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A Condiment that Comes with Community

By Lorrie Baumann

To make it in the U.S., you need either financial capital or intellectual capital, according to Gerard Bozoghlian, whose family emigrated from Argentina to the U.S. in 1991; “Mom’s rich intellectual capital is an archive of Argentine culinary methods and traditions.”

Those recipes included authentic recipes for Argentinian chimichurri sauces that his mother, Azniv, had developed while she was cooking for the Bozoghlian family and friends. Azniv, herself of Greek descent and who had grown up in a Greek neighborhood in Argentina; the food she’d been served at home was what she knew. After she married Bozoghlian’s father, Carlos, and settled into housekeeping, she felt the need to expand her culinary repertoire, so she took herself off to culinary school. “The running joke in the family is that Dad told Mom that he could eat dolmades and moussaka a couple of times a week, but that he wanted his dose milanesa, lasagna and empanadas as often as possible,” Bozoghlian says. “She really has an ardent passion for food, to become one with the essence, the roots and eventual influences of Argentine culinary traditions. Every family vacation was grounded and planned around culinary excursions. Visiting the Rosa Mosqueta harvest in Bariloche or the tomato harvest in Rio Negro. As a family, much of our time spent bonding revolved around the discovery of ingredients and the overall appreciation of food and wine.”

After the family moved to the U.S. when Gerard, the youngest of three brothers, was 15, the older boys went off to college, one to UCLA and one in Pasadena, and the whole family focused on finding a sense of community for themselves in West Hollywood. “In Argentina, everyone was home for dinner at 9 p.m. In the States in the ‘90s, honoring a nightly family dinner schedule was a challenge. There was an increasing feeling of separation,” Bozoghlian says. “In Buenos Aires, extended family gatherings were the norm on the weekends. Here, we just had the five of us, and the Los Angeles work/university travel times and distances were spreading us thin. Maintaining our strongly bonded family unit meant everything.”

The family worked hard to turn Azniv’s recipe collection into the basis for a menu for an authentic Argentinian steakhouse that began attracting other Argentine emigres. “Slowly we developed the community we dreamed to have,” Bozoghlian says. Today we’re blessed to have guests who have been dining with us for 22 years. Families that discovered us when their children were toddlers are now hosting their college graduation celebrations at Carlitos Gardel.”
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Eventually, Max Bozoghlian, the oldest of the three brothers, became one of an early wave of professional sommeliers in Los Angeles, Rodrigo went off to law school, and Gerard, at 21, graduated from his apprenticeship under his mother to become the restaurant’s general manager. A couple of years later, Azniv decided that she’d laid enough of a foundation for the restaurant’s kitchen that she could take a step back from working a regular shift at the restaurant — although she is still very much in charge of the desserts there.

Somehow, Gerard decided that he wasn’t busy enough just operating the restaurant, and he began working on the development of recipes for the sauces so they could be preserved as shelf-stable products while still maintaining their authentic character. He found mentors in Freddy Carbajal, Founder and CEO of Dotta Foods International, Inc., and Eliot Swartz, co-Founder and co-Chair of Two Chefs on a Roll, Inc.“Freddy really took me under his wing. Introduced me to some of the top food scientists,” Bozoghlian says. “He wanted to see me succeed. Even with his and others’ help, it took five years to formulate the first product that’s shelf-stable, authentic in terms of composition: staying true to authentic ingredients found in chimichurri; and also authentic in terms of consistency. We don’t produce an emulsified paste. We produce a hand-crafted, free-flowing sauce, and it goes into the jar that way. There’s never a time when the full integrity of the sauce is not honored.”

“Argentines respond to Gardel’s Chimichurri because they recognize it as what they’ve always known chimichurri to be,” he continues. “That was my goal — to stay true and honor our traditions.”

Some of that story is now on the label of each of Gardel’s Fine Foods’ chimichurri sauces. All made with 100 percent extra virgin olive oil and no added sugar, they are Chimichurri Balsamico, Chimichurri Spicy Balsamico, Chimichurri Autentico and Chimichurri Lime. Each jar holds 8 ounces of sauce and retails for $8.99 to $11.99. Nationwide distribution is available. For more information, visit www.chimichurrisauce.com.

Down a Georgia Road with Cheese

By Lorrie Baumann

CalyRoad Creamery’s retail shop in Sandy Springs, Georgia, is a key component in the business model that provides multiple revenue streams to keep Founder and Owner Robin Schick afloat while she exercises her passion for making artisanal cheeses. Her small creamery and its shop are located in a retail building in a commercial district at the heart of Sandy Springs, a suburb on the north side of Atlanta, Georgia.

Her business plan has three main components for producing revenue from her artisanal cheese production: the retail operation, which includes marketing events and classes as well as her shop sales; wholesale distribution to local foodservice establishments; and distribution to other regional retailers. She’s still working on the economics of a relationship with a wholesale foods distributor into retail that will be a key to real profitability, but she’s able to support her business with the revenues generated through the other streams. “We’re knocking on the door,” Schick said. “I think what we found is that it has to be a combination of revenue streams. We needed to develop the retail aspect — events with corporate team building in which companies bring in their staff and do a wine and cheese tasting or a class together. We do birthday parties here.”

CalyRoad Creamery really started a decade ago with a phone conversation between Schick and her sister Cathy Lynne, who was living on a 13-acre farm with some pet goats. “My sister and I were trying to decide if we wanted to work together and what we wanted to do, Schick says. “We were laughing and joking about milking the goats, and we got serious.” The two of them went to the University of Georgia’s Center for Agribusiness and Economic Development and asked them to do a feasibility study. With the university’s encouragement, Schick and her sister developed a business plan and then did some internships at local farms before heading off to the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese to learn how to make cheese. When they were ready, they found a goat dairy where they could launch their cheesemaking business with a 35-gallon cheese vat and a recipe for chevre while the farmer took care of the animal husbandry. “We quickly realized that there was no way we could learn both sides of this and do it well, so we concentrated on the cheesemaking,” Schick said.

As time went on, the farmer decided to retire from farming, the goat herd was adopted by another dairy, and Schick needed to find a new home for her cheesemaking operation. She decided to leave the farmstead concept behind in favor of a location closer to Atlanta’s urban market. CalyRoad Creamery found its new home in a small building about 60 or 70 years old on a side street in Sandy Springs, about 15 minutes north of downtown Atlanta. With 900 square feet of production space, 100 square feet of retail shop space and herself as the cheesemaker, Schick was back in business. “We had a very nice following in nine farmers markets and a nice following with wholesale into some of the white tablecloth restaurants in Atlanta,” she said. “We quickly realized that with a 35-gallon vat, we were never going to produce enough to make a living.”

That realization would be enough to knock the wind out of most women, and Schick was no exception. Then she had what she calls a “Little Epiphany,” which is now the name of one of her cheeses, a high-moisture, soft-ripened cow milk cheese with delicate floral notes that she’d just figured out how to make when she was at her most discouraged about the future of her business.

She’d just moved into the new production facility, and she was making cheese she loved, but with her tiny vat, she just wasn’t making money, she told her mom. Her mom asked her if she was actually losing money. Schick said no, she was covering her bills — she just wasn’t making a profit. “Then what’s the problem?” her mother asked. “Why are you measuring by money rather than by your experience that making your cheese makes you happy?”
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“It was Christmas time, and I thought they were so right,” Schick said. “It was my epiphany that it didn’t matter. … That cheese is near and dear to my heart.”

When the two retail suites next to her small shop became available, she had to decide whether to expand or quit, and she decided to expand. She sold her 35-gallon vat and bought a 350-gallon cheese vat and a 700-gallon bulk tank for milk. She built a couple of new aging rooms into the additional space so she can make more cheese varieties. With a total of three aging rooms now, one is dedicated to hard cheese, one to blue cheeses and the third to white mold cheeses.

While in the 35-gallon vat days she was making chevre, a Camembert-style cheese called WayPoint, a feta, and a blue cow milk cheese called Bit O’ Blue, now she’s doing cheddar cheese curds and a tomme-style cheese called Hilderbrand that’s aged a minimum of six weeks, with some of her Hilderbrand inventory now at eight or nine months as she builds her stock for a big order from Delta Airlines.

She has WayPoint and several aged goat cheeses flavored with various spices in her white mold room along with Big Bloomy, a plain aged goat cheese and Black Rock, a pepper bloomy rind that was a 2018 finalist in the Flavor of Georgia Food Product Contest, which, according to the Georgia Department of Agriculture, is “the state’s premier proving ground for small, upstart food companies as well as time-tested products.”

Her cheeses also include Red Top, a flavored goat cheese rubbed with smoked Spanish paprika that’s named after Red Top Mountain, where iron ore was once mined and which is now a state park. Named, like most of Schick’s goat cheeses, for another famous Georgia landmark, Little Stone Mountain is an ash-rind goat cheese that’s a customer favorite.

David Rospond has joined CalyRoad’s creamery as Cheesemaker, Cheese Oracle Tim Gaddis is teaching a couple of classes a month on cheese pairing and cheese board selection in CalyRoad’s shop and Schick is busy dreaming of new cheeses that Rospond will help her make. “I taught him all that I knew, and now we’re both working together to learn more and more,” she said of Rospond. “He has just been a joy to work with. He fell right into it. … He knew how to read the recipes, and he knew intuitively what to do, which is great.”

Slow Cookers As A Vehicle for Change

By Greg Gonzales

“Who knew slow cookers could be a vehicle for change?” It may have been a rhetorical question, but when she asked it in January, Meg Barnhart clearly knew the answer ― she was giving an acceptance speech for the Specialty Food Association’s Business Leadership Award at the Winter Fancy Food Show. Slow cookers, Barnhart says, can change the world from from the dinner table to the community at large. Barnhart partnered in 2012 with co-creator Jane McKay to start a slow cooker recipe blog, zen of slow cooking, which expanded into a B Corporation that sells pre-packaged spice blends with the pair’s popular recipes printed on the bag. Barnhart wanted to start a business where she could share her passion for slow cooking; to help families spend more time together, to assist underserved populations and provide a place where people like her son, Doug, who face learning disabilities, could find work.

The dinner table, Barnhart said, is where it all started; she and her kids ― Phil, Doug and Lucy ― didn’t have much time between sports and dance lessons in the late afternoons and early evenings to cook meals that require a lot of last-minute prep work. “Slow cookers gave me an opportunity to bring my family back to the dinner table. It allowed me to prepare food when I wasn’t home, so when we all came home we had this great, warm, delicious meal waiting for us,” she said. “It was as much for me as it was for everybody else, and I felt like somebody had been cooking for me all day. I don’t think there’s anything that replaces that feeling when you walk into a home and there’s a cooking smell, that sensory component. You feel taken care of.”

The slow cooker gave her the freedom to prepare her food at nine in the morning, head off to work, come back and have a hot meal ready to serve right away. To her, that made the slow cooker a truly special appliance. Home cooks can’t leave the oven on before heading to work, and no one can really trust a hot stove while they’re helping the kids with homework, she said, because those appliances require more physical attention. “For most people with young families, either they aren’t physically home at 5:00 when everyone else gets home, or they don’t have the time to do the food prep. A slow cooker gives you a unique ability to create that healthy meal at a time that works into your schedule.”

The company offers 10 unique slow cooker spice blends, including Moroccan Tagine, Sichuan and Coq Au Vin. The globally-inspired, non-irradiated spice blends are certified GMO-free, contain no additives or fillers, “and only two have a little bit of salt in them,” said Barnhart. Each packet is pre-portioned, makes a recipe for four to six people and there are two packets per pouch. “A lot of what’s on the market are seasoning packets, which have other things in them – fillers,” Barnhart said. “Ours are just spices, pre-packaged, pre-portioned, meant to be used in combination with our recipes for the slow cooker or the Instant Pot. All the blends have recipes on the back of them, and when you go to our website, we have multiple recipes for each spice blend.” With recipes for both slow cooking and pressure cooking available, home cooks can make a meal while away from home or pressure cook a meal in minutes.

Barnhart and McKay still post to the blog, too, offering even more recipes and tips for their fans. “I write one Zen inspiration per month where I share a little perspective on how to bring a little Zen into your life, and Jane follows up with slow cooking recipes,” she said. “It’s very organic. We don’t advertise on it or anything, and we love to bring new people into our slow cooking journey.”

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A mission to change the world for the better, Barnhart said, is what got the business started: “In 2010, I started studying what life was like for people with disabilities, cognitively and intellectually, in the state of Illinois, and I found the statistics were pretty grim,” she said. “Only 24 percent of adults with cognitive challenges are employed. My son is absolutely, incredibly wonderful and positive with so much to offer the world; I couldn’t imagine a world where he couldn’t shine his light ― and I decided I had to create a business for him. That was really the genesis [of the company].” Planet Access Company, a third-party logistics provider and social enterprise of nonprofit Search, Inc., was already providing employment for learning disabled individuals, so Barnhart partnered with them to take care of her company’s packaging needs. She sends the spice blends to Planet Access, and its team packages them in pouches. “The cool part about Planet Access is it’s a tiered employment model,” she said. “Those in training work on one part of our business, and as they gain more skills, they can work in the warehouse part of the business. They have a full-service warehouse, and there, it becomes more of an integrated employment model, where people with disabilities are working with people who don’t have disabilities.” With an expanded skill set both social and professional, she said, disabled individuals can go on to find employment elsewhere if they so choose. “It’s an unlikely pathway to success, but [zen of slow cooking] really started with this passion to create employment for people who don’t have employment opportunities,” she said. “I have a child with challenges; it’s gratifying to know I created a business he can work in someday. When we started with Planet Access Company, we had four adults with disabilities working in the business, and we’re now up to over 30. We have to keep growing that.”

Zen of slow cooking blends appeal to a wide range of consumers. “The fun part about our product is that we really are a lifestyle company. We have a lot of college kids who love us for tailgating,” said Barnhart, adding that young professionals also like the blends. “Our primary demographic is 30- to 55-year-olds, mostly women, and men who love pressure cooking. That’s actually a demographic that’s really rising; those are people who are cooking seven days a week– often they have families, and they don’t have the luxury of figuring out what they want to eat at 8:00 at night or ordering pizza. They usually have to get food on the table for their families by six, so they use the slow cooker all the time. Then, we get to the Baby Boomers, who often aren’t cooking as much but buy the blends for their kids who are getting started. Then, we’ve got the elderly, a generation of people who love us because it’s so easy to slow cook. Our recipes all take 20 minutes or less prep, some as little as 5 minutes of prep; if you have any kind of ability issues, or challenges standing for a long period of time, you can put our recipes together quickly and have a meal waiting for you.”

Retailers who carry zen of slow cooking blends get plenty of help selling them. “We spend a lot of time educating the grocery teams because they’re the front line for us once we leave the store,” Barnhart said. “When we go and do a demo, we spend a good hour talking to everyone at the store ― the grocery buyer, anyone stocking the shelves, the butchers. We leave them samples. These are the people who are helping us build the brand.” Through its robust brand ambassador program, which demonstrates the blends in-store, word of mouth spreads quickly. “We get about 10 people or more, customers who stop by and love us. They’re so excited about what we’re offering; they love our social mission, they love our product, the ease and simplicity of it, the health surrounding it ― they end up helping us sell it! They tell their friends, and once we’ve gone into the store one or two times, there’s this velocity that starts to flow.”

Barnhart also has tips for retailers and grocers who want to sell zen blends. “The stores that put us on a flat wall by the produce or the butcher, our packets fly off the shelf,” she said. “The butchers love us because we help them sell more meat. We’re designed to do that. It sells well anytime we’re right next to where fresh food is, because that’s how the packets are designed to be used, in combination with fresh food ― it’s not a product where you just add water, it’s something that requires you to cook with fresh foods.” As for kitchenware retail displays, she said it’s best to put the blends right next to a slow cooker or pressure cooker. “We’re in a couple of culinary stores that sell them. Any store that’s actually selling the slow cookers is a perfect fit for us. A lot of people like to use our blends as gifts. They’ll buy a slow cooker, an Instant Pot, and put three blends in to make it a gift for a new homeowner, new bride, new mom. It’s a great companion product.”

Zen of slow cooking spice blends have a suggested retail price of $6.99 per pouch. For more information, visit www.zenofslowcooking.com.