizzled on top, and the bright, sweet syrup is made by a family in a small building in St. Louis. Of course we have to dig into some ice cream in this episode, but Cat’s next stop isn’t to just any ice-cream counter. She heads to Kansas City to check out the Mexican ice cream and ice pops from Paleterias Tropicana, and then wraps up the episode in the kitchen making ice pops of her own.

feast tv

is brought to you by the generous support of our sponsors: 10

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Missouri Wines supports the more than 125 wineries operating in the state and is focused on promoting the industry’s growth and vitality.

Kaldi’s Coffee Roasting Co. is dedicated to creating a memorable coffee experience for customers and guests via sustainable practices and education.

Ole Tyme Produce provides some of the finest produce in the St. Louis region, serving restaurants, hotels, food service and catering companies.

The Raphael Hotel is Feast’s official hotel, offering luxury accommodations and dining near Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza.

boundary / basso

Upscale comfort food, close to home. Enjoy our wide selection of lunch and dinner menu items HAPPY HOUR MON.-FRI. 3 TO 6 PM

LasceLLes

1324 NiedriNghaus ave., Granite City, illinois • 618.709.7375

lascellesgc.com

neW Menu aT basso and boundary Executive chef Nick Blue has created upscale yet relatable menus for the restaurants. WriTTen by beThany ChrisTo

The firelit Boundary and Basso spaces set the scene for your dining experience. Executive chef Nick Blue has reworked the menus to serve cozy, comforting American food that is familiar yet features high-end twists from his time in restaurant kitchens ranging from fine dining (Niche, Sardella, Blackbird in Chicago) to barbecue (Sugarfire Smoke House). Take, for example, the PORK CHOP on Boundary’s new menu, which boosts the familiar menu item by serving the thick, bone-in chop over parsnips, pancetta, crème fraîche and a generous portion of dill. Blue foresees the LITTLE GEM SALAD being another top seller at Boundary, or the vegetarian BEET “CARPACCIO” at the Italian-focused Basso, which features thinly sliced Chiogga and golden beets, burrata, pickled shallots, microbasil and balsamic reduction. 7036 Clayton Road, St. Louis, MO 63117 314.932.7818, boundary-stl.com | 314.932.7820, basso-stl.com

Lascelles, a place for excellent food and drink, friendly faces and promoting social change within the Granite City community.

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Enjoy fishing anytime! Finding places to discover nature and fish in Missouri is easy with the new, free mobile app — MO Outdoors. The app can help users plan their next fishing trip, find nearby conservation areas and accesses, and learn about regulations and season information. Download for

Android

Discover

Nature

smoked paddlefish Niçoise Serves 4

Salad 2 pounds smoked paddleﬁsh or trout, cut into bite-sized pieces ½ pound green beans, cooked (or another green vegetable such as asparagus or edible-pod peas) 12 small new potatoes, cooked 20 cherry tomatoes or other tomatoes 3 ears fresh corn, cooked and cut off cob 8 small beets, red or golden, cooked 12 calamata olives 2 hard-cooked eggs, quartered 1 medium red onion, sliced ¼ cup ﬁnely chopped fresh parsley (also chives and basil, if available) Optional: avocado, mushrooms, sweet peppers

Lemon vinaigrette 1 large lemon Extra-virgin olive oil Garlic Salt and freshly ground pepper Lemon zest

A couple of hours before serving, steam all the vegetables that need cooking, let them cool, and then cut them just before composing them on the platter. To compose, place ﬁsh in center of platter and surround it with vegetables, keeping each in separate groups. Stud the display with olives and eggs, arrange red onion slices over all and sprinkle with parsley. Minutes before serving, generously drizzle lemon vinaigrette over all. Serve with crusty bread and your favorite white wine.

Find more wild recipes in Cooking Wild in Missouri. Order yours at mdcnatureshop.com. 12

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Go Out DINE & DRINK

/ ON TREND / SHOP HERE / HOT BLOCKS / HOMETOWN HITS

▪ st. louis

808 Maison Story and photography by Mabel Suen

St. Louis' Soulard neighborhood has a new bistro specializing in French fare from

Burgundy-braised lamb shank with Parisian gnocchi, mirepoix and arugula

the owners of popular adjoining spot Molly’s in Soulard. 808 Maison debuted in January, featuring a menu by former Franco chef Jon Dreja. Highlights include smoked sweetbreads parmentier with a wild mushroom-foie gras duxelle, duchess potatoes and veal jus gras. For dessert, choose from French classics such as crème brûlée and apple tarte tatin. 808 Geyer Ave., St. Louis, Missouri, 808maison.com

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DINE & DRINK

ON TREND

SHOP HERE

HOT BLOCKS

HOMETOWN HITS

▼ SPRINGFIELD, MO.

Great Escape Beer Works Written by Juliana Goodwin / Photography by Tessa cooper

With a sprawling deck overlooking the Galloway Trail, Great Escape Beer Works in Springfield, Missouri, is an ideal spring destination. The brewery opened in December and features up to 14 brews on tap, including two permanent selections: Epic Epoch Kölsch, and the Wayfinder, a session IPA of which a portion of the proceeds goes to TrailSpring, a local nonprofit devoted to building trails. Co-owner and head brewer Jake Duensing worked as a brewer in Colorado and Seattle before returning to his native Springfield last year. This spring, look for a Belgian wit brewed with coriander and chamomile that Duensing describes as, “a very light and flavorful beer that goes well with lazy afternoons.” 4022 S. Lone Pine Ave., Suite 200, Springfield, Missouri, greatescapebeerworks.com

▲ ST. LOUIS

Rhone Rum Bar

ewed with r b t i w n a i g Bel omile, m a h c d n a r e coriand pring coming this s

Story and photography by Mabel Suen

The latest addition to the Hamilton Hospitality restaurant empire features a taste of the tropics. Rhone Rum Bar opened in St. Louis in December, specializing in Caribbean-inspired cocktails. Sidle up to the bar to choose from more than 100 rums, or try a frozen drink such as The Rhone, with Sailor Jerry dark rum, Blue Chair pineapple rum cream, wild berry purée and Piña Colada mix. For something citrusy, opt for The Pirates Paloma, with Cruzan mango rum, grapefruit juice, lime juice and Ting, a Jamaican soda. Pair your drink with island-inspired fare, including conch fritters with Key lime remoulade or a beef and goat Jamaican hand pie. 2107 Chouteau Ave., St. Louis, Missouri, rhonerumbar.com

▶ PERRYVILLE, MO.

The Cheesecake Ninja Written by Heather Riske photography by elaine rohde

Greg Franklin opened The Cheesecake Ninja in downtown Perryville, Missouri, last fall, where guests can shop a rotating selection of nearly 250 flavors of cheesecake, plus cupcakes, brownies, truffles and cookies. Offered in sizes ranging from mini cheesecakes to 9-inch cakes, the signature dessert is available in flavors like classic New York-style and the best-selling crème brûlée. For a truly local treat, opt for the stout cheesecake with candied bacon, made with local bacon that Franklin candies in Villainous Coffee Stout from neighboring Jackson Street Brewing Co. 110 N. Jackson St., Perryville, Missouri, facebook.com/thecheesecakeninja 14

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▶ MISSION, KS.

Ni Hao Fresh Written by Jenny Vergara / Photography by anna petrow

The family behind Kansas City favorite Bo Lings, along with co-owner Ed Mitchell, recently debuted Ni Hao Fresh, a fast-casual concept serving build-your-own poke bowls and Asian fusion stir-fry bowls in Mission, Kansas. Select your base from options including sushi rice, mixed greens and zoodles, and then choose from either raw ahi tuna or salmon for a poke bowl, or cooked proteins like Korean beef for stir-fry. Next, pick your favorite veggies, plus toppings and a sauce to complete your meal. 6029 Metcalf Ave., Mission, Kansas, nihaofresh.com

▼ SPRINGFIELD, MO.

Agave Neighborhood Grill & Bar Story and photography by Tessa Cooper

ais

vea

nt mo

hee

lia

ag le tel ▲ KANSAS CITY

Farina Written by jenny vergara / photography by anna petrow

The newest restaurant from executive chef and partner Michael Smith and his wife, general manager Nancy, Farina combines his modern Italian-inspired menu with her impressively curated wine list. The warm, inviting space in Kansas City's Crossroads Arts District includes a delightful oyster bar with a streetside view. Michael describes the menu as a blend of Italian flavors and techniques and contemporary American-style entrées

Springfield, Missouri, has a long-standing and popular Mexican food scene. So when husband-and-wife team Martin Ortiz and Kryztal Arteaga opened Agave Neighborhood Grill & Bar in January, they wanted its menu to embrace local favorites but also bring new flavors to the area. Agave serves classics like quesadillas, but also signature dishes like shrimp with poblano pepper and chipotle sauce. Don't miss the cocktail menu: Try the Lola's Cantarito, a blend of tequila, lime juice, orange juice, grapefruit juice and grapefruit soda, all served in a traditional Mexican clay mug. 3057 S. Fremont Ave., Springfield, Missouri, facebook.com/agaveneighborhoodgrillandbar

made with seasonal Midwestern ingredients, as well as some Mediterranean influence. Antipasti range from braised veal cheeks with fava beans, tarragon and farinata to asparagus-langoustine bruschetta with harissa crema and Moroccan lemon. Secondi courses include broiled arctic char with artichoke-ramp ragù, basil and dried yellow tomatoes. The menu features 10 housemade pastas, such as the lemon linguine with spring peas, mint, fresh ricotta and Espelette pepper. Enjoy a Negroni at the bar before choosing a selection from Nancy’s 300-plus wine list to perfectly pair with your meal. 19 W. 19th St., Kansas City, Missouri, farinakc.com / a pr i l 2 019

DINE & DRINK

ON TREND

SHOP HERE

HOT BLOCKS

HOMETOWN HITS

◀ ST. LOUIS

St. Louis’ Perennial Artisan Ales uses spelt in a range of beers, but cellar manager and brewer Chris Kinast particularly likes working with the grain in hazy IPAs. The recently released Pilot Talk, for instance, was brewed with Pilsner malt, flaked oats, Chilean-grown Vienna malt and spelt, which Kinast says balances everything out. “It gives you the mouthfeel that you can get from oats but also those really nice light, nutty flavors on the back end,” he says. “The best part for me is the balance it has between the mouthfeel and not being too overly wheat-impact on the flavor.” 8125 Michigan Ave., Suite 101, St. Louis, Missouri, perennialbeer.com photography by judd demaline

with You know barley, wheat and rye – but what about spelt? The hard-grained heirloom wheat is one of the oldest ingredients in the beer-brewing book; it can be traced back some 10,000 years to Mesopotamia, and historians believe that the first beer was produced using spelt. Yet as interest in ancient grains becomes popular across the food-and-beverage industry, spelt, historically associated with saisons, is finding its way into new styles. Brewers like it for its mild, nutty flavors and its ability to play nicely with other ingredients. -HEATHER RISKE 16

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▪ ST. LOUIS

▪ KANSAS CITY

Side Project Brewing is internationally revered for its

In Kansas City, Boulevard Brewing Co. has played around

saisons, so owner and head brewer Cory King began

with spelt in a few mixed-fermentation beers, including

researching spelt years ago. The acclaimed Maplewood,

its BLVDIA Grisette, Belgian Golden Strong Ale and Sour

Missouri, brewery uses spelt in most of its beers. King

Saison Ale (the latter two of which are used as base beers

doesn’t employ spelt for its flavor; rather, he says the yeasts

for the brewery's sour blends). Brewer Ryan McNeive says

and bacteria he uses like feeding on the underdeveloped

using even a small amount of spelt can add another level of

malt, enabling deeper complexities to develop through the

complexity to lower-ABV beers like saisons and grisettes.

fermentation process. “Because we age everything in oak,”

“Spelt gives some creaminess and earthiness to round out

King says, “all of our beers have a longer fermentation, and

that dryness,” McNeive says. “Compared to styles like New

they need sustained food for the [yeast] to stay happy and

England IPAs and coffee stouts that have big, bold flavors,

produce the flavors that I want.” This year, Side Project will

something like spelt is not super powerful, but it’s complex

also use spelt in an IPA and a farmhouse-style lager.

enough to give your beer its own spin or unique taste.”

7458 Manchester Road, Maplewood, Missouri, sideprojectbrewing.com

2534 Madison Ave., Kansas City, Missouri, boulevard.com

ONE ON ONE /

ONE on

st. louis

with Tony Saputo / beverage director, The Midwestern Meat & Drink

Written by Heather Riske photography by judd demaline

At The Midwestern Meat & Drink, Tony Saputo is equally happy to make you a pork-fat-washed whiskey cocktail or pour you a Busch. As beverage director of the Downtown St. Louis barbecue restaurant and bar, which opened in March and will celebrate its grand opening this month, Saputo oversees an ambitious bar program ranging from draft and canned beer (with a heavy focus on local brews) to craft cocktails, wine and a well-curated bourbon list to pair with chef-owner Ben Welch’s menu. After years behind the bar at Layla, Atomic Cowboy, Eclipse and, most recently, The Benevolent King, Saputo is making sure everyone has something to sip and savor at The Midwestern. You were known for a progressive cocktail program at The Benevolent King. What’s your approach at The Midwestern? The integrity of the drinks is still great, but I want them to be simple – and not simple in structure, but I want them to be approachable and easily understood. I don’t want someone to have to look at a menu for 10 to 15 minutes. There’s a meeting of what I think the average drinker wants and what I want. It’s as esoteric as possible, but also approachable and easily understood. Tell us about the cocktail menu. I’m doing some of my variations on classic whiskey cocktails – pretty much classics how I like them – including a Horsefeather, Old Fashioned, Blood and Sand, Mint Julep and a house Manhattan. We also have tequila and mezcal drinks to mix it up a bit. What about the whiskey list? We have more than 215 whiskeys, the majority of which are American whiskey and bourbon. The highest one is around $120 [for a pour], with our wells starting at $6. We do have both Whistle Pig’s The Boss Hog V and Boss Hog IV, which is pretty exciting. I’m also really excited about my Taiwanese Kavalan Whisky. I got in a 28-year bottle of Bunnahabhain, which is one of my personal favorite Scotches. I’m trying to carry as much as I can [from] Union Horse [Distilling Co., in Lenexa, Kansas], too; they make everything really, really well. 900 Spruce St., St. Louis, Missouri, midwesternstl.com

tony saputo’s

favorite st. louis spirits

big o ginger liqueur

1220 spirits origin gin

still 630 rallypoint rye

“I’ve been working with this brand for the past decade, and it’s an awesome product. To me, it actually tastes more like ginger bananas; I get a big banana, clove-y taste to it. The base is made of hand-cut ginger, and there’s a little bit of cardamom. You’re going to be hard-pressed to find a cocktail menu from me without Big O on it.”

“This is a great workhouse gin; it does well with every type of cocktail. It’s a very Americanized style, but it’s not so malty that it’s too sweet, and it’s not too dry – it’s right in the middle of the road. The juniper is a little more laid back, so it’s well-balanced.”

“It’s just a really good standard rye; it’s got a nice backbone to it. It works well in cocktails, and there’s a nice floral element to it, too. It’s nice to see whiskey that has a lot more nuanced flavors but can hold up in a cocktail. And the spiciness of the rye and the dryness of it gives it a great finish.”

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DINE & DRINK

ON TREND

SHOP HERE

HOT BLOCKS

HOMETOWN HITS

◀ SPRINGFIELD, MO.

Tantara Farms Written by Juliana Goodwin / photography by travis howard

At Tantara Farms in Springfield, Missouri, owner Clayton Lile and his father-in-law, Keith Williams, have curated nearly 50 infused balsamic vinegars and olive oils, plus organic spices and herbs, flavored sea salts and sugars, unique teas and house-roasted coffee. The retail space is bright and organized, with handcrafted wood shelves and black accents. Sample any of the oils and vinegars before you buy; Lile and his team are happy to give recommendations. Try the smoked balsamic vinegar, excellent on quinoa or grilled vegetables, or the Persian lime olive oil, which pairs perfectly with avocado, black beans or Southwest salads. 4121 S. Fremont Ave., Suite 116, Springfield, Missouri, tantarafarms.com

3 Must-buys at Tantara Farms

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Thai Ginger Salt

“Genmaicha is very earthy,” Lile says. “It has a nutty flavor from the brown rice. It bridges the gap from ancient tea [traditions] to how we drink tea now.”

This finishing salt adds texture

25 Star Dark Balsamic Vinegar

and a little heat to dishes. It’s a medium-grain sea salt mixed with dried ground ginger. Try it on rice, stir-frys, Asian noodles or tuna.

“It’s our best-seller, crafted from the highest-quality grape must and red wine vinegar that’s been aged a minimum of 10 years. It’s a very well-balanced vinegar,” Lile says.

Genmaicha

Genmaicha is a Japanese tea that combines toasted and popped brown rice mixed with sencha green tea. The tea originated from Japanese farmers who added rice as a filler to stretch their more expensive tea supplies.

What’s on your Bucket List? AAA Travel can help ﬁll it!

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12237 Peter Moore Lane | DeSoto, MO 63020 Like us on facebook Like us on facebook 636-586-2777 | lachancevineyards.com

CALL: 866-222-7587 VISIT: Your local AAA Travel ofﬁce CLICK: AAA.com/travel Certain restrictions may apply. Your local AAA Club acts as an agent for its travel vendors and is a motor club with a principal place of business at 12901 N. Forty Drive, St. Louis, MO 63141. Copyright © 2018 Automobile Club of Missouri. All Rights Reserved. / a pr i l 2 019

ONE ON ONE /

ONE on

with Alex Pope

kansas city

/ chef-owner, Local Pig and Pigwich Why did you want to move to City Market? I’ve always loved this neighborhood. I lived in River Market for three years before I opened Local Pig and Pigwich in the East Bottoms. As a chef, I love the weekend farmers’ market; it’s a vibrant area with the perfect combination of retail, restaurant and residential. The Kansas City streetcar bringing in additional traffic doesn’t hurt, either.

Written by Jenny Vergara photography by zach bauman

Chef Alex Pope and his business partner, Matt Kafka,

What’s changed in the new space? For Local Pig, not much has changed, other than the fact that our team of butchers is now down in our lower-level basement space, breaking down whole animals instead of on a table in front of customers. For Pigwich, we finally have a proper commercial kitchen, where my guys won’t freeze in the winter and burn up in the summer months making sandwiches for our guests.

first opened butcher shop Local Pig in Kansas City’s East Bottoms in 2012, with Pigwich following a year later. In January, the duo relocated both to City Market to give their staff and customers room to grow. The move has

Tell us about the new space. I love the personal touches that we were able to bring to this space with help from some talented local artists. Jeff Huff from KC Furnishing Co. handmade our tables and benches from wood he had from floors inside train cars. I consider that a nod to our previous space in the East Bottoms, when trains rumbled by so often we didn’t even hear them. Also, a big thank you to local artist and designer Chris Foxworth, who helped decorate the walls with murals and lettering which really brought this place to life.

allowed Local Pig to expand its retail footprint to include more local goods as well as select local spirits, bottles of still and sparkling wine, plus its excellent selection of sausages, steaks and various pickles. Pigwich, on the other hand, now boasts a year-round indoor space with seating, a seasonal outdoor

20 E. Fifth St., Kansas City, Missouri, thelocalpig.com; pigwich.com

patio and an expanded menu that includes more sides, a kids’ menu and dessert.

alex pope’s

favorite new menu items

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cereal-marshmallow

wine at local pig

bars at pigwich

“Selling bottles of wine that guests can take home when they’re shopping for dinner or [a] dinner party is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Primary proteins and something to drink with them just makes sense to sell together.”

“I’m really proud of this dessert, because cereal bars are something that both kids and adults enjoy; there’s a nostalgia to them that plays to the kid and the kid at heart. We have fun with them, mixing Fruity Pebbles and Skittles together in a fruit-flavored bar. My favorite: the butterscotch and bacon bar made with cornflakes cereal and bacon.”

kids’ menu at pigwich

“With three kids of my own, I know how important it is to have a kids’ menu when you go out to eat. For $6, kids and parents can choose from a small cheeseburger, smoked pork burger or pig’s fingers [pork tender strips] and get a drink and a marshmallow-cereal bar. I’ve also added a kids’ play area with smaller tables and a chalkboard [to] draw on.”

NEW S HOUR

cafÃ© SEBASTIENNE at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

Lunch: Tuesdayâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Friday, 11:00 a.m.â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2:30 p.m.

Dinner: Thursdayâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Friday, 5:00â&#x20AC;&#x201C;9:00 p.m.

Brunch: Saturdayâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Sunday, 10:00 a.m.â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2:30 p.m.

4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111 | 816-561-7740 | kemperart.org/cafe

/ a pr i l 2 019

DINE & DRINK

ON TREND

SHOP HERE

HOT BLOCKS

HOMETOWN HITS

Commercial Street Springfield, Mo.

co-owner Cafe Cusco, Van Gogh’s Eeterie and Chabom Tea & Spices

loves

Sisters in Thyme bistro & bakery “The quiche at Sisters in Thyme is a pretty big standby for me. To be honest, the amount of cheese is [what I like about it]; most quiches can come out dry or too eggy. Theirs is, for lack of a better word, ooey-gooey.”

Sisters in Thyme Bistro & Bakery Friendly faces and freshly baked bread await you at cozy Sisters in Thyme Bistro & Bakery. The shop offers almost everything in both a traditional and gluten-free varieties, including irresistible sweets such as fudgy brownies and gluten-free vegan cupcakes in flavors like strawberry, vanilla, chocolate and lemon. Snag a seat at one of the few tables to enjoy a relaxed lunch like the now-legendary Reuben sandwich. Don’t forget to ask about the quiche of the day, with daily meat and vegetarian offerings.

That Lebanese Place Pizza House Since 1958, Pizza House has delighted Springfield natives with hand-rolled thin crust pizza covered in rich marinara sauce and melted cheese. No need for avant-garde toppings here: The classic pizza joint’s devoted following appreciates the simple menu and old-school atmosphere. The affordable prices are also a draw: You can chow down on a small one-topping pizza for just $8.

338 E. Commercial St., thatlebaneseplace.com

312 E. Commercial St., springfieldpizzahouse.com

photography by dean groover

That Lebanese Place owner Elie Ghanem has been known to wait on customers personally, offering a taste of his signature stuffed grape leaves along with a wry smile. The cozy C-Street eatery specializes in dishes like baba ganoush and shawarma; regulars love the pistachio baklava. The lightly buttered phyllo dough melts in your mouth, providing a bursts of honey and Lebanese simple syrup with rose water.

306 E. Commercial St., facebook.com/sisters-inthyme-bistro-and-bakery-113794368655437

Big Momma’s Coffee and Espresso Bar

White River Brewing Co.

Big Momma’s Coffee and Espresso Bar has been a C-Street institution throughout the district’s revival, supplying the neighborhood with quality coffee and light café fare. The shop offers an extensive drink menu, including a variety of largely single-origin blends available for purchase. North Springfield residents are particularly fond of the new Historic C-Street Blend, a dark roast that combines Sumatran and Ethiopian beans for a coffee with finishing notes of berry and chocolate.

White River Brewing Co. specializes in American ales and lagers with an Ozarks twist. Since opening in 2012, the brewery has catered to adventurous beer-lovers, offering brews with names inspired by area rivers, trails and caves. Taproom favorites include Table Rock Red, a red ale named for the eponymous nearby lake. Look for local collaboration beers like the Mahogany Lager, a full-bodied brew made with malted barley in partnership with Lindberg’s Tavern. 505 W. Commercial St., whiteriverbrewingco.com

217 E. Commercial St., bigmommascoffee.com

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

PHOTO BY ANA ELLIOTT

photo by starboard & port creative

Downtown Springfield, Missouri, is widely regarded as the heart of the city's dining scene. However, head two miles due north and you’ll hit Commercial Street – aka C-Street – a quaint historic district with charming brick facades, an Ozarks-influenced brewery and enough global cuisine to vie for the title of best dining destination in town. -Lillian Stone

Joseph Gidman

b ut go d

Peruvian Dining

in SpringField MO

t vo

te d

t begs an &

ve ht e nig dat

334 E Commercial St.,Springfield, MO 417.344.0085 | vangoghseeterie.com

“Your Hometown Grocery Store”

Freddie’s Market lo c a l s p o t l i g h t

miller ham co.

delighted our loyal customers with quality hams for over 40 years. 9052 Big Bend Blvd, Webster Groves | to order call: 314.968.1914

freddiesmarket.com

Chinese Culture Days Taste the traditions of China and enjoy a colorful celebration of pageantry, art, music, dance, and more! April 27–28 | 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Missouri Botanical Garden mobot.org/chineseculturedays

Inspired Local Food Culture /

MIDWEST

don’t miss a single serving

1 year $

2 years $

/ a pr i l 2 019

DINE & DRINK

ON TREND

SHOP HERE

HOT BLOCKS

HOMETOWN HITS

These three delicious destinations are under the radar – but should be on yours. WRITTEN BY NANCY STILES

▼ CAPE GIRARDEAU, MO.

Bistro Saffron

▲ PITTSBURG, KS.

Chicken Annie’s Original

◣ MACON, MO.

Ashley’s Apple Basket Cafe Noah Heaton and his wife, Kari, bought Ashley’s Apple Basket Cafe in Macon, Missouri, in 2014; their daughter, Ashley, had been working at Apple Basket Cafe for more than 10 years when the owners retired. Noah says the current menu pulls inspiration from the former restaurant while evolving its range of offerings. The Sweet & Spicy Chicken Bacon Ranch Wrap, for example, was put on the menu after employees dipped the wrap in a house sweet and spicy sauce, and eventually customers just started ordering it. The changes have been a hit: Ashley’s serves around 500 people a day in a town of 5,000. 215 N. Rollins St., Macon, Missouri, facebook.com/ashleysapplebasketcafe photo by aaron ottis

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

In 1934, during the Great Depression, Annie Pilcher needed to support her family in the coal-mining town of Pittsburg, Kansas. Her husband was disabled in a mining accident, so Annie began cooking out of her home kitchen for miners and their families. Eventually, the family moved out of the house and built additions to accommodate the growing restaurant, named Chicken Annie's Original. Annie's children took over in the 1973; today, Annie’s grandson, Lonnie Lipoglav, his wife, Janice, and his sister, Donna, run the restaurant. The fried chicken and onion rings are still prepared exactly the way Annie made them in 1934, as is the potato salad and German-style coleslaw.

1143 E. 600th Ave., Pittsburg, Kansas, chickenanniesoriginal.com photo by Mark Neuenschwander

cy Sweet & Spi Chicken Bacon Ranch Wrap

Su Hill opened Bistro Saffron in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 2000. She missed her mother’s Thai cooking and wanted to share it. Today, Hill features some of her mother’s recipes on the pan-Asian menu. Best-selling dishes include Thai curries and massaman beef, with Thai-spiced braised beef, potatoes, onion, cashews and steamed rice. Hill works with many local producers and farmers to source meat, eggs, hot peppers, and seasonal herbs like basil and lemongrass. Sushi and other Japanese dishes appear on the menu, too. Hill works with her niece Paula Ridings as the executive chef and part owner; they’re also working on getting some housemade sauces, curry paste, marinades and kimchi bottled and sold in retail stores. 1610 N. Kingshighway St., Suite 101, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, bistrosaffron.com photo courtesy bistro saffron

ONE ON ONE /

ONE on

springfield, MO.

with Lacy Adamson

/ chef-owner, Maritime

Story and photography by Tessa Cooper

3 Must-Try Dishes at Maritime

Thanks to Lacy Adamson, you can now take a trip to a coastal café without leaving Springfield, Missouri. Earlier this year, Adamson expanded Maritime, her beloved food truck, with a brick-and-mortar location, serving seafood and coffee under one roof. The menu features everything from pancakes and breakfast sandwiches to shrimp baskets and salads. And with more than 40 drink options, the coffee menu doesn’t disappoint; try the best-selling Candy Bar Frappuccinos. You can still occasionally find her food truck, too, at the Ozark Farmers Market in nearby Ozark, Missouri.

killer cajun shrimp

The best-selling Killer Cajun Shrimp pairs Cajun-spiced shrimp with garlic aïoli and assorted steamed vegetables.

beignets

A New Orleans classic, Adamson’s sweet, fried beignets are topped with a mound of powdered sugar and served piping hot.

What inspired you to open a brick-and-mortar café? I love seafood and coffee, and you don’t really hear about those two things together very often. So I decided I was going to be the first person in Springfield to offer them together. [My fiancé and I] opened the food truck first, and learned what everybody liked. We had a really good first season. With all the craze, we decided it might be a good idea to open a restaurant. How does the restaurant’s menu differ from the food truck? With this new restaurant, we’ve been focusing more on the seafood aspect of our business. We have about 30 different shrimp [dishes]. One of our most popular right now is the Spicy Yum Yum; we grill the shrimp and cook it in our [Asian-inspired] Yum Yum

sauce and top it with spicy aïoli. We have people who come in from the food truck and order things that aren’t even on the menu – sort of like secret items, like the Korean kalbi Nachos in a Bag, with Korean kalbi beef, lettuce, tomato, sweet onion, green chile, cilantro, lemon juice and Colby-Monterey Jack cheese, all inside a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos. What’s your hope for the new location? We want to be known for our fresh food. I just hope that it continues to draw in people, and that when they come here, they feel comfortable. 525 S. Kimbrough Ave., Springfield, Missouri, facebook.com/maritimegourmetcoffee

shrimp salad

Adamson’s shrimp salad dresses up fresh spring greens with shrimp, avocado, cucumber, tomato and sweet Vidalia onions in a tangy ginger-sesame dressing.

/ a pr i l 2 019

PROMOTION

SUNNY SIDE UP AVOCADO TOAST SERVES 2 TOMATOES 1 Tbsp olive oil 1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved ¼ tsp cinnamon 1 tsp fresh thyme 2 tsp honey kosher salt and fresh black pepper TOAST 2 slices of your favorite homemade bread or multigrain muesli bread 2 Tbsp olive oil 2 large brown eggs ½ large avocado, mashed 1 Tbsp lemon juice salt, fresh ground pepper and red pepper ﬂakes to taste handful of baby arugula or microgreens pepitas (pumpkin seeds) / PREPARATION / Heat olive oil in a cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat. Add cherry tomatoes and cook for 2 minutes. Stir in cinnamon, thyme and honey. Cook for an additional 1-2 minutes. Remove from heat. Season with salt and pepper; set aside. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a nonstick skillet over medium-low heat. Break an egg in a small bowl and carefully slip it on the skillet. Then repeat with the second egg and reduce the heat to low. Cook eggs uncovered for 5-7 minutes. Remove from heat. Toast bread and top each slice with mashed avocado. Drizzle with lemon juice and remaining olive oil. Then season with salt, a few cracks of fresh black pepper and crushed red pepper ﬂakes to taste. Top each toast with a cooked sunny side up egg, baby arugula and pepitas. Season with additional salt and pepper, if desired. Serve with a side of tomatoes.

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

SPONSORED CONTENT BY KARA BEHLKE REGISTERED DIETITIAN, SCHNUCKS DIRECTOR OF HEALTH AND WELLNESS PHOTOS PROVIDED BY SCHNUCKS Some of my happiest childhood memories involve running through the wheat fields as I played hide and seek with my two brothers on our family farm in Nebraska. As the days grew warmer and the wheat was ready to harvest, I’d hop into my dad’s lap as he drove the combine through the fields. And after a long day’s work, we’d all pile into the kitchen where we were greeted by the captivating smell of my mom baking fresh bread. To this day, the smell of freshly baked bread immediately transports me back home. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of mom’s “made from scratch” bread that makes me so excited about this month’s recipe. Or that I get to share a recipe that is a staple in my breakfast routine. The great part about this recipe is it includes foods from four different food groups so you’re getting a variety of nutrients. All too often people tell me they are cutting out particular types of foods or food groups all together… no carbs, no sugar or no meat, for example. I believe that eating is about balance, not deprivation, and by adding the right combination of ingredients, you can create something that’s nutrient dense and you’re excited about eating. Thinking about Easter brunch, I wanted to put a twist on our family’s traditional holiday menu – avocado toast! Avocados naturally contain good fats and with their creamy texture and mild flavor, they’re sure to be a crowd pleaser. With it being Easter, I couldn’t resist adding a sunny side egg on top to elevate not only the protein (and choline), but the look of this recipe, too. This year, we won’t be topping mom’s famous homemade bread with butter and jelly, but instead some good fats and hunger-fighting protein. Just another way I encourage you to Eat Good to Feel Great. If you’re looking for more Easter brunch recipe ideas, don’t forget to pick up a copy of this month’s Simply Schnucks magazine at any Schnucks store.

Stay In SWEET IDEAS / HOW-TO / THE MIX / MIDWEST MADE / MYSTERY SHOPPER / THE DISH / HEALTHY APPETITE / QUICK FIX / CRASH COURSE

Cookies can be a problem for me. I can’t stop eating them, always crave them and am thinking about new ideas for them all the time. One of the most simple cookies to make, shortbread, is both versatile and a crowd-pleaser. This recipe is a great jumping-off point for your favorite flavors: Experiment and add nuts, spices, sweets or sprinkles. For this recipe, I prefer using Braggadocio popcorn cornmeal from McKaskle Family Farm in Braggadocio, Missouri, which provides a unique flavor and texture.

. 54 Turn to p ore m n r to lea cKaskle about M arm. Family F

To save dough for later, wrap log tightly in plastic wrap once firm and freeze for up to two months. Transfer dough to refrigerator one day before you want to slice and bake.

Written by Christy Augustin, chef-owner, Pint Size Bakery in St. Louis Photography by jennifer silverberg

Lemon-Cornmeal Shortbread yields 2 dozen cookies

½ ¼ ¹⁄₃ ¼ 1 1 ½ 1¼ ¼ ½

cup room-temperature unsalted butter cup tightly packed brown sugar cup plus ¼ cup granulated sugar, divided tsp kosher salt Look for popcorn lemon, zested cornmeal in specialty egg yolk grocery stores, or make tsp vanilla extract your own by grinding cup unbleached, all-purpose flour popcorn kernels tsp baking soda in a home mill. cup cornmeal or popcorn cornmeal

/ preparation / In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with

the paddle attachment, combine butter, brown, sugar, ¹⁄₃ cup granulated sugar, salt and lemon zest on medium speed until light and fluffy. Add egg yolk and vanilla and continue mixing on medium speed, scraping bottom and sides of bowl as needed, until smooth. Reduce speed to low and slowly add flour, baking soda and cornmeal; mix until well combined, taking care not to overmix. Transfer dough to a clean work surface, roll into a 1-by-12-inch log, wrap in parchment paper and refrigerate for several hours until firm, up to 4 days. Preheat oven to 375°F. Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper. Remove dough from refrigerator. Slice into 24 half-inchthick rounds and place on prepared sheets. Sprinkle tops with remaining ¼ cup granulated sugar. Bake until edges are medium-golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool. Serve immediately or store in an airtight container for up to 1 month.

pair with: Chardonel

PA I R IT!

Reach for a Chardonel to pair with these cookies, like the estate-bottled Chardonel from Stone Hill Winery in Hermann, Missouri. A hybrid grape cross of Chardonnay and Seyval, this varietal produces a full-bodied, complex wine. Its richness and buttery texture make it a great match for shortbread cookies, and the flavors of honey, melon and citrus pair nicely with the lemon zest in this recipe. -Hilary Hedges stonehillwinery.com

/ a pr i l 2 019

SWEET IDEAS / HOW-TO / THE MIX / MIDWEST MADE / MYSTERY SHOPPER / THE DISH / HEALTHY APPETITE / QUICK FIX / CRASH COURSE

In a heavy-bottomed saucepot over medium heat, ● add 1 tablespoon olive oil and 1 roughly chopped yellow

Add 1 cup Arborio rice and ¼ cup dry white wine ● to saucepot with onion, stirring for about 30 seconds or

onion. Sweat onion for about 5 minutes.

until wine is fully absorbed.

●

Continue to add simmering broth, ½ cup ● at a time, stirring constantly until all broth is fully

Risotto Arborio rice is crucial for making risotto, as it adds creaminess without turning to mush during a lengthy cooking time. Slow and steady wins the race, so grab a glass of white wine and get ready to sip and stir. Recipes and photography by Julia Calleo, writer and recipe developer, mylavenderblues.com

In a small saucepot over medium-high heat, heat 4½ cups low-sodium chicken broth until simmering, then remove from heat. Add 1 cup simmering chicken broth to rice mixture and stir continuously until broth is fully absorbed, about 10 to 15 minutes.

As risotto reaches a creamy texture, add ½ cup grated ● Parmesan and 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper and season with kosher salt to taste; stir to combine. If this makes risotto too thick, add just a little more stock and stir.

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

absorbed, about 10 to 15 minutes more. Continue stirring until risotto reaches a creamy, al dente texture.

6 Garnish with fresh basil leaves and shaved ● Parmesan and serve immediately.

PROMOTION

[

All AbOut AlliumS

leeks

in GOOD with Sponsored Content by Brand Ave. Studios

Alliums punch up flAvor And the immune system With dr. GrAhAm colditz

associate director of prevention and control at Siteman Cancer Center If you’re the sort of cook who reads a recipe that calls for three cloves of garlic and instead tosses in seven, you are doing a great favor for your health — if maybe not your breath.The same goes for onions, chives, leeks, ramps and shallots. All of these are alliums — a Latin word meaning garlic — and they’re all packed with antioxidants and nutrients that are strong allies in the fight against a slate of diseases. Alliums’ sharp smell and taste derives from the sulfur-containing compounds they’re made from. These compounds are also what give them many of their crucially important disease-fighting qualities, says Dr. Graham Colditz, associate director of prevention and control at Siteman Cancer Center. “Organosulfur compounds are anti-inflammatory,

anti-allergic, anti-microbial and anti-blood clotting. This means that alliums are heart-healthy by lowering cholesterol and blood pressure. Organosulfur compounds are also thought to be what gives alliums their anti-cancer qualities. Good evidence shows that alliums reduce the risk of stomach and colon cancers, especially,” Dr. Colditz says.

cells and protect them from the free radicals that we get from our environment, fundamentally reducing the damage that free radicals are doing,” he says. “So many of our disease processes are driven by the accumulation of damage to cells, but antioxidants can help clear free radicals as part of a healthy, protective diet.”

As if that weren’t reason enough to ask for extra onion in your salad, there’s more. Alliums also contain quercetin, an antioxidant compound found in berries, green tea and red wine. Quercetin helps fight inflammation, heart conditions, bladder infections and diabetes. And it eliminates free radicals — atoms with chemical properties that can lead to damage in cells’ DNA, Dr. Colditz explains. “Such compounds can clear out these

Dr. Colditz recommends getting at least one serving of alliums a day for maximum health benefits. “Many recipes already call for alliums. These are good for any time of day:Try chives, leeks or shallots in a morning omelet, onion slices in your sandwich at lunch and garlic in just about anything at dinner!These vegetables come in an array of varieties, and all of them are good for you.” Garlic lovers, rejoice!

French OniOn SOup Yields | 21 mini brownies 4 servings soup and 2 slices garlic cheese toast

onions sliced into half moons (3 Vidalia or 1 yellow, 1 red, 1 white) 1 ½ Tbsp butter ½ tsp salt 1 cup white wine 1 ½ cups low sodium beef broth 1 ½ cups low sodium chicken broth 5 oz. apple cider

cloves garlic (unpeeled) 2 tsp olive oil Thyme sprigs, bay leaf and parsley Butcher’s twine Pinch of pepper 1 cup Gruyère cheese, grated 1 country loaf, cut into 6 3-inch strips

| preparation | preheat oven to 350°F. cut onions into half-moons (slice the onion in half) into ¼-inch slices. place large, high-walled 12” skillet over medium-low heat and add butter. add onions and salt in layers then let sit untouched for 15 minutes. then, stir the onions and let them cook down for another 45 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes or so. the onions should be dark brown in color. because you are caramelizing the onions, some burning is acceptable. while the onions are cooking, wrap garlic cloves (unpeeled) in foil with 1 teaspoon olive oil and pepper, and place on baking sheet. roast for 30 minutes. increase skillet heat to high. add wine to skillet and reduce to syrup consistency, about 8 minutes. add apple cider, beef broth and chicken broth. bind thyme, bay and parsley with butcher’s twine and add to soup. season with pepper to taste. turn heat down to low and cook for 20–30 minutes. remove herbs before serving. brush bread with 1 teaspoon olive oil and toast in oven for 6–10 minutes as desired. cool garlic, remove from peel and spread over toasted bread. add 1 tablespoon gruyère to toast and melt cheese under broiler. top soup with shredded gruyère cheese (about 2½ tablespoons). Nutrition Information (4 servings soup, about 1.5 cups each with 2 small slices toast): 431 calories, 16g fat, 508mg sodium, 36g carbohydrate, 2g fiber, 17g protein.

]

Leeks resemble large, flat green onions. Their broad emerald leaves give way to a pale green and creamy white base where their mild, onionlike flavor lies. Even when they’ve been cooked the leaves are inedible, but they can add flavor to stocks or soups, much in the way that bay leaves do. Embrace the warmer temperatures with a springlike leek-and-lemon soup, or braise leeks in white wine and garlic for a simple yet elegant side dish.

onions Sweet, sharp, pungent, mellow. All of these adjectives describe onions, so it’s no wonder they’re used in recipes from just about every corner of the world. Nearly 90 percent water, onions impart flavor and texture with minimal calories, but they do bring doses of vitamin C, folate, vitamin B6 and potassium. As is true for most vegetables, the darker varietals come with the biggest nutritional impact.

scAllions First things first: Yes, scallions and green onions are the same vegetable. (Spring onions are not.) Scallions are reminiscent of white or yellow onions with subtle peppery notes, whereas spring onions are sweet. At the store, look for scallions that are firm from bulb to tip; avoid those that are slimy or wilted. All except scallions’ stringy ends can be used for cooking: The green parts are mild and bring texture as a garnish to foods like potato dishes and soups.The stronger white ends can hold their own even under intense heat, such as roasting and stir-frying.

shAllots If a recipe calls for a quarter cup of onion, what should you do with the rest of it? Trick question: You should buy shallots instead. They can take the place of red or yellow onions (they’re a little sweeter and milder than both), and they’re small — smaller than a golf ball — so you can buy just a little bit at a time. Like garlic cranked up to 11, shallots bring a rich depth of flavor to dishes, not to mention antioxidants, folate and vitamin A.

rAmps Ramps are not easy to come by.They’re harvested from dark, densely forested areas, and they’re only available for a few weeks — look for them in farmers’ markets or high-end grocery stores from now through the beginning of June.The good news is you can eat every part of a ramp, from their slender white bulbs to their gorgeous green leaves. But use them thoughtfully: At $20 per pound, they are by far the most expensive allium on this list. It’s the easiest preparations that really allow ramps to sing — they’re a perfect harmony of garlic and onion — like grilling with olive oil, salt and pepper

/ a pr i l 2 019

SWEET IDEAS / HOW-TO / THE MIX / MIDWEST MADE / MYSTERY SHOPPER / THE DISH / HEALTHY APPETITE / QUICK FIX / CRASH COURSE

Cappelletti, a bitter Italian wine-based aperitivo – think an easier-drinking Campari – is the backbone of the cocktail, paired with an herbal gin. A bright and floral syrup made from fresh rhubarb and cardamom pods, topped with a dry brut sparkling wine and a splash of soda round out this light and bubbly apéritif.

Rhubarb & Bubbles Serves 1 Use this earthy syrup to add unexpected flavor to sparkling water, tea or coffee.

You may be able to find Cappelletti at specialty liquor stores; it’s also available for purchase online.

Summer is on its way, and rhubarb should be popping up by the end of the month. When you’re making your first rhubarb pie of the season, save a few stalks for this spring-inspired spritz-style cocktail.

Rhubarb-Cardamom Syrup (Yields 2½ cups) 1 cup granulated sugar 1 cup roughly chopped fresh rhubarb 1 cup water 2 cardamom pods, crushed Spritz 1 oz gin 1 oz Cappelletti ½ oz rhubarb-cardamom syrup (recipe below) 3 oz brut sparkling wine 1 oz soda water lemon wheels (for garnish) 1 fresh sprig mint (for garnish) / preparation – rhubarb-cardamom syrup / In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, combine all ingredients. Stirring constantly, bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer, 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and let cool. Strain and discard solids. Cover and refrigerate for up to 2 weeks. / preparation – spritz / In a Collins or wine glass, combine first 3 ingredients and add ice. Top with sparkling wine and soda water; stir to combine. Garnish with lemon wheels and mint sprig; serve.

3 Local Gins to Use

Written by Rogan Howitt, co-owner, Good Spirits & Co. in Springfield, Missouri Photography by Starboard & Port Creative

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

 SGF

 MO

 KC

meadowview botanical gin This botanical gin made in Springfield, Missouri, features a floral flavor, with orange and lemon notes and 12 botanicals that finishes with hints of lavender and sage.

Pinckney Bend Distillery Navy Strength Gin

J. Rieger & Co. Midwestern Dry Gin

At 57 percent ABV, this gin from New Haven, Missouri, is fiery and assertive for those who like more of a boozy kick.

London dry-inspired, this Kansas City gin features bold, piney juniper flavors with light anise and citrus – great for classic cocktails.

meadowviewgin.com

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jriegerco.com

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pinckneybend.com / a pr i l 2 019

SWEET IDEAS / HOW-TO / THE MIX / MIDWEST MADE / MYSTERY SHOPPER / THE DISH / HEALTHY APPETITE / QUICK FIX / CRASH COURSE

Timothy Nordmann

owner Mr. Meowski’s Sourdough

Made Fare Co.

Local Granola Add some crunch to your morning routine with granola from these local producers, offering from-scratch flavors. Written by Nancy Stiles / photo by judd demaline

“I [found Made Fare Co.] at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market, and frankly, up to that point, I never knew how photo by Paul Nordmann

good granola could be. I was astonished the first time I had Made Fare’s granola; it was simply on a different level – like I had been missing out on something my whole life. I initially got hooked on the lemon-blueberry, which I often eat

St. Louis-based Made Fare Co. offers granola made with heirloom grains in eight flavors, including black pepper-fig, rosemary and lemon-blueberry. Buy it online or at Local Harvest Grocery, Union Studio and Mr. Meowski’s Sourdough in the St. Louis area. madefare.com

Granola Jones is made in Independence, Missouri, by Andrea Schnetzler and Darrell Tindal. Flavors include Gateway Granola (almonds, pecans, cinnamon) and Spice-A-Delic (Hatch New Mexican chiles, pepitas, cranberries). Grab a bag at Kansas City-area Hy-Vee markets or Whole Foods Market. facebook.com/granolajones

with Greek yogurt for breakfast.”

At The Merc Co+op in Lawrence, Kansas, you can pick up a number of locally made granolas, plus veggies, meat and more, usually sourced from within 200 miles of the store. The Merc also offers housemade granola, packed with organic rolled oats, brown sugar and almonds. The Merc is a member cooperative, but anyone can shop its shelves, regardless of membership. themerc.coop

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

Mike Nabors first bought his century-old gristmill in 1974. Today, that mill is still used to grind whole grains for one of three Neighbor’s Mill Bakery & Café locations. Pick up granola at the Springfield, Missouri, bakery, featuring rolled oats, pecans, sunflower seeds, almonds, cornflakes and toasted coconut roasted with honey and maple syrup. neighborsmill.com

Acclaimed pastry chef Anne Croy launched Banner Road Baking Co. in 2015, which specializes in certified organic, non-GMO verified, gluten-free and vegan granola. Try Kickstart, made with Springfield, Missouri-based Askinosie Chocolate, Kaldi’s coffee, organic oats, seeds, quinoa and sliced almonds all roasted with extra virgin olive oil, Date Lady date sugar and organic tapioca syrup. Order online or pick it up at markets across the region such as Cherry Picker Package x Fare in Springfield, Gilbert Whitney & Co. in Kansas City or Civil Alchemy in Webster Groves, Missouri. bannerroad.com

Irene Reinkemeyer expanded Irene’s Homemade Granola into a commercial kitchen nearly two years ago. She now offers five granola blends, all wheat- and egg-free, including three dairy-free blends. Pick up blends at select St. Louis-area Dierberg’s and Fresh Thyme stores, plus Vincent’s 12th Street Market in Soulard. ireneshomemadegranola.com

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These protein-packed seeds, filled with amino acids, fiber and antioxidants, are poised to become the next big thing in grains.

Job’s Tears Written by Shannon Weber, writer and recipe developer aperiodictableblog.com photography by Jennifer Silverberg

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

What Is It? Job’s tears are a member of the grass family, and get their dramatic name from a teardrop-shaped husk and the way the stems bend toward the ground due to their weight. Sometimes called Chinese pearl barley – a misnomer – or coix seed, the seeds are distinctive. They’re fat, white, and round, with a deep channel running through the center. When cooked, they have a delightfully chewy texture with a flavor that’s both nutty and popcornlike. What Do I Do With It? First, you have to find it. Although gaining popularity with chefs, the grain can still be difficult to source. You might find Job’s tears at Asian or international markets under the Chinese pearl barley label, or you can order it online – it’s worth it. Traditionally, powdered Job’s tears are used in Korea to make a thick, warm beverage, while in China, simmering it whole and adding sugar yields a tealike drink. The seeds, however, have a fantastic chew: It adds texture to soups and satisfying bulk to salads. Try mixing Job’s tears with grains like bulgur or amaranth and fresh herbs as a side dish, or use it as a bed for roasted vegetables. Don’t discard the cooking liquid: It has a light, corn-meets-chicken broth flavor ideal for thinning sauces and dressings.

Haricots ve rts are a type of Fr ench green bean, that ar e thinner, shorter and more tender than traditio nal green beans.

Job’s Tears with Tahini-Turmeric Sauce Serves 4 Job’s Tears 2 cups Job’s tears water Tahini-Turmeric Sauce (Yields ½ cup) ½ cup tahini 1½ tsp ground turmeric 1 clove garlic, peeled and grated zest of 1 medium lemon juice of 3 medium lemons ¹⁄₃ to ½ cup water reserved from cooking Job’s tears (see below) to serve 4 cups lightly packed baby arugula 12 oz steamed haricots verts 1¼ cup grape tomatoes, halved ¾ cup marinated Kalamata olives 4 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and halved lengthwise 1 to 2 scallions, trimmed and sliced into matchsticks 2 to 3 tsp ground Aleppo pepper tahini-turmeric sauce (recipe below) / preparation – job’s tears / In a large saucepan

over medium-high heat, add Job’s tears and enough water to cover Job's tears by 2 inches. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until chewy, 45 minutes. Drain and reserve cooking water. Return Job's tears to pot and cover to keep warm. / preparation – tahini-turmeric sauce / In a medium bowl, whisk tahini, turmeric, garlic and lemon zest and juice until combined. Add ¹⁄₃ cup reserved cooking water and whisk, adding more as needed until sauce reaches desired consistency. Set aside. / to serve / In 4 shallow bowls, divide arugula on one side and haricots verts on opposite side. Place cooked Job’s tears in center of bowls and top with tomatoes, olives and eggs. Garnish with scallions and sprinkle Aleppo pepper over top; generously drizzle with turmeric-tahini sauce and serve.

pair with: gin

PA I R IT!

To complement the tahini-turmeric sauce in this recipe, my mind goes to gin – something less juniper-forward, and more focused on other botanicals. Truly Floral Gin, from Webster Groves, Missouri-based Civil Alchemy pairs beautifully with the sauce, and can stand up to the acidity and brininess of the tomatoes and olives. Try it in a simple cocktail like a Pink Gin: In a mixing glass, combine 2 ounces gin with 3 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters and stir with ice, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Angostura bitters are traditional in a Pink Gin, but for this recipe, I would use Peychaud’s, as it will bring out hints of anise and mint that play well with the nuttiness of Job's tears. -JENN TOSATTO civilalchemy.com

/ a pr i l 2 019

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serves 4 grains 4 cups vegetable stock, divided ½ cup tri-color quinoa ½ cup farro Scallion Aïoli (Yields 2 cups) ¾ cup roughly chopped scallions 1 Tbsp olive oil 1 cup mayonnaise ¼ cup sour cream 1 tsp minced garlic clove salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste Pickled Red Onion (Yields 2 cups) 1 red onion, thinly sliced ½ cup apple cider vinegar 1½ tsp kosher salt 1 Tbsp granulated sugar 1 cup warm water Roasted Mushrooms (Yields 2 cups) 1 cup roughly chopped button mushrooms 1 cup roughly chopped shiitake mushrooms 2 Tbsp olive oil salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste to serve 1 cup vegetable stock 1 tsp minced garlic ¼ cup dry white wine salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste 2 large carrots, shaved 1 cup fresh arugula 2 cups roasted mushrooms (recipe below) scallion aïoli, to taste (recipe below) 4 soft-boiled eggs (to serve) pickled red onion (recipe below) / preparation – grains / In a medium bowl, add 2 cups vegetable stock and quinoa. In a separate medium bowl, add 2 cups vegetable stock and farro. Refrigerate to soak for a minimum of 8 hours or overnight. / preparation – scallion aïoli / In a medium bowl, toss scallions with oil. In a medium skillet or grill pan over medium heat, cook scallions for 3 or 4 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool. In a food processor, add cooled scallions and pulse until broken down. Add all remaining ingredients and pulse until incorporated. Refrigerate until ready to serve. / preparation – pickled red onion / Place onions in a 1-pint Mason jar. In a small bowl, add remaining ingredients and stir until sugar has dissolved. Pour mixture over onions and let sit at room temperature for 1 hour. / preparation – roasted mushrooms / Preheat oven to 350°F. In a medium bowl, toss mushrooms with oil and season with salt and pepper to taste. Transfer to a lipped baking sheet and roast for 8 to 12 minutes. Set aside. / to serve / Preheat oven to 350°F. In a baking dish, add soaked grains and their stock. Bake for 30 to 45 minutes.

In a saucepan over medium heat, add cooked farro, quinoa and 1 cup vegetable stock; cook for 1 minute. Add garlic and cook 2 to 3 minutes more, stirring frequently, until all liquid is absorbed and pan begins to steam. Add white wine and cook 2 to 3 minutes more, or until wine is mostly absorbed. Season with salt and pepper to taste; fold in carrots and arugula. Remove from heat and stir in roasted mushrooms. Divide farro mixture between 4 bowls. Top each with a dollop of scallion aïoli, egg and pickled onions; serve. 36

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

Farro-Quinoa

grain bowl with Roasted Mushrooms and Scallion Aïoli

Added to the menu at Retreat Gastropub in St. Louis in February, this hearty grain bowl is made with a base of tri-color quinoa and farro for an energizing desk lunch or a light and refreshing dinner. -liz miller

Recipe courtesy Adam Bingham, chef, Retreat Gastropub Photography by madison stringfellow

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ONE ON ONE /

kansas city

with Kyle Claypool

ONE on

/ co-owner, Lifted Spirits

Written by Natalie Gallagher / photography by jason dailey

Experimentation and adventure drives the spirits made by Michael Stuckey and Kyle Claypool (pictured left), co-owners of Lifted Spirits, a distillery in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District. Since opening in 2016, the pair have launched an impressive line that includes gin, vodka, absinthe and, now, a wheat whiskey. You released your wheat whiskey in October. Why did you decide to move into barrel-aged spirits? Whiskey was always part of our plan – it just took us two years because everything we do starts from scratch with local grain. With whiskey, unfortunately, that means it sits in a barrel for a long time. We started working on our whiskey close to two years ago. We love the deep, rich tradition of whiskey and how many different ways it can be interpreted. What grains do you choose, how do you distill them, how do they age, and you can create things that are so different with so few variables – that always fascinated us. Why a wheat whiskey? We really fell in love with 100-percent wheat whiskeys, and it’s kind of a rarity. Bourbon is

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

mostly [made with] corn, and people are familiar with rye whiskey – but not so much wheat. Our whiskey falls somewhere near an Irish style with the spicy note of a rye. Irish whiskeys tend to be smooth, a little bit sweet and often much more accessible than Scotches or most bourbons. Rye whiskey has that spicy grain note to it, and you get a nice combination of those two things with ours. It’s got this smooth vanillacaramel-toffee character. Tell us about your barrel-adoption program. We’re a small operation with a shoestring budget, and the financial model for starting a whiskey program is really rough. You’re incurring all the costs up front to buy the barrels, put the whiskey in and let it sit for a while. That’s tough for a brand-new small business.

[Some distilleries] start their whiskey [program] by sourcing whiskey from a factory, so they can sell something under their brand while they’re waiting for theirs to age, and that didn’t feel like us. Instead, we created a barrel-adoption program. People were able to pay the cost of filling a barrel to get our whiskey program started. We had a couple events where we brought the barrel adopters in, and they got to participate in the process and bottle it when it was ready. At the end, they got their money back, plus a case of whiskey from their barrels. It was a different approach, and a fun way to let the rest of our community participate in making a truly local whiskey. 1734 Cherry St., Kansas City, Missouri, liftedspiritskc.com

more To learn d w o Lifte about h ade its Spirits m hiskey, wheat w . 61. turn to p

Black Manhattan Serves 1 RECIPE by Kyle Claypool

2 oz wheat whiskey 1 oz Amaro Averna 2 dashes Angostura bitters 1 orange peel (for garnish) 1 Maraschino cherry (for garnish) / preparation / In a mixing glass filled with ice, combine whiskey, amaro and bitters and stir vigorously for 30 seconds. Strain into a chilled coupe glass; garnish with orange peel and cherry; serve.

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Wine Tasting • Vineyards • Craft Beer AirBnb • Weddings / a pr i l 2 019

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I have long been a fan of grain-based breakfasts like overnight oats, muesli, oatmeal, cream of wheat – you name it. This take on overnight oats substitutes classic old-fashioned oats for kasha, toasted buckwheat commonly used in Central and Eastern European cuisines. Although kasha is often used to make porridge, I love using it in overnight oats-style recipes because of the unusual texture: There’s a chewy, earthy flavor that you can’t replicate with other grains. Written by Amanda Elliott, chef, Peachtree Catering and Rustic Supper in Columbia, Missouri Photography by Drew Piester

t a n a r g e m o p t u cocon serves 6

1 cup kasha ½ cup chia seeds ¼ cup hemp protein ½ cup hemp seeds You can find kasha at ½ cup raisins 1 cup pitted and chopped dates most grocery stores from 1 Tbsp ground cinnamon brands like Bob’s Red Mill, 6 Tbsp honey as well as at Eastern 6 Tbsp vanilla Greek yogurt European markets. 4½ cups unsweetened almond milk 1 cup fresh pomegranate seeds (for garnish) ½ cup toasted unsweetened coconut chips (for garnish) / preparation / In the bowl of a blender or food processor, add kasha and pulse a few times until grains split and crack but do not turn into powder. In a large bowl, combine next 6 ingredients. Add pulsed kasha and stir to combine. Divide mixture between six 8-ounce canning jars with lids and top each with equal portions honey, Greek yogurt and almond milk. Cover and refrigerate overnight. or up to 1 week. / to serve / Remove jars from refrigerator and stir mixture thoroughly. Garnish with pomegranate seeds and toasted coconut; serve.

pair with: Wheat beer with Citrus

PA I R IT!

When you're drinking beer with brunch, it's going to be a good Sunday. For those of you trying a brunch brew for the first time, try swapping your cup of OJ with Contact High Juiced from 4 Hands Brewing Co. in St. Louis. This hoppy wheat beer gets its pop of juicy flavor from finishing on fresh orange zest. The Juiced variant is kicked up a notch with fresh tangerine zest and juice. It may not be OJ, but consider it the next best thing. -Justin Phelps 4handsbrewery.com

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bMEAL-PREP TIP

Make this batch of six servings on Sunday to eat for breakfast all week; the kasha will keep in the refrigerator up to one week.

CULINARY LIBRARY /

springfield, MO.

with Craig Crosby

/ owner, The Artisan’s Oven

What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained by Robert L. Wolke (2008) “[The book shares] the processes in cooking, anything that has to be changed by the chef to create an effect – Chapter One talks about sugar, then salt, fat, heat, tools and technology. In baking, we deal with chemistry more than anything else; when we’re trying to formulate new breads, it really helps the development process to know what’s actually happening. This book helps fill in the blanks in understanding certain ingredients and how you use them. ”

Larousse Gastronomique

The Bread Baker’s Apprentice

by Prosper Montagné (1938)

by Peter Reinhart (2001)

“This book is like an encyclopedia of food from way back. It’s got a little bit of history thrown in, and it has recipes and preparations that have been made, some [of them], for hundreds of years. [My] copy is from 1961. It has every region of Europe represented; it has every way that you could think of to prepare anything, plus about 30 more variations that you didn’t know existed. It has a nice old-world perspective on culinary preparations back before some modern appliances and conveniences came around.”

“[Reinhart] is one of the foremost authorities on artisan bread-baking and seems to have the most know-how. The other day, I had a customer request Kaiser rolls, and I went ahead and got started on them and wasn’t quite getting the results I wanted. I went back and looked at [Reinhart’s] recipes, and the process is so detailed that I knew exactly where I was messing up and was able to fix the problem. [The book] came with the bakery when I took over, and it’s really been a big help; everybody looks to him for inspiration.”

tCraig Crosby spent more than two

decades as a chef before taking over his sister’s bakery, The Artisan’s Oven, in Springfield, Missouri, 10 years ago. The

shop is known for its housemade breads and pastries, including the Bordelaise, a country-style sourdough, plus cinnamon rolls, quiche, granola and more. Here, Crosby shares the cookbooks that he returns to often to refine his craft. -nancy stiles

/ a pr i l 2 019

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Stuffed Grape Leaves with Pomegranate Molasses Stuffed grapes leaves are known by many names. Depending on where you are in the Mediterranean or Middle East, they might be called dolma or sarma. Most preparations include rice – as well as fresh herbs, meat and spices – but here, we’re using pearled farro.

In this class, you‘ll learn how to make fattoush, a hearty Lebanese bread salad with mixed greens and vegetables. You’ll also learn how to season chicken with sumac, which has a tangy, lemony flavor.

An ancient grain, farro is named for the Italian word for emmer wheat. Pearled farro cooks more quickly than semi-pearled, which in turn takes less time than whole. For this recipe, look for jarred grape leaves packed in a brine in your local grocery store; you can make them less salty by boiling them in water for two to three minutes, if desired, and then immediately shocking them in an ice bath before patting dry. Written by Gabrielle DeMichele Photography by Jennifer Silverberg

serves 4 to 6

Get Hands-On

Pomegranate Molasses 1 16-oz bottle pomegranate juice ¼ cup granulated sugar juice of ½ a lemon

Join Feast Magazine and Schnucks Cooks Cooking School at 6pm on Wed., April 24, at the Des Peres, Missouri, location to make the dishes on this month’s menu. Tickets are just $45 for a night of cooking, dining and wine.

Don't have time? You can find jars of pomegranate molasses in specialty grocery stores.

RSVP

nourish.schnucks.com/ schnucks-cooking-school

or call 314.909.1704. 42

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

Stuffed Grape Leaves ½ cup pearled farro 1 lb ground beef 2 Tbsp tomato paste 1 tsp ground Aleppo pepper ½ tsp dried mint 1 bunch Italian parsley, roughly chopped 1 egg 2 tsp kosher salt, plus more to taste 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste 1 jar grape leaves (about 25 leaves total), rinsed and patted dry 2 carrots, peeled and thinly sliced 1 yellow onion, finely diced 1 rib celery, finely diced pomegranate molasses (recipe to right)

/ preparation – pomegranate molasses / In a small saucepan over high heat, combine pomegranate juice, sugar and lemon juice and bring to a boil; reduce heat to medium. Allow to reduce by half, about 20 minutes. Set aside off heat. / preparation – stuffed grape leaves/ Preheat oven to 400°F. Prepare farro according to package directions. Drain and set aside to cool. In a large mixing bowl, add next 8 ingredients plus cooled farro and stir to combine. On a clean work surface, spread out grapes leaves. On the lower ¹⁄₃ of each leaf, add 1 to 2 tablespoons farro mixture. Roll leaves up by folding the bottom over the filling, tucking in the sides and closing tightly. In an oven-safe casserole dish, add carrots, onion and celery and season with salt and pepper to taste. Arrange stuffed grape leaves on top, pour all pomegranate molasses over top, cover with aluminum foil and cook, 25 minutes. If the sauce becomes too thick while cooking, add ½ cup water to prevent burning. Remove foil and cook 5 minutes more. Serve stuffed grape leaves with cooked carrots, onion and celery and spoon sauce from casserole dish over top.

 Chef’s Tip: TURN UP THE HEAT. There are many types of farro, each featuring different amounts of fiber, protein and cooking times. Be sure to carefully read the preparation instructions on the package so your farro turns out chewy and al dente.

MAKE THE MEAL • Fattoush • Creamy Hummus with Warm Pita Bread • Stuffed Grape Leaves with Pomegranate Molasses • Roasted Chicken with Sumac and Lemon • Chocolate, Banana and Pecan Cookies

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ts For a one night stay or a weekend getaway, stay at one of these fine establishments.

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W r it t e n by S h il l u st r annon Weber at io n s by M ic h elle Na hmad

, Baking bread from scratch

inspires a host of emotions, ranging from terror to exhilaration and everything in between. Often, the scary part is due to not really knowing how to "build" a bread properly, and that's truly what it is: construction, with a little bit of science thrown in. Educating yourself on the building blocks of breadmaking – flour, yeast and more – will help you design and execute your perfect loaf.

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

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Across from the Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows • I-255 Exit 17A / a pr i l 2 019

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Bread is Universal

The world of bread is vast and varied, from chewy pita to fluffy brioche, but breads around the world generally fall into three basic categories.

▼

High-rise These are what you likely think of as basic bread: fluffy sandwich-style, towering artisan boules, pillowy plaited loafs and airy dinner rolls.

Mid-rise Think breads like a baguette or focaccia here: Mid-rise breads are voluminous, but in a softer, more subtle way, which increases their versatility. Fluffier than pizza dough, they’re great for slicing, but have a higher crust-to-crumb ratio than high-rise.

low-rise Low-rise flatbreads are generally unleavened, meaning they’re made without yeast; some, like pita, are slightly leavened for a bit more heft. There are dozens of variations on flatbreads, such as Indian naan, Norwegian lefse, Mexican tortillas, Middle Eastern lavash and South American arepas.

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Choose your flour wisely The type of flour you use to make bread will change everything from baking time and supporting ingredients to texture and flavor. Wheat-based flours are ideal for bread, as all that gluten gives bread structure while keeping things light on the inside. Bread flour, also called strong flour, is high in protein and made from hard winter wheat; all-purpose flour, whole-wheat and white whole-wheat flour are also favorites for crisp, airy loaves. Gluten-free flours are most often made from a mix of rice and sorghum flours; potato and tapioca starch are usually added, as well as a little xanthan gum, to do all the things gluten isn’t around to do. It provides elasticity and structure while holding onto the moisture gluten-free flours can struggle to retain. Alternative flours, or those made from corn, semolina, tapioca, quinoa, rye, spelt and coconut, can often make a traditional bread fall flat when used alone. They can be workhorses of flavor and texture, but too much can make bread gummy and deflated. Try mixing alternative flours at no more than a 50:50 ratio (and sometimes less) with a wheat-based flour.

That dough isn’t gonna rise on its own Other than flatbreads, bread rises, but in order for that to happen, it needs either yeast or a pre-ferment, also called a starter. For straightforward breads, yeast does the trick: It reacts with the gluten in dough by consuming sugar and releasing bubbles of carbon dioxide, causing the dough to rise. Active-dry yeast is living bacteria that needs to be dissolved in warm water before you mix it into your dry ingredients.

Instant yeast doesn’t need to be dissolved and can help your bread rise faster.

b For more complex flavor, however, you may want to consider a

starter. The process is longer and more labor-intensive, but with far superior results. Certain types of bread favor different kinds of pre-ferments: Sourdough starter is, of course, used to make sourdough bread, while biga is great for Italian breads like ciabatta. Poolish is often used for baguettes or country loaves, and sponge is best for enriched doughs like brioche and croissants. Pâte-fermentée, on the other hand, works well with almost anything. They all rely on varying combinations of water, flour and yeast – both added and wild – and a fermentation time ranging from weeks to merely an hour. Adding one of these pre-ferments to your dough immediately ages it, imbuing it with unique flavors it couldn’t develop using an instant yeast.

Heavyweight steel sheet pan

As any baker or pastry chef will tell you, baking is a science. It’s best to measure ingredients like flour by weight instead of volume, so you’ll need a small kitchen scale to really master bread.

Free-form loaves need nothing more than a high-quality sheet to ensure they bake properly all the way around. If you don’t have one, it’s a good investment you’ll use often.

Baking or pizza stone A pizza stone preheats in the oven and then returns that heat to the dough, pulling moisture out and making a supremely crackly, light crust.

Loaf pan Loaf pans are ideal for tender, soft breads that need a little help with height, or have a tendency to spread outward rather than upward, such as those made with spelt and cornmeal. Stoneware is great for this, but a high-quality steel pan will work, too.

Baguette pan Baguettes have a very specific texture, both inside and out. That’s thanks in large part to baguette pans, which are perforated to allow air to circulate as the loaves bake, resulting in a bubbly, crispy crust and chewy interior.

Dutch oven Preheated much like a baking stone, Dutch ovens offer something no other baking pan does: a lid. That lid keeps moisture in, allowing bread to steam itself into a soaring loaf with a crispy crust.

Pick the perfect

pan

Your baking vessel can help shape a bread or give it room to grow.

Basic Ale Bread Recipe by Shannon Weber

Kneading your bread dough in a stand mixer may seem tempting, but kneading by hand will often get you better results.

photo by julia calleo

yields 1 loaf 18 2½ 2 2 1 1 2 to 3

oz bread flour, plus more for flouring work surface tsp kosher salt tsp instant yeast Tbsp melted and cooled unsalted butter 12-oz bottle pale ale, room temperature olive oil, for oiling bowl and work surface tall unscented kitchen bag cups hot water (for steam)

/ preparation / In a large mixing bowl, add bread flour. Add salt and yeast on opposite sides of the bowl on top of flour. Pour in melted butter and beer and use your hands to incorporate liquids into dry ingredients. Continue to work mixture until a rough dough forms; mixture should clean the bowl as you mix. Rub a clean work surface with olive oil and transfer dough onto surface. Knead firmly, rolling dough from heel of palm and down the lower part of your arm, alternating arms back and forth, for 7 to 10

minutes until dough is smooth and supple; shape into a ball. In a large bowl, rub with oil and add dough ball. Cover with a clean dish towel, set in a warm place and let rise for 1½ to 2 hours. Lightly flour a clean work surface and line a steel baking sheet with parchment paper. Tip dough out of bowl onto oiled work surface. Fold sides of dough into its center as you press out excess air. Flip over and form dough into a smooth ball; transfer to prepared baking sheet. Slide a large, clean plastic bag around pan and tie to close. Let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, 1 hour. Preheat oven to 425°F. Set a lipped sheet pan on bottom rack of oven to preheat. Remove prepared baking sheet with dough from plastic bag and place sheet in oven on middle rack. Carefully pour hot water into lower preheated sheet pan to create steam. Close oven and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until bread is deep golden and baked through. Loaf should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom. Remove from oven and allow to cool on a wire rack. Serve. / a pr i l 2 019

PROMOTION

Spring Festivals & events

feastmagazine.com ja n ua ry 2 0 1 9 feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

weekends

augusta, mo | beverage

FRÜHLINGSFEST weekends in April, times vary

Celebrate warmer days with fresh new vintages, live music, local beer tastings, blind wine tastings, a townwide scavenger hunt and more. Augusta Winery (888.667.9463, augustawinery.com) is kicking off spring with FRÜHLINGSFEST, a series of events throughout weekends in April that includes the opening of its Wine & Beer Garden on Sat., April 6, through the Plein Air Art Festival’s Sip ’n‘ Paint on Sat., April 27. Most events are free to attend; some require tickets in advance. German for spring, Frühling is more fun with friends – so bring them all to Augusta, Missouri, this April.

EDITED BY BETHANY CHRISTO

e did it: Winter finally came to an end. With warmer weather, we’re all itching to ditch the sweaters, break out the gardening tools and bask in the beautiful outdoors. Missouri has plenty of ways to make the most of the spring season. Beer-lovers can head to the Upper Muny Parking Lot in St. Louis for the annual celebration of microbrews the first weekend in May or experience a big-top carnival celebration of beer a few weeks later. Later this month, wine enthusiasts can traverse Augusta wine country for a series of art and wine “paint-outs.” Or in St. Louis, Cardinals opening day is an unofficial holiday: Take in the birds on the bat from a birds-eye view 26 floors up at Three Sixty rooftop bar on April 4. Hungry for culture? Head to a farm-to-table brunch and Earth Day activities at Kansas City’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art on Sat., April 27, or nights out at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis throughout June, with cocktails and catering in the garden before the show.

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April

April de soto, mo | beverage VINEYARDS' 19-21 LACHANCE FOURTH-ANNIVERSARY PARTY Fri., April 19 to Sun., April 21, times vary

Spend an April weekend with family and friends at LaChance Vineyards (636.586.2777, lachancevineyards.com) for its FOURTH-ANNIVERSARY PARTY. To celebrate its success throughout the years, LaChance is hosting a free celebration with delicious food and, of course, amazing wine at its picturesque winery and vineyards in De Soto, Missouri. Griffin and the Gargoyles will be performing on Sat., April 20 from 6 to 10pm.

PROMOTION

April

thru

st. louis | beverage

August SUMMERMARKT

Saturdays, April through August, 11am to 4pm

Craft-beer lovers and craft makers unite at SUMMERMARKT at Urban Chestnut Brewing Co. (314.222.0143, urbanchestnut.com) on Saturdays April through August. Enjoy live music, food specials and all-star Urban Chestnut bier lineups at the free market while you peruse the wares of 20-plus local artisans and artists at the Midtown Brewery & Biergarten. Vendors will be indoors and outdoors, so when the dog days of summer arrive, you can beat the heat and still shop for unique locally made products.

April

26-27 May& 3

augusta, mo | beverage

AUGUSTA PLEIN AIR ART FESTIVAL April 26, April 27 and May 3, times vary

Head to wine country in Augusta, Missouri, and watch artists create masterpieces before your eyes. The Augusta Wine Trail is sponsoring events during the PLEIN AIR ART FESTIVAL (augustapleinair.com); four wineries on the trail will feature "paint-outs" for dozens of artists. Montelle Winery will host a morning paint-out for artists to capture the early light (Fri., April 26, 8:30am), a Quick Paint-Out at Noboleis Vineyards will challenge artists to paint in an allotted time frame (Fri., April 26, 5pm), Augusta Winery is hosting an afternoon Sip ’n‘ Paint workshop (Sat., April 27, 12pm, tickets required) and artists can enjoy an evening at Balducci Vineyards for its Sunset Paint-Out (Fri., May 3, 4:30pm).

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April

st. louis | food + beverage

2019 OPENING DAY ROOFTOP RALLY Thu., April 4, 11am

Get a bird’s-eye view of the St. Louis Cardinals opening-day festivities 400 feet above St. Louis at the ROOFTOP RALLY at Three Sixty (314.241.8439, 360-stl.com) rooftop bar. Opening at 11am, you can enjoy craft cocktails and a brand-new menu from executive chef Rick Kazmer while celebrating St. Louis’ favorite unofficial holiday, just blocks from the ballpark in Downtown St. Louis. No ticket is required.

April kansas city | food EXTRAVAGANZA 27 E(ART)H Sat., April 27, 11am to 3pm Join Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (816.753.5784, kemperart.org) for an unforgettable Earth Day-inspired event, E(ART)H EXTRAVAGANZA (free, RSVP required), that includes flash talks about indigenous plant-host relationships by artist Amanda Gehin, earth-conscious art-making activities, storytelling with the Kansas City Public Library, a live performance by Junkyard Orchestra, workshops, a museum shop sale and a brunch special highlighting ingredients from local BoysGrow farm at Kemper Museum’s Café Sebastienne.

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PROMOTION

April 27

fulton, mo | beverage

MORELS AND MICROBREWS Sat., April 27, 12 to 4pm

Celebrate spring with MORELS AND MICROBREWS (573.220.0007, morelsandmicrobrews.com), a beer-tasting festival in Fulton, Missouri, with live music, food and your favorite seasonal fungi: morels. Your $20 ticket includes a commemorative glass for beer and spirit tasting, and raw and fried morels will be available for purchase (cash only). At 1pm, children 8 and younger can participate in a mushroom hunt, and at 4pm, a morel auction will be held, with proceeds benefiting the historic Brick District in Fulton. Music will be provided by The Kay Brothers, followed by The Fried Crawdaddies.

May 18-19

grafton, il | beverage

GRAFTON WINERY’S BLUES FESTIVAL Sat., May 18 and Sun., May 19, 11am to 6pm

Pair blues and wine at Grafton Winery’s BLUES FESTIVAL (618.786.3001, thegraftonwinery.com) – there’s nothing like listening to some of the best blues music around while enjoying award-winning wine at Grafton’s vineyard location in picturesque Grafton, Illinois. The free festival includes food from StLouisiana Q food truck and live music by Joe Metzka Band and Ivas John Band on Saturday and NGK Band and Billy Peek on Sunday.

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May 2

st. louis | food

DINING OUT FOR LIFE Thu., May 2, all day

Join Saint Louis Effort for AIDS for the 26th-annual DINING OUT FOR LIFE (314.754.0114, diningoutforlife.com/stl) on Thu., May 2. Grab your family and friends, and make plans to dine out for breakfast, lunch or dinner at any of the 100-plus participating restaurants. At these establishments – the full list is available at diningoutforlife.com/stl – 25 percent or more of your check will be automatically donated to support the work of Saint Louis Effort for AIDS.

May25

st. louis | food + beverage

FRIENDS June 29 YOUNG May 25 and June 5, 13, 21, 22, 29, times vary

Join Opera Theatre of Saint Louis for one of several YOUNG FRIENDS (314.961.0644, experienceopera.org/youngfriends) events during its 2019 season. Meet other opera-lovers under 45 and enjoy an unforgettable night (single tickets $49, passes start at $79), including a delicious buffet by Ces & Judy’s Catering and an open bar with locally distilled cocktails from Spirits of St. Louis Distillery and SqWires. After the show at the Loretto-Hilton Center, linger in the gardens to enjoy another cocktail and meet the cast.

PROMOTION

May 3-4

st. louis | beverage

ST. LOUIS MICROFEST Fri., May 3 and Sat., May 4, times vary

Benefiting Lift for Life Gym, the 2019 ST. LOUIS MICROFEST (314.588.1186, stlmicrofest.org) is a two-day beer-tasting festival of international and craft offerings, with more than 125 breweries pouring more than 600 beers at the Upper Muny Parking Lot. With three different sessions available over Friday and Saturday, each Microfest ticket ($45 general admission, $60 VIP) includes a commemorative tasting glass, access to chef demos and brewery discussions, and live music. Food will be available for purchase from Bogart’s Smokehouse, The Dam, Mission Taco Joint, Strange Donuts and more. VIP tickets available.

June 29

st. louis | beverage

STILL 630 DAY Sat., June 29, 5 to 9pm

STILL 630 DAY (314.513.2275, still630.com/shop/ticket) is StilL 630’s anniversary party, but it’s also a celebration of the St. Louis distillery’s great collaborative partnerships. Plus, StilL 630 announced that it’s finally bringing back S.S. Sorghum Whiskey as its very first bottled-in-bond spirit at the event. Tickets for StilL 630 Day are limited ($35 in advance, $40 at the door) and include barbecue from Bogarts Smokehouse, beers from Narrow Gauge Brewing Co., cocktails, gourmet chocolate, live music and more. VIP packages available.

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May 18

st. louis | beverage

LUPULIN CARNIVAL Sat., May 18, 1 to 5pm

4 Hands Brewing Co.’s LUPULIN CARNIVAL (lupulincarnival.com), dubbed “the greatest beer show on Earth,” is moving to The Big Top at Kranzberg Arts Foundation this year. Lupulin is a celebration of hops and the release of War Hammer Imperial IPA. Every year, to celebrate, 4 Hands invites a variety of its favorite breweries from across the country to come share a taste of their own favorite beers with St. Louis. Tickets to Lupulin ($60) include amazing carnival acts, awesome tunes, circus fare and lots of fabulous beers.

weekends thru

Nov.

st. albans, mo | food

CULINARY CAMPS weekends through November

The Inns at St. Albans, just 35 miles west of St. Louis, offers CULINARY CAMPS (636.458.0131, innsatstalbans.com/cooking-school) taught by award-winning cooks, bakers, food professionals and best-selling authors. The weekend cooking events are immersive experiences, each custom-designed to give students the opportunity to master new skills, explore new culinary traditions, and discover local producers and artisans. Upcoming classes (prices vary) include Unleash Your Pie Superpower with Cathy Barrow the weekend of May 17 to 19, Patio Parties: Wood-Fired Pizzas & Grilling with Judith Fertig from June 21 to 23 and more.

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Out

at the opera

Experience opera in a whole new way at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis

pera Theatre of Saint Louis (OTSL) makes

the opera fun, sociable and accessible. From preshow picnics in its beautiful gardens by Ces & Judy's Catering (or bring your own!) to postshow cocktails with the stars of the show, OTSL is focused on making the experience as unique, memorable and inviting as possible. Plus, operas are performed in English or with English supertitles so that you can understand every word of the show. You can also learn more about each production during a free opera preview held one hour prior to each performance.

tickets Single tickets 2 Matinees Wed., Sat. 4 Matinees Saturday 4 evenings (Wed. to Fri.) 4 evenings (Sat., Sun.)

$25+ $44+ $80+ $80+ $92+

compose your own options at experienceopera.org

feastmagazine.com / a pr i l 2 0 1 9

PROMOTION

let the seasOn begin The Marriage of figaro

May 25, 31, June 6, 8, 12, 16, 19, 29

Life at court is about to get complicated. The maid Susanna is determined to wed her fiancé, Figaro, while the Count is equally determined to add her to his list of conquests. But Susanna and Figaro won’t allow one self-entitled nobleman to ruin their happy ending! They each hatch their own plots to teach their master a lesson. What follows is a whirlwind day of romantic intrigue, cunning schemes and uproarious fun.

rigoleTTo

June 1, 5, 14, 20, 22, 26, 30 There is no purer love than that of a father for his daughter – and no more impossible task than protecting her from the world. Rigoletto is a bitter court jester who serves the Duke of Mantua, a lecherous womanizer. Together, they are despised throughout the city. But alone, Rigoletto is all tenderness when it comes to his innocent young daughter, Gilda. Little does he know that an ominous curse is about to take its toll. When the Duke seduces Gilda, only to then abandon her, the enraged father swears vengeance.

The CoronaTion of poppea June 9, 13, 15, 22, 26, 28

The fight for the throne is never dignified. Poppea will stop at nothing to become empress, no matter who she has to blackmail, betray or kill. And Emperor Nero, who is infatuated with Poppea, is not thinking with his head. Separately, they’re bad enough. Together, they will turn Rome upside down. Sexy, bloodthirsty and unapologetic, this opera is the best kind of political thriller.

fire ShuT up in My boneS World Premiere

June 15, 19, 21, 23, 27, 29 One moment can change everything. When Charles discovers that his cousin has returned to his Louisiana hometown, he races home from college to confront his past. Memories and shadows surround Charles as he strives to move beyond a cycle of violence and forge a brave new path. Terence Blanchard teams up with screenwriter Kasi Lemmons (Eve's Bayou) for a haunting, powerful and tender coming-of-age story.

CenTer STage One Night Only!

A Young Artist Showcase - June 25 Rising opera stars from across the country step into the spotlight for one thrilling night of song. Cheer on the members of OTSL’s nationally acclaimed young artist programs – normally seen in small roles and the season ensemble – as they perform some of opera’s greatest hits and cherished rarities, accompanied onstage by members of the renowned St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. The future of opera is bright, indeed!

For more information on tickets and performances visit experienceopera.org.

/ j a nu a ry 2 019

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Features

a step in the rice direction After a devastating tornado, McKaskle Family Farm rebuilt into the only organic rice producer in Missouri.

field to fermentation

back to the grindstone

In Wellsville, Kansas, Great Plains Custom Grain grows wheat, barley and corn used to make some of your favorite local beers and spirits.

At Brian Severson Farms, heirloom wheat, oats, blue corn and other grains are grown organically and stone-ground into nutritious flours and cornmeal.

/ a pr i l 2 019

Steve first looked into organic farming after two decades of conventional farming in Braggadocio. He was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and his family moved to Caruthersville when he was in elementary school. In high school, he met Kaye. Kaye is a fifth-generation family farmer; her great-great grandfather is buried under a time-worn tombstone near the McKaskles’ house.

pril 2, 2006, started out like any other Sunday for Steve and Kaye McKaskle. Although balmy, the afternoon stretched out quietly: Kaye reading a book and Steve writing an agricultural newsletter in their home in Braggadocio, Missouri. Steve had the news on in the background, but he soon took notice: A tornado was heading due east across Pemiscot County, in the extreme southeastern part of the Missouri Bootheel.

After Steve graduated from college, Kaye’s father convinced him to take up farming in Braggadocio, as there weren’t many young people doing so. Steve learned the cotton business from his father-in-law. “It was mostly a negative experience for 20 years,” Steve says. “Low prices, low yields, commodity market swings – there’s all kinds of things that are against the conventional farmer. And I was getting up to here with it.”

Steve went out to the front yard and saw the EF4 twister less than a mile away. Dirt and debris were everywhere, so they jumped into their car to drive just next door to the home of Gary Coppage, Kaye’s cousin. When they got there, the wind bent one car door in half and tore the other clean off. “We ran in their house screaming, ‘Get in the basement!’” Steve recalls. “They didn’t even know there was a tornado. So we got in the basement, and a minute or two later we heard this, bang, bang, bang, bang, noise. It didn’t last long at all. We came up and the whole top part of the house was gone.” The devastation was total. More than 700 homes in nearby Caruthersville were destroyed; two people in Braggadocio were dead. McKaskle Family Farm, then an organic cotton and soybean operation, was almost entirely gone: The tornado ripped out a century-old barn and two 100-year-old pecan trees and destroyed tractors, farming equipment and the cotton gin – not to mention half of the McKaskles' home. The den was pretty much the only room left intact in the couple’s house; Steve and Kaye slept on a mattress there for a few months while they rebuilt. That first night, though, they slept in their adult kids’ old bedroom, with no roof. “We slept in their beds – it was a dry tornado – and you could see the stars,” Steve says, shaking his head. “All you could hear were chainsaws [from people working on debris] all night long.”

“They said they [were] gonna pay $1 a pound for the cotton lint when I was getting 35 cents; I was going, ‘Thank you, thank you!’” Steve says. “I got in for the price, mainly. We started farming organically, and the more I did it, the more I realized this was the right thing to do.”

McKaskle Family Farm

Because their cotton operation was decimated, the McKaskles had to rebuild from scratch. Steve had switched over to organic cotton in early 1993 and was selling his crop to Patagonia, and later, Levi’s and Nike. But after the tornado, he had the chance to make a change. He’d been talking to a rice mill in Arkansas about possibly getting into organic rice and decided to roll the dice. “I called him and said, ‘We’re wiped out,’” Steve says. “‘And I would like to grow 80 acres of organic rice this year.’ And he said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

And then representatives from Esprit, the California-based clothing company, came to a farmers’ meeting at the University of Missouri Fisher Delta Research Center, looking for people growing organic cotton.

I I I

oday, the McKaskles organically farm 3,200 acres of rice, corn, soybeans, wheat and popcorn; usually around 700 to 800 acres of that a year is dedicated to rice. What started as just an organic rice and popcorn business has now grown into a product line featuring rice flours, white cornmeal, white corn grits, polenta and popcorn cornmeal, all processed and milled on-site. Rice farms like McKaskle Family Farm are common in southeast Missouri, although it’s the state’s only all-organic rice operation. Rice was first planted in the state in 1910, but commercial production really ramped up in the 1960s and 1970s; today Missouri is the fourth-largest producer of rice in the country. Almost all Missouri rice farms – 386 as of 2012, the last year numbers were made available – are located in the Bootheel. Natural flooding from the Mississippi River created fertile soil that supported millions of acres of forests and swamps that were cleared in the early 20th century and converted to farmland “perfectly suited for the wetland-style region that rice farming requires,” according to the Missouri Rice Council.

Steve recalls with a laugh that his first organic inspection, in 1993, was a phone call from the Tennessee Land Stewardship Association, as the farm is only about 20 miles from its jurisdiction, with about five questions. Now, though, the requirements for organic certification are extensive and complicated, but in general, the use of synthetic substances such as fungicide and pesticide is prohibited, as is working with genetically modified seeds. Periodic inspection and testing is also required. In 2007, a year after the tornado hit Braggadocio, McKaskle Family Farm relaunched with crops of organic long-grain rice and popcorn. In 2010, the couple decided to begin selling popcorn and rice under their own label, Braggadocio. Steve and Kaye were packaging their haul in clear bags with McKaskle stickers, building pallets in their living room and delivering to customers themselves. As their customer base grew, the couple moved their packaging and storage into an old building next to the Braggadocio Post Office that Kaye owned, and built a 3,750-square-foot warehouse for the milling equipment and a cold-storage building. McKaskle now employs 17 people between the farm, office, mill and packaging and distribution. Planting rice – a type of grass seed and cereal grain – begins in late April and runs into May; Steve and Kaye manage both their own fields and some fields for neighboring landowners as well, which they rent. All of the soil had to be laser-graded to provide the right type of irrigation for rice, which requires a lot of water, mostly for weed prevention. Soil is graded on a slight incline, and a system of small levees allows the McKaskles to control irrigation. After laser-grading their own fields, the McKaskles had to convince the owners of the land they rent to do the same. “They thought we were nuts at first. Everybody thought we were crazy,” Steve says. “Nobody heard of organic when we started. It got where – and it still is – people are making real good rent, income, on land we’re farming. Which really helps. If we weren’t making any money, they wouldn’t do it. So we’ve got to make sure that we do it and still do it good enough where people can make a good income.” Rice is harvested in October with a combine harvester; the soil is flooded all summer thanks to the irrigation and levees, but the stalks of rice aren’t submerged. It almost looks like tall grass from overhead. / a pr i l 2 019

Destination: Waterloo, Illinois

ChiCken Dinner SunDayS!

Whiskey Wh is key for the Winter

Buy One Get One tasting events every friday

 More than 300 Whiskeys in Stock 10 Minutes from Special Order Available downtown St. Louis  Serving St. Louis & Southern Illinois for 78 years 210 W. Main Street | Collinsville, IL 62234 | 618-344-4930 | deansliquor.com  

Chicken Dinner

1/2 Price

Expires 3/31/19 Dine-in Only. Limit one coupon per table. Not to be combined with any other offer.

GALLAGHER’S

Just 15 Minutes froM the JB Bridge!

Coming Soon

“Classic Italian Food. Authentic and made with care.”

– Dan B.

“I had my wedding dinner celebration at Favazza’s. Everything was amazing and the staff was great! ”

– Chloe A.

“Perfect night on the patio! Music, fresh sunflowers at every table and a garden lining a beautiful mural. We’ll definitely be back! ”

– Jess S.

5201 Southwest Street, St. Louis, MO | Favazzas.com

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Small Beer, Big Impact 4 Hands Brewing Co.

{ milling stages }

RICE IN HUSK

BROWN RICE

{ from the field }

{ husk removed }

WHITE RICE

RICE FLOUR

{ bran removed } McKaskle Family Farm keeps the crop from different farms separate from planting to harvesting through to processing and packaging. Steve’s also helping some local farmers transition from conventional to organic to produce transitional rice and other crops. “We can tell you what farm your bag of rice came from,” he says. “That’s called knowing where your food comes from. It’s so important – transparency.” Today, Steve says that his facilities are inspected for one certification or another – the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Organic Crop Improvement Association, as well as entities to verify kosher certification, non-GMO grain processing and food safety – annually. His staff? They inspect the rice every two hours.

I I I

{ stone ground }

After passing under another rare-earth magnet, the grains are then sent through an additional machine that removes the brown part of the rice, called rice bran. Rice bran is where rice holds its fiber and vitamins, so that’s sold separately for animal feed, though this step is obviously skipped when processing brown rice. Yet another machine removes broken grains of rice; there’s nothing wrong with them, but consumers want uniformly sized grains. At this point, head miller Sonya Driver takes a sample every hour to determine what percentage is broken and ensures it’s kept at 4 percent or less. Steve’s favorite machine is the color sorter. This machine uses two specially calibrated cameras to catch anything coming through that’s black, brown, green or red and automatically removes any rejects. After passing a third magnet, a conveyor belt takes the rice through an X-ray machine looking for glass, ceramic, plastic and stainless steel, all of which the magnets won’t catch. Driver tests the X-ray every two hours with samples of these contaminates; if even one of them is found, all the rice that’s been processed over the past two hours has to start over. Then, finally, it’s ready to be packaged (or milled further, in the case of white and brown rice flours, grits, polenta and cornmeal). The flours, grits, polenta and cornmeal are ground to various sizes over in the warehouse next to the post office in a room off of the packaging area. Today, McKaskle uses three granite stone grinders ranging from eight to 20 inches to grind rice and popcorn. Their very first mill was made with only 8-inch stones, and Steve, Kaye and another employee would use screens to sift by hand. “We were all sitting there shaking [the screens], and after 15 minutes I said, ‘This is not gonna work,’” Steve says with a laugh. He soon bought a sifting box that’s suspended from the ceiling by chains and, when operating, swings around like a hula hoop to shake flour, polenta, grits or cornmeal through the screens and out the bottom of the machine. The biggest grinder uses 20-inch stones – “That’s a hoss right there,” Steve says – which is primarily used for rice flour. The team currently fulfills a monthly 12,000-pound rice flour order in addition to its normal output, including 2,000 pounds a month to a bakery in Dallas. Although similar in flavor to white rice flour, brown rice flour is the only rice flour that has fiber, thanks to that nutrition-packed rice bran.

he first line of defense in McKaskle’s organic rice mill is one of four very powerful magnets – a rare-earth double-drawer magnet, to be exact, which will catch any stray nuts, bolts, washers or even metal shavings. After rice is harvested, it’s deposited into one of several grain bins and stored until ready for processing. The rice is moved from the grain bins into the warehouse through the ceiling using special flexible pipes, past the first magnet and into the cleaner. This machine removes any sticks, straw or trash from the rice. Next is the sheller, which sends grains of rice between two rubber wheels that separate the hard, pointy husk from the rice (which is later sold for chicken coop bedding). A second line of defense is the separator, which uses 12 trays to sift out any rice that didn’t get husked and pushes it through again. photo by beth trimm

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Stacked against the wall are box screens with wooden frames painted white. Numbers stamped on the side indicate the mesh size: 24 for rice flour, 18 for popcorn cornmeal, 12 for grits. “The higher the number, the smaller the holes,” Steve says, pulling out a tray. “Look at that – I mean, you can’t even see the holes! That’s for very, very fine rice flour. Normally we [use] 24 mesh, but some people want a talcum-powder consistency.” In an adjoining room, an employee is filling bags with popcorn kernels, sending them down a conveyor belt through a machine that simultaneously seals the bags and stamps them with an expiration date in instant-dry ink. At the end of the short conveyor belt, another employee boxes the sealed bags and stacks them on a pallet. “None of us knew how to do any of this – it’s been a huge learning curve,” Steve says. The farm now sells 11 products under the Braggadocio label: long-grain white rice, long-grain brown rice, white basmati rice, brown basmati rice, white rice flour, brown rice flour, popcorn, popcorn cornmeal, white cornmeal, polenta and white corn grits. The couple also bought the Texas Best brand a few years back and sells brown and white long-grain and jasmine rice under that label. Much of McKaskle’s rice flour is purchased by gluten-free bakeries all over the country; Steve says the increased availability of rice flour has been a real boon for people with celiac disease or gluten issues. It’s also commonly used to make rice noodles in East and Southeast Asian cuisines. Thanks to its fairly neutral flavor, it can be a great alternative to all-purpose wheat flour. “Rice flour is a real hot item right now,” he says. “We’ve fried fish and chicken strips in our flour and cornmeal and it’s just wonderful. A lot of chefs are starting to use the non-gluten flours; these non-gluten bakeries are popping up everywhere.” Kaye cautions that rice flour can’t be swapped cup-for-cup with all-purpose wheat flour: Often, you have to add tapioca or potato starch for the rice flour to behave more like traditional wheat flour, but once you get the proportions right, she says, it’s really tasty. “What you’re seeing is what all farmers need to do, and that’s called value-added agriculture, instead of taking a commodity that’s priced on the Chicago Board of Trade that you have no influence over,” Steve says. 48

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“We process [our rice] and we’re selling it to the consumer. Then we took that same rice, brown and white, and we’re making flour, and that’s value added. Instead of growing popcorn and selling it to a wholesaler, we’re growing it, we’re processing it, we’re selling it to humans. There’s more money in it, it’s more work – but you have more control over it. It’s a lot of work.”

PICTURED LEFT TO RIGHT: Steve McKaskle; his son-in-law, Carter Ellis; and grandsons Coppage and Stephen Ellis

These value-added products help McKaskle Family Farm’s bottom line, of course, but the flavor is important, too. The McKaskles first started grinding popcorn into cornmeal after a customer north of Cape Girardeau couldn’t find organic and non-GMO cornmeal, so she ground Braggadocio popcorn into cornmeal in her home grinder. The resulting cornbread muffins were so good, she brought Steve and Kaye a batch, and they were sold.

I I I

hen all is said and done, Steve and Kaye are building up McKaskle Family Farm for future generations. Their son-in-law is the company’s chief operations officer, and one day, they’d like their grandchildren to take the reins. Their oldest grandsons, Stephen and Coppage Ellis, 24 and 22, respectively, are working on the farm and learning the ropes. Currently, McKaskle Family Farm provides rice to more than 60 Chipotle restaurants in Missouri, and brown rice for national meal-kit delivery service Blue Apron. You can find Braggadocio brand rice – and often the farm’s other products – at Mama Jean’s Natural Market in Springfield, Missouri; Local Harvest Grocery and Whole Foods Market in the St. Louis area; Lucky’s Market in Columbia; and through Shatto Home Delivery in the Kansas City area. “I don’t really wanna get much bigger than what we are right now,” Steve says. “I think we got enough.” Kaye finishes Steve’s thought. “Until the boys can grab hold of it. They have a whole lot to learn,” she says. “They all have a future here, but they need to learn the farming first, then they need to learn the money, and then they need to learn the marketing.” “They never complain,” Steve says. “We’re hoping that what we’re trying to build here will be good for them. We hope that they really like it. That’s why we’re doing it, really.” That doesn’t mean Steve is slowing down: McKaskle Family Farm is currently testing

ready-to-eat bags of popcorn, which they hope will be yet another value-added product. They also experimented last year with a form of weed control that essentially electrocutes the weeds that grow taller than their soybeans. Since shifting gears on the farm in 2006, Steve has survived two forms of cancer that are now in remission, and he continues to constantly look forward and try to answer the question, “How can I improve my farm, crops and business?” “He’ll never retire,” Kaye chuckles. She retired about a decade ago as a buyer for an independent bookstore in Caruthersville. Steve’s next project – other than planting, growing and harvesting, that is – is a weed-control research program in conjunction with the University of Missouri’s Bradford Research Center outside of Columbia. “I’m known for talking too much and telling too many stories,” Steve says, sipping a cup of black coffee. “It’s real hard. The farming part is real hard; the processing part is real hard. It’s just lots of work. But if you’re passionate about organics – if you’re not passionate, I don’t think you could do it.” Kaye nods. “Anything worth having is worth working for.” McKaskle Family Farm, Braggadocio, Missouri, mckasklefamilyfarm.com

White Rice Yeast Bread yields 1 loaf 2 ²⁄₃ ¹⁄₃ 3 2 1¼ 1¼ 1 ¼ 3

Recipe courtesy McKaskle Family Farm

cups white rice flour cup potato starch cup tapioca starch or tapioca flour Tbsp granulated sugar Nondairy milks such tsp instant or rapid-rise yeast as almond or oat milk tsp kosher salt and nondairy butter tsp xanthan gum alternatives will work in cup warm whole milk cup softened unsalted butter this recipe, in the same eggs measurements, as well. nonstick cooking spray

/ preparation / In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with

the paddle attachment, add first 7 ingredients and mix on low speed until combined. With mixer running, slowly pour in warm milk; add butter and beat until thoroughly combined. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating after each addition and scraping the bottom and sides of bowl as needed. Increase speed to high and beat for 3 minutes. Cover bowl with a dry, clean dish towel and transfer to a warm place; let rise for 1 hour. Preheat oven to 350°F. Scrape down sides of bowl to gently deflate. Grease an 8-by-4-inch baking dish with cooking spray and pour dough into pan. Using a spatula, smooth out top. Spray a sheet of plastic wrap with cooking spray and cover dish; let rise on a countertop near oven until loaf just barely crowns above rim of dish, about 20 to 25 minutes. Bake bread until golden brown, about 38 to 40 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool slightly; serve. / a pr i l 2 019

THE INNS AT ST. ALBANS April 5-7 : Fancy Fish: Easy & Impressive Party Ready Food with Christine Burns Rudalevidge Put down the cocktail sauce and step away from the boiled shrimp! Learn new ways to make seafood the guest of honor at your next party. From appetizers to entrees, you’ll learn everything you need...

May 17-19: Unleash Your Pie Superpower with Cathy Barrow Cathy Barrow knows that slab pies are the answer to feeding a crowd. They’re easy to slice, easy to make and easy to eat. Up your summer pie game in this Culinary Camp.

The Inns at St. Albans offers culinary classes taught by award-winning cooks, bakers, food professionals and best-selling authors. the weekend cooking events are immersive experiences, each custom designed to give students the opportunity to master new skills, explore new culinary traditions and discover local producers and artisans. Weekend camps and classes include a mix of hands-on cooking, demonstrations, excursions, talks and tastings.

June 21-23: Patio Parties Wood Fired Pizzas & Grilling with Judith Fertig Expand your outdoor entertaining options with this weekend class dedicated to delicious pation parties. You’ll fire homemade pizzas in our wood fire pizza oven and learn techniques for achieving the same type of delicious results at home.

June 7-9 Foraging with Jeff Ross Artisan Chef Jeff Ross likes to say, “good gardeners cook and good cooks garden.” He understands the too-frequent disconnect between the planted fields and a talented kitchen, and seeks to erase that distance. With an education in American history, more than two decades of professional experience with plants, and a profound passion for food, he has combined his talents to forage and cook in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee.

July 19-21: Surprising Pantry Staples that Make Meals a Breeze with Christine Burns Rudalevidge Make your pantry work for you! Spend the weekend learning how to stock your pantry and freezer with homemade flavors that are there when you need them for quick and delicious meals - spice blends, compound butters, sauces and stocks. Make summer meals a breeze.

Book a cooking camp with accommodations for the weekend | Visit www.innsatstalbans.com | 636.458.0131 The Inns at St. Albans | 3519 St. Albans Rd, St. Albans, MO 63073 | info@innsatstalbans.com 60

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In the dead of winter, Hickory Creek Farm is cast in swatches of muted browns and grays.

The sky is a cheerful, cloudless blue, but somehow, the Wellsville, Kansas, landscape – with its barren trees and patches of snow and ice – looks even colder than it feels. To the untrained eye, Hickory Creek’s brown fields are indistinguishable from one another. Even now, Cory Johnston and Gary Van Horn can identify almost every square inch of the farm’s 640 acres. As the partners behind Great Plains Custom Grain, which sells both heirloom and commercial grain grown at Hickory Creek for local craft distillers and brewers, that's their job. Great Plains got its start in 2014, shortly after Johnston purchased Hickory Creek with his parents. Johnston's wife, Veronica, made a serendipitous connection that led to the idea: At a high school reunion, she became reacquainted with a classmate, Darren Unruh, who lived about a mile from Hickory Creek. He was in the process of helping to open Lifted Spirits, a distillery in Kansas City's Crossroads Arts District. Along with Unruh, Lifted Spirits’ co-owners Kyle Claypool and Michael Stuckey asked if Johnston might grow wheat for their distillery. Johnston seized the opportunity, reaching out to Van Horn, a tenant farmer whose family had been farming corn, soybeans and wheat at Hickory Creek since 2010. Today, Johnston and Van Horn employ sustainable agricultural practices on the farm, including crop rotation, cover cropping and no-till farming to raise soft red winter wheat, winter barley, millet, nonGMO yellow corn and two varieties of heirloom corn. Under the Great Plains label, the partners sell their grains to Lifted Spirits as well as breweries like Brewery Emperial and Torn Label Brewing Co. in Kansas City and Blind Tiger Brewery & Restaurant in Topeka, Kansas. Johnston and Van Horn have also had a couple tons of their soft red winter wheat malted at Blacklands Malt in Leander, Texas. Malting is the process of germinating a grain – usually barley – and then drying it for brewing. Great Plains sells its malted wheat to local breweries, including Blind Tiger; Cinder Block Brewery in North Kansas City, Missouri; and Double Shift Brewery in Kansas City. Together, Johnston and Van Horn’s goal is to bring more local flavor into craft beer and spirits, as well as support the grain economies in Kansas and Missouri. “What we’re doing is about having a relationship with the crop you’re growing,” Johnston says. “We know how much effort, time and luck it takes to really grow a good crop. And what better way to tell the story of grain than over [a] beer or cocktail made with that yield?” 62

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TASTING THE STORY For John Dean, brewmaster and co-owner of Blind Tiger Brewery, Great Plains’ most interesting and important product is the unmalted wheat. “Unmalted wheat is harder to come by, especially if you want a local product,” Dean says. “Kansas is a wheat state, but very few people grow brewing-quality wheat – most of it's grown for bread. That’s why I was so happy to find Great Plains.”

John Dean

Unmalted wheat can give beer a bread-dough flavor with rounded smoothness and sweetness – exactly what Dean was going for in Raw Wheat, Blind Tiger’s flagship beer. “It’s a spectacular flavor, and that’s the reason you bother to use unmalted wheat,” Dean says. “It can make lautering [separating the mash from the wort and residual grain] difficult, because it’s gluey and can make water stick to the mash, but it’s worth it.” Dean also uses Great Plains’ soft red winter wheat in his County Seat Wheat beer. Great Plains isn't Blind Tiger's only Midwest grain supplier, and Dean is adamant about his passion for using local products. “The most important part for me is quality local [ingredients],” Dean says, “and when [Great Plains is ] involved, that’s no question. Cory literally delivers the grain [himself]. You’re talking to and shaking hands with the guy who grows your product. You’re not just another number.” Johnston says you can taste the difference in beer made with Great Plains’ grain, too. Heirloom corn like Silvermine benefits from cooking at 212ºF – significantly higher than a basic mash temperature, which is about 150ºF. Once the Silvermine reaches 212ºF, cold water is added to bring the temperature down to 150ºF before the corn is mixed with malted barley in the mash. “Depending on the temperature and duration, your heirloom corn can contribute fermentable and non-fermentable sugars,” Johnston says, “so what you would notice is additional sweetness, corn flavor and higher ABV, which lightens the body of the beer. In our experience, the red [Bloody Butcher] corn has a strong corn flavor and the white [Silvermine] corn has a mild flavor. Yellow corn falls in between on the flavor scale.”

Michael Stuckey, co-founder and head distiller at Lifted Spirits, echoes Dean’s regard for sourcing grain locally. Stuckey has used Great Plains’ soft red winter wheat to produce Lifted Spirits’ gin and vodka from the beginning, and it’s also featured in the distillery’s newest product, a wheat whiskey released earlier this year. “One of the most important components is the grain that we use,” Stuckey says. “That ability to make exactly what we want – instead of getting pallets of wheat from a huge supplier – gives us an amazing degree of control on our product. We have this investment in each other’s dreams, and that’s really why we work well together.” Stuckey’s enthusiasm for customization is not unique among Great Plains’ clients – most are looking for grains grown to their specifications, as that’s a rarity for many craft brewers and distillers. After harvest, test batches of grain are distributed to clients, and Great Plains then works closely with them to dial it in further. “[Lifted Spirits is] looking for a pretty specific protein content based on what they’re producing,” Johnston says. “Distillers are looking for lower protein and higher starch for improved yield, but too low of protein and fermentation can make the product suffer. The soft red winter wheat we grow for Lifted Spirits targets protein levels between 11 and 13 percent; that’s enough for a good fermentation, but it allows for a higher starch content, which is good for ethanol yield.”

Michael Stuckey

Stuckey notes that because Great Plains works to customize exactly what he’s looking for, Lifted Spirits can make more alcohol with less grain, resulting in reduced waste. “If we were using a regular wheat from the silo, we would need 650 pounds or so, and with the Great Plains wheat, we're using 470 pounds because of things like the high starch content – it's really efficient,” Stuckey says. According to Stuckey, Great Plains’ wheat helps distinguish Lifted Spirits’ vodkas, gins and whiskeys in the marketplace. He says the value of working with Johnston and Van Horn is in the unique flavor of their grain, which in turn give his spirits their distinctive character. “The easiest thing to observe about the effect of the grain is the mouthfeel of the spirit,” Stuckey says. “When you sip on our gin, you realize it has a presence on your whole palate, and those characteristics are driven by the kind of wheat we use. Some of the sweet notes you get in the spirit are from the wheat, and they balance the botanicals. It’s a give-and-take between the juniper and sweet flavors.”

. 38 Turn to p ore m n to lear ed ift L about s it ir Sp

Learn more about six of the heirloom and commercial crops grown at hickory creek farm.

Violetta two-row winter barley. Malting barley is generally divided into two types: two-row and six-row, named for their different appearances (two rows of kernels versus six). Violetta is a French hybrid that was originally developed to be grown in coastal regions of France, but it works well in Midwestern soil. Johnston says it’s especially good for pale ales.

Cory Johnston (pictured left) and Gary Van Horn

LABOR OF LOVE It’s Great Plains’ heirloom grains – which more closely resemble what our ancestors harvested – that get the most attention. The Silvermine white corn grown at Hickory Creek, for example, was developed in the 1880s and refined by plant breeder Ernest W. Young in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1907. “From a food nerd perspective, if a variety is still around after 100 years, it may have outstanding flavor characteristics,” Johnston says. He vouches for some of his own cooking experiments with the white corn, including using ground Silvermine to make grits. “They tasted slightly sweet with a mild corn flavor,” he says. But it’s not just the flavor and the history that makes growing heirloom varieties attractive to Johnston and Van Horn. “From the landowner and land-steward perspective, heirloom varieties allow us to get away from GMO crops and their reliance on chemical herbicide applications,” Johnston says. “It, hopefully, creates another source of income away from pure commodity crops. The first year we grew Hickory King white corn, we were amazed by the number of honeybees during pollination. It’s not something I’ve seen with other varieties of corn.”

Millet. Millet is a whole grain that grows in several colors. Pearl millet, which is small, round and white, is most commonly grown for human consumption. When cooked, millet has a fluffy texture and a mild, slightly nutty flavor; it can also be used to make flour.

Non-GMO yellow corn. Non-GMO and GMO yellow corn have a similar appearance, and both can be ground and used in baking and cooking. When ripe, yellow corn has sweet flavor; it's often used to produce beer with a mild, slightly malted flavor.

Silvermine heirloom corn. Silvermine heirloom corn was developed in the 1880s and refined by plant breeder Ernest W. Young in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1907. It's perhaps the most local grain on this list. It has medium-sized, creamy white kernels, and grinds well into grits and corn flour. The grits are sweet and mild.

Bloody Butcher heirloom corn. Bloody Butcher corn

There are some challenges associated with growing heirloom grains, however, including yields, which aren’t comparable to commercial varieties. “Even non-GMO crops with 100 years of variety improvements have much better yield, disease resistance and drought resistance than the heirloom varieties we’ve grown,” Johnston says.

has been grown in the U.S. since 1845. It’s known for its dark crimson color and medium-large kernels. It has a strong corn aroma, and, when ground into cornmeal or flour, has a rich, sweet flavor. It makes wonderfully tasty grits and polenta.

It’s not just heirlooms that give them trouble, though: Johnston and Van Horn have also struggled with growing barley to malting-quality standards; barley needs to meet minimum and maximum thresholds for kernel size, kernel conformity, protein, moisture, germination power and mold and mildew levels.

Soft red winter wheat. Soft red winter wheat is a

“We’ve planted barley for malting and brewing for three years running,” Johnston says. “We haven’t exactly produced a crop up to malting-quality standards, and part of this is because barley varieties were traditionally developed to grow in more northern latitudes as a spring variety; it gets too hot in Kansas to grow spring barley.” 64

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modern wheat variety with a strong yield that produces between 11 and 13 percent protein content. It has a mild nutty flavor, and when malted, develops nutty, light caramel, bread and pasta flavors.

Johnston is devoted to solving his barley problem, though. “Lots of Eastern [U.S.] universities are publishing great barley variety research more attuned to growing in our climate,” he says. “We’ve sourced winter barley seeds that resulted from that research, and here, in our fourth year of production, we’re looking for malting-quality results.” Great Plains was recently awarded a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to receive matching funds for a feasibility study on building a malting facility in Kansas City. This is a promising project, as it would increase access to locally grown malt for brewers and distillers, although it’s still in the early stages. “In other words,” Johnston says, “what we’re doing is a labor of love.”

FULL CIRCLE First Johnston and Van Horn focused their energy on Hickory Creek Farm, then on launching Great Plains, and next, their attention will turn to Fields & Ivy Brewery, which they plan to open in Lawrence, Kansas, next month. The 10,000-square-foot space will seat 130 and include a brewery and taproom as well as a live-music venue and brick-oven pizza restaurant. It’s a natural evolution for Johnston and Van Horn, as eventually they’ll be able to serve 12 of their own beers on tap brewed with Midwestern ingredients. Eventually, Fields & Ivy may even brew a few beers made with exclusively with Great Plains products. “Summer Pasture, our American wheat-style beer, is made with Great Plains’ wheat malt,” Johnston says. “Our Worboys lager is made with about 10 percent heirloom Silvermine white corn – which is awesome, because Silvermine was developed in Lawrence, where the beer is being made. We have other ideas about beers for local grains like the Bloody Butcher corn or lighter styles for the Silvermine.” Dan Chivetta, head brewer at Fields & Ivy, studied brewing at the Siebel Institute in Chicago and previously spent nine years brewing at Boulevard Brewing Co. in Kansas City. “Brewing a beer in Kansas with all Kansas[-grown] ingredients – that's really cool," Chivetta says. "Local matters, and Cory’s got the vision for it. This is the sort of thing that really resonates with people." Indeed, Johnston’s longterm vision seems broader than growing grains and brewing beer. He’d like the work he and Van Horn are doing with Hickory Creek, Great Plains and Fields & Ivy to be part of a larger narrative around transforming the image of his home state. “Everyone knows Kansas as the breadbasket of America,” Johnston says. “Now we want to make it America’s beer barrel, too.” Fields & Ivy Brewery, 706 E. 23rd St., Lawrence, Kansas, fieldsandivy.com Great Plains Custom Grains, Wellsville, Kansas, greatplainscustomgrain.com / a pr i l 2 019

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Written by Liz Miller photography by neil burger

t’s lunchtime when I arrive at Brian Severson Farms in Dwight, Illinois, about 80 miles southwest of Chicago. The country roads leading up to the property are slick with ice and snow on this frigid January day, but inside the Severson home, it’s warm and filled with the comforting aroma of freshly baked bread. Brian welcomes me into the kitchen, where his wife, Karen, and their oldest son, Luke, are sitting at the table. As a fifth-generation farmer, Brian is carrying on the legacy started by his great-great grandfather, Lars, who immigrated to Illinois from Norway in 1866. When Brian first started farming on his own land 30 years ago, his grandfather, Harold, brought him iron tracings of horses that had hung in his barn. Harold told Brian to hang the tracings in his barn, as well, just has his father before him had done. His reasoning was simple: “The answer is tradition,” Brian says. “Doing things the way our grandfathers and their fathers did them.

Harold Severson's brother cultivating corn near Gardner, ILlinois, in 1917. ▶

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To try and grow the crops and varieties they grew, that tasted good, without chemicals or GMOs – because that’s what they fed their families – using methods that have been used for hundreds of years.” This story is now featured on the back of several of Severson’s packaged products, including the white popcorn and pastry flour, and serves to explain the farm’s emblem: a horse. Karen gestures toward a vintage pastel Crock-Pot on the buffet. “Are you hungry?” she asks me. “We have chicken soup, bread and cornbread made with our blue cornmeal.” The four of us sit down at the table, but before we dig in, Karen asks Brian if he’ll say a prayer. He thanks God for the family’s many blessings, including this food, and says he’s hoping that our conversation here today goes well. Faith, even more than tradition, guides the Severson family.

It was that faith and tradition that brought Brian back to the farming methods practiced by his forefathers and later to milling his grain into stone-ground flour, cornmeal and other value-added products. Today, his organic and chemical-free fields are barren – winter is the family’s “down time” – although during the height of the growing season, they’re lush with non-GMO heirloom oats, wheat, corn, popcorn, peas, soybeans and buckwheat. It’s a scene much closer to what you’d have expected back in 1866 than anything in much of rural America today.

E E E Like many farmers of his generation, Brian came of age after the Green Revolution, also sometimes called the Third Agricultural Revolution. In the 1940s, American scientist and agronomist Norman Borlaug began experimenting with plant breeding to produce a wheat strain with more disease resistance and higher yields. His goal was to feed more people across the globe, especially in developing countries, and it worked: Borlaug is credited with saving more than a billion people from starvation worldwide and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. This slowly led to the global proliferation of genetically modified crops, more commonly called GMOs. At a time when GMOs were heralded as the future of agriculture, Brian took a different path. After earning an agronomy and crop science degree at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988, he bought the land he farms today. He started out as a sharecropper and has never grown GMO crops, yet he did farm with chemical herbicides and pesticides, which is what he’d learned in school. By the 1980s, this is the way that the vast majority of corn, wheat and soybean farmers operated in America, and also in many countries across the world. For the better part of 10 years, this is how Brian farmed.

“You start having kids, and I didn’t want them around the chemicals,” Brian says. “We started raising sweet corn, and I didn’t want my kids around all the [chemicals] with conventional sweet corn. And we enjoyed [organic farming].” The first certified organic crop Brian harvested was 20 acres of sweet corn. Other crops, like alfalfa, had to be transitioned from conventional to organic; farmers must grow organically for 36 months before their crops can be eligible for organic certification, so after that first year, his alfalfa was considered a transitional product – farmed organically but on soil that was still in transition. By 2007, he’d raised his first certified organic sweet corn, and slowly began incorporating other grains. Today, Brian grows his crops without chemical pesticides and herbicides, and farms in crop rotations, meaning that a field of wheat may grow next to a field of corn next to a field of legumes in sequenced seasons. This helps reduce soil erosion and improve soil fertility and crop yield, all without the use of chemicals. The family now grows so many different crops that they’re in the field as early as March, when oat season begins, through November and sometimes into early December with their blue corn. In between, they’re in the process of either planting or harvesting everything else, from heirloom Turkey Red hard winter wheat to buckwheat.

brian severson ▲

Farming organically makes sense to Brian – it’s a return to the traditions of past generations. In that spirit, he’s now teaching his oldest son, Luke, the family business. Since earning a degree in business from Bob Jones / a pr i l 2 019

University last May and moving back home shortly after, Luke’s been partnering with his father to run the farm while also working to help improve and expand it. In January, he redesigned and relaunched the farm’s website, debuting a sleeker look, home-cook-friendly recipes for Severson’s milled grain products and a more user-friendly online store. “I’m proud – it’s what I’ve grown up doing my whole life, and I’m really glad that I get a chance to still do it,” Luke says. Not everything grown on Brian Severson Farms comes from heirloom seeds – including the corn and soybeans grown for animal feed – and Brian admits that heirlooms are a lot more work. His blue corn seed, for example, a Hopi variety he purchased from a farmer in Arizona, can cause havoc during harvest season. Because the seed hasn’t been modified or bred for selection in more than 600 years, the plant has a weaker stalk than modern corn varieties and is more sensitive to weather conditions and temperature variations. This past fall, Luke was in charge of the blue corn and popcorn harvests, which are both done with a special picker machine instead of a combine, as the crops are delicate. Heavy rainfall had made the fields muddy,

which could put stress on the picker and potentially kick up mud and dirt onto the plants. Preserving the quality and cleanliness of their product is among Brian and Luke’s top concerns, so they waited to harvest the corn until after midnight, when the mud had frozen. “The stalks were weak and starting to fall over, so we needed to get them in before they gave way completely,” Luke recalls. The blue corn doesn’t produce a yield comparable to commercial varieties, but that’s not why the Seversons grow it – their concern is preserving the seed and producing products with exceptional flavor. After harvest, the blue corn is made into cornmeal and corn flour, two products that number among the farm’s most popular with consumers. Like all of the farm’s products, the whole-grain corn is stone-ground on-site, including the germ, which means none of the grain’s natural nutrition is milled out of the cornmeal and corn flour. “Having a softer starch, if you make it into grits, it’s a creamy texture,” Karen says of the blue cornmeal. “I was packaging orders this week, and when I opened the lid on the blue [cornmeal] bucket, it smelled like sweet corn. The grits are the main thing [we make with the blue cornmeal] – we like the flavor and texture.”

Another unique best-seller is the farm’s hulless oats, which easily shed their hulls, unlike more common varieties, which require expensive equipment to remove that outer layer. “Originally, we raised hulled oats and sold them for [animal] feed, but [hulless oats] just seemed to be a way to get a food-grade oat that we could afford to get into [farming],” Brian says. “And it’s a market niche – I don’t want to try to compete against Quaker Oats. I’m looking for a market where I can do something different from what they’re doing, and tastes better, too.” There are a couple of other key differences between commercially produced oats – like what you’d find in a tub from Quaker – and what the Seversons sell. Most commercial processing facilities steam the oats, which softens the grain and removes the bran, or fat, to lengthen the products’ shelf life. Brian’s hulless rolled oats, on the other hand, retain the natural bran, resulting in a richer bowl of oatmeal than many consumers may recognize. The Seversons have seen increasing interest in their organic oats in recent years, with online orders coming in from across the country. They attribute this at least in part to rising concerns about the allowable levels of chemicals like glyphosate, a chemical found in

▲ oatmeal made with hulless rolled oats ▼ blue corn grits and cornbread

herbicides like Roundup, in conventionally farmed wheat and oats. Wheat, oats, corn and soybeans aren’t washed after harvest, which means that chemical residue can linger on those crops. Because wheat and oats are grown organically at Brian Severson Farms, this is not a concern – something that Brian and Karen say matters to many of their customers. Still, it’s ultimately the flavor that ensures that repeat orders keep coming in. “Taste is the main thing,” Karen says. “The difference in taste.”

E E E Whatever the crop, most of it ends up being processed and milled on-site, except for the majority of the whole-kernel Pennsylvania Dutch butter-flavored popcorn, which is not ground (a small amount is popped for sale at farmers' markets). For safety, Brian houses his Meadows stone-grist mill in a shipping container inside the same barn where Karen packages products. With so much combustible dust and airborne flour particles interacting in close proximity, it’s a potential fire hazard, which is why the mill is housed in a shipping container.

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The walls of the shipping container are coated in a fine layer of flour; as Brian walks me through the various steps to mill whole grains, he keeps accidentally leaning up against them, dusting the back of his shirt with powder. Luke taps Brian on the back periodically as a reminder to not touch the walls. “If all his shirts are covered in flour, he takes mine,” Luke says with a laugh. Unlike high-speed roller mills, which process out the bran and germ of whole kernels, stone-ground mills like the ones used by the Seversons preserve that nutrition. The Meadows mill features two large stones – so heavy that a forklift has to be used to move them – positioned vertically inside the mill. The stones can be placed closer together or farther apart depending on the desired grain size. Brian thinks the vertical placement is better for operations where different grains are being milled periodically; instead of the rigorous cleaning required on horizontal stones, gravity does a lot of that work for you. On a busy run, the mill will grind 200 to 300 pounds of wheat flour or 500 to 600 pounds of cornmeal in an hour; it takes less time to mill products with a coarser grind, like the grits. The Seversons mill everything in small batches weekly. The majority of their orders are placed online, either directly through their website or via Amazon, where the farm operates under the name Quality Organic. The family’s closest market is Chicago, where they vend at the Green City and Oak Park farmers’ markets and sell into specialty marketplace Eataly. “I remember the first time we sampled [products] at Green City [Farmers’ Market], and everybody was coming up and saying, ‘Hey, somebody told me about these grits!’” Brian remembers. “We weren’t really advertising it, but people left and tasted them and they told their friends. It’s neat that the product can be so much different and surprise people.” Products are also available in the St. Louis area, including at Larder & Cupboard in Maplewood, Missouri; Toasted Coffee House in High Ridge; Fair Shares St. Louis in St. Louis; and Mr. Meowski’s Sourdough in St. Charles. Chefs and bakers across the Midwest have taken a shine to the products, including Josh Galliano at Companion in the St. Louis area. Galliano first got connected with Brian Severson Farms through Fair Shares St. Louis, a community-supported agriculture cooperative that sources the farm’s products. At the time, Companion was in the early stages of its local grains project, which supports Missouri and Illinois grain farmers by making select breads almost exclusively with locally grown and milled grains.

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“We started talking to Brian to figure out what type of stuff he had, and we were just really impressed with the variety, from wheat flour to corn to oats,” Galliano says. “We weren’t expecting him to be so diversified.”

“The really nice thing about Brian – we could really select the grind we wanted,” Galliano says. “It wasn’t just one size fits all. We could dial it in; we could ask him to spread his stones a little farther apart to get this nicer product.”

The very first bread Companion released made with Brian Severson Farms’ grains was an oatmeal-porridge loaf that used both the rolled oats and some whole-wheat flour, as well as sorghum molasses from a farm in Ava, Illinois. Galliano says the bread required some trial and error to refine, as the whole-wheat flour doesn’t bake exactly the same as most of the flours you’d buy at the grocery store, because the bran and germ are still intact.

Since joining Companion in 2015, Galliano says he’s seen a sea change happening with local grains, even if slowly. He likens it to the farmto-table movement in the restaurant industry 15 or 20 years ago: Although groundbreaking at the time, it’s now the rule instead of the exception. If you want quality food, you buy it closer to home and support the local economy. He hopes to see that same approach applied to local grains as well.

“In one instance, it was a little bit coarser and had more bran in it,” Galliano says, “and that worked a little differently from what we were used to, so we had to adjust for that. It [required] adding more of his flour into it, because it wasn’t hydrating the same way we were used to with normal whole-wheat flour.” The second project was a hoagie roll made with a ciabatta formula using Brian’s Bloody Butcher heirloom corn and his whole-wheat pastry flour. Because Brian operates his own mill, Galliano was able to request a specific grind on the cornmeal for his desired texture.

“We haven’t supported the use of the local grain economy enough yet, and I think that points to where we’re at right now; we’re supporting it more and we’re changing it more through our purchasing power,” Galliano says. “You don’t see that often enough – that people have purchasing power that can change the way we eat. We’re at that point where if we start to change it a little bit at a time, maybe we’ll see more local flour on a grocery store shelf or at the farmers’ market.” At Larder & Cupboard, which specializes in regional and artisan food-and-drink products, owner Cindy Higgerson has seen a similar shift.

▲ brian severson's mill uses vertically

positioned stones and is stored in a shipping container for safety. josh galliano of companion ▶

holding an oatmeal-porridge loaf made with Brian Severson Farms' rolled oats and whole-wheat flour. PHOTO BY SPENCER PERNIKOFF

“More consumers are asking the question about where the ingredients are sourced,” Higgerson says. “Just because a product is local doesn’t mean that all the ingredients are local – they can be a local company sourcing ingredients from wherever. I’m seeing a lot more consumers questioning where the ingredients are from [and] how it’s made.” In addition to selling six Brian Severson Farms products at her shop – organic sifted soft winter wheat pastry flour, transitional organic soft winter wheat pastry flour, transitional organic all-purpose wheat flour, organic Turkey Red hard winter wheat, whole-wheat bread

/ a pr i l 2 019

oat groats blue hopi corn blue hopi corn grits

rolled oats coarse oatmeal fine oatmeal

bloody butcher corn bloody butcher fine cornmeal

popcorn popcorn flour

oat flour

▼ brian severson products at Larder & Cupboard in the St. Louis area PHOTO BY SPENCER PERNIKOFF

flour and organic rolled oats – Higgerson also uses the pastry flours in retail packages of biscuit and pancake mix. As she does with all of the products in her store, Higgerson periodically hosts cooking demos using the biscuit and pancake mixes and is quick to offer customers advice for how to cook and bake with the flours and oats at home.

“I think the pancakes and waffles that you get when you use his whole-wheat pastry flour or all-purpose flour have a nuttier flavor, even biscuits have a nuttier, heartier flavor,” Higgerson says. “I prefer those biscuits in something like biscuits and gravy, because the biscuits stand up to a really nice sausage gravy.”

stranger appreciate your effort… I think that was really rare.”

Higgerson first met Brian and Karen several years ago at the Good Food Expo in Chicago, which brings together chefs, farmers, entrepreneurs, investors, buyers and consumers from across the Midwest. It was at this same festival that the Seversons first met Amy Halloran, author of The New Bread Basket, which documents the revival of regional grain production in North America. Halloran recalls meeting Brian, engaging him in a conversation about his farm and mill and watching his face light up.

“I think Brian’s got a critical role for a lot of different reasons,” Halloran says. “Farming is a real spectator sport. These growers are going out on a limb and direct marketing [their] grains, and other farmers are watching them, because it’s a big risk. Doing this is really good for him and his family, and their own sustenance and future as a farm, but it’s also a model for other people to look to for how to make a go of it.”

“I understand what he's doing, and I don’t think that he gets that kind of reception often,” Halloran says. “Even in states that are predominantly agricultural, the awareness of farm work is negligible. So he was kind of blushing at how excited I was about his whole enterprise. You know, it’s so hard to see all of this work – this work is so invisible to people. So to be able to have a

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Halloran says that farmers and operations like Brian’s are helping to bring back those local and regional mills and grain economies – to help us recover something we’ve lost – and in that way, helping show other farmers what’s possible.

For Brian, the future of the farm rests in Luke's hands, as is tradition in the Severson family. “That’s really why I started farming initially – it’s a neat way to raise your kids and something you can pass on to them,” Brian says. “It’s a neat tradition. That’s been my goal from before Luke existed, because that’s what’s going to last.” 8430 S. Dwight Road, Dwight, Illinois, qualityorganic.com

Kernels & Flours These 10 Brian Severson Farms products are grown and processed organically unless noted as transitional here. Soft Red Winter Wheat is used to make whole-wheat pastry flour and sifted pastry flour; whole wheat berries and wheat bran from the milling process are also sold. The whole wheat gives the pastry flour a nutty flavor.

Transitional Organic Hard Red Spring Wheat is used to

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make whole-wheat bread flour and sifted bread flour; the wheat berries are also sold. This specialty flour is commonly used in dark breads.

Heirloom Turkey Red Hard Winter Wheat is a high-extraction sifted flour that acts similarly to the all-purpose flour you’ll find at the grocery store, making it a good introduction to stone-ground flour. Transitional Organic All-Purpose Flour blends all of

the farm’s sifted flours for a high-extraction flour with a tan or light brown color.

116 E. 3rd Street Waterloo, IL 62298 (618) 939-2337 hopskeller.com

Hulless Oats, also known as naked oats, naturally shed their hulls

when harvested and are not treated with steam heat like typical grocery store brands. The farm sells them as whole oat groats, rolled oats, oat flour, fine stone-ground oatmeal and course-ground oatmeal.

Heirloom Bloody Butcher Red Dent Corn is sold as kernels,

fine cornmeal and medium cornmeal. Bloody Butcher corn is an heirloom, open-pollinated non-GMO variety of dent corn from the Appalachia region. It’s great for making grits and cornbread.

Heirloom Blue Hopi Flour Corn also makes great grits and cornbread and is sold as kernels and a medium-grind cornmeal. Transitional Organic Heirloom Henry Moore Yellow Dent Corn is an open-pollinated yellow dent corn made into corn flour,

whole fine cornmeal and bolted (smoother textured) grits; whole kernels are also sold. The corn flour is almost as fine as wheat flour.

Heirloom Pennsylvania Dutch Butter-Flavored Popcorn dates back to the 1800s and is sold as whole popcorn

kernels and popcorn flour. The flour can be used for cornbread or as breading for meats or vegetables, while the whole kernels make fluffy, bright-white popcorn.

Transitional Buckwheat Flour is light in color with a strong, almost bitter flavor. Not a wheat variety or wheatgrass at all, buckwheat is more closely related to rhubarb. The farm’s buckwheat is also used to make soba flour, which is sifted and ground finer than buckwheat flour and used to make Japanese soba noodles. / a pr i l 2 019

Back Burner the

this month, we asked industry pros:

What’s your favorite ingredient to work with, and why?

Clémence Pereur

chef-owner Like Home St. Louis

PHOTO BY jennifer silverberg

“Chocolate. You can do so many things with chocolate: bread, mousse, chocolate bars. When I was at chocolate school, we had chocolate tastings every day, and when you taste a piece of chocolate, sometimes there are [flavors of] berries, sometimes of alcohol… Every chocolate is so different. So if you change the chocolate, you’re going to change the recipe, because the flavor will change.”

Nick Bognar executive chef

James Lowery owner and winemaker

Nippon Tei

KC Wineworks

Kymberlee Matney-Schmitz executive chef

kansas city

Lost Signal Brewing Co.

st. louis

“Soy sauce. There are so many [kinds], so many base ingredient differences, different lengths of fermentation. There’s soy sauce from Japan; soy sauce aged for 10 years; bourbon barrel-aged soy sauce; smoked soy sauce; white soy sauce; tamari; really light tamari that’s basically the runoff from miso. There are so many variations, and using different types together helps develop huge depth of flavor.” 74

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“Grapes! It’s really about the grapes, because when you get your grapes in for the year or when you harvest, it’s then incumbent on you to take this raw ingredient and make the best thing you possibly can. There’s all that potential there that’s locked up in those grapes. It’s the most exciting part of the year, and my favorite part of the year, I’d say.”

springfield, Missouri

“Lemons. There are so many uses for them, from classic cakes and pies to a perfectly cooked steak seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic and a splash of lemon. I believe lemon can take almost any dish to the next level.”

Kate Frick owner

Joshua Smith chef, butcher and co-owner

The Myers Hotel Bar

Barred Owl Butcher & Table

kansas city

“Elderflower blossoms. It blooms in late spring, early summer. I make an elderflower cup from an 1800s recipe that features an elderflower syrup with rice vinegar, sugar and lemon juice. You have to cook the elderflower blossoms because if you don’t, they can be toxic. It’s a beautiful contradiction: an elegant, fragrant little flower that’s deadly. I usually shake the syrup with gin and serve it up with a zest of lemon.”

Columbia, Missouri

“Chile and paprika peppers of all types – dried and fresh. Depending on the variety, they can add sweetness, spiciness or smokiness; some are fruity, some chocolatey, some raisin-y and so on. They’re also my favorite things to grow in our garden at home.”

The Road Worth Traveling Trail Map

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Augusta Winery 5601 High Street Augusta, MO 63332 (636) 228-4301

Noboleis Vineyards 100 Hemsath road Augusta, MO 63332 (636) 482-4500

Balducci Vineyards 6601 S. Missouri 94 Augusta, MO 63332 (636) 482-8466

Mon-Fri 10am-5pm Sat 10am-6pm, Sun 12pm-6pm

Open Daily 11am-5pm, closed Tuesday

Mon-Fri-11am-5:30pm, Sat-11am-7pm, Sun 11am-6pm

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