Butter three 9-by-2-inch round cake pans and line with parchment paper.
A lot of that was Anson Mills.I had read about Carolina Gold rice before the restaurant opened and Anson Mills' name came up.
I emailed, as it turns out, Catherine Schopfer [partner and chef liaison for the company] and started a beautiful friendship.I asked her about the rice and she said that was the test crop.They didn't really have rice to sell.
She gave me the name of someone else, a man named Mike Booth, who was growing Carolina Gold rice.His job was something completely different, like an electrical engineer, it was really like a side gig, and I bought rice from him..
But Catherine said, "Well, we do have some other things.
"At the time, they had grits and cornmeal, which I started buying from them.Home cooks took notice, too.
Now 80% of her business is direct-to-consumer via the company's site.Still, the chef community remains the lifeblood of the brand, she said.. "It's something that I feel very strongly about never losing because it's the chefs that built our whole world," she said.
"They're our community.They're our heartbeat.