Meat On a Stick, Black Coffee, and Bread: Kim Vallejo On Our local Grainshed
The Museum of Food and Drink
MOFAD
https://www.mofad.org/
Wed June 10, 2026 : Kim Vallejo and June Russell in conversation about the past, present, and future of local grains.
https://mofad.ticketing.veevartapp.com/tickets/view/list/restoring-the-grainshed-reviving-regional-grain-in-new-york
https://www.mofad.org/program-detail-page/grains
MOFAD Programs
https://www.mofad.org/programs
Kim Vallejo
She Wolf Bakery
https://www.shewolfbakery.com/
June Russell
Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming
https://www.glynwood.org/
Culinaria: Women Of Color Rewriting Our Food Stories
https://culinariastories.net/book
Dr. Willa Zhen
The Culinary Institute of America
Leah Eskin
Like Wafers in Honey
https://www.leaheskin.com/
Farmer Ground Flour
https://www.farmergroundflour.com/
Brooklyn Granary and Mill
https://brooklyngranaryandmill.com/
Bread Alone
https://www.breadalone.com/
TRANSCRIPT
(0:00)
Ivan De Luce (ID)
Welcome to Radio...Take two. Welcome to Radio MOFAD, the podcast from the Museum of Food and Drink. How's it going, Bernadette?
Bernadette Cura (BC)
It's going great. We love the rain.
ID:
We love the rain.
BC:
It makes people want to scurry into a museum. Come here when it's raining. It's the perfect place to be.
And we're not going to give you a headache because we're too large. And also there are snacks to help you to fight off that museum headache.
ID:
We've got protein in the form of Nuts for Nuts honey roasted peanuts.
BC:
And also the halvah has a good amount of protein and fiber.
ID:
It's all good for you, really. The pretzel bites are tasty, too. Some simple carbs for some energy as well.
BC:
There's like a great burst of energy.
ID:
And you know what I will say about MOFAD? Your feet will never hurt after you get through it, because there's simply not that much surface area to walk across, you know.
BC:
It's just the right size.
ID:
I agree.
BC:
Absolutely. (1:00) And also the air in here is quite nice. Like, you know, like the air in museums sometimes it's just like, oh my, why am I dissing museums?
ID:
Take that, The Met.
BC:
No, stop. I love museums.
ID:
I love museums, even The Met.
BC:
So I'm not going to say another word about other museums. I'm just going to say this is a really great place to be. And oh my gosh, we are revealing too much about ourselves, I think.
ID:
Pay no attention to the podcast hosts behind the curtain.
BC:
We'll edit this out in post.
ID:
Yes, or will we?
BC:
I don't know.
ID:
Well, so we had a great chat with Claudette. We've also had some great events this past week here at MOFAD as well. One of my favorites was the one about Women of Color in Food Studies.
It was basically a book talk for this new book called Culinaria. And it basically has these chapters written by different food studies academics, both senior academics and junior academics, all about their food stories and their cultures. It ranges from autoethnography, talking about one's own family and family recipe history and culture, other kinds of ethnography, talking to people from other cultures, and just a really broad transnational look at Women of Color in Food Studies.
BC:
(2:19) Well, I know that Willa was here, and she is a professor at the Culinary Institute of America, of which I am a graduate. It was nice that she was here to be part of that program representing the CIA, yo!
ID:
Exactly.
BC:
We had food at that event. Tanoreen provided some delicious food.
ID:
Delicious Palestinian food.
Yeah, it was so delicious.
ID:
Yeah, so I really encourage people to check out culinariastories.net. It is the page for the book. The book is out soon.It's not out yet. But for any of you food studies people out there, it's a really unique look at these underrepresented topics.
BC:
I was at the event for Leah Eskin and her book, Like Wafers and Honey, which we called our book club, but nobody had to read the book beforehand.
ID:
But they probably learned a bit about the book while they were there.
BC:
The nice thing is that Leah read some lovely excerpts from the book.
ID:
So what is the book? What's it about?
BC:
So that book was set in the town of Pitigliano, which is in Tuscany, which apparently we all learned was called Little Jerusalem because of the Jewish community in that town for centuries. And sadly also for centuries at different times the community was persecuted and kicked out. There were also times of you know where the community flourished and was supported, but not always.
And I believe this book was set in the last time that it happened during the anti-Jewish laws in the 30s.
ID:
(3:58) Right.
BC:
So Taylor, our program director, made some cookies from the book because it's stories and recipes. The cookies were called sfratti and sfratto means eviction. It's so dark and sad that they can make something delicious about something that is so tragic.
But when they would do these sfratti or evictions, they would use a stick to bang on the door or to bang to like let people know that they had to get out. And the cookie is in the form of a stick which is then cut into rounds. And they're made with walnuts and pine nuts and lemon zest and honey and they were so delicious.
A gentleman who also came to the program made them as well from the book and said he had the same experience.
ID:
It's just interesting to make this recipe out of a very dark time in your community's history. It shows the resilience of that community. Making the most of being evicted en masse just because of your religion.
BC:
(5:00) Anyway, it was a really moving event and we loved it.
ID:
Wow, very cool. Another event coming up relating to She Wolf Bakery.
BC:
Oh my gosh.
ID:
A lot of you might be familiar with this really amazing bakery here in New York that sources local grains from the New York and Tri-State area. We're going to be talking to Kim Vallejo who is the business director at She Wolf Bakery. About sourcing local grains.
BC:
I'm so excited for that. And she's going to be in conversation with June Russell who I know had a lot to do with building that ecosystem. Here in our area, she used to work for Grow NYC.
As a matter of fact, one of our volunteers MJ or Michelle Hernandez used to work for Grow NYC and knew her and speaks highly of her and is very excited about that program for that reason. Yeah.
She's going to be back talking about what she built with She Wolf also.
ID:
(6:01) Right, right. So cool. Yeah, it's going to be great.
I can't wait.
BC:
We did talk to Kim about this upcoming event. Yeah, so here it is. Check it out.
ID:
Welcome to Radio MOFAD, the podcast from the Museum of Food and Drink. Kim Vallejo is the business director of She Wolf Bakery, a New York City-based bakery that sources its grains from local farmers. Founded in 2009, She Wolf helped to create the resurgence of regional grains resulting in breads that are healthier, tastier, and easier to digest while fostering a more sustainable food supply chain.
Kim will appear at MOFAD on June 10th in conversation with June Russell, director of regional food programs at the Glynnwood Center for Regional Food and Farming to discuss regional grain in New York along with a guided sourdough tasting.
ID:
Kim, so you are the business director at She Wolf Bakery and I was wondering how you got your start at She Wolf and how you got connected with them in the first place.
Kim Vallejo (KV)
(7:06) That's a great question. And also like everything in our story loops back to June Russell. So I had been working with the state of New York.
I was the head of the New York City office for the New York State Department of Agriculture based in Brooklyn, and I did that for about five years from about 2016 into 2021. Working with local ag or representing local ag in the city was super exciting and fulfilling work. That's where I initially met June and got really excited about the work she was doing at the grain stand.
And halfway through 2021, I decided I needed a career change. State service was wonderful, but just not for me. It was a great job while I had it, but I just I needed something more hands-on.
As we've sort of discussed, I grew up in food and I missed the actual hustle and bustle of being inside a kitchen or at the farmer's market or really working with ingredients with my hands, right? (8:02) And so I made the tough choice to make a career change then and took the summer off. I was doing a lot of baking and soul searching and trying to find my way and like what comes next.
And I just happened to shoot an email to June and I said, hey, you know the mission that that you're pursuing and this work with local grains still feels really relevant to me and like something that I want to pursue further. Do you know of anything? And there wasn't really a lot on the job market at the time for doing this kind of work, but June got back to me and said, you know, Andrew Tarlow is looking for someone to run She Wolf.
She Wolf is poised to grow. They don't currently have a business person or a business lead. It was just sort of that the founding head baker and the owner and maybe one other manager at the time and they needed to be thinking about the next steps.
He was slated to move the bakery into the Navy Yard, which is a city run entity. I had worked for the state and worked with city RFPs and I understood the process of working with the government agencies and the red tape and all of the licensing and all of the inspections and all of the fun things that we were going to have to to go through in our new home. (9:06) And so June put us in touch.
BC:
Yeah, right. All the fun stuff.
KV:
But June put us in touch and Andrew and I met for coffee and he came with my resume with just like notes all over it and said, you know, you seem awesome. We should talk and the rest is history. I think we spent two hours in Marlowe & Sons just chatting about all things food and getting really excited about the work that She Wolf is doing.
And I came in, I met the team and completely fell in love with the work. We are so true to our mission and that's so hard to find these days that it just like it felt like home, like kind of immediately. And so here I am five years later, still very excited to be doing this work every day.
BC:
I was wondering, you were saying get your hands back into food. Do you actually participate in production at She Wolf? Because I know you're the business manager.
KV:
Yeah. (9:59) Yeah, you wouldn't expect me to do much in production, maybe less so now, but certainly in my early days. Running a small business means you do anything and everything, right?
And so I'm literally going to be the person at the farmer's market tomorrow. I'll probably have to cover a wholesale shift, you know, in the next week or two. I'm definitely pretty good at shaping bread at this point and like happy to get my hands in the dough whenever I can.
I jump into our pastry team and we troubleshoot our custard recipes together. Like luckily, I come with enough kitchen experience and enough of a love for baking that the team found me useful in those spaces, which was really exciting for me. It makes for a really exciting job.
Yeah, but it is a little bit of, you know, I've got the 30,000 foot view, but I'm also on the ground and inside every operational piece of what we do in a day and sometimes that does mean production. Yeah, and it's fun. I wouldn't change it.
I think it's hard to find the balance of time sometimes. You're splitting your time in so many different ways and I think we've gotten a little better about that as the team has grown. (11:02) We've had more people to delegate to and more people to lean on across all the teams, but if I go for too long without shaping a batard, I'm in a bad place and I need to get on the bench.
That's just a part of my reality here.
ID:
Because it's all about the bread. Absolutely.
KV:
It is all about the bread. Yes, exactly.
ID:
You know, our main topic here about this regional grain sourcing and that sort of landscape, we were wondering what that looks like and how it's evolved both since She Wolf was founded in 2009 and since you joined in 2021.
KV:
Yeah, I mean it's growing and evolving literally every single year, which is something that I find so exciting about working in this space. When our bakery began, there was no local flour to work with. Like our origin story, Austin Hall, our founding baker, he was hired at one of Andrew's restaurants.
He was hired at Roman's to just bake bread for the restaurant. So he would come in overnight, mix the dough, bake it off in the morning for service, and then go home.(12:04) I think in the early days, they were just working with King Arthur, you know, organic flour, whatever you could find, because there were not other options until June introduced herself and came knocking.
I think she reached out to Andrew pretty early on in the grain stand days and was like, explained what she was doing, looking to bring local grains into the green market. She came in and met with Austin and Austin just immediately gravitated to that mission. Like he just, he got it and was committed to, as a baker, figuring out how to do this well.
And from there, our niche was born. Our niche was the sole bread of She Wolf in the early days until we were a little further along and then we started making batards. But even then, Austin could not find local grains.
So at this point, we're talking like 2014-2015, which is when the grain stand got its start. He was going to the farmer's market or sending someone to the farmer's market to get a 10-pound bag or a 20-pound bag. (13:00) He couldn't even get multiple bags of these.
So our production was really, really small, in part because the mill we were buying from had also just formed. I think that Farmer Ground flour was founded about the same time that we were. And so they're just new and growing and didn't quite have distribution into the city yet.
The grain stand was the only way to get your hands on some local grains. That, of course, has changed very dramatically just within the last couple of years. We have continued to buy a lot of our flour from Farmer Ground and what used to be one 20-pound bag a week has now turned into two full pallets of various grains every week.
4,000 pounds of local grains coming in and out just from one supplier. We branched out who we're sourcing grains from as well because the market has evolved, because there's more people getting into this space. And something that I have been really excited to do with Sarah Vitale, my pastry lead, she's having an especially big impact on this because we realized a couple of years ago, you know, Farmer Ground has grown to a scale that we can get pallets every week, which is great.
(14:06) But there's a lot of other smaller mills in our region who are now trying to come up on the heels of Farmer Ground. There's more consumer demand. There's people milling in Jersey. There's people milling in Pennsylvania. There's people milling in Massachusetts.
BC:
There's people milling in Brooklyn.
KV:
Yes. Oh, we'll get to Patrick. Absolutely. There's people milling in Brooklyn now. And all of this is coming from, I think, the original proof of concept that you can make beautiful, delicious things out of local grains and that people want them. People come to the market to seek them out.
I know that Sfoglini Pasta and She Wolf are, I think, Farmer Ground's biggest customers at the moment. But what we started to do maybe three or four years ago, Sarah and I, is look at our pastry program as an area for growth. And this was strategic in a couple of ways.
One, you can work with flours that don't make great bread in pastry. You can use a softer wheat. You can use something with less protein.
(14:59) You can use something like rye that is tricky to make a bread entirely out of or a good bread entirely out of. And you can start to buy from smaller mills and smaller suppliers because you don't need as much flour to make a couple of muffins as you do to make hundreds of loaves of bread. Or you can use something that's like einkorn that's quite pricey and really special, but you can use a small amount of it in biscuits that, again, you're not making these giant loaves of bread and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them at that point.
We're just making them at this point for our café, we could make six or 12. And then if something is a hit and we want to scale it up, we have the option to do so and we can bring it to the green market. But through that, we have been a part of constantly keeping our eyes peeled. Anytime we hear that there's a new varietal, a new mill, a new way to get some local grains here in Brooklyn, we jump on it. That includes working with folks like Patrick. (15:59) As soon as we heard he was opening, we were like, what can we get from you that we can't get from someone else?
Let's build a product around it. We start with the grain first. That's how we're creating new products here.
Our brownies, our cookies, all of that is coming from not just we should have a pastry program, but looking at what the local grain industry needs and how can we support it. We can make something at smaller scale. We can make these new items that require different kinds of specs than bread.
And between both our pastry and our bread program, now we have a home for pretty much anybody who's milling locally.
BC:
That's so exciting. When I was reading about June and the challenges of bringing these grains to bakers, I read that people would use the new flours from the grain shed and would say they just don't work because they had been baking with commodity flours and they act differently. I'm sure that's one of the challenges still since you're dealing with new varieties of flour all the time.
(16:59) That's just amazing that you're doing that education for people if they need it. On a numbers basis, what percentage of people in New York do you think, like this is a small percentage of usage, right? I mean, it's like a drop in the bucket.
Whmjķat are the numbers? I'm curious.
KV:
For perspective, we say that something that makes She Wolf really deferent from a lot of other bakeries that work with local grains is our scale, is our volume. It's one thing to make 25 perfect loaves or 30 perfect loaves from local grains and sell it in your local bakery. That's a beautiful thing. Every neighborhood should have a bakery that is doing that. That's not She Wolf's job. We're producing at a slightly higher scale. We're making 2,000 loaves on our busiest days, which is significant. But to your point, it's still a very small drop in the bucket for New York City. We're still, for the most part, we sell about half of what we make in the farmer's market. 1% of the population actually shops at the farmer's market. We really are serving a very small slice of the pie. (18:00) We are expanding our wholesale program. We have about 75 wholesale customers, mostly restaurants around the city. We are, in reality, serving a much wider audience beyond that. But again, it's people who have the income and the leisure to go to great restaurants around the city and enjoy local food there. So there's still a long way to go, I think, in terms of making these grains and the products that you can produce from them just very commonplace and more approachable or accessible to the general public.
BC:
Ivan, at your store where you get the She Wolf, do you see the Bread Alone bread there?
ID:
Yes, our ocal farmer's market is the Tompkins Square Park one in the East Village and we see Bread Alone and we see She Wolf. And She Wolf's right by our compost drop-off. I think that I'm lucky to live near this and anyone who's living near a farmer's market because growing up in New York, I was not living near one while I was in Washington Heights or Hell's Kitchen or things like that.
BC:
(19:04) Yeah, even within the city, it varies.
KV:
Yeah, access neighborhood by neighborhood is really different. And we can't leave Bread Alone out of this conversation. We have to shine the light on Sharon and her team there, too, because they have also been doing this work since the 80s. We're sort of the first ones on the scene. They're producing at a much different scale than we are and we're using a different percentage of local grains. But in terms of moving the needle and creating demand for sourdough and really highlighting the grains themselves, Bread Alone is a very important part of that story and we're very happy to sell alongside them at the farmer's market. We learn a lot from them. We're actually a very tight community. Most of the bakers who do this kind of work and we need to be because what we're doing is really tricky.
It is really hard and it's really helpful for us to be able to bounce ideas off one another, talk about sourcing, talk about equipment investment, talk about, you know, can I send my staff up to visit your bakery to learn because we're going to expand this kind of production. (20:05) We have colleagues like that around the northeast. Nora up at Mel, Randy at Red Hen up in Vermont.
We all have been a part of these trials where we're working with sort of unknown grains and working together to come up with a recipe so we can test how well they produce bread. And it really does take this sort of coalition of all of us to move the needle. It's how we've seen so much growth in the industry. And I think the more bakers there are like us who want to solve this problem, the more demand you're going to see for local grains from the general public. We just need to make it delicious and then everybody wants it.
BC:
It's funny that you just said that we just have to make it delicious. The stuff tastes so good. And when I talk to my own family, they are so resistant. It's like, why am I going to pay eight dollars for a loaf of bread? It's half the price for this. And I'm like, have you tasted it? Have you done a side-by-side? M Because that piece of spongy bimbo or whatever that I don't want to cut down anyone.(21:05) Dude, taste it.
It tastes so good. With it in my own family, it's so frustrating. Like you guys, please taste it. That's what matters.
KV:
It's taste and feel. This is something I hear from my customers and my personal networks all the time is people come to the stand and they say, you know, I can't eat other people's bread. I thought I was sensitive to gluten, but turns out I have no trouble with your bread.
That could be because it's sourdough. It could be because it's organic. It could be because it's more whole grain.
All of these things combined, right? I have a very picky audience in my personal community. I'm a boxer and I will sometimes bring unsold bread to the gym just because I hate to see it go to waste. We have a very robust donation program. We're always making sure that unsold bread finds a home. And they know our baguettes because we don't donate our baguettes the next day because they don't hold up.
(22:00) So I bring a few into the gym every now and again. And I anticipated getting so much pushback from a gym community of like, don't bring us carbs, don't bring us bread. But as soon as people try it, they say this is the best bread I've ever tasted.
And because they're working with their bodies as their profession, they say I feel different. I don't feel bloated. I don't feel just full of fluff.
This feels nourishing. My gut notices the difference. And I think that's the truth with all of our breads and everyone who tries it.
It's taste and feel.
ID:
Totally, totally. It's really hard to go back once you try good bread. When I would spend a lot of my childhood with my family in Serbia, there's bakeries all over the place.
I mean, whenever you think of it with the European bakery on every corner, it's like that in Belgrade. It was it was always disappointing to come back to New York and then suddenly not have that. So it's it's sad.
BC:
(22:57) How sad is it that it's disappointing to come back to New York because it's like so burgeoning there like and so part of a regular life. That even New York, which is pretty decent, is lacking. Wow.
KV:
We have customers that come to the green markets all the time and say I just got off a flight from France and put in any any European city. They're like I literally just got off a flight. You're the only bread I eat in New York.
I came straight here from the airport.Or they're going home to some other town in America and they're coming and buying bread and asking can I put this in my carry-on? Like, yeah, I fly with bread all the time.
It's the only way. But yeah, we get a lot of that people saying, you know, the French in particular, they come seek us out and they're like this is this is the only bread outside of France that I eat.
ID:
Well, I was also wondering how does one get involved in this community? Whether it be joining a grain supplier or a bakery or some kind of intermediary maybe some kind of city agency or something. How can people get involved in in this?
KV:
I think there's a couple of ways. (23:59) I mean, first and foremost, always as a consumer, the more business we can do, the more we prove the concept that this is something that should exist and there should be more of us and there should be more and more bakeries that operate like ours. If you're looking to take the next step, I think there are some of our colleagues are teaching classes.
It's not something we do yet, although I love the idea of it. I know that Patrick is hosting classes at Brooklyn Granary and Mill. Take any opportunity you can to get your hands on some of these grains and start working with it. Start experimenting. If people do come to our cafe in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we sell some of our sourdough starter as well as a collection of local grains that we work with so you can get a little starter, a little she will starter pack and you know, happy experimenting at home. I think that's a really a really important way.
The question that I think you raised though with like thinking about city agencies and sort of higher level, you know, agents of change. I would love to see some more support for better grains procurement. (25:00) This has been a tricky issue when I was with the state. I was there in the early days of COVID and a lot of our emergency response was about getting food to food pantries, right? And the thing that people wanted more than anything was grains and bread. In grains because they're shelf stable, they last a long time.
Bread because it's the base of so many people's diets, various kinds of breads across so many different cultures is relevant. And there was a lot of money that we were managing at the state front called Nourish New York. It was a governor's initiative to buy from local farms and get it into food pantries and we could find local beef, local milk, local cheese, local eggs, local fruits and veg. We had the hardest time finding any bread that met the local requirement that was going to be 50% or more of local grains because there's just not enough of it out there and there's not enough people making it. I think June again had a hand in finding one of our green market bakeries that could step up and produce for food pantries. (26:00) But that still feels elusive.
Schools don't serve the kind of bread that we make and they should. Kids love our bread. It's much healthier.
We know that it's better for you when it's organic. We know that when it's sourdough you're going to absorb more of the vitamins and minerals that are more bioavailable to our bodies. We know that good bread is actually the base of a very healthy diet and bad bread is not. M But there's not a lot of institutional support yet, I think, to prioritize grains. I think it's much sexier, much easier to talk about, you know, we're in a dairy state. We got to get New York state milk into schools.
Absolutely. Apples, we have a plenty. Let's talk about fruits and veg.
Those are more immediately coming to mind when people talk about the importance of local food. I think staple crops get a little bit lost in that conversation and people just don't think about flour. With that level of intensity or interest that they do, you know, the heirloom tomato. And I would argue that it's just as important and just as interesting. (26:59) It's just not center stage yet.
ID:
Absolutely. Well, keyword yet. I guess that brings us to the future of this and what a bright future it looks like. I mean, where do you see these trends going in the next five years?
KV:
I really don't know, but I'm so excited to find out. I think the more of us that are asking these questions and the more bakers that are putting their creative energy into coming up with new ways to showcase these grains, that's really the thing that's going to drive the progress forward. I think that everything that Nora's making at Mel looks stunning and she's helping reclaim rye in a really fun and exciting way.
We also love rye, but we don't work with it quite as much as she does. Except our brownie, our new rye brownie is hot stuff. If you've not had it, that is like to die for.
It's 100% rye flour. We've never had a brownie like it. But it is this sort of thing where people are taking this very familiar comfort baked carb and stuffing it full of heritage, local, organic, stone milled, you know, insert whatever descriptor you want for good grains.
(28:09) And making that the star of the item. That's where you're going to really see traction and that creative energy to just keep pumping stuff out that people want is going to get them excited. The number of people that come back to our stand and have all these questions about rye.
They didn't know what it was. They'd never heard of it. They may have had like a deli rye slice at some point in their life, but thought they hated it because they actually don't like caraway seeds and that's a completely different conversation, right? That's the kind of thing that is going to help really the entire industry just find new people, find new customers and innovate and create new bakeries that we should just be, we should be in every neighborhood selling this good stuff to our neighbors one day.
BC:
Yeah, just as far as for my part, I'm going to do my part by doing what you did, which is bringing more bread to people. I'm not going to wait for them to decide to buy it. (29:00) I'm just going to start gifting people bread and flour.
ID:
Starting with me and our co-workers at MOFAD, you're going to bring us bread.
BC:
Yeah, and you know, we're going to get a little taste of it when y'all are in MOFAD for the program, you and June. Yes, but I'm just going to start gifting people breads. Come on.
And normalize gifting bread. Yes. What you said about it feeling good and not just tasting good because I was always coming from a taste perspective, but people, you know, that just like freaking blew my mind now, like I'm going to pivot and start talking about feeling because that's a priority to people, you know, getting enough protein, like the bread has protein because it sure does, you know, like, absolutely.
ID:
I'm really craving some bread now. Oh, I love this.
BC:
I'm glad to hear it.
But so just to wrap up, we're going to ask you the questions that we ask all our podcast guests.
Okay, question number one. What is the one food that brings you right back to your childhood, like at the table with your family?
KV:
Apple pie, man.
I am from upstate New York. There is nothing happier in my world than New York State apples and a good apple pie. It's the thing that I could never get on the West Coast when I lived out there unless I made it. I think I may be like, in all seriousness, like partially moved back out east because I miss the apples. They're just different. They're just better.
I love a New York State apple and you got to put it in a pie.
BC:
Yes. New York State apples are the best. I had a cousin visit me from Washington state and she had the gall to bring Washington apples to my home. Sorry, Washington.
KV:
No, sorry. I can't do it.
BC:
Are you…? Anyway,
ID:
We're all in agreement today.
BC:
OK, so question number two is, since we're the Museum of Food and Drink, what is the drink thatl you can't do one day without?
KV:
Black coffee.
I'm so old school. I don't need any sugar. It just needs to be good beans.
I love our coffee. Pipe and Tabor is making some really beautiful beans for us. And I love just like a simple hot…I make a pour over every morning. If I don't, my cats are so mad. We need our time to like sit together and have the cup of coffee. I would not be me without a cup of black coffee in the morning.
BC:
Ivan, you’re a black coffee guy, right?
ID:
Absolutely. I know it depends on the day. You know, if I'm feeling a little more gentle, I'll throw in some oat milk. I need that ritual.
I need that quiet moment before the day really starts.
KV:
Absolutely. Same.
BC:
You're the first person to say coffee, actually, like we asked other people and they said other things. And Ivan and I were like, what the hell?
KV:
The obvious one. I'm here for that.
BC:
Thank you. Okay. Question number three is, since our exhibition is about street food, what is your favorite street food right now?
KV:
Oh, man, I don't eat enough street food in New York, but I did live in South America for a long time and I have a spot for Anticuchos.
I love a heart on a skewer over open flame on the street at 2 a.m. There is nothing better.
BC:
I wonder if anyone's making those here in town.
KV:
They must be.
I'm sure somewhere out in Queens. I'm going to go find it now that now that we are talking about it. I'm going to go hunt for the best Anticucho in New York City, but I have not not ventured out to find them as of yet.
BC:
You know who puts stuff on a stick and grills it? Filipinos.
ID:
Absolutely.
BC:
Maybe check out the stuff in, you know, Woodside.
Question number four is kind of related. Just like if you were going to make a street food, what do you think needs to be out there in the street?
KV:
Yeah, I think about this a lot. So my partner is South Asian and we recently built a tandoor oven in our backyard because we have dreams of just like kebab and pita coming out of the same oven.
We have not perfected this dance just yet, but I think I want I just want to basically I'm a simple girl: meat on a stick, black coffee and bread. I don't need anything else. That and apples, right? That's all you need to know about me.
But I want a little mobile tandoor cart where I can make some really delicious flatbreads and grill some meats alongside it. I that's my happy place.
ID:
That sounds really good.
All sorts of cravings I'm having today now. Wow. We have had a lot of great guests on the podcast so far, but this is the first one: She Wolf is technically street vending out there on the streets of being part of a farmer's market right there on the sidewalk. So, yeah, we're kind of happy to incorporate Street Food City, our current exhibition, however we can. So it's wonderful that you really are just out there bringing it to people in the street, being out in the public.
It's hard. I got to tell you, vending on the street is hard. It rains.
The bread doesn't like it. It's cold. It's hot. It's all the things. But it's beautiful. Like we love being a part of the seasonal change.
We love seeing the sun rise as we're loading out the van. Like there's a lot of beauty to it, even though the work is really tricky. So, yeah, I'm happy to be your first, you know, street vendor.
ID:
That's great. Yeah. And was there anything else you wanted to add?
KV:
No, I think that's great.
I'm excited to to take today's conversation and flesh it out a little more for our event on the 10th. I'm really looking forward to that. And we're going to bring so many good things for you all to try.
So I hope you buy a ticket, buy a loaf and come for the grains.
BC:
It's going to be great. Awesome.
KV:
Well, thank you guys for your time and for the invitation to join you all today.
ID:
Great. Thank you so much, Kim.
What a great talk. Thank you so much. Thanks.
KV:
Thank you guys.
ID:
All right. We are here at the Farmer's Market in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village where we have a She Wolf Bakery stand.
So let's get some bread.
ID:
OK, could I please get a rye brownie and can I get the mini miche and can I also get the classic batard? Yeah, thank you very much.
ID:
We’re back at the museum with our volunteer Owen and with Bernadette and we're going to try the She Wolf bread.
BC:
I see there that there's a
like a baked good bag that's different from a bread bag. Were you able to find the brownie with the rye flour in it that Kim was talking about?
ID:
Yes, I was actually able to find the rye brownie and I'm super excited. So the rye brownie looks a bit like that. Looks like a regular brownie.
Owen Yaggy (OY):
Yeah, it does.
ID:
Yeah, but it's got some rye flour. Yeah. I've only ever had rye bread and I've only ever had rye bread with caraway seeds like Kim mentioned.
We've also got two kinds of bread here. We've got the classic batard loaf sourdough. And then we've got we've got the classic miche.
This is the first bread that She Wolf started out with. It was called a mini miche, but the loaf is over a foot long. So I don't know what's so mini about it,
OY:
They're beautiful.
ID:
Yeah. So let's, I don't know. Let's just rip off a piece.
I just want to go for it. I just want to grab it. Right.
Isn't the French way to just rip it off?
OY:
I think so. We'll certainly act like it is.
ID:
Oh, man. Oh, that's good.
OY:
That's good bread.
ID:
It's got a really soft sort of gooey sort of inside of the bread.
And then the outer crust is so nice and hard and it's got a great golden color. It's so nice. It's such a great contrast from the inside to the outside.
OY:
Oh, this part in the middle where you have the divot in the crust is like a softer crust, too. That's kind of cool. Yeah. Like two different parts of the bread in one.
ID:
Totally. That must help it expand in the baking process.
And then we have the mini miche, which the large size of the loaves contributes to the keeping quality, but necessitates a long bake, which results in a darker crust. I'm trying the miche and it is so good. It's got this kind of flour on the outside that reminds me of semolina or something.
It's a bit softer on the outside, a bit darker, maybe more of a sourdough taste to it.
OY:
And this has a stronger flavor to it.
ID:
The miche has a stronger flavor.
I kind of like it even more. I like the hard crust of the batard. I love how floury the outside of the miche is.
Should we go to the brownie?
BC:
Yes. Okay. Yeah, I'm very excited for this brownie.
ID:
Okay. So the She Wolf rye brownie. Let's try it.
BC:
All right. Do it. You have the first piece.
ID:
All right. I'll grab a little corner here and let's see.
BC:
And what other flour is in here? Is it just rye flour or is it other...
Your face!
ID:
I went into another plane. It's incredible.
It's amazing. It's creamy. It's soft.
It's got a wonderful crispy top. It's so good. We're all having convulsions.
It's incredible. Stop the presses.
BC:
That's a freaking good brownie.
OY:
Wow.
ID:
Holy moly. It's moist.
BC:
I love that moist fudgy brownie, but it's cakey on the outside.
ID:
This could be the greatest brownie I've ever had. It is so good.
It's not too sweet. I'm just wondering, I'm not getting an overpowering rye. It's kind of subtle.
BC:
Chocolate is very strong. It overpowers most flavors.
ID:
Which is what you want in a brownie anyway. Yes. So I think they didn't compromise on the browniness of it just for the sake of the rye. But I think the rye really comes through at the beginning of the bite.
And the rye gives it a thickness.
BC:
It's got texture. It adds texture, crunchy texture.
ID:
It's like a fullness that's really satisfying.
BC:
Dang. It's so good.
ID:
Yeah. Even though we weren't jumping up and down on the floor about the bread, that's because brownies are a sugary treat and they do that to people. But the bread is just as good as this.
BC :
Kim, girl, you were right. Wow. Who's got last bite syndrome? Eat that right now.
ID:
Owen, go for it. It's all you.
BC:
Owen deserves it.
OY:
I did just eat it.
BC:
I'll just lick this bag. Okay.
I licked the bag. You didn't see it, but I did it. Oh damn, Ivan.
ID:
All right. A little more ASMR there, folks.
ID:
Kim will appear at MOFAD on June 10th in conversation with June Russell of the Glynnwood Center for Regional Food and Farming.
Purchase tickets at mofad.org. RadioMOFAD is by Bernadette Cura and Ivan De Luce for the Museum of Food and Drink. Thank you for listening.
