Episode 6: Time Travel

AUTHOR: Claudia Woloshin, Director, The Mind of a Chef
EPISODE: ROOTS
CHEF: SEAN BROCK

Traveling to the Appalachian Mountains with Sean Brock felt a little like traveling back in time, when people took their sweet ole time.

Relaxing into the tempo of the earth. Or was this just the magic of the South? A place, I soon learned, I knew hardly anything about.

These were the mountains where he hunted in as a kid. Where he remembers his fingers smelling of tomatoes from his grandmother’s garden. Where he learned to cook things ‘slow and low’. A place he confesses he wasn’t always as fiercely proud, as he is today, to claim as his ‘roots.’ Now it’s where he eagerly returns for inspiration.

He told me once that every time he comes to Blackberry Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee, it changes his life. And after filming with him there and eating mouthwatering Southern food (so much juicy pork!) and meeting his friends and sweating my face off under the sweltering June sky, I began to understand why.

The deepest roots are gnarled and tangled up in places. Filming with Sean reminded me — never be scared to get your hands dirty in them.

I took this photo of Sean on our first shoot together. Just before I took it, he was talking about the mountains he grew up in and how people should try to hunt and farm their own food to better understand and respect what they put in their mouths. When I got to go with him to Knoxville, Tennessee and walk around the staggeringly gorgeous land and gardens at Blackberry Farms, it started to sink in how much that idea made sense.

We woke at dawn and headed to the Smokey Mountain National Park right outside of Knoxville. Sleepy-eyed but awed by the sheer beauty we found ourselves dropped into. Soon after, we spotted a black bear.

This man forever changed the way I will look at seeds. I loved all the lines in his face. A life of farming under the Southern sun with such deep understanding and reverence for the land.

I loved John Coykendall’s story of how, when he was 16 years old, he found an abandoned, 100-year-old seed book by some train tracks. (This is his book, too, but he has an even older one!) The chance encounter with those discarded pages changed the course of his entire life and was the catalyst for his becoming a farmer.

After one hot-as-hell day spent filming outside, Sean and Chef Tyler Brown kick back some Dale’s Pale Ale in the late afternoon light of Blackberry Farms. Behind the cameras, the crew did the same thing.

Lying around in Ancient Seed Man’s barn is an ear of the very same heirloom corn that Sean has tattooed on his arm.

This may not have ended up in the episode, but it was so damn cool to watch. Chef Joseph Lenn caught this Rainbow Trout literally right before we started filming the cooking of it. They simply stuck it on a stick and let it slowly cook beside the flames. I’d never seen that done before.