Nothing but the best for our biscuits!
by Marcy Harris
For those of you who love American Spoon preserves, this isnât going to be easy to hear. Weâve said goodbye to the preserves weâve had on our menu since the dawn of time, and said hello to a new jam. It was not an easy decision, and itâs not that we donât love American Spoon anymore. Sometimes things just donât work out. But man, it took forever to find something that measures upâin this case, in spoonfuls.
For Ari and Chef Bob, it was a tough 6 months sourcing out a new jam. We canât settle for just anything to top our amazing buttermilk biscuits. They deserve something really good. After all, theyâve been good to us. But weâve finally found just the right thing for our Southern homemade biscuits: Southern homemade jam.
Keep it simple, keep it delicious.
We are now spreading the love for really good jam with Blackberry Patch in Georgia. Ari has known one of the founders, Harry Jones, for years. Harry and his partner Randy Harvey took over Blackberry Patch in 1999, expanding the distribution of their jams and fruit syrups. Before then, it was owned by farmers local to Thomasville, with the intention of using time-honored Southern techniques with locally harvested fruit. The ingredients are simple: fruit and cane sugar, which is far superior to beet sugar. By keeping it simple, Blackberry Patch accomplishes their mission of making jam that tastes like your mom made it.
Theyâve been featured in O The Oprah Magazine, Southern Living, Garden and Gun, USA Today, and more. After stumbling upon Blackberry Patch, Food and Wine named Thomasville one of the âbest small food towns in the countryâ last year. They couldnât get enough of the jam and the Sweet Grass Dairy cheese that is also found in Thomasville. This is the kind of stuff that Zingermanâs dreams ofâsmall town, artisan-made, with really good local ingredients.
Orange you glad we have a new flavor?
We started out with a flavor that is not well-kown up in these parts: Satsuma. Itâs actually been a common request for years that we offer some sort of an orange marmalade on the breakfast menu, so this worked out well. Satsuma is a variety of Chinese mandarin. The original Chinese name means âhoney citrus of Wenzhou,â which is an apt description of its gentle, sweet flavor. Satsumas originally came to the U.S. by way of a Jesuit plantation up the river from New Orleans early in the 19th century, and from there, spread across the South and out to California. The towns of Satsuma in Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Louisiana were all named after the fruit. By 1920, Jackson County in the Florida Panhandle started to call itself the âSatsuma Capital of the World.â
âHoney citrusâ perfectly describes the flavor. It is delicate and unassuming, which is just what we want to showcase the buttery flavors of our biscuits. But we didnât stop there. We also offer strawberry and blueberry as options, and they are both wonderful. We look forward to more seasonal flavors, as Blackberry Patch offers quite a variety!
Jam on!
If you like the jams for breakfast here at the Roadhouse, you might like them at home, too! The jams and the fruit syrups are now available in our retail shop, so you can smother your homemade pancakes and biscuits with pure deliciousness.
In the meantime, stop in for breakfast or brunch and get your jam on with Blackberry Patch!