February 2015 Feast Magazine

cream of the crop

french classics translated

[cory] king of beers

SHATTO MILK

DISCOVERING ESCOFFIER

SIDE PROJECT

feastmagazine.com | FEBRUARY 2015

spREAd thE lovE

ONL KETS

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IC .org BUY T r d i G r a s a StLM ON W U S i G r a s , I n c. T L M G O L L S FO Mard as # r book ardiG Face STLM @ r e Twitt

S AT . F E B 7 , S U N . F E B 8

11 AM–5 PM, SOULARD Several of Soulard’s fine establishments offer samples of their signature dishes in this unique, create-your-own-experience event!

Attendees are able to stroll though Soulard using the seven taste tickets from the ticket booklet to sample six signature dishes and one taste of Southern Comfort from the participating restaurants and pubs of Soulard. Attendees are welcome to use the free trolley service on Saturday from 11:00am – 5:00pm or walk the neighborhood on Saturday and Sunday. Veterans of this event enjoy creating their own pub crawl.

E NEW H T T GE I GRAS MARDUIS APPPD!ATES, U STAL.TLIMOE NEWDSISACNODUNTSS

RE AND ANT ONS TAUR COUP ARS, RES B FROM NSORS! PPLE OR A SPO D N OW F A N E L AB AVAIL DROID! AN AND

ADVANCE TICKETS

FOR A STRICTLY LIMITED TIME! YOU MUST BE 21+ YEARS OLD TO ATTEND THIS EVENT

P A R T I C I P AT I N G E S T A B L I S H M E N T S 1860’S • BASTILLE • BIG DADDY’S • BROADWAY OYSTER BAR CARSON’S • CAT’S MEOW • CHAVA’S • CUZ’ • D’S PLACE • DB’S EPIC PIZZA & SUBS • FRANCO • FRANKLIN’S PUB • GOOD LUCK BAR AND GRILL GREAT GRIZZLY BEAR • HAMMERSTONE’S • HISTORIC CROSSROADS ISLAND FROZEN YOGURT • JOANIE’S PIZZERIA • JOHN D. MCGURK’S JOHNNY’S • JULIA’S MARKET CAFE • LLYWELYN’S PUB • MISSION TACO JOINT

JAN. 6-FEB. 17, 2015

MOLLY’S • NADINE’S • THE PORCH • SASSY JAC’S • SONNY’S SOULARD COFFEE GARDEN • SOULARD SOCIAL HOUSE • SOULARD’S RESTAURANT SOUTH BROADWAY ATHLETIC CLUB • THE SWEET DIVINE • TRUEMAN’S

StLMardiGras.org

Saturday, February 21, 2015 1 - 4 P.M. @ Rams Park One Rams Way, Earth City, MO 63045

Train Like the St. Louis Rams Attendees must be 18 or older.

REGISTER ONLINE BARNESJEWISH.ORG/WELLNESS15

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FRESH LOCAL ARTISANAL SUSTAINABLE FUN AFFORDABLE ...OUR FOOD

Inspired Local Food Culture | Midwest

FEBRUARY 2015 froM the staff Meet OUr CONtrIBUtOrS

| 46 | Seed tO taBLe

|8|

frOM the PUBLISher

Farmer Crystal Stevens shares how to tap sugar maple trees for from-scratch maple syrup.

A taste of winter’s bounty.

| 10 |

dIgItaL CONteNt

What’s online this month.

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| 15 |

feaSt tv

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T AT Y L N

FLE

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E: info@todayattRufflES.CoM MoN - SAT 10AM-7PM / SUN 11AM-4PM F: 314.567.9105

@butChERyStl www.todayattruffles.com

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Buy it and try it: ‘nduja.

| 50 | MeNU OPtIONS

DINe

| 52 | Sweet IdeaS

DrINK We’re sipping whiskey in St. Louis, beer in Kansas City and rich, buttery espresso in Springfield, Missouri. We also catch up with one of the founders of Earthbound Beer, a new brewery in St. Louis, and the owner of Shang Tea in Kansas City.

S

9202 Clayton Rd. St louiS, MiSSouRi 63124

T: 314.567.7258

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| 48 | MyStery ShOPPer

A peek at the February episode.

We’re dining at a new Korean barbecue restaurant in the St. Louis area, a beloved restaurant that was recently resurrected in Kansas City and a Europeanstyle bistro in Lawrence, Kansas. In our monthly travel piece, Road Trip, writer Amy Lynch travels to Louisville, Kentucky, and shares where to dine, drink and stay during the city’s Bourbon Classic this month. We also highlight two must-try dishes – a Tex-Mex brunch dish made with slowcooked beef brisket in St. Louis, and seared foie gras at a French restaurant in Kansas City.

F RU

cooK

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SEVEN DAYS A WEEK

The return of your neighborhood butcher!

| 45 |

shoP We visit two regional shops – a confection-filled candy store in St. Louis, and a Frenchinfluenced market in Kansas City. Find out what inspired the interior design at 4204 Main Street Brewing Co. in Belleville, Illinois, and learn what defines the collection of home goods at St. Louis-based online boutique Keep Design + Lifestyle.

Learn how to make satiny smooth sea salt caramels from the comfort of home.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, pastry chef Christy Augustin shares how to make a flourless chocolate truffle torte.

COVER PHOTOGRAPHY OF MELTED CHOCOLATE (P. 70) BY Jennifer Silverberg.

TABLE OF COnTEnTS PHOTO OF CHOCOLATE, BLuEBERRIES AnD PECAnS (P. 70) BY Jennifer Silverberg.

FEATURES

56 65 70 76 82

back in the game

Elk farmers are seeing an uptick in demand as chefs across Missouri are experimenting with elk more and more in the kitchen.

Bibamus et Invenio!

the sweet of the sour Discover the science behind Cory King’s barrel-aged, Belgian-style beers at Side Project Brewing in St. Louis.

make it & break it Learn how to make from-scratch chocolate bark in flavors like dried fig and pistachio plus macadamia nut, crystallized ginger and toasted coconut.

cream of the crop Venture to Osborn, Missouri, to visit Shatto Milk Co., a three-generation artisan dairy producing butter, half-and-half and milk in flavors like root beer, banana and cotton candy.

escoffier to today A chef in Louisiana, Missouri, uncovers a long-lost family connection to the father of French cooking, Auguste Escoffier, while researching a cookbook in France.

Let us drink and discover!

9202 Clayton Rd. St louiS, MiSSouRi 63124 E: info@todayattRufflES.CoM TUESDAY - SATURDAY T: 314.567.7258

F: 314.567.9105

@tRufflESStl www.todayattruffles.com

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We Desig Restauran n ts!

Magazine Volume 6

Largest Provider of Pre-Owned Equipment in the Midwest! We carry New, too!

Visit us Weekdays | 5 Minutes East of the Arch | bclRestaurantSupply.com BID & SAVE ON THESE LOCAL AUCTIONS: Food Service Equipment • New Home Furnishings & Appliances • Medical Supplies • Tools • Automotive Supplies • Lawn & Garden and More!

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| Issue 2 | February 2015

Publisher Catherine Neville, publisher@feastmagazine.com Director of Sales Angie Henshaw ahenshaw@feastmagazine.com, 314.475.1298 EDITORIAL Senior Editor Liz Miller, editor@feastmagazine.com Director of Digital Content Sarah Fenske, sfenske@feastmagazine.com Assistant Editor Bethany Christo, bchristo@feastmagazine.com Assistant Digital Editor Heather Riske, web@feastmagazine.com Kansas City Contributing Editor Jenny Vergara Editorial Assistant Alex Wilking Proofreader Christine Wilmes Contributing Writers Christy Augustin, Jonathan Bender, Ettie Berneking, Seán Collins, Shannon Cothran, Gabrielle DeMichele, Matt Duchesne, Pete Dulin, Mallory Gnaegy, Kyle Harsha, Valeria Turturro Klamm, Amy Lynch, Ryan Sciara, Matt Seiter, Matt Sorrell, Crystal Stevens, Michael Sweeney, Shannon Weber ART Art Director Lisa Allen, art@feastmagazine.com Assistant Art Director Alexandrea Doyle, adoyle@feastmagazine.com

Hand Crafted Coffees Importing Fine Coffees from 20 Countries • QUALITY • EXPERIENCE • SERVICE Full Service Coffeehouse & Restaurant Supplier Fourth Generation Family Owned Coffee Roasters Since 1930

WWW.CHAUVINCOFFEE.COM

314-772-0700

Contributing Photographers Brad Austin, Travis Duncan, Jonathan Gayman, Emily Suzanne McDonald, Jennifer Silverberg, Jessica Spencer, Alistair Tutton, Landon Vonderschmidt, Cheryl Waller FEAST TV

producer: Catherine Neville production partner: Judd Delamine of Graine Films

COnTACT US Feast Media, 900 N. Tucker Blvd., 4th Floor, St. Louis, MO 63101 314.475.1244, feastmagazine.com DISTRIbUTIOn To distribute Feast Magazine at your place of business, please contact Bill Morlock at bmorlock@stldist.com.

Feast Magazine does not accept unsolicited manuscripts, photographs or artwork. Submissions will not be returned.

All contents are copyright © 2010-2015 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

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ContrIbutors

02.15

BE A WISE CUPID NEW SATIN & VELVET EMBOSSED KEEPSAKE BOX

mallory gnaegy St. Louis, Writer Mallory recently returned to her native St. Louis after living on the gulf coast of Florida where she was a food writer for a paper in Sarasota. After she wrestled an alligator to the ground with her bare hands and ate it, she decided she had seen it all and moved back to her hometown. Mallory attributes her honed palate to Kaldi’s Coffee, where she got her start as a 16-year-old barista, and to her mother and uncle Richard who taught her that food is an experience to enjoy with loved ones. She takes as many trips to California wine country as her liver allows and pretends to cook as well as the chefs she writes about. You can find her gluttonously enjoying the culinary explosion that happened in the eight years she’s been away, or ashamedly boxing off the calories at an MMA gym.

jonathan bender Kansas City, Writer Jonathan Bender is the founder of The Recommended Daily. He is the author of LEGO: A Love Story and the winner of the Greater Kansas City Restaurant Association’s 2012 Media Person of the Year. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he has judged the American Royal World Series of BBQ, eaten sandwiches for a month and pitched grain as a brewer’s assistant – all in pursuit of learning more about what Kansas Citians eat and drink. You can find him wherever there’s a proper toddy coffee or fried egg sandwich.

PLAZA FRONTENAC | 32 MARYLAND PLAZA | 314.367.9750 | WWW.BISSINGERS.COM

alistair tutton Kansas City, Photographer My name is Alistair and I am an Englishman. I feel this is important to tell you before we speak to one another, as you may find yourself momentarily rendered speechless by my magnificent use of the Queen’s English. I have been a professional photographer in the colonies – I mean states – since 2006. Although I’m based out of Kansas City, I travel extensively throughout the U.S. for my clients and occasionally just for myself. My wonderful clients include local, regional and national companies as well as global ad agencies. I believe that the best photo shoots begin by asking the right questions and listening closely to the answers. By completing the front-end research, my clients and I both understand what shots are needed, while still allowing for the spontaneity that distinguishes good images from the great.

cheryl waller St. Louis, Photographer Cheryl grew up in Warrenton, Missouri, and always dreamed of becoming an artist. Cheryl received her first camera from her parents when she was 15 and began photographing everything in sight. It wasn’t until her junior year of high school that she decided she wanted to be a photographer. With the support of her parents, Cheryl graduated from the University of Central Missouri in 2013 with a Bachelor’s of Science in professional photography. She then moved to St. Louis to pursue her love of commercial photography, where she is now a freelance photographer and photographer’s assistant. In the short year she’s lived in St. Louis, she’s had the pleasure of meeting many wonderful and talented individuals. Nothing brings Cheryl more joy than the opportunity to photograph beautiful images and to work with new people every day.

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publisher’s letter

winter is an unexpectedly beautiful time of year.

As I traversed the region this past month, I was continually struck by the stark beauty of the rural Midwest when the light is hard and trees are black, twisted skeletons.

Driving home from a daylong Feast TV shoot at Hinkebein Elk Farm in Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri (turn to p. 56 for Back in the Game), the sky melted from Feast TV producer and host Catherine Neville with Graine Films’ Judd a searing fuchsia, lavender Demaline during filming of the February episode cooking demo. and yellow to indigo blue as I wound through golden, bare farm fields on a two-lane state highway. I had spent the past five hours with Kevin Hinkebein and his herd of big, beautiful elk (as well as his sweet dog, Bailey), bumping through fields and over creeks to capture a look at this up-and-coming industry. Elk were once prevalent in Missouri, but were hunted nearly to extinction. In recent years, these gentle, majestic animals have been reintroduced, and elk farming has also increased. You will be seeing more and more elk on restaurant menus in the years to come, and demand for the rich, lean meat far outstrips supply. Watch for growing herds of elk as farmers work to meet the needs of our region’s chefs.

The rest of my Feast TV adventures took me and our production partner, Graine Films, on a tour of Shatto Milk Co., an artisan dairy about an hour north of Kansas City (p. 76); to Carbondale, Illinois, for a visit to Grand River Spirits, the first craft distillery to launch in southern Illinois since Prohibition (p. 29); and to Maplewood, Missouri, to talk with Cory King, an immensely talented brewer, at his new tasting room, Side Project Cellar (p. 65). Each stop along the way allowed me to meet people who are dedicated to their craft, each of whom are contributing something unique to the culinary scene. You’ll meet these folks in the pages of our February issue as well as when you turn on your local PBS affiliate to watch the show.

February is a time when fields are fallow, so people often assume that there’s not much being produced. The people we cover this month prove that assumption to be deliciously wrong. Our region is producing a bounty of food and drink even in the depths of winter.

FeAst eVeNts MO

6th Annual silver Cup Chefs Challenge Sat., Feb. 7; Sat., Feb. 28; finals on Sat., Mar. 14; Seven Springs Winery; $25; sevenspringswinery.com

Witness a culinary battle as chefs from various Lake of the Ozarks-area restaurants compete for “Best Chef at the Lake.” Proceeds benefit the Tri-County YMCA. KC

Mardi Gras Kansas City Fri., Feb. 13 and Sat., Feb. 14; Power and Light District; pricing varies; mardigraskc.com

Celebrate Mardi Gras in style while also raising money for local charities. Festive events include a masquerade party, Mardi Gras 5K, street festival, Cajun cook-off, pub crawl and more. stl

stadium District restaurant Week Mon., Feb. 23 through Sun., Mar. 1; Ballpark Village; stlballparkvillage.com

Enjoy $10 to $15 lunch menus and $25 to $35 dinner menus in Downtown St. Louis during Stadium District restaurant week. Visit any of the participating restaurants for special menus and gift card rewards for future meals. stl

schnucks Cooks sea salt Caramels Wed., Feb. 25, 6 to 9pm; Schnucks Cooks Cooking School; $40; schnuckscooks.com or 314.909.1704

Join us in the kitchen and learn how to make sea salt caramels. In this month’s class you’ll learn how to caramelize onions, apples and chicken in addition to making caramels. stl

st. louis Centennial beer Festival Thu., Feb. 26 through Sat., Feb. 28; Moulin Events & Meetings; pricing varies; centennialbeerfestival.com

Sample brews from more than 25 local breweries and tastings of 200 local, regional and international beers. The beer festival also includes food pairings, a homebrewer’s competition and a VIP experience in the Malt House Cellar. stl

Feast Feasts Thu., Feb. 26; 400 Olive; $50; stlouisdowntown.hilton.com

Enjoy an exclusive four-course dinner in Downtown St. Louis. Each course, including dishes like beef pot pie, layered pork chops with spinach and goat cheese and spiced bundt cake, will be paired with a specialty Jim Beam cocktail. stl

Celebrate life, Celebrate local: A tasting event Sat., Feb. 28, 5 to 8pm; Foundry Art Centre; $50; celebratelifecelebratelocal.org

Enjoy delicious bites and sips from St. Louis-area wineries, breweries, distilleries and restaurants.

Proceeds directly benefit hospice and home care patients and families in the St. Louis area. stl

KMOX Food Fight Thu., March 5, 6:30 to 9:30pm; Hollywood Casino; stlouis.cbslocal.com

Watch as some of St. Louis’ top chefs battle it out in the kitchen during the first round of this secondannual competition. Guests will have the opportunity to sample specialty dishes from each chef.

Until next time, stl

Cat’s picks Wednesdays, 8:35am; The BIG 550 KTRS

Tune in as Feast publisher Catherine Neville chats with host McGraw Milhaven and gives her weekly picks for the best places to eat and drink in the St. Louis area.

Catherine Neville publisher@feastmagazine.com

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feastmagazine.com

FEBRUARY 2015

@cat_neville

@cat_neville

Here’s to firsts: First dates. First loves. First homes. No matter the occasion, Missouri Wines is sure to have a wine to perfectly complement each milestone. So, pour a glass and celebrate the little things and the big moments with Missouri Wines. We’ve created a milestone in Missouri as well.

Find out what makes our wines so memorable by exploring over 125 Missouri wineries.

Your journey begins at missouriwine.org.

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DIGITAL CONTENT

hungry for more?

feastmagazine.com

connect with us daily:

PHOTOGRAPHy By STACy MCCAnn

FACEbook. Stay up to date with the latest

openings (like Spoon Baking Co. in Alton, Illinois) at facebook.com/feastmag.

TWITTER. Follow @feastmag for behind-the-

scenes photos from our recent Feast TV shoots (like Side Project Cellar in Maplewood, Missouri).

PHOTOGRAPHy By JennIFeR SIlveRBeRG

onLInE ExTRA

PHOTOGRAPHy By JOnATHAn GAyMAn

ThE FEEd: Keep up with what’s happening in the region’s food-and-drink scene by visiting our daily updated news blog, The

Feed, at feastmagazine.com/the-feed. Recently, we shared stories about Clementine’s naughty or nice Creamery in St. louis, Hank Charcuterie in lawrence, Kansas, and a sneak peek of Harold’s Doughnuts in Columbia, Missouri.

SPECIAL GIVEAWAY: Win a pair of tickets to the Mardi Gras Kansas City Masquerade Party on Fri., Feb. 13, or the Cajun Creole

Cook-Off on Sat., Feb. 14. Just head to the Promotions section of feastmagazine.com for all the details.

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feastmagazine.com

FEBRUARY 2015

PHOTOGRAPHy By TeReSA FlOyD

Ever wonder what goes on inside a barrel when beer is aged? St. Louis brewer Cory King describes the science that goes into his acclaimed beers at Side Project Brewing in this month’s The Sweet of the Sour feature (p. 65). Visit feastmagazine.com to watch an animation where King breaks down exactly what happens as one of his sour beers is aged.

PInTEREST. Find winter recipes from around the world, including Caserola Milanese, on our Casseroles board at pinterest.com/feastmag.

InSTAGRAm. Hashtag your local food and drink photos with #feastgram for a chance to see them in Feast! Details on p. 90.

Watch our videos and Feast TV.

youtube.com/FeastMagazine

Treat your Sweet

Make this Valentine’s Day SPECIAL, with ROMANTIC dining “In Good Company”

IMPRESS with special offerings at all “In Good Company” locations!

Historic St. Charles HendricksBBQ.com 636.724.8600

The Grove on Manchester SanctuariaSTL.com 314.535.9700

Grand Center, SLU Campus DiablitosCantina.com 314.644.4430

Central West End, SLU Campus CafeVentana.com 314.531.7500

Historic St. Charles MoonshineBluesBar.com 636.724.8600

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FEAST TV

TV

Look for the Feast TV splat throughout the magazine. It tells you which articles are part of this month’s episode!

In the February episode of Feast tV, publisher Catherine Neville demos how to make French-inspired recipes including a baked eggs dish, a pine nut tart and steak with béarnaise sauce. Turn to p. 88 to find two of the recipes in this issue.

watch this month’s episode to:

Segment 1: Take a sip at Side Project Cellar in Maplewood, Missouri, where brewer Cory King offers his barrel-aged, belgian-style beers.

Segment 2: venture to Osborn, Missouri, to visit Shatto Milk Co., a three-generation artisan dairy producing butter, half-and-half and milk in flavors like root beer, banana and cotton candy.

PHOTOGRAPHy by JennifeR SilveRbeRG

Segment 3: Go behind the scenes in Carbondale, illinois, at Grand River Spirits, the first distillery to launch in southern illinois since Prohibition.

Segment 4: Travel to Hinkebein elk farm in Ste. Genevieve County to see how elk are being raised in Missouri.

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

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FEBRUARY 2015

Missouri Wines

Whole Foods Market

in february, reach for a bottle of St. James Winery’s 2013 Cynthiana. Feast TV producer Catherine neville pairs it with french-inspired fare including steak with béarnaise sauce and a pine nut tart.

Get cooking at home! Pick up the recipes and ingredients from Catherine neville’s february Feast TV demo at the brentwood and Town and Country locations of Whole foods Market in the St. louis area.

WATCH FEAST

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY

SPECIAL GIFTS FOR YOUR SWEETIE: $70 - $695.

It takes two to Tango.

ON THESE NETWORKS

In St. Louis, tune into the Nine Network (Channel 9) to see Feast TV on Sat., Feb. 7 at 2pm; Mon., Feb. 9 at 1pm; and Sun., Feb. 15 at 3:30pm. Feast TV will also air throughout the month on nineCREATE.

Shinola Runwell 41mm stainless steel watch with blue dial & black leather strap, $550.

TIVOL Collection 18K yellow gold pyramid earrings, $595.

Puppy Love.

“Draw me wearing this.

ONLY this.”

In Kansas City, watch Feast TV on KCPT (Channel 19) on Sat., Feb. 21 at 2:30pm.

TIVOL Collection Doggie Tag featuring one round diamond, $79.

Complimentary engraving of pet’s first name and phone number. $20 donated to KC Pet Project.

Michele Deco 31mm stainless steel watch with diamonds & red leather strap, $695.

You can watch Feast TV throughout midMissouri on KMOS (Channel 6) on Thu., Feb. 26 at 8:30pm.

You’re just my type.

TIVOL Collection Bar Necklace 18K yellow gold bar pendant, $595.

Custom engraving available.

Feast TV will air in the southern Illinois region on WSIU (Channel 8) at 10am on Sat., Feb. 14.

tivol.com

800.829.1515

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Girl Scouts of Eastern Missouri

Dessert First

Thursday, February 26, 2015 Chase Park Plaza

invites you to join us at Dessert First, our signature fundraising event, where local chefs transform our famous Girl Scout Cookies into decadent desserts.

Vote for your favorite alongside FEAST Magazine Publisher Catherine Neville.

Participating Restaurants Amy’s Corner Bakeshop Bailey’s Chocolate Bar EdgeWild Restaurant & Winery L’Ecole Culinaire Onesto Pizza & Trattoria Scape American Bistro

All proceeds from the event will support our leadership development programs for girls.

Tickets start at $150 | girlscoutsem.org/dessertfirst

dessert first February 26, 2015

Presenting Sponsor

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors Crawford Taylor Foundation

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Media Sponsor

where we’re dining

welcome to the seafood jungle on p. 18 photography by Jonathan gayman

ONE ON ONE

como

alan mcclure

owner, patric chocolate

columbia, mo. Patric Chocolate, an artisan

How do you come up with a bar like red coconut curry? I love food in general. In my spare time I’m baking or making food: wild fermented pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, cheese, cured meats, miso, wine and beer. Anything that is an interesting, difficult, complex and

delicious food, I want to have my hands in.

When I go to new cities, I want to try foods I haven’t tried before and learn something about what delicious [means] in different cultures. Red coconut curry is something I love to make from scratch for dinner, so I wondered how I could bring some of these flavors into chocolate. The fact that no one had really done it either was interesting. How long does it take you to develop a new bar? It takes an average of six months of research and development to get from an idea to a finished product. That includes many iterations, a lot of trial and error and searching for ingredients.

For the red coconut curry bar, I tasted many different types of coconut before I found something that was not just good, but really made the bar something incredibly different; the coconut was unexpectedly good. I want to bite into a bar and smile uncontrollably

when I taste it. Until I taste a bar and get that reaction, I need to keep working on it. How has Patric Chocolate changed since launching in 2006? From the beginning my goal was extremely simple: make great chocolate that I enjoy that is complex and that uses high-quality ingredients. I put out chocolate bars that taste like something I want to eat. In the beginning I was doing only single-origin bars, but now I also make milk chocolate, blended dark chocolate and inclusion bars – the red coconut curry and black licorice bars, for example. That still follows the principle of making things that are delicious and complex. What’s a great way to enjoy Patric Chocolate, besides simply eating it? When the signature 70 percent blend or the 67 percent Madagascar are mixed with half-and-half and a pinch of sea salt, they

make the best hot chocolate. And I’ve had some great hot chocolate. What new bar can we look forward to in 2015? An orange dreamsicle-type bar made with a milk chocolate that is bright and citrusy on its own, paired with blood orange essential oil.

Order online at patric-chocolate.com or email customer.service@patric-chocolate.com to find your closest retailer.

PhoTo courTeSy oF roger meiSSen

bean-to-bar chocolate company based in Columbia, has received its share of accolades since founder Alan McClure released his first single-origin 70 percent Madagascar bar in 2007. Since 2011, Patric Chocolate has won eight Good Food Awards, which celebrate exceptionally delicious foods that also support sustainability. The 2015 winners were the 67 percent Madagascar, black licorice, PBJ OMG and red coconut curry bars, making the company the only American chocolate-maker to win five years in a row.

WRITTen By VAleRIA TURTURRO KlAMM

must-try dish STL

migas

whErE wE’rE diNiNg

Kc

wriTTen by maTT DucheSne

st. louis. The Tex-mex migas (not to be confused with Spanish and Portuguese migas,

PhoTograPhy by aLiSTair TuTTon

which are much different) at Gringo in St. Louis’ central west end neighborhood sound like the ultimate hangover cure, and you can thank chef rob mcclelland for adding them to the restaurant’s weekend brunch menu. The dish plates slow-cooked beef brisket with scrambled eggs with a blend of onions and tomatoes in pico de gallo, plus avocado purée, poblano rajas, cheese and salsa, with tortilla strips sprinkled over top.

Gringo, 398 n. euclid Ave., Central West end, St. louis, Missouri, 314.449.1212, gringo-stl.com PhoTograPhy by cheryL waLLer

jj’s restaurant wriTTen by Jenny Vergara wri kansas city. Kansas city celebrates

the return of a well-loved restaurant and wine bar with the reopening of JJ’s Restaurant located in the Polsinelli building. a tragic fire destroyed the old restaurant, but from those ashes, proprietor Jimmy Frantzé has managed to recreate the warmth and magic of the original location along with most of the original staff less than a block from its former home. The scale is bigger, but the warm stucco walls are covered with familiar-looking paintings from local artist mike Savage. you’ll ou’ll be glad to see JJ’s still boasts an enviable wine list, as it always had one of the best in the city. The beloved former menu is still in place, so start with familiar favorites such as Paco shrimp or onion soup gratinée. gratinée For your entrée, the petit filet is 8 ounces of beef dusted with dried, ground porcini mushrooms and then seared to your preferred temperature – a steak worthy of cow Town.

JJ’s Restaurant, 900 W. 48th Place #110, West Plaza, Kansas City, Missouri, 816.561.7136, jjsrestaurantkc.com

Feb. Friday 20th

Feb. Saturday 21st

Feb. Sunday 22nd

11am-8pm

10am-8pm

11am-5pm

Presented By:

375 EXHIBIT SPACES

Featuring

3RD ANNUAL

“INSPIRED CHEF COMPETITION”

It’s a lot of fun and you’ll get some great recipes too!

Full details on how to enter the contest at

www.wwssonline.com

It’s All About Pork!

This year, you can enter any recipe, as long as it contains Pork!

On the Cooking Stage at 1:30pm Saturday &12:30 Sunday at the St. Louis Working Women’s Show.

Presented by the Missouri Pork Association Watch Ricki from 106.5 the Arch Morning Show Saturday and Sunday at the Cookoff! There will be a Grand Prize Winner Prize Winner for each of the the two days - Saturday and Sunday.

The Competition Is Fierce!!!

There will be one competitor from listeners of 106.5 the Arch radio station and one competitor from the 28th Annual St. Louis Working Women’s Show attendees.

Cheer On Your Favorite Inspired Chef!

Judges will be from:

106.5 The Arch | St. Louis Working Women’s Show The Missouri Pork Association

PRIZES FOR EACH WINNING CHEF: N $100 Dierbergs Gift Card N Gift from The Missouri Pork Association N Keurig Coffee Machine N 12 Month Subscription to “Bon Appetit” Magazine N Chef’s Hat and Apron N 8 Tickets for the St. Louis Women’s Show

T IC

K E T SAL

E LOCATIO

NS

www.WWSSOnline.com | www.WWSSBlog.com FOR ALL SHOW AND TICKET INFORMATION 800-762-9973 Inspired Local Food Culture

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ONE ON ONE Stl

david rosenfeld

executive chef, blood & sand and death in the afternoon written by bethany Christo st. louis. although he’s fairly new to st.

Louis, executive chef David rosenfeld has been quietly shaping the culinary scene to fit his high standards for several years. since november, he’s been commanding the kitchens of Downtown’s Death in the Afternoon and members-only Blood & sand. Prior to landing in st. Louis, rosenfeld cooked in popular new york City institutions such as blanco, roberta’s Pizza and Dovetail. with rosenfeld’s appointment as executive chef also came the announcement that Death in the afternoon would introduce evening hours. this month, the evening hours will morph into a tasting room of sorts, with beer pairings made by its in-house nanobrewery, Upper 90 brewing Co.

photography by Emily SuzannE mcDonalD

How did your promotion to executive chef come about?

[Former executive chef] Chef nick [Martinkovic] left in november, and it was very amicable. he and i have been good friends since we first met when we worked together at roberta’s, probably four years ago. we’ve worked closely ever since. when [co-owners] tJ [Vytlacil] and adam [Frager] spoke to me about stepping into the role, i felt it was a great opportunity for me. i spent a lot of time helping open Death in the afternoon [since June], and most of blood & sand’s menu has been greatly influenced by me since i started [last] January, so it’s been a fairly easy transition. What did you learn from working with Martinkovic? there have been a million lessons – everything from the smallest, seemingly pointless lesson to when he would call me out on something in front of the staff. the biggest thing that has always stuck with me is his attention to detail. he taught me to look around and see everything, as opposed to just being focused on the task at hand. What are you most excited about with all the changes? adam and tJ dream really big, and they have a lot of ideas. when they have an idea they really want to pursue, it almost always comes to fruition. we’re getting ready to open the Upper 90 brewery in Death in the afternoon, and beer is something i’ve been passionate about since culinary school. we’ll be designing the beer to go with certain dishes, and vice versa. there’s endless potential – we’ve talked about using the spent grains and yeast that come off the beer for making bread, and played with [the idea of] beer dinners. What menu items can people expect from upper 90’s tasting room during evening hours? i [worked] with the chef de cuisine at Death in the afternoon to design the menu that makes sense for the time period that we’re open and focus[es] on Upper 90’s tasting room and offering food that goes well with that. we want it to taste substantial enough that if someone wants to stay and have a whole meal, they could do that. but it should still be fun, easy and playful, which goes well with relaxing and drinking a beer. What changes do you hope to bring to the restaurants? we have this gorgeous two-person chef’s counter that overlooks the kitchen at blood & sand that i’d like to utilize for a multicourse tasting program. i have the opportunity to customize the menu based on their comfort level with different ingredients, for anything from five courses to 20 courses. we’ll also be offering our members monthly cocktail or cooking classes – i love taking every opportunity to educate my staff and diners. then at hen we first opened, our menu Death in the afternoon, i’m taking a slightly different route. when was changing constantly, which i love the idea of, but i also feel like for lunch, you also need some consistency. Certain menu items that people love are going to stay as staples – like our pastrami sandwich [on] a housemade pretzel bun, sauerkraut and pastrami-mustard aïoli; our burger; falafel; and always having two types of ramen. You’re coming up on two years onestly, moving here, i had no in st. louis. What have you learned about its food scene? honestly, idea what to expect. i’d only been once, and i had a preconceived notion [of] the Midwest not having a fast enough taste for me. but the food scene here is a lot bigger than i ever thought it would be, and there [are] really talented chefs around. ass far as the diners, again, i expected to only have meat-and-potato people, but i can put sea urchin or geoduck [clams] on a menu, and people will order it and love it.

Blood & Sand, 1500 St. Charles St., Downtown, St. Louis, Missouri, 314.241.7263, bloodandsandstl.com Death in the Afternoon, 808 Chestnut St., Downtown, St. Louis, Missouri, 314.621.3236, deathintheafternoonstl.com

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seoul q

writtEn by matt DuchESnE

univerSity City, Mo. when David choi first looked at the space at 6665 Delmar blvd. in the Delmar loop, he knew it was too big for just the relocation of his Korean-mexican restaurant Seoul taco, previously located down the street. in fact, the kitchen alone was bigger than the entirety of Seoul taco’s old location. Enter seoul Q , St. louis’ newest Korean barbecue restaurant, which opened in late January in the space formerly occupied by ginger bistro.

both Seoul taco and Seoul Q exist in the same space, divided by a partition, with different atmospheres on each side. Seoul Q has an edgier and more industrial feel, and unlike Seoul taco, seating here is family-style, a staple in many Korean barbecue restaurants. Diners at Seoul Q can partially cook their meals to their liking, as each table sports either a small grill for cooking meats, or an induction plate for hot pots. choi describes Seoul Q’s menu as a hodgepodge of his favorite Korean dishes, including ones he grew up eating, with focuses on meats and side dishes called banchan – think croquettes, radish kimchi and black soybeans. be sure to order a hot pot (the Seafood Jungle is a stand-out, piled high with shrimp, crabs, mussels and more) or choi’s favorite dish, Seoul ssam wraps, a take on the Korean dish bo ssam, which plates thinly sliced pork belly and pork shoulder boiled for eight to 10 hours in spices. seoul Q and seoul taco, 6665 Delmar blvd., Delmar Loop, University City, Missouri, facebook.com/seoulqstl

must-try dish

Kc

seared foie gras

writtEn by JEnny VErgara

kAnSAS City. Few things are more seductive in Kansas city than Le Fou Frog at night. opt for a

dozen of the French restaurant’s fresh oysters on the half shell with a glass of white wine and a silky bite of the seared foie gras.

Le Fou Frog, 400 e. Fifth st., river Market, Kansas City, Missouri, 816.474.6060, lefoufrog.com photography by lanDon VonDErSchmiDt

PhotogrAPhy by JonAthAn gAymAn

Voted Best All-Inclusive Family Resort by Apple Vacationers in 2014!

Gracing the breathtaking shores of Riviera Nayarit, this 24-hour all-inclusive resort lies on the incredible mini-peninsula of Punta de Mita. 25 miles from the Puerto Vallarta Airport, IBEROSTAR’s newest gem is ideal for singles, couples and families.

Choose from endless culinary options and delectable dishes offered at the hotel’s four specialty restaurants and Nopal Buffet. These restaurants are inspired by international cuisine and famous Mexican seafood dishes, like shrimp meatballs, aguachile, shrimp tamales, and freshly caught fish on the grill. Guests will also find eight bars around the hotel serving assorted snacks, local and international drinks.

where we’re dInIng KC

Apple Vacations makes getting there and easy and affordable with exclusive non-stop vacation flights to Puerto Vallarta.

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chai shai

written by Pete Dulin

L

4 CRYSTA 01

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AR

ER

BEST ALL-INCLUSIVE FAMILY RESORT A

neighborhood of Kansas City to hunker down with friends and share Pakistani-indian entrées and appetizers. the restaurant’s name refers to chai tea and the food that traditionally accompanies it during a social gathering, including savory snacks. At the restaurant, that can translate to starting a meal with a cup of masala chai, followed by orders of vegetable, beef or chicken samosas and pakoras (fried indian fritters suitable for sharing and dipping into mint-chile chutney). For a light starter, juicy, ripe mango is served with a masala spice blend. weekend dinner specialties change each week, but look out for chicken biryani with marinated chicken, spiced basmati rice, fingerling potatoes, toasted almonds and saffron; fish shorba with marinated tilapia dressed in ginger, garlic and crushed tomatoes; or beef khara masala seasoned with aromatic black cardamom, clove and peppercorns. use warm naan to mop up leftover sauces and dips.

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kansas City. when winter’s chill cuts to the bone, head to Chai Shai in the brookside

D WIN

N

Chai Shai, 651 E. 59th St., Brookside, Kansas City, Missouri, 816.260.5203, chaishaikc.com Inspired Local Food Culture

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where we’re dining ks

715

wrITTEN By pETE DuLIN

lawrence, ks. 715 is a European-style bistro

serving unpretentious, handmade central Italian cuisine in the eclectic dining scene in Downtown Lawrence. Try a seasonal cocktail such as the gin-based Beet Generation or a Hall of Famer barrelaged Manhattan. For starters, rustic rosemary flatbread is simple and satisfying. Flaky, house-smoked trout appears as a brunch plate with crostini and accoutrements while the dinner version combines the trout with arugula and lemon-caper aïoli.

Housemade soppressata and fresh mozzarella headline one of several pizzas, while rabbit ravioli, lasagna Bolognese and penne ragu underscore the bistro’s Italian focus.

Smoked beets and roasted broccoli with harissa yogurt, an Asian pear salad and the lemon-roasted eggplant pizza make it easy to forgo meaty main courses. Limestone walls, sleek architectural lines and refined wood create an elegant, relaxed setting. After a meal, linger for another cocktail or indulge in specialty gelato in flavors like Nutella and brownie, pistachio, and peppermint-chocolate, or the Seven Dollar Donuts – rich ricotta fritters with Calvados crème anglaise.

715, 715 Massachusetts St., Downtown, Lawrence, Kansas, 785.856.7150, 715mass.com pHoToGrApHy By LANDoN oN VoNDE VoNDErSCHMIDT

Located in the boutique Hotel Ignacio and serving the freshest fish in St. Louis flown in directly from Hawaii.

Our chic Lobby Lounge with an indoor fireplace is unlike anything else in town and perfect for your next event Lunch Tuesday - Friday Happy Hour $5 Maki Rolls Kitchen Open Until Midnight Weekends DJ’s Friday and Saturday

Saturday, February 21 presents Wall Ball, an exciting evening of live artistry and delicious treats.

Engaging an eclectic mix of artists, collectors, and admirers, this annual event features amazing art at unreal prices through a unique silent auction.

Sponsored by

7-11 pm•30 artists

$35 General Admission $60 VIP includes beer/wine and early admission at 6:30 p.m.

Third Degree Glass Factory

5200 Delmar Blvd. • St. Louis, MO 63108

3407 Olive Street St Louis MO 63103 Tel: 314-896-2500 BaiKuStl.com

Valet Available - Cash Only

For more info: 314-865-0060 Purchase tickets online www.artscopestl.org/wallball

DIY Beer and Wine Kits We offer beer and wine kits and supplies, cheese kits,sausage & jerky supplies, Full line of distilling supplies and equipment! One wine kit makes up to 30 bottles of wine.

Gift Certificates Available. We will also ship your supplies!

Makes a Great Gift! Also available Gourmet Coffees, Coffee Roasters and Grinders

10% OFF Purchase OVer $10 If ordering online use code: FEAST in the coupon section of the shopping cart.

WE MOVED! 1 Mile South of Old Location.

It’s Worth the Drive!

10663 Business 21 (by Subway) • Hillsboro • 636.797.8155 • brewandwinesupply.com

Furniture Repaired, Furniture Refinished 5 Year Workmanship Guarantee Quality Craftsmanship • Refinishing • Reupholstery Antique Restoration Repair • Custom Made Draperies Custom Made Furniture • New Furniture • Antiques Monday - Friday 8am - 4:30pm Appointments & Service Available

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24 Hrs. A Day, 7 Days A Week Just east of 3400 S. Kingshighway We accept Discover, Visa, Mastercard and American Express

4821 Fairview Ave., St. Louis • 314.832.1555 • zollingerfurniture.com Inspired Local Food Culture

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destination: louisville, kentucky

ohIo

ILLINoIS

INDIANA

Wv

wrITTEN BY AMY LYNCh KENTUCKY

MISSouRI

vA

tENNESSEE NC

MS

NC

GA

Bourbon’s the prevailing flavor of Louisville, Kentucky, and the Urban Bourbon Trail maps out an itinerary for tasting it, winding through local restaurants and bars where participants pick up stamps in a passport with each drink. Meanwhile, Evan williams distillery and the new Copper & Kings brandy distillery serve up tours and samples.

For the most immersive way to experience Kentucky’s native spirit, attend the Bourbon Classic on Feb. 20 and 21 at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts. here, hundreds of enthusiasts from around the U.S. convene to learn from Master Distillers, enjoy food and bourbon pairings and sip to their hearts’ content.

sleep

eat

the Brown hotel

Lilly’s – A Kentucky Bistro

with hand-painted coffered ceilings, Palladian windows and marble floors, this historic hotel’s soaring two-story lobby is elegance personified, and provides a breathtaking backdrop for an Old Fashioned and a classic hot Brown (the decadent open-faced turkey-bacon sandwich drenched in creamy Mornay sauce was invented here in the 1920s) at the bar or either of its two restaurants.

Nearly 300 guest rooms and suites blend Oldworld furnishings with modern conveniences for pampered stays.

A leader of Louisville’s farm-to-table movement, chef Kathy Cary gives Southern cuisine a sophisticated continental twist using local ingredients such as artisan cheeses, free-range beef and regionally grown produce. Add in an artsy atmosphere, classic cocktails and heavenly desserts like chocolate lava cake with bourbon ice cream, and Lilly’s becomes a date night-worthy dining destination.

335 W. Broadway, 502.583.1234, brownhotel.com

the Seelbach hilton

1147 Bardstown Road, 502.451.0447, lillyslapeche.com

Mayan Café Under the talented direction of chef Bruce Ucán, a Mayan Indian from the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, this perennially popular neighborhood restaurant in the vibrant NuLu district will change the way you feel about lima beans forever. (That’s right, lima beans.) Tasty eats along the lines of cochinita pibil, plantains, empanadas, chilaquiles, black bean stew and flat-iron steaks round out the menu of hearty fare at the intimate eatery.

the Silver Dollar

Photo CouRtESY oF KRIECh-hIGDoN PhotoGRAPhY

home to a famed record player stocked with artists who celebrate the 1950s “Bakersfield Sound” (think Buck Owens and Merle haggard), this feisty whiskey bar serves up a rollicking good time, along with Southernstyle comfort food like hickory-smoked brisket, chicken and waffles and a weekend brunch that’s sure to remedy any hangover you might be nursing from the night before.

Ward 426 Chef Shawn ward is reinventing himself at this fashionable new operation in the happening highlands district. Expect swanky décor, innovative interpretations of local seasonal ingredients and a fantastic beer list. Don’t miss the shrimp and grits (one of chef ward’s specialties) or the s’mores dessert – a luscious assembly of graham cracker cake, toasted marshmallow ice cream and ganache.

21c Museum hotel

700 W. Main St., 502.217.6300, 21cmuseumhotels.com/louisville Photo CouRtESY oF 21C MuSEuM hotELS

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The oldest confectionery in town turns out Kentucky Derby-themed treats and an array of chocolates, but it is best known for something called a Modjeska. These sinful caramel-coated marshmallows were created as a sweet tribute to a Polish actress who passed through town in the 1880s.

1761 Frankfort Ave., 502.259.9540, whiskeybythedrink.com

500 S. Fourth St., 502.585.3200, seelbachhilton.com

get a load of the bedazzled red limo just outside the entrance. These mod boutique accommodations include 90 guest rooms and common spaces punctuated by funky art installations and appearances by the hotel’s ubiquitous flock of signature red penguins. renowned for its bourbon selection and its contemporary Southern cuisine, the hotel’s trendy Proof on Main restaurant makes a great see-andbe-seen perch, and the museum galleries stay open to both guests and the public 24 hours a day.

Muth’s Candies

630 E. Market St., 502.585.2952, muthscandy.com

813 E. Market St., 502.566.0651, themayancafe.com

If this luxurious Beaux Arts beauty sounds familiar, it could be because you’ve read about it – F. Scott Fitzgerald used to hang out at the Old Seelbach Bar and commemorated the 1905 landmark in The Great Gatsby. with opulent finishes throughout, sumptuous dining in The Oakroom and the gorgeous rookwood-tiled rathskeller in the basement, we can see why the facility makes such a lasting impression.

local gems

426 Baxter Ave., 502.365.2505, ward426.com

Garage Bar Situated in a former service garage in the NuLu district, this cozy hotspot warms customers up with specialty bourbon cocktails, wine and craft beer. On the food menu, wood-fired, brick-oven pizzas and hush puppy-like rolled oysters mingle with boiled peanuts and country ham platters.

If the weather cooperates and the temperature allows, you can grab a paddle for a game of outdoor pingpong.

700 E. Market St., 502.749.7100, garageonmarket.com

Scissors Rock Paper A whole new way to get a glow on, bourbon appears on the list of spa services at this NuLu salon as one of the ingredients in a Kentucky-style brown sugar body scrub. Scented with pecan and cherry, the natural vegan body treatment smells good enough to eat.

400 E. Main St. #107, 502.690.7775, scissorsrp.com

Butchertown Market In the trendy Butchertown neighborhood, this hometown market is the place to browse all sorts of edible Kentucky souvenirs like Bourbon Barrel Foods’ bourbon-barrel aged vanilla extract and smoked sea salt, and Cellar Door Chocolates’ bourbon balls. Plan to stay for lunch – the on-site Jackknife Cafe serves a killer ham and pimento cheese sandwich.

1201 Story Ave., 502.599.8270, thebutchertownmarket.com

PhOTOgrAPhY COUrTESY OF ThE LOUISvILLE CONvENTION & vISITOrS BUrEAU

road trip KY

From the first bite to the very last, Chef Pierpaolo Pittia invites you to dine like the star you are with an incredible cast of the finest steaks and chops, sumptuous seafood, decadent desserts, and so much more.

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Inspired Local Food Culture

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ONE ON ONE

kc

craig jones

owner, savory addictions gourmet nuts written by Pete Dulin kansas City. Grill master

Craig Jones – appointed “grill mayor” of 2012 by Food network – and his wife, Gay, used smoking techniques over live fire to create Savory Addictions Gourmet Nuts, which launched in October 2011. the sweet, savory and smoky small-batch lines of nut blends are sold in several varieties, including ones specifically created for pairing with red and white wines.

photography by alistair tutton

Visit feastmagazine.com to read Pete Dulin’s extended interview with Craig Jones.

Visit savoryaddictions.com or call 816.875.6887 to order or find retailers that carry savory addictions in Missouri and kansas.

photography by Jennifer silverberg

What inspired you to use your live-fire techniques with gourmet nuts? i cook everything over a live fire on the grill. in 2008, we were invited to a cocktail party and were asked to help with appetizers. normally, i’d bring my smoked bacon-wrapped dates.

However, the person specifically said, “Just bring something like nuts.” And then jokingly said, “i bet you can’t figure out how to do those on the grill.”

Challenge accepted and met. What types of wood do you use for smoking?

Specific amounts of hickory and fruit woods. i want my process to be consistent and reproducible, so i weigh each type of wood to the half-ounce.

Describe your product development process with the red wine blend. i start with a baseline like our Standard blend. i think about the “profile flavor” i’m going for and try to figure out which herbs or spices i should change. On the red wine blend, the spiciness clashed with some red wines, so i removed it.

From there, it’s a combination of removing and substituting different herbs and spices, and taking detailed notes. i’m like Alton brown when it comes to writing recipes and procedures: i want my recipes to be reproducible, so i can keep the consistency of quality control. Of course, we had to keep testing with plenty of good red wine. Do you have new blends in the works? we started distributing Harvest blend in november. this blend was designed to complement the floral aspects of boulevard [brewing Co.]’s tank 7 Farmhouse Ale and was used exclusively at Manifesto in Kansas City; however, many people love it on its own. the Harvest blend is different from other blends because i used rosemary. rosemary has to be used in the right amounts to complement – [not] overtake – a flavor profile. Which blend sells best?

Our Standard blend is still our best seller. it is packed with tons of flavor.

Most of our other blends have more subtle undertones designed to pair with some sort of alcoholic beverage. Are you developing other products aside from nuts? in november, we released our beer barrelsmoked sea salt. Most smoked salt uses hickory and can sometimes be a little bitter or heavy-handed. by using oak beer barrel staves as a smoke source, we created a smooth, slightly smoky finishing salt without any bitterness and subtle vanilla sweetness. Surprisingly, it lends itself nicely to desserts because the salt is so smooth.

One of our favorites is premium vanilla ice cream topped with two tablespoons of local honey and a sprinkle of Savory Addictions beer barrel-smoked salt on top.

zydeco blues

written by bethany christo

des peres, Mo. imagine a typical friday night at a cajun and creole restaurant in southern louisiana: live blues music filters through the sound of your friends’ laughter and your stomach is filled with rich, spicy house specialties. now, imagine indulging in that same experience – maybe in honor of fast-approaching Mardi gras – without traveling to the big easy. late last year, Zydeco blues opened in Des peres, featuring live blues music and authentic cajun eats so good you’ll think you’re in the bayou. locals come for the happy hour Monday through thursday, 4 to 7pm, at the imposing copper-topped back bar. start your meal with shareable plates like Moosabec mussels, crawfish pot stickers, crab cakes with chipotle aïoli or scallop blinis with honey-vanilla cream. if you’re fixin’ for something heartier, we suggest the colorful creole fisherman stew with a thick medley of crab, shrimp, mussels and bay scallops in a spicy tomato broth topped with mahi mahi, or the braised short ribs in a creole demi-glace served with roasted red pepper grits and stewed greens. house specialties dot the menu, from baked oysters loaded with artichokes, bacon, spinach and cheese to fried shrimp po’ boys and slow-cooked red beans and rice studded with grilled andouille sausage. take a bite, and then lean back, close your eyes and listen to the blues – of the zydeco persuasion, of course – because even north of new orleans, life can still be filled with a little spice.

Zydeco blues, 1090 Old Des Peres road, Des Peres, Missouri, 314.858.1188, zydecobluesstl.com

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The Finest European Footwear and Accessories for the Active Woman, the Business Woman, the Fun & Fashionable Woman in You! Le Shoe carries all the hottest brands that look and feel great: Bernie Mev, Camper, Earthies, Merrell, Wolky, Gabor, Arche, Beautifeel, Dansko, Naot, Taos, Domedaris, Fly London and more.

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2538 S. Brentwood Blvd. • Brentwood • 314.963.1300 • le-shoe.com Inspired Local Food Culture

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where we’re drinking

go for the gold standard on p. 34 PHOTOGRAPHy by jennifeR silveRbeRG

ONE ON ONE STL

rebecca schranz

co-owner, earthbound beer WriTTen By HeATHer riSKe

How do you see Earthbound standing out from other breweries in town? We are exceptionally small. And because of that, we don’t have any investors who we have to report to. We have an incredible amount of flexibility in what we can do with our brew because our brew is so small. We have a lot of recipes that Stuart has used throughout the years that have stranger ingredients or have a historical perspective – things that have been made for centuries – but we probably don’t necessarily see on the shelf anymore because they don’t have a long

and what do you think it says about the business? We initially thought we would be in a space with caves, and each of us has been a professional environmentalist. When the guys were thinking about a name, Jeff’s phone went off with a ringtone from the video game earthBound. Stuart had a ringtone from the game as well. Jeff jokes that the name rang out to us. Between our personal ties to conservation and using interesting natural ingredients in the beer, the name is an extension of who we are as people and the ideals we want to share with the public.

What does each owner bring to the table?

As brewmaster, Stuart shares an incredible wealth of knowledge with Jeff and me. He has taught us how to brew, and he can explain it in the simplest of terms or break down each of the chemical processes at work. He is always toiling on something new or finding an unconventional way to change a classic.

Jeff is the heart of earthbound. There is nothing he would not do to make sure the brewery is functioning at [its] best. He came to St. Louis a little over a year and a half ago to start a business, and now that it is here, he is dedicated to stepping into any role necessary. i feel responsible for keeping all of our ducks in a row. i’m certainly the most organized of the three of us, so i keep track of the finances, marketing and all of the general paperwork.

The best thing about earthbound is that we work as

a cooperative. All of us have input on every decision we make. While one of us may take ownership of a task, each of us contributes to its execution. Where would you like to see Earthbound a year from now? i would like to have earthbound go through its first successful rotation of seasonal beers – at least 30 in total. The tasting menu should change every week or so because we will be making limited quantities of each beer. i want us to be recognized alongside the other craft breweries for making big, interesting beer on the smallest system in the city.

Earthbound Beer, 2710 cherokee st., cherokee Business District, st. louis, Missouri, 314.769.9576, earthboundbeer.com

whErE wE’rE driNkiNg KC

the ship

WRITTen By Jenny VeRGARA

PHOTOGRAPHy By LAnDOn VOnDeRSCHMIDT

kansas city. If you love dive bars with a nautical theme, then your ship has come in, literally. The Ship, located in the West Bottoms of Kansas City, had been a top-secret bar and private party location for local artists and industry folks for years. But for the first time in its history, The Ship is now aboveboard, having opened its bar and event space to the general public in May. Owners Bob Asher and Josh Mobley stumbled across the disassembled pieces of the original bar – also called The Ship – that operated Downtown in 1935 after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. When this historic old bar finally closed in 1993, it had 60 years of history in the city and had served many famous faces. After researching the background and the look of the original bar, they spent years painstakingly rebuilding the space using the salvaged parts of the bar they found in an old warehouse in the West Bottoms. It was a labor of love that shows in every steel rivet and porthole in the place. Behind the bar, staples like well drinks and draft beer are your best bets, which is what most folks at The Ship are drinking. This is not a fancy bar; this is a dive bar with a fun crowd and a small stage where bands play or DJs spin tunes on weekends. There is no food served at The Ship, other than a small popcorn machine for those in need of a snack.

The Ship, 1217 Union Ave., West Bottoms, Kansas City, Missouri, 816.471.7447, theshipkc.com

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PHOTOGRAPHy By JOnATHAn GAyMAn

st. louis. The newest craft brewery to enter the booming St. Louis beer scene might just be the city’s smallest. This past november, Earthbound Beer opened its brewery and tasting room in a narrow 1,000-square-foot space on Cherokee Street. The brewery has just three employees: owners Stuart Keating, who serves as brewmaster, and rebecca Schranz and Jeff Siddons, who handle earthbound’s business and operations. But the brewery’s small size might be its biggest asset, as it gives the trio the freedom to experiment with unusual ingredients and return to historical methods of brewing.

shelf life. Because of our business model, we have the freedom to make the strange, weird beer we want to taste and hopefully other people who enjoy beer can finally taste now, too. What beers should we look for this spring? The two beers i am most excited for this spring are the Kentucky Common, which is a whiskey mash-turned-beer traditionally made by moonshiners. We add roasted barley and ferment it with whiskey yeast. The Thai Basil iPA is also a favorite of mine. it’s an extremely light-bodied iPA with soft marshmallow notes from jaggery and miles-deep bass notes from the Thai basil. Stuart has found a recipe dating back to 800 B.C. that was made in Bavaria for a Celtic king using young oak leaves. To try the recipe in a modern way, we’ll be picking the leaves during the spring and serving half of the beer on the summer solstice and the other half on the winter solstice. How would you describe the Cherokee Street tasting room? everything in the space was made from scratch by Jeff, Stuart and [me] over the summer, including the brew system and coolers. it was an extreme labor of love for us. We scoured Craigslist for everything from cooler panels to cedar fence posts.

The fence posts are in the bar; they’re our tables; they’re our wall hangings; they’re the benches. everything you see in the space is reused, reconditioned or repurposed. We have a barrel-and-a-half brewing system with a 10-barrel fermentation capacity. Making the beer on such a small system allows us to be creative in the brewing process as well as try out more recipes than the average brewery.

Where did the name Earthbound come from,

drInk destInatIon IL

grand river spirits

TV WRITTEn By MATT DuCHESnE

carbondale, Il. Since mid-2012, Grand River Spirits in Carbondale has established

itself as an up-and-coming Midwest craft distiller. Situated in the heart of what’s locally known as Little Egypt (the southern third of Illinois), Grand River Spirits is using its location to showcase locally produced grains and fruits in its whiskeys and bourbons.

Owner and distiller Karen Binder says the distillery is also producing some of the highest-quality spirits in the region.

“We have nationally award-winning water in Carbondale,” Binder says. “It’s some of the best water in the country. What that means for distilling is we can make an even higherquality product [with] it. We view it as southern Illinois in a bottle.”

Currently, the distillery has two product lines that are for sale in the Metro East and in southern Illinois: Grand River whiskey and bourbon, and Red Eye corn whiskey. The Red Eye line offers whiskeys enhanced with natural flavors like lemonade, hot cinnamon, cherry and apple pie. In May, Binder says that Grand River will be unveiling its new brand of whiskey, including honey and wheat varieties, that were chosen from the most popular styles of her experimentations with the Grand River line.

In December 2013, Grand River Spirits opened its tasting room on the outskirts of Carbondale. But in 2015, Binder plans to move to a bigger location in town. The current location is open Friday from 4pm to 7pm and Saturday from 10am to 3pm, or by appointment. For larger parties, Binder recommends calling to make a reservation. “But of course, if we’re there and somebody wanders in, we’ll help them,” she says.

Grand River Spirits, 428 Wood Road, Carbondale, Illinois, 618.503.9050, grandriverspirits.com PHOTOGRAPHy COuRTESy OF KAREn BInDER

three must-try spirits Binder says apples have been a traditional crop in southern Illinois since the region was first settled, so it should be no surprise that red eye pie moonshine, an apple pieflavored corn whiskey, is the best seller at Grand River.

The whiskey was recognized in 2014 with a bronze medal in the American Craft Spirits Association’s competition.

grand river baby bourbon whiskey is aged in small 10-gallon barrels instead of typical 55-gallon barrels, which Binder also works with and plans to use for a straight bourbon being released later this year. “The aging is a little quicker, but it’s a different product,” Binder says. “you end up with a different bourbon flavor.”

One of the newcomers to the Red Eye line is

red eye lemonade moonshine, a flavor suggested by a customer.

Binder says she often asks customers for suggestions, “This is about what people want; it’s not about what we want.” The lemonade flavor works well in many cocktails, but it’s perhaps best enjoyed on a warm summer day.

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the mix

Vieux Carré The Vieux Carré is a thoroughly New Orleans cocktail. From the city’s French roots to the U.S. acquisition of the port town, the drink incorporates volumes of cultural influences. Much like New Orleans itself, the Vieux Carré incorporates elements of France, Italy, the Caribbean and America all in one glass. In anticipation of this month’s Mardi Gras festivities, I’d like to pay homage to the Crescent City with this classic cocktail.

Historically, the drink is credited to bartender Walter Bergeron, who worked in the lobby bar at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter. A few sources credit Bergeron with creating the drink in 1938, although it first appeared in print in 1937 in Stanley Arthur’s Famous New Orleans Drinks & How to Mix ‘Em. The drink’s name is an old French term for what’s now known as the French Quarter – in French, le vieux carré translates to “old square.”

In the years following the Civil War, Italian-Americans flooded New Orleans, settling into the neighborhoods in and around the French

Story and recipe by Matt Seiter Photography by Jonathan Gayman

Quarter. By the 1890s, Italian businessmen were taking hold of the area. One of those businessmen, Antonio Monteleone, purchased a hotel located at the corner of Iberville and Royal streets. Over the years, he purchased adjacent property and expanded the hotel’s capacity and amenities. In 1908, he renamed the establishment Hotel Monteleone, and it has operated under that name ever since.

The drink is a combination of three base spirits used in equal parts: rye whiskey, brandy and Italian vermouth, also known as sweet vermouth, mixed with Bénédictine and two types of bitters. As I stated earlier, the drink combines three of the influences that helped build New Orleans: the U.S. (rye whiskey), France (brandy and Bénédictine) and the Caribbean (Angostura bitters produced in Trinidad and Tobago). The recipe also calls for Peychaud’s bitters, which were invented and first used in cocktails in New Orleans.

As for the Italian vermouth, it comes courtesy of the cocktail’s birthplace, the Hotel Monteleone.

Matt Seiter is co-founder of the United States Bartenders’ Guild’s St. Louis chapter, a member of the national board for the USBG’s MA program, author of The Dive Bar of Cocktails Bars, bartender at BC’s Kitchen and a bar and restaurant consultant.

Vieux Carré Serves | 1 | 1 oz rye whiskey 1 oz brandy 1 oz Italian vermouth ½ oz Bénédictine 2 dashes Peychaud’s bitters 2 dashes Angostura bitters ice lemon twist

| Preparation | In a mixing glass, combine first 6 ingredients and stir for 30 seconds.

Strain into an ice-filled Old Fashioned glass. Garnish with lemon twist and serve.

Base Spirits Rye Whiskey. I prefer a rye whiskey with a bit of backbone to it. Rittenhouse Rye is a good one, and at 100 proof, it’s easy on the wallet. Other good substitutes are Sazerac Rye, Thomas H. Handy Sazerac and Colonel E.H. Taylor Straight Rye. If rye whiskey isn’t your preference, highproof bourbon would also work well in this drink. I suggest Evan Williams White Label bonded bourbon, Elijah Craig 12-year bourbon or Buffalo Trace bourbon. For a local twist, try J. Rieger & Co. Kansas City Whiskey. The sherry notes in this whiskey play well with the Bénédictine and sweet notes of the vermouth.

Brandy. Cognac is the brandy of choice to use in this libation; however, it may be a little heavy on the wallet. There are some great values out there (Camus VS Elegance, Deau and Pierre Ferrand), but they may be hard to source. Another type of brandy can be used, as well, but will produce a different final product. Calvados or Pommeau are apple and pear brandies from the Normandy region of France that both offer a little more sweetness and fruit-forward notes.

Italian Vermouth. Many new and rereleased vermouths have hit the market in the past decade, so choosing one is definitely a matter of personal preference.

I stick with my go-to sweet vermouth, Cocchi Vermouth di Torino. It’s versatile, savory but sweet and, in my opinion, has the right balance of spices. However, Martini & Rossi is classic vermouth, or for a richer option, try Carpano Antica Formula.

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on the shelf

Mo

WINE must-try drink Stl

barrel-aged latte

Stone Hill Winery’S Cream SHerry, nV written by ryan Sciara Provenance: Hermann, Missouri Pairings: askinosie chocolate’s dark

milk chocolate bar with Fleur de Sel or with traditional crème brûlée

written by Matt ducHeSne st. louis. at Mississippi Mud Coffee roasters in downtown St. louis, a new menu item has joined the café’s range of coffee drinks: the barrel-aged latte. the drink is made by barrel-aging unroasted coffee beans – either costa rican or Sumatra beans – that are placed into wine barrels from chandler Hill Vineyards in defiance, Missouri, where they age for a month before being roasted. the barrels infuse the beans with oak, vanilla and caramel. when the final product is used to make a latte, it makes for an earthy, complex morning pick-me-up.

Mississippi Mud Coffee roasters, 1223 Pine St., Downtown, St. louis, Missouri, 314.724.6188, cafe.mississippimudcoffee.com PHotoGraPHy by eMily Suzanne Mcdonald

Stone Hill Winery goes to great lengths to produce its incredibly rich and luscious cream sherry. First, it takes a blend of grape varieties its winemakers grow and fortifies them with grape brandy. the wine is then baked, which causes a slow oxidation, imparting the sherry with an almost caramelized flavor and aroma. after the wine is baked, a modified solera system – a traditional Spanish sherry-making process – is used to barrel-age it for three to 10 years. the final product is complex, showing the textbook nutty, caramel, dried fruit notes of Spanish cream sherry, as well as a beautiful balance of sweetness and acidity, with a silky texture and a long nut-brittle finish.

Stone Hill Winery, multiple locations, 573.486.2221, stonehillwinery.com

one on one

kc

zehua shang owner, shang tea Written by Pete Dulin kansas city. Zehua Shang of Shang Tea in Kansas City specializes in white tea sourced from Fujian’s taimu Mountain, also known as White tea Mountain, along China’s southeastern coast. Shang visits the farms two times each year, spending two months overseas working with tea cultivation and processing. established 2,600 feet above sea level just below the summit, the farms are situated at the highest elevation of nearby tea farms. Pure mountain air, water and soil at this elevation contribute to the tea’s high quality. Shang tea sells fine, loose-leaf tea, porcelain and teaware and hosts tea parties at the shop as well as at off-site locations, offering lessons on the tea production process and how to properly brew tea.

PHotoGraPHy by landon VonderScHMidt

When do you typically visit the farm on White Tea Mountain? i travel there in April and September for one month each time. i watch harvest and production and oversee quality. What are your best-selling teas? Pure white tea and red tea. in China, black tea is called red tea.

My shop specializes in white tea. What is white tea? All tea comes from camellia sinensis, the species that produces different varieties of tea. White tea is the least processed tea. it is sun-dried or air-dried. Green tea is steamed or roasted and processed with high heat. What makes your teas such high quality? Quality depends on where the tea is grown and how it is processed.

Higher elevation, good soil, climate and spring water on the farm make for a higher-quality tea leaf. then the tea leaf should be dried traditionally in small batches to ensure quality. Do larger tea companies dry white tea traditionally like yours? no. to dry large quantities of tea leaves traditionally is very hard. We process our tea for 32 to 40 hours. Most big companies use modern equipment for large-quantity production

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within 15 to 25 hours of harvest. it’s faster, but the quality isn’t the same. Small farmers will air- or sun-dry tea to yield better quality and more complex flavor. How can people distinguish the quality of white tea in the U.S.?

Good-quality tea smells good naturally and has a clean taste. it doesn’t make the throat dry. Good tea quenches your thirst, no matter if it is white, green, oolong or black.

Aged white tea is more flavorful and sweeter than new crops. White tea made with modern drying methods is not as soothing and tastes thin with less flavor. Can you steep white tea more than once? High-quality white tea aged one to three years can be steeped up to five times. if aged longer, tea can be steeped five to 10 times. it also depends on the water quality. How do you flavor your tea?

We use time-honored Chinese techniques that preserve the integrity and goodness of the tea leaf. We use real flowers such as jasmine or tangerine blossoms near the White tea Mountain area. Good tea leaves don’t need artificial flavor. shang tea, 2450 grand Blvd. #106, crown center, kansas city, Missouri, 816.421.2588, shangtea.com

Ryan Sciara has been in the wine business for more than half his life and has spent the past nine years dedicated to selling wine, spirits and craft beer in the retail market. His latest venture, Underdog Wine Co., is the culmination of 23 years of knowledge and experience all crammed into a 600-squarefoot retail shop in Kansas City.

on the shelf Stl

BEER

Perennial artiSan aleS’ 17 written by MicHael Sweeney style: Stout (10% abv) Pairings: braised lamb ∙ chocolate cake

February is all that stands between us and spring; maybe that’s why it’s the shortest month of the year. but the dark nights of winter mean we can enjoy some luscious black beers. Perennial Artisan Ales in St. louis prepares us for spring by offering up an imperial stout brewed with cocoa nibs and mint leaves. this classic pairing intertwines beautifully with the beer’s rich base of roasted and chocolate malts. act quickly: this one will be gone long before spring arrives.

Perennial Artisan Ales, 314.631.7300, perennialbeer.com The creator of stlhops.com and founder of St. Louis Craft Beer Week, Michael Sweeney is also the craft beer manager at Lohr Distributing.

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where we’re drinking Stl

old standard fried chicken

where we’re drinking Mo

written by Kyle HarSHa

PHotoGraPHy by JeSSiCa SPenCer

sT. louIs. it’s tough to say what is more in the spotlight right now – small-batch whiskey or elevated comfort food. St. louis restaurateur ben Poremba has taken advantage of both with the opening of Old Standard Fried Chicken in the city’s botanical Heights neighborhood, which joins his alreadystellar neighborhood eateries elaia and olio.

brick & mortar coffee sPrIngfIeld, mo. Forget about adding spoonfuls of sugar to

tap. Using the toddy cold brew method and a custom-built water filtration system, the rich coffee concentrate is stored in kegs and charged with nitro.

your coffee, and don’t even think about asking for soy milk. at Brick & Mortar Coffee in Springfield, piping-hot cups of coffee and espresso are served neat. the only accoutrement offered is whole milk. “we wanted this to be a reversal of things in the coffee world,” says owner Jonathan Putnam. “we wanted to be less commercial. Simple.” and simple but exceptionally delicious coffee is exactly what customers will find at brick & Mortar’s tasting room. Settled into a refurbished motorcycle shop, the caffeinated team behind brick & Mortar is first and foremost a small-batch coffee roastery that provides roasted beans to a growing number of local businesses. but past the shiny roasters and bags of green coffee beans is its tasting room, where guests can pull up a bar stool and enjoy the week’s lineup of brews. there is no set drink menu. there is no sugar or cream. there isn’t wiFi. but there is rich, buttery espresso and iced coffee on

on the shelf

written by ettie berneKinG

Despite how it might sound, there’s nothing about the brick & Mortar game plan that’s pretentious. you won’t find a drink menu because Putnam and his team want to help guide customers to the best possible cup of coffee. they love their product and don’t want to mask its flavor. in fact, each Saturday at 1pm, customers are welcome to stop by the shop for a free public cupping that previews the week’s upcoming brews. the cuppings are designed to further build and educate the community – and of course, to share truly excellent cups of coffee.

Upon sidling up to the rustic wooden bar, it’s immediately clear that the focus is whiskey: Dozens of bottles make up the back bar, with nary a bottle of vodka or gin in sight. old Standard offers more than 50 whiskey options, and more than half of those are bottles of bourbon. Selections run from pours of Mellow Corn or w. l. weller Special reserve, willett 10-yearold bourbon and angel’s envy rum-finished rye. beyond the list, whiskey fans will appreciate the rarer selections (which took Poremba’s team nearly two years to curate). if you want to turn a pour into a cocktail, just add $3 for a Manhattan, or double the pour price for a Mint Julep. beers are mainly served in cans, with one rotating draft available, and wine is limited to red, white, sparkling, pink sparkling and sweet. the housemade sodas in flavors like mango-orange-blossom-vanilla are special treats that should also not be overlooked. the ambiance at old Standard is rustic, with unvarnished wood and chicken coop-like wire separating shelves behind the bar. the place is small, so calling ahead might be a good idea on weekends. of course, the star of the menu is the succulent fried chicken, but make sure you also order the bread basket with butters and jams and a few of the snacks, particularly the housemade pickles and the whitefish croquettes. there are many restaurants currently specializing in high-end comfort food, but by sticking to basics like fried chicken and cornbread – and by doing them extremely well – Poremba’s joint proves that even old standards can benefit from new approaches.

Old Standard Fried Chicken, 1621 Tower Grove Ave., Botanical Heights, St. Louis, Missouri, 314.899.9000, oldstandard.co

Brick & Mortar Coffee, 1666 E. St. Louis St., Springfield, Missouri, 417.812.6539, brickandmortarcoffee.com

Mo

SPIRIT

Pinckney Bend distillery’s AmericAn corn Whiskey written by Matt Sorrell Provenance: new Haven, Missouri (41.5% abv) Try IT: neat with one or two ice cubes

Pinckney Bend Distillery, 573.237.5559, pinckneybend.com When he’s not writing, Matt Sorrell can be found slinging drinks at Planter’s House in St. Louis’ Lafayette Square or bartending at events around town with his wife, Beth, for their company, Cocktails Are Go.

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PHotoGraPHy by JenniFer SilverberG

Unaged whiskey – also known as white whiskey, moonshine, white dog, etc. – remains a popular category in the spirits world. However, many of these potables tend to be on the harsher side. Quite the opposite is true of Pinckney Bend Distillery’s corn whiskey, which has a decidedly different flavor. Made with a mash bill that primarily consists of corn with some barley and rye, the whiskey is distilled in a pot still, resulting in a smooth, rich final product that can easily be sipped neat or mixed with other ingredients in cocktails. the new Haven distillery’s whiskey has also been recognized internationally, taking home a gold medal at the 2013 San Francisco world Spirits Competition.

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elebrate Life Celebrate Local A

TA S T I N G EV E N T

Saturday, February 28, 2015 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Foundry Art Centre 520 North Main Center St. Charles, MO JOIN US IN CELEBRATING THE BEST FLAVORS OF OUR REGION Pinckney Bend Distillery The Big O Ginger Liqueur 4 Hands Brewery Schlafly Beer Urban Chestnut Brewing Company Edg-Clif Farms and Vineyards Chandler Hill Vineyards Augusta Winery Montelle Winery St. James Winery Public House Brewing Company

The Rack House West Winery Naked Bacon The Chocolate Affair The Caramel House VB Chocolate Bar Mandi Picture Spirits of St. Louis Distillery 100 Percent Wine Cocktails Are Go! Cardinal Sin Vodka AND MORE!

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS UMB Naturalizer/Brown Shoe Company Medical West Edward Jones OxyCare

All Family Care Relocation Real Estate, Inc. Peggy and Rick Bourne Towers Watson Greensfelder, Hemker & Gale, P.C.

Purchase tickets by calling 314-989-2775 or at celebratelifecelebratelocal.org 36

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do the twist

stock up on candy coated confections on p. 42 PHOTOGRAPHy by cHeRyl wAlleR

SHOP HERE KS

french market written by Jenny Vergara prairie village, kS. when the spot behind Cafe

PHOtOgraPHy by brad auStin

Provence opened up in the Village Shopping Center in Prairie Village, its owners, the Quillec family, jumped at the chance to open French Market to sell the restaurant’s wares. browse the warm and colorful shop’s selection of French cookbooks, tablecloths, wrapping paper, soaps, imported French sauces, condiments and candies. Step toward the back of the store and you’ll find a large refrigerated case full of Cafe Provence grab-and-go items from salads and side dishes to entrées and desserts that make for quick and tasty meals. you can pick up excellent baguettes here as well. grab a jar of the shop’s la daube de boeuf, a filet mignon-red wine stew with sliced carrots, or cassoulet made with duck confit, sausage and white beans. Come in on Saturdays from 9:30am to 2:30pm when the shop makes authentic French crêpes to enjoy at one of the tables located in the front of the store. try la complete crêpe filled with ham and Swiss cheese – and be sure to order yours with a “runny egg,” or sunny-side up egg, on top.

French Market, 6947 Tomahawk Road, Prairie Village, Kansas, 913.362.0803, frenchmarketkc.com

OnE On OnE StL

sara tran of keep design + lifestyle St. louiS. Interior designer Sara Tran has her mind on many different projects. Tran owns the almost 1-year-old Keep Design + Lifestyle, an online boutique that works with artists to sell handmade home goods. Tran is also an interior designer with the Lawrence Group in St. Louis and is a manager at her family’s business, Mai Lee Restaurant in Brentwood, Missouri. We sat down with Tran to get the scoop on her latest projects and what’s next for Keep.

What is your background? How did you get to where you are today? I went to school here in St. Louis; from [St. Louis Community College at] Meramec to Maryville [University], then I worked at two different firms, and now I’m at the Lawrence Group, where we do a variety

of projects. I’ve been doing this for over nine years. I’ve always loved the retail side of things as well, and part of interior design is that you have to find the product. So I figured, why not start my own boutique shop?

What was your concept behind Keep?

Everything I’m selling at Keep now is from artists who are from around the world, who are hand-making their products. I look through artists from all over the place, from Pinterest to Etsy to Instagram. And the items I sell are things I’ve been saving throughout the years online – things I like, things I find unique. I call them my little secret gems. But I thought, “You know what? I would love if there [were] a shop that had all of these,” and then I decided to

written by Matt duCHeSne

start my own little retail shop online, to sell the products that I love and I think are amazing.

has been my whole life. It’s also my business background, and that’s where I get that aspect.

What makes a product catch your eye?

Very clean lines, and I’d have to say [if it’s] contemporary. It has to catch my eye right away, and that can be from geometric shapes to anything really. Just things that I know I would love. Also, I try to keep it pretty simple; it’s my word that I stick to. And it’s definitely how my house looks; I can tell you that – comfortable and simple.

Did you design Mai Lee’s interior? I did. And for the Lawrence Group I’ve worked on Union Station [in St. Louis] and a couple of hotel projects Downtown; I’ve also worked on the Hilton Cocoa Beach Oceanfront in Florida.

How do you balance your creative work with your responsibilities at Mai Lee? I love everything that I’m doing. Mai Lee is my family’s restaurant, and the family business

Any tips for aspiring interior designers? Start off with a palette. If it makes it easier for you, just go on Pinterest. There’s so much going on there, and it’s so easy to keep a folder of what inspires you, what you love, what your style is.

Social media is the way to go. keepdesignandlifestyleshop.com

“EvErything i’m sElling is from from around thE world, who arE hand-making thEir products.”

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FEBRUARY 2015

PHOtOgraPHy COurteSy OF Sara tran

artists who arE

ARTISAN PRODUCT stL

written by Matt Duchesne

Kevin Kelly and Dan Peskorse created the Original Snake Bite as a way to better ventilate cans of beer by poking two holes into the top of the can, hence the product’s name. Based out of St. Louis, Kelly and Peskorse created the prototype with a basement 3-D printer and launched a very successful Kickstarter campaign to crowd-source funding, eventually raising more than $20,000. From there, Snake Bite Co. was born. Also a bottle opener, the Original Snake Bite comes in black, brown or natural leather colors, available for purchase at snakebiteco.com.

geT ThIS gADgeT

PhOtOgraPhy cOurtesy Of snake bite cO.

original snake bite

www.tenderloinroom.com/events

MO

“We stock hundreds of these quilted washcloths, and we just cannot keep them on the shelves. We took them to a show in Quincy, Illinois, and sold every single one of them.

It got to the point that at the store, people can only purchase the three-pack if they’re buying something else with it. I’m not sure what it is about them – I think it’s just the fact that they are inexpensive but work [so well]. They wash your dishes really well with little scrubbers on one side, you can throw it on the top shelf of your dishwasher to sterilize really easily and it dries quickly.” –Julie Rolsen, owner, Main Street Kitchen Store Main Street Kitchen Store, 123 N. Main St., Hannibal, Missouri, 573.248.9800, facebook.com/themainstreetkitchen

PhOtOgraPhy cOurtesy Of skOy enterPrises

skoy cloth

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dine on design iL

get this gadget

stL

nordic ware popcorn popper “This popper provides a healthy alternative to bagged popcorn since it doesn’t need oil and makes fluffy popcorn right in the microwave, and you can serve it from the bowl.

I use it all the time; it really works!” –Debbie Langenbach, sales associate, Cornucopia Cornucopia, 107 N. Kirkwood Road, Kirkwood, Missouri, 314.822.2440, cornucopia-kitchen.com PhotograPhy courtesy of nordic ware

PhotograPhy courtesy of Lisa Larson

4204 main street brewing co.

artisan products Ks

written by bethany christo

annedore’s fine chocolates

written by Jenny Vergara

Annedore’s Fine Chocolates, 5000 State Line Road, Westwood Hills, Kansas, 913.831.0302, annedores.com

PhotograPhy Phy courtesy of annedore’s

Customize your own Annedore’s Fine Chocolates gift box of locally crafted, made-fromscratch chocolates for your sweetheart this Valentine’s Day from one of the area’s most celebrated European-style chocolate stores. Try some of these indulgent, boozy favorites: Grand Marnier caramel, port wine and limoncello chocolates.

BELLEVILLE, IL. step inside 4204 Main Street Brewing Co., in belleville, illinois, and everything the eye can see – aside from the chairs – were made by the hands of owner todd Kennedy or by his father, father-in-law or best friend. the restaurant and brewery is the first to brew beer in belleville since stag brewing co. closed 25 years ago. the brewery’s building previously a roadhouse-style joint, abandoned for six years and in a state of disarray when Kennedy took the reins. the seven-month build out, completed in May, transformed the space into a 130-person dining room meant for an upscale, date-night experience serving highquality meats in hearty winter dishes. Plus, a 5,000-square-foot heated patio seats 110, with plenty of space for games with friends after work or for sipping some suds. the beer program is helmed by brewmaster tony toenjes, who helped design the brewery’s setup, as well.

Kennedy describes the current 15 beers on offer as “true to form,” with the best sellers being the blonde ale, a “craft-beer gateway;” the pecan brown ale; and toenjes’ own lager-ale hybrid, the california common rye. “the key to our success is becoming ‘belleville’s brewery’ – what stag brought to belleville 25 years ago,” Kennedy says. “the history is what drew us here.”

BrEwIng procEss. “i designed the space to reflect the beer process from conception to consumption,” Kennedy says. “the brewery is on the front porch and is the focal point of the entire place. but from anywhere you’re sitting, you can see some step of the process, from grain to finished product. we want people to ask questions about what’s going on with the milling behind the glass garage door, or about the metal tubing over the bar and dining area that transports ingredients to the fermenters.”

HandmadE BootHs. “the booths were the first things i built, and they were a therapeutic break for me from the other five restaurants i own,” Kennedy says. “after we got those in place, it was just a matter of utilizing as much of the existing wood and structure as we could to make everything else. tabletops, bar tops – you name it; we made it – even the bathroom stalls.”

HEatEd patIo. “in a matter of five months, we expanded the patio from 800 to 5,000 square feet,” Kennedy says. “we expanded it five different times to the heated and covered area that it is now. we’ve become known for our live entertainment around town, and our whole goal is to have people stay here for the duration of their night, to feel like they can relax and hang out, as well as a place for a great food at a lower price.”

4204 Main Street Brewing Co., 4204 W. Main St., Belleville, Illinois, 618.416.7261, mainstreetbrewingco.com

Feasts

Please Join us, Thursday, February 26th for a four course dinner created especially for Feast Readers by

4 0 0 O l i v e S t r e e t, S t. l O u i S , M O 6 3 1 0 1

With Sampling Pairings provided by

Welcome Cocktail featuring Jim Beam Bonded First Course: Basil Hayden Choice of: Salad or Soup Salad: Arugula, mandarin oranges, dried cranberries, walnuts with an Orange Vinaigrette Soup: Seafood chowder Second course: Jim Beam Single Barrel Petite Beef Pot Pie with garlic mashed potatoes Or Vegetable Napoleon Entrée Course: Cocktail featuring Jim Beam Rye Layered Pork Chop with Spinach and Goat cheese Or Linguini with garden vegetable sauce, choice of: Grilled Shrimp or Grilled Chicken Breast Dessert Course: Maker’s Mark 46 Spiced Bundt Cake with Orange Zest Crème Or Carmel and Fudge Brownie with Vanilla Bean Ice Cream $50.00 per person: Includes taxes, gratuities and whiskey tasting per course 6pm and 8pm Seatings Available

Advance Ticket Purchase Required Please Call 314.554.7098 or visit www.opentable.com Stlouisdowntown.hilton.com Inspired Local Food Culture

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shOP here stL

PhOtOgraPhy by CheryL waLLer

|1|

|2|

miss m’s candy boutique St. louiS. retro glass jars filled with colorful candies line the long L-shaped counter at Miss M’s Candy Boutique in st. Louis’ Delmar Loop, enticing taste buds with the likes of vanilla-honey caramels, Key-lime gourmet pretzels, pumpkin spice tripledipped malt balls, pink grapefruit gummy bears and much more.

Co-owners sharon and Lee echols eagerly greet each customer who walks through the door, and they will happily customize almost anything in the store to your preferences – this time of year, think Valentine’s Day boxes of chocolate and gift baskets filled with an assortment of chocolate-covered strawberries, cherry cordials, extra-large peanut-butter cups and any of the housemade chocolates inside the store’s glass display case.

Miss M’s has been around since July 2010, and everything in the store is candy-focused, according to Lee, showcasing more than 500 types of candy that are also available for purchase

culinary libr ary ar

written by bethany ChristO

online. Various candy accessories are also available including lollipop bracelets, edible board games (Candy Land, of course), handmade purses made by a local artist and more. the echols’ candy passion has also taken them outside the shop’s doors – one of the main elements of the business is now candy-catering. “we’ve done events of all different sizes in the past – weddings, corporate events, birthdays – and we are there for the whole process,” sharon says. the pair will walk customers through selecting candy, usually based off of color, theme and type, then will set up and manage displays throughout the event and clean up once it’s over. “we take all the worry out of it for you,” Lee says.

Miss M’s Candy Boutique, 6193 Delmar Blvd., Delmar Loop, St. Louis, Missouri, 314.721.7000, missmscandy.com

written by Liz MiLLer

the arkansas Delta almost cuts the state vertically in half.

Much of the food heritage and culture of the Delta was born of the Mississippi river and the highways that connect it with communities across the region and the country. in her latest book, Classic Eateries of the Arkansas Delta, released October 2014, author Kat robinson explores the richness of the Delta’s food traditions through its most classic restaurants, roadhouses, donut shops and pit stops. robinson knows the history of the region well – her previous books, Arkansas Pie: A Delicious Slice of the Natural State (2012) and Classic Eateries of the Ozarks and Arkansas River Valley (2013), are just as well-researched and informative. some of arkansas’ most historic restaurants are organized into four sections (the Lower Delta, the Upper Delta, the Corridor and Out of the Delta), like the $3 pork sandwiches at the James beard america’s Classics-awarded Jones’ bar-b-Q Diner in Marianna and the fresh, spicy beef tamales at Pasquale’s tamales in helena-west helena, to the hearty reuben sandwich at Presley’s Drive-in in Jonesboro, fried chicken gizzards at walker’s Dairy Freeze in Marked tree and roasted-herbed catfish at wilson Cafe in wilson. robinson sprinkles in recipes throughout – some from restaurants, others from the arkansas Farm bureau, including duck gumbo and green tomato relish. at the end of the book, she includes what she calls “an incomplete Listing of Classic restaurants in the arkansas Delta,” in case the stories and photos leave you wanting to dig into the Delta for yourself. feastmagazine.com

FEBRUARY 2015

ThREE MUsT-TRY TREATs FRoM Miss M’s cAndY BoUTiqUE | 1 | Candy-Catering. “Usually people choose their candy based on a theme or color,” sharon says. “we can usually special order things that aren’t in the store, as well. i’ve done glitter-coated almonds for a birthday party or individual sixlets that spelled out ‘love’ for a rehearsal dinner.” | 2 | HouSemade CHoColateS. the echols rent out a kitchen to make their chocolates, which have become one of the shop’s signatures. best sellers include chocolate-dipped Oreos, salted caramels, peanut-butter cups, naked turtles and mint-almond bark. | 3 | Candy aCCeSSorieS. “it’s a small store packed with a lot,” Lee says.

Other than dispensers filled with 21 M&M colors and assorted Jelly belly and sixlet flavors, the walls are brimming with candy-related accessories.

get this gadget

MO

kyocera knives “My everyday go-to in the kitchen are my Kyocera knives. The blades are ceramic and literally the sharpest knives you’ll ever own. And just in time for [Valentine’s Day], the [company has] come out with a double-knife set with the Santoku and Utility styles in festive red.”

–Jet Pabst, owner, A Thyme For Everything A Thyme For Everything, 229B SE Main St., Lee’s Summit, Missouri, 816.554.3755, athymeforeverything.com

PhOtOgraPhy COUrtesy OF KyOCera

ClassiC EatEriEs of thE arkansas DElta

by Kat robinson classiceateries.com

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|3|

“Life is a combination of magic and pasta.”

– �E�E�I�O F�L�I�I

BECAUSE THERE’S A FOODIE IN EVERY TRAVELER. Come and visit 400 Olive Restaurant and 400 Olive Bar in the newly renovated Hilton St. Louis Downtown at the Arch. Our award winning restaurant is a hidden gem in the heart of downtown St. Louis. Experience our seasonal bistro style menu in this unique historic but modern setting.

Call 314-554-7098 or visit stlouisdowntown.hilton.com

314.878.6767

342 West Port Plaza a www.patrickswestport.com

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner!

Watch for our Extra Special Valentine’s Day Event Make Your Reservations Today!

Special will be available 13th, 14th & 15th

400 Olive St. | Saint Louis | MO 63102 | USA ©2014 Hilton Worldwide

• Cajun Entrees • Breakfast • Appetizers • Burgers/Sandwiches • Entrees • Salads • Desserts

Drink Specials Bottle Beer Always $2.50, Well Drinks $3

Living Word Christian School Educating Tomorrow’s Leaders Today Christian High School Voted one of the Top 50 Christian Schools in the U.S.

The food is Creole, St. Louis style cooking.

It’s a little spicy, little different, highly seasoned, and highly desired!

255 Union Boulevard Saint Louis, MO 63108 (314) 454.1551

Live Music & Dancing Featuring Dirty Muggs on Friday, Feb. 13th and Plastic on Saturday, Feb. 14th

Call for a Tour Today!

1145 Tom Ginnever Ave O’Fallon • 636.978.1680 www.lwcs.us

Valentine’s Day,

4-course dinner for $100 per couple Make your reservations now at Bella Vino

325 S Main St, Saint CharleS, MO 63301 www.bellavinOwinebarStl.COM (636) 724-3434 Inspired Local Food Culture

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sweet ideas

find love at first bite with the berry torte on p. 52 photography by cheryl waller

seed to table

Tapping Maple Syrup sugar maple trees are native to the northeastern U.s. and Canada, and they are the symbolic tree from which maple sap is extracted and used to produce maple syrup. in the Midwest, sugar maple tree sap flows freely in the winter and is easily collected when nighttime temperatures dip below freezing and daytime temperatures are just above. in Missouri, the sap typically flows best on sunny days throughout the month of february, making it the best time of year to tap sugar maple trees. if you happen to have a sugar maple tree in your own backyard, you’re in luck. for a small batch of maple syrup, one large tree with a few taps will produce all you need. tapping maple trees is somewhat of a complex process that, by comparison, only yields a small amount of syrup. yet until you have seen such a complex process through – whether by making your own cheese, wine, maple syrup, etc. – it might not hold as much reverence. there is a lot of knowledge, love and dedication that goes into making artisan food products, especially maple syrup.

My husband, eric, holds a significant admiration for the plant kingdom, and views the art of growing and sourcing food as a labor of love. from the fields as a farmer and through the forests as a naturalist, he truly respects and honors the seed-to-table process. we are fortunate enough to live on a farm in godfrey, illinois, that has several old-growth sugar maple trees. when we first moved to the farm, eric

written by Crystal stevens PhotograPhy by Jennifer silverberg

used reclaimed wood and materials to build a small sugar shack with a roof. each winter, he braves the elements and sets up spiles – spouts that are inserted into trees for tapping – and buckets to catch the sap. for a home-tapping project, there are many great books and online tutorials that cover how to tackle maple syrup production. there are different methods to follow, but after much research and trial and error, this was the best and most affordable method for us. we have found that if you can, it’s best to tap at least three trees, as sap just flows better from some trees. as a general rule, the tree should be at least 12 inches in diameter to be the right age for tapping. with large trees, measuring no fewer than 25 inches in diameter, you may place up to three spiles in various places around the tree.

Keep in mind that it takes 40 gallons of maple sap to produce 1 gallon of maple syrup. the sugar concentration is very low in the sap. once the sap is boiled down, most of the water evaporates and the sugar concentration significantly increases, yielding the thick, sweet liquid we enjoy drizzling over waffles and pancakes, or use to bake treats. home evaporation can be done using a copper kettle over a fire and then finished on the stove top. During large-scale maple syrup production, the sap is collected from hundreds of trees, stored in a sap tank and evaporated using a large-scale evaporator. evaporating water from the sap is what actually turns the sap into syrup.

Crystal Stevens is a farmer at La Vista CSA Farm on the bluffs of the Mississippi River in Godfrey, Illinois, where she farms with her husband, Eric.

They have two children. Crystal is an advocate of integrating creativity into sustainability through writing, art, photojournalism and seed-to-table cooking. Find more of her work at growingcreatinginspiring.blogspot.com, which she created to launch her forthcoming book, grow Create inspire.

Maple Syrup Tapping 101 | Tapping the Tree | 1. if you plan to collect sap multiple times a day, you may place the spile onto the south-facing side of the tree. if you only have time to collect the sap once a day, you may want to place the sap on the north-facing side of the tree. the best place to tap is below a healthy limb or above a vigorous root. 2. Measure 2½ inches on a drill bit and mark it with a piece of tape. this will serve as a template to mark the depth to drill into the tree. Drilling into the tree does not harm it unless you drill more than 3 inches in. 3. based on the description in the first step, find a spot on the tree to drill into using a drill bit relative to size of your spile. 4. angle the drill up at about a 10 degree angle so that the spile will be facing downward to promote sap flow into bucket, which will hang from the spile. 5. the hole you drill needs to be at least 2 inches deep, but no more than 3 inches deep. 6. hammer the spile snugly into the drilled hole, taking care to ensure the spile is firmly set in place.

7. hang a 2½-gallon bucket from the hook on the spile. 8. hammer a nail into the piece of scrap metal about 6 inches above the spile to act as a makeshift roof.

| Collecting the Sap | on a sunny winter day, sap could fill a 2½-gallon bucket in one afternoon. it’s best to collect the sap into a clean 5-gallon bucket twice a day to prevent sap from overflowing. store 5-gallon buckets with lids outdoors in a cool place if temperatures stay below 38°f. if temperatures are warmer, you can store sap in the refrigerator. since 40 gallons of sap yields 1 gallon of syrup, we typically collect and boil sap several times throughout the span of 5 or 6 weeks. | Boiling the Sap | build a fire in a designated fire pit at the base of a copperkettle stand. the fire will need to be going all day to boil sap down, at least 10 hours.

Pour all sap collected into a 10-gallon copper kettle and keep the fire stoked. boil the sap until ¾ of its contents have evaporated. Using a mesh strainer, strain sap into a large stainless steel pot. transfer pot to kitchen stovetop and continue to boil down. repeat the process with the remaining 5-gallon buckets. it may take several hours to finish evaporating the water necessary to create syrup on your stove top; use a candy thermometer to monitor the temperature. the sap turns to syrup when the temperature reaches 219°f. the sugar concentration should be at 66 percent. test your maple syrup for doneness by pouring it on a white plate; if it pours to the consistency of maple syrup, it’s likely ready. once finished boiling, remove from heat. strain syrup through a fine-mesh strainer. Pour syrup into several Mason jars and place lids on immediately. store in the refrigerator for up to 2 months.

Bon Appétit

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mystery shopper

MeeT: ‘NdUJA This month, turn up the heat on your cooking with ‘nduja, which may require a little bravery and trust – but we promise the payoff will be well worth it.

What Is It?

‘Nduja (pronounced en-DOO-ya) is a spreadable salami originating from the Calabria region of Italy. If you’ve never come across it, you’re not alone: It’s a specialty item only made by a handful of producers, and virtually everything about ‘nduja – from the ingredients used to make it to the process by which it’s made – is shrouded in mystery. This is not a bad thing, considering that it’s made from a creative mix of pig parts that would delight any nose-to-tail enthusiast. It may be difficult to imagine, but combining meat scraps with a slightly terrifying amount of hot pepper and spices results in an oddly spectacular treat.

STORy AND ReCIPe By ShANNON WeBeR PhOTOgRAPhy By JeNNIFeR SIlveRBeRg

What Do I Do WIth It?

The answer may surprise you. ‘Nduja is quite flexible, which makes getting to know it a little easier. For a solid blast of heat, spread it on bread, eat it with cheese or slather it on sandwiches or pizza.

If you only want to get a small taste, add a little to pasta sauces, vinaigrettes, vegetables (my apologies to vegetarians) or even eggs.

Using these applications allows you to control the heat, which can be fairly aggressive. Don’t let it scare you; ‘nduja is worth your time, and you won’t find the unique flavor profile anywhere other than this unctuous salami.

It’s important, given the nature of ‘nduja, to seek out the highestquality product you can find. Buy it from artisan shops or from online suppliers that sell high-quality meats.

Shannon Weber is the creator, author and photographer behind the award-winning blog aperiodictableblog.com, and her work has appeared on websites such as Bon Appétit, Serious eats and America’s Test Kitchen. She is a self-taught baker and cook who believes the words “I can’t” should never apply to food preparation and that curiosity can lead to wonderful things, in both the kitchen and in life.

Warm Potato Salad with ‘Nduja Vinaigrette This recipe is a simple one, with a few things happening all at once. If you begin cooking the mushrooms just after you turn the potatoes on, and proceed with the vinaigrette, you’ll have everything holding in the skillet and ready to go when the potatoes are done.

Serves | 8 | Potato salaD 1½

2 2 10

lbs small red potatoes, scrubbed tsp kosher salt water Tbsp olive oil oz crimini mushrooms, cleaned and sliced

‘NDuja VINaIgrette

3 3 1 2 3

Tbsp olive oil Tbsp finely diced shallots Tbsp plus 2 tsp Dijon mustard Tbsp ‘nduja Tbsp white wine vinegar

to serVe

1 ¾

14½ oz can artichoke hearts, quartered cup roasted red peppers, drained and sliced into thin strips sea salt and freshly ground black pepper small bunch roughly chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

| Preparation – Potato Salad | In a 6-quart saucepan, add potatoes and salt.

Fill with water until potatoes are covered by 1 inch; bring to a boil. Simmer for 12 to 15 minutes until tender, then drain.

As potatoes cook, add olive oil to a large cast-iron skillet and heat over medium high. Add mushrooms and sauté until moisture has evaporated and mushrooms are dark and soft. Remove from pan and set aside.

| Preparation – ‘Nduja Vinaigrette | Add olive oil to the same skillet over medium heat. Add shallots and stir occasionally until tender, 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from heat and add mustard and ‘nduja, whisking to incorporate. Add vinegar and stir until mixture is smooth and homogenous. | To Serve | Add artichoke hearts, red

peppers and cooked mushrooms to the skillet and toss with ‘nduja vinaigrette to coat. Place over medium heat to warm vegetables, reducing heat to low if needed to hold for potatoes. Once potatoes are cool enough to handle, cut into 1-inch pieces and add to ‘nduja mixture, tossing to coat and heating gently until everything has warmed. Season generously with salt and pepper and garnish with fresh parsley.

Serve immediately, either family-style from the skillet or by dividing into equal portions onto plates.

%PG

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Inspired Local Food Culture

F E B R UA RY 2 0 1 5

49

menu options

Sea Salt CaramelS Making candy doesn’t need to be a special treat for a special time of year – homemade candy is special just by virtue of the work it takes to make, whether during the winter holiday season, for a loved one on Valentine’s Day or just because you’re in the mood for something sweet. Caramels are also more complex than the standard candies that traditionally come wrapped in wax paper. Elevate satiny smooth

story anD rECipE by GabriEllE DEMiChElE photoGraphy by JEnnifEr silVErbErG

caramels by coating them in chocolate, sprinkling them with sea salt, adding in nuts, spices or dried fruit – and those are just a few of the many ingredient and flavor combinations to consider. Using European-style butter (Kerrygold is a great brand that’s easily found in grocery stores), the following recipe serves as a reliable base for whatever inclusions you choose, with a slight sprinkling of sea salt.

Yields | 50 caramels

1½ 8

chef’s tips Materials Matter. Using a wooden spoon or silicone spatula will work best when you’re caramelizing the sugar, as these materials don’t transfer heat.

the pan over to bring more sugar up the thermometer. staying in the exact temperature range is important to the hardness of the caramels.

to teMp. Don’t let the candy thermometer touch the bottom of the pan. if you’re not sure if the thermometer is reading correctly, tilt

pan out. When caramelizing sugar, use the heaviest-bottomed pan you have, such as an enamel-coated cast-iron pan.

Make the Meal • Onion Soup with Caramelized Onions, Gruyère Cheese and Baguettes • Greens with Celeriac and Fennel with Caramelized Apple Vinaigrette • Caramelized Chicken Thighs with Ginger • sea salt Caramels

sea salt caramels

learn More. in this month’s class you’ll learn how to caramelize

onions, apples and chicken in addition to sugar. you will see how each ingredient caramelizes based on its sugar content and moisture, and understand more fully what’s called the Maillard reaction.

get hands-on: Join Feast Magazine and schnucks Cooks Cooking school on Wed., Feb. 25, at 6pm at the des Peres, Missouri, location, to make the dishes in this month’s menu. tickets are just $40 for a night of cooking, dining and wine. RsVP at schnuckscooks.com or call 314.909.1704.

1 1½ 2 1

|

nonstick cooking spray cups unpasteurized (or lightly pasteurized) heavy cream tbsp salted European-style butter, cubed and divided tsp sea salt, divided tsp pure vanilla extract cups cane sugar cup light corn syrup or cane syrup

| Preparation | line a 9-inch-by-13-inch pan with parchment paper and spray with nonstick cooking spray. in a medium saucepan combine cream, 4 tbsp butter, ½ tsp sea salt and vanilla and stir until fully combined and heated until mixture begins to boil. immediately remove from heat, cover and keep warm.

In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine sugar and corn syrup and attach a candy thermometer into the mixture in the pan.

Cook gently over medium heat, stirring with a silicone spatula to make sure sugar melts evenly. When mixture is thoroughly combined and sugar is fully moistened, stir only as necessary to avoid any hot spots that will burn.

Cook until sugar mixture reaches 300°f on the candy thermometer. sugar will not have color. turn off heat and carefully stir in cream mixture until smooth. the sugar mixture may pop while adding the cream; it will be very hot. return the pan with both of the mixtures back onto the heat and cook until thermometer reaches 260°f. immediately remove from heat and stir in remaining butter. pour mixture into the prepared pan and let sit for 10 minutes. sprinkle remaining salt over top and allow to cool completely.

When cooled, lift parchment paper out of the pan and transfer to a cutting board. Peel away the paper and cut caramels into pieces.

Wrap individual pieces in wax paper. serve immediately or store in an airtight container for up to 4 weeks.

TV

WATCH IT ON THESE NETWORKS

In St. Louis, tune into the Nine Network (Channel 9) to see Feast TV on Sat., Feb. 7 at 2pm; Mon., Feb. 9 at 1pm; and Sun., Feb. 15 at 3:30pm.

Feast TV will also air throughout the month on nineCREATE.

In Kansas City, watch Feast TV on KCPT (Channel 19) on Sat., Feb. 21 at 2:30pm.

You can watch Feast TV throughout mid-Missouri on KMOS (Channel 6) on Thurs., Feb. 26 at 8:30pm.

Feast TV will air in the southern Illinois region on WSIU (Channel 8) at 10am on Sat., Feb. 14.

Feast TV’s February episode will take you to Side Project Cellar in St. Louis, where ground-breaking brewer Cory King offers his barrel-aged, Belgian-style beers via a custom-made draft system. Then, it’s off to Osborn, Missouri, to visit Shatto Milk Co., an artisan dairy producing butter, half-and-half and milk, including flavored milks flavors like root beer, banana and cotton candy.

In Carbondale, Illinois, we get behind the scenes at a new craft distillery, Grand River Spirits. And last, we head to Ste. Genevieve County to visit Hinkebein Elk Farm and see how elk are raised on pasture.

FEBREWARY At Schnucks, we’re celebrating FeBREWary because we love beer! We’re showcasing our selection that includes popular brands, imported beers and craft brews.

We’re proud to carry beers from some of the most respected brewers including an impressive variety brewed right here in St. Louis!

Don’t forget to ask about ordering keg beer.

Check in-store for craft beer tastings and classes.

Cheers to Beer!

For a list of our Certified Beer Servers and locations, visit schnucks.com And, follow Certified Beer Server Chris Wong @SpiritsSipsSuds and Certified Cicerone® Chris Kline @SchnucksBeerGuy! ©2015 Schnucks

Feast TV is presented by Missouri Wines with additional support from Whole Foods Market.

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F E B R UA RY 2 0 1 5

51

sweet ideas

ChoColate truffle torte The most decadent chocolate desserts are just that: chocolate in its truest form. Many soufflés, mousses and truffles contain so much sugar and fat that the experience of enjoying these confections is more about the luxurious mouthfeel than the deep, dark flavor of the chocolate itself. Thanks to the brilliance of my business partner and fancy-pants cake-maker Nancy Boehm, we have come up with a way to have the best of both worlds. This single-layer cake, or torte,

is intensely chocolaty but dreamily smooth at the same time. Highquality chocolate is paramount to the success of your recipe – that and a bit of patience. While the torte comes together quickly and bakes in just 20 minutes, you cannot unmold it until the next day.

As an added bonus, this dessert is gluten-free. Served with fresh berries and dry Champagne or sparking wine, your sweetie will be as enamored of this dessert as they are of you this Valentine’s Day.

Christy Augustin has had a lifelong love affair with all things sweet. After working as a pastry chef in New Orleans and St. Louis, she opened Pint Size

STORy AND ReCIPe By CHRISTy AuguSTIN PHOTOgRAPHy By CHeRyL WALLeR

Chocolate Truffle Torte Yields | 8 to 10 slices |

4 12 1 6 ¼

Bakery & Coffee in St. Louis’ Lindenwood Park in 2012. She calls herself the baker of all things good and evil. Learn more at pintsizebakery.com.

1

nonstick cooking spray oz unsweetened baking chocolate oz premium-quality semisweet chocolate chips cup unsalted butter, cubed large eggs cup granulated sugar pinch kosher salt tsp bourbon, dark rum, or vanilla extract

| Preparation | Preheat oven to 400ºF. Line an 8-inch cake pan with parchment paper and coat with nonstick cooking spray.

Chop baking chocolate into small pieces and place in a large metal or glass bowl along with chocolate chips and cubed butter.

Set bowl over a pot of simmering water to create a double boiler and stir frequently until melted. Take care to keep the heat on low so as not to scorch chocolate.

In a separate bowl, whisk eggs, sugar, salt and bourbon to lighten eggs. Off of the heat, whisk egg mixture into the chocolate mixture until well combined.

Pour batter into the prepared pan and place the cake pan into a large casserole dish. Fill the casserole dish with hot water no more than halfway up the side of the cake pan to create a water bath. Cover the casserole dish with foil, venting all four corners with a small slit in the foil. If you are concerned about water sloshing into the cake pan, place the prepared pans in the oven with the rack pulled out and add the water at this stage before gently pushing the rack back into place. Bake for 15 minutes, remove the foil and bake 5 minutes further.

Remove from the oven and leave cake pan in the water bath to slowly cool at room temperature for 1 hour.

Wrap cake pan in cling film and refrigerate overnight or freeze for up to 2 weeks. To unmold the torte, place just the bottom of the cake pan in a pot of hot water just long enough to soften the edges, or do what the professionals do and torch the sides and bottom of the pan with a household propane torch.

Invert a serving platter on top of the cake pan and flip the two over, and your cake should pop out. Chill to set the edges if they are soft and store in the refrigerator until ready to serve with fresh berries and whipped cream.

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feBruarY 2015

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Inspired Local Food Culture

F E B R UA RY 2 0 1 5

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F E B R UA RY 2 0 1 5

| 56 |

back in the game

Interest in Missouri elk is increasing across the region.

| 65 |

the sweet of the sour

The science behind the barrel-aged, Belgian-style beers from St. Louis’ Side Project Brewing.

| 70 |

make it & break it

Make from-scratch chocolate bark in creative flavors at home.

| 76 |

cream of the crop

Meet the family behind Kansas City’s artisan dairy, Shatto Milk Co.

| 82 |

escoffier to today

A Missouri chef uncovers a long- lost family connection to the father of French cooking.

photography by JENNIFER silverberg

BACK IN THE GAME

interest in Missouri-raised elk is increasing across the region

WRITTEN By Mallory Gnaegy PHOTOGRAPHy By Emily Suzanne McDonald

Kevin HinKebein pulls his red utility ATV up toward the sloping back pasture of Hinkebein Elk Farm just outside Farmington, Missouri. His white-faced black lab, Bailey, runs alongside, trying to keep up. As he parks, an elk cow, Dora, knowingly approaches.

She sticks her muzzle through the gate – like a 500-pound dog greeting its owner.

Hinkebein enters the pasture near the squeeze shoot. It’s a padded stall that electrically squeezes elk in tight to hold them still so Hinkebein can perform health tests twice a year. He pats Dora’s head and gently shoos her to the side of the 8-foot high metal gates.

“Dora’s getting ready to be a mother,” the elk breeder says proudly. Two years ago, Hinkebein bottle-raised Dora in his basement when her mom wouldn’t claim her as a calf. Ironically, his basement represents the full spectrum of the circle-of-life; it’s also where he practices hobby taxidermy.

Bottle-feeding newborn elk isn’t all that unusual. If the mother had a painful birthing process or the calf was born too late, they are typically abandoned. He’s mothered a few calves since he bought his first pair in 1990.

“Those are the hard ones to get rid of,” he says.

“Those stay around until they die.”

The other 20 forage-fed elk on his 150 acres are farmed to produce sticks and sausage for wineries in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, like Twin Oaks Vineyard & Winery and Charleville Vineyard, Winery & Microbrewery. He sells boneless loin, whole tenderloin, ground elk and rump roasts to establishments like Annie Gunn’s in Chesterfield, Missouri, Chaumette Vineyards & Winery in Ste. Genevieve and Celebrations Restaurant and Bar in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Popularity of the lean, flavorful meat is increasing.

“If I had the quantity to sell, the demand is there,” he says.

Nearby, a huddle of elk cows stand in a group by an empty grain trough – he feeds them a small amount daily and lets them graze the field naturally throughout the day. He just sold all of his bulls, which he rotates out every year to continually improve his herd’s bloodline. They are raised naturally without antibiotics, in a process similar to cattle, and once they’re at least 2 years old, they are processed.

During the rut, the mating period that occurs in the fall, Hinkebein likes to sit on his back deck in the evenings and listen to the bulls bugle back and forth.

The last rut ended in December, and he suspects his cows are all pregnant – elk calves are typically born in June. He watches them grazing in his other field, in between his home and his back pasture. He can also watch them in this field from the kitchen table of his cozy, country-style home.

I would describe the texture as a lean beef. It has a rich, bold flavor that pairs well

The land is the same he and his brothers used to play on as children. His parents bought the property in 1950, and now the 350 acres are split in half by a road. One of his brothers owns one side, and Hinkebein owns the other. Their father raised hogs, cattle, sheep, goats, chickens and horses – the sons still have the original cow herd their father started with 50 years ago.

“It’s very lean; I would describe the texture as a lean beef,” Lambay says. “It has a rich, bold flavor that pairs well with deep red wines, like Nortons.”

Hinkebein often hand-delivers the meat himself, but Lambay has also been to the farm often since then. Lambay enjoys visiting his farmers in person.

“I get to see what they are doing and have a conversation with them, and it makes relationships a lot stronger when they truly appreciate what I do and I appreciate what they do,” Lambay says. “It’s validity, I think.”

Out of all the people in his family, wildlife resonated the most with Hinkebein. He used to keep raccoons and crows for pets.

Hinkebein gladly celebrates elk. Although the humble man would never admit it himself – his fiancée, Valerie, has to tell people for him – he consistently works to introduce people to eating elk and helps mentor new breeders.

When he has the opportunity to take a vacation from his work at the farm, he spends it volunteering at the Missouri state fair just to promote and grow awareness about elk.

“I’m never going to get rich off of elk,” he says. “I just think it’s a livestock industry that needs to stay here.”

According to the Missouri Department of Conservation, elk were plentiful in the state before European settlements drove them almost to extinction by the late 1800s. In 2010, with renewed interest in restoring the state’s elk population, the Department launched an effort to trap elk in other states and release them in Missouri. In late 2014, the Department estimated that about 125 elk had been reintroduced. Depending on population growth, the Department may begin issuing hunting permits for elk in the next few years.

PICTURED LEFT PAGE: Kevin Hinkebein and his grandson Corbin leave Hinkebein’s country-style home near Farmington, Missouri, to tend to the elk. Corbin often helps Hinkebein on the farm. PICTURED ToP RIGhT: Hinkebein moves hay bales on his tractor.

For these reasons, Hinkebein was glad to host the farm-to-table elk dinner. Its scope was to

“Wild animals were always intriguing to me,” he says. A neighbor of his former in-laws raised elk for more than 20 years, and he would see them out in the field every time he went to visit. This sparked his initial interest in elk, and one day he stopped in to talk to the neighbor about his herd.

Later, the farmer sold him his first pair in 1990.

The back pasture they’re hanging out in now is where, in July, Hinkebein hosted six Missouri chefs and more than 100 people for a dinner called It’s All About Elk.

wIth deep red wInes, lIke nortons.

The experience was the brainchild of executive chef Adam Lambay of Chaumette Vineyards & Winery, just down the road from Hinkebein’s farm. Lambay works to build relationships with many farmers and producers in the area. He sees it as his responsibility to contribute a more meaningful culinary experience. Seven years ago, Hinkebein brought him some elk to cook, and he was surprised by its mild game flavor – he says it’s less gamey than venison or antelope and would compare it more closely to bison.

introduce attendees to the idea that elk is locally sourced and expertly prepared by chefs in the area. Much of the crowd consisted of chefs and their families. One of Hinkebein’s daughters, Jessica, not only grew up on the farm, but also now gets to sit on the other side of a table as a chef at Chaumette.

Attendees experienced the full spectrum of elk’s versatility in a family-style casual dinner.

Josh Galliano, chef-owner of The Libertine in Clayton, Missouri, prepared a chilled marinated elk tenderloin salad with hazelnuts, salt-cured egg yolks and herbs. Lou Rook, executive chef of Annie Gunn’s in Chesterfield, Missouri, prepared elk carpaccio with toasted pine nuts, Manchego cheese and local tomato relish. Matt Bessler, executive chef at Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood, Missouri, created elk and rice meatballs with garden chimichurri and smoked Gouda grits and gravy (paired with Schlafly APA, of course).

Rex Hale, executive chef of The Restaurant at The Cheshire, thought it was a great event. He even took his daughter to the farm to meet the meat.

- Adam Lambay, executive chef, Chaumette Vineyards & Winery

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FEBRUARY 2015

59

“I’m never goIng to get rIch off of elk,” he says. “I just thInk It’s a lIvestock “I love that they brought people down,” Hale says. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to bring them on the farm where the animals are raised. So many people have no idea.”

Hale sells out every time he features elk in monthly specials like elk chile empanadas or maple-marinated elk loin.

Galliano sourced from Hinkebein long before the dinner. The first time was nearly a decade ago, when he was the chef at now-shuttered An American Place in St. Louis. Hinkebein needed to sell a whole elk and approached him. Galliano was game – pun intended – and planned to butcher it without realizing its size. He learned to utilize the whole animal, and now, he appreciates the nonloin cuts – particularly the hind legs.

“It’s a very lean meat,” he says. “It has a softer muscle structure, so it tends to be tender right off the bat. The nice thing about it is that it has a minerality to the flavor as well as a little sweetness.”

He says a lot of people think of it as a fall meat

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FEBRUARY 2015

like most game but suggests that it’s versatile to cook with throughout the year and can be substituted for any of your favorite beef recipes.

These days, Hinkebein isn’t working so hard to market meat, and he needs more calves to satisfy the growing demand. He used to have 35 cows and once worked to sell them. But now that word of mouth is catching on, he sells what he has – that’s why he’s down to 20. He doesn’t even eat a lot of it himself.

When he occasionally runs out, he refers customers to Joyce La Rue of Premium Elks Inc. in Unionville, Missouri (both Hinkebein and La Rue are members of the Missouri Elk Farmers Association; La Rue is the organization’s president). They are the only steadily active breeders for wholesale elk meat in Missouri – all other breeders raise elk for conservation or sell to whom they know.

La Rue’s path to elk farming began in 2004, due to her husband Loyd’s back problems.

They learned elk velvet, the fuzzy, not-yetfully-grown antlers, helps heal arthritis,

cartilage and tendon injuries. The material can be made into a powder and taken as a capsule.

Some people boil it as tea. La Rue first heard about it at a deer show from a farmer who swore by it.

She didn’t know that by tagging along on the antler pickup, she’d also come home with 21 elk to add to her family’s roughly 3,000-acre Lazy L Elk Ranch on the northern edge of the Missouri-Iowa border. She attributes the decision to an elk cow she met and fell in love with named Molly.

She explains they also raise beef cattle, corn, soybeans, hay and, as she says, “a whole lot of hell,” but that she is the sole operator of the elk portion of the business.

La Rue’s major customer is Sysco Corporation, which serves 425,000 customers around the country including Gram & Dun in Kansas City and BC’s Kitchen in Lake St. Louis, which have both sourced her elk. She also sells wholesale to restaurants around the state, to individuals via her

website, premiumelk.com – one customer once placed an order to send elk meat to a member of the military serving in Iraq and Afghanistan – or to Hinkebein’s customers when he’s running low on filling orders for regulars like Matt Bessler at Schlafly Bottleworks.

Bessler trusts the referral because of their relationship. He’s been sourcing from Hinkebein for seven years and met him through Hinkebein’s cousin, who delivered pork to Bessler and told him that Hinkebein needed an outlet to sell.

Now, what Hinkebein has available usually goes straight into Bessler’s elk chili, but he will occasionally have specials if there’s extra.

He says you can’t go wrong with elk pot roast.

Bessler likes to tell people about Hinkebein and heralds the concept of knowing one’s food.

“I know Kevin, his wife, his kids,” Bessler says.

“I’ve seen his farm. I know his characteristics as a person and the business side; I know how he raises his animals and the pride he has in it.”

PICTURED LEFT: Elk grazing in the fields of Hinkebein Elk Farm near Farmington, Missouri. PICTURED BELOW: Kevin Hinkebein and his grandson Corbin prepare to move buckets of feed from the feed

machine into the elk’s trough. Hinkebein says that Corbin likes to ride on the tractor, knows how to operate the feeder and may just grow up to become a rancher himself, as it, “runs in the family.”

Industry that needs to stay here.”

Get up close with the elk at Hinkebein Elk Farm near Farmington, Missouri, and learn more about owner Kevin Hinkebein in the February episode of Feast TV.

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elk recipes Glazed Elk Loin Recipe by Josh Galliano, chef-owneR, The LibeRTine

Serves | 4 |

| Assembly | Transfer four pieces of elk loin to

Compressed rutabaGa

1 1 ½ ½ 2 1 1

Tbsp yuzu juice Tbsp sorghum molasses tsp tamarind concentrate tsp kosher salt Tbsp water Tbsp organic cider vinegar rutabaga, peeled and thinly sliced into discs

3 Tbsp olive oil 1 lb whole celery root, peeled and diced salt and freshly ground black pepper 2 Tbsp unsalted butter 1 sprig thyme 1 garlic clove sauCe apiCius

Tbsp whole coriander Tbsp whole white peppercorns Tbsp whole cumin Tbsp dried dill Tbsp dried oregano Tbsp saffron Tbsp fish sauce lb honey Tbsp water Tbsp white vinegar

elk loin

2 lbs elk loin, cut into 4 pieces salt and freshly ground black pepper 4 Tbsp olive oil 4 Tbsp unsalted butter 1 sprig thyme 1 garlic clove 1 apple, peeled, quartered and placed in water with lemon juice 3 Tbsp diced chives 16 small celery stalk leaves (for assembly)

| Preparation – Compressed Rutabaga | in a small mixing bowl, combine all ingredients except rutabaga. place shaved rutabaga in 2 12-by-12inch cryovac bags. Divide liquid between each bag. Seal each on 100 percent vacuum with an extra 20 seconds for compression. Refrigerate bags until ready to use.

| Preparation – Roasted Celery Root | in a large sauté pan, heat olive oil over medium high until just smoking. Add celery root and season with salt and pepper. brown celery root, tossing often to color all sides. when celery root is halfway browned throughout, add butter, sprig of thyme and garlic and cook until tender and well-browned. Remove celery root to tray and keep warm.

| Preparation – Sauce Apicius | Grind whole spices. in a medium pot, transfer all ingredients except vinegar to combine. bring mixture to a boil, then allow to reduce to a thick syrup.

Remove pot from heat and add vinegar.

| Preparation – Elk Loin | Season elk with salt and pepper. in a large sauté pan over high heat, heat olive oil. when oil begins to smoke, add elk loin pieces 1 at a time. Reduce heat to medium high and sear for about 3 minutes on one side. flip elk pieces and continue to sear for 1 minute. Add butter, thyme and garlic to the pan. continue cooking elk until internal temperature reaches 118°f to 120°f on a meat thermometer.

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the center of four plates. Spoon celery root on top of elk and arrange three apple slices and three rutabaga discs with celery stalk leaves around the top. Serve immediately.

Elk Stew with Cranberries, Chiles and Cinnamon Recipe by rex hale, execUTive chef, The ReSTAURAnT AT The cheShiRe

roasted Celery root

5 1 2 1 1 ½ 1 1 5 2

Using a kitchen brush, paint sauce apicius on top of elk pieces in the pan. Remove elk from pan and allow to rest at room temperature for 5 minutes. Slice apple quarters lengthwise and transfer to a medium bowl to toss with chives. cover and keep warm.

FEBRUARY 2015

Hale cautions overcooking lean meat like elk – the leaner cuts of elk needs to be cooked rare to medium rare or wrapped in fat for protection.

Hale recommends garnishing the stew with Baetje Farms fresh goat cheese, freshly made tortillas and micro cilantro, and pairing it with Norton, Chambourcin or Syrah wine.

Serves | 16 | 4 5 2½ 1

Tbsp olive oil lbs elk stew meat diced from shoulder cups shredded yellow onion cup diced mixed red and yellow bell peppers 2 roasted poblanos, peeled and diced ¼ cup garlic, minced and roasted ¼ cup raspberry vinegar 5 freshly ground cinnamon sticks ½ cup sugar ¼ cup chipotle paste ½ bunch freshly chopped basil 1 bunch fresh thyme, in sachet bag 3 freshly ground bay leaf 1½ bags fresh cranberries 3 quarts elk or veal stock water sea salt and freshly ground black pepper fresh goat cheese (for garnish) tortillas (for garnish) cilantro (for garnish)

| Preparation | place a large brazier over medium-high heat and add olive oil and elk meat. Add onions, peppers, poblanos and garlic. Deglaze pan with raspberry vinegar. Add cinnamon, sugar, chipotle paste, herbs (including sachet bag) and cranberries. finish with stock and cover all ingredients. Simmer slowly for 3½ to 4 hours, stirring frequently. Add water as needed to maintain chili consistency. Season stew to taste with salt and pepper and serve.

Elk Chili Recipe by matt bessler, execUTive chef, SchLAfLy boTTLewoRkS

Bessler’s relationship with elk began on a family vacation to Yellowstone, Wyoming, 20 years ago when he decided to order a plate of game meats.

“I wouldn’t call it an epiphany, but learning as a child that there was something else out there [was impactful],” Bessler says. According to him, this flavorful elk chili, found on the menu at Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood, Missouri, is best served with a beer that holds its own, such as Schlafly APA. Serves | 10 to 12 | 2 1 2 4 4

Tbsp vegetable oil yellow onion, diced green peppers, diced Tbsp minced fresh garlic cups beef stock

1 1 1 1 2 1 4 2 2 2 1 ¼ 4

lb ground elk meat 15-oz can kidney beans, drained and rinsed 15-oz can chili beans Tbsp puréed chipotle in adobo sauce cups chili sauce 15.5-oz can diced tomatoes tsp kosher salt Tbsp chile powder tsp freshly ground black pepper tsp ground cumin Tbsp ground paprika tsp ground cinnamon Tbsp semisweet chocolate chips

Where to try

The following restaurants and wineries source elk meat from Hinkebein Elk Farm near Farmington, Missouri, and Premium Elks Inc. in Unionville, Missouri.

We recommend calling ahead to confirm that elk products or dishes are currently in stock or available on menus.

| Preparation | in a 4-quart saucepot over mediumlow heat, heat vegetable oil. Add onion and peppers to pot and cook until onions are soft, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and cook an additional 2 minutes. in a large mixing bowl, mix beef stock with raw elk meat until meat is completely coarse and broken up with no remaining clumps.

Add elk-beef broth mixture to saucepot with onion, peppers and garlic over medium-low heat.

Mix well and bring to a simmer. Add beans, puréed chipotles, chili sauce, tomatoes and spices and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring frequently. Add chocolate chips and stir until melted and wellcombined. Adjust seasoning to taste and serve.

Hinkebein Farm Elk Roast Curry Recipe by adam lambay, execUTive chef, chAUMeTTe vineyARDS & wineRy

In first grade, Lambay’s teacher asked him to draw his favorite food. Most kids in the class drew pizza; he drew curry. Now as a professional chef making curry on a regular basis, Lambay sees it as his professional responsibility to provide locally sourced food that inspires patrons. He visits farms five to six times a week and almost always has an elk special on the menu.

Serves | 6 | 4 4 2 1 1 3 to 4 1 2 2 6

Tbsp butter Tbsp vegetable oil cinnamon sticks Tbsp black cardamom Tbsp whole cloves bay leaves Tbsp crushed coriander Tbsp whole cumin yellow onions, julienned cloves garlic and 2-inch section fresh ginger puréed together* 2½ to 3 lbs boneless elk roast, sliced into 1-inch cubes 3 Tbsp madras-style curry powder 2 Tbsp freshly ground black pepper 1 tsp red pepper flakes 2 cups whole-milk yogurt 1 qt chicken stock 3 Tbsp kosher salt *You may need to add a little water to the puréed garlic and ginger mixture.

| Preparation | in a large heavy-bottomed stew pot over medium heat, heat butter and oil. Add whole spices except cumin. when bay leaves begin to brown, add cumin. when cumin pops and browns, immediately add onions. Stir onions to ensure even cooking. when onions brown on edges, add garlic-ginger purée. Stir-fry for 1 minute. Add elk and stir-fry until brown on all sides. Add curry powder, black pepper and pepper flakes. fry for another minute, stirring constantly. Add yogurt, chicken stock and salt and bring to a boil. Turn heat down to a simmer, cover and let cook for 1 hour or until elk is tender.

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sweet the

sour of the

There was a time when Cory King thought he might want to be a pharmacist. But as his mom, Betsy Chaffin, remembers it, he got a job in a pharmacy during his freshman year of college and told her, “If I have to spend my whole life making potions for people, I’ll go crazy.”

Instead, the smart kid turned his science-loving mind to something really useful: brewing.

King is the head brewer at Perennial Artisan Ales in St. Louis, the craft beer brainchild of Phil and Emily Wymore housed in the old

the Scientific Mind Behind St. LouiS’ Side Project Brewing Written by Seán Collins

Coca-Cola syrup plant in the South Carondelet neighborhood. Perennial began brewing in 2011 with, in Phil Wymore’s words, “the experimental, seasoned craft beer drinker in mind.”

about the styles of beer that we’re going to make and the product development,” Wymore says, “but we’ve also been very open-minded about the business model.”

Experimental indeed. If you walk into the brewery on a chilly winter day, you may just find a clutch of volunteers sitting around a pile of ancho chiles, picking their way to another award while King Tuff blares on speakers in the brewhouse.

That has resulted in King being Perennial’s head brewer and also being able to open the gypsy brewery, Side Project Brewing, using Perennial’s space and equipment. And that makes sense – for King and for the Wymores.

“We’ve been very open-minded, not only

You see, King is a bit of beer rock star these days. His work at Perennial and Side Project

|

PhotograPhy by Jonathan Gayman

has gained the attention of the world’s beer lovers. Side Project’s Saison du Blé [say-zohn doo blay] Batch 2 was deemed among “the most audacious, elegant and superb pours” of 2014 and named one of the 25 best beers of the year

by Draft magazine. Perennial’s Barrel-Aged Abraxas took gold in the Experimental Beer category two years in a row at The Festival of Wood and Barrel Aged Beers and was runner-up for Best of Show in 2014. And at the time this article was being written, three of Perennial and Side Project’s brews were ranked among the top 100 beers in the world by BeerAdvocate.

“I’m goIng to focus on makIng the best beer I possIbly can. If you PICTURED bElow: The tasting

room at Side Project Cellar in Maplewood, Missouri.

PICTURED RIGHT: Cory King stands inside the barrel-aging room at Perennial Artisan Ales in St. Louis, where all of Side Project’s beers are created and aged.

King says, “It’s been crazy to think that my tiny, tiny brewery is starting to get accolades like that.”

Hardcore fans of craft beer trade hard-to-find bottles with one another. Mike Sweeney, creator of stlhops.com and a Feast contributor, says that King’s brews are being traded like mad by “beer nerds” – a term he uses lovingly – in a measure of what they consider great product. “There are a few breweries across the country that have always had high trade value because they’re difficult to obtain and because they produce stellar beer,” Sweeney writes in an email. “Side Project and Perennial have entered that realm of sought-after breweries and have helped to put St. Louis craft beer on the map.”

OK, stop. Think about that for a second. You could be forgiven if your eyes ran over the words “St. Louis,” “beer” and “map” and thought, “Yeah, yeah… tell me something I don’t know.” Of course St. Louis is on the beer map, right?

But we’re not talking Bud Light here. The beer that King brews is all about place and time – it

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just seems remarkable that the place is St. Louis and the time is now.

There’s something wistful about King. It’s as if he’s longing to return to a very specific place in history and settle in. From what you can piece together listening to him talk about his work, that place is a small village somewhere – maybe in Belgium, maybe Missouri – sometime in the past.

Maybe 100 years ago. Maybe 200.

“I’ve wanted to hone [in] on how beer used to be made,” King says. “I’ve become more nostalgic in the last year just because I’m jealous of how things used to be, like the slow pace. There are some breweries still doing it over in Europe, but hardly any in this country.”

King and his wife, Karen, opened Side Project Cellar, their tasting room, at the end of 2014. It’s on Marietta Street, a crooked little one-block lane tucked into Maplewood, Missouri. If you squint, you

can imagine the village King has in mind: besides the tasting room for barrel-aged beers, there’s Strange Donuts at the end of the block, Larder & Cupboard is an easy walk away and around the corner, Chris Bolyard’s neighborhood butcher shop Bolyard’s Meat & Provisions offers heritage breed wholeanimal butchery. The scale here is small and human.

“Someone will always out-market, outsell me, outdo all that stuff on the business side of it,” King says. “So, we’re not going to do our business like businesses normally do their business. I’m going to focus on making the best beer I possibly can. If you want to drink it, come here.”

King’s respect for the way things used to be is not some gauzy-eyed nostalgia. It seems rooted in a hard truth about our technologically mediated lives and the pace at which we feel compelled to live them. Slowing things down may make more and more sense to more and more people.

And in the same way architects and urban planners have “rediscovered” a mixed-use

urban design that was at the core of our greatgrandparents’ communities, the old techniques of brewing may be a window to our future. As King says, “All beer used to be barreled.”

It is with those barrels and what happens inside of them that the science-geek in King gets to come out and play.

The room is dark and shadowy. Light leaks around the barrels that are stacked on their sides from floor to ceiling. The air between the barrels is perfumed – like an empty cathedral an hour after service has ended. But here the ritual was about wine and whiskey, and malt, and funk, and a sweet grapy heaviness that hangs around your nose to remind you that something magical is happening inside the oak.

King has the kind of mind that allows you to ask him about the geometry of oak barrels and the convective movement of fluids inside them. He

want to drInk It, Come here.”

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(Aren’t you glad he’s not a pharmacist?)

Side Project’s beers are often sour: cloudy, bright and crisp. And they are alive – the yeasts and the bacteria responsible for fermentation and aging are present in the barrel and in the glass.

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“They’re not all going to do everything at the exact same time,” King says.

“For me, the fun thing to think about is: Day one, you’ve got Saccharomyces, which is my standard brewer’s yeast that everybody uses in all breweries around the country. And it goes at it and starts doing its thing… with all these other little bugs in there just hanging out, slowly growing. They’re just slow and lazy.”

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Side Project’s beers might have dozens, maybe hundreds of different microorganisms going to work in the barrel and, as far as King can tell, they set their own schedules of when and how long they’ll work for him.

“You have this environment that’s lower in pH and has alcohol in it and Saccharomyces is like, ‘I’m done; that’s all I can do,’” he says.

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“Brett, Pedio, Lacto… you’ll start having one take off,” King says. “The population has to hit its

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three of Perennial and Side Project’S brewS were ranked PICTURED bElow: A range of

draft beers poured at Side Project Cellar in Maplewood, Missouri. PICTURED RIGHT: Cory King tastes beers throughout the aging process before they end up on draft in the tasting room.

tipping point… it grows to a point and it’s like, ‘Alright, we can tell now that the sugar content is here – we are ready for that.’ And they switch over and start metabolizing the sugars and start producing their characters.”

King likes to say he doesn’t make beer – the yeast does. And, of course, that’s true to some degree. He does, however, play the important role of hall monitor: checking on what the many microorganisms are up to from month to month.

seeing what the bugs have been up to, and checking to see how far along they’ve taken his beer and how it has interacted with the wood of the barrel and the remnants of wine or whiskey that the oak contains.

And those flavor characteristics are distinct. The most obvious is sourness. It’s a bright acidity, somewhat lemony in the finished brew. That comes from the Lactobacillus, the same bug that gives us yogurt and sauerkraut.

In each barrel there’s a single steel nail pounded into the head. He pulls it out and catches a stream of young beer that squirts from the barrel months before it’s ready to be bottled.

But already, King’s palate is gauging progress,

He sips from a glass, drawing air and young beer into his mouth. He pauses for a good five seconds.

You can almost hear the gears turn as he tries to match what his tongue is telling his brain with his past experience of the world.

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“Like right on your three-quarter palate… you can get… (another pause)… um… some toffee,” he says. “Almond. Dessert-y. Like somebody reduced some bourbon and nuts together. And a little vanilla note, too. It’s not heat. It’s like a fluffy… whipped… almond something right there in the middle.”

A fluffy whipped-almond something.

It will be months before he bottles the beer in this barrel. In the meantime, he’ll pull nails and

among the toP 100 beerS in the world by beeradvoCate.

Brewing glossary Brettanomyces is a genus of fungi, a yeast, that is often seen as a contaminant in wine and beer-making but is essential in the production of Belgian farmhouse ales like saison. The effect on the palate is hard to name, but it is generally thought to impart a “dryness” that adds to the complexity of the beverage. It’s also responsible for flavor characteristics ranging all the way from smoky, barnyard, or Band-Aids to cherry pie, citrus, orchard flowers and honey. It is the strains of Brett with these more vibrant, fresh, delicate characters that fascinate King.

Pediococcus is a genus of bacteria in the same family as Lactobacillus that also contributes to the sour taste of some beers.

Pediococcus can add a buttery or butterscotch note to beer and wine.

lactoBacillus, or lacto, is a genus of bacteria that metabolizes sugars and produces lactic acid as a by-product. It is this lactic acid that gives some beers their sour taste. Lacto is also responsible for the fermentation that produces yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut and more.

wort is the grain tea formed by the addition of hot water to various grains, some of which have been malted, which is when it is allowed to almost sprout and then is stopped. The addition of malted grains assures the presence of enzymes that assist yeast in fermentation.

saccharomyces is a genus of fungi that contains many species of yeast including the culturally important brewer’s yeast and baker’s yeast. Saccharomyces metabolizes sugars and produces carbon dioxide and ethanol as by-products.

side Project’s draft system King’s penchant for science doesn’t end in the barrel. It extends all the way to the tap. He designed and built a draft system for Side Project Cellar that allows him to deliver beer from kegs at specific temperatures and with a precise degree of carbonation. Basically, it allows him to customize the pour for every beer served on tap.

be dissolved in a liquid, provided the pressure is maintained over the liquid – is allowed to escape the liquid. Chemists, like King, say it “comes out of solution.” And it bubbles out over time, making us happy as we drink our beer.

In the keg, a barkeep has to maintain the right pressure over the beer: too little and the beer will go flat before the keg is emptied, too much and the beer will absorb an overabundance of carbon dioxide, altering its flavor. The bar also has to calculate what added pressure is needed to overcome the resistance in each line in order to move the beer from its keg to the tap. What King’s draft system allows is the regulation of both the temperature of each beer on tap and the pressure in the keg.

“Carbonation is a function of pressure and temperature,” King explains. “If you pour beer warmer, it takes more pressure to maintain the foam inside the beer.” That’s crucial for Side Project’s beers, as King wants many of them served a little warmer than is usual so their flavors open up.

“Think about opening up a warm beer,” he says.

“It’s more foamy.”

What’s happened with the warm bottle of beer example is that the carbon dioxide, which is dissolved in the beer – yes, a gas can

No one else in Missouri does this. In fact, few bars in the country go to this degree of precision to present a draft beer at its best. But King says he wanted to get his beers right and, while he was at it, he might as well get everyone else’s right, too.

Go behind the scenes at Side Project Cellar with Cory King and learn more about how his beers are made in the February episode of Feast TV.

check on the work the bugs are doing. The rest of us will just have to wait to see if the fluffy whipped-almond something he tastes today will make it into the bottle.

Side Project Cellar, 7373 Marietta Ave., Maplewood, Missouri, 314.224.5211, sideprojectbrewing.com; Perennial Artisan Ales, 8125 Michigan Ave. #101, South Carondelet, St. Louis, Missouri, 314.631.7300, perennialbeer.com

ONLINE EXTRA! Visit feastmagazine.com for an animation featuring Cory King describing what happens inside one of his barrels with art

by Paul J. Fister (paul.j.fister@ gmail.com) and produced by Seán Collins (seanmcollins.net).

Inspired Local Food Culture

FEBRUARY 2015

43

Make It

& Break It Written by Crystal Stevens PhotograPhy by Jennifer Silverberg

My first experience with the chocolate tree began in the jungles of Costa rica, on a misty morning with Stephen brooks, an ecotourism guide and the founding director of the Punta Mona Center for regenerative Design & botanical Studies. the center’s mission is to educate students from the U.S. about where their food comes from and to impart a reverence for food. brooks brought us to visit the bribri tribe at Kekoldi indigenous reserve in Puerto Viejo de talamanca, which has grown cacao trees in the understory of their forest for several generations. Members of the tribe hand-grind the cacao and then mix the resulting powder with tapa de dulce, or blocks of raw cane sugar.

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bite into

made-from-scratch chocolate bark

Inspired Local Food Culture

FEBRUARY 2015

43

PICTURED RIGHT: Roughly chopped fair-trade dark chocolate ready to melt down. PICTURED BELOW: Dried fig and pistachio chocolate bark.

The memory of walking through the tribe’s forest filled with tropical food-producing trees and plants against the jungle backdrop is forever etched in my mind. The Bribri tribe has a deep connection with their food. We witnessed their entire process for making chocolate: The pods were harvested from the trees and sliced open to reveal the pulp, which was then removed. The beans were sorted, fermented and dried in the sun. Once dried, they were roasted over an open fire in cast-iron skillets. Once the beans cooled, we all helped remove the beans’ outer shells. Finally, a respected grandmother in the tribe, whose

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hands were worn from years of hard labor, kissed each bean before grinding all of them several times using two large stones that acted as a huge mortar and pestle.

aromatic chocolate, which the tribe then wraps in wax paper and sells to fairtrade buyers around the world.

From there, the beans were mixed with cane sugar, and the mixture was finely ground inside a metal corn grinder with a hand crank.

The mixture was ground until the desired consistency was achieved – smooth and creamy, almost the consistency of almond butter. The chocolate mixture was then hand-shaped into 1-inch-by-4-inch rolls and dried in the sun under a net. The final product is rich, earthy and

Later, we watched as members of the tribe removed remnants left in the grinder to make hot chocolate. A handful of the powdered cacao and a handful of cane sugar were thrown into a large pot of boiling water, and fresh cow’s milk was added to make a rich, bold, bitter and sweet drink. When my cup was empty, I shook hands with each member of the Bribri tribe that worked so hard to make it.

In The True History of Chocolate, authors Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe say the origin of chocolate “… can be traced back to the Theobroma cacao, the chocolate tree, about 4,000 years ago in the jungles of Mexico and Central America.”

According to the Coes, chocolate was historically consumed in an unsweetened liquid form and was so revered in Central America that it was used as currency by the Mayans and then later by the Aztecs. The story of how it arrived in Europe typically cites the Spanish conquest of Central America. In Europe, chocolate was also used in beverages, though it was royals and aristocrats who were sipping it. Today, the modern bean-to-bar process is highly multifaceted. Cacao seeds are usually fermented, dried, roasted, ground and made into concentrated chocolate liquor and combined with sugar to attain fullbodied sweetness.

EvEryday PricEs

chocolate bark is essentially made by melting chocolate, spreading it out into a thin layer and sprinkling flavorful ingredients on top.

Making chocolate bark is my favorite way to work with chocolate. It is a simple process that yields a high-quality, gorgeous end product, and requires very little time and just a few ingredients. Chocolate bark is essentially made by melting chocolate, spreading it out into a thin layer and sprinkling flavorful ingredients on top.

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chocolate bark 101 Flavor pairings such as Mayan chocolate, spicy dried cayenne peppers, cinnamon, cardamom and nutmeg make for a more fiery bark to warm up chilly winter nights. Alternatively, for a refreshing tropical take, top bark with crystallized ginger, toasted coconut and macadamia nuts. Wild blueberries with the rich nutty flavor of pecans offer a more delicate and subtle sweetness, or try incorporating sliced dried figs and pistachios. For a bit of a caffeine kick, dust bark with richly flavored espresso.

If you prefer milk chocolate or white chocolate, the same proportion of either can be used in the bark base recipe below.

Dark Chocolate Bark Base This basic recipe for chocolate bark stays the same no matter the toppings.

Yields | 24 pieces of bark | 1 lb block dark chocolate

| Preparation | Cover a large sheet pan with 1

steel saucepan or a double boiler. Melt chocolate on low, stirring frequently throughout. Continue stirring until chocolate is fully melted, then turn off heat and continue stirring until slightly cooled, about 3 minutes.

Using a rubber spatula, spread a thin layer of cooled chocolate on the parchment paper-lined sheet pan. Start by placing 12 spoonfuls of melted chocolate equally on the sheet pan, just as you would when baking cookies; this helps with the consistency of the bark. Once chocolate is in place, use the rubber spatula to spread it, covering every inch of the sheet pan.

If you prefer thinner chocolate bark, the melted chocolate may be spread onto 2 parchment paper-lined sheet pans, so long as the parchment paper cannot be seen through the chocolate.

While the chocolate is still soft, sprinkle any combination of ingredients (see pairings at right) over the chocolate. For a more elegant appearance, evenly divide and carefully place ingredients on top of chocolate.

Chocolate Bark Flavor Pairings The recipes below are each based on using the base recipe for the chocolate bark, which yields roughly 24 pieces from a 1-pound block of chocolate. Use the base recipe to prepare your chocolate bark, and then top it with any of the following ingredients.

Mayan ChoColate

1 ½ ¼ ¼

tsp dried cayenne pepper flakes tsp cinnamon tsp cardamom tsp freshly grated nutmeg

Wild BlueBerry and PeCan

1 cup dried wild blueberries 1 cup Missouri pecans dried Fig and PistaChio

1 cup sliced dried figs 1 cup roughly chopped pistachios esPresso

Once ingredients have been added, refrigerate bark for at least 30 minutes to allow chocolate and toppings to meld, harden and set.

sheet of parchment paper and set aside.

Using a sharp knife, roughly chop chocolate into 1-inch pieces. Transfer chocolate to a stainless

served immediately or stored in 1 or 2 layers inside an airtight container in the refrigerator.

Once chocolate has set, remove from the refrigerator and, using a pizza cutter, slice chocolate into bark-size pieces. Bark can be

¼ cup finely ground espresso beans MaCadaMia nut, Crystallized ginger and toasted CoConut

3 Tbsp roughly chopped crystallized ginger 4 Tbsp toasted coconut 4 Tbsp chopped macadamia nuts

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Written by Jonathan Bender

|

PhotograPhy by Travis Duncan

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The glass bottles clink together like half-gallon champagne flutes as they slide along Shatto Milk Co.’s line. Over the next six hours, the bottles will be filled with enough white milk to fill an aboveground pool and milk the pastel colors of Easter. The bottling line makes a steady whooshing noise, the measured breaths of a family dairy.

“I wanted glass bottles,” Leroy says of the company, which opened its doors in 2003. “I wanted to do it like they used to do because it tastes better, and I wanted to stand out in the dairy aisle. It was that and no growth hormones that got us in the door, and then not too long after that people started talking about local.”

The production schedule is tracked on a white dry-erase board, where employees of the dairy in Osborn, Missouri, cross off orders for root beer milk, banana milk and coffee milk. Leroy Shatto, husband of owner Barbara Shatto, stands beneath the order board in cowboy boots, watching the milk travel through a cream separator – a machine that catches the cream for the dairy’s butter and ice cream. The milk will also be homogenized and pasteurized before the bottles are filled and capped.

And they haven’t stopped talking about Shatto.

It turns out the future of this family farm just needed a little inspiration from the past.

The land in Osborn has been in Barbara’s family for more than a century. Before she married Leroy in 1972, she was Barbara Cox – the youngest of three sisters who grew up on the farm, where her mom and dad, Georgia and Ivan Cox, raised hogs, chickens and cattle.

“My dad had high expectations,” Barbara says.

“He told us you can do anything boys can do, and he meant it.”

Her mom milked alongside her dad and would call the cows by name into the barn at night. Today, many of Shatto’s cows have the same names as cows that Barb remembers from her youth.

There’s Lucy and Trixie, who are joined by more modern bovine monikers like Moo-Stakas, so named for the Kansas City Royals third baseman.

The faint bleating of Moo-Stakas’ 400 farmmates stretches over the parking lot of Shatto Milk Co., letting you know, once you open your car door, that you are indeed in cow country.

“If they get off schedule, they let you know,” says Leroy, the corners of his mouth curling up just far

enough to let you recognize that this is a dry joke and a simple reality of dairy farming. “If you don’t feel good, you still have to get up and be here to feed them two times a day.”

And nobody knows the schedule of the cows here quite like Leroy, who has spent the past 39 years milking them on the property.

“You can read all the books you want, but this is one of those jobs you have to learn on the job,” he says.

Leroy is the pop of this mom-and-pop operation (Barbara being the other half) that has grown into a real mother of a business. Barbara retired in 2013 after working nearly four decades as a nurse and joined the family business full-time. Their son Matt, the chief operating officer for the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America,

assists with the dairy’s marketing efforts.

In just 12 years, Shatto Milk Co. has released more than a dozen flavors of milk; developed a cheese, butter and ice cream program; and opened a country store with a milk bar, where visitors can sample current flavors as well as new ones being tested.

“In the 30 years before this that I milked, I never made any money,” Leroy says of the time he spent selling milk to a local dairy cooperative. “Dairy farmers never retire. They usually just die.”

The success of the milk in glass bottles – Shatto had to buy 80 more cows, doubling its herd after the first few months – meant that the dairy had an unanticipated, but not unwelcome, problem: Leroy had a whole lot of cream in a world that loves its skim milk.

“We made the butter first, and then our customers pushed us into ice cream,” Leroy says.

“People ask [us] why don’t we have more cows and why don’t we do sour cream. But you start getting too big, and you screw things up. When I was with the co-op, I would wake up with nightmares of people pouring milk down the drain.”

But the growing herd of Holstein cows keep producing milk. So four years ago, Shatto added a cheese-making operation – bringing in consultants from Vermont and Wisconsin to help them develop Plattsburg, a Gouda-style cheese, and a line of cheese curds. Today, Shatto sells six different types of aged cheeses. And at the 2012 Family Day at the Farm, an annual summer open house each June, Shatto debuted its ice cream sammiches. Families gobbled up the oatmeal-raisin cookies filled with caramel-sea salt ice cream and

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sugar cookies with strawberry ice cream.

Farm life is the nightlife, just not in the classic sense. The milking starts early, somewhere between 2 and 3am daily. The cows also need to be fed twice a day – a ration of corn silage, alfalfa hay and corn and soybean meal. The feed is critical; a cow has to ingest roughly 2 pounds of feed to produce 1 pound of milk, and Leroy asserts, “Any change in the cow’s diet, and you can taste it in the milk.”

It’s not just the feed that stays the same.

Even though the operations side has grown tremendously over the past decade, the basic principle and process is the same as when Leroy only had a single part-timer by his side.

“You have to be kind of crazy to be a dairy farmer,” he says. “I’d be out there freezing in the winter and sweating in the summer, and as soon as I was done, it felt like it was time to start all over again.”

“I think sometimes people think we’ve just got a spigot in back, and that’s where the milk comes from,” Leroy says. “But here you can see how we milk the cows and how it gets to the bottles.”

named the top milk in the open class category at the World Dairy Expo in 2012 and 2013. It’s a wellearned award for the sumptuous taupe milk that tastes like a root beer float in a bottle.

In 2003, it took Leroy and a part-time employee nearly 10 hours to feed and milk the 80 cows on the property. They could milk three cows at a time.

Today, they’ve got room for 12 cows in the milking barn, six stalls on either side of a central chute.

The milk is pumped through stainless steel pipes from the dairy to the bottling plant. Inside the plant, the white milk is pasteurized, homogenized and, according to those white board orders, flavored. The company currently bottles on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.

“We get inspiration from kids,” Barbara says.

“They come up with the crazy flavors. We never would have had banana milk if not for a little boy on one of our tours.”

A pair of baby calves – often accompanied by kittens sleeping nearby in a scene that turns everyone into schoolchildren – in an adjacent “calf barn” are the stars of the farm tours. The Shattos hosts as many as 130 people on the farm walkthroughs, which pull in tourists and city folk alike.

In the adjacent country store, the milk in the case is a dairy rainbow. There’s a tan pumpkin spice eggnog, blue cotton candy and pink strawberry alongside straw yellow lemonade and a bright orange drink. The dairy’s root beer milk was

After celebrating its 10th anniversary with a collection of limited release flavors – birthday cake, candy corn, chocolate mint, apple pie, cherry chocolate, blueberry and cookies and cream – Shatto Milk Co. released its first collaboration. In the fall of 2014, the company introduced chai latte milk, produced with Tyler

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Beckett of Kansas City-based Hugo Tea Co. “Every time I tested a batch of our chai, I used Shatto milk,” says Beckett of his decision to approach Shatto about a ready-to-drink chai latte.

“I grew up only a few miles from the dairy and was already acquainted with the folks up there.”

The chai concentrate – made with black tea, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom and black pepper – used to make the milk is brewed at The Big Rip Brewing Co. in North Kansas City. The flavor reminds Barbara of pumpkin pie.

Leroy sits at the milk bar, a few dozen feet from the latest batch of chai latte milk in the refrigerated cases of the country store. His eyes flicker past the attached cheese-making shop, which hasn’t been in use the past few weeks because the demand for his milk continues to push the limits of his herd’s production. He’s thinking he may need to purchase more cows again.

“So many things have happened that I never thought would happen,” Leroy says. “I’m trying to slow down. There’s just always something to do.”

After all, dairy farmers never retire.

“It was straightforward and simple,” Beckett continues. “That’s one of the great things about local collaborations. I could just text the production manager, and we could talk about suggestions. We were involved in the entire process.”

Shatto Milk Co., 9406 N. Highway 33, Osborn, Missouri, 816.930.3862, shattomilk.com pouRINg mILK pHoTogRApHy By ©ISToCKpHoTo.Com/pAvLINEC

Go behind the scenes at Shatto Milk Co. in Osborn, Missouri, and see how its products are made in the February episode of Feast TV.

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escoffier to today Written by Shannon Cothran

|

PhotograPhy by Jennifer Silverberg

A Missouri chef uncovers a long-lost family connection to the father of French cooking Exactly one year ago, a culinary mystery involving the father of modern cooking, Georges Auguste Escoffier, was revealed after a chef from Louisiana, Missouri, traveled to France to write a cookbook.

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PICTURED RIGHT: Axel Eugene Blumensaadt was only

16 when he left his home in Odense, Denmark, to study the culinary arts in Paris. PICTURED AbovE: Axel’s granddaughter, Karen Blumensaadt-Stoeckley, still has the knives, skillet and gold-tipped ink pen that Axel took with him on the journey.

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1897 – Axel Eugene Blumensaadt was taking a risk – with his knives, a skillet, a gold-tipped ink pen, a blank notebook and some clothes packed in his sea chest, he was leaving his home of Odense, Denmark, to study the culinary arts in Paris. He was only 16 years old. His parents were not happy with his choice. Why be a lowly chef, they asked him, when you could choose another more respectable, more lucrative career?

1898 – Auguste Escoffier was quickly becoming a world-renowned chef. He had just begun writing a book for chefs and other kitchen staff, one that he envisioned would guide them and eventually lift the status of the culinary industry from drudgery to artistry. He and his business partner, Swiss hotelier César Ritz, were in Paris to open the now-famous Hôtel Ritz. Escoffier was in charge of the kitchen at the hotel’s restaurant and began teaching the cooks his culinary concepts. His style was a grand departure from mainstream cooking of the time; chefs under his tutelage were learning to simplify dishes.

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1963 – It was early summer, and teenager Karen Blumensaadt was in the attic of her maternal grandparents’ garage in Pennsylvania. Her father had stashed his own parents’ treasures there after they passed away. The attic was brimming with the belongings of two families that spanned three generations, and her father had given her the responsibility to go through the boxes to sort what to throw out and what to keep. Sunlight poured in from the multiple windows lining the walls. The attic was warm and dusty. In one corner, next to her childhood tea table and chair set, sat an old wooden trunk; it looked like the sort that contains treasure in pirate stories.

She opened the lid and found old knives, a skillet, a gold-tipped ink pen in its case, a packet of handwritten letters in French from the early 1900s and – the pièce de résistance – a book filled with hundreds of handwritten recipes. She sat on one of the tiny chairs from her tea table set and carefully thumbed through the fragile book, soaking in the faded French handwriting.

The trunk and its contents had belonged to her grandfather Axel. She had never met him – he died three years before she was born – but her great-aunt, uncle and father had told her that his tremendous cooking skills were family legend. That day in the humid attic, watching the dust mites waft through the sun’s rays, she decided that someday she would write a cookbook based on her grandfather’s recipes from the early 1900s. She envisioned a book that displayed her grandfather’s handwritten recipes on one side with modern interpretations – her own, maybe – on the facing page. The project would be a way she could honor him and his work – he loved the culinary world but ultimately left it after having children later in life.

She gathered the knives, pen, books and letters and put them in a satchel, where they stayed for 50 years.

2012 – Karen (now Karen Blumensaadt-Stoeckley), moved from Chicago to Louisiana, Missouri, with her husband, John, in 1985 and quickly fell in love with

her new rural lifestyle. She opened the now-shuttered restaurant, The Eagle’s Nest, which grew over the years to incorporate a winery, bed-and-breakfast and bakery.

After many happy years running the restaurant, the 16hour days began to take their toll. She had battled cancer in the past, and now her blood pressure was running high. Her doctor warned her to relax, or else.

Karen decided to take her doctor’s advice and leave the busy life of a chef behind. Instead, she would dedicate her time to another lifelong dream – translating her grandfather’s recipe book. In September 2012, she moved into the same quaint stone house in the Provençal town of Les Arcs-sur-Argens in France, where she and John had enjoyed their most relaxing vacations over the years. A friend introduced her to local chef Max Callegari. He was intrigued by the story of Karen’s French-trained grandfather who left behind a legacy of recipes and wanted to help her translate and modernize the dishes. The two chefs chose a hundred of Axel’s recipes and set to work. The recipes weren’t

easy to decipher, let alone translate, as most were little more than a list of ingredients written in French with no measurements or preparation steps.

“I would select five recipes to work on each day, and when [Callegari] arrived, we would work our way through the recipes based on our own training and experience,” Karen says. “Eventually, we also referred to Le Guide Culinaire by Auguste Escoffier. We then would alter the old recipe to meet today’s available foods and also to make it easier for home cooks to accomplish. Then we would set time aside to meet in Max’s restaurant’s kitchen to test the recipe.”

After combing through pages and pages of recipes, Callegari was sure he knew who Axel’s instructor had been: “I know this is Escoffier!” he exclaimed to Karen.

He insisted that she visit the Escoffier Foundation in the south of France to confirm his suspicion. While visiting the foundation, Karen experienced a fortuitous twist of fate when she ran into Michel Escoffier, Auguste’s great-

grandson and the foundation’s worldwide ambassador.

He, too, was fascinated by Axel’s book, and he and Karen began comparing the ledger with Le Guide Culinaire, the world’s culinary standard, which Auguste published in 1903. The parallels were phenomenal, with the same names and the same ingredients. Unfortunately, Auguste never kept records of the names of the more than 2,000 chefs he trained, so Karen and Michel couldn’t be certain that Axel had trained under Auguste.

All they know for sure is that the two were in Paris at the same time, and Axel’s book is filled with information that only Auguste was teaching.

Oct. 14, 2014 – An unseasonable cold has settled over the countryside around Karen’s home in Louisiana, Missouri, and a chilly rain spatters the horses and cows in PICTURED abovE: Baked eggs and roasted lamb

with mashed potatoes and vegetable confit from Karen’s cookbook; a photo of Axel Blumensaadt.

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the pastures. But inside her warm, bright country kitchen, the frosty, wet night seems light-years away. Karen is hosting a dinner party to celebrate the February 2014 release of her book, A Culinary Legacy: From Escoffier to Today. A few copies sit on a small kitchen table.

The cookbook is a large, heavy hardcover tome, suitable for a legacy. Just as she dreamed as a girl, there are pages that show Axel’s own neat handwriting next to modernized, adapted recipes. There are also mouthwatering images of the dishes, pictures of scenic locales in Les Arcs-sur-Argens and information about the history of the book – the journeys of Axel and Auguste and of Karen and Michel. Karen describes the recipes in the cookbook as written and paired just as Axel instructed in his notes. The largest inspiration throughout the ledger is classic French cuisine – dishes with Provençal influences like steak au poivre and roasted lamb, basic sauces like mayonnaise and béchamel, and pastry crusts and breads – though Karen says other influences could be from Axel’s childhood

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home in Odessa, or later in his life, when he lived and cooked in Philadelphia. What connects each of the recipes is Axel and his myriad experiences as a chef.

The book gives people “another way to augment what they’re already doing in their home kitchens,” Karen calls out over the countertop, where she’s slicing bread. “It’s not designed for a professional chef, but many have bought it because it’s another viewpoint of Escoffier’s teachings. My grandfather wrote in his book what he felt was important for him to remember.”

On this night, Karen and chef Stephen Dennison from Jax Café in St. Louis are preparing a six-course meal of recipes from the book, recipes that Karen’s grandfather almost certainly learned from Auguste.

And the guest of honor is Michel Escoffier, who also penned the book’s introduction. Michel flew in from France two days before but shows no signs of jet lag as he tucks into his meal. The other guests are dear friends of Karen’s, many who helped to edit the

book or taste-test recipes. In the dining room, a large wooden table that John made by hand is lined with a centerpiece that Karen arranged using artichokes, lemon leaf, rosemary and seeded eucalyptus. Around the table, private jokes and stories are tossed around.

The group is like a family formed around a love of food.

Talk drifts from discussing the production of the book – “We would cook the food, and then we’d shoot the food, and then we’d fight over the plate,” – to fun facts about Auguste – “Ritz and Escoffier were the first to enable ladies to dine in public. Before that they could only eat out if it [were] in private rooms” – before settling on his accomplishments in changing the direction and perception of cooking in the modern age.

The media would eventually coin Auguste, “king of chefs and chef of kings.” In his lifetime, he accomplished three major achievements in the culinary world. First, he simplified cooking, doing away with elaborate dishes and arranging recipes for the five mother sauces

(béchamel, espagnole, hollandaise, sauce tomate and velouté). Second, he elevated the profession of chef to one that was respected in society by implementing organization and discipline in his kitchens. Finally, he wrote about his first two achievements in Le Guide Culinaire. Published in 1903, the book is still the main textbook taught in culinary schools around the world.

“Auguste didn’t teach specific procedures; he taught concepts; he wanted [his pupils] to be creative,” Karen says. “He taught them good cooking [and] fundamental basics. He was a great innovator.” “[Almost] nothing [since Auguste] has been invented in terms of concepts,” Michel adds. “People just have their interpretations.” For example, to celebrate Auguste’s 150th birthday, Michel ate the same menu prepared by six organizations all over the world in the same week. “Yet I never had the same dinner, though everyone respected the menu,” he says. “They were the same ingredients interpreted differently.”

Auguste taught all of his students, “Surtout, faites simples,” or, above all, keep it simple. “Basically what he’s saying is, work with what you have and let the natural flavors come through,” Karen says. “I think the main thing is that you don’t have to have huge, complicated recipes. The other thing he taught very well was that great cooking doesn’t come from breaking away from tradition, but taking tradition in a new direction.”

Michel agrees: “Over 100 years ago, Auguste Escoffier wrote in Le Guide Culinaire that cooking, like fashion, has to evolve with time and take into account the changes in people’s lives, which keep accelerating.

That will drive us toward lighter dishes and shorter menus. Cooking, while remaining an art, will become more scientific and precise, and we will enhance the nutritive and taste value of dishes. But what will remain unchanged are the basic principles of cooking. And this is precisely what has happened since then. Many changes have occurred over the years,

following various trends, yet always respecting the fundamentals and the quality of the product. Any attempt to ignore this has been doomed to failure.”

Everyone nods, silently considering his words.

Then the kitchen doors open, and Dennison begins serving the next course: piping-hot shrimp coated in butter and garlic. This is the same dish that Auguste perfected in the late 1800s, the same dish that Axel wrote notes for in a ledger book that Karen found 52 years ago in an old trunk. It’s been reimagined, but it still calls for the same ingredients prepared under the same principles that Auguste Escoffier taught.

It’s once again enjoyed by friends and family gathered around a long table, as it has been for more than a hundred years, and will be for a hundred more.

PICTURED abovE: Shrimp in garlic sauce and the

pine nut tart recipes from Karen’s cookbook; a photo of Karen cooking in her kitchen.

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escoffier to today recipes ReCIPeS RePRInTeD wITh PeRmISSIOn FROm Karen blumensaadt-stoeCKley AS They APPeAR In A CulinAry legACy: From esCoFFier to todAy

Oeufs Aurore These baked eggs are one of Karen’s favorite recipes from Axel’s ledger because they are an elegant starter, and they allow so many options for adding a third flavor after the eggs and cream sauce. At Karen’s dinner party, she served this first course with slivers of smoked salmon tucked between the egg slices. Her co-author, Max Callegari, recommends baking them with finely chopped shrimp, lobster or truffles under the cheese.

Serves | 6 | 4 Tbsp softened butter 6 peeled hard-boiled eggs salt and freshly ground black pepper 1 cup grated Swiss, divided 4 Tbsp heavy cream, divided

Grilled lamb

2

salt and white pepper lbs fillet of lamb rosemary sprigs (for garnish)

VeGetable Confit

2 2 1 3

Tbsp olive oil large shallots, roughly minced large eggplant, diced into ¼-inch squares large ripe tomatoes, deseeded and diced salt and freshly ground black pepper

| Preparation – Mashed Potatoes | Combine

| Preparation | Preheat oven to 400°F. Butter

mashed potatoes with butter and slowly add hot milk by the Tbsp until potatoes form a thick consistency. Add in beaten eggs to hot potato mixture and blend well. Add salt and pepper to taste. Cover and keep warm.

4 7-ounce au gratin dishes with 1 Tbsp butter in each dish.

| Preparation – Grilled Lamb | Season lamb

Slice eggs into 6 slices each, overlap them in each dish and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Sprinkle each dish with ¼ cup cheese and drizzle with 1 Tbsp heavy cream.

with salt and pepper. Grill lamb until internal temperature registers 135°F on a meat thermometer. Remove lamb from grill and cover with foil for 5 minutes. Slice lamb into ½-inch thick medallions.

Bake dishes on a baking sheet in the oven for 3 minutes. Turn oven to broil and broil for 3 minutes. Serve immediately.

Noisette d’Agneau Brillat Savarin Axel wrote this recipe in his ledger exactly as Karen served it: roasted lamb with a French take on mashed potatoes with vegetable confit. Karen was initially against using this recipe in the cookbook, but after Callegari prepared it for her, she knew it was one of the best in her grandfather’s ledger.

Serves | 4 | mashed Potatoes

4

cups boiled and mashed Yukon potatoes 1 stick butter ½ to ¾ cup hot milk 2 beaten eggs salt and freshly ground black pepper

| Preparation – Vegetable Confit | In a saucepan over medium heat, heat oil and sear shallots for 2 minutes. Add eggplant and sauté for 3 more minutes. Add tomatoes, cover and stew vegetables for 5 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.

| To Serve | Spoon potatoes into a large piping bag. On heated oven-safe plates, pipe potatoes into a 5-inch circle. Place 3 lamb medallions on top of potatoes. Spoon vegetable confit around the outside of potatoes. Place finished plate under the broiler for 1 minute to singe the edges of potatoes and to reheat lamb. Garnish with rosemary sprigs and serve immediately.

Gambas in Garlic Sauce Gambas, or jumbo shrimp, were included in many of the recipes in Axel’s ledger. Six to 8 inches long, these are one of the few crustaceans in France that are not sold precooked. For an entrée portion, three or four shrimp are usually sufficient, though

guests may want more after tasting the rich garlic-butter sauce. At the dinner in October, Karen served them with nutty red quinoa, but grilled asparagus or vegetable-studded rice pilaf also pair well with the dish. Remember to provide guests with a dish for the shells.

She says to take care not to over-process the almonds, or you’ll end up with almond butter.

Serves | 6 to 8 | Crust

2½ cups all-purpose flour ¼ tsp salt

Serves | 4 |

¾ cup cold unsalted butter ¾ cup powdered sugar

16 jumbo shrimp

2 eggs

½ cup extra virgin olive oil

1 Tbsp ice water

1 Tbsp finely chopped herbs de Provence salt and freshly ground black pepper 4 large finely minced garlic cloves

assembly

½ cup softened butter

4 Tbsp unsalted butter

¼ cup honey

1/3 cup dry white wine

4 eggs

1 Tbsp finely chopped fresh parsley

½ cup superfine sugar ½ cup almond powder

| Preparation | In a large glass dish, place cleaned shrimp in their shells in 1 layer with a little space between each.

In a small bowl, combine oil, herbs, salt, pepper and garlic and pour evenly over shrimp. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or overnight.

Spoon shrimp out of marinade mixture and transfer to a very hot grill or grill skillet, reserving the marinade. Grill shrimp for 2 minutes on each side. In a large skillet, melt butter until foamy and add reserved marinade, bringing mixture briefly to a boil. Add shrimp in 1 layer and pour wine over top, allowing it to flame by tilting the pan backwards towards your flame or with a match if your stove is electric. Stir well to coat.

| To Serve | Divide shrimp between 4 heated au gratin dishes and evenly pour remaining garlic-herb sauce over each dish. Sprinkle fresh parsley over each dish and serve.

½ cup pine nuts

| Preparation – Crust | Sift flour and salt together in a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Cut the cold butter into small pieces and add to processor. Pulse mixture for 1 to 2 minutes until a coarse texture forms.

Add sugar and pulse 1 more minute to blend.

In a small bowl, beat eggs well and then slowly pour into the running processor. Pulse for 30 seconds. Add ice water and pulse 30 more seconds. Transfer dough onto a floured work surface and lightly knead a few times to make pastry smooth. Divide pastry into 2 pieces and wrap in plastic wrap. Allow to chill for at least 1 hour or overnight. Only 1 piece of pastry will be used in the recipe; the extra can be frozen for later use.

| Assembly | Preheat oven to 350°F.

Tarte aux Pignons

Roll pastry out and line a removable-bottom 9 or 10-inch tart pan with pastry. Crimp and cut the edges.

Karen and Callegari argued fiercely about including this recipe in the book – she was against it, he was for it – until, she says: “He made me one and proved me wrong. It works because it’s not [overly] sweet, but sweet enough with a nutty flavor.” In the cookbook, Karen shares how to make your own almond powder by processing whole almonds in a food processor until they form a fine flourlike texture.

Using a mixer, blend butter and honey until creamy. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating until blended. Using a rubber spatula, gently fold in sugar and almond powder. Transfer mixture into the pastry shell. Spread nuts evenly over top of filling. Bake tart for 20 minutes or until filling is set and crust golden. Serve.

Watch cooking demos of the oeufs aurore, tarte aux pignons and other recipes from the cookbook by producer Cat neville in the february episode of Feast tV. 88

feastmagazine.com

FEBRUARY 2015

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Inspired Local Food Culture

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WE’RE SWEET ON CHOCOLATE! Baked into fudgy brownies, drizzled over fruit or rolled into gourmet truffles for Valentine’s Day, we believe chocolate can enhance almost any dish or drink. This month, we invited our Instagram followers to share photos of the chocolaty treats they were making at home and buying from their favorite shops by tagging photos with the hashtag #feastgram. For a look at bean-to-bar chocolate production in Missouri, turn to p. 16, where we chat with Alan McClure, owner of Patric Chocolate in Columbia, Missouri. To make your own decadent chocolate treats, turn to p. 52 for a flourless chocolate truffle torte or flip to p. 74 to learn how to make chocolate bark in creative flavors at home.

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| 1 | Teresa Floyd @now_forager All in a day’s work. #Chocolate #ElbowChocolates #FoodPhotography | 2 | 4 seasons bakery @4seasonsbakery Eclairs. Choux, vanilla pastry cream, chocolate ganache and organic cacao nibs. (At 4 Seasons Bakery in St. Charles, Missouri) .

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| 3 | chow chieF sTl @chowchief_stl Let them eat cake. #STLFoodie (At Russell’s on Macklind in St. Louis)

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| 4 | Vb chocolaTe bar @vbchocolates #VBChocolateBar #Cottleville 72 percent dark salted turtles | 5 | diana sTaUb @dianastaub Frozen cheesecake on a stick | 6 | organic sTl @organicstl Can’t wait to eat this homemade vegan chocolate drizzled organic popcorn! Super easy to make and a delicious snack #Homemade #Organic

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| 7 | we eaT sTUFF @weeatstuffstl Black Forest Macaron Pop @ChouquetteSTL #STL #Dessert #STLFoodScene #PrettyFood #Macarons | 8 | kayli dice @kaylidice Devouring double chocolate breakfast brownies + devouring Jan. issue of Feast! Recipe available on our STL-based food blog planteatersmanifesto.com | 9 | kakao chocolaTe @kakaochocolatestl Vegan cherry pistachio truffle. | 10 | sarah camille TerranoVa @cucinaandcamera Chocolate + coffee + chops #OnTheBlog featuring local coffee beans by @oddly #KCMO

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Want to see your photos in the March issue of Feast?

Next month, in honor of Pi Day – as in 3.14, or March 14 – our focus turns to pizza. We want to see the pies you’re making from scratch at home to the ones you’re ordering at your favorite local restaurants and pizzerias. To submit your photos for consideration, simply include the hashtag #feastgram and tag @feastmag on your Instagram photos beginning Sun., Feb. 1.

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PHOTOgRAPHy COuRTESy OF INSTAgRAM uSERS

#feastgram

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DELIVER ROMANCE! When you want to impress your sweetheart, visit schnucksfloral.com!

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