On a recent Saturday morning, Chef Ted Kelly greeted curious customers with a long list of Swedish-inspired recipes; Mushroom tartlets, eggs Benedict with a Meyer lemon hollandaise and a sunchoke and potato chowder.
Kelly is the owner of Viridian, a local business that offers prepared meals and baked goods made from locally grown seasonal produce. He draws from his own curiosity and his personal garden to give his customers at the Sunset Ridge Farmers Market in Alamo Heights the opportunity to try something new, rich in flavor and nutrients.
“Sunchokes, do you know what they are?” Kelly asked a curious customer that Saturday morning. “They are like a tuberous vegetable, but they are in the sunflower family. They look like sunflowers, then you dig around the base and you find all these crazy-looking roots.”
Kelly, 28, moved to San Antonio about a decade ago and in 2018, he graduated from the St. Philip’s College’s culinary program with an associate degree. But he didn’t land in the kitchen in a conventional way. He became interested in where food comes from well before he even thought of cooking it.
“I would obsessively research so that one day when I would grow up I would be able to have all this stuff,” he said. “So I would categorize all these things … I’ve always been interested in useful, edible plants.”
He recalls doing in-depth research of plants when he was in his early teen years, seeking to better understand them and waiting for the moment he could start his own garden. But growing up in a military family meant constant movement and not enough time in one place to plan seasonally.
Kelly and his family arrived at San Antonio when he was 17 years old after his father was stationed in Fort Sam Houston. Once he moved to San Antonio, his family opted to homeschool him for the last year of high school.
Through a bit of research he found the Culinary Arts program at St. Philip’s College, and signed up as a dual credit student.
Through St. Philip’s, Kelly found the opportunity to study abroad and travel through countries like Spain, Morocco and France meeting and cooking with people from all over the world.
This experience opened his eyes to different cultures, ingredients and the flavors that he uses as inspiration and today in his business. Each week he picks a theme and draws inspiration from different cultures to use the seasonal produce.
“I use a non-gmo heirloom wheat flour, real butter and unpasteurized eggs … then there’s cardamom and raisins inside with Swedish pearl sugar,” he explained to customers as they browsed through the baked goods of the week.
The science of food
The day Kelly was interviewed for this story, he arrived with a small box of goods from his garden. Inside was a purple sweet potato, a hibiscus flower and a large yellow lemon with peculiar green stripes and white and green leaves still attached to its stem.
It was a Eureka lemon, he explained, which originated from an interesting natural variation.
“When you cut it open you’re going to see it’s pink inside,” Kelly said. “But this actually comes from what’s called a sport in botany, which is basically like one part of the plant kind of spontaneously mutates and turns into something else.”
Kelly’s higher education path was never a straight arrow into the world of food. He was interested in the entire process; how food was grown, why certain things grow better in certain climates and seasons. The science behind the food we eat and what we are missing from our diets.
“I was originally thinking that I was going to get a biology degree … maybe a botany degree,” Kelly said. “And then I thought, ‘Well, what I really want to start doing is developing my own varieties and my own signature.’”
To quench his interest, he took courses that interested him at various colleges. He considers himself a student of the Alamo Colleges District in general, half-joking that at some point he enrolled at all of their five campuses.
At Palo Alto College he took organic gardening and farming classes, and even volunteered some time to the Bexar County Master Gardener program.
Before graduating from St. Philips, he worked in kitchens all over San Antonio, including the River Walk and the RIM at La Cantera. But when the coronavirus pandemic wiped most of the opportunities to continue working in kitchens, he was forced to rethink his path.
“My heart was in the kitchen,” he said. “So I was just like, well what do I do? So I started doing little meal prep here and there for friends and then I also started doing landscaping jobs to make ends meet for a little while.”
Landscaping helped reignite his dream of having his own garden and growing his own food, so he started his own garden in Helotes. The same garden where he grows most of the food he serves to customers each week.
Today, his weeks are split between gardening, prepping menus, cooking and selling at the Sunset Ridge Farmers Market, right across the street from Sunset Ridge Church, which provides a commercial kitchen for him to work on his dishes.
The market and the community around it, is like a second home for Kelly, a place where he gets to display his creations and interact with the curious customers who seem eager to try the new flavors and foods he presents.
“When you go to a grocery store, it’s just a narrow sliver of what life has to offer,” Kelly said. “What I try to do a lot with my business is educate my customers, because sometimes what is the most aesthetically pleasing in the grocery store isn’t the most flavorful, certainly not the most nutritious.”
The San Antonio Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
