Home Grown: A celebration of local culinary enterprise

Kurt Dammeier: Culinary entrepreneur

He's best known as the owner of Beecher's Handmade Cheese in the Pike Place Market, but keep in mind that Kurt Dammeier is an entrepreneur, a guy who loves doing business deals. Increasingly, those deals revolve around his passion for natural ingredients and pure food; with evangelical fervor, he stages comparative tastings to spread the gospel of artisan cheese.

Dammeier made a fortune when his family's high-tech printing company was acquired by a Canadian rival in 1994; with the proceeds, he started investing. First came Pyramid Breweries, where he served for a time as chairman of the board and opened the popular Alehouse across from Safeco Field. Next he acquired the four Pasta & Co. stores, founded by Marcella Rosene, which had established a reputation for high quality ingredients. Couple of years ago, he launched Bennett's Pure Food Bistro on Mercer Island, because that's where he lives and he wanted a good restaurant nearby. He was also an early advocate of food trucks. And not just any old truck, either. He built a giant steel pig on wheels, with a fearsome snout and giant ears, the sort of thing that Jules Verne might have invented. Named Maximus Minimus, it holds court daily at 3rd & Pike downtown in good weather, and has garnered 5,000 Likes on Yelp.

For its part, Beecher's occupies a central spot in the Market, long the home of the Seattle Garden Store. To snag the coveted space, Dammeier couldn't just put in another Pasta & Co. outlet; the Market watchdogs frown on chain outlets. (Starbucks is exempt because it started in the Market.) But an artisan cheese factory? Well, yeah, that was a concept the Development Authority could go for. And Dammeier, a 1982 grad of Washington State, had been aching to produce a cheese of his own ever since he discovered Wazu's award-winning cheddar-in-a-can, Cougar Gold.

Then, instead of the usual steps (raw materials, manufacturing, distribution), Dammeier put the deal together backwards. He had the sales outlet and the basic concept in hand; now he went looking for a production guy, a cheesemaker. And he found Brad Sinko, whose own family operation on the Oregon coast, Bandon Cheese, had just been snatched up by Tillamook. Together, Sinko and Dammeier went looking for a dairy to supply the operation. They found what they were looking for at Green Acres Farm in Duvall. The herd was originally all-Holstein; now they've added an equal number of Jerseys. Worth noting that Green Acres doesn't own the 40 new cows; instead, it leases them from a local entrepreneur, who just happens to be Kurt Dammeier.

France has hundreds of traditional, regional cheeses; not so in the U.S. Dammeier set out to create a specifically local cheese for Seattle. He and Sinko quickly settled on a cheddar-Gruyère hybrid; they named it Beecher's Flagship--Beecher was Kurt's grandfather--but it would have to age almost a year. While they waited (and the raw milk version was particularly promising), they built up an 80,000-pound inventory...and sold a lot of fresh curds. Dammeier also perfected a pasta recipe, "World's Best mac & cheese," that's now shipped nationwide. That's the one he cooks up for guest shots on TV; it's rich, creamy and utterly delicious.

With pleasure, too, we open Dammeier's book, Pure Flavor, which celebrates our region's bounty and offers some suggestions for simple preparations that enhance the pleasure this fare brings to our senses. He highlights the usual suspects (salmon, crab, mushrooms, cheese, berries, the Pike Place Market, even coffee) and turns the spotlight on a handful of local food pioneers (Gwen Bassetti of Grand Central Bakery, Marcella Rosene of Pasta & Co., sausage man Frank Isernio, cheese woman Sally Jackson, fisherman Bruce Gore, Paul Shipman of Red Hook, wine grower Veronique Drouhin, chef Tom Douglas). Had someone else written the book, Dammeier himself would be on that list.

Gwydion Stone: Distiller

Marteau is French for "hammer." It's also Gwydion Stone's brand of Absinthe, Stone being the founding member of an association called the Wormwood Society whose purpose is to educate bartenders and drinkers about the magic green distillate. Not an easy task, since competitors (virtually the entire alcoholic beverage industry, not to mention zealous government bureaucrats) are more than eager to demonize absinthe, ascribing to it every evil and unfortunate medical condition known to the planet.

Never mind that real absinthe, properly made, is a thing of beauty, "like drinking an Alpine meadow," as Stone puts to curious imbibers who assemble from time to time on the penthouse terrace of the Sorrento Hotel.

To sweeten the absinthe, drip some ice water through a sugar cube suspended on a slotted spoon above the glass. Don't set fire to the sugar! That's a bar trick from eastern Europe designed to camouflage counterfeit absinthe; the real stuff turns milky when water is added. Absinthe used to be cheaper than wine; that's why it was so popular during the Belle Époque, at the end of the 19th century. In its early years, until craft distilleries were legalized in Washington, Stone's Marteau was distilled under contract in Switzerland. Today there are dozens of distilleries throughout the state, all of them owe Stone a big debt.

As for the absinthe, remember, it's a distillate, not an infusion. Now close your eyes and taste the meadow.

Ron Holden/November 2013

Ronald Holden is a Seattle-based journalist who specializes in food, wine and travel. He has worked for KING TV, Seattle Weekly, and Chateau Ste. Michelle; his blog is www.Cornichon.org