AgriMissouri

Columbia Farmers Market

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to visit one of our AgriMissouri Farmers' Market Award winners, the Columbia Farmers Market.

What a fun Saturday morning activity! The atmosphere is very festive. People laughing, talking and having a great time.Not being a morning person, I was amazed at all the people who were there at 9:30 a.m. and that there must have many lots earlier because some vendors had already almost sold out of some items. The Market opens at 8:00 a.m. and offers live music to add to the festive atmosphere.

Vendors lined both sides of the parking lot of the Activities & Recreation Center (ARC). I wandered around looking at all the products trying to decide what I wanted to purchase and how I was going to use it. At this market you can purchase local beef, pork, lamb, goat cheese, bread, jam, salsa, pickles, plants, honey and lots of fresh vegetables, fruits and herbs. Determining what I was going to purchase was a huge decision. I ended up purchasing Devon's salsa, from AgriMissouri member Country Goodies, herb and garlic bread and a pound of green beans. I also picked up a recipe from Slow Food.

I'm planning on heading to the Columbia Farmers' Market again this Saturday, this time armed with my shopping list. Many of our AgriMissouri farmers market members offer this same sort of experience in their local communities. To find a farmers' market near you visit the Farmers' Market page on agrimissouri.com or A Look at Missouri's Farmers' Markets blog.

Sarah

Flickr photo courtesy of alisonfonte.

Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who shopped, visited or sampled in the AgriMissouri Market at the State Fair! It was the hottest week of the summer so we really appreciate everyone who came to support the Market.

Despite the heat and slightly low attendance at the State Fair, AgriMissouri Market Sales remained steady. I attribute this to wonderful repeat customers and the additional AgriMissouri members who sampled their products throughout the fair. Below are photos of patrons shopping and Wilby's Firehouse Foods sampling in the AgriMissouri Market at the State Fair.

Again, many thanks to everyone who shopped or participated in the Market! Sarah

Thanks to my colleague, Lane McConnell, for the photos.

Transcript - AgriMissouri Showcase 4

AgriMissouri Showcase:. Food usually is not controversial. We all have different opinions about different kinds of food, but when is the last time you heard someone actually try to build a factual, evidentiary case to convince you of something like the value of pepperoni over Canadian bacon? That's not what happens with barbecue though. With barbecue, everyone's always trying to get to the fact of the matter. Sauce or no sauce. Sweet or vinegar-y, and people involved in barbecue always seem to take it so seriously. That's why it was a little refreshing to catch up with Bill Arnold from Perry on a windy day at the State Fair in Sedalia. Bill's the guy behind Blue's Hog Barbecue. He's the guy who's won 300 some awards and he's had his barbecue mentioned on CNN of all places, and that's just the start of it.
Bill Arnold:. We ship sauce to the U.S. Embassy in Norway three times this last year and I got a letter from the Ambassador himself saying wow wow // yeah. It's been on Air Force One. I just love to cook for people, make 'em smile.
Tyne Morgan:. Looking back, what's, I mean what's the best part of your career?
Bill Arnold:. Walkin' in to the World Championship it's the American // International Barbecue and Sauce Contest in Kansas City, we're at a 500 teams I finished tenth place, but six of the teams in front of me came up and hugged my neck and said thank you. It doesn't get any better than that.
Tyne Morgan:. Bill Arnold's creator and owner of Blue Hog's Barbecue Company out of Perry, Missouri is an entertainer not only with his food, but with his stories. Arnold's passion is where it all began.
Bill Arnold:. I got hungry you know. No, I love to cook. Cooking has always been a passion of mine. Creating new recipes, especially in the barbecue community, and I have a pretty good barbecue sauce to flavor the meats with. I just love to cook and use different flavors, spices, seasoning, and make sauce. My business actually started out, I was helping like cancer patients doing fundraisers, and people that were less fortunate than others and down on their luck, had been burned out of their homes, there was a family that got burned out of their home in Perry, Missouri about nine years ago and their neighbors asked me if I would cook a hog for a hog roast. I made up a batch of my sauce and sent it down there. Well, the next day the phone started ringing. What kind of sauce is that? Where did you get that sauce? And one gentleman that called happened to own a chain of IGA stores. He said you got something you need to work with and they say I've got a very unique taste buds or so, what I hear, but I'll think of a flavor and I can actually reproduce it in my kitchen - yeah. And I've taught a lot of cooking classes, but it’s just over the years I've created and studied a lot of different techniques and not only barbecue but canning, foreign dishes, Jamaican style dishes, Italian dishes, just any type of cooking I just love to explore it.
Tyne Morgan:. And it takes help from programs and other people to market the products on a higher level and really launch your business.
Bill Arnold:. And the Department of Agriculture and AgriMissouri have played a big role in taking me to a commercial level with my hobby, and I've had a lot of good help from people that are unique in their own fields such as marketing, spices, there's so many different aspects of getting a product onto the national level when you started out on your kitchen stove.
Tyne Morgan:. And sometimes Arnold said it just seems so surreal.
Bill Arnold:. You're in a restaurant in Kansas City waiting on a cup of coffee, and you hear people recognize you and talk about you behind your back and then they want your autograph and pictures. That's exciting. They follow you around saying are you him? And excuse me for being hoarse right now, but I've been talking for a few days, but I've been blessed. God has really blessed me with a talent and it’s cooking and working with flavors. I love to make people happy. I love to watch them smile, Tyne, and that's what it’s all about. I'm not about fortune and fame, it’s just they're knocking on my door, and I didn't cause it, I just, I'm doing what God tells me to do, and I just think that if I - I'm a single parent of three little girls, their ages 7, 8 and 9 I work for their future with my efforts.
Tyne Morgan:. And those three little girls that he was just talking about, well those are his three biggest fans.
Morgan Girl1:. I // //
Morgan Girl2:. I describe it of, I describe it that they like a very messy, it’s he's the man, and he cooks a great sauce. I don't really like sauce, but when I eat ribs and there's sauce on it, I think it’s a little spicy but I think it’s really good.
Morgan Girl 3:. I like whatever pappa makes but the best is that I think of is probably the original.
Tyne Morgan:. Was your dad a pretty good then?
Morgan Girl 3:. //
Tyne Morgan:. When I asked him to give us the highlight of his career, he's still so moved and appreciative, tears literally filled his eyes.
Bill Arnold:. About four years ago on CNN news on Sunday afternoon when we had just captured Baghdad there was an Air Force general flying missions in and out of Baghdad, CNN News did an interview with him, and asked him, "What do you miss about being at home and America, the American life." His comment was Blue's Hog Barbecue Sauce and outdoor cooking. And they had just captured these game preserves of Sadham Hussein's and was talking about how good it would be if we had Blue's Hog on this meat. They were having to eat, but three weeks later I got a phone call in the middle of the night, and it was from an Air Force general in Baghdad, and he said "Mr. Arnold, I require your presence I'm the guy that was on CNN News, and I've taken a 72-hour leave there's a barbecue contest at Veteran Stadium in Philadelphia, and I want you to cook for me." You got it! [laughs] So I drove to Philadelphia and I met this guy. He had his Air Force uniform on, sand on his boots, shaved head, like he had just come out of the desert, and we cooked this contest against 72 of the best chefs in the world, came in eighth place and we cooked kingfish. // that's the memories, I've got lots of those.
Tyne Morgan:. And now for the big barbecue question, sauce or no sauce? Well, the barbecue master has your answer.
Bill Arnold:. I try to make my barbecue products and dry rub seasonings not to over power or flavor meat but yet you enhance the natural flavor or meat.
AgriMissouri Showcase:. By the way, Bill won another grand championship at this year's Fair. You can find out more about has it barbecue at BluesHog.com. Of course, not everybody who goes to these barbecue competitions makes it a business. Tyne also caught up with somebody who got into the barbecue contest game on a whim and he's been at it ever since.
Tyne Morgan:. Fred Utlaut, founder of the team Road Kill Redeemers has been in competition barbecue for more than 17 years, and his answer is just a bit different than Arnold's. He says it’s all about who you're feeding.
Fred Utlaut:. Well, that's the big question, to sauce or not to sauce, and a lot of times they think well, if you're putting sauce on it you're trying to hide something, but then again, you know, I have a lot of people that you want to serve it the way they want to eat it, and a lot of people are going to put sauce on it. I prefer not to, because 5, 10, you know, 12, 13, hours cooking a piece of brisket and when the last five minutes put some sauce on it that may or may not be what they want, kind of defeats my purpose. I just want to get a piece of tasty meat that's done and then I'd rather they sauced it, but for competition purposes you almost have to sauce it.
Tyne Morgan:. And what do you do then before you sauce it to make it so favorable and ?
Fred Utlaut:. Well, on a lot of the meats, you know, like chicken particularly I'll brine that in a mixture of sugar and salt in a Ziploc bag for an hour or two, which gives it, it really helps it after you grill it to maintain the moisture in it.
Tyne Morgan:. Utlaut's career all got started with back yard barbecuing.
Fred Utlaut:. I just like to cook in the back yard. It’s kind of a fun thing to do, and there was a little contest in Concordia Missouri one year and I thought, I was scared to death, but I said I'm going to go try that, and got third and fourth and thought I can do this, and so from then on I just started picking up a few contests here and there and really enjoyed it.
Tyne Morgan:. And he's no rookie to the Missouri State Fair Barbecue Contest. He's been entering for more than a dozen years.
Fred Utlaut:. You know, I was always so excited if I could ever get my name called and I thought they're always giving away such beautiful trophies anyway it’s a nice plaque of Missouri and you have to get in the top five to get that, and after about three years, I think I got second in chicken, was so excited because I got called up and I got a plaque and then two years later I got first in something and then back and forth I could usually win at something but I couldn't put it all together until 2003 I finally put it all together and I was a grand champion then.
Tyne Morgan:. And Utlaut's key to successful barbecue? Enhancing the flavors of the meat before you even put it on that firey grill. I'm Tyne Morgan with the AgriMissouri Showcase.
AgriMissouri Showcase:. We've got a link to the results of this year, and then just in case you're hungry, we've also linked to a few dozen places where you can get Missouri made barbecue of your own, all across the state. That's it for now, thanks to Tyne Morgan, Fred Utlaut, and Bill Arnold, and thanks also to Albert Collins, Johnny Copeland and Robert Cray along with AJT for our music this week. Next time, we'll have everything you ever wanted to know about a woman named Lettuce Lizzy. For now, I'm David Brazeal, and thanks for listening to AgriMissouri Showcase.

Episode 4: The BBQ Blues

Barbecue is serious business. If you don't believe it, listen to this episode of the AgriMissouri Showcase.

Download audio (MP3, approx 13 mb)

Related links:
Missouri State Fair BBQ Contest Results
Blues Hog BBQ
Search for Missouri BBQ

Setting Up the Market

The Market is set up and ready for opening day at the 2007 Missouri State Fair. On the left is how the Market looked when we started today and when we finished. The transformation is amazing! I have a great team of fellow Department of Ag employees who help set up the Market. Without their help, the Market would not exist.

Tomorrow is opening day and $1 Day. We'll have meat sticks from Western's Smokehouse and Swiss Meat and Sausage Company as our $1 Day special. In addition, Little Pleasures Foods, Jon El's BBQ and Wilby's Firehouse Foods will be sampling their products.

Stop by to sample soups and dips from Little Pleasures, White Lightning sauce from Jon El's and Firehouse Mustard from Wilby's.

We're located in the center of the Ag Building facing the East door. Come check out the unique and delicious products.

Getting Ready for the AgriMissouri Market

It's two days before the gates officially open on the 2007 Missouri State Fair! Things are going well here in the AgriMissouri Market. We have boxes all over the place but most products are priced and arrived in Sedalia with no problems. It's hot but the Market is located in the center of the air-conditioned Ag Building.

The AgriMissouri Market is going to be better than ever, offering samples from three members daily. It's a great place to try new products and find old favorites. I'll be taking photos and posting information about each of our members sampling.

So come out and see us!

Transcript - AgriMissouri Showcase 3

AgriMissouri Showcase:. When you hear the word "gourmet" you think about places like Paris, or Tokyo, or Bangkok - fancy food in fancy places, but the thing about food is that wherever you are, the best stuff is not from 3,000 miles away, it's from a garden in your back yard, or a farm down the road. Andy Ayer is the owner and chef at Riddle's Penultimate Café and Wine Bar in St. Louis takes that idea pretty seriously, and Tyne Morgan has talked to him about it.
Tyne Morgan:. Andy Ayer got his hands into the food business at an early age when in high school he started as a busboy. He caught on quickly to the restaurant business, learning early on, actually on his second day of work that the harder he worked, the more money he would make.
Andy Ayer:. And then about two weeks later, I found myself thinking, I could run this place better than he does, [laughs] so it’s, I was attracted. It was serendipitous that I started in the restaurant business, but I found that I liked it, and over the years, I've seen a lot of different people come in and out of my own business, and I could tell you that there's a certain percentage of the population that fits well in this type of a business, and there aren't, I read recently in the National Restaurant Association has some figures and I don't know what the exact figure is but it’s an enormous percentage of the adult population worked in a restaurant at one time or another in their careers generally at the front end. We see a lot of entry level people here and there's a much smaller percentage obviously to which the industry sticks and are still there as a career but it’s a lot of fun in this kind of work so that's what I found and here I still am. I did not go to culinary school except for some course I took at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park which has a good culinary program and food service management program. It was interesting that although I dropped out of high school, I ended up many years later as an adjunct professor in the beverage management department at St. Louis University, or I'm sorry at the St. Louis Community College at Forest Park, so I feel like I kind of came full circle in that regard. I spent time as a waiter, I transferred to the back on the house, and I learned cooking that way. I always knew that the meat of the operation and the real center of gravity was in the kitchen, so I was happy to be able to sneak back there whenever they let me into the kitchen and I found I really enjoyed that. And when I went into business for myself I went as a - I took the perspective of the back of the house, the food production primarily and have always put a big emphasis on the quality of the food and its preparation so - but I worked (in) a lot of different restaurants in St. Louis. This is one of the industries where a checkered résumé is actually positive [laughs] you know, because you can learn a lot at any restaurant but you learn more if you give yourself the experience of quite a few different styles, different styles of management, different styles of cuisine and menu. I left St. Louis before and said I would never be back and have not have been in the restaurant business consistently all through my life, but I found myself drawn back to it.
Tyne Morgan:. Ayers followed his fascination and has been in the restaurant business for 27 years, and for 22 years, in one special place. Riddle's Penultimate Café and Wine Bar off the Delmar Loop in University City. And it’s all because of one fear of his that the business has been such a success and considered to most as unique.
Andy Ayer:. I have this recurring nightmare where a couple of people are walking out the front door and they say to themselves. "weren't we in one of these // places in Boston last month?" and the reason it’s a nightmare, it's not reality is because we are a single-unit owner/operated restaurant that's unlikely to remind you of a chain restaurant. for instance we print the menu every day. And we buy a tremendous amount of our stuff from local growers. We put the names of the farmers that we deal with right in the menu on a daily basis, not just in general terms, which has gotten to be a fad any more where a restaurant will list those, a group of farmers as a sidebar and say we buy from these people sometimes, but I buy all through the growing season and now, it’s a 12-month proposition now that there's more locally meat products available, so this is the kind of thing that a chain operation just can not approach because it takes the hands-on management style of an independent operator to even approach this level of interaction with local growers.
Tyne Morgan:. When you set down to eat at Riddle's Penultimate Café and Wine Bar the menu is dated for that particular day to show the products are fresh and entrées are made daily, special to what products they have in house.
Andy Ayer:. It's great, it’s been a lot of fun, you know, one of the things about writing the menu every day. We change the menu every day, everything doesn't change, but certainly enough changes that we have to reprint and change these pages from day-to-day. Using the best local ingredients is a real inspiration to the people who work in the kitchen here. And the whole point of this from my perspective was not, I mean I didn't start to shill the local food industry. That's not my point, and it’s not a gimmick inasmuch as if I find a product that's imported from elsewhere that is of a higher quality, I will buy that. for instance, for a long time I bought Idaho trout here because I found while there were local trout farmers, the quality was not up to my specifications and while I would love to be able to brag about my local trout, I didn't want to do that. The implication of the local sourcing is that it’s the best product available, and if that's not the case I will say Idaho on the menu. The fact is the trout farm that I used to buy from changed hands recently in the last five years, and the new owners really understand the quality that's necessary to do this kind of thing so I'm back to Missouri trout now.
Tyne Morgan:. It actually took a suggestion from his wife that he transition into buying locally grown products for his restaurant.
Andy Ayer:. When I - thinking back there is a particular point in time when I had my first little restaurant, it happened to be located down the street from a long time St. Louis County farm operation, truck farm, with a produce stand right there at the farm and I found myself stopping in there to buy home grown tomatoes for myself and my family to eat because growing up in St. Louis, I knew how very good they were. Of course, coming up in the restaurant business, I was taught to - the last thing you do at the end of the night is you make a list of produce that you need. You call your produce broker and the next morning he shows up and unloads everything off the same truck, so I, that's the way I ran my restaurant, but I was eating these great tomatoes with my wife who said, don't you think our customers would like these tomatoes, too? And it was like a thunderbolt, well yeah they would! Of course they would! So, that's when we started buying homegrown tomatoes, and as things progressed I worked more and more local items into the menu from that particular farm, which is still there and I still buy from, buy I began to develop a larger and larger circle of local growers for more and more different purposes. It’s gotten to the point now where I almost let the growers write the menu because I take the approach that I want to buy what I can locally and it’s our job here to figure out how to prepare it, so when I think it was when blackberries right at the moment, Blackberries are running real strong right now, so I have bought more blackberries frankly than I know for sure what I'm going to do with and we'll figure it out. There's a pork chop dish on the menu right now that uses blackberries. We're going to making our own blackberry ice-cream very shortly. We're using them in cakes and pies. We've got a vinaigrette of homegrown blackberries that we use as a sauce for Missouri Lamb Sausage, and we'll think of some more things to do before too long, so that's - again, a kind of a circle explanation for how we've evolved over the years to enjoy local produce.
Tyne Morgan:. But it’s not just local fruits and vegetables he uses.
Andy Ayer:. It's all the ground beef that I use in the restaurant that I buy from the grower who's located in Sainte Genevieve. All the pork products that I use in the restaurant come from the Ozark Mountains Pork Co-Op which is cooperatively owned by a group of 50 or so pig-raising Missouri families who have involved their own money and built their own USDA inspected packing plant. They hire the butchers and the truck drivers and they own that business. I'm especially happy to be able to deal with an operation like that, and it works out well because individual growers just don't have the volume to be able to supply me with the cuts that I need when I need them. They'll, if I, I know some people that raise hogs, but if I call them and say I want 50 pounds of 10-ounce center cut pork chops tomorrow they may not be able to fill that bill. The co-op on the other hand does the volume that enables them to fill - they've never turned me down for the order that I had, no matter how unusual it was so this is the kind of market response that I have said for years and years as the demand for local produce evolves the market will respond with a supply and believe me, I see that happening more and more. When I started doing this, it looked to me like from year to year there might be fewer growers. Essentially when the old folks died, these kids are not staying there in the winter. They take over the farm, and I thought we were dealing with a dwindling supply, but what I've seen more and more in the last 10 years I would say is young people actually going into agriculture and identifying local markets for themselves. This is an amazing development and a very welcome one.
Tyne Morgan:. And what's so unique on the menu?
Andy Ayer:. Well, there's a bunch of them. Right now, today, for instance, I've got a great item that we're selling as a small plate or an appetizer that we call, Missouri Apple Lamb Sausage. The lamb is raised by Dave and Barb Hildebrand who are in Forestville, Missouri just about 60 miles from St. Louis and they worked with their butcher to come up with this preparation for an apple-lamb sausage. We buy them from Dave. We start with a bed of caramelized Texas sweet variety onions that I buy from Bob Lober in Moscow Mills. We cook them for a very long time so they get sweeter and sweeter. Put a pile on the plate, grill one of these apple lamb sausages from Dave Hildebrand and then we dress the plate with blackberry vinaigrette that are also locally grown. That's an example of the kind of combination of flavors that I'm sure would never have occurred to me except for the fact that I've got these great local ingredients here and I'm thinking of different ways to combine them and use their flavors and counterpoints and present their stuff in different and innovative ways so that's a good example.
Tyne Morgan:. Ayers sees it as rewarding not only for his customers to eat products produced by people they know, but sometimes the producers even come in and try it out on their own. I'm Tyne Morgan for AgriMissouri Showcase.
AgriMissouri Showcase:. You can find Riddle's Penultimate Café and Wine Bar online. They've even got their latest daily menu there at RiddlesCafe.com. Our music for this episode comes from Deidre Rodman. Thanks to Andy Ayers for his time and to Tyne Morgan for her interview. Next time we'll be back with a story about Missouri barbecue. For AgriMissouri Showcase, I'm David Brazeal.