The Tastemakers by David Sax Page A

of years, working to bring back, grow, and cook antebellum southern grains that were on the verge of extinction. Those ingredients formed the core of Brock’s cooking, and much of what he did with them unfolded in the restaurant’s immaculate kitchen laboratory, stacked to the ceiling with shelves of precisely labeled food containers and where he worked with Josh Fratoni, his “fermentation guru.” On a large chalkboard was a list of sixty-odd vinegars,misos, and fermentation experiments currently going on with local grains, most of them supplied by Anson Mills. Brock handed around several plastic vials of liquid fermented from Sea Island red beans, which we dropped onto our tongues and unleashed its unique flavor, something like a sweeter, milder soy sauce. Next, the chef grabbed plastic spoons and scooped red pea and faro shoyu paste from a tub. It was tangy and sweet but also tasted like porridge, thanks to the natural sugars brought out through a yearlong lactic fermentation, which Brock still wasn’t sure was long enough. He took out another tub and passed around spoons with its contents. “Tell me what you think this is,” Brock said as I took a taste. Buttery and salty but somewhat sweet, it was incredibly familiar, like a richer version of something I’d eaten all my life. “It’s popcorn,” Brock said, with the slightest hint of the magician’s smile. “A miso made from whole popcorn and popcorn stock. Actually, from Glenn’s own Appalachian heirloom sweet flint corn.”
    Miso paste is typically made by fermenting rice or soybeans. When mixed with stock it becomes the soup often served at Japanese restaurants. Brock had not only created a stock with popcorn but also found a way to ferment popcorn kernels. I shut my eyes and took another lick, transported instantly to a movie theater’s sticky seats.
    We tasted more misos, including one made from benne seeds (“It’s like peanut butter on sex,” said Roberts), and one that was actually a fermented peanut butter (“like peanut butter with MSG on top” countered Brock, with great pride). “I’ve got an idea,” Roberts said, turning to Brock quickly with a flick of his hair. “Because with that rice, when you cook it, the dregs taste like black cherries. I mean, think about that,” he said, motioning to the popcorn miso, then, looking at the bag of rice on the counter, “and wow!”

    I n the world of
Sex and the City
–themed cupcake tours, it is tempting to think of food trends as 10 percent creativity, 90 percent fashion fad, with the herd flocking toward the latest taste of the week. Even though the great cupcake boom took years to reachits maddening apex, it was fundamentally a relatively simple thing. Someone decided to bake a cupcake in New York, those cupcakes became popular, and that popularity spread around the world, inspiring others to bake their own cupcakes. Yes, it took tears, long hours, and enough butter to fill the Grand Canyon to make the cupcake into a trend, but no one had to paddle a canoe into alligator- and snake-infested waters at the crack of dawn to hand-harvest cupcakes with a scythe in hand, as Glenn Roberts has regularly done with certain types of rice. Never had there been a year when cupcakes simply weren’t available because a hurricane, flood, or insects decimated tray after tray of cupcakes in one fell swoop before they could even be iced. No one ever lost the original DNA for a cupcake, setting the entire industry back years before another cupcake could be eaten. For Glenn Roberts, these regular catastrophes are the acceptable, everyday risks he weathers in order to bring his grains into the world.
    To start a food trend from agriculture is one of the riskiest, most ballsy things an entrepreneur can do. Yet every day there are countless farmers, scientists, and gardening dreamers with a trowel in their hand, digging in