May 8, 2013
Biscuit Love Truck: A day in the life of a mobile food kitchen
Jennifer Justus
The Tennessean
The alarm went off at 4:30 a.m.
Time to make the biscuits.
I was meeting Karl Worley of Biscuit Love Truck as he prepped for his lunch shift at a Brentwood office
park. By 5:30 a.m., he had already whipped up an army’s batch of sausage gravy with 15 pounds of
seasoned pork and a gallon and a half of milk. At 6:30 a.m., he had combined flour, sugar, yeast and
buttermilk in a giant bowl. He rolled out the dough and cut it into 120 circles.
He still needed to make a cooler of sweet tea, fill containers with homemade caramel-apple jam, bake
the bread and wrap the trays with plastic, load up, wash dishes and make it to a new locale by 10:45
a.m. And that doesn’t even count the hours spent before these securing a location, adding it to
insurance, scheduling employees and making announcements on social media.
“For a three-hour shift, there’s so much that goes into it,” he said.
The Nashville Food Truck Association, to which Worley belongs, had about eight trucks when the
organization formed in 2011. This year, it’s up to about 35, says association president and Riffs Fine
Street Food co-owner/chef B.J. Lofback.
The group rolled out a new app this month that shows the whereabouts of all trucks with the easy tap of
a smartphone (as opposed to tracking them on separate sites on Twitter or Facebook), and the month of
May has been dubbed the inaugural Nashville Street Food Month with events bringing several of the
trucks together in one spot.
“The Nashville Food Truck scene is relatively new compared to Miami,” said chef Yayo Jimenez of
Yayo’s Original Mexican Gourmet, who had a truck in Miami before moving to Music City. “But it is
definitely thriving and we are proud to be a part of this vibrant community.”
But despite the growing food truck scene in Nashville (Worley says he gets two to three calls each week
from someone with a food truck dream), this work hasn’t started getting any easier.
It’s a tough mix of hard work and creativity from the confines of a hot tin box combined with the appeal
of entrepreneurship, individuality and the exhilaration of social media-meets-customer-to-chef
interaction.
“I make less money than if I were an executive chef somewhere — with more hours and more stress,”
said Worley, a Johnson & Wales Culinary School graduate. “But it’s mine.”
Indeed, it seems that for every deflating story about running a food truck, Worley also has a buoyant
one.
The Southern Ground Music & Food Festival, for example, had him running ragged and buying
barbecue from local restaurants to keep up with serving 1,500 people — and possibly compromising the
integrity of his product.
When he finally announced that the truck could do no more, customers who had been waiting in line
were irate. But over the course of that weekend, he also met a kind woman who suggested he try the
green Tabasco on one of his dishes rather than the red.
“I’ll send you some,” she told him.
“What are you, like, the Tabasco rep?” he asked.
“Sort of,” she said.
It turned out — he learned later — she was a Tabasco company heir.
Many challenges
As Worley strained Charleston Tea Co. tea into a cooler with sugar, he realized the spout wasn’t up and
tea began to pour onto the commissary floor. (A commissary is a health department-approved brick-andmortar kitchen where ingredients are often prepared and stored for a rental fee that can run between
$400 and $700 a month.) He scrambled to stop the mess and save valuable product.
“It’s only like six times more expensive than other tea,” he joked. “Why wouldn’t I use it?”
But spilled tea is a minor issue among many. The No. 1 most difficult factor in working a food truck,
Worley says, is weather. The thermometer read 130 degrees at the fryer inside the truck during the Hot
Chicken Festival last summer. Worley has even dropped 50 pounds over the past year.
And the second most difficult problem he notes? Knowing your audience.
Worley pays top-dollar for his products, such as the tea. He uses Kenny’s Farmhouse Cheese at $8 a
pound, and buys local sausage from the farmers’ market. He has to know where people will be willing to
pay $8 for his biscuit sandwiches. “It’s like you wouldn’t put a J.Alexander’s in East Nashville,” he said of
knowing where you fit.
But the third most difficult issue, he says, is the truck itself.
“Most of us don’t have new trucks,” Worley said, noting that the truck he uses, called Bessie, is
30 years old.
Thanks to Franklin chef and restaurateur Jason McConnell, Worley is in the unique position of borrowing
a truck while he refurbishes a 1974 Airstream trailer named Lily (after White Lily flour), which he hopes
to have ready by the International Biscuit Festival in Knoxville May 16-18.
Many food truck entrepreneurs have to incur transportation expenses right away. But even when his
Airstream comes out of rehab, Worley still worries about it, thinking of a food truck called Skillet in
Seattle that just collapsed in the middle due to age and weight of equipment.
Long days
At 11:01, the first four customers lined up at the Biscuit Love Truck.
Worley usually likes to be out front taking orders, but on this day, he worked a station inside. He was
training a new employee who can fry about 50 to 60 items an hour but needs to ramp up to 150 an hour
by summer.
Tickets quickly began to stack up — some with orders from the menu, others wanting mustard on the
side, no cheese, no gravy or biscuits with eggs (not on the menu, yet Worley obliged).
Brian Shoun ordered the East Nasty all-the-way. He works at a nearby office building called iVantage
Health and visited Biscuit Love for the first time having downloaded the new Nashville Food Truck
Association app just about an hour before showing up.
“I’ve been wanting to try this,” said another customer, Savannah Clark.
Worley would shut down at 2 p.m. (he sold
71 biscuits that day), drive back to the commissary, clean the truck, do more dishes and take inventory
before hosting a tasting for some potential catering clients at
5 p.m. After dinner with his 2-year-old daughter, Gertie, he would stay up with his wife, Sarah, to prepare
paperwork and details for the weekend, which involved a few double shifts.
But during a break in the action of this particular shift, Worley looked out the window just in time to see a
FedEx truck turn into a nearby lot.
“Look,” he said, “there goes a future food truck.”
Yayo’s OMG Mahi Mahi Fish Tacos
Makes 2 tacos
FISH TACOS:
8 ounces mahi mahi fillets, cut into even strips
3/4 cup dark beer
1 cup vegetable oil, for frying
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon salt
COLESLAW:
6 tablespoons red cabbage, cut into tiny pieces
6 tablespoons white cabbage, cut into tiny pieces
6 tablespoons carrots, shredded
10 tablespoons orange juice
Salt and freshly ground pepper
CILANTRO SAUCE:
10 tablespoons sour cream
6 tablespoons fresh cilantro
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 small cloves garlic
Salt and freshly ground pepper
Four 4-inch corn tortillas, for serving
Oil, for heating tortillas
1. For the fish tacos: Marinate the mahi mahi strips in the beer, 5 to 7 minutes. Heat the oil over medium
heat until hot.
2. Mix together the flour, paprika, cayenne and salt in a large bowl, and then dredge the mahi mahi
strips one at a time in the flour mixture. Lightly fry the fish until golden brown, 1 minute 30 seconds to 2
minutes.
3. For the coleslaw: Combine the cabbages with the carrots and then mix in the orange juice. Season
with salt and pepper.
4. For the cilantro sauce: Blend together the sour cream, cilantro, garlic and lemon juice in a blender.
Season with salt and pepper.
5. For assembling: Heat the tortillas in a skillet with a little bit of oil. Layer 2 tortillas per taco. Add
coleslaw and top with mahi mahi strips, followed by some more coleslaw. Finish off with cilantro sauce.
Recipe from Yayo’s Original Mexican Gourmet Mobile Food Truck + Catering Services.
Karl Worley shared a couple components for The Gertie, a dessert biscuit named after his 2-year-old
daughter. His angel biscuits are served with caramelized banana jam, house-made peanut butter with
pretzel crunch and Olive and Sinclair chocolate gravy.
Biscuit Love Chocolate Gravy
Makes 1 quart
1 pint heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar, granulated
1/2 pound Olive and Sinclair 67 percent cacao chocolate
1 teaspoon salt
Heat heavy cream over medium-low heat to simmer. Add sugar, chocolate and salt to the cream. Cook,
stirring constantly for 8-10 minutes until chocolate melts and mixture has a gravy consistency.
Chef’s note: “True chocolate gravy is typically made with cocoa powder, flour, sugar and milk. I
developed our chocolate gravy to take advantage of the beautiful chocolate coming from a local
producer,” said Worley.
Recipes from Biscuit Love Truck
Biscuit Love Banana Jam
Makes 1 quart
2 cups sugar, granulated
1/4cup water
3 cups bananas, peeled and sliced
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 tablespoon vanilla
Mix sugar and water in the bottom of a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan. Heat sugar mixture on high
heat. The water will need to evaporate before the sugar will caramelize. Once the caramel reaches a
deep brown, turn heat to low and pour in the bananas. Stir with a wooden or heat-resistant spoon until
the bananas begin to break down, about 10-15 minutes. After the bananas are broken down, add salt
and remove from heat. Stir in lime juice and vanilla. Serve with warm biscuits. Will keep in the
refrigerator for up to 1 month.
Recipes from Karl Worley