Food and Wine: The Naturals

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The Naturals

It’s arguable that food has never been so in style. From Top Chef to Food Network to Julie and Julia, we dine in an age where farming trends, celebrity chefs, and blogs about last night’s dinner are about as commonplace as frozen pizza. We are attuned to food, not only for its tastes, its connection to our health and environment, or the pleasure of turning out a really fine meal—but also to seek specialness in a world fast becoming too flat, connected, indistinct, and impersonal.

In our twenty-first-century pace, there is something wholly comforting about the purity and slowness of food made by hand. Its quality is noticeably superior—not to mention mouthwateringly delicious—and its tinkerers, scientists, and artists have become sacred keepers of time-tested culinary traditions. They are links to the past, to a time when life felt a bit less hurried. Lucky for us, these Upstate artisans continue to thrive.

The Reigning Roaster

Coffee connoisseurs will taste the love at Leopard Forest
by Lydia Dishman

Ildi Revi Owner and Roaster

Leopard Forest Coffee Company
26 South Main Street, Travelers Rest
(864) 834-5500
leopardforestcoffee.com

Favorite Brew: Pinnacle. “It is a large bean, on the lighter side of medium roast, but full-bodied, like cherry in a cup.”

Roast Toast: The South Carolina Department of Agriculture distinguishes Leopard Forest’s beans as “certified South Carolina grown,” because they are roasted here. The beans are considered products of our state because of this designation.

Ildi Revi’s love affair with coffee started with romance of a different sort. The Chicago native met Robert Boswell Brown, a native Zimbabwean coffee farmer, when she was teaching in Mozambique. It wasn’t long before the two decided to marry and settle on his family’s 1,000-acre property in the Vumba Mountains. Curious about the process, Ildi experimented with roasting in 1998 using a charcoal roaster that Robert had built during a drought, and continued to perfect her skills until moving to South Carolina in 2004 and opening Leopard Forest Coffee Company, a café and roaster in downtown Travelers Rest.

While Robert continues to own and manage the farm (he makes the commute several times a year to ensure things run smoothly and sustainably), Ildi fires up the twelve-kilo roaster daily to put the dark blush on those plump beans. “That size keeps it a craft,” she explains, as does the 100,000 pounds that go in it annually.

She is also quick to point out that this small scale makes it easy to track the love and care that goes into those beans from pick to pour. “My family raised this product, so it is really important to me what I do with it.”

In addition to taking care of those workers who toil to nurture the crops, Ildi hand-profiles each roast, taking into account slight changes in weather and temperature.

“We never use a computer. There is that much nuance in the process.” She also educates each wholesaler and retailer who carries Leopard Forest on the finer points of brewing the perfect cup. “I could lose all quality at the brew point,” she says. Ildi believes it is an ongoing collaboration. “I just want to make sure that whoever is drinking our coffee gets the optimum product from seedling to cup.”

The Bread Winners

Pete and Barbara Rizzo get their grain on outside of Gotham at The Village Baker in Pendleton
by Heidi Coryell Williams

Pete & Barbara Rizzo Owners and bakers

The Village Baker
104 East Main Street, Pendleton
(864) 646-5800
myvillagebaker.com

Yuletide Yum: During the holidays, try their Dresdner Weihnachtsstollen, a specialty from the German city of Dresden, or the Bûche de Nöel (yule logs), a traditional French holiday item.

From the moment he cracks open a fresh bag of King Arthur–brand flour and scoops his hand in, the science and artistry of Pete Rizzo’s decades-long baking career begins to take shape. This simple act—throwing handfuls of flour onto a six-foot-long wooden tabletop—speaks to him in a language that’s as complicated as it is uncommon, revealing almost everything he needs to know to create the perfect loaf, baguette, sticky bun, or scone.

Rizzo hung up his apron eight years ago, after running more than a dozen bakeries throughout the metropolitan New York and New Jersey areas, as well as shops in California and Denver. But last year he stepped out of retirement to create his fresh-baked goods from a brightly lit shop on historic Pendleton’s sleepy Village Green. Rizzo and his German-born wife, Barbara, who whips up all the homemade fillings for The Village Baker’s Danishes and other pastries, have since attracted a following of customers from as close by as Clemson to the outer reaches of the Upstate and beyond, including Lake Keowee, Simpsonville, and even Atlanta.

“Our products are formulas, recipes we’ve acquired over the years,” Rizzo says. “We’ve tweaked them a bit—changed this or that—to come up with our own version.” Although their popular whole-wheat and nine-grain breads are their own, almost every other loaf, pastry, and bobka sold from The Village Baker can be traced back fifty years or more—be it a challah from a Jewish-American bakery in New Jersey or cinnamon rolls from an old Polish formula.

When Rizzo decided to pursue a career in carbs, he was working as a full-fledged baker at an Italian coal-fired shop in Passaic, New Jersey. The fifteen-year-old was told artisan bakers typically study with European masters. But for Rizzo—a New Jersey native born at the end of the Great Depression—traveling overseas wasn’t an option.

So, following the advice of a Waldorf-Astoria pastry chef he met at that first job, Rizzo set out to learn his trade domestically. “Bakeries are large operations,” he explains. “This chef told me to learn everything you can about that one job, and once you learn it go someplace else and learn it all there.” More than a hundred bakeries later, he acquired the education of an artisan, and now he’s teaching it to his son, Ron.

Local ingredients—like Anderson tomatoes, Six Mile blueberries, Pickens honey, and Gaffney peaches—are used seasonally. The Rizzos buy their eggs from a free-range chicken farm off Liberty Highway. Yet the calling card of a true artisan baker is not found in the fillings, but rather in his ability to take three simple ingredients—flour, water, and yeast—and create hundreds of varieties of bread—one of the most complex foods. While some novice bakers might rely on thermometers, timers, and other tools to keep a loaf from collapsing or turning out tough, Rizzo instinctively knows what to do. Running his hands through the flour and watching how it falls onto his butcher block allows him to discern its temperature and its grind; he also takes into account the humidity and temperature of his shop and how those will affect the way the dough rises and ferments.

After years of practice, he’s able to churn out more than seventy distinct varieties of bread daily—each one an edible work of art—just feeling his way through.

The Brew Master

From blonde to black, Thomas Creek Brewery crafts beer for every palate
by April A. Morris

Tom Davis Owner and brew master

Thomas Creek Brewery
2054 Piedmont Highway, Greenville | (864) 605-1166
thomascreekbeer.com

Hop To It: Want to try your hand at craft brewing? Thomas Creek Brewery has a homebrew shop that can outfit anyone with all the right equipment and ingredients to brew beer at home.

Just inside a warehouse tucked off Piedmont Highway, the warm, yeasty smell of brewing beer greets you. And just inside the doors of Thomas Creek Brewery, Greenville’s own microbrewery, you’ll find brew master and owner Tom Davis among the gleaming tanks and polished equipment, constantly monitoring the boiling, fermentation, filtration, and bottling of each batch.

The story of how Davis came to operate his own brewery begins in the 1980s, before the term craft beer was part of the beer-drinker’s culinary lexicon. Driven by the lack of what he calls “better beers” in the area, Davis, then twenty-six, set out to create his own tasty brews and began homebrewing. He went on to brew at Henni’s brewpub in downtown Greenville and opened Thomas Creek in 1998. For more than ten years, Davis has engineered recipes for more than thirty styles of beer, including the new high-gravity Up the Creek Extreme IPA (12.5% alcohol), Pump House Porter, and Appalachian Amber, one of Davis’s favorites.

“Brewing is truly a passion, because it’s too much work not to be,” says a smiling Davis, who, before he created his first batch, read numerous books on the technique and chemistry of brewing. Along the way, he has learned that in addition to having a sense of what taste profile or variety appeals to a mass audience, a brewer must pay attention to the science of beer. “I started out as a seat of the pants brewer and now am much more into the chemistry and microbiology,” he says. Davis monitors everything from ingredients—hops, barley, and malt—to water quality and even weather conditions to make beer that is exceptional and consistent, batch to frothy batch (roughly 19,000 beers).

His method goes back to the Middle Ages when beer was first created commercially by monasteries, brewing guilds, and pubs. Unlike large-scale commercial breweries, Davis’s recipes use all-natural ingredients, no adjuncts like corn or rice, and the beer remains unpasteurized. This process yields the opposite of a typical, pale and light-tasting mass-produced brew—a more robust product with complex character.

Though Davis crafts “extreme beers” and brews that push the envelope—like a current test batch of coconut porter—he prides himself on creating drinkable beer. “I don’t want to brew a beer that someone won’t finish because it’s offensive to their palate,” he says. “It’s a mixture of science and artistry.”

The Sweet Dreamer

For nearly sixty years, Vaughn-Russell Candy Company has treated the Upstate to homemade confections
by Jack Bacot

Billi Beard Owner

Vaughn-Russell Candy Company
1624 Augusta Street, Greenville
(864) 271-7786
vaughnrussell.com

Signature Sweets: Mint Pecans, ½ pound $10.95, 1 pound $19.95

Favorite Candy: Baby Turtles (caramel, pecans, and chocolate)

In 1999, Billi Beard’s sweet tooth turned into a mouthful of homemade candies. That was the year she went to Vaughn-Russell Candy Company to buy a box of chocolates and ended up buying the entire operation.

The store’s original owners, Marva and Leroy “Mac” McManaway, founded Vaughn-Russell in 1950. In those days, confectioneries were as common as Starbucks is today. There was a candy store on virtually every corner, especially up North where the owners were from. They decided to introduce Greenville to the concept of the local candy store and opened it on Augusta Street, a few doors down from where the operation sits today.

Fascinated with candy, the McManaway’s had learned to make confections the old-fashioned way from family recipes. There are no modern techniques—no preservatives, no wax, no large manufacturing assembly lines—just the backbreaking work of a handful of employees making each piece by hand with natural ingredients and lots of love.

Beard’s interest was piqued when she came into the store that day and learned it was for sale. Mac McManaway had passed away, and Marva was growing weary of trying to run the operation in her elder years. Her back needed a rest, so Marva sat down and taught Beard how to make candy. She shared her secret recipes and passed along the patent to the store’s signature mint pecans. The nuts come from south Georgia, and each one is inspected, roasted, seasoned, cured, and individually hand-dipped in minted chocolate. “We are known for our mint pecans,” Beard proudly explains. “This recipe and process has not changed since it was introduced in 1950.”

During the holidays, they sell more than 1,000 pounds of mint pecans, and that’s just one of their confectionery delicacies. Vaughn-Russell Candy Company has counters full of various chocolates and delicious sweets—all created from old-fashioned recipes and each made by hand, in small batches, so the only candies you get are made the way they were originally intended.

The Cake Maven

Pastry artist Irmgard Looser’s cakes look almost too pretty to eat
by Blair Knobel

Irmgard Looser Cake creator

Eat Cake: Irmgard’s cakes are available at Rainer’s, 610-A South Main Street, in downtown Greenville. (864) 232-1753

She makes a fresh delivery every Tuesday morning, and her offerings vary weekly.

Faced with such elegant cakes, it’s hard to believe their creator was, at one time, thoroughly opposed to the job. “I hated baking,” confesses Irmgard Looser, the petite Hamburg-born baker extraordinaire. “I would buy $20 worth of ingredients and make a mess out of it.”

But after ten years of co-owning Haus Edelweiss, a local deli and gift shop offering German bites and knickknacks, Irmgard decided to change course. Having relatively little pastry experience—let alone at a fine-dining establishment—she convinced the executive chef of Greenville’s venerable Seven Oaks Restaurant to hire her to lead his pastry program. Then, instead of earning pedigree at a sterling culinary school or even taking a single class, the determined Irmgard taught herself the intricacies of cake making—by poring over texts, experimenting with ingredients, and calling on her own European roots. “I suppose it is the German in me; I refused to quit.”

Twenty years later, Irmgard continues to challenge herself to the delight of friends, family, and customers of Rainer’s, an artsy café near Greenville’s West End. Her cakes stand out artistically (fresh berries dance around precisely appointed swirls of white-chocolate mousse), technically (a delicate chocolate-rum mousse cake is a structural marvel, keenly executed and perfectly balanced), and authentically: Each of Irmgard’s cakes is a mouthwatering result of her own tinkering and trial-and-error baking process. She is a perfectionist and purist, often using imported ingredients to meet her high standard.

And the taste?

“I don’t do shortcuts,” she asserts. “If you’re going to splurge on calories, you might as well make the most of it. I use only the best ingredients and no preservatives.”

An assertion in this case (or any displaying Irmgard’s stunning work) that is deliciously apparent.