Sprawling acres of ranchland and clear blue Montana skies aren’t the typical backdrop for a feast of crab and oysters.
Yet they’ll be on the menu at the Old Salt Festival later this month in Helmville, Montana, where Baltimore chefs Spike Gjerde and Damian Mosley are in charge of an entire day’s worth of festival fare for an expected 2,000 people.
Gjerde, the James Beard Award-winning chef behind Woodberry Kitchen, and Mosley, the owner of Remington favorite Blacksauce Kitchen, are headed west alongside Farm Alliance of Baltimore executive director Denzel Mitchell Jr. and “oyster ninja” Gardner Douglas to bring a taste of Maryland to Montana.
On the surface, there’s not much that links the Chesapeake Bay to the Blackfoot Valley, a slice of western Montana known for cattle ranches and grizzly bears, not crabbers and oystermen.
Instead, Baltimore’s foodie delegation found common ground with the philosophy of the festivaland its founder, Cole Mannix, who started the event last year in an effort to draw attention to regenerative agricultural practices, which seek to create resilient, sustainable food systems through local networks of producers and processors rather than large-scale supply chains.
“I’ve always thought that one of the coolest things is that when local food systems thrive, they’re uniquely expressive of the place where they’re located,” Gjerde said. The festival, he added, “kind of brings in all the things that we care about, which is culture, agriculture, cuisine, environment.”
For this week’s column, I spoke with organizers and chefs to learn more about their vision for regional, sustainable food systems, their Maryland-meets-Montana festival menu — and the logistics of transporting thousands of raw oysters out west.
Oysters, biscuits and carpetbagger steak
The original plan was to road trip to Montana, with 4,000 oysters in tow, as well as pounds of crab meat, scrapple, fish peppers and other produce. The team researched refrigerated vans and mapped out a 33-hour journey that would also take them past a Minnesota farm, where they would pick up poultry for a fried chicken dish.
Then, said Gjerde, “reason prevailed.” Now he’s got a logistics guy who’s helping ship all the food on a Southwest Airlines flight to Montana a day before the culinary crew takes off.
There will be logistics aplenty to figure out once the team gets to the Mannix Family Ranch, where the festival is set to take place June 21-23. Among other challenges, they’ll be cooking over an open flame, baking biscuits at a higher-than-usual altitude and enlisting the help of festivalgoers to shuck those raw oysters. (That’s not a knock on Douglas — 4,000 bivalves in a day is a tall order for even the most nimble of shuckers.)
The Baltimore contingent will be responsible for producing the festival’s food on Sunday, June 23. Chef Eduardo Garcia of Bozeman-based small batch salsa company Montana Mex is in charge of small bites on Friday and chefs Jaret Foster and Mona Johnson of Portland, Oregon-based caterer Tournant will handle Saturday’s eats.
Gjerde, Mosley and Mitchell’s menu will blend the culinary heritage of the Chesapeake with Montana beef and pork. They’ll start the day with a “Hangtown fry,” a Gold Rush-era dish of fried oysters, scrambled eggs and scrapple subbed in for the traditional lardons and stuffed into a tortilla.
Next up will be oysters on the half shell roasted with chili butter and an oyster shooter featuring Montana whiskey and pickled ramps. Heartier bites include fried chicken on Blacksauce biscuits, as well as a spin on pepperpot stew with beef, salt pork, oysters, crabs and local greens cooked in a cauldron over a wood fire.
The centerpiece will be a dish called carpetbagger steak, a whole ribeye stuffed with oysters. Gjerde sees an antecedent for the meal in Maryland’s tradition of bull and oyster roasts.
The Maryland-Montana connection
By now, you might be wondering how some of Baltimore’s culinary stars connected with a Montana rancher.
Woodberry Kitchen, the Farm Alliance of Baltimore and Mannix’s Old Salt Co-Op are all recipients of loans from Steward, a lender focused on partnering with local agriculture and food businesses. The loans are crowdsourced from small-scale investors who contribute anywhere from $100 to thousands of dollars to projects in exchange for future returns.
The company’s founder, Dan Miller, is a Washington, D.C. native with Maryland roots: His father’s family ran a produce business in Baltimore, and his mother grew up on a farm in Caroline County.
The Chesapeake watershed “really anchored my childhood,” said Miller, who remained interested in finding ways to improve the health of the bay into adulthood. After talking with small farmers, like Mitchell, and chefs dedicated to local sourcing, like Gjerde, he realized that traditional lenders tend to favor large-scale, conventional agricultural producers, “and anything outside of that is pretty much left in the cold.”
By raising money online, Miller discovered he could broaden funding for agricultural projects and connect consumers to producers. “Instead of people just spending money at restaurants, or buying at farmer’s markets to support regional food systems, they could actually fund the capital needs for those types of growth,” he said.
Steward has so far funded about 100 projects across the U.S., including a $240,000 loan to help pay for a recent renovation at Woodberry Kitchen that converted the 120-seat North Baltimore restaurant into an event venue and 30-seat tavern.
The biggest Steward loan to date — $6 million — went to the Old Salt Co-Op, Mannix’s Montana operation. Though his family owns and runs the ranch, Mannix branched out on his own, founding Old Salt in 2020. The co-op seeks to build a local infrastructure for beef production.
While cattle farming is one of Montana’s most significant industries, most of the beef travels out of state to be processed, expending fossil fuels and making it harder for consumers to trace where their food is coming from.
“People have been trained to think about agriculture as a synonym for production,” Mannix said, “but we’re trying to frame agriculture as another word for a food system. It’s a culture of eating. And right now the big culture of eating is extractive from land and community. We’re trying to create a microcosm of agriculture that’s regenerative and resilient, and actually nourishing for people.”
Old Salt runs two restaurants in downtown Helena — a burger joint and a wood-fired grill and butcher shop — and is working to establish its own USDA-certified facility in the area that can process meat for local ranches. Mannix started the festival to highlight his co-op’s work, as well as that of others in the regenerative agriculture space. In addition to food tastings, the weekend features music, poetry and talks and demonstrations on topics like livestock handling and butchery.
Two regions ‘grounded in place’
Miller brought Mannix together with the Baltimore chefs during a retreat at his parents’ Easton property last year. At “probably two in the morning around the campfire… I said: ‘You’ve got to come to Montana next summer and be a part of this whole thing,’” Mannix recalled. The Baltimoreans agreed.
Mitchell was interested in the opportunity to tell the story of Maryland and Baltimore foodways, from farmer to chef. “It really represents for the city, for the state, and connects the people who work the land and work with the animals with the folks that take the product and turn it into food, which is what creates the memory,” he said.
The Chesapeake watershed and Montana’s ranchland are “grounded in place… two completely different ecosystems but the same exact challenges,” said Miller. By building up local agricultural systems, Mannix and the Baltimore chefs all hope to create a sustainable future.
Mosley hopes his cooking can bridge the distance between Maryland and Montana.
“I really never made food without considering the audience,” he said. “It’s so much easier to do in your own city… where you have an idea of people’s expectations.
“We’re going out here. It’s so far from home, it’s so far from any place I’ve imagined. So I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we communicate this message. And are they gonna get it? I hope they do.”
