Baltimore Magazine Features Tulkoff
How Tulkoff Food Built a Horseradish Empire in Baltimore
Strong, spicy, pungent—and known to clear a sinus or two—Tulkoff’s fiery products have local roots that date back 98 years.
With its refrigerated trucks and vast parking lot, the outside of the Tulkoff Food Products plant looks like every other business in the industrial park. But the 98-year-old business is anything but ordinary.
The six-acre site Tulkoff occupies in Holabird was once part of an active Army base during World War II—it’s where they tested the iconic Willys Jeep—and now houses a football-field-sized room filled floor to ceiling and front to back with horseradish.
You might think that a room filled with over two million pounds of horseradish root would make your eyes water, or at least your nose tingle, but instead it smells like the dirt that still clings to the root of the horseradish plants from when they were two feet in the ground. (Horseradish’s signature nasal-clearing kick comes from oils called isothiocyanates that are released once the roots are crushed.) And standing in Tulkoff’s lobby—filled with mementos from nearly a century of business—the strongest scent seems to be fresh ginger wafting from another part of the factory floor.
Read the full article here: https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/tulkoff-food-horseradish-history-baltimore/