Gravy

In “Bread and Friends,” the final episode in her five-part series for Gravy, producer Irina Zhorov meets Camille Cogswell and Drew DiTomo in the final stages of preparation to open their new bakery. They hope that Walnut Family Bakery will be a special space in its Marshall, North Carolina community, where people run into friends, meet new acquaintances, and generally feel good entering. But how does such a place get created? 

Marshall was once a thriving town, where people went from the surrounding country for all their needs, but as new bypasses and highways were built, the area began withering. The population of Madison County, where Marshall is located, was at a high of around 22,500 in the 1940s. By the 1970s it had dropped by nearly 30 percent. 

Starting in the 1990s, new people began showing up—for the natural beauty, including mountains and streams; because of the area’s reputation as a stronghold of Americana music; or for its population of incredible artists and craftspeople. One of the first businesses opened by such a newcomer, in 1997, was a bakery.

Jennifer Lapidus produced European-style hearty loaves in a wood-fired oven. When she left, in 2008, she rented the space to other bakers, each of whom ran their own version of the place. Everyone who baked there came from outside Marshall…and yet they tried to build community with pizza nights and workshops. But the people who frequented the bakery over the years were almost exclusively the newcomers, while the locals preferred biscuits and cornbread to those heartier bakes. Plus, many locals didn’t have the time or budget to make a special trip for bread. 

Lapidus sold the place in late 2020 and the new owners, Cogswell and DiTomo, plan to run a retail operation, so that anyone can come by on the weekends, order at a staffed counter, hang out with a coffee, and stock up on bread for the week. They want their neighbors to gather on the property. Their business model and very ethic is built around a sense of camaraderie and care. 

In this final episode, Zhorov talks to Cogswell and DiTomo all about their visions for the bakery’s future, and how they plan to bring all of the people who make up Marshall’s community to their table. Additionally, she hears from Rob Amberg and Paul Gurewitz, two long-time Marshall residents and regulars at the bakery throughout its many iterations. As Zhorov tells us, “To turn flour into bread, good bread, requires skill, but to turn strangers into friends—into community—is the world’s greatest alchemy.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Cottage” bakeries refer to those in which people sell baked goods out of their homes. For much of the twentieth century, selling food made at home was largely prohibited, but that changed in the 1990s and early 2000s, when a small number of states passed laws allowing such sales. In the wake of the 2008 recession, every state followed suit, allowing people to earn money during a financial crisis. Around 2020, during the Covid pandemic, some states further loosened their cottage food laws, lifting earning caps and restrictions on the products people could sell. The number of cottage bakeries again exploded. 

Many bakers—like Camille Cosgwell and Drew DiTomo, the new owners of the rural North Carolina bakery that this Gravy series follows—are drawn to the cottage models during times of transition. It’s a chance to reshuffle priorities and create a sustainable work life without the long hours and unpredictable schedules the restaurant industry is known for. For others, a cottage bakery is a stepping stone to a brick-and-mortar shop. 

For this episode, Zhorov talks to Cogswell about her dreams for the new property. She wants to work four or five days per week, grow some fruits and vegetables, and build something that feels sustainable and fun. Zhorov also interviews other cottage bakers in the South about their trajectories and hopes. Dalen Gray and Tatiana Magee operate Between the Trees Bread in Boone, North Carolina, out of a space that used to be Dalen’s mother’s garage. During the pandemic, sisters Reyna Soto and Adriana Ipiña opened El Pantastico, in Duncanville, Texas, making Mexican pan dulce, or sweet baked goods. Former preschool teacher Sierra Patterson of Auburn, Alabama, started Sour South from her home when her school closed and she didn’t have childcare for her son. In conversation with Zhorov, each baker explains how cottage production works for them and how they hope to evolve their businesses in the future.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In “Fresh Flour to the People,” the third episode in her five-part series for Gravy, producer Irina Zhorov talks to bakers who have started demanding more from a key element in their craft—flour.  When we talk about ingredients, there’s a lot to consider: how fresh the fruit, how local the meat, how wild the fish. But for some reason, these are not questions most of us have been asking about flour—until more recently. 

In the South, much of the work to bring local, quality flours started in an inconspicuous little house and bakery in Marshall, North Carolina. People who have lived and worked at this property had a tendency to become obsessed with flour to the point that two of them actually transitioned away from baking, to milling flour. They’ve driven a small but mighty revolution among bakers in the South and beyond to take flour seriously, creating new markets and new flavors. 

A quick primer here. There are two basic kinds of wheat: hard wheat and soft wheat. Hard wheat has more protein, which gives the bread structure and allows it to rise and develop pretty air pockets. Hearty loaves require hard wheat, which did not grow in North Carolina. In fact, the whole South mostly grew soft wheats, which were better adapted to the local climate and land. Then local farmers and wheat breeders started experimenting with varieties of hard wheat, creating a local grain economy, a resurgence of small-scale mills, and breads packed with distinct and varied flavors. 

In this episode, Zhorov interviews Jennifer Lapidus, the first baker on the Marshall property, who began seeking a local hard wheat for the European-style, naturally leavened loaves she loves. Today, she runs Carolina Ground, a small grain mill in western North Carolina that has fostered a community of farmers, bakers, and millers. After Lapidus left, she rented the property to David Bauer, who opened Farm and Sparrow bakery and similarly became interested in milling; today, Farm and Sparrow is exclusively a mill. Bauer tells Zhorov of his path to working with local grains, and of the tension between innovation and tradition. Zhorov also speaks with David Marshall, a former wheat breeder for the U.S. Department of Agriculture who began experimenting with local varieties of hard wheat in the region.  Finally, Camille Cogswell, who now owns the bakery with her partner, Drew DiTomo, shares how she is choosing the flour she will work with in the space, fostering connections to her new home, new foodways and purveyors, and new people along the way.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s how the ovens work. You build a fire inside the oven’s chamber and let the heat soak into the masonry, a process that can take many hours of maintaining the fire. Eventually, you let the fire go out, sweep out the ashes, and you’re left with a hot box that functions as an oven. Unlike a gas or electric oven, you can’t just turn up the oven once it cools, or add a little fire if it doesn’t seem hot enough. 

The current owners of the Marshall property, Camille Cogswell and Drew DiTomo, are seasoned bakers who have worked in high-end restaurants. But, despite their expertise, neither had used an oven like these to make bread or pastries before moving in. Learning how to manage the fire in the unforgiving ovens has been a rite of passage for everyone who’s lived and baked here, including the person who built them—Jennifer Lapidus.

Lapidus bought the place in 1997 and ran her bakery, Natural Bridge Bakery, from there. She’d apprenticed with baker Alan Scott to learn to make Flemish style bread, which uses a centuries-old style of natural leavening. Scott, who also designed wood-fired ovens, came from California and helped Jennifer build her ovens. Jennifer procured all her own firewood, often from an hour away, and experimented until she learned how to harness her oven, burning a fire for twelve hours before baking in order to heat the masonry through. 

After Lapidus, Tara Jensen tinkered until she mastered the fire for her bakery, Smoke Signals. She’d start the fire in the evening, feed her sourdough starters, and let the fire burn until the early morning, when she’d start mixing and baking dough. The multi-day process became a ritual. 

In this episode, Zhorov talks to Cogswell, Lapidus, and Jensen all about how they learned to tend the fire and live by the rhythms of wood-fired sourdough baking. She also talks with Rob Segovia-Welsh, who runs Chicken Bridge Bakery with his wife, Monica, about what benefits he sees in working with fire. Throughout these conversations, she explores how baking this way offers potential for connection to a community—and makes the baker’s life a pretty good life. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The little building with a metal roof and ovens with more than sixty square feet of stone hearth has been home to some of the most exciting baking in the country. It’s one of the places where naturally leavened, rustic breads gained a foothold in the South, where two artisanal flour mills got their start, and where multiple incredible bakers honed their craft. 

It started with Jennifer Lapidus, who fell in love with naturally leavened, Flemish loaves and learned how to bake them in a wood-fired oven under California baker Alan Scott. She moved into the property in Marshall, and made one of the two buildings her home, and the other, Natural Bridge Bakery. Lighting the oven fire, shaping dough, baking, transporting firewood—she gained mastery as she evolved with the property. 

After a decade of living and working in Marshall, Lapidus turned the bakery over to David Bauer, who opened his own business, Farm and Sparrow, before turning to milling. After David came Tara Jensen and her bakery, Smoke Signals, which she also operated as a classroom. At the end of 2018, Brennan Johnson moved in. Soon after, the pandemic hit. Johnson would be Lapidus’ last tenant. 

The new owners, Cogswell and DiTomo, bought the place in 2020. Both come from the restaurant world—in 2018, Cogswell was named Rising Star Chef by the James Beard Foundation for her pastry work at Zahav in Philadelphia. The following year the owners of Zahav tapped her to open a new restaurant, but at the beginning of the pandemic, Cogswell was let go. She visited her family in Asheville and saw an Instagram post about the sale of the bakery. In the course of a day, she and DiTomo formulated a vision for their life there. 

In some ways, they are following the same path as the bakers that came before them. They sought it out at a time of transition and moved in with their own dreams, ready to shape the place and let it shape them.

In this episode, Zhorov talks to the new bakery owner Camille Cogswell about her vision for the future; the original owner, Jennifer Lapidus, who shares her own journey to the property and beyond; and the bakery tenants in between, including David Bauer, Tara Jensen, and Brennan Johnson. Each baker gives insight into the rhythms, challenges, and promises of living and working around a wood-fired oven.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lucien Darjeun Meadows is an English, German, and Cherokee writer born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains. His debut poetry collection, In the Hands of the River, is forthcoming from Hub City Press in September 2022.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can Co-Ops Fix a Broken Food Delivery Model? Gravy producer Sarah Holtz introduces listeners to food industry veterans in Lexington, Kentucky, who launched a food delivery co-op during the COVID era as an alternative to Big Delivery (think DoorDash, GrubHub, Postmates, or UberEats). It aimed to put drivers, restaurants, and take-out customers all on the same team. Listen to learn more about the promise of a more equitable system during a time when takeout can make or break a restaurant.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“The Bare Minimum,” producer Sarah Holtz follows Florida’s Fight for 15, a labor campaign aimed at raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Though there are countless labor issues associated with restaurant work, from wage theft to sexual harassment, the minimum wage is a concrete area to affect change, because it improves material conditions for hourly workers in every industry. Historically, it’s also a difficult thing to change. 

To understand why, Holtz interviews experts to explore the history of the minimum wage. She speaks with Alex Harris, a fast food worker and leader in Florida’s Fight for 15 campaign. He tells of the health risks he endured while working during the pandemic, participating in a walk-out, and what’s at stake in the Fight for 15. Holtz also interviews Matthew Simmons, a labor historian at Emmanuel College in Franklin Springs, Georgia, who has studied the unique challenges among low-wage workers in Florida. Finally, Samantha Padgett, general counsel for the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, provides a counter-argument, asserting that minimum wage hikes threaten businesses that bolster tourism in Florida. In her reporting, Holtz examines both the economic and moral factors that motivate the Fight for 15. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In “The Bitter and the Sweet of Craft Chocolate in the Global South” episode of Gravy, producer Sarah Holtz engages important voices in the complex conversation about ethical chocolate, from central Ghana to southern Missouri. 

In the chocolate world, terms like corporate sustainability and ethical sourcing are gradually entering the mainstream, but they remain a little vague. Holtz explores how direct trade and profit-sharing models offer alternatives to the practices of the largest chocolate companies in the world—Big Chocolate—which conceive of cocoa farmers not as partners, but as links in the supply chain.

In her reporting on labor in the chocolate industry, Holtz asks: How do you define ethical consumption? Is there such a thing? And—when you’re standing in the grocery aisle, gazing at a wall of options—how do you know which chocolate bar to choose?

To begin to address these questions and more, Holtz speaks with Kwabena Assan Mends, founder of Emfed Farms, a company that serves small cocoa farmers in central Ghana, especially those who are aging or have physical disabilities. She also talks to Shawn Askinosie and Lawren Askinosie of Askinosie Chocolate, and Scott Witherow of Olive & Sinclair, two vanguards of the craft chocolate movement. Finally, Megan Giller, food writer and author of Bean-To-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution, weighs in on the history of the chocolate supply chain and upending a pattern of colonization. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In "Memphis Restaurant Workers Unite," Gravy follows a group of restaurant workers that’s slated to become the first formal union of food and beverage workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Led by Lily Nicholson, the group, Memphis Restaurant Workers United (MRWU), organized a petition that resulted in $2.5 million in pandemic support grants from the county government and has begun negotiating contracts with local restaurants so that workers can make a living wage with benefits. At the average restaurant in Memphis, the front of house staff will be majority white, while the back of the house will be predominantly made up of immigrant workers and workers of color. This unsettling trace of Memphis’s segregated past reflects a larger structural issue in the industry. Part of MRWU’s challenge is to make sure that the union is as diverse as the city. 

In this episode, reporter Sarah Holtz talks to Lily Nicholson, Allan Creasy, and Zach Barnard, restaurant veterans and organizers of Memphis Restaurant Workers United, all about the working conditions that led them to form the union and the process entailed. She also speaks with Jeffrey Lichtenstein of the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest federation of unions, who helped get MRWU off the ground; and Victoria Terry, who works with the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based group of African American trade unionists. Holtz attends an MRWU meeting at RP Tracks, a Memphis bar and restaurant that supports the efforts of MRWU.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices