The right tools make oyster shucking simple

We’ve been gearing up at Southern Season to celebrate National Oysters on the Half Shell Day on March 31. There’s just one problem: Not all of us know how to shuck an oyster.

We asked Chef Ricky Moore of Durham, North Carolina’s acclaimed Saltbox Seafood Joint to show us – and you – how to shuck oysters like a boss.

“It’s not that hard,” says Moore, who grew up enjoying fresh seafood in coastal New Bern, North Carolina. “The most important thing is to buy the freshest local oysters you can find. Once you find an oyster knife that feels good in your hands, and you learn how to pry open its hinge, you’ll be good to go.”

Moore appreciated the heft and elegance of shucking tools produced by Carolina Shuckers. Each tool is hand-forged by North Carolina artisans Kirk Davis and Michael Waller.

“A good oyster knife is engineered to open a shell like a can opener,” says Moore, who will teach a Chef Meets Farmer class on cooking fresh catch with Locals Seafood on May 16 at the Cooking School in Chapel Hill. “You could shuck oysters all day long with one of these.”

While a heavy glove can protect your hands from injury, Moore prefers to grasp a closed oyster between folds of dishtowel. Be sure to have plenty on hand as they’ll get wet and dirty.

Set the oyster down on the dishtowel with the rounded side up. The indented, hinged side should be facing you. Secure the oyster in place by folding the towel over the shell and pressing down. Poke the point of your oyster knife into hinge, pressing just enough to slide in about ½-inch of the tip. Grasp the knife firmly and twist the handle a quarter-turn until you hear a pop.

“The goal is to keep all that oyster liquor inside the shell,” Moore says as he pulls back the dishtowel and gently pries open the oyster, revealing a plump mollusk surrounded by ocean-fresh brine. Moore uses the oyster knife to scoop under the oyster, releasing it from the shell. If necessary, use the tip of the knife to remove any dirt or shell fragments.

“Next, you want to eat it,” he says with a grin, tipping the shell to his lips as the oyster slid into his mouth. “That’s all there is to it. Just keep repeating until they’re all gone.”

While the oysters were outstanding as is, Moore also suggests trying them with a great hot sauce – like bourbon barrel-aged Red Clay from Charleston – or making a simple mignonette. Once you’ve made the recipe below, feel free to tweak it with different acids (maybe a champagne or sherry vinegar) or substitute the parsley for cilantro or other fresh green.

“For me, the mignonette needs to be a pourable mass; not quite a paste, but you want to drizzle it on and let the oyster liquor loosen it up,” he says. “It brings a fresh flavor that pairs beautifully with the oyster.”

Ricky Moore’s Mignonette

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (or a favorite vinegar)
1 tablespoon minced shallot
1½ tablespoons minced Italian parsley
1 tablespoon minced chives
Freshly grated black pepper

Blend all ingredients in a small bowl until well combined, then drizzle over raw oysters.

If the oyster liquor is not salty enough for your taste, add a pinch of sea salt to the mignonette.

Note: As with any raw food, there is some risk associated with consuming raw oysters. Purchase oysters from a reliable seller and avoid consuming them raw if you have a chronic illness.

This post first appeared on Southern Season.

Think Outside of the Box for Passover

There are few things that Melissa Krumbein enjoys more than cooking for her large family at the holidays. Add in the challenge of not using leavened products during Passover and the Richmond, Virginia-based caterer is truly in her happy place.

“There’s no reason to have a boring meal just because it’s Passover,” says Krumbein, who teaches at the Cooking School.

Observant Jews forgo leavened bread during this festival of freedom, which begins at sunset April 22 and continues through the 30th. The act is meant to remind them of the time when Jewish slaves fled Egypt in such haste that they had no time to bake traditional breads. Instead, they made flat matzo crackers, which remain a staple of Passover celebrations around the world.

The first two nights of Passover are ushered in with solemn seders, during which several aspects of bondage are recalled. Among them is the task of eating charoset, a sweetened apple and nut mixture that symbolizes construction mortar. While delicious on matzo, it’s a tasty year-round addition to yogurt or hot cereal.

Krumbein, who owns the Richmond dessert company Let’s Nosh, relies on a recipe first made by her husband’s grandmother, Lillian Gass Nerden. Born in 1910 to a Russian Jewish family that had immigrated to Orono, Maine, she was responsible for caring for her many siblings. Their tight bond lives on today in the family’s Cousin Club, which celebrates reunions across the country and in Canada.

“I can assure you that Lil never made a small quantity of charoset, as the holiday table was always full of aunts and uncles, cousins and friends,” Krumbein says.  “Lil was a wonderful cook. Be sure to make extra, enough to last the week!”

Lil Nerden’s Charoset 

6 red delicious apples, peeled, cored and coarsely chopped
3 cups nuts, such as walnuts or pecans, coarsely chopped
3 teaspoons sugar
1½ teaspoons Vietnamese cinnamon
6-7 tablespoons sweet red wine, such as Manischevitz (or Concord grape juice)

Hand-chop apples and nuts to a consistency like rough-cut mortar. Don’t use a food processor for this as the result will be too smooth.

Transfer apple-nut mixture and remaining ingredients, starting with 6 tablespoons wine, to a medium bowl. Stir to combine, adding more wine if needed. Cover with plastic wrap, pressing film to surface of charoset, and chill for at least an hour to let flavors blend. Bring to room temperature before serving.

This post first appeared on Southern Season.

Peanut Butter Lover’s Day is March 1st

Mark Overbay is deeply amused by the notion of March 1 being National Peanut Butter Lover’s Day.

“For me, that’s like having a National Oxygen Lover’s Day,” quips the founder of Big Spoon Roasters, a maker of artisan nut butters in Durham, North Carolina. “Peanut butter has always been, and will always be, a staple of my existence!”

Overbay just celebrated the fifth anniversary of his company, which was the nation’s first maker of small-batch, fresh-roasted, handcrafted nut butters. He drew inspiration the time he spent in rural Zimbabwe with the Peace Corps, where he experienced the extraordinary flavors and textures of nut butters made with local ingredients and ground with stones. Each family added its own unique touches, such as honey, coconut oil or spices.

Overbay takes a similar approach, sourcing the majority of his ingredients from sustainable growers in North Carolina and throughout the Southeast. The current line of 10 flavors is produced on a rotating schedule, with product delivered as soon as it’s packaged. For Southern Season’s Chapel Hill and Raleigh locations, that means it arrives within hours.

While North Carolina’s Triangle region takes special pride in this local product, Big Spoon Roasters nut butters have been earning national praise since their debut. In fact, Food & Wine magazine named its Peanut Pecan Butter as one of the seven best things staff tasted in 2011. The current issue of Teen Vogue raves about the brand’s Cherry Pecan nut butter bars. Overbay does not take such praise lightly.

“We have zero control over what the media covers, but we do have control over how we select our ingredients, how we roast our nuts, how our food tastes, how our jar feels in people’s hands, how we interact with someone who calls our office,” he says. “These are the things we try to do as well as we can.”

The company will mark its fifth anniversary in the spring by introducing a new nut butter flavor as well as a nut butter bar recipe. Both currently are labeled Top Secret.

“The goals that launched Big Spoon Roasters as a business remain our goals today,” Overbay says. “We want to introduce people to the inimitable experience of eating truly handmade-to-order, fresh-roasted nut butter; to be a progressive market force for sustainable agriculture; and to positively affect the communities we touch.

“These are goals we can never exceed,” he adds “but also goals we can pursue and measure every day.”

Visit Southern Season stores for a wide selection of Big Spoon Roaster nut butters or shop online.

This post first appeared on the Southern Season blog.

Pure Parmesan

At Southern Season, when you buy a chunk of Parmesan cheese, you get 100 percent premium Italian cheese chosen by our Cheesemonger in Residence to deliver exceptional flavor and quality. “We’ve heard from customers who are concerned about reports of wood pulp in some commercial brands of pre-packaged grated cheese,” says Dany Schutte, who is based at Southern Season’s Richmond, Virginia, store. “We stock only the best cheeses available from authentic sources.”

As reported by numerous news sources, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating some companies that produce products labeled as “100 percent real Parmesan.” A few brands have been found to contain excessive amounts of cellulose, an anti-clumping additive made from wood pulp, as well as less expensive filler cheese. While not necessarily dangerous for consumption, such products are not consistent with Southern Season’s premium quality standards.

Schutte has selected a Parmigiano Reggiano produced by Giorgio Cravero as the signature cheese available at our stores. The Cravero family has been producing wheels of the highest quality aged cheeses since 1855. “We choose his wheels because he exceeds the minimum requirement of the Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium, flipping and rubbing down his wheels every two days instead of the required two weeks,” Schutte explains. “He also matures them longer. The flavor profile is deeper, nuttier and sweeter.”

The cheese is available in a range of sizes to suit customer needs. While Cheese Departments offer grated cheese for grab-and-go convenience, Schutte recommends grating or shredding the cheese just before use for maximum flavor.

This post first appeared on the Southern Season blog.

Raleigh woman’s pie business inspired by son’s military service

Pam Runyans prepping pie crusts in her Oakwood kitchen.
Photo by Robert Willett of The News & Observer 

When her son received an appointment to West Point in 2000, Pam Runyans thought it was not possible for her heart to be more full of love and pride.

Four years later, when Bob was sent on his first conflict deployment to Iraq, the Raleigh mother of three found that fullness turned to sleep-starving fear. She’d rise from her bed in the middle of the night, wide awake, calculating the time zones and wondering what he might be doing.

“He was in an armored Humvee,” she says. “Those were the days before instant messaging. We lived for phone calls.”

Bob Runyans at Ur in Iraq.
Photo courtesy Pam Runyans.

Alarmed by vivid news coverage, the only way Runyans could keep her thoughts from wandering toward danger was to focus squarely and positively on something she enjoyed doing for him. So, night after night, Runyans rolled pastry and baked pies. She baked a lot of pecan pies, Bob’s favorite, and apple, her favorite because they were distractingly time consuming. She baked recipes she learned from her grandmother (lemon with billowy meringue) and mother (peach) and experimented with dozens more torn from magazines.

In the beginning, neighbors and friends were surprised when she’d knock on their doors and hand off pies. “I couldn’t possibly keep them all. I’d be big as a house,” says Runyans. She relied on husband Robert, a Raleigh architect, to serve as her taste tester.

I’D MAKE PIES AND THINK ABOUT HIM AND PRAY. I’D WATCH THE NEWS AND WORRY AND MAKE MORE PIES. I HAD TO KEEP MYSELF OCCUPIED SO I’D BE SANE.

Pam Runyans, about what she did while her son was serving in Iraq

Runyans, whose father tinkered with his birth certificate to join the Navy at age 15 during World War II, kept baking throughout Bob’s service. Her technique developed from tentative to masterly. At her son’s urging, she launched ABC Pie Company in 2010.

“Just before his second deployment, he told me I needed something to do that made me happy, and baking pies makes me happy,” she recalls from the pristine kitchen of her home in the historic Oakwood neighborhood, where two commercial convection ovens are preheating. “I’d make pies and think about him and pray. I’d watch the news and worry and make more pies. I had to keep myself occupied so I’d be sane.”

Military family

The business draws its name from children Abigail, Bob and Camille, each of whom has pursued a military career. Abigail is a physician assistant who serves in the U.S. Army Reserve in Colorado Springs. Camille, who graduated from West Point last year, will report to Fort Bragg in February to fly Blackhawk helicopters.

“She graduates from flight school the day before Thanksgiving. Does the Army have a sense of humor or what?” quips her proud mother. “It’s not like this is my busiest time of year or anything.”

Camille is engaged to an Army Ranger also stationed at Fort Bragg. Bob, who now serves in the Army’s Judge Advocate General division in the Netherlands, met his wife when they were both in service at Fort Campbell, Ky.

While Runyans developed her skills making full-size pies, her ABC pies usually are produced in endearing 5-inch rounds. She got the idea from Arnold Wilkerson of Little Pie Company of the Big Apple, a renowned baker she befriended while traveling to New York to visit Camille at West Point.

BEING A SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEUR TAKES A KIND OF LOVE THAT YOU JUST CAN’T DESCRIBE. CLEARLY, SHE’S GOT IT.

Arnold Wilkerson of Little Pie Company of the Big Apple, about Pam Runyans

Wilkerson recalls they had a lot in common because he started his business in his apartment. “I didn’t know her family story then, that she would bake because of her son’s service,” he says. “She understood pie baking, but being a successful entrepreneur takes a kind of love that you just can’t describe. Clearly, she’s got it.”

Photo by Robert Willett, The News & Observer

Runyans continues to infuse her pies with genuine affection. They look so perfect, and they have such appealing texture and flavor, that some people doubt she makes each by hand.

“Take a look,” she says, opening one of three freezers in a former breakfast room repurposed several years ago for her one-woman, home-based business. It is stacked high with nearly 200 frozen pastry shells, each with elegantly fluted edges. “Oh, that’s nothing. You should see what it looks like around here just before Thanksgiving.”

Busy month

November is her busiest month as customers seek her pies for family gatherings and hostess gifts. Among her most popular fall flavors are apple caramel crumble, pumpkin with pecan streusel, maple walnut, Mayan chocolate pecan, pear cranberry custard and red velvet custard.

Most will be sold through Southern Season, the Chapel Hill-based gourmet market and home store. Runyans credits the business for giving her opportunity and exposure.

“I was so nervous. I brought all these different pies for them to try, but they didn’t take a single bite,” Runyans recalls. “She just looked at them and said she’d take two dozen. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

With help from her husband, Runyans continues to sell pies there as well as NoFo@The Pig in Raleigh’s Five Points area. Neomonde recently started carrying her smaller, cupcake-sized pies in Raleigh and Morrisville. ABC Pies also are sold at the Washington, D.C., outpost of Dean & DeLuca, the prestigious New York-based market.

Runyans’ normally busy baking schedule slowed this fall as she sorted through the estate of her beloved father, Gene L. Watterson, who was pastor of First Baptist Church in Shelby for 26 years. She and her husband spent weekends clearing his home, where they rediscovered ample evidence of his impact on his community. “It was hard work, but we found so many lovely things, personalized books and things he and Mama collected when they traveled,” she says. “Now, I’m back to making pies around the clock.”

This time, however, she’s driven not by worry but to please loyal customers, for whom Thanksgiving would be incomplete without her pies.

This post first appeared in The News & Observer on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2015.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/article44173590.html#storylink=cpy

IACP-winning cookbook author Cathy Barrow to teach canning class at Southern Season

Cathy Barrow, aka Mrs. Wheelbarrow, will teach at a cooking class at 6pm Monday, May 11, at Southern Season in Chapel Hill. She'll demonstrate her No Pectin, No Fail Strawberry Jam, water bath canning, Strawberry Jam Barbecue Sauce with Pork Sliders, and Mini Jam Tarts from her award-winning book, Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Practical Pantry: Recipes and Techniques for Year-Round Preserving. To reserve your seat, click here or call 800-253-3663.

Cathy Barrow, aka Mrs. Wheelbarrow
(Photo © Christopher Hirsheimer)

With local strawberries starting to appear at farmer's market, even those who have never canned jam or jelly before find it hard to resist to the tug. "Do it," they seem to say, as dew from early morning picking begins to dry into a sweet sheen.

The timing could not be better, both for those unfamiliar with canning techniques and experienced jammers who want to step up their game. Cathy Barrow, whose debut cookbook, Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Practical Pantry, recently earned the 2015 International Association of Cooking Professionals award for best single-subject book, will unlock the secrets of strawberries on May 11 at Southern Season.

"Every new canner starts with strawberry jam and it's really the hardest one to make," says Barrow, who writes about preserving for The Washington Post and in her Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Kitchen blog. "I've got a few tricks up my sleeve to make sure those first-time jammers are successful."

Those tricks benefit experience canners as well. Using her directions, I've produced the most glossy, flavorful strawberry jams and sauces ever. I'm a particular fan of her Double Strawberry Preserves, which uses both fresh and tart dried cherries, and the lightly floral Strawberry Mango Jam.

I had the privilege of being among a group of testers, her Practical Pantry Posse, who made those recipes before the book was published. Trust me, there's just no going back after you've made these flavor-packed treasures.
 The book lists for $35 but often is available for less online. While there's nothing a diehard canner likes better than a jam-splattered cookbook, note that the Kindle edition currently is on sale for just $2.99.
The following is one of her strawberry-based recipes that will not be on the menu at Southern Season. While I'm told that local rhubarb can be found at some farmers markets, you are more likely to find it imported from a cooler climate at a well-stocked grocery store. Local strawberries, however, are abundant and should be your first choice.

Strawberry Rhubarb Sauce 

Reprinted with permission of Cathy Barrow from Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Practical Pantry: Recipes and Techniques for Year-Round Preserving  (W.W. Norton & Co.).

   

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 25 minutes

Total Time: 40 minutes

Yield: 4 pints or 5 12-ounce jars, plus some to enjoy right now

 

Ingredients

• 4 pints (48 ounces or 1380 grams) strawberries, rinsed, hulled, and quartered
• 3 pounds (1350 grams) rhubarb, rinsed and cut into ½-inch dice
• 5 cups (35 ounces or 1 kg) granulated sugar
• Juice of 3 lemons
• Star anise (optional)

Instructions

1. Put the berries to a large glass or ceramic bowl and, using a potato masher or wooden spoon, gently crush them. Add the rhubarb, sugar, lemon juice, and star anise (if using) and stir well and completely until the sugar has dissolved. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the mixture macerate for 4 hours, or if refrigerated, for as long as 2 days.
2. Scrape the mixture to a preserving pot and clip on a candy thermometer. Slowly bring to a simmer over medium-high heat, stirring frequently to prevent scorching. Then bring to a vigorous boil and stir constantly until th sauce thickens to the consistency of ketchup, about 25 minutes.
3. Turn of heat and discard the star anise. Ladle the sauce into warm (sterilized) jars, leaving ½-inch headspace. Clean the rims of the jars well with a damp paper tower. Place the lids and rings on the jars and finger-tighten the rings.
4. Process in a boiling-water bath for 15 minutes.

Note: You can skip the water-bath process and tucked the cooled sauce straight into the refrigerator, but processing keeps it shelf-stable for a year. You'll be glad to have some stashed for the holidays, or on a frigid day when you can laugh at the weather with a bowl of warm oatmeal topped with Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Strawberry-Rhubarb Sauce.

 

Chef Kevin Gillespie dares home cooks to have fun in the kitchen

Kevin Gillespie is a serious chef with a lighthearted mission. He wants home cooks to loosen up and experience the pleasures of cooking.

“So many people get caught up in the idea that cooking every day is hard work, or that going to farmer’s markets is too much effort,” said the burly tattooed chef, who made a name for himself a few seasons ago on Top Chef. “As with life in general, the whole point of cooking is to have fun.”

Gillespie succeeds in his goal to empower home cooks with eminently do-able recipes and approachable technique advice in Fire in My Belly: Real Cooking (Andrews McNeel), his first book, which was released just this week. He will appear at Southern Season in Chapel Hill for a book signing at 3pm Saturday, with a sold-out class to follow at 5pm.

While his TV fame and award-winning Woodfire Grill restaurant in Atlanta gave him the credibility to produce what he disparagingly calls a “chef-y chef” book, Gillespie returned to his roots for the home-style cooking that first inspired him.

As he describes in the opening pages, Gillespie grew up surrounded by cousins on a former dirt road called Sunshine Circle in Locust Grove, Ga. Though he spent countless hours planning his escape from ever-present family and the routine of meals lovingly cooked by his Granny, he now counts those formative years as the foundation of his food ethics and outreach.

“Now, as an adult, I realize how special that opportunity was,” he said. “It’s taught me so much about who I am and what food and family mean to me.”

One of Gillespie’s goals is to get folks to take at fresh look at familiar foods by using them in ways that may seem contrary to logic. For example, the Indian-spiced Not Your Everyday Butternut Squash Soup featured on his website makes use of the tough skin that usually is peeled and discarded. One commenter admitted trepidation: “Will it bite me back or does it soften up enough so that I won’t be applying bandaids to the roof of my mouth?”

“I’m hopefully giving a teaching moment there,” Gillespie said. “I’m trying to tell people, hey this is going to produce really amazing results. I want people to trust that I wrote this book, all these recipes, with them in mind. My objective is to build confidence in the kitchen.”

Gillespie accomplishes this through 120 recipes, more than 350 vivid photos and series of essays that eloquently define his culinary point of view. The handsomely produced book – which miraculously lays flat no matter what page it’s opened to – also includes a useful Seasonal Recipe Index to steer users toward making the best use of peak produce and proteins. “The ideal of eating seasonally,” he writes, “is 100 percent dependent on eating local food.”

In keeping with is food-is-fun mantra, Gillespie also includes stories about certain recipes that seems to reinforce Woody Allen’s quip that “80 percent of success is just showing up.” A humorous example is his Overnight Grits with Tomato-Braised Greens, which Gillespie described as the fortunate result of what at the time seemed like a major blunder.

“It’s a wonderful dish and preparation that was a complete accident,” he said with a laugh. “But it turned out pretty cool so we went with it.”

Gillespie writes that his team was preparing grits for a thousand diners with tickets to attend a Slow Food event. The grits were inadvertently left in a hotbox overnight and turned a curious milky brown color, like iced coffee. Daring a taste, he discovered them perfectly caramelized and “100 times creamier than our normal grits. … People went apeshit for them.”

“I’ve served that dish to many a Southerner and many people outside of the South, and everybody loves it,” he said. “It’s proof of good things that happen in the kitchen sometimes when you least expect it, and it can happen for home cooks, too.”