Matt Twing

This is the seventh in a series of pieces profiling Colorado-grown products...and what some local restaurants do with them.

As much pride as we Coloradans take in our local producers and their staggering variety of goods, how many of them can say they tangled with the heaviest of heavyweights on a global platform -- and won? "This is world-class," Haystack Mountain's John Scaggs says through a mouthful of his Haystack Mountain Queso de Mano. "This stands on a world stage, no worries."

See also:
- The Right Ingredient: Munson Farms Corn is candy on the cob
- Il Mondo Vecchio gets cheeky with guanciale, salumi
- Red Wagon Organic Farms: Can't beet its produce!
- Two small-town families made Colorado's Best Beef a sought-after brand

More »

Life can be ironic sometimes, like a dairy farmer who becomes lactose-intolerant. Jake Rosenbarger, owner of Kim and Jake's Cakes, was recently diagnosed with Celiac disease. But despite this new-found gluten intolerance, he continues to do what he loves: baking delicious cakes. "In the world of food production and that kind of thing, gluten-free is really exploding. So there is a lot of opportunity to grow, and that's a good business to be in," Rosenbarger says. The only difference form his previous job? Now he basically has to wear a hazmat suit while he's baking.

See also:
- The Gluten Gladiator will tell you how to defeat wheat
- Kim and Jake's Cakes rolls out a fall list featuring paprika, vindaloo and beer
- Kristy Greenwood spreads the love with Victory Love + Cookies

More »

Eating healthy can seem easy when all you have to do is go to the store and buy the products labeled "organic." But Pete Marczyk wants you to know where those products come from. On his new Rocky Mountain PBS show, Great Ingredients, Marczyk is traveling all over the state to find the best locally grown foods, like peaches from the Western Slope and free-range chickens from northern Colorado.

See also:
- Pete Marczyk, chef-owner of Marczyk Fine Foods, sounds off on why food regulation makes him want to throw his baguette
- Round two with Pete Marczyk, chef-owner of Marczyk Fine Foods
- Cooking with Pete and Barb Marczyk: chocolate zucchini bread

More »

Photos by Chris Utterback

This is the sixth in a series of pieces profiling Colorado-grown products...and what some local restaurants do with them.

Is there an ingredient that makes Colorado chefs salivate quite so much as Munson Farms corn? They simmer it into chowders. They bake it into biscuits. They sprinkle kernels, raw, over fresh salads. Given the chance, they might very well bathe in the liquid left after the corn is cooked.

See also:
- Hazel Dell mushrooms provide Colorado's 'shroom service
- Il Mondo Vecchio gets cheeky with guanciale, salumi

- Red Wagon Organic Farms: Can't beet its produce!
- Two small-town families made Colorado's Best Beef a sought-after brand

More »

Paul Cure and his kid campers.

This is the fourth in a series of pieces profiling Colorado-grown products...and what some local restaurants do with them.

"I want to have a relationship with someone who's cooking my food," declares Paul Cure, co-founder of Boulder's Cure Organic Farm. One handshake at a time, Paul and his wife, Anne, have labored to do just that: from passing out organic produce to over a hundred CSA members, to holding pig cookouts and Easter egg hunts, to hosting farm dinners among their rows of beans and beets, to the intensely close partnership they have with the staff of the Kitchen franchise.

See also:
- Hazel Dell mushrooms provide Colorado's 'shroom service
- Il Mondo Vecchio gets cheeky with guanciale, salumi

- Red Wagon Organic Farms: Can't beet its produce!

More »

This is the third in a series of pieces profiling Colorado-grown products...and what some local restaurants do with them.

Why is Red Wagon Organic Farm's produce so beloved among Colorado's chefs? Simple: They know when to let it go. "If the quality isn't there, we simply don't offer it for sale anywhere," says Wyatt Barnes, who founded Red Wagon with his wife, Amy Tisdale. "A lot of farms won't do it like that."

See also:
- Hazel Dell mushrooms provide Colorado's 'shroom service
- Il Mondo Vecchio gets cheeky with guanciale, salumi

More »

Nathan Federico

This is the second in a series of pieces profiling Colorado-grown products...and what some local restaurants do with them. Read the first installment, on Hazel Dell mushrooms, here.

Sticky, fragrant, bright orange fat. Rendered from chunks of silky guanciale, it slathers the agliolini all' Amatriciana pasta at Cellar Wine Bar, cutting into the tart San Marzano tomatoes bolstered by crispy bits of pork cheek. "Guanciale fat is my new favorite fat," says Cellar executive chef Joe Freemond. "I can't get enough of it."

More »

Matt Twing

This is the first in a series of pieces profiling Colorado-grown products...and what some local restaurants do with them.

In rows and rows of old shipping containers in dark, dank buildings, fungi grow are growing in neatly stacked and sealed plastic bags. These modest mushrooms will soon be shipped out to hundreds of restaurants, farmers' markets and supermarkets across the West.

More »

When I moved to Colorado seven years ago, I got an entry-level job at Great Divide Brewing Co.. One of my duties was driving around in a piece-of-shit van with a busted transmission, delivering kegs to accounts whose supplies had run out.

After a few months on the job, I was dispatched to the Wazee Super Club -- a Denver institution, I was told -- because the Samurai tap had just kicked and the bar needed a keg dropped off. What I wasn't told, however, was that I would be doing just that.

More »

I had a case of the munchies the other day and knew from experience that chocolate chip cookies would cure it. An old neighbor and I used to get "safe" on a fairly regular basis (for more on safety, follow my man William Breathes) and as cliche as it sounds, the chocolate chip cookies he'd randomly throw down were...awesome.

Although I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it, I'd never made the almighty munchy before, so I welcomed the opportunity to learn how.

More »