Tennessee Crossroads 3735

- [Announcer] "Tennessee Crossroads" is made possible in part by.

- [Phil Oldham] I'm Tennessee Tech President Phil Oldham.

Here in Cookeville, Tennessee's college town.

We are bold, fearless, confident, and kind.

Tech prepares students for careers by making everyone's experience personal.

We call that living wings up.

Learn more at tntech.edu.

- [Announcer] Discover Tennessee trails and byways.

Discover Tennessee's adventure, cuisine, history, and more made in Tennessee experiences, showcased among these 16 driving trails.

More at tntrailsandbyways.com.

- This time on "Tennessee Crossroads," we'll visit a Germantown Tennessee Landmark, known for a friendly vibe and tasty barbecue.

For dessert, some intoxicating cookies from a bakery in Knoxville.

We'll meet a Smyrna tech guy who likes to burn stuff.

And finally make a stop at the Puffy Muffin in Brentwood.

Hi everybody, I'm Joe Elmore.

That's the lineup for this edition of "Tennessee Crossroads."

(calm music) The Bluff City and barbecue go together like peas and carrots.

There are several amazing restaurants that serve up Memphis style barbecue, but Laura Faber found one that claims the queue is so good, it'll make you wanna slap your mama.

(upbeat music) - [Walker] You come to Memphis, you're out of town.

Hey, I gotta have Memphis Barbecue and we're one of the go-to places.

- [Laura] For more than 40 years.

The cooking has started early in Germantown, Tennessee.

- [Cook] throw some of those links down there too.

- [Laura] Ribs, chicken, sausage links and more are first rubbed down with an original salty, sweet, and slightly spicy seasoning blend, then homemade sauce.

And finally cooked slow over local hickory wood.

This is the Germantown Commissary.

Pit masters like Anthony know when the meat is perfect with a smoky flavor.

- The chicken looks good though, for real.

- [Laura] The pork is pulled by hand.

In fact, everything here except the french fries are homemade.

The seasoning rub, the sauces, the sides, and the desserts.

Coconut cream, chocolate and lemon ice box pies are made every morning on site.

The cakes made locally, caramel, coconut, and strawberry and customers go bananas over the banana pudding.

- And the banana pudding, oh my gosh.

If you want a good dessert, get the banana pudding.

- [Laura] This place wasn't always the Germantown Commissary.

For more than a century, it was a country store, selling everything from blue jeans to Bologna.

Walker Taylor's dad bought it in 1973.

- My dad started selling barbecue to go in 1975, and it was by sheer accident.

- [Laura] He was smoking some pork for a dinner party that night and a customer offered to buy it.

It wasn't truly a restaurant though, till after Walker bought it from his dad in 1981.

- [Walker] I said, sell it to me.

I wanna turn it into a barbecue restaurant.

And I did, young, dumb and full of fun.

- [Laura] And success was not immediate.

- [Walker] Yeah, I was in here from seven o'clock in the morning till nine o'clock at night.

About four years before I took a paycheck.

- [Laura] A fire in 1984, nearly wiped Walker out.

- [Walker] The floor didn't burn because we had put brick floors in here when we did the remodel.

81 days later after being taken to the ground, we opened back up and you could never do that now in 81 days.

- [Laura] Today Germantown Commissary is an institution in this town just outside Memphis.

- Yeah, I'll put those up here if y'all will run those back.

I'll hit a couple other tables.

We get used a lot of times as directional references like, well, you know where the Commissary is, well go down the street and make a left.

- It's just a really cool area that everyone knows where it is, you can say that's how we tell people to get to our office.

It's one of those places that has that kind of a vibe to it where everybody wants to bring their family when they come in town.

- [Laura] Known for their ribs, they are truly first rate, crested with seasoning and sauce, a hickory scent and meaty.

The smoked sausage and pork tamales are worth a try.

And of course the pulled pork is always popular, but the thing customers order almost more than anything.

- Probably the barbecue nachos.

- [Laura] The barbecue nachos, a menu item Walker claims one of his former longtime employees named Rosie, invented in 1982 while working concessions at a local horse show, Rosie added some barbecue to chips and cheese for her own lunch break.

- A customer came up and goes, what's she eating back there?

And I went, I said, oh, some nachos.

I said, Rosie, you got some barbecue on those.

And she goes, mhm, and I said, well, what are those?

She goes, barbecue nachos, fool.

And the man goes, can I get an order of those?

That's when they were born.

- [Laura] Another Germantown Commissary original, the deviled eggs, they make 750 deviled eggs every day here at a minimum.

And you get one with everything you order here at Germantown Commissary.

- That was clearly an accident.

This was about 1983 or four, and one of my employees had stopped somewhere and gotten a plate of deviled eggs.

She put 'em in the deli box and they were up front and a person came in and said, I wanna get two of those deviled eggs.

And we went, okay, that's how they were born.

- Okay, darling, here I am.

- [Laura] The other thing that always gets talked about besides the food, is the service and the loyal staff, manager, Lori Picard, has been here 27 years.

Manager Terry Wilkerson, 16, waitress Cynthia Rivers, 26.

And then there's Katie Butler.

- Hi, sweetie, you need anything else?

What I do, everything, manager, wait tables, work the orders, whatever need to be done, I do.

- [Laura] She's worked here 40 years.

- All right baby, what are you having?

- [Laura] And what is it about this place that you think people in this community love so much?

- [Katie] The atmosphere, the love, the warmness, the happiness and the food.

You know, the personality make the food better.

- There you go, thank you.

- [Laura] Walker Taylor says he would've never, in his wildest dreams imagined his little country store turned barbecue restaurant would mean so much to so many people, and to him.

- Still seeing customers that come in and have been coming in for over 40 years, I get a real thrill out of that being part of something that's been enjoyable for other people.

Thank you, y'all, come back.

- [Customer] Y'all have a great day.

- Well, after all that barbecue, how about some moonshine for dessert?

Well, moonshine cookies, that is, Miranda Cohen takes us to a gourmet bake shop in Knoxville where White Lightning is poured into delicious treats.

(upbeat music) - [Miranda] Rick Dunlap is from McMinnville.

Mike Maddox is from Mount Juliet and Robin Maddox is from Knoxville.

And this dynamic trio has been friends for nearly 40 years.

It all started back at the University of Tennessee from their sophomore year, Rick Dunlap and Mike Maddox were college roommates.

Mike and Robin were sweethearts, now married for 35 years.

- I saw something in him that it just became my dearest friend.

And here 40 years later, he's still my dearest friend.

He's a thinker and so it doesn't shock me at any of his ideas that he comes up with.

- Robin thinks I'm a serial entrepreneur, so I would say that I'm guilty as charged.

- [Miranda] So no one was surprised when Mike opened a pizza restaurant in Knoxville, in his twenties, always the thinker, he wanted to make his business stand out, so he talked his new bride into making her delicious homemade cookies.

- [Mike] So we started sending out the cookies and with the pizzas that day and about thirty, forty five minutes later, the phone starts ringing off the hook and it's people not calling back to order an extra pizza, but they're wanting extra cookies.

- I thought it was amazing.

I thought it was just like unlike any cookie I'd ever tried before.

- [Miranda] Fast forward 30 years, now older, wiser, and with the desire to do something a little different, the old friends were brought back together by fate and those amazing cookies.

Robin still had the great recipe for the cookies, they called Rocky Top and Peanut Buttercup Rocky Top, but they wanted to give their new cookies a little something extra.

- And I knew that there was one thing that was smoking hot at the time, and that was moonshine.

It had just been legalized.

The whole idea for the moonshine was really just to get people's attention.

- [Rick] It was such a novel thing, but also delicious.

You know, novelty only goes so far and when they taste, it was unlike anything they had ever tried.

- [Robin] So we started the moonshine, it was like just trial and error, starting another one.

Can we do one with strawberry moonshine?

Well, how about orange moonshine?

Well, how about, you know?

So we just kinda went from there and just started creating different recipes.

- [Miranda] And that's how the Moonshine Mountain Cookie Company started.

Now they have two locations in Knoxville and a busy mail order business.

And though each cookie has a little something special, they are still completely family friendly.

- [Mike] This is not an adulterated product in any way.

We had it tested by the state and they kind of laughed at us.

You're not gonna taste the alcohol.

Some people are disappointed about that and some people are happy about it, but it's safe for kids, it's safe for everyone.

- [Miranda] In fact, spirited baking has been around for centuries.

- [Rick] We know from our past that a lot of our grandmothers or great-grandmothers put alcohol in their baking and that extends the life of it.

- For me in East Tennessee, when you say moonshine, you think Tennessee, it helps keep our cookies moist.

And as the alcohol bakes off, most bakers will tell you that the alcohol bakes off, the flavoring that was used in that flavoring moonshine stays and it gives the cookie an extra flavor burst.

- [Rick] It really does, you know, accentuate the taste and the moisture content.

- [Miranda] And the founders of the Moonshine Mountain Cookie Company didn't have to look far to find the perfect libation.

They use old Smoky Moonshine.

- We're very proud of being a Tennessee company, so we're very proud that it's Tennessee moonshine.

- [Miranda] In the beginning, they enlisted a small army of family and friends.

Now they have a full-time staff who carefully oversee the mixing of only the finest ingredients.

- [Robin] We just don't wanna skimp.

And we're like, you know what?

We think the cookie's worth it.

We put a lot of love and a lot of time into it, so we want 'em to be the best.

- And the Moonshine Mountain Cookie Company cookies are true to their name.

In each cookie, there is a little splash of moonshine, and if you look closely on each cookie, there is a mountain.

- [Rick] We found the novel approach to use a ice cream scoop.

So therefore we had Moonshine Mountain because our cookies are shaped like a mountain.

I think it's our signature.

I think every single business needs a brand and something that reminds them of what it is, and to stand out from the others.

- [Miranda] And stand out, they do.

In fact, the cookies made with a little secret recipe are hardly a secret anymore.

They will ship all over the country from this Kingston Pike location.

And once you've had one of their creative libations, you'll be coming back for more.

With flavors like Berry White, John Lemon, Mint Jagger, Fall and Oats.

Happy, Happy, Decadent, (indistinct) and many more.

They even make giant cookie cakes with handwritten inscriptions like happy birthday, congratulations or even the name of your favorite TV show.

- We try to be creative and a wholesome company, and we put the two together and we really are just looking for fun and we want it to be an excellent product.

But we want to be a wholesome company that has fun and is fun.

- [Mike] We really emphasize the customer service because I can't control whether you like our cookie or not, but we can certainly control whether you were treated well when you came in.

- [Rick] We've put out a product that comes from Tennessee, from products of Tennessee, and nothing makes us happier than to represent the state of Tennessee with a cookie that is worthy of all Tennesseeans.

- Thanks Miranda.

The process of burning wood and paper to create works of art is ancient, although nowadays it's not that well known.

Well, we caught up with a Smyrna man a while back who works in the high tech world of information technology by day.

Other times he pursues his creative passion to burn things.

- [Joe] Smyrna is home to one of four Motlow state community college campuses.

Here, modern technology is vital to teaching and learning, 25% of classrooms have a computer for each student.

And increasingly, online learning is an essential component to the educational effort.

That's where Terry Durham comes in.

He's dean of Motlow's Academic Technology.

- If it's distance education, if it's distance learning, then my department's involved.

- [Joe] A busy job with important responsibilities.

So what does a guy like Terry do to unwind?

- When I tell you I go home and burn things, I'm not kidding.

I literally go home and burn things.

(upbeat music) - [Joe] Terry is a talented, dedicated, and very patient wood-burning artist.

Well, today he's creating a piece by burning paper.

He's burned wood for the majority of his projects.

- Started out like any 12-year-old kid.

Got the woodburning kit for Christmas and really fell in love with that and then didn't revisit it again until, well, probably 2001.

(upbeat music) I do a lot of horses, I do a lot of trains.

I've done a lot of mills, especially in the, you know, eastern areas of this state.

And I've also done a lot of the steam tractors or steam engines as we used to call them.

My first step in the process is really to go and select that piece of wood.

I've got a picture usually in mind, and then I have to go and find a piece of wood that that picture's going to best fit.

I usually come home and sand it, you know, a little bit more just to get it all the, you know, imperfections out that I can.

And then I use tracing paper, used to, I would outline the whole entire thing.

And some of my first work, I called it lion art because I did very little shading.

The later projects I've gone to almost all shading.

So I will very lightly trace the major lines and then the bulk of what I do is just shading from there.

- [Joe] Imagine the time and patience it took to burn in each and every one of the bricks in this bridge.

That's why works like these attract lots of attention to craft shows, but not so many customers.

- The projects that I'm doing now really don't lend themselves to craft shows because those folks are looking for a relatively inexpensive product, and mine are a little bit more time intensive.

The train that you saw in my office, that took six months, we went to the Merriweather Lewis show down in Hohenwald, and my wife was with me and a gentleman said, I think you could do that with a laser.

And I laughed and said, yes, but I don't have the, you know, 10 or $15,000 that the laser would cost to do this.

And plus that's not the reason I do it anyway.

- [Joe] Terry has created a line of more affordable, smaller items, well, like these wooden trays.

(upbeat music) - I do more and more paper.

It's a little easier definitely to come by.

It's easier to frame and hang rather than the wooden pieces.

This is actually on 300 pound cold pressed paper, so it's very thick.

It's a real consistent surface.

Somebody did ask me one time, they said, well, have you ever burned yourself?

Yeah, play with fire, you'll get burned.

But I will say this, you'll only do it once.

- [Joe] So while keeping thousands of students and instructors connected and supported in the name of higher education, his other passion is the more organic process of creatively burning paper and wood.

And like a true teacher, he supports any budding artist who wants to learn to burn.

- I'll have folks look at, you know, at my stuff and they'll say, there's no way I could ever do that.

Yes, there is.

Yes, there is, you can do it.

If I can do it, you can do it.

Actually, believe it or not, the satisfaction I get is just trying to get better.

(upbeat music) - In our final story, Cindy Carter takes us to a popular little bakery and restaurant in Brentwood that's all about comfort food.

Oh, but don't get too comfortable.

Cindy warns that overindulging at the Puffy Muffin might lead to muffin tops on the customers.

(upbeat music) - [Cindy] In Brentwood, Tennessee, Christie Stone makes it her business to greet her customers.

- Y'all, thanks for coming in today, good to see you.

- [Cindy] As if they were old friends and many of them are.

- How are y'all today?

Very good, how was lunch?

(upbeat music) - Simply put, the Puffy Muffin bakery and restaurant is comfort food.

Seriously, as soon as you walk through the door, you can literally smell the rich aromas that bring to mind home and family gatherings.

And that Christie says is exactly the point.

- Food is love, okay?

Food is love.

It's one way that I can show my family I love them.

It's one way that I show my friends that I love them and enjoy them.

- [Cindy] Puffy Muffin has been bringing people together since 1986.

Christie's mother Linda started the bakery in their family kitchen, baking puffy muffins and other tasty delicacies for the guests she entertained at home.

- [Christie] Her idea was to have a business where people felt like they were coming into our home.

And so to build relationship, make connection with people, make people feel good and fill their bellies.

And so that's how it all started.

(upbeat music) - [Cindy] Today, the Puffy Muffin named for those delicious rolls that just puff up when you bake 'em is a Brentwood staple, beloved by both locals and folks just passing through.

- I've been coming to the Puffy Muffin somewhere in the neighborhood about five years or more, off and on, and then regular for the last five years.

- [Cindy] Puffy muffin regular Lloyd Potique with cell phone in hand often conducts business over breakfast or lunch or sometimes both.

- [Lloyd] They don't try to rush you.

The help here is very congenial and the food is good and it's reasonably priced, so everybody's real nice here.

- [Cindy] The workday begins pretty early at Puffy Muffin.

The kitchen is teeming with activity as staff members mix, sprinkle, slice, grill, garnish, and of course bake their way through the day.

- [Christie] Some of our specialties are chicken salad, quiche, ginger tea, which is a fruit tea with ginger ale in it that my mom, a recipe that she came up with.

Also, we've got a wonderful bakery counter, as you can see behind me where we've got made from scratch, cookies, petit fours, cakes, quiche.

We've got a grab and go counter where we do salads and sandwiches and cake in a cup, things that people can just pop in and grab for a quick lunch.

There you go, you're going to 53, thank you.

- [Cindy] There's absolutely nothing fast about this food.

These dishes are meant to be savored over conversations with friends or loved ones.

But at Puffy Muffin, you must remember to save room for dessert.

And the dessert display case pretty much ensures you will.

- [Christie] We want it to be like home-cooked food that you would make yourself at home.

- Now this window inside the Puffy Muffin offers a delicious view of the bakery's cake department, wedding cakes, graduation cakes, everyday cakes.

And if you're lucky, you just might spot a celebrity inspired cake headed to the Grand Ole Opry.

(upbeat music) For more than a decade, the Puffy Muffin's cake baking and decorating artists have helped the Opry officially induct its new members with a customized cake and assisted in sweetening a few other musical milestones as well.

- [Christie] We've done Dolly Parton's birthday cakes, two of them in the last few years, Little Big Town, I mean, just all of them.

- [Cindy] Cake artist, Elizabeth Starley is honored to have her work appreciated by so many in the country music industry.

- And these are buttercream roses.

- [Cindy] But says she's equally thrilled to design cakes for Puffy Muffin's loyal customers.

It's a job she's loved for more than 15 years.

- I think having a great work environment makes it amazing.

And I also love the family feel.

My mom has worked here for over 25 years and there's a lot of people that have worked here for decades, so I love the family aspect of it.

- [Cindy] A family that invites everyone to sit down at a table and enjoy a taste of home.

- Just getting together with friends for lunch.

I love it, well, enjoy, okay.

- [Cindy] Because as delicious as the food is, it's the relationship between the Puffy Muffin and its customers, that is the secret ingredient behind this restaurant's rise to the top.

- Well, that's all we got for you for this time, but we'll be back next week.

In the meantime, check out our website, tennesseecrossroads.org.

And there you can download that PBS app.

We'll see you next week.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Tennessee Crossroads is made possible in part by.

- [Phil] I'm Tennessee Tech president Phil Oldham, here in Cookeville, Tennessee's college town.

We are bold, fearless, confident, and kind.

Tech prepares students for careers by making everyone's experience personal.

We call that living wings up.

Learn more at tntech.edu.

- [Announcer] Discover Tennessee trails and byways.

Discover Tennessee's adventure, cuisine, history, and more made in Tennessee experiences showcased among these 16 driving trails.

More at tntrailsandbyways.com.