I wanted to pass this news article along, a really good story. I left the article link and Marble Hill Facebook link at the bottom of the post.
Marble Hill captures local flavor
Frequent farm visitor makes jams and jellies with fresh ingredients
By Polly Campbell
Bill Sands grew up in New York City, in the Marble Hill area of the Bronx.
He named his first company, Marble Hill Chocolatier, and his new one, Marble Hill Provisions, after his old neighborhood.
But for a guy who grew up in the city, Sands has been spending a lot of time in the country.
Ever since he began developing recipes for the jams, jellies, preserves and pickles that he sells as Marble Hill Provisions, he’s been hanging out at farmers markets, spending weekends driving around rural Ohio, talking to farmers, even pitching in on farm work.
“That’s the fun part,” he said. “Almost as fun as making the products. I get a lot out of it, personally, seeing how the products are grown and harvested, talking to the farmers about what goes into producing them.”
Sands, who makes his home in Union, Ky., has visited Wayward Seed Farm in Marysville, Ohio, where he buys sweet potatoes for his sweet potato butter. He’s visited the orchards at Eshelman Fruit Farm in Clyde, near Sandusky, where he gets apples and pears.
He got started with produce from Can-Du farm in Bethel, whose owners he met while selling jams and jellies at the Madeira Farmers market in summer 2008. He spent a day in the field with the root vegetable team at Chef’s Garden, the well-known specialty grower in Huron, Ohio.
“Almost all our products have a connection with a specific farm or producer,” he said. “That relationship gives such a sense of integrity. The one-on-one relationship is so important to what I’m doing.”
Each product is a season and a place captured in a jar to be enjoyed even in January or February. Production is seasonal; the products change with the availability of raw ingredients. So when they make Fortune Plum butter, it’s gone until next season for fortune plums.
For all the local, homegrown ingredients, the flavors and ingredients of some of the products have a big-city sophistication. There’s a strawberry-espresso and an apricot-bourbon jam. Sands seeks out unusual fruits and varieties such as quince, or the fortune plums, made into a fruit butter scented with cardamom. One popular style of his pickles is bottled with rye whiskey.
One popular flavor, which doesn’t use local ingredients, is the Meyer lemon-kumquat marmalade.
Sands and his one employee, Brooke Brandon, were making that variety one morning recently in the kitchen of Cumin, the Hyde Park restaurant. After chopping the citrus fruit and squeezing the juice, it was all combined in one shallow copper pot with flared sides.
“Copper works best because it heats quickly and evenly,” said Sands. “Jellies and marmalades need the high heat.” It’s also beautiful, with the shiny copper reflecting the fruit mixture, getting thicker and glossier as it reduces. It’s an intuitive cooking process; it’s done not so much at a specific temperature as when it reaches the particular consistency. The hot mixture is ladled into 8-ounce jars and then pasteurized.
That’s all there is to making marmalade. They don’t use added pectin. Most products have just a few ingredients.
“The Meyer lemon naturally has a spicy note, so we don’t add anything else. We want every product to taste mostly like its main ingredient,” said Sands.
This is production on a small scale. This batch will make one case of the marmalade, to be delivered to Fresh Market in Kenwood or Oakley, Marble Hill’s biggest customer. (Some kinds are also available at Park and Vine and Coffee Emporium.) Anthony La Marca, manger of the Kenwood store, said that the products were selling well, with their own display near the produce section, even at a premium price, about $10. “People just see them and are attracted to them,” he said. “And the guy’s here all the time, sampling and demonstrating his products.”
Sands is not actually there all the time, because he has a full-time job in IT sales, and runs Marble Hill on evenings and weekends. He’s about to take his next big step in developing his business. His products will be carried by Fresh Markets in Columbus, Cleveland, and soon in Indiana and Kentucky.
They will soon grow out of the Cumin kitchen, and are looking for a new production spot.
Meanwhile, Sands is working on expanding his network of farmers who will grow with him. They’ve used California strawberries in the past, but hope by this summer, they’ll have a local supplier.
As he moves to Fresh Markets in other parts of the country, he sees an opportunity to create connections with farmers in those areas.
“Ten years ago, I don’t think this would have worked,” he said. “But I’m finding smaller, family farms who are really open to this. When they see I’m serious, they want to support the company and grow together. I’m finding a real spirit of partnership out there.”
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20120125/LIFE01/301250022/Marble-Hill-captures-local-flavor?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|s
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Marble-Hill-Provisions/141236912597593
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