(upbeat country rock) - [David] A Fork in the Road was brought to you by.

(light bright music) - [Announcer] Georgia's soil is rich.

Its climate agreeable.

Its agricultural variety exceptional.

That's why we're nature's favorite state.

Georgia Grown supports the farmers and producers who work the land and keep us fed because we all grow better together.

Find out more about Georgia agriculture at GeorgiaGrown.com - [Announcer] Since 1917, the Farmers and Consumers Market Bulletin has been Georgia's primary resource for all things agriculture, From thousands of classifieds for livestock, farm supplies, equipment, and homegrown goods to the latest and most important farming news.

- Ah, Georgia, nature's favorite state.

(light uplifting music) Let's hit the road and meet the farmers, producers, makers and bakers who keep us all fed and keep us coming back for more straight ahead at the Fork in the Road.

("Howling at the Moon" by D Fine Us) ♪ I came from the mud ♪ ♪ There's dirt on my hands ♪ ♪ Strong like a tree ♪ ♪ There's roots where I stand ♪ Georgia farmers, artisans, merchants, and producers, we depend on these men and women every day of our lives through the choices we make in the food we consume.

Their strategy and approach is always shifting but the end game remains the same, results.

(upbeat music) This week, we feature a wide variety of goodness sprouting from The Peach State, from Good Boy Goodies and sweet Vidalia onions to tasty, natural Georgia-raised beef and even a healthy dose of kombucha to top things off.

We begin this unique week up in the foothills of the Appalachians in Jasper, Georgia where something totally bodacious is cooking.

(light uplifting music) Find something you love and make a living out of it.

And that's exactly what Cathy Cunningham did.

- Trust me on this.

These are Mama Geraldine's cheese straws.

(upbeat music) - What we have here is the number-one-selling cheese straw in all of these United States made right here in Jasper, Georgia at the Bodacious Food empire, Mama Geraldine's.

Although I'm the founder and creator of this great product, I have to give full credit to my Mama Geraldine.

She was the inspiration, she would make them, it was very difficult 'cause she would use this grinder, this extruder little thing.

She'd ship them to me, I'd get a supply of cheese straws from Geraldine and people would descend on them like locusts.

"When can we get some more, when can we get some more?"

And I go, "Whenever Mama's gonna make them.

"I don't make cheese straws."

(like bright music) So, skip ahead maybe another 15 years or so, I was working at a radio station and I just, suffice to say, I was not gelling very well with the corporate culture.

So I'm sitting there one day, drinking a glass of wine, paying another gourmet company for their cheese bites, and I said, "Now, wait a minute, "mine are better than these "and I'm writing them a big old check."

I go, "You know, I think I could make "a business out of making cheese straws."

- [David] These straws began as a grassroots, hand-pressed operation, but has since grown significantly, due to some clever marketing, but mainly by its tasty reputation - The Kroger Company comes to me and they said, "Well, we like your cheese straws.

"We think we want to carry these Geraldine's," at the time, they said, "You think you could produce "about 20,000 cases and have them ready "in September of 1998?"

I said, "Absolutely, not a problem."

The most I had ever shipped at one time prior to that was 10 cases.

Now I gotta do 22,000.

In the world of entrepreneurism, you always go, "Absolutely."

And then you sit back and if you don't pass out, you figure out a way to do it.

(light country music) This is the bakery part of our facility and this is where all the magic with Mama Geraldine's happens right here.

Now, as you can see, it is all about the cheese.

I'm going to show you how we used to do it and what gave me the idea that we gotta be able to do this better.

So my Mama Geraldine would spend hours, hours upon hours churning these cheese straws out and you'd just go on and on, and obviously, I'm not doing a really good job at it.

So I watch my mama do this and I go, "Whew!

"There has got to be a better way."

And as you can see how we made it then and this is how we make it today.

So now you're going to enter the expansion, it was about 10,000 square feet into a new packaging, fully-automated packaging area.

And I'll tell you something about my oven here, it's kind of like a old cast iron skillet.

There's no oven on the planet that's going to bake a better cheese straw than this one 'cause it's designed and seasoned to do so.

This is our automated carton filler.

So instead of somebody having to put the carton together and glue them, this does it for us.

Okay, so what we have here is the end of our 70-foot continuous baking tunnel oven.

So they're all baked evenly and they come out crispy.

We have to have a very long cooling period because honestly, if they came out of this oven and we decided to go ahead and bag them, they would probably melt each other.

So we have to have all the way up this conveyor and these two guys combined to do the cooling.

(light upbeat music) - [David] Every straw is geometrically unique, some straight, some slightly curved, some may be L-shaped, but you see it doesn't matter.

And that's the part that's so endearing.

- Now, David, I'm getting ready to give you a real treat.

There are very few things in life better than a fresh baked cheese straw right off the Bodacious Food baking facility.

Trust me on this.

I had the Kroger Company here one time, doing a little survey and doing an inspection, they're having fun and they would not leave this area.

I thought they were going to eat up my whole day's worth of work, but that was okay.

(softly crunches) (light upbeat music) - [David] And this is just the cheese straw sector of Cathy's Bodacious Foods.

Did I mention the Key Lime or Pecan Cini-Minis cookies?

I guess there's always room for a dessert snack when we're done sipping down some straws.

Thanks again, Mama Geraldine for passing down this cheesy tradition.

(uplifting acoustic guitar) From tasty cheesy treats for humans to a Georgia-grown gourmet snack for man's best friend.

And for that, we head down to Byron to meet a dog named Chubb and his creative best friend, ArrKeicha.

(light acoustic guitar) Every dog has his day - Good boy.

- [David] And for this good boy, that day is every day.

- This is Mr. Chubb, Mr. Chubb is the reason behind Good Boy Goodies.

- [David] Chubb was the muse.

Chubb is named after a famous Georgian.

- Yes, Nick Chubb, the running back.

(softly laughs) Go Dogs.

- [David] The inspiration for ArrKeicha's Good Boy Goodies, a training tool and rewarding treat that keeps Chubb and his mommy pretty much on good terms every day.

(light upbeat music) - So I wanted to have a treat that was good for him but also good to him, hence Good Boy Goodies.

They're all natural made with human-grade ingredients and what that means is if you went to a bakery and said, "I need you to bake me some cupcakes," the same quality of ingredients they would use for your cupcake we use for our treats.

They're free of corn, wheat and soy because over time, those things are bad for your dog.

We have actually three main flavors.

We have peanut butter, we have pumpkin, and we have oatmeal, peanut butter being our bestseller, pumpkin coming in second.

Chubb will eat all of them as if they were the same.

They're bite size and if you were training your dog, you would actually break it up in order to give him several pieces.

(light acoustic guitar) Chubb has actually just become a therapy dog.

So as a company, we wanted to give back to the community.

So we'll be taking him into the children's hospitals as well as some of the nursing homes, just to give them some therapy.

- [David] Now ArrKeicha admits that like most dogs, Chubb doesn't have a sophisticated palette.

- Good boy, good boy, Chubb.

- [David] He's going to eat these goodies like a sack of Halloween candy.

So ArrKeicha realized that she needed to make them both tasty and healthy.

Chubb will eat absolutely anything.

He's very, very food motivated.

You can get him to do almost anything for a treat, almost anything.

- [David] And he's in good shape.

- He is in good shape.

- [David] Even though he eats a lot.

- He does, he does.

- Aww!

From a dog named after a famous Bulldog to an onion that's made a sweet name for itself, on to Vidalia, home to the legendary Vidalia onion.

(upbeat country rock) You know 'em, and you love 'em and it's only in Georgia where you can grow 'em.

The legendary Vidalia onion, a crop so magically sweet that you can eat them just like an apple.

- We're in it now, we're digging onions, we're clipping onions, we're harvesting.

- [David] Aries Haygood is an onion farmer, manager, and all around good guy.

The farm name is changing from M&T Farms to A&M Farms due to a family generational adjustment.

But the onion awesomeness remains the same.

- The unique thing about this onion is what the generations before us did as far as marketing the onion, showing and proving how sweet this onion is based on growing conditions and the soil, the environment that it's has grown in.

You can do so much more with it.

You can eat it fresh, you can cook it down, whatever it is that you want to do.

Or just simply just put it on a hamburger roll.

Because the name carries such a brand that folks recognize, the chefs more and more, they're wanting to make sure that they are able to cook with the onion, use the unique flavor, to be able to put that brand, that name on their menus.

- [David] The city of Vidalia and Toombs County, Georgia is the center of the sweetness in the onion's namesake.

But the sweetness is spread throughout the South Georgia region allowing several Georgia counties to grow and deliver these special onions to help supply the demand.

- It's pretty neat, we get the name because of the county that we're in, but all of us kind of, we jump in and we do it together and we support one another, that's for sure.

(light music) - [David] Aries always runs a clean and safe operation.

So with the current situation at hand they're just stepping things up a bit to be certain.

- The good thing about what we're in, we do food safety.

So part of food safety of course is hygiene and cleanliness.

And so we're always training on washing our hands properly before and after a break.

Anytime they cross the red line that I'm standing on they're supposed to wash their hands.

So we already trained in that, do your best to stay away from each other while we're packing.

As you can see, there are certain areas where it gets to be within that six foot but we're doing our best to keep them away reminding them constantly.

We're training ourselves to be flexible so that we can just be ready to respond any way that we need to.

- [David] It's a favorite of signature chefs all around America, a kind of sweetness that can only be grown in Georgia.

(light acoustic guitar) From Aries of onion town to the curious world of kombucha, let's journey back north along the Atlanta BeltLine to the Cultured South Fermentation Company, the source of Golda Kombucha.

(light acoustic guitar) Located in Atlanta's trendy West End neighborhood, Cultured South Fermentation Company is the creation of brewmaster Melanie Styles, founder of Atlanta's first and only kombucha company, Golda Kombucha.

(light uplifting music) - Kombucha is a probiotic tea.

It is a fermented drink made from a sweet tea base with a culture of yeast and bacteria.

The yeast and bacteria converts the sugar and the caffeine in the sweetened tea to probiotics and it has a little bit of a tanginess quality to it.

It also is fizzy just like a beer or carbonated water.

It all started with my love of fermentation, specifically kombucha.

My grandmother taught me how to make kombucha when I was in college, and I started brewing it from home, just fell in love with the entire process of fermentation.

And it is traditionally not a Southern drink but I kind of put my own Southern spin on it.

We use fresh peaches from local Georgia peach farms and lots of herbs and fruit pairings that you would traditionally find in the Appalachian Mountains and Georgia.

I started Golda Kombucha in 2013.

2018 we decided to start going into more of the fermentation of food and vegetables and different kinds of cultures.

So I started a company called Cultured South to kind of encompass all of that.

And today we make fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi and a vegan cheese called Pure Abundance, and of course, Golda Kombucha.

(upbeat electronic music) The fermentation process does produce a little bit of alcohol naturally, but it is a non-alcoholic beverage.

It's less than half a percent of alcohol and it's a healthy amount of alcohol.

So just enough to digest your food, things like that.

Probiotics are great for the micro flora in your gut system and the vitamins found in kombucha are all naturally occurring, vitamins B12 and vitamin C. And those of course help with energy and overall health and wellness.

- [David] Cultured South is yet another booming spot right along the Atlanta BeltLine, plenty of indoor and outdoor seating to chow down, take some sample flights and drink up the goodness.

- So here at Cultured South you can try a flight.

This is our flight board sampler.

It's five different flavors of Golda Kombucha.

This one here is our elderberry refresher, it's made with fresh elderberries, mint, echinacea.

We also make an elderberry syrup which is an immune-boosting tonic.

And this is our kombucha that's made with the same herbs that are infused into our elderberry elixir.

We have here our Strawberry Mint flavor.

We use fresh strawberries and dried mint.

Here we have our high Hibiscus Orange kombucha.

It's got a beautiful color.

It's a little bit more of a tangy kombucha.

This is going to be our Cream Soda kombucha.

It uses a rooibos tea with herbs like lavender, vanilla, and orange peel.

All of our kombuchas are very low in sugar.

We don't add any artificial flavors, no added sugar.

They taste very much like a effervescent sparkling water with a little bit of a tanginess.

Here we have our Lavender Lemon.

This is one of our top sellers.

It's very floral forward, it has fresh lemons and dried lavender infused into it.

(light acoustic guitar) - [David] And just a few feet from the taproom is the brewery and the research development kitchen where fresh local produce, herbs, and fruits all blend to create fun fermented goods.

- We have our own canning line.

We brew everything fresh weekly, and we can it right here at our taproom and brewery.

Right behind me, they are canning up some fresh Lavender Lemonade kombucha to go into stores like Kroger and Whole Foods.

And you can find that in all of your local stores here in Atlanta, Georgia, and beyond.

This is example of our growler of kombucha.

You can bring it here and get it refilled and we have 15 different flavors of kombucha on tap to choose from.

So this is our black tea that we use to make the fresh tea in the kombucha.

So kombucha is the fermented tea, it's a sweetened tea, just like you would drink here in Georgia sweet tea, but we actually ferment all the sugars out so it makes a really yummy probiotic-rich kombucha tea.

(light music) - [David] Golda Kombucha, I just like saying that name, is yet another unique creation sprouting from the heart of the Peach State, an old Southern concoction of probiotic-rich goods with a modern twist of flavor and goodness.

(light acoustic guitar) Our final Fork in the Road takes us to a Southern farm that sources a high-grade beef product that has chefs smiling all over the South.

(light banjo music) ♪ Hey ♪ Beef is big business in Georgia, an industry that is indeed growing down here and has plenty of opportunity to expand as a national powerhouse.

One of the players making that happen is Francois Leger who has business operations in Augusta and other parts of South Georgia, including a massive state-of-the-art farm in Southeast Georgia known as Chatel Farms.

- I have a passion for the meat business, try to get the best beef possible.

- [David] Primarily focused on Black Angus and other high-quality breeds, Chatel is one of the primary Georgia farms that sources Southern River Farms Natural, providing high-quality, hormone-free beef for restaurants and chefs all around Georgia and the South.

♪ Hey ♪ (bright music) - When a consumer buy a piece of meat, or he buys a ribeye, a tenderloin, or a strip, or whatever piece of meat, he wants two things.

He wants it to be tender and he wants it to be flavorful and that's what we're looking for.

That's why here at Chatel Farm, we're not feeding cattle with hormones or added hormones.

We're not using (softly mumbles) we're not using antibiotics.

We do not push them too hard.

And I think we're quite successful at that.

(light country rock music) - [David] And here's one of the major things that sets this beef apart from most of the competition.

From start to finish, the beef never crosses the state line.

That's a rarity in this industry east of the Mississippi.

- Initially, we were just a cow and bull business.

So more toward ground beef.

I saw an opportunity to feed cattle in the Southeast.

Especially with the heat and the rain, Georgia, in my opinion, is very friendly to agriculture.

If we wanted to build a high-quality program in term of a beef, there was not another way but doing it ourself.

Everything's that I've heard so far in the country was it's impossible to feed cattle in the Southeast.

So we had to prove that it is possible to feed cattle in the Southeast.

- That's what brought me to FPL, was the vision of building this vertically-integrated, sustainable beef program that really no one else in the Southeast can do or is doing.

And really, I've been around a number of places and you don't see it anywhere really in the United States from this scale, at this level of what Francois is building here.

So our Southern River Farms Brand, the cattle for that brand actually come from the Southeast.

So Chatel supplies some of the cattle for that program but all the cattle come out of the Southeast.

We work with local farmers, local ranchers that raise cattle in a manner that meet our specifications on its one breed of cattle, Black Angus.

It's a controlled feeding regimen that all the cattle get.

For chefs, that's important.

They want to be able to say the ribeye you have today at my restaurant is the same ribeye you're going to have tomorrow and the same ribeye steak you'll have six months from now.

(light upbeat music) - [David] So now we journey to Augusta to feature this product in the tastiest way possible, meet chef Todd Schafer, owner of the highly-acclaimed Southern kitchen and oyster bar, Abel Brown.

- Southern River Farms Natural I think is really how beef used to be raised.

Now companies produce cattle that the ribeyes are 12 to 15 pounds, minimum per ribeyes.

And so it makes the eye so much bigger so it's impossible to cut a fat steak without it being 30 ounces.

They're just very naturally raised, plus the marbling is great, plus they're local.

We do have a couple of different variations that we'll do.

We take the ribeyes, we trim them down and we smoke them whole and then cut them into steaks.

We smoke them just enough to get a tiny little bit of smoke flavor, but it's still raw so we can grill it.

Another thing that we'll do with these is we'll trim them like this and we'll submerge them in duck fat and kind of poach it gently, very gently, and then cut it and grill it.

It's pretty delicious.

You can see the marbling in this, this is prime.

I mean, it's really as good or better than any prime on the market.

(light upbeat music) The way we cook it is we're able to cook it right.

Again, I can't say enough about a steak that's that big because that's about as, I'm not kidding, this is a ribeye from the '70s.

This is what they used to look like.

And now, I mean, they're this big, you know what I mean?

They're huge, so it allows us to get a better quality piece of beef.

It's a better package, it just, it's concise, it's tight, it's great.

(light upbeat music) What I'll do with these strips is I'll cut them on a very, after I grill it, I'll cut it on a very steep bias and turn it inside so that way when it goes to the table, the guest knows it's cooked mid rare, rare, well, whatever.

Hopefully not well, but (crew softly laughing) it's your money, but you do whatever you want.

(upbeat country rock) I'll just sear just the outer edges.

So it looks kind of blonde.

I'm just trying to sear in the juice, just throw it on the grill, gently, and then I'll close it up.

For beef, that's the best way to cook it, I think, is get a good light sear on it and they cook kind of fast, and high heat.

Whereas something like pork or lamb, you can put a good sear on it, but then you slow it down.

(upbeat country rock) So that's the smoked one.

And then this is the, the New York Strip.

(upbeat country rock) (light uplifting music) - [David] Day in and day out, the farmers, artisans, and small business pioneers of Georgia continue to display how old Southern methods and traditions can blend with a modern twist of science, research, and technology to create a unique and tasty Georgia product.

See ya at the next Fork in the Road.

(light uplifting music) (upbeat country rock) A Fork in the Road is brought to you by.

(light bright music) - [Announcer] Georgia's soil is rich, its climate agreeable, its agricultural variety, exceptional.

That's why we're nature's favorite state.

Georgia Grown supports the farmers and producers who work the land and keep us fed because we all grow better together.

Find out more about Georgia agriculture at GeorgiaGrown.com.

- [Announcer] Georgia FSIS provides efficient and accurate third-party inspection services to members of the industry.

We inspect various fresh commodities including peanuts, fruits, vegetables, and pecans.

The use of the inspection service ensures the shipment of high-quality products and enhances Georgia's reputation as a supplier of superior agricultural products.