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Reply to "These chefs are blending culinary traditions across the South"

Katie Button, executive chef and co-owner of Cúrate Tapas Bar and Nightbell, Asheville, North Carolina

Katie Button gave up a prospective career in biomedical engineering so she could work her way up from a server in José Andrés' American restaurants to the kitchen of Ferran Adrià's world-renowned elBulli in Spain. She returned to the South eager to draw from its agricultural bounty for her first restaurant, Cúrate Tapas (13 Biltmore Ave, Asheville, NC 28801; +1 828-239-2946).
Button starts each dish with a protein. Ideally, it's from a local purveyor near her base of operations in Asheville, a bustling hub in the Smoky Mountains where hippies flex their entrepreneurial muscles.

 

Chef Katie Button.Chef Katie Button.
Lyric Lewin/CNN
For this dinner, she asked her friends at Heritage Farms Cheshire Pork what they had in surplus and she ended up with pork cheeks. To balance the pork's richness she took advantage of an abundance of two more local favorites in season: tomatoes and peanuts.
Boiled peanuts are a treasured roadside snack in gas stations and bootleg food stands across the South if you can get past their wrinkled appearance. Button used boiled peanuts in place of almonds or hazelnuts to form the base of the classic Spanish-Catalan romesco sauce.
Add pickled tomatoes to the romesco-braised pork cheeks and the peanut takes on a bold flavor, she says.
"When you taste the sauce on its own it's peanut-forward. But with the rest of dish it come together and the acidity from the tomatoes and the richness of pork bring out a new flavor," she adds.
"The romesco ends up the star even though it started with pork cheeks."
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