By David Rogers. February 9, 2012. BLOWING ROCK -- If Bistro Roca's Michael Foreman and Hearthstone Tavern's Josh Grogan somehow fall out of favor with the High Country's culinary crowd, they can always fall back on careers as stand-up comics. In live interviews Wednesday night with Fire on the Rock emcee and host Jimmy Crippen -- after the meal and before the results were announced -- the air filled with one-line zingers rivaling David Letterman, Robin Williams and Jay Leno. Photos by Amanda Fife Lugenbell

Battle #4 of the 2012 Fire on the Rock competition dining event was a raucous, rollicking good time. In the end, Bistro Roca's Foreman prevailed, winning 69.4% of possible points, compared to 57.1% of possible points for Grogan. Under the new scoring format used this year, the "public" dining guests account for 70% of the final score, and professional judges account for 30% of the weighted final scores.

The "secret incredient(s)" for Wednesday's battle were provided by the Colorado Spice Company: Cinnamon and Lavender.   With these, the culinary teams faced an interesting contrast in challenges.  One spice (cinnamon) is widely used in food preparation, from toast to burritos, while the other (lavender) is recognized more for its often powerful and, if not careful in application, its potentially overwhelming floral fragrence. 

Foreman, Grogan and their respective teams of kitchen artistes were up to the challenge, serving up a scrumptious six courses to delight the palates of the 110 diners jammed into Crippens Country Inn & Restaurant for this installment of the Fire on the Rock series.

• FIRST COURSE (Foreman): Cinnamon Pork Sausage En Croute,  with lavender and honey Stokes County purple sweet potato, baby greens, cinnamon-ligonberry vinaigrette, and lavender mustard
• SECOND COURSE (Grogan): North Carolina Coastal Shrimp & Scallop, with mesquite-lavender smoked scallop, cinnamon-jalapeno grilled shrimp and lavender honey champion dressing
• THIRD COURSE (Foreman): Smoked Paprika & Cinnamon Crusted Mt. Ulla Flank Steak, roasted on Himalayan sea salt, cinnamon stick, and lavender flowers, goat cheese polenta, Italian garden mignonette, with toasted lavender and cinnamon stick
• FOURTH COURSE (Grogan): Duo of Pork, featuring cinnamon braised pork belly, orange lavender spoon bread and grilled tenderloin, lavender potato puree, maker's mark sauce
• FIFTH COURSE (Foreman): German Apple Cake, including lavender North Carolina buttermillk ice cream and pine nut toffee brittle
• SIXTH COURSE (Grogan): Cinnamon-Cardamon Apple Fritter, with lavender ice cream

Host Crippen always advises the chef teams in the noon meeting (before each event gets underway), "One dish can make you or break you." On Wednesday night, all three of Foreman's dishes were widely praised by public and professional judges alike, especially the Pork Sausage (#1) and the German Apple Cake (#5).  The Hearthstone team's offerings were competitive, keeping it close -- until the public largely dismissed his Apple Fritter with Ice Cream for the evening's final course.

Blowing Rock News interviewed diners throughout the evening, but it was #6 that received the most passionate attention, albeit adverse:

• "The ice cream is too salty," said numerous guests.
• "The ice cream is too grainy," observed one Banner Elk guest. "It was over-churned," she said, knowingly.
• "The apple fritter was delicious," drawled a man visiting the High Country from Texas. "The ice cream detracted from an otherwise wonderful dessert."

"It was another fun round of cooking," Fire on the Rock veteran Grogan told Blowing Rock News afterwards in assessing the event. "We don't work much with lavender, but cinnamon we do, so this was something fun for us to get into. With spices as the secret ingredient, it is kind of hard to elevate its role in a recipe to where it is featured.  It is easy to do too much of a spice, especially lavender, and it is also easy to do too little. In retrospect there are a few things I would tweak if we had it to do all over again, but (the results are what they are). I feel like my shrimp & scallop courses I should have increased the levels of the spice just a bit."

Foreman Gives a Behind-the-Scenes Look

A visibly tired, but happy Foreman sat down with Blowing Rock News when the dust had settled, with high praise for the event and some behind-the-scenes glimpses of the challenges faced by the competing teams.

"Another long day at Crippens in Fire on the Rock," the Bistro Roco-based culinary mastermind smiled. "I like the new format with the truck, although when you have six guys in the truck jostling and fighting for ingredients, it doesn't matter how big that truck is. You're throwing elbows and snatching things out of other guys' hands. The first guy that gets it, gets it! It is larger than the Crippens pantry from previous years, but if you are in a truck that's got shelving down both sides, and tables to measure out and weigh out things, and then you go through a single door into a refrigeration unit, and the refrigeration unit is three-sided with ingredients...maybe two guys can fit in there, but if somebody flings the door open, the guy behind the door gets shoved into the meat rack! So it definitely gets a little bit tight and tricky.

"But it's nice," Foreman noted after his first time working under the new format. "Actually, it's beautiful. When we did our first tour of the truck and they opened up the back, just the spice rack alone should have been a giveaway that the secret ingredient would be one or more spices.  

"But as we started looking at the products in the truck," Foreman enthused, "we could see that they had great stuff.  Southern Foods is a big player up here (in the High Country). So to be able to see product lines that were on that truck was great. You know, we don't have time to read catalogs cover-to-cover. So, with this, not only do we get to physically see product lines that they have available, Fire on the Rock actually gives us a chance to use some of those product lines, how they work, and how much you like them. The benefit is that when we sit down with our (Southern Foods) representative, we can get some price quotes and make an informed decision."

Foreman also explained how being able to readily see the products in the truck impacted one of his course offerings for Wednesday's Battle #4.

"Instead of the (goat cheese) polenta (course #3)," he explained, "we were going to do this bird's nest thing with patai noodles...but when we started to see how our menu was shaping, putting an Asian-like ingredient into that mix didn't make sense. It didn't make our menu flow. They didn't gel. So we made a last minute decision to go back and grab polenta out of the truck. This decision also made it a whole lot easier when you consider that we are putting out a 110 plates. While a element, to sit there and have to do 110 bird's nests would have been painful."

In describing the process leading up to the actual food preparation, Foreman outlined for Blowing Rock News, "Jimmy told us about the secret ingredients at about 12:15 this afternoon.  We probably spent 5-10 minutes jotting down loose-knit ideas for the menu, then went onto the truck.  We started seeing ingredients and, as a team, we just started to silently point at them because we didn't really want to let the other team know what we were thinking or looking at. So we just pointed at items to grab.  

"There are a limited number of proteins on the truck," Foreman continued. "Josh (Grogan) took the pork belly, so the that was gone. In past (Fire on the Rock) competitions, we sort of took turns picking proteins, but this worked out pretty well for us, with the stroodle that we did, going to the flank steak and voiding the seafood, which can be tricky (in this event).  We like to work with food that we are comfortable with, but then taking it to a different level, using different techniques, like the sea salt, the cinnamon stick, and lavender flowers. We roasted them in the oven to make them perfume. We took the marinated flank steak and then actually grilled them on big crystals of salt.  The salt was about 500 degrees, then we grilled the steak on the salt. So it perfumes up into the steak without leaving marks, and you get that lovely roasted steak, with all the flavors.

"I used to use a similar technique in (Albuquerque) New Mexico," said Foreman in giving Blowing Rock News hints of his culinary background and influences, "And in Germany we actually took a beer and mustard-marinated pork loin, crusted it in wet sea salt, and roasted it, encased in the salt. Then you break the salt off and slice the pork...you have to be careful using salt in this way, making sure that when you break the salt off you clear all the chunks away.  If a guest would happen to bite down into a chunk of salt, they would instantly think that the steak was brutally over-salted."

For the highest-rated dish of the evening, the Bistro Roca team's German Apple Cake with lavender buttermilk ice cream and pine nut toffee brittle, Foreman was quick to deflect praise to his executive sous chef. "Seth is a rock star. He loves to do desserts...He'll propose multiple desserts and then we'll narrow it down. Then he comes to me on textures and flavors. We work well together. We talk about every course. It is not an ego thing when he and I are in the kitchen together. We are there for the common goal."

More than one Fire on the Rock diner lauded the fascinating combination of apple cake, buttermilk ice cream and pine nut toffee brittle. One woman from Winston-Salem observed, "Never in a million years would I have thought about putting those three elements together, but WOW!  It got my attention.  The course was highly creative. No, make that ingenious, even cunning. It should be a home run in anybody's culinary ballpark."

Some of the one-liners:

• In describing his reaction upon learning that the secret ingredients were lavender and cinnamon, Foreman told Crippen, "I was shocked.  I had this dream that it was going to be 'Battle Mayo'."
• Foreman also told Crippen, "In my dream you didn't have Texas Pete hot sauce, so you and I got in a fight in the kitchen."
• After praising the growth of the Fire on the Rock event since its early days when Crippen staged it at the Green Park Inn, Foreman lamented, "With having to plate 110 servings of each course, after about 60, your eyes cross.  After 70, you swear that the plates are rabbits and they are breeding. At around 100 you are shouting at Stan, 'There just can't be more plates!'"
• Crippen introduced Grogan as the "Mouth of the South", but noted that the Hearthstone chef was fairly quiet during the course of the afternoon and evening. "Well, there is a time to talk," explained Grogan. "And there is a time to do. And then there is a time to talk after you do."
• In describing his preparation, Grogan shared, "Well, when we first got here I overheard Michael talking to you about his dream from last night, so I immediately pulled together my staff and asked, 'What can we do with mayo?"
• More Grogan: "We can put lavendar and cinnamon in mayo, but you don't have any Texas Pete!"
• Even more Grogan: "This was good, though. You know, me and Michael, we're the Spice Boys." Which spice boy are you? asked Crippen. "Salty."
• In answering Crippen's question about his experience in working with lavender in the past, Grogan replied, "Yeah, there is some great lavendar hand soap in the bathrooms here. I haven't actually used that as an ingredient, but I am very familiar with the taste of lavender hand soap. I had a very traditional Southern mother."
• Re: the Grogan's recent purchase of Banner Elk's Hearthstone, a second restaurant for he and wife, Jessica: "My lovely wife, she has this thing where she gets bored and goes out and signs contracts and leases, and then comes home and tells me that I have been slacking off. She said we just need something else to do, because we are bored with two children and a restaurant (Crave, in Boone)."
• "I know that I look incredibly youthful," Grogan noted, "Most of these ladies probably wouldn't put me over the age of 25, but it's like a 50-year old inside here (pointing at his chest). I've been punched and (pummeled)." "That's called parenthood," Crippen observed. "No," Grogan deadpanned, "it's called being married."

The scores:

Taking next week off for Valentine's Day observances, the next Fire on the Rock event, "Battle #5," is Tuesday, February 21, when Glidewell's Guy Thomas faces The Table at Crestwood's Matt Barlow.  Crippen advised Blowing Rock News on Wednesday night that the events for both February 21st and 22nd are nearly sold out. Potential guests should call Crippens at 828-295-3487.

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