You wouldn’t think a James Beard Award and a Bon Appétit magazine cover were in the cards for someone from a Virginia coal town who was primed to take over his father’s trucking business and didn’t eat in a restaurant until he was sixteen. But that’s exactly what happened to Sean Brock.
He’s now in Nashville, manning the kitchen of Audrey, his new Appalachian-focused restaurant, after years spent running the award-winning Husk in Charleston, South Carolina, as well as its various branches. His love for Southern cooking goes back to his childhood. “I always had amazing food as a kid,” Brock says. One of his favorite dishes was a wilted garden salad called “killed lettuces.” “My mom would go to the garden, dig up a couple of young onions and snap some lettuce leaves. She would bring them into the kitchen and put them directly on the plate. The ‘killing’ happens when hot fat is drizzled over the lettuces and onions. You use whatever fat you have, then eat right away.”
After his dad died suddenly of a heart attack when he was eleven, Brock and his mother moved in with his grandmother. “Her kitchen garden was larger than what we classify as farms today,” he recalls. His grandmother was a master of jarring, canning, and pickling, passing on techniques that had been handed down from her grandparents. Maybe that’s why he is always finding a new way to reuse coffee grounds, say, or leftover foods: “It’s the way I was raised, and you got in trouble if you threw anything away.”
A self-described workaholic, Brock is obsessed with seed varietals, guitars, and antique automobiles and, for a difficult period, vintage bourbons. His home kitchen often serves as a testing ground—a place for working through Noma’s fermentation recipes or planning his next cookbook—and his refrigerator is a testament to that.
“My rule to live or cook by is he who dies with the biggest fridge or pantry wins,” he remarks. Void of alcohol, the shelves of his fridge are crammed with regional heritage seeds, milled corns, even descendants from his grandmother’s garden. “See these leather britches, they’re green beans. The seeds on the bottom—they were my grandmother’s. I have kept these alive for the past ten years since she passed. You drop these into a pressure cooker and braise them with potlikker and it tastes like meat. I call it hillbilly seaweed because it has so much glutamic acid,” says Brock.
At home Brock is often the one cooking: “How do you think I got such a pretty girl?” he asks in reference to his wife and mother of his child. “The joke around the house is that when there is no food around, I usually end up cooking one of the best meals I have ever cooked. I like to create really flavorful sauces—sweet, salty, bitter, fat, as long as this formula is there, I can match that to whatever we are eating.”
CURRENT HOMETOWN: Nashville, Tennessee
RESTAURANT THAT MADE HIS NAME: Husk, Charleston, South Carolina
SIGNATURE STYLE: Noma-inspired Southern Appalachian food
BEST KNOWN FOR: His deep, historical knowledge of Southern food; his best-selling cookbook, Heritage; and his James Beard Award and nominations
FRIDGE: Samsung
- WATERMELON MOLASSES (reduced watermelon juice)
- CHASHU FAT (the fat from braised pork belly)
- BACON LARD—“I keep it in my fridge like every good Southerner.”
- CAROLINA AFRICAN RUNNER PEANUTS—“It’s the very first peanut that came to America. We have been trying to grow them for fifteen years. Last year was the first we had enough to cook and make oil with.”
- BOB’S RED MILL YELLOW GRITS—“I use at least seventy-five varieties of corn for grits and cornmeal. The list is always growing as we discover once-forgotten varietals.”
- CHILI SAUCE—“Each year I make a chili sauce. I take different kinds of chilies and bury them in salt. I let that go for six months and then I add vinegar for six months. It ferments and then I puree it. Shelf life in the fridge is forever.”
- SOUR MUSHROOMS (a sauerkraut made from salt, water, and mushrooms)
- BENNE SEEDS—“The original form of sesame seeds that came to the South via West Africa. I get them from a guy once a year. I also turn them into vinegar.”
- BUTTER
- PORK BRAISING LIQUID
- BUCKWHEAT HONEY—“This is my favorite honey because it’s so floral and nutty! I eat a tablespoon every morning.”
- CAJUN BOILED PEANUT MISO—“I bought the peanuts from a roadside stand. We take the peanuts and make traditional miso.”
- COUNTRY HAM LEES—“We make ‘fish sauce’ with country ham.”
- MATCHLESS COFFEE SODA—“It’s a local Nashville product that I’m addicted to.”
- SEEDS AND GRAINS—“I toss them in the fridge until they get filed away in the seed bank. I collect seeds, so people just mail them to me, and some I grow and save each year.”
- ROW 7 SEEDS, from Dan Barber
- RICE PEA SEEDS
- PETITS POIS VERTS—“They look like lentils but they’re actually peas.”
- HIS GRANDMOTHER’S GREASY-CUT SHORT BEANS
- HEAVY CREAM
- SHIRO DASHI
- FRESH PORK RACK
- MUSHROOMS: SHIITAKES, ROYAL TRUMPETS, MAITAKES (hen of the woods)
- DANDELION, KALE, SWISS CHARD—“I’m going to make a meatless green gumbo with all of those greens. It’s a once-a-year tradition. It cooks for a couple hours in a dark roux with onions and garlic.”
- BEEF STEW
- PORK AND CHICKEN STOCKS
- WILD BERRIES—from last summer for smoothies
- CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
- KOJI RICE
- PESTO—from a friend who makes it once a year
- BRAISED PORK BELLY—“I roast an entire belly, then portion it into little vacuum bags and throw them in the freezer for quick meals.”
- KOJI RICE
- BEEF—from Pineywoods cattle for an experimental tasting
- CANVAS BAG WITH ACORN FLOUR
Q & A
You keep your grits in the fridge? Yes, and in fact, when the corn is being ground I put it in liquid nitrogen and then grind, so that the heat of the stones doesn’t dissipate the flavor of the grits.
What kind of grits do you use? My grits are Cherokee White Eagle variety. I’m obsessed with the terroir that corn carries. And it’s a portion of my heritage—this is kind of crazy but my fifth-great-grandfather was Chief Red Bird [a half-Cherokee chief who lived in Tennessee and Kentucky in the eighteenth century] and his dad was Chief Great Eagle or something like that. The corn is not common in the South but it’s available to grow. And it’s a dent varietal—there is dent corn and flint corn. If it’s smooth on the top and the dimples are on the side, like my flint corn tattoo, that’s flint corn.
How do you cook your grits? Dent is usually used for grits and flint is usually used for polenta, because of the starch content. I have a theory with grits. I’m so obsessive: about the varietals, how they are stored, every aspect to keep as much of the flavor compounds together as possible. Most people would slow-cook in a pot—I don’t love that because too much flavor escapes. It’s also much easier to burn, scorch, or dry out. So I like to use pressure cookers or even a rice cooker. You literally keep it on warm and use three parts water, one part grits, and salt. I put it on the rice setting and leave it. You can’t really overcook grits. I believe that steam is flavor and this traps it in. I’m also crazy about only using water, not stock or milk; I figure if we went to so much trouble to get this variety grown, I don’t want to dump milk on it. I will sometimes put a little butter in there—depends what I am making.
Any other corn tattoos in the works? I plan to get my son Leo’s name tattooed over my heart. So cheesy, I know. But it’s a statement and a reminder.
You said you Noma-fied your redeye gravy? This is coffee shoyu—inspired from The Noma Guide to Fermentation. I’ve been making shoyus for about ten to twelve years. I drink a lot of coffee and have a lot of leftover grounds, so I was excited to see what would happen when I used them. You take leftover brewed coffee and as you cook country ham you deglaze the fat with coffee. I’m going to pour that over the grits I’m making. This couldn’t be easier: you literally take three ingredients, dump them in a rice cooker, and turn it on. Then a month later you get soy sauce that tastes like coffee.
You keep garbage in your fridge? I took the waste of the restaurant in one day—the fish, meats, vegetables, egg whites, everything—and made garam with it. So basically no waste.
What is country ham fish sauce? It’s a funky fermented country ham paste that we ground up and treated like fish sauce. You can add it to anything or everything to boost up flavor.
There’s A1 sauce on that shelf—is that something you like? Yes, that stuff really lives in there. I’m crazy about it. It’s for steaks. Here is the way I look at it—if I put it on a plate, beautifully plated in a restaurant setting, and told you it was tamarind fermented shit, you would say that is the most delicious thing you have ever had in your life.
That’s a lot of cubed bread in the freezer. Anytime I have really great bread, I cut up the leftover bits and freeze them for making quick croutons to throw in salad. I also do the same for potatoes. These have been steamed and frozen. So for breakfast all I have to do is plop that into a pan and I have hash browns. My favorite thing to do is to panfry them really crispy and then douse them in crème fraîche, caviar, and chives.