Home-Baked Granola with Love
DOOR COUNTY LOVE ARTISAN GRANOLA USES ONLY THE BEST INGREDIENTS
Karma almost always smiles approvingly on a kind gesture.
So it came to pass that Carol and Chris Ash, with no larger design in mind beyond sharing some baked goods with a friend, surprised even themselves four years ago by birthing a business.
Instead of the proverbial cup of sugar, though, Carol gave a Mason jar full of her homebaked granola to Gibraltar Schools art teacher Emily Salm.
Salm liked the recipe to say the least and gave it among the first of many rave reviews. The circle of admirers was about to grow beyond Ash's family and close friends.
“She kept texting me, ‘You've got to sell this, you've got to sell this.’ She wouldn't leave me alone,” Carol Ash said.
The Ashes decided to take Salm's advice and introduced Door County Love Artisan Granola to the marketplace in 2014 to near-instant acclaim.
After moving into and out of three locations, their Kick Ash Products company eventually put down stakes last year in the family's hometown of Ellison Bay. The Ashes rent a kitchen and storefront on the grounds of Island Orchard Cider off State Highway 42, also selling take-out bakery and small-batch, handroasted coffee that Chris Ash taught himself to make.
Kick Ash Products granola comes in a variety of flavors. Steven Brandt of Creative Compassion Photography
Ash loves granola's shape-shifting versatility that gives it a variety of forms in the food world. There's no single formula for preparing granola, but rather endless possibilities combining the basic grains; nuts; raisins, dates or other dried fruit; salt for that type of palate; and honey, chocolate or other confections for the sweet tooth.
Call it (or eat it) as a sweet-or-salty snack bar, a crunchy breakfast cereal bobbing in milk, a taste-tempting topping in its own right or a nutritious, energizing trail mix — and each approach would be correct. Kick Ash Products distributes it in the latter form, but except for making it into a chewy bar, it can serve all the other purposes without any extra cooking effort.
“There are so many cool ways to eat it,” Ash said. “People use it as a topping to put on their yogurt. Some eat it straight out of the bag as a snack, for sure.
“The one that keeps coming up is making oatmeal (more appetizing) – throw (a little granola) on top and give it some character. The dark-chocolate sea salt (brand) is great on ice cream. One (customer) says he cuts apart half an apple or banana and has it with peanut butter and granola on top.”
Her granola comes in six flavors: the aforementioned dark-chocolate sea salt; dark-chocolate cherry; maple pecan; blueberry chia; cherry almond; and “paleo,” an ultra-health conscious vegan variety that is both grain- and gluten-free.
The toasted treat was originally named “granula” when developed during the Civil War years at a New York state health spa. Cereal manufacturer Kellogg's later introduced a similar food product but changed the name to “granola” to avoid legal trouble with the inventors.
Before health food became mainstream, granola survived its hippie associations in the 1960s and the accompanying, derisive “granola eater” sneers. Then the product's popularity really took off when yet another cereal maker, General Mills, brought its Nature Valley brand of crumbly bars to the market in 1975.
Granola is a relative of muesli, a raw, unbaked version of Swiss-German origin first seen around 1900.
The Ash family with Trevor and Makenna on the left, Sheridan and Brady on the right and Chris and Carol in the middle. Contributed photo
On the company website, Ash tells how she turned to making her own granola when she read the sides of cereal boxes and grew dismayed at the nutritional value – or lack thereof – for her four children.
"I grew up with this Scandinavian line of bakers (on her mother's side)," Ash said. "We always baked; my grandmother and my mother and I were never afraid to do anything in the kitchen or combine several different recipes. (Granola) became something fun and easy to give to someone, but even after we turned it into a business, we never intended to do retail. Wholesale better suited our life.”
But they did in the end choose to sell directly to customers – and didn't skimp on the personal touch once that choice was made.
With only two full-time and two part-time employees outside the family, Carol delivers all but the long-distance online orders herself. Chris, a pilot for Southwest Airlines based at Midway Airport in Chicago, often drops off for accounts in northern Illinois "on his way to work,” said Ash.
“Initially I would take orders by text from people who knew about us up here, and then deliver it by car and hang it on their doors,” said Ash.
“Some of my kids' friends at school would bring money from their parents (who were customers).”
With a chuckle, Ash added: “It felt a little weird exchanging money and handing off these bags in a school parking lot.”
Door County Love can “easily” turn out 100 bags of granola per day, and during the busiest season from midsummer through October the company sells about 500 batches per week, Ash said. But that's still a small enough output to keep it artisan and not give in to an assembly-line mentality.
“Artisan' to me means just the human factor, which is what we do best,” she said. “It's created for humans by humans. We watch every single pan, drizzle every single pan, 10 pans at a time (in the oven). We mix it all by hand and put it in the pans by hand.” The lineup of trays takes about 25 minutes to bake to a perfect crisp, yielding about 2½ bags of product per pan.
Oh, and there's one more business philosophy that goes into the Ashes' definition of “artisan.” “Our big thing is that with the ingredients, there's no compromise,” Ash said. “We know it's expensive to use pure maple syrup as the sweetener, but we do every time. We do not want to just cut down on our costs; we stuck to our guns on that.”
The main suppliers are Anderson's Maple Syrup in western Wisconsin, La Crosse Milling for oats and Country Ovens of Forestville in southern Door County for dried cherries and blueberries.
Having a little fun in the kitchen. Carol Ash sings the praises of her staff. Here amongst the granola are, from left, Julia Keepper, Britt Maltby and Carol. Julia and Britt bake and also work the retail part of the shop. Steven Brandt of Creative Compassion Photography
“I'm humbled by this community welcoming this venture and how everyone helps each other out; it almost makes me teary." — Carol Ash
Before getting their own quarters, the Ashes baked at the former Farm Market Kitchen communal kitchen in Algoma; Thyme Cuisine & Catering in Sister Bay; and The Fireside Restaurant in Ellison Bay. Of those early Algoma trips, Ash said: “We just loaded the car to the gills with ingredients, and my husband, who's a saint, baked with me. But we had already grown tired of the drive even before (Farm Market Kitchen) closed (in 2015).”
The Ashes would sometimes choose prep days in Algoma to coincide with Gibraltar Vikings road basketball games. Their daughter, Makenna, is Gibraltar's all-time leading girls’ scorer and also broke the school rebounding record previously held by her mother, the former Carol Fitzgerald.
Makenna Ash now plays at NCAA Division III St. Olaf (Minn.) while younger sister Sheridan was the Vikings’ second-leading scorer and top rebounder as a senior in 2016-17.
One of the most rewarding parts about watching her business baby grow, Ash said, is that it took place in her native Ellison Bay and among the small but close club of far Northern Door merchants. For example, she said, her women's hiking group includes “a ton” of female business owners who are “selfless and encouraging” with their insights – a priceless resource for Ash, a physical therapist by training who had never been her own boss before.
“I'm humbled by this community welcoming this venture and how everyone helps each other out; it almost makes me teary,” Ash said.
Door County Love Artisan Granola can be found at 15 shops throughout Door County; three in Green Bay; and one each in the northern Illinois cities of Glencoe, Evanston, McHenry and Genoa.
