Niedlov's everyday customers know what time their favorite bread is hot out of the oven. They know all of the ingredients. And they know the baker, who arrives at 2 a.m. each morning to begin mixing dough - most of which is made using only flour, water, salt and yeast.
Artisan food is defined by its simplicity: handmade in small batches, using only essential ingredients. But what makes it unique are the relationships it nourishes.
Bakers sculpt their loaves. Butchers know their animals. Candy-makers melt, blend and temper real chocolate. At its heart, the artisan food movement is a return to the midcentury American market, a time before factory food and big-box grocers.
But in place of all those preservatives and shortcuts is often a higher price tag. There's a reason for that, says Erik Niel, owner of Main Street Meats, Chattanooga's boutique butcher shop.
"You're feeding the soul as well as the body," he says.
Craft, small-batch foods cost more to make than mass-produced foods. Not to mention, additive-free foods tend to have a shorter shelf life, which also increases their cost.
"Real food molds," says Wendy Buckner, candy-maker and owner of The Hot Chocolatier. "There is nothing like biting into a fresh truffle."
The goal of artisan food is more than flavor; it is also to make eating a more meaningful experience. Here, six artisan food-makers in Chattanooga discuss their efforts to change how locals see their food.
Aperson could eat a different type of cheese every day for the rest of his or her life and never try them all, says Jesse Watlington, who co-owns Bleu Fox Cheese Shop with his wife, Brittany.
At any time, Bleu Fox has 60-75 types of cheese in its display: Gouda, goat, blue, wash-rind and more. One of the best-selling is the Austrian "Alp Blossom," a nutty-flavored cheese rubbed with wildflowers.
"There is such a vast array," says Watlington, who hand-selects every cheese he imports. "It's easy to make a sellable cheddar, but it's hard to make a really good artisan one."
Quality cheese, he says, always begins with quality milk. After its production, however, freshness is up to the purveyor. According to FDA regulations, some types of cheese may be stored in plastic for up to 31 days after it is cut.
"Cheese wrapped in plastic for that long is going to taste like plastic," Watlington says.
So Bleu Fox imports only small quantities of cheese and cuts to order.
"Cheese gets a bad rap," he says. "But it's arguably the perfect food. It's got tons of vitamins, minerals and protein. Paired with some fruits and vegetables, it's one of the most balanced meals."
Raw-milk cheeses, he continues, have even more vitamins than pasteurized varieties. Grass-fed cows produce cheese with more minerals than the grain-fed cows typical of most dairy factories. And aged cheeses tend to have lower levels of cholesterol.
"Unless there is a person there to tell you why a product is better, how would you know?" Watlington says.
Among its cuts of local beef, poultry, trout and lamb, Main Street Meats' pork arrives as whole pigs. Each weighs about 225 pounds.
"Having the ability to control the whole animal, it's kind of a chef's dream to play with that," says Erik Niel, who co-owns the shop with wife Amanda. "It's a game, finding a way to use every bit of the animal."
The skin becomes pork rinds. The trim becomes sausage. The belly becomes bacon. Special cuts are placed in the retail display. Even the head is used - brined, braised, pulled and pressed into a mold in order to make "head cheese."
"It's an Old World technique. It's one of the most fabulous things we do," Niel says.
The hope, he says, is that his "old Southern style butcher shop" method helps people feel more connected to their food, in contrast to big-box grocers, where the meat is processed off-site.
More than its conscientious use, Main Street Meats knows the animal's life history: where it was raised; what it was fed; how it was slaughtered.
"You can talk to the butcher who put his hands on the whole animals when they came in. The results are very palpable," Niel says.
Every day, Niedlov's makes between 120-150 hand-shaped bread loaves, all of which are baked in a hearth oven. "The initial intense burst of heat [from the stone] on the cold dough helps create richly colored loaves and chewy, better-tasting crusts," says General Manager Red Petty. "You don't get that when you bake in a pan."
Among its 18 kinds of bread, Niedlov's "Chattanooga sourdough" is its most popular, made with just flour, water and scratch-made starter, a fermented culture that enables the bread to rise.
"You have to start with a strong starter for the best flavor. We use a 15-year-old sourdough starter," Petty says.
Every day, Niedlov's sourdough finishes baking around 2 p.m. - except when it doesn't. Outside temperature and humidity can affect the speed at which it rises.
"We go with whatever the dough gives us. We care more about the product than the timeline," Petty says.
Customers do, too. "There are customers I see every single day. I know their families," says Petty.
"We do what we do for the community. It's simple. It's delicious. It's good for you."
Fifty-eight different glass bottles line the mahogany shelves at Olive Chattanooga: 28 types of olive oil and 30 flavors of balsamics. Owner Josh Ferguson knows the origin of every one. The oils are imported in small batches from places such as Spain, Tunisia, Italy or Greece, depending on growing season. The balsamics come from Modena, Italy.
Ferguson also knows when the fruit in every bottle was harvested. He hand-bottles and hand-labels all his blends. The olive oil infusions range from Tuscan herb to white truffle. Balsamics range from peach to chocolate.
Balsamics, he says, should be sweet. "They shouldn't taste like saltwater."
Ferguson encourages his customers to sample before buying.
"Not many people have tasted straight olive oil or balsamics. Where else could they do that? The crux of our business," he says, "is education, teaching people to use olive oil as healthy fats and balsamics as healthy sweets, and also finding flavors to facilitate that. I love talking about food. It's all I do. It's what I know."
The finer the spice is ground, the more likely it is to clump. To prevent that from happening, some companies add preservatives - which also extend shelf life.
"Other spice companies often make huge quantities of product that often sit on warehouse shelves for a year before hitting the grocery," says Ben Gordon, owner of Alchemy Spice. Specializing in micro-batch spices, Alchemy avoids the use of additives by using coarser grinds.
Alchemy's individual spices, ranging from allspice to turmeric, are ordered from all over the world.
"We don't powderize our spices," Gordon says. "We don't use soy, dairy, MSG - nothing that wasn't grown on a plant. Our spices might sit on a shelf for just a couple weeks. Essentially, we make to-order."
The result, he says, is fresher-tasting spices. Of the 24 all-natural blends, 21 are sugar free and five are salt free, and with the exception of Alchemy's "Easygoin' Seasoned Salt," the rest are low salt. Moreover, says Gordon, from the "Chive Jive Southwestern" to the "Kitchen Karma Mediterranean," Alchemy's blends cover the full flavor spectrum.
"I enjoy cooking a lot, and my hope is that our spice blends help people get into cooking more," Gordon says.
Chocolate is Wendy Buckner's medium. Before she and husband Brandon opened The Hot Chocolatier, her art was hot-wax paintings.
"Wax and chocolate are similar. You have to heat them to liquid, set them, add colors. They're both very sculptural," Buckner says.
Labor-intensive, too - which, Buckner says, is probably why there are not more artisan chocolate shops. "It requires a lot of patience. We're chocolatiers, not chocolate-makers. That gives us more time to develop recipes" she says.
First, The Hot Chocolatier receives small batches of premium bars from France, Belgium or North America. Some chocolate-makers, Buckner says, replace the chocolate's naturally occurring cocoa butter with partially hydrogenated oils. Then, those companies sell the high-quality butter to other industries.
"We would never do that. Cocoa butter is a good, healthy fat. It makes chocolate more satisfying," she says.
After receiving the candies, the chocolatiers melt and blend them. Then, it is time to temper, a meticulous process that involves spinning and heating the chocolate to the perfect temperature. While that takes place, they hand-chop fruit with which to fill truffles.
Ten years ago, when The Hot Chocolatier opened, "Nobody knew what a French macaron was. Even truffles - people were always asking 'What's a truffle?'" Buckner says.
But today, she says, the Scenic City's palate is more sophisticated - thanks, in part, to the ever-growing number of local food artisans, whose goal, like Erik Niel says, is to feed the body and the soul.
"We wanted to give people a place where they could treat themselves with a good quality, healthy product," Buckner says.