Chef Becomes Entrepreneur to Bring Compound Butters into the Mainstream
— An Interview with the David Stemmle, CEO of Headstart Gourmet —

When we think of food and wine together, it often involves pairing the two.  We might have an aromatic white to go with our papaya salad, a hearty red to drink with that filet mignon, or a dry rosé to enjoy with an antipasto plate.  But what about integrating wine into food?  That's a bit of a different story and one that far fewer people think about, much less actually practice.  That is, of course, unless they happen to have a good amount of comfort with the culinary arts — much like Chef David Stemmle.  At the heart of his company, Headstart Gourmet, is a line of quality, handcrafted compound butters that contain a substantial amount of reduced wine.  The effect of using wine as an ingredient in this way is to give the foods to which it's added an intensity and concentration of flavor.  Coupled with the richness inherent of the butter itself, his product is nothing shy of sensational.  Not long after I first met Chef Stemmle at the Annual Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, he spoke to me from his home in North Carolina, sharing not only the story of how he came to create his compound butters but also his culinary perspective on the wine's versatility in the preparation of fine food.

NM:  I initially became intrigued with your product because one its key ingredients is wine — and a lot of it!  As a chef, can you say a bit about your experience with wine and how it plays into your relationship with food?

DS:  I believe that food and wine are intrinsically tied.  Food is simply better with wine, and vice versa.  I'll tell you brief story to illustrate my point.  Awhile back, I went to a wine dinner at a little French bistro where I used to work.  I'd requested the night off because I wanted to be there as a customer and enjoy the dinner.  I'd convinced ten of my friends to come along with me, and we were all sitting around this big table.  They brought around an Alsatian Gewurtztraminer and poured us all glasses — but none of us really thought the wine was that great, and I was starting to get worried.  Then they served a salad with it, a relatively plain salad with some spicy greens like arugula and watercress with a tangy citrus vinaigrette dressing.  Everybody ate the salad and when they tasted the wine again, every single person around that table said "Wow!  That totally changed it!"  Everything about the wine was better; everything about the food was better.  And that entire experience burned an indelible impression in my head about how food and wine can really work together to become something greater than the sum of their parts.

NM:  Yes, there's often a synergy between the two.  And I'm always curious to get a culinary viewpoint on that, since it's coming from a very different side of the equation than that to which I'm accustomed as a wine professional.  Tell me a little more about your perspective.  For starters, what prompted you to create your compound butters and start your venture with Headstart Gourmet?

DS:  I started working in restaurants when I was seventeen years old — at a Denny's.  I learned how to make a mean Grand Slam working at that Denny's!  After working there for a while, I moved on to another big box chain restaurant, and then eventually moved to North Carolina.  It was only after leaving the food industry for a short while and coming back that my real passion began.  I started working at a little Italian place, and I learned how to make every dish that they served.  I also began to learn about wine there; there was a weekly class that the manager there taught us.  And that was my first real introduction to food from a serious, culinary standpoint.  [This was a restaurant that was] owned and operated by chefs, and these guys wanted to teach us as much as they could about their product; they also wanted to teach us about the wines they were serving so we could communicate with customers about the quality of their product, and the time, effort, and love that went into that product.  So that really got me started on this path.

DS: (con'd) I spent some time at that Italian place, some time at the French bistro I just mentioned, and then moved on to what would be called a "New American" place — Four Square Restaurant in Durham, North Carolina.  The chef there, Shane Ingram, had trained with Patrick O'Connell at The Inn at Little Washington, Charlie Trotter in Chicago, and Emeril Lagasse when Emeril opened his first restaurant in New Orleans.  Shane really blew my mind and got me excited about food.  He made a lot of reductions as a way to intensify flavor — he'd make a stock and reduce it down to the demi-glace, or he would take a couple of bottles of wine and reduce it all down to a syrup — he would bring out these intense flavors without taking a shortcut.  And that's when I started playing with these techniques, trying to imitate what he was doing.

I still use some of the lessons that I learned at the French place, like [preparing] the compound butter.  There, we were serving meat dishes with it: the hot hangar steak comes off the grill, the blue-cheese compound butter goes right on top of it, and by the time the plate hit the table, that blue-cheese butter would have melted all over the steak — it was just luscious and decadent!  So I thought of combining that process with Shane Ingram's intense reductions and began putting this whole thing together.  It started one day while I was at my in-laws house and they asked me to make a sauce for a side of salmon.  So I thought I would make a beurre-blanc sauce — a white wine reduction finished with butter, shallots, and herbs — but instead, I decided to make a compound butter so people could take a piece of salmon, put a little bit of that butter on top and let it melt.  And then I thought that since the main ingredient in both of those concepts is butter, why couldn't I make a beurre-blanc compound butter?  So I tried it: I made an intense wine reduction, adding some vinegar to heighten its acidity, then cooled it down and whipped it into some butter.  I was totally amazed because, ultimately, it was very convenient to just pull this thing out of my fridge and dollop a bit on top of the piece of fish — there I had the convenience of the compound butter with the flavor of the beurre blanc.  I then did some research online to find out where I could actually buy it because I could see using it all the time.  I looked all over the place but couldn't find anything like it, nothing at all.

NM:  So, you went from the experience of deciding that this was something that you liked and wanted to have, to then making it and actually moving forward with marketing and selling it.  That's quite a leap, from enthusiast to entrepreneur!  Can you say a bit more about what motivated you to do so?

DS:  Well, it is quite a leap; you're right about that.  I guess I saw a niche and thought [my compound butters] would make a really cool product, something I could get behind and not be afraid to put my name on.  There's nobody else out there doing this — not like this.  Now, make no mistake, there are other compound butter companies, and I've since seen some that use wine.  But we have over half a bottle of wine in each 4-ounce container!  That's not a splash; it's significant, it's one of the main ingredients.  And that, I think, is what makes our product so unique.  If you look at our red wine compound butter, the Raspberry Honey Mustard Beurre Rouge, that thing is really red!  And the reason it's so red is because there's half a bottle of reduced Merlot in it.  Of course, that also gives it qualities of fruit and acidity.  And when you take an acid and a fat and a dash of salt, you get something that's going to taste really good.  That's one of the big foundations of flavors, taking an acid and cutting a fat with it — that's essentially what a salad dressing is.  A beurre blanc is the same thing, with the fat from the butter and the acid from the wine.

NM:  What goes into the choice of wines that you reduce into your butters and what did you face when it came to sourcing that wine in larger quantities?

DS:  There are several factors.  In North Carolina I have to use something that I can buy directly from a grocery store or a wine shop; I'm not allowed to buy bulk or directly from a distributor.  So that restricted what my options were.  But more to the point — I read an article in the New York Times a couple of years ago, a discussion on the subject of what wines you should cook with.  The entire food editorial staff of the Times gathered together as a tasting panel for an experiment.  They made an authentic Italian dish, a risotto cooked in red wine, whose recipe specifically calls for Barolo.  In the experiment, they prepared the dish exactly the same way, but one version used Barolo and the other used Two Buck Chuck [Trader Joe's value wine, Charles Shaw].  And it turns out that the panel chose overwhelmingly in favor of the Charles Shaw version.  This really cheap, simple wine ended up making a much more elegant and refined classic Italian Barolo dish than the Barolo itself did!  The reason for that is that when you take a really intense, complex wine that's full of subtle nuance and is wonderful on its own, and then reduce that down, all its flavors are intensified — including ones that don't work out so well when they're concentrated.  One example is oakiness: if you have a very oaky wine and intensely reduce it, the oak character turns bitter, giving you a bitter sauce.  In other words, when some nuances are exaggerated, you can have an issue.

So what we ended up going for [in the Headstart Gourmet butters] was an acidic, fruit-forward, and simple style of wine that didn't have much in the way of tannin or oak.  And that, I think, is what works best in this sort of situation.  We have the butter, which adds flavor and texture, to which we then add the wine reduction.  To our Beurre Blanc, we also add lemon, thyme, garlic, a little Dijon mustard, and parsley.  Similarly, with our Beurre Rouge, we add the raspberry honey mustard.  And that's it; there's nothing else.  There's certainly no chemical flavoring, preservatives, or colors.  By keeping it simple and adding those layers, we get something that's really profound.

NM:  I have to say, when I first tasted your butters, I was struck with their depth and concentration of flavor.  What sort of customer would you say is most drawn to your product?

DS:  When chefs see this product, they get excited because they know what it takes to make something like this.  They can understand immediately how to use it; their minds start going.  At the same time, I'm personally invested in the retail product because I'm a firm believer in its value and versatility in the home kitchen.  You can make amazing sandwiches by using this instead of a mayonnaise or mustard.  In preparing hors d'oeuvres, you can spread it on some crostini along with smoked salmon and some capers.  It's fantastic!  You can also melt it down and use it as a sauce or dollop on top of a hot piece of meat coming off your grill or toss it in with some steamed vegetables or stir some into a risotto.  I mean, there are so many things you can do with it!  And for the record, our butters have half the fat of regular butter, because we're diluting it with the wine and other ingredients.  It's a pretty cool trick to add flavor and remove fat at the same time.

To find out just how many ways Headstart Gourmet can jumpstart your cooking, visit Headstart Gourmet online.  David Stemmle's entire line of compound butters can be found at select Whole Foods Markets, in addition to a number of smaller, independent grocers.