Deborah Geering

Sheep Cheese

Deborah Geering — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 13:21:00 GMT

Atlantans Rebecca and Ross Williams launched Many Fold Farm in South Fulton’s Chattahoochee Hills in 2009, and a year later they began selling eggs, lamb meat, and blueberries at local farmers markets. But it wasn’t until late this past June that sheep cheese, their showcase product, made its debut. First the husband-and-wife team had to establish a flock, survive their initial lambing season, and build the creamery, a gleaming 3,000-square-foot facility—capable of producing about 14,000 pounds of cheese a year—that was finally licensed this summer.

The learning curve has proved worth the effort. The couple, still in their twenties, are the only independent makers of sheep’s-milk cheese in Georgia, and one of a handful in the Southeast. Their initial efforts show astounding skill. There’s brebis, a bright soft cheese with a texture similar to fresh chèvre and a sweetness that hints of apple, and Condor’s Ruin, an aged beauty gently coated in vegetable ash. A firm but creamy Peekville Tomme cheese will be unveiled in late fall.

As they continue to introduce new cheeses, don’t expect the familiar. “We’re not going to do a feta,” Rebecca Williams says. “Our philosophy is to make cheeses that you can’t get. The Spaniards do a really good Manchego; I don’t think I can improve on it.” Many Fold cheeses can be found at Peachtree Road Farmers Market on Saturdays and at Star Provisions. manyfoldfarm.com

Photograph by Caroline C. Kilgore

Eggplant Craze

Deborah Geering — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 19:13:00 GMT

Eggplants are hot in the produce world. The bready fruits—whose skins may vary from white to purple-black, though the interiors of all common varieties are uniformly cream-colored—seem to grow in popularity every summer. From 2009 to 2010, eggplant sales by Georgia farmers jumped from $15.5 million to $35 million. Farmers love eggplants because they produce right up until frost—long after the summer tomato rush has dwindled to a few green fryers. Chefs love eggplants because they are abundant and adaptive, not to mention relatively cheap.

A couple of years ago, a lavender-shaded heirloom variety of eggplant called Rosa Bianca was all the rage, but now skinny Asian varieties are in vogue. “They slice quickly, cook quickly, more uniformly, and I think they have a better flavor,” says Paula Guilbeau, a farmer with Heirloom Gardens in Cumming, who grew up on the Louisiana bayou eating eggplant fritters with cane syrup on Sunday nights. Guilbeau likes to split and grill her Purple Fingerling and long, tapered Black Shine eggplants, or dice and saute them to include with cherry tomato bruschetta drizzled with reduced balsamic vinegar. Find Heirloom Gardens’ eggplants at the Peachtree Road Farmers Market and the Cumming Harvest, both on Saturdays, and the Dunwoody Green Market on Wednesdays.

Photograph by Caroline C. Kilgore

Heirloom Watermelons

Deborah Geering — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Several generations ago, the watermelon you devoured on a summer day may have looked and tasted nothing like the melons grown just a county or two away. The local pride may have been round or oval, large or small, with a thick rind or thin. But it would have been prized for its flavor above all else.

Contrast that with today’s mass-market watermelons found in most grocery chains: red-centered, dense-fleshed, thick-skinned, and bland. Shippable, predictable.

At local farmers markets, though, you’ll find that heirloom melons have started to make a comeback: Moon and Stars (the name comes from its dark rind with yellow spots), Georgia Rattlesnake, Black Diamond. Those old-time favorites, and hybrids like the sweet, multicolored Sorbet Swirl, give us a hint of the watermelon diversity our great-grandparents may have known. Decades of commercial growing have caused massive extinction of plants. “It’s difficult to know what we’ve lost and what is still out there,” says Kathy Kretzinger of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Mansfield, Missouri.

One thing is certain: When a melon is raised for sweetness, not rind thickness, you won’t mind spitting out a few seeds. Look for standout heirloom watermelons throughout the summer from growers like Woodland Gardens (woodlandgardensorganic.com) at Morningside Farmers Market on Saturdays.

Photograph by Caroline C. Kilgore

Deborah Geering is one of our contributing writers.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

S&J’s Woodfired Pizza

Deborah Geering — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Not everyone who becomes a beloved fixture at local farmers markets sells blueberries and sweet potato greens. Jonathan Seyfred and his wife, Sarah—who run S&J’s Woodfired Pizza—pull up weekly to four markets (Dunwoody, East Atlanta, Grant Park, and Peachtree Road), fire up a truck-hauled Italian brick oven, and start tossing pies featuring the fresh ingredients found all around them.

They make a thin crust topped with a sheen of tomato sauce and a sprinkling of cheese. Each mouthful is punctuated with a local surprise—a smoky bite of Pine Street Market bacon, a juicy sliver of pepper from W.A. Hennessy Farm, or . . . was that a peach? Yes. Marketgoers line up for bacon, peach, and jalapeño this time of year. Few flavors are ever set in stone: Jonathan emails fellow market vendors before they arrive so he knows what he’ll be working with.

Before he jumped into the mobile pizza business, Seyfred was an emergency-room nurse. It’s an unlikely career move, perhaps, but he and Sarah (also a nurse) say it makes sense: Neither is afraid of working long shifts on their feet, and they reasoned that a $20,000 trailer oven was a less risky investment than a $200,000 restaurant. Another bright side: "People are a lot happier at a festival or a farmers market," says Seyfred. "No one wants to go to an ER." sjpizza.com

Photograph by Caroline C. Kilgore

Deborah Geering is one of our contributing writers.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

Blueberry Haven

Deborah Geering — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Arrive at Hard Labor Creek Blueberry Farm in Social Circle at dawn to avoid the crowds and the heat. Wind down a long drive, past the garage and a giant fig tree. Tie a bucket around your waist with one of the hanging lengths of rope and then step among 1,200 of the prettiest blueberry bushes you could ever hope to see.

Based on the scads of white blossoms that covered the groomed plants this spring, and barring a late frost, Bill Kitchen anticipates one of the best—and earliest—harvests he’s seen since planting blueberries twenty-eight years ago. It was a postretirement plan that turned into a second three-decade career. Now eighty-three, he’d like to retire again, but the tight real estate market has forced Kitchen and his wife, Carolyn, to stay put.

That’s lucky for us. Tidy rows of shoulder-high branches loaded with fruit make picking a joy. Seven cultivars, carefully labeled by row, ensure berries ripen from mid-June through mid-August. Traps keep insects under control, so berries are never sprayed. Kitchen’s favorite is a midseason variety called Baldwin—he likes its concentrated taste the best, he says. Pay $1.65 per pound for whatever lands in your bucket. What ends up in your mouth is on the house. Hard Labor Creek Blueberry Farm, 38 Knox Chapel Road, Social Circle, 770-464-2412. Open daylight to 5 p.m., Monday to Saturday, during harvest (early June to mid-August).

Photograph by Istockphoto.com

Deborah Geering is one of our contributing writers.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

Pastry Pride

Deborah Geering — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Bella’s Best organic gourmet goodies sets up booths at farmers markets around the metro area, selling cookies, breads, and sweet potato biscuits. But Ray Grady saves the most persuasive sales pitch for his company’s signature dessert. “Try the strucla,” he says. “It has apricots, walnuts, golden raisins, coconut, and some mmm, mmm, mmm.”

Much of the extra “mmm” comes from the strucla’s cream cheese pastry, which strikes many of Bella’s customers as a cross between rugelach, a Jewish treat, and strudel. Grady’s wife, Kim, a former communications professor, learned the recipe from watching her Aunt Bella, who made strucla as a much-anticipated, once-a-year Christmas indulgence. Kim never asked Bella how she came to master the sweet or if she knew the origin of the unusual name, but she’s adopted it for her business with booming success. Bella’s original called for homemade apricot preserves, but Kim changes her filling with the seasons; in addition to always having apricot, she uses apple or raspberry preserves or even chocolate. This time of year, the Gradys stock up on local organic strawberries for other products like lemonade, shortcake, and miniature cheesecakes.

Find their revolving selection of strucla and other goodies at weekly markets such as Sandy Springs, Emory, Georgia Tech, and Douglasville. bellasbestcookies.com

Photograph by Caroline C. Kilgore

Deborah Geering is one of our contributing writers.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

Burge Organic Farm

Deborah Geering — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Those of us who treat small-scale farming as a spectator sport view asparagus as a returning champ: It’s one of the first crops of spring and a rare perennial vegetable. Farmers need only plant it once, and then they reap the rewards year after year.

Yet nature provides its own checks and balances. There’s a reason why sustainable-method farmers don’t inundate markets with heaping carts of green spears. “The weeds are a nightmare,” says Cory Mosser of Burge Organic Farm in Mansfield. You can’t avoid weeds, though, if you wish to grow asparagus without herbicides. If Mosser were to take a hoe to the whole patch, he says, he’d disrupt the crowns and kill the immature stalks. His secret weeding weapon? The innocent enthusiasm of young volunteers.

When Peachtree Road Farmers Market reopens on April 14, Mosser will sell his three-quarter-pound bundles of asparagus for $5, a price customers happily paid last year: “One week we went to market with 168 bunches of asparagus, and we sold out.” The fresh, tender stalks lure shoppers to Mosser’s other harbingers of spring, including young lettuces and first yields of the farm’s nearly 4,000 strawberry plants. 912-257-9865, burgeorganicfarm.wordpress.com

Photograph by Istockphoto.com

Deborah Geering is one of our contributing writers.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

Buckeye Creek Farm

Deborah Geering — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 13:00:00 GMT

At Buckeye Creek Farm in Hickory Flat, Liz and Randall Porter raise a variety of corn that is so heirloom, they don’t even know the name of it. “Someone sent it to the ag school of University of Georgia, and they weren’t sure of its origins,” says Liz, who procured it from a North Georgia farmer nearly twenty years ago. The same seed produces mostly white corn, but an occasional ear of yellow or brick-red kernels pops up too.

The Porters grow the corn on four horse-plowed plots totaling about an acre. Several times each fall and winter, they fire up a 1937 Allis-Chalmers engine to power their gristmill, which houses the original twenty-inch granite stones it was fitted with in 1941. It takes most of a day to assemble the mill, shell and grind the corn, pack the grits, and then disassemble and clean the mill again, so they process at least 100 pounds at a time. The grits are beautiful in the bag but even prettier in the bowl: creamy white, with glints of gold and flecks of red. They cook up smooth and soothing, with the warm corn flavor shining through.

You can taste these unique grits at the Shed at Glenwood (which serves them with rabbit and collards), Kevin Rathbun Steak (as the treat under a Berkshire pork chop with braised greens and peach chutney), and Woodstock’s Freight Kitchen & Tap (as part of a Georgia shrimp and grits appetizer). They’re also available via Buckeye Creek Farm’s grinding parties; keep an eye on facebook.com/buckeyecreekfarm. Or just score a breakfast invitation from Nathan Deal: They’re served at the governor’s mansion too.

Photograph by Caroline Kilgore

Deborah Geering is one of our contributing writers.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

Spotted Trotter

Deborah Geering — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Photograph by Caroline Kilgore

Like the pig hoof it’s named for, the Spotted Trotter hit the ground running. Before the Kirkwood charcuterie opened to the public in November, owner Kevin Ouzts was already turning out bacon by the half ton and premium hot dogs by the hundreds for restaurants as diverse as Taco Mac and Richard Blais’s HD1. “Not in a million years did we imagine we’d get so big, so fast,” Ouzts says. He has spent years preparing for his overnight success: studying at culinary school, training at Restaurant Eugene, briefly apprenticing at California’s famed French Laundry, and learning from media-darling charcutier Taylor Boetticher of Napa Valley’s Fatted Calf.

Nearly two years ago, Ouzts returned to Atlanta, where he worked at farmers markets to gain respect within the city. “The Fatted Calf guy said, ‘All you need is a grinder,’” Ouzts recalls. “But I’m married to an attorney, and she was like, ‘No, dude, we’re doing it the right way. We have to go through the USDA so we can sell across state lines.’”

Certification in hand, Ouzts brings a chef’s particularity to every ingredient in his artisan-cured meats, including house-smoked andouille sausage made with meadow-raised pork and locally grown Alabama red peppers; boudin fashioned from Southern-grown rabbit; and an Italian-inspired, air-dried salami flavored with sorghum syrup and cracked black pepper. 1610 Hosea L. Williams Drive, 404-254-4958, thespottedtrotter.com

Deborah Geering is one of our contributing writers.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her

Local Market South

Deborah Geering — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:00:00 GMT

Photography by Caroline Kilgore

My motivation for giving locally made gifts this year is that I don’t have to drive to any malls to buy them. Thanks to a pair of culinary-minded entrepreneurs, I don’t even have to leave my house. I’m getting all my holiday shopping done at Local Market South, an online store where boutique Southern delights—including cured meats from Avondale Estates’ Pine Street Market, Charleston’s Slather Brand barbecue sauces, even ice cream from Atlanta’s High Road Craft—fill the virtual shelves.

As with all things Southern, the origins are as important as the outcome. Site cofounder Jennifer Maley details the background on each item and the company that makes it. “We wanted to tell the stories behind them, about the ingredients and their connections to the region,” she says. When you order, you’ll learn that the recipe for Unforgettable pound cake comes from Atlantan Kathryn Bowden’s granny, or that Lauri Jo Bennett’s line of pickles and sauces is made with produce from local farms. “It’s an irony of many brick-and-mortar stores that, even though you can talk to a person about [a product], they don’t necessarily know where it came from or who inspired it,” says husband John Maley, who built the site and launched it in September.

And no need to worry about junky, Southern-themed schlock. The Maleys, food lovers and farmers market aficionados, assess each product meticulously before it goes live for sale. localmarketsouth.com

Deborah Geering is one of our contributing writers.
Learn more about her | Follow her on Twitter | Contact her