Todd Kelly is a hotel chef who runs Orchids at Palm Court in Cincinnati, but he treats it like a farm-to-table restaurant, making his own charcuterie, cheese and even beer.
Kelly discussed some of the tribulations of his job, as well as his new hot sauce, with Nation’s Restaurant News.
Do you have a seasonal beer for the fall?
Yes. It’s coming out on Thursday. It’s going to be kind of a take on pumpkin beer, but we’re using apples instead. We started with 200 pounds of local, organic apples and we turned them into apple butter and seasoned it with ras el-hanout [a North African spice mix, the exact composition of which varies from person to person], and that’s going to be the fermenter for the beer. We added it to malted barley, barley and a little bit of wheat. It should be pretty interesting.
What did you work on over the summer?
We spent a lot of the summer fermenting. We started at the beginning of ramp season [in the spring], making ramp kimchi and things along those lines, and that went into the summer. We probably have 500 gallons worth of product that is up and fermenting, and that will be done in six months or so.
We foraged alone in one trip 300 pounds of ramps. And it took us as long to clean them as it did to harvest them. We made purées that we froze, we pickled the bulbs, we made kimchi with a lot of the tops, and of course we spent weeks using them fresh.
I have a farm, and with another local farmer we grew a ton of hot peppers. About a month ago we topped off a Blanton’s [bourbon] barrel with hot sauce, and we’re going to age that for about six months.
You made that from local chiles?
Yeah. We started off with Fresnos, and then cayennes, and then we finished it with Thai chiles, because with the base of the Fresnos it didn’t get enough heat. We put about a 10-pound batch of Thai chiles in there.
How do you make it?
It takes about two to two and a half weeks. We start off with the peppers. We grind them [about 50 pounds at a time] and then salt them and add a little bit of garlic in there and let it ferment. Then we add vinegar and let it sit for a week, week and a half, and then that gets strained and that’s what went into the barrel.
We’re about a month and a half in. We test it every month, and we think it’ll be ready in about six months. It just keeps getting better and better.
Once it comes out of the barrel we’ll thicken it with a little xanthan gum.
Then what will you do with it?
We’ll use it all year long. One of the things we’re doing at the bar is Buffalo sweetbreads. We’re dredging them and searing them and deglazing the pan. Typically I like to deglaze sweetbreads with vinegar — I just think the acidity works great with them. For this dish we just drain the oil once the sweetbreads are seared and we hit it with the hot sauce. Then we’re making little blue cheese panna cottas and a little celery salad. So that’s one of the uses of the hot sauce.
You do your own charcuterie too, right?
We have probably 35 prosciuttos hanging now, and fresh ones like lardo and bacon. We have salamis and coppas hanging, too.
How do you find time to do that?
We have two full-time butchers. They fabricate all our meat and fish, and we get a whole hog every 10, 11 days. We did a couple of lamb prosciuttos as well. We got these beautiful lambs in, and I just didn’t have the right application for the legs [to go on the menu], so we cured them. Those are pretty small, so I think they’re going to take about six months to get to the right water ratio.
How do you test them?
That’s a good question. We have a variance in with the board of health, and they won’t accept it, but they won’t deny it either. So it’s not illegal, nor legal. [Our testing] is really based on water loss and time. We sent a couple of the samples out to get tested. They inoculate them with botulism and other different spores to see what potential they had to grow. None of them came back with any issues.
The cheese program is going strong, too. We were doing Valençay-style goat cheeses, and now we’re dong large, Camembert-style cheese.
They go in at a little under four kilos (8.8 pounds), so they’re pretty big wheels. We did our first couple of those, but our formula was off a little, so we got a firmer texture than we wanted. It wasn’t perfect for our cheese plate, so we’re using it in salad applications and things like that. It’s an experiment that went wrong, but that didn’t fail, if that makes sense.
More from Kelly
Does it cost more or less to make your own charcuterie and cheese than it would to buy it?
Cheese definitely costs a little bit more. The reason is you have the initial investment of supplies, and you’re also taking on the risk. If I’m going to pay $14 for a piece of Valençay, I’m guaranteed that that $14 is getting me what I’m purchasing. If I’m investing $13 [in milk and other supplies as well as storage], plus the equipment, plus that variable of how it’s going to turn out… Our initial batch had blue-green mold instead of white mold, so that was a loss.
So we had a local cheese maker come in. Our version of clean and cheese’s need of clean are two totally different things. We had to bleach and pressure-wash the entire cooler and redo all the filters and the fans. Every single time we put a new batch in that has to happen. That itself takes half an hour, 45 minutes.
But in the long run, it’s better. It may cost us a little bit more, but when we can control all the variables we want, we can make it perfect for my application.
How about for the charcuterie?
You might pay $18-$19 a pound for a ham. We pay $2-$3 a pound for these beautiful whole Berkshire or Red Wattle hogs. [Prosciutto] is a great use for the hams. During the holidays we ramp up our pig production, but we’ll wet-brine the hams instead [of making prosciutto] and use them for Thanksgiving. We’ll smoke them the day before and then finish them in the oven. Then after the holidays we’ll hang about two hams every three or four weeks.
We had some butchery issues. Red Wattle hogs have very thick, bristly type of hair, and [at the slaughterhouse] if they scald them [after slaughtering them] and can’t get all the hair off they take the skin off, and those ended up being wet brined.
Because if the skin isn’t on you can’t cure them?
Yeah, the product won’t come out right. And they come from a slaughterhouse that won’t open in the summer because of the heat. So we’ve had some supply issues there, too. We found that out the hard way, and we couldn’t get the [USDA] inspector from that specific slaughterhouse to pass [our hogs], so we had to wait for the other slaughterhouse to open before we could start production again. There are only three or four USDA-inspected slaughterhouses in our region, so if one’s closed and the other one’s 300 miles away, I’m going to tell my farmer that he’s going to get $800 or $900 for a pig and he has to drive 600 miles and stay overnight? So we ran into some hiccups there.
But still, it’s definitely worth it on the hams. And I think with our water rate and percentage loss, the hams are absolutely perfect. They’re climate controlled the entire time, and I think they’re amazing.
What do you do with the rest of the hog?
We usually fight over the ears, because you only have two. We usually just eat those. We’ll make either head cheese or a porchetta di testa with the rest of the head, and then roll it or form it into a terrine, or deep-fry it after that. The butts and the picnic cuts we’ll either make into charcuterie or we’ll use them as a braised application in the bar — like tacos or crispy pig with two-hour eggs.
Two-hour eggs? Is that eggs in an immersion circulator for two hours?
We’ll do that for 45 minutes and then we’ll crack them and add tea and soy and herb and put them back in [the circulator] for two hours. So they’re kind of like Chinese tea eggs. They’re really intense but they still have that liquid center, but with all those umami flavors of the tea and soy. That’s something I like to do with pork. It just makes them a little more interesting.
Then the chops and tenderloin you use as center-of-the-plate main courses?
Tenderloins we usually manipulate into something because they’re not as large as commodity pork tenderloins. We’ll cure the loins for Canadian bacon or other things for charcuterie plates. And we’ll either do pork belly or bacon with the belly.
We make goetta with the bones [an Ohio specialty sometimes associated with scrapple] and use that as a component of other pork dishes.
We usually cure and smoke the feet and hocks, and when it’s salmon season we’ll do a ham hock broth that we use with it.
And we’ll make lardo out of the back fat, and we might make guanciale [from the jowls]. The only bad part is when you get these 300-pound hogs it takes three days to process them.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
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