and how to reach people,” she says. “It was going to be expensive, but you do it anyway.” She returned to Lawrence, Kansas, in the summer of 2012 armed with a business plan and an idea to sell spices and serve food at farmers markets. But the process of getting licensed and the initial response from buyers showed her that the spices were, in fact, her business. The ideas for new salts and rubs come from cookbooks, food blogs and the tea and herb section of the grocery store. The Ol’ Tradition salmon blend is their “take on a Southern smokehouse,” made with granulated honey, smoked paprika and smoked alderwood salt. The Breakfast Sausage rub (which smells like a proper Midwest plate of biscuits and gravy) pairs sage with oregano, fennel, black pepper and smoked rosemary sea salt.
When she needed extra labor for the business, Jess turned to her brother – a handyman, bartender and anthropology and business student at the University of Kansas. “My learning style is like Papa Bear from The Berenstain Bears,” Ben says. “I learn by doing what I’m not supposed to do.” Jess regularly feeds him ideas for new blends that he dutifully lists in a notebook along with the historical background and science of salt. “You start out with Google and see where it takes you,” he says. Late last summer, the siblings commandeered their mom’s potting shed for the wood component of Wood + Salt. They toast
American white oak wood chips on a screen in an open-faced kiln. The chips are then immersed in bourbon inside of a 50-gallon drum for three months for their Bourbon Smoking Chip. “Toasting the wood brings out the vanilla – it’s the same flavor you get in oak-aged whiskey,” Jess says. “So we’re almost doing the same thing, just in reverse.” A second wood chip – the Manhattan Blend – uses bourbon-infused smoked cherry wood to emulate the classic cocktail. Wood + Salt’s also started infusing peppercorns with rye whiskey and then smoking them over pecan wood. “You get this pipe tobacco sweetness from the rye, and the outside is bacon-y and smoky,” Jess says.
PICTURED BELOW: A selection of Wood + Salt’s product line, which includes spice blends, rubs, infused sugars, smoked finishing salts and more.