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Director Of Specialty Sales, Tulkoff Food Products Inc.
For many Baltimore Jews, it just wouldn’t be Passover without a bottle of Tulkoff extra-hot horseradish on the seder table. The Tulkoff family has been preparing the pungent root for more than 75 years. The company, now based in Essex, was started by Michael Tulkoff’s grandparents, Harry and Lena. Today Michael, 49, works with his brothers, Phil, the CEO, and Alec, who runs Tulkoff’s plant on the West Coast.
> My grandparents ran a produce store on Lombard Street in the 1920s, but my grandfather got fed up with the proverbial lady coming in and pulling an orange off the bottom of the produce display and everything spilling on the floor. It was him basically screaming, ‘That’s it! No more!’ They had been grinding horseradish by hand and he went into just doing that.
> My grandmother always had a closet of empty jars at their apartment on Park Heights Avenue. She would wash out empty mayo or jelly jars and hoard them. I always took this as a lesson that you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and you have to be prepared. Something as simple as a glass jar, that was something of value to her.
> My grandfather was a classic tough, hardworking, shoulders-to-the grind-stone type of Jew who didn’t give up and fought and kicked and screamed and tried to get to his dream. I think that work ethic definitely went into his two sons and my two brothers and I.
> All three of us worked with my father at the company when we were kids. We would move heavy wooden pallets, cut open 100-pound burlap bags of horseradish root, and that distinctive smell is just ingrained in our nostrils forever.
> My brothers and I did different things before returning to the family business. My older brother, Phil, likes to joke, yeah, he went to Bucknell University, became a mechanical engineer and worked on a couple of missions for the space shuttle so he could eventually make horseradish.
> My dad, my uncle and my grandfather are smiling in the grave that the three guys are back together.
> Less than 5 percent of what we do is retail of Tulkoff products. We manufacture more garlic than horseradish. That isn’t for those little jars, but for big multi-national companies whose names I can’t drop. When they’re making their sauces, their dressings and other products, they are buying from us 30-pound pails or 400-pound drums of things like garlic or ginger or horseradish and dumping that into their vats.
> Most Jews, you take them on a tour of the plant and they’re wide-eyed — ‘Wow, I didn’t know people ate that much gefilte fish!’ — not realizing that horseradish isn’t just for Jewish foods. The seafood and shellfish industry is a multibillion-dollar industry and that’s where seafood sauces go. And horseradish is an integral part.
> Working next to my father for four years was the best kind of university education anyone could ever have. We’d pull up in the parking lot and he’d say, ‘Mike, you see those 50 cars? Those aren’t just 50 cars, they’re 50 families who are depending on us.’
> A lot of our horseradish comes from the Mississippi River valley in Illinois. You need very loamy soil to grow horseradish. The roots are stored in a room with 40-plus-foot-high ceilings, six racks high and several deep — there are bales and bales and millions of pounds. Horseradish roots are stored at 28 degrees. Not cold enough for ice cream, but that’s the temperature they like best.
> I don’t exactly pick [the roots] up and eat them like apples, but I do put horseradish on a lot more than gefilte fish. Yes, we go through a lot of it at home.
> It’s a very rare bird that a family business gets to a third generation. A fourth generation? That’s a very good question.
>The business has changed so much, but I think my father would recognize it today, and I think he would be brought to tears. He would be so darn proud.