DINING TASTE
Grilled to Perfection By Tom Worgo | Photography by Stephen Buchanan crowd often slowly gathers around Jim Holderbaum as he begins to cook on one of his Grill Works, which he considers the best woodfire grills in the world. The party goers typically pepper him with questions about the scintillating steaks, eye-catching seafood, or succulent vegetables he prepares. “There’s nothing like having big grills with lots of flames shooting up,” says Holderbaum, the owner of Range & Reef, his catering business. “It gets people’s attention. A lot of times, it just becomes a performance, a show. I’ve had people just hang out for an hour asking a million questions.” Matching the right foods with the right wood sets apart Holderbaum’s cooking process. Depending on the meat or seafood, he may use peach, oak, cherry, or apple woods to enhance the taste of the food. “The fruit woods have their own sap, resins, and tannins,” Holderbaum explains. “That’s what gives the foods a unique flavor.” Events, which he puts on for groups of up to 150 people throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, include summer parties, weddings, anniversaries, and corporate picnics. The 61-year-old Bowie resident started Range & Reef in 2014 after spending 23 years as an international development advisor, including a stint with the U.S. State Department that focused on agricultural and environmental issues. He wanted a new challenge and had used woodfire grills in his backyard for two decades before starting the business. During that time, his travels to dozens of countries around the world educated him on food cultures.
RANGE & REEF 240-476-7291 rangeandreef.com We recently talked to Holderbaum about his customer’s favorite foods, how he prepares the product, grilling tips, and what sets his catering business apart. Your business is not typical catering. Can you explain that? Many catering services operate out of a kitchen or a restaurant and most of the food is prepared before it’s brought to the venue. What I do is completely different. I cook, grill, and serve onsite. We are serving food as it is being taken off the grill or out of steam pots. If we are doing a buffet, we are just putting it out at one time. And doing natural wood fires is something very few other caterers get involved with because it’s a lot of work and it takes a lot of time to do it right. I have been playing around with natural wood fires for 30 years. I make the food and prepare it. The cooking of the food is part of the experience. The smell of the food and hearing the sizzle if it. That’s what separates what I do. What most fascinates people when they are watching it? I think people are most intrigued by the grilling of food over natural wood fires. While I am grilling,
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we are constantly putting wood into the fires. Especially if it’s a private event and we are setting up a grill bar. We are just passing it across the bar to guests and they just keep walking up to it. The whole time we just keep adding peach wood or apple wood. What we are grilling with, people are just amazed by that. I think they just view it as an art form. What are some favorite foods you grill? I think people really like the grilled shrimp. I think they like it because the seasoning is not real heavy, plus they are grilled over peach wood, which most people never have had. And the fact that I don’t over-grill shrimp is a huge factor. It only takes four or five minutes to make shrimp pink. Even when people are grilling shrimp in a pan, they are cooking them way too long. The other thing is the rotisserie center-cut sirloins. We will take a whole sirloin. They are just coated with fresh ground pepper and kosher salt. We rotisserie grill it for three or four hours and then we slice it really thin and people like that. By the time they are done on the rotisserie, the whole outside of the rotisserie is glistening.
