Edible Food Find: Roots & Spoon
Photos by Michael Piazza
Laura Imhoff never really cared for pickles until her grandmother persuaded her to try her homemade bread-and-butters. Imhoff was hooked, enthusiastically welcoming the care packages of pickles her grandmother would ship from her home on Cape Cod to Imhoff’s college in Boston. When she moved to Texas after graduation, Imhoff hoped her beloved pickle supply chain would continue.
Her grandmother demurred, but offered: “I’ll send you the recipe and you can learn to make them.”
Imhoff still has the typewritten recipe, which sparked her own pickling journey while living in Texas. She accepted her grandmother’s challenge and took things to the next level: pickling various vegetables along with making fermented hot sauces, sauerkraut and kimchi, and sharing recipes on a blog. She fell in love with the sense of community she encountered with its shared passion for good food and the environment. While holding different jobs, including working at Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts in Austin and at an urban farm, she started her own business, Made by Laura Lee, which featured canned goods, hand embroidery and furniture restoration. In 2017, she held a Kickstarter that raised $10,000 in 30 days—an affirmation that her entrepreneurial leanings had legs.
A few years after that, Imhoff took her canning and pickling business full-throttle when she returned to her native Boxford at the end of 2020. In summer 2022, she launched Roots & Spoon, a canned goods company featuring small-batch jams, jellies, pickles and relishes handcrafted from seasonal and locally grown produce.
You can be assured these are not your ordinary jams and pickled vegetables. Their names alone are captivating: orange and thyme pickled beets, blueberry basil jam, strawberry balsamic jam, lemon and clove pickled beets—recipes inspired by mixing sweet and savory, and sweet and spicy.
“I like being playful with flavor combinations; I think that comes from working at a culinary school,” Imhoff says, referring to a stint at the Escoffier school in Austin, where in addition to working at the front desk and then as director of student services, she helped teach canning classes. “There’s so much room to play with jams and pickles. And I find that I’m often asking myself: ‘How can what I make pair with cheese? What can I do other than toast?’ I don’t think of just the product, but how it can be used.”
Indeed, this is how she approaches her own meals, though she says she often eats right out of the jar. She’ll pile her pickled beets, fresh ricotta, honey, salt and thyme on sourdough. Or toss her orange and thyme pickled beets with arugula, toasted almonds and goat cheese, and coat them with the vinegar from the jar—quite possibly the perfect summer salad.
Imhoff plans her small batches around what’s in season locally and available nearby. (She makes an exception for cranberries, which she procures from Cape Cod.) On a recent July day, she talked about getting cases of raspberries from Lanni Orchards in Lunenburg, which she’ll use to make raspberry hibiscus jam, perhaps with some orange zest.
“Supporting local farms is so important for the economy, for the environment and for the farmers,” she says, also extolling the health and immune system benefits from eating locally. “The food also just tastes so much better.”
She jams and pickles out of Kitchen Local in Amesbury. Fresh off Cape Cod’s entrepreneur accelerator program EforAll, in addition to “nonstop canning,” Imhoff is looking to grow her business. But she won’t stray from her standards. For example, when she cans beets—30 to 50 pounds at a time—it’s a two-day affair.
“There may be a better way to do it but I’m so happy with the results,” she says. “And while I know I need to scale up my recipes, I’m not willing to sacrifice quality and flavor.”
Imhoff ultimately aspires to own a micro farm where she’ll grow produce for her canned goods, operate a farm stand, host farm-to-table dinners and invite a rotation of chefs to come in. A musician herself, Imhoff would also like to hold music events. “We can talk about food and flavor and growing, but the one thing that brings everyone together is food put on a table,” she says.
This story appeared in the Fall 2023 issue.
