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Imagine if the most important ingredient in your kitchen is the one you're about to throw away?
Available on Apple and Spotify.
In this episode of Imagine If, Victoria Riskin visits B Bar Ranch in Montana to talk with chef George Pierce about what it really means to cook close to the land. George breaks down why not all grass-fed beef is created equal, how B Bar traces every cut of beef back to the specific cow it came from, and how he turns corn cobs, lobster shells, and vegetable scraps into stocks instead of garbage.
George also shares how he left the restaurant world during COVID to run the Livingston Food Resource Center, a food pantry stocked with local beef, fresh produce, and bread made from Montana wheat, built to feel like a grocery store, not a relief line.
What you'll hear in this episode:
- Why not all grass-fed beef is the same, and how B Bar traces every cut to its source
- George's core kitchen philosophy: Make an ingredient taste like itself, nothing more
- Turning kitchen scraps, corn cobs, lobster shells, and vegetable trim into stock instead of garbage
- The scale of food waste in America, from restaurant kitchens to Yellowstone National Park
- George's pivot to running the Livingston Food Resource Center, a food pantry built on dignity
- The 10-day sourdough starter that turned into a decade-long obsession with fermentation
- Imagine if we all got back in touch with our local food systems
About George Pierce:
George Pierce is a passionate, data-driven chef whose culinary philosophy centers on letting high-quality, local ingredients shine in their purest form. Raised in Coos Bay, Oregon, where he spent his youth foraging, fishing, and learning to live off the land, George brings a deep commitment to sustainability, local food systems, and zero-waste kitchen practices to his role at B Bar Ranch. His unique background blends professional culinary training with a deep dive into the chemistry of wild yeast sourdough and two-and-a-half years managing a local nonprofit food pantry, giving him a rare, holistic perspective on how cooking mindfully can heal both people and the planet.
Meet the Host:
Victoria Riskin: I am Victoria. I’m always looking for the best life has to offer despite a turbulent world. I find comfort in the environment and joy in friendships. We have a great team of all ages at Bluedot who inspire me every day as we work together to build community.
Transcript
Victoria Riskin: I'm here at B Bar Ranch and having the most extraordinary time, and there are many parts to what's extraordinary about this ranch in Montana near Yellowstone. Part of it is the team who are running the ranch, and I want to take a little moment here and talk to the chef, because the minute we sat down, George, everybody was ooh-ing and aah-ing about the very first thing that you put in front of us. I think it was a beet dish, right? What did we have?
George Pierce: It was a beet salad with homemade whipped ricotta, some fresh berries, arugula, and basil.
Victoria Riskin: It was extraordinary. So it was a big deal. There were 16 of us who traveled here, and we couldn't stop talking about the food. We can't stop talking about how wonderful the staff is, but the food is always a happy place for so many people. So George, how long have you been here at B Bar?
George Pierce: I'm only on my, I believe, this is my sixth week.
Victoria Riskin: Sixth week?
George Pierce: Yes.
Victoria Riskin: So, from the frying pan into the fire. I don't know what the analogy is exactly.
George Pierce: That's a great one.
Victoria Riskin: Because running a kitchen is a big deal, but what was your background? Where did you come from?
George Pierce: So I grew up in Coos Bay, Oregon. I grew up foraging for mushrooms, fishing with my dad, hunting. We ate a lot more deer, elk, clams, crab, and salmon than beef or chicken. And yeah, so food has always been a really important thing in my life, especially local food.
Victoria Riskin: Right. And very fresh then.
George Pierce: Fresh food. Yeah. Fresh food. Absolutely.
Victoria Riskin: So your dad had that ethic, that value system, right?
George Pierce: He was convinced we could live off the land and just buy vegetables. We didn't have enough room in our house for a garden, so…
Victoria Riskin: Yeah. So you had to go foraging and find fresh vegetables elsewhere. Yeah. So that's where you grew up. You went to high school there.
George Pierce: I went to high school there. I didn't know anything about cooking or that I wanted to cook until I was in my early 20s. And my dad actually passed at that time, and my mom was always a great cook. And so at the time, I was living in Portland, Oregon, going to school for business. Just as random as, “I've got to go to school. What am I going to get a degree in? I guess business is good.”
Victoria Riskin: Exactly. Right.
George Pierce: And so I came home to be with my mom, and we spent a lot of our time in the kitchen. I can remember she always made this beautiful potato bacon soup, which is always one of my favorites. And she gave me the recipe, and I made it, and I remember her tasting it and saying, “Wow, that's really good.” And I was like, “Wow, that felt really good.” You know?
Victoria Riskin: Yeah, yeah.
George Pierce: And that was kind of what started it. And then there was a classic French restaurant in Coos Bay, where I grew up. And at that time, I was managing a coffee shop, so it was kind of my initial intro into food and beverage. I went to this French restaurant and spoke to the Frenchman who ran it named Christophe, and I asked him if I could cook for him.
Victoria Riskin: Yep.
George Pierce: And he laughed at me and said, “No, but I need a dishwasher.”
Victoria Riskin: Oh my gosh. So you had already sort of leapfrogged. You thought you were going to be cooking for him, right?
George Pierce: Yeah, I was so naive, right? And so yeah, I quit my management gig at this coffee shop, and I went and started doing dishes for this guy.
Victoria Riskin: Wow.
George Pierce: And, you know, like most restaurants, somebody left, and then I got to wait tables, and then I got to bartend, and then eventually someone in the kitchen left, and I got to start doing salads and breads, and it all just kind of snowballed. And I went to culinary school right there in Coos Bay, Oregon.
Victoria Riskin: OK.
George Pierce: And when I graduated, I had to do a 1,000-hour externship, and my mentor, who was my main instructor, he knew a chef in Big Sky, Montana.
Victoria Riskin: OK. And so that was how, you're not too far from here, right?
George Pierce: Yeah, yep. It's about, well, 13 miles as the crow flies, but about two hours if you're driving.
Victoria Riskin: OK. That's Montana, right?
George Pierce: Yeah, exactly. No direct route. But yeah, so I came out here just to do that and fell in love with Montana.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah.
George Pierce: Eventually met my wife.
Victoria Riskin: And you have a little girl now too, huh?
George Pierce: Little boy.
Victoria Riskin: A little boy.
George Pierce: A little boy, Grayson. He's 5.
Victoria Riskin: Little boy. OK.
George Pierce: And now he wants to be the next chef, so.
Victoria Riskin: Fantastic. So you did Big Sky, and then did you come here right after that?
George Pierce: I did not. So I've been bouncing around a little bit. I spent a year in Europe, mostly in Brussels, but went to London, went to Paris, and did some kind of unpaid externships, if you will.
Victoria Riskin: Right, right.
George Pierce: I came back to Montana, and I started working for the Arthur Blank organization. He started Home Depot, he owns the Atlanta Falcons.
Victoria Riskin: Oh, right.
George Pierce: And he's got a couple different guest ranches out here. The one that I was at was called West Creek Ranch, which also hosts nonprofit groups and business connections of Arthur's as well. But it's a larger operation. And when I found B Bar, you know, it just seemed like the perfect fit. You know, it's just me and one other person doing the cooking.
Victoria Riskin: You're the whole deal. You're in charge.
George Pierce: Right.
Victoria Riskin: You get to make all the decisions. So, well, we've had these great meals here, and I want to have you outline a few of the others in a minute.
George Pierce: Yeah.
Victoria Riskin: But what do you think about in terms of… I know you care a lot about food waste, the quality of the food, where it comes from, how it's prepared. You're a deep thinker in that regard. So what are some of the headlines you might give us about what your philosophy is in the kitchen?
George Pierce: Absolutely. So one of the most important lessons I learned was when I was in Big Sky. Our sous chef at that time, it was the first job he had ever had that wasn't in a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
Victoria Riskin: Wow.
George Pierce: He was obsessed with fly fishing, and so he decided to come out to Montana for a summer. And he taught me what has now become my philosophy with food, which is to find the best ingredients you can. Make them taste as much like that ingredient as possible without muddying the waters with lots of garlic and onions. And, I guess as an example, the first thing that we made together was a butternut squash soup. And the way that he had me do it was we took the long butternut squash, we sliced it in half lengthwise, got the seeds out, and put it into a roasting pan to roast it. Which, I'm all familiar with, right?
Victoria Riskin: Right.
George Pierce: But then he gets a bucket of water, and he starts pouring it in there so that it's, you know, about three-quarters of the way submerged, but the tops are still exposed. And I was like, “I don't understand what's going… Are we steaming it?”
Victoria Riskin: Yeah, what's going on here?
George Pierce: “Are we braising it? I don't really understand.” And when we took it out of the oven, the tops were just golden brown and caramelized. And he says, “The most important thing about this is the water. I want you to taste that water.”
Victoria Riskin: Oh.
George Pierce: And so we taste the water, and it's just squash stock.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah. Amazing.
George Pierce: And so we use that water to blend the stock. No onion, no garlic, no mirepoix or anything that you would normally add to a soup.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah.
George Pierce: And it was just the essence of squash.
Victoria Riskin: So if I understand you, it was just squash. Squash and a little water that was flavored, and that was it. And when you made the soup, did you puree it then?
George Pierce: We pureed it, and then, you know, I was asking him, like, “You know, I used to do a squash and apple and curry soup, you know.” And he's like, “Well, that's great. But we can add, like, a curried brown butter, or we could add some chopped apples to the top if we want those flavors. But as far as the squash goes, we want the squash to be the squash.”
Victoria Riskin: Let's let the squash just be… And when you puree, I hate to ask you this, but what do you use to puree so you get it as fine as possible?
George Pierce: I use a Vitamix and a very fine sieve.
Victoria Riskin: OK. Yeah. So you do the two things. Vitamix and… OK, we can talk about equipment in a minute. I'm very much in love with something called a Thermomix, but I don't know if you've seen one of those.
George Pierce: Oh, I've seen them. I have not used one before.
Victoria Riskin: But I know you have to save your pennies. They're expensive. But they do that thing that happens through a Vitamix or some other pureeing machine, and then put it through a sieve. It seems to sort of happen naturally in this Thermomix. But I don't want to advertise it, because they're very expensive. So, you use Vitamix. Why do you use Vitamix?
George Pierce: Vitamix is kind of the industry standard. It basically has a lawnmower engine on it, you know? It's got three-and-a-half horsepower, the sharpest blades. I've even bought replacement blades that were a third-party brand, and it's just…
Victoria Riskin: Not the same.
George Pierce: Vitamix has it dialed in.
Victoria Riskin: Such a quality company. Absolutely. And I think they're… is the container glass or plastic?
George Pierce: I use a plastic one.
Victoria Riskin: You do?
George Pierce: I try not to have much glass in a professional kitchen, just because when it breaks, then it can get into the food.
Victoria Riskin: Oh, I hadn't thought about that, because there's such an effort right now to de-plasticize kitchens.
George Pierce: Yes, yes. So, you know, I'm going through the yin and the yang of decision-making on these things. That is one of the most difficult personal things I have in professional kitchens. I've seen so much water waste, so much plastic waste, so much… You know, so we try to do things where we can to conserve that. So, buying lids instead of just wrapping everything in plastic wrap. And you know, I used to work at a place where the standard was every day you get your proteins out of the freezer, and you put them in the sink, and you turn the water on.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah. And then you're sort of heating up the plastic in a lovely way that sinks into the food, right?
George Pierce: Well, it's cold. You keep it cold, but you're just sitting there running water all day.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah, you're running water. And with water shortages everywhere, it's… So how do you… Well, you take stuff out of the freezer.
George Pierce: It's just all about planning ahead and making sure, well, for us, you know, trying to keep food as fresh as possible and use the freezer as little as possible.
Victoria Riskin: So here you're dealing, and maybe other places that you worked at in Big Sky and so on, they're using organic beef. This is a ranch after all. And there's a lot of worry, and understandable worry, about beef consumption in general, so it's an important conversation to be having. And where does that beef come from, and how has it been raised, and what's in it? And I've learned so much. And we hear a lot about trying to limit your beef, you know, reduce your beef consumption. I think that's right, but that's not enough if we're really thinking about what we ingest, how healthy it is for us, and how healthy it might be for the planet to make some of these changes. So could you just kind of riff on that?
George Pierce: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, I feel like a lot of the beef that most of us eat is what we would call a commodity beef product, right? So it's raised in, you know, not the most desirable situation for the cows. It's being shipped across state lines for processing with that footprint. It's, you know, being pumped full of antibiotics and hormones and all these things to get the biggest, most marbled beef you can. And honestly, I've, in the past, had a really difficult time with grass-fed. So our beef is 100% organic, grass-fed, grass-finished. OK. These cows never eat anything but grass. And all grass-fed beef is not created equal.
Victoria Riskin: OK, say more about that.
George Pierce: Yeah, so depending on what type of grass they eat, because if you go out into our pastures where our cows are, there's probably a dozen different types of grass. And each type of grass has different nutrients, different things that benefit the cows. But cows being cows, they find what they like.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah.
George Pierce: And if they kind of stick to the one thing that maybe doesn't have the right nutrients or whatever, they're just not going to turn out right. And when I first met Mahail, who runs our beef operation over in Big Timber, he was talking about all this data that he tracks, you know, soil health, which grasses have the most nutritional benefit, and which stage of the growing process is the best to feed them. And I'm a data guy myself. I try to apply chemistry to everything I do in the kitchen. And so to bond with him on that was really cool.
And then he sent me home with a couple of New York steaks, which in full transparency is not my favorite cut of steak. And I went home that night, and I cooked them up for my wife and my son, and I was flabbergasted. I could not believe how good this beef was.
It just, it hit me in a way of like, “Oh my gosh, I get to cook this amazing beef beautifully and serve it to people, and know where it comes from and know how much they care about these animals and the process of, you know, every step of the way from artificial insemination to the actual processing.”
You know, all the data is there. Each piece of beef I get, whether it's a pre-cut steak or a full side that I'm going to cut myself, has a tag number on it. It'll say, like, M256. And that is the mom of that cow.
Victoria Riskin: Oh, wow.
George Pierce: And so Mihail tells me, “If you ever cut into anything and it is just outstanding, call me right now and give me that number so we can make sure that we get that utilized more. And if it's less than desirable, call me even faster and tell me what tag number that is.”
Victoria Riskin: Look at that attention to detail. That's amazing. And where would people get this beef for themselves, or do we have to find a central place?
George Pierce: So we sell it throughout Montana at a couple of different co-ops and grocery stores in Montana that we do sell it through. And if you are in the south, about 50% of the beef that we take to market goes outside of Atlanta. There is a very famous year-round farmers market. Dekalb County. Dekalb County Farmers Market.
Victoria Riskin: Oh, sure.
George Pierce: And they literally get half of our beef and sell it.
Victoria Riskin: Oh, I have to go… Do I have to go to Atlanta, Dekalb County, to get the beef?
George Pierce: No, no. I think that you could definitely get it in Bozeman. You can get it in Livingston, Montana.
Victoria Riskin: And again, can't I get it online? Although, when you ship it, you know, you have to… it has to be cold.
George Pierce: Right. Yeah.
Victoria Riskin: So, I mean, does that degrade the freshness?
George Pierce: Yeah, I think they're probably shipping it with dry ice and ice packs.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah, yeah. Because I have bought some beef from B Bar Ranch.
George Pierce: Yeah.
Victoria Riskin: So for folks, maybe they want to try the online version.
George Pierce: Yeah. Yeah.
Victoria Riskin: So when you're in the kitchen, OK, so we had some lovely corn risotto. Yeah. Tell how you made that. I was really intrigued.
George Pierce: Yeah, so, and this goes to food waste, and again, about making your ingredients shine as far as whatever that specific ingredient is. And so, the dish itself, one of my favorite things is Mexican street corn, or elotes, where they grill the corn, they slather it with the lime crema, they put the chili on there, some queso fresco. I love it.
And so, yeah, last night we did a corn risotto with all of those flavors, and they had their choice of protein, which was either Alaskan salmon or pork that was raised here in the Rocky Mountains. And so to make the risotto itself, I obviously want to cook the rice in corn stock because that's going to make it taste the most like corn.
And so the first thing I did was I grilled all of our corn cobs and got all of the kernels off, and then I chopped up our cobs, and I put them in my pressure cooker, just the cobs themselves with water, and pressure-cooked it for about 20 minutes, which just really brings out that corn flavor. I love pressure cookers, especially for stock, because it just… if you think about drip coffee versus espresso, you've got that pressure that just accentuates the flavor.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah, so it pulls… Yeah, exactly.
George Pierce: And so then I used the corn stock to both make the risotto and to make a corn puree, which we finished the risotto with, just so that it's screaming corn when you taste it.
And yeah, using corn cobs that would normally go into the garbage can. One of my earliest chefs had a saying in his kitchen, which is now a saying at my house and every kitchen I've worked in, which is, “We don't put money in the garbage can.”
Victoria Riskin: You know, I want to talk more about that because first of all, there is so much food waste in the United States, whether it's from industrial farms, whether it's from restaurants, whether it's your own home. The more I find that I am not throwing food away but have found all the alternative uses, or put it in a compost, I have a composting machine because I'm a little lazy about composting, but I have a beautiful machine and it comes out, this wonderful dirt comes out. And then I can either just throw that in the woods or whatever. But food waste is such a big and crazy issue. It's an important issue, so talk a little bit about that.
George Pierce: Yeah. It's heartbreaking. I mean, going back to Mahail, if you think about it, when I think about all the work that he's putting into these cows to get me this beef, there's no way I want to waste an ounce of it.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah.
George Pierce: You know, because we have that connection. But I feel most people, especially in the United States, are so disconnected about where their food is coming from and what the processes are that go into that. And so it's easy to say, “Oh, I didn't get to that.” Yeah. “I'll just throw it out.” Or, “I didn't really like that.”
Victoria Riskin: “I didn't really want it. They put it on my plate and…”
George Pierce: Yeah. And there are so many options. I mean, I could come up with hundreds of examples of what you could do with things that would normally go into the garbage can. I frequently order, I don't order a lot of lobster, like whole lobster for the meat, but I do order lobster shells.
Victoria Riskin: Really?
George Pierce: And they’re almost free. And you can make the most beautiful lobster stock out of those that you could add to a bisque or some kind of sauce for a seafood dish. Things like chicken, I think it's most common for people to just go to the store and buy a box or a tray of chicken breasts or thighs or whatever they're in the mood for that evening. Where a whole chicken, one, is fairly easy to butcher. It takes, you know, a couple of times to get it down, but you're left with the bones that you can make a beautiful stock out of. And most people, that just goes in the garbage.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah.
George Pierce: The grocery stores are fabricating these chickens and throwing hundreds and hundreds of chicken bones into the garbage.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah, that's so sad.
George Pierce: And what do you do with the bones after you've done the stock? Is that the end of it?
Victoria Riskin: That's the end of it at that point.
George Pierce: We actually had a conference in the Valley a couple of years ago where a bunch of chefs, restaurants, and people, somebody who was in charge of conservation at Yellowstone National Park, we all got together to talk about food waste. And Yellowstone National Park, we were informed, has a million pounds of food waste every year. And we got to talking about bones, just to get back to where you were. That was kind of the endpoint, and one person was like, “Well, you know, what they used to do is make china.”
Victoria Riskin: Oh. Right? Bone china, is that the… Am I going in the right direction?
George Pierce: Yeah, yeah.
Victoria Riskin: Yeah, so… but like making plates and things out of ground bone. And obviously, that is a, you know, that takes someone being very industrial.
George Pierce: Exactly. But to that end, there are options for that. Absolutely.
Victoria Riskin: OK, so we have lobster and we have chicken. Chicken stock. OK, what else?
George Pierce: We have the corn cobs from last night. I mean, let's say I'm making a broccoli salad. Just a simple broccoli salad. Of course, I'm going to use the florets, but that whole stem is beautiful and tastes like broccoli, and if you slice it super thin, it's fresh, it's juicy. It's unbelievable. And, you know, just little things like that.
Victoria Riskin: What can I do with asparagus? You know, when you get down to the bottom, it's kind of woody.
George Pierce: I would use those to make an asparagus stock if I was going to make an asparagus puree, or sometimes, you know, I have a collection of vegetable scraps that I'll use for stock-making purposes.
Victoria Riskin: That's so interesting. I interviewed a fellow who makes stock called Brodo. And he's a chef. Yep. A really good restaurant in New York. And he was so stressed. He was having kind of a midlife meltdown, and he just stopped everything and lived mostly on his stock. And he began to heal, and he gave up smoking, and he slept better, and he was happy again, and now he's manufacturing it. And he said something very powerful, which was that he would love to see hospitals introduce healthy food, beginning with healthy stock and broth as a healing mechanism rather than these manufactured things called Ensure and all that kind of thing.
George Pierce: Yes. Absolutely.
Victoria Riskin: And I think we forget how our body craves healthy food, and yet there is a whole enormous industry out there serving us manufactured food full of all kinds of strange things. And yet, you know, here you are. You're a young man with a young wife and son and so on, and you're making this your life, and that's so inspirational. What else do you want to tell me about your kitchen before we close the conversation? I have one more uber question for you.
George Pierce: Yeah. I… Well, what you just said brought something up. So around COVID, I think a lot of chefs got burned out or just weren't working. And I ended up taking a very left, out of left field, the ranch that I used to work for had a foundation. And it was all associate-led. And so as a group of employees, our owner would say, “Here is a million-and-a-half dollars. I want you guys to go out into the community, get grants, get good grant applications, go on site visits. Ask the questions you need to ask, and then as a group, vote on how to distribute this money.” And we had our priorities, which were around food access, early childhood development, support for seniors, that sort of thing.
And I got connected to a place in Livingston called the Livingston Food Resource Center, which is a food pantry. During COVID, I got a phone call from the founder who was ready to retire, and he said, “I'm going to retire, and I think you should do this.” Wow. I had no nonprofit experience whatsoever, and of course, the grass is always greener. I was like, “This sounds amazing,” and so I did it for two-and-a-half years.
We had an artisan bakery attached that was also making 100% Kamut whole-wheat bread with grains grown in Montana that we would share with other food pantries throughout the state for free. And it was all grant-driven. But to what you said about the quality of the food and what we're eating, that was our biggest mission. So if you came into the food pantry, it looked like a grocery store. Even the canned goods, we would say, “We don't want anything with extra sugar or extra salt added,” or anything like that. But we would raise enough money every year to connect with the Hutterites, which are a Mennonite group out here. They're all over the state. There are different colonies all over the state, and they're all driven by agriculture. And so we would buy thousands of pounds of local carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower. And we would process them, like steam blanch them in our kitchen, freeze them, and vacuum-seal them.
B Bar would donate hundreds of pounds of local beef. Ground beef. Wow. The tomatoes that we've been eating this week that are grown here in the valley. They would come after every farmer's market, whatever they didn't sell, they would come and donate it. And so you had people who would normally just show up to a food pantry that would be given a box of random Top Ramen, mac and cheese, all these not-good foods.
Victoria Riskin: Right, this is just adding to the deficiencies in their health.
George Pierce: Exactly. Exactly. And so it was so inspiring to see a local food bank providing local food free of charge.
Victoria Riskin: So, you know, it just goes to the point, I think, that so many of the solutions that we need really are best if they're managed locally, and with clarity and wisdom and knowledge. But we can do a lot. We don't have to sit back and always wait for the government, although I'm not against the government, but there are things that can be done much more efficiently, faster, and better. And it also feels good because you're doing something to help your fellow man or woman.
George Pierce: 100%. Yeah. And I think that everybody could find something like that in their area. Whether you're worried about food waste in your household, there's probably somebody that you know that knows somebody who has pigs or chickens or something like that. Yeah, I mean, here we have compost toilets at B Bar.
And so we're able to compost all of our food waste, which is fairly minimal. But yeah. I mean, I'm in Livingston, Montana, which is a small town, but my neighbors have chickens and turkeys in town, you know. And that's a pretty common thing, I feel like, nowadays.
Victoria Riskin: And so… sort of going back to the fundamentals of what really matters, and going back to the Earth, and going back to nature and what's good for you. I have to say, I have two more questions, really.
George Pierce: Sure.
Victoria Riskin: Because you made some sourdough bread.
George Pierce: Yes.
Victoria Riskin: And that was, I'm trying not to eat too much bread, but I couldn't help myself, and I slathered some fabulous butter on it, and it was so good. You just have to tell me a little about the history of that particular bread.
George Pierce: Sure. So I moved out to Montana in 2010. And around that time, I had bought a cookbook that is called Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast. And it is written by a man named Ken Forkish, who's from Portland, Oregon. He has Ken's Artisan Bakery and Ken's Artisan Pizza in Portland, Oregon. And this book talked about starting a wild yeast starter just using flour and water, and kind of treating it like a…
Victoria Riskin: What kind of flour did you use?
George Pierce: I used all Montana-grown wheat.
Victoria Riskin: Wheat, OK.
George Pierce: Which, there are dormant yeasts that live on the outside of the husks. And so for flours that haven't been extremely processed, there's actual dormant yeast living inside of it. There's also yeast on our hands right now and in the air. And so every day I would take some of it out. I would add more water and flour. And for, I don't know, maybe 10 days, it didn't do anything. And then one day I came in, and I saw these little bubbles.
And I was just like, “Oh my God, it's happening.” And so yeah, that kind of started my journey on sourdough. And it's something that I took a big dive in chemistry-wise to find out. I started making bread, and it was like sometimes it was good, sometimes it was outstanding, and sometimes it was exceptional, and I did not know how to get to exceptional every time.
And so that's when I kind of took a deep dive into it as far as chemistry goes, and now it's one of the most important things in my life, in a weird way. Like, it's funny because it's just bread, but at the same time, it's so much more than bread to me.
Victoria Riskin: So how did we get to be exceptional? What were some of the elements of that?
George Pierce: Really just trying to understand my starter and getting to know what the enzymes inside of it are doing, and what yeast does as its job, right? So yeast's entire job is to eat sugar. And the byproduct of that is CO₂ , which is the gas that lifts the bread, and alcohol, which kind of gives it the sourness. So that's fermentation, right? That's all that's happening. And then you have enzymes that are eating gluten. That's what their job is.
Victoria Riskin: Good for them.
George Pierce: And so a lot of people who have maybe a mild gluten allergy or intolerance, I've found that they can enjoy my bread because it's a long fermentation, so there's less gluten in it.
Victoria Riskin: I've seen that, and it's true. And also, my friends who have mild gluten sensitivity say they can eat bread in Europe.
George Pierce: And I'm a firm believer in that, and that's the way that we grow our wheat. If you looked at how many bushels per acre are grown here versus in Europe, it's 100 times. I mean, they're… so I just think of these super roots, these super wheat plants with super gluten and, you know, all the processing. But yeah, I think about my bread as like a form of alchemy, right? The fact that I can take flour, water, and salt and have that end product.
Victoria Riskin: But it takes patience, because I had some wonderful yeast, you know, sourdough starter, and then it grew, and then I put it in another container, and then it grew. And I thought, “My God, it's going to take over the kitchen.” I never really mastered it. But I do have a friend who makes wonderful sourdough bread, so I invite her to dinner very often. And she'll say, “What can I bring?” And I say, “Bread.”
George Pierce: Bread. Yeah.
Victoria Riskin: And then I could eat the whole thing by myself. Now, my last question for you, we ask everybody who we interview. The podcast that we do is called Imagine If. And I think one of the things that drove that title is if we could imagine a different world and things working differently, you know, we can solve a lot of problems. But you have to have the imagination to be able to get to that point. So what would be your “Imagine If”?
George Pierce: Man, I get on a soapbox a lot about local food. Obviously, it's so important. But it's a trend. It's trendy. And trends come and go, you know? And that scares the heck out of me. Like right now it is important for people to know, like in maybe the more foodie circles, it's important for folks to know where their food is coming from. But I worry at some point that they stop caring because it's trendy, right? And it's a trend.
Victoria Riskin: So true.
George Pierce: And so I guess my what if would be: What if we could all go backward a little bit and get back in touch with our locality? And like I was saying earlier about finding a chicken farmer or a pig farmer and then sharing your food waste, and then maybe there's an opportunity for you to get a chicken or some eggs or… you know, to really embrace that local side of things.
You know, at one point in Montana before B Bar and during, B Bar is actually one of the only operations that is processing their beef. Like, almost 90% of the beef that is raised in Montana gets shipped out of state for processing. And that was because of a lot of the plants closing down during COVID. And the percentage that actually makes its way back is minimal, you know? And same thing in, like, Wisconsin. I think, you know, the bread belt of America, they're growing everything. They export something like 85% of all their produce.
And then you've got restaurants ordering from Sysco or, you know, the big manufacturers that are shipping produce all the way up from Mexico or Southern California, and with that carbon footprint and…
Victoria Riskin: I think emotionally, and I, again, appreciate your concern about trends. I think people are looking for a feeling of coming back home, and home in a very metaphorical sense of feeling that they have a connection to their neighbors, and they have a connection to their community, and what is happening is not about getting more but getting closer and better. And I think your imagination touches that feeling. I share that feeling. And I think it's an exciting time. So everything that we do at Bluedot is about moving in a better direction together with a sense of joy and connectivity. Yeah, so thank you for spending some time with me.
George Pierce: My pleasure.
Victoria Riskin: This was so great. This is George Pierce, chef, B Bar Ranch. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we will see you next time. And I'll get some of his recipes to share with you.
George Pierce: Whichever ones you want. That's great.
