It's a special day for Making It Grow and Susie Ellison with
the South Carolina Department of Agriculture's specialty food
division comes down. Suzy we're so happy to have you and
remind our viewers about what the Specialty Foods division is
Well Specialty Foods is just a very wide array of specialty
food products and they range all over the state, Upstate, PeeDee,
Lowcountry, Midlands, all over. Hot sauces, barbeque sauces,
rice, dumplings honey, teas, coffees, you name it and we have
a ton of different products. We have creative people in South
Carolina and I think you brought one with you today. I
did. Tracey Richardson from Lilies in Charleston. Tracey,
I'm so happy that you're with us and you have a lovely story
about how the name of this product came about. Thank you
for having me. The name Lilies is named after my father's aunt,
my great aunt Lily and when we were, when my father was
stationed in the service in New Jersey we would go visit my
great-aunt Lily on Sundays to have our Southern Sunday dinners
And so then your father came back to South Carolina and I
think he was a restaurateur. Yes. He had a restaurant called
The Rib Shack on King Street and growing up my sister and I work
the restaurants in summer is when we were in college and
people were always asking for the sauce.
He'd go to the back
and he'd get them samples of the sauce for them to take home
and after the restaurant closed people were still asking for it.
So my sister and I decided to start bottling it. And that's
how we got Lily's of Charleston. And Suzy I think everything
that she's brought today has some of the product in it. Why
don't you start with what's down there near you?
A nice cool refreshing beverage right in the middle of the
summer. You call this the Palmetto mule? Yes
Okay your version of the Moscow Mule. Exactly.
What goes in it? So we have ginger beer,
sweet tea can't go do anything without sweet tea in the South.
And we have vodka and lime juice and then we rend it
with a specially-made salt that has our hot sauce in it. So it's
got the hot sauce, sugar and salt mixture with a little bit
of black pepper. Nice. Hopefully you can package that one day.
I would love to. And I believe you have two hot sauces
so tell us what the difference is please. Sure
so the Lowcountry logo is a hot version. All of our sauces have
a lot of flavor. So the heat sort of sneaks up on you. A lot
of our customers call it sneaky eat and the special
blend is a milder version. So if you want still the hot sauce
flavor you can use it and it doesn't have a lot of heat
and our products all are low in sodium and Suzy we were
talking about the hot sauces. They're not watery they're
kind of a wonderful texture. It's more of a condiment.
slash sauce. The Lowcountry Loco is my favorite. Because it's..
Anyone that knows me knows that I drink the stuff
literally. (laughing)
And then I think we have a hors devourers? Yes so what we did
was we made hummus and we
swirled the hot sauce in with it and with a little olive oil
and some black sesame seeds. Oh I was wondering what the
what the decoration was. How perfect for South Carolina
is that we need to say benne seeds... Yes exactly!
(laughing) And then Suzy let's learn, see what we're going to
get in this one. I don't know I was thinking maybe a dirty rice
but it's It's a Gullah rice. Gullah rice. Gullah red rice
actually. Gullah red rice So we put sausage and shrimp in our
red rice with a mixture of like vegetables with have onions,
celery, red bell peppers. You make the liquids first then you
add the rice to it and the meat and then we cook it on the stove
just till it boils. And then put it in the oven to sort of dry
out. And again because your sauces are not just a liquid in
front of heat that they're really as Suzy said more like a
condiment you can use it in this way to really bind everything
together. Right. Our hot sauce is so thick that a lot of people
use it as an ingredient when they're cooking. You can use it
for your greens. You can use it when you make chili. There's a
lot of recipes on our website and which it shows you how you
can use the hot sauce as an ingredient besides just the
condiment like on your eggs. And although you didn't bring
anything with the mustard on it today, Suzy see if you can
get some ideas from her of how we can use these mustard sauces.
Well they have their barbecue sauces. Their, that's probably
not really a good term cause barbecue sauces have the cliche
and these things are more like a condiment. Right.
And plus you have some dry product that are fixing to be
introduced very shortly. Don't you? Yes, sort of like our
salt. We're going to be
introducing some rubs and poultry brine. So we'll have a
chicken poultry brine. We'll have a mild chicken rub and a
hot chicken rub. And then we'll also have like this nice sweet
pork rub. And Suzy if people want to see the listings of the
South Carolina specialty food products and that wonderful
array that just celebrates the creativity of our South
Carolinians what how do they get to your website?
The website is scsfa.org and or you can
just google South Carolina Specialty Foods.
It's easy to find. It pops right up. Well I want to thank you so
much for coming and sharing your family's history and
and all the wonderful things that y'all are cooking and
Suzy, thank you for coming as always. It's always my pleasure.