Mouthing Off

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

Once we had eaten our fill of BBQ we headed an hour west to Snow Camp, NC to pay a visit to Cane Creek Farm. When I knew we were going to be driving through North Carolina I got in touch with Andrea Reusing, the chef/owner of Lantern restaurant in Chapel Hill. Andrea is highly regarded for both her skills in the kitchen and her commitment to local sourcing, so I knew she would have great ideas about who was worth a visit. She suggested Cane Creek Farm right off the bat, and offered to meet us there.

Eliza Maclean is the proprietor of Cane Creek, and it's an understatement to say that she's a busy woman. The farm is maybe best know for its pigs (Ossabaws, Old Spot Gloucestershires, Farmers Hybrids, and an Ossabaw/Farmers Hybrid mix that Eliza has named a Crossabaw), but Eliza also raises Black Angus and Red Devon cows, goats, sheep, chickens, ducks, and turkeys, as well as two children. The cattle and much of the farm's sprawling 570 acres came as a result of a merger between Cane Creek and Braeburn Farms in 2007.

So what makes Cane Creek exceptional? It's sustainable agriculture at its best. Eliza practices rotational grazing, which any of you who have read a Michael Pollen book know means moving different species of animal through the same parcel of land in succession to mimic a natural ecosystem. The land stays healthy and the animals get what they need from it, which means minimal artificial inputs from we humans. Eliza's sheep, cows, and goats are all entirely grass-fed, and her pigs feast on grain-based food, supplemented by whatever they can root around for in their pasture.

All this means lots of happy animals (you can tell it just by looking at them), but also a lot of work on Eliza's part to bring each food item to market. I wish everyone who complained about the price of organic free-range eggs could see this place in action.

After seeing an operation as thorough and well-run as Cane Creek Farm, as a chef you can't help but feel like you have a responsibility to put as much care into cooking an animal as Eliza put into raising it. "Head to tail" cooking may be trendy right now, but I also think that the best way to truly honor the animal is to leave no part of it unused.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

Day three, and we set out before dawn to hit Chapel Hill by lunchtime. Damon had to part ways to head out to Craft Los Angeles, but we picked up a few new travelers at the Raleigh Durham airport: Katie Grieco, my business partner in Craft Restaurants, as well as Jeffrey Zurofsky and Sisha Ortuzar, my partners in 'wichcraft.

Our first stop of the day was selected by Jeffrey, who went to school at UNC Chapel Hill and worked at the time with a guy named Damon Lapas. Now, Lapas co-owns a restaurant called The BBQ Joint, so we stopped in to get a taste of what Eastern North Carolina Barbecue was all about.

Although we were only about 200 miles as the crow flies from Big T's in Columbia, South Carolina, here the style of barbecue is totally unique from the mustard based sauce we had there. With Eastern North Carolina barbecue the pork is smoked, pulled, and coarsely chopped, and served plain except for a hint of a tangy vinegar sauce. It's unadorned, so the hardwood smoked meat has no sweet sauces to hide behind.

Damon and his partner Jeffrey Childres served up a hearty lunch, highlights of which included smoked blue fish, spare ribs, and of course the signature pulled pork served with slaw, pickles, and cornbread.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

We left the banks of the Stono River and crossed Charleston to reach Shem Creek just in time to see Captain Magwood and his crew finish sifting through the day's catch on board his hulking shrimp trawler.

The domestic shrimp industry has really suffered in recent years as cheap imports from Asia make it hard for local fisherman to make ends meet. Whether you know it or not, much of the shrimp you've eaten in your life has been foreign, frozen and transported thousands of miles before it reaches your plate. But try eating a shrimp fresh off the boat like this and you'll taste the difference.

Matt and Ted couldn't let us leave Charleston without trying The Wreck Of The Richard and Charlene, a quirky dive of a restaurant that they view as one of the best places to sample some of the very shrimp that we saw coming off of Captain Magwood's boat. The Wreck (named in honor of an old shrimp trawler that Hurricane Hugo put ashore on the restaurant's current site) looks like the classic fried seafood shack that you find just about anywhere up and down the eastern seaboard from Florida to Nova Scotia. It serves up fresh-caught shrimp, oysters, scallops and crab, as well as well-executed hush puppies and "hominy squares," which are sort of like a croquette made of grits.

My body might be back from my trip to Argentina, but my stomach is still firmly in South America. My friends and I had the requisite beef and Malbec (more on that later), but we also regularly indulged in dulce de leche, which I am still craving. In Buenos Aires we got our fix at the heladerías (ice cream shops), the best of which was Freddo. The shop has locations throughout the city, and their menu has a separate section just for dulce de leche flavors. (My kind of place.) But my favorite vehicle for the milky caramel was alfajores, a traditional South American sandwich cookie with dulce de leche filling. The best ones we had came from our hotel in Patagonia, Edenia. Opened in 2007, the modern, minimalist hotel is located away from the touristy bustle of downtown Calafate and has panoramic views of Lago Argentino. Its alfajores were crispier and less cakey than the ones in Buenos Aires, and I only wish I had packed some to bring home.  

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

After bidding the Seans and their pigs goodbye, we followed Matt and Ted out to a dock on the Stono River. That's where we met up with Fred Dockery, a local crab fisherman who offered to take us out for a couple of hours while he pulled pots. The blue crab is a staple of the coastal diet, which makes crab fishing a traditional industry in these parts. Matt and Ted thought that one of the best ways to experience Charleston's food culture was to see a local waterman at work.

I grew up pulling hands lines for crabs on Barnegat Bay, so this was a return to familiar territory for me. As a commercial fisherman, Fred Dockery is out on the water almost every day, year round, catching crabs which he sells by the bushel to a mix of local families, distributors, and restaurants. His boat is small, just big enough to carry four or five people (and several baskets of crabs) and perfect for maneuvering from buoy to buoy as he checks his pots.

The process is straightforward: hoist the trap, dump the crabs out, toss the live ones into a bushel basket and the dead ones back into the water, bait the trap, push it into the water, move on, and repeat.

Dockery is licensed to set 400 pots at a time, but is sensitive enough to conservation and good stewardship of these waters to tailor the number of traps he sets to the market's demand. He is currently running 300 of them scattered throughout local waterways, and on any given day he catches only what he knows that he can sell.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

Our first stop after brunch was meeting Sean Brock at Thackeray Farms, which is about thirty minutes from downtown Charleston on Wadmalaw Island.

Sean Thackeray originally grew flowers on his land but in the past few years has been planting a wide array of produce, and is currently transitioning to become a fully organic operation. Sean Brock grew his own produce on this land for a while, and still buys extensively from Thackeray. Walking the crop rows we stopped to sample everything from peppery French radishes to sweet turnips to lemony arugula, and I was reminded how much better things taste when you pull them out of the ground with your own two hands.

In addition to his crops, Thackeray also raises pigs. When we found Sean Thackeray, he was hard at work building a wooden chute that he would use to keep his pigs from panicking when he loads them into a truck. At the time of our visit, rooting around in a sprawling pasture were three big, fat, happy Yorkshires owned by Sean Brock, along with seven little Berkshire piglets of Thackeray's.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

Back in Charleston that morning we made a beeline for a local favorite of mine, The Hominy Grill. The Hominy specializes in Southern classics like fried green tomatoes, she-crab soup, and--as its name would suggest--really, really good grits. Everything is prepared from scratch and as many of the ingredients as possible are local. Shrimp and grits is probably The Hominy's signature dish, but Ted Lee's personal strategy is to order from the specials board, which is where Chef Robert Stehling really has his fun. I followed Ted's advice and ordered from the chalkboard a braised oxtail ragout over cheese grits, topped with a poached egg. I was not disappointed.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

Rather than get a hotel in downtown Charleston our first night, we drove 40 minutes east to stay at one of the guest cottages on Kiawah Island. I started coming to Kiawah ten years ago, when I become the consulting chef at The Kiawah Island Club's flagship restaurant, Voysey's, and I make it down to visit whenever I can. Usually I spend my time fishing or playing golf, but on this trip there wouldn't be time for either. One Kiawah ritual I did get to do: I woke up early, took my coffee out onto the dock behind the cottage, and watched as the sun came up over the water. God, I love that place.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

When I asked Glenn what chefs in the area were doing southern food the old-fashioned way, he named Sean Brock at McCrady's in Charleston.

Since Charleston was our next stop, we took Glenn up on his suggestion and invited Matt and Ted Lee to join us. The Lee Brothers have written extensively for this magazine, know just about everything there is to know about Charleston, and were kind enough to offer to show us around their stomping grounds.

We were treated that night to locally caught stone crab and triggerfish, as well as a house-made charcuterie selection starring Sean Brock's own Yorkshire pigs. Anson Mills grains appeared in two courses during our dinner: Farro and Sea Island Red Peas were served with a rich block of pork belly, and Carolina Gold Rice accompanied swiss chard and lamb with vadouvan. I found Sean Brock's cooking to be a mixture of the traditional and the modern, applying progressive, contemporary techniques and presentations to time-honored southern ingredients and flavors.

Sean prides himself on buying as much as possible from small farmers and fisherman in the Charleston area, and even grows some of his own food at his farm in McClellanville. After our meal at McCrady's we were all eager to meet Sean's growers, so he offered to take us to a friend's farm the next day.

Editor's note: Tom Colicchio, the head judge on Bravo's Top Chef (and a Food & Wine Best New Chef 1991), will be blogging every day this week about his road trip from Atlanta.

In true eco-friendly fashion, Anson Mills' headquarters is located in a reclaimed warehouse behind a carwash, and our only real indication that we had found the right place was the small pile of discarded grain composting near the building. Once inside we found waiting for us not only Glenn Roberts, but his business partner Catherine Horton-Schopfer, southern food historian Dr. David Shields, and farmers Ben Dubard and Emile DeFelice.

What we learned that afternoon about traditional Southern foodways, native grains, and the short history of Anson Mills could easily fill its own feature article, but I'll do my best to hit the high points here.

Glenn opened Anson Mills about a decade ago to solve a problem: many of the grains that were staples of the southern pantry before the Civil War were no longer being grown, and would go extinct (and part of the regional cuisine along with them) unless someone resuscitated them. So, Glenn took it upon himself to grow, harvest and mill rare varieties of heirloom corn, rice, and wheat organically.

Take, for example, Carolina Gold Rice. David Shields, a man who has forgotten more about Southern food history than most other people know, gave us an impromptu seminar on the "Carolina rice kitchen," an antebellum cuisine in the Charleston region that was based entirely around a breed of rice called Carolina Gold. It was the most valuable (and possibly tastiest) rice in the world in the first half of the 19th Century, but had all but disappeared by the time of the Depression.

It's one of the grains that Glenn now grows and sells. He works with thirty organic farmers in six states, and grows a wide variety of native heirloom grains plus French oats, Italian farro, and Japanese buckwheat.

In fact, as we discovered later that day, they were all sitting in big white chest freezers in the next room waiting to be milled-to-order. Glenn walked us through a dozen different grains, telling their stories and encouraging us to run our fingers through them, taste them, and smell them.

Glenn's newest project is another near extinct breed of corn called Perla Bianca, an ear of which Ben Dubbard managed to wrangle from an old farmer during a trip to Italy last fall. Now, using that ear for seed stock, Glenn is working tirelessly to cultivate it in South Carolina. Some of the first locally grown Perla Bianca kernels made it back to the Anson Mills office just a few days before our visit, and Glenn milled some into polenta — one whiff of the freshly milled corn and it's obvious why Glenn's fighting for it. Its floral, milky scent and sweet taste are unlike anything I've known.

As for Emile — I knew I was going to like Emile when he burst into the Anson Mills sales office with a case of PBR under one arm and a country ham under the other. Emile owns Caw Caw Creek Farm, where he raises heirloom pastured pigs using traditional agricultural methods, free from hormones and antibiotics and fed on a nutritious mix of organic Anson Mills grain byproducts and wild grasses, peas, and peanuts. When it comes time for the pigs to be harvested, they are slaughtered humanely. As with Glenn, what Emile is doing is a remarkable contrast to how most of our food is being produced across America. The hard work and hard thought that they put into their farming is all in the name of doing the right thing, ethically and environmentally.

Leaving Anson Mills with a country ham from Emile and a bag of Perla Bianca polenta from Glenn, the wheels were already spinning about how I could use them in a Tom: Tuesday Dinner menu...