...handmade, homemade, pretty good, but where’s the tomato...
Consider the restaurant. I don’t find myself going out to eat very much with food as the destination, but mostly for “doing lunch” or “grabbing a bite” before a show at the Paramount or during Friday Night Live, or after a gallery opening, with friends. When I do make it a point to go to a certain restaurant, it’s because I expect to find something on the menu that intrigues me.
The other day I “did lunch” with my visiting friend Dana at The Back Home Again. I like their food – it’s simple and filling and not too expensive, and the venue is convenient and intriguing. I love all the hand-smoothed curving, carved wood and splotches of leather, and windows in odd places, and the little nooks. And I adore their fruity mate’ – quite often I stop in on a hot day and carry out a humongous one to a meeting. I admire the Tribes’ energy, their ability to get things done in their own idiosyncratic way. Case in point, they have developed a good-tasting spelt bread that is higher in protein and lower in carbohydrates than wheat bread, and it’s something that others have despaired of doing. They even grow much of the spelt on their farm in
That day I asked for their special, a grilled cheese made with Cabot Cheddar, and asked them to grill a “juicy slice of tomato and one of onion – fresh from the field, of course,” with the cheese. To my surprise the waiter couldn’t “be sure the tomato is local.” I was dumbfounded: “Don’t you get your produce from local farmers at this time of year?” I asked. He didn’t know, couldn’t swear to it. “The problem is that local tomatoes are irregularly shaped, we can’t get uniform slices out of them, and there’s a lot of waste.”
I let it go, and ordered the grilled cheese/tomato/onion anyway. The tomato was pale pink and hard. I was saddened at this. It’s a damned shame when a local eating place can’t put a slice of fresh tomato on a summer sandwich.
That evening I was slicing tomatoes that Dana had brought from her
But irregular. The little bottom belly-button was lopsidedly close to the stem end.
“Look,” I showed her accusingly. “Irregular,” I shouted. “Can’t slice that!”
“Toss it in the compost,” she crowed. “Useless.”
We ate it, slobbering voraciously, over the sink.
A day or two later I was watching Vermont Public Television’s Feast in the Making, which showcases chefs who use local foods, farmers who provide it, and people who eat it. A segment on Vermont Herb & Salad Company in Benson briefly flashed a list of their customers. I rewound and paused, and there, before my very eyes was the name of the Back Home! That led to me check out their website, where I found these words: “At the Back Home Again Café we use organic and locally produced ingredients whenever possible.” That was what I had assumed before talking to the waiter. I must say I’ve seldom had to do so much backwards investigation to disprove my point and vindicate a self-maligned entity. I made one more call and achieved vindication. Mea Culpa, I guess, my dear Back Home, but where’s my tomato?
VPT’s Ann Curran tells me, “We'll begin the series [Feast in the Making] anew
on Wednesday, Sept. 19, at
Saturday at
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Nevertheless, it is disturbingly true that most restaurants do not find the opportunity to serve much local food. High price and the lack of a central distributor are the factors most often cited. It seems to me that a savvy entrepreneur will solve the latter problem very soon. Or perhaps one of the existing distributors will take up the slack – Vermont Fresh is out there.
What is our responsibility here? Why, for those of us who can even POSSIBLY afford it, to feed the local farmer by buying his product until he is strong enough to feed us all. It is an abomination that poor people can more cheaply buy Twinkies than a bunch of carrots. The new farm bill deals very little with these issues and, if passed, will delay for another five years the impetus to deal with them.
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It is doubly heartening, then, to listen to chefs who are totally enamored with fresh and local food.
Three Tomatoes’ Keith Paquin guesses that 90% of their food is gotten direct from the farmer, and he sings a siren song of producers’ names:
And though Hans Entinger of Country Man’s Pleasure does not buy directly from farmers, he does buy from Black River Produce, for their fish of unparalleled quality, and also their produce which, when possible, they get from
I am very well acquainted with my friend and neighbor, Chef Stanti’s penchant for shopping locally – you’ll see him at the Farmers’ Market if you get there early enough, selecting vegetables and berries and cheeses to serve at his Victorian Inn at Wallingford, and he seeks out the best Vermont grown eggs and chicken. And butter: “Vermont Butter and Cheese makes a very, very good butter! With sea salt. Very outstanding,” He gets 100% of his produce locally, in season, most of it from Boardman Hill Farm.
I don’t even have to call Chef Robert (Hobare) at Café
“The majority of our provisions are local,” Robert says. “When someone comes from
I tell him my story of the pink hard August tomato. He’s more forgiving than I am. “It’s a big decision when you decide to use local products, because we pay more than for
“I think you’ve given me my title,” I said with satisfaction.
These, of course, are not the only restaurants who use a preponderance of local foods: north, south, east and west I can think of more that I didn’t consult, but you will notice that they are almost all relatively high-end restaurants.
I am not sure if it’s for lack of commitment that less-expensive restaurants don’t use more farm fresh foods, or if the time and money expense is just something their clientele will not accept. Or perhaps it’s that when you become passionate about your ingredients you become heedless of expense and your customers begin to pay a little more for the quality. Do they think it’s worthwhile? I guess they’ll let you know in the long run.
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Conspicuously missing from these chefs’ litanies are most free-range meats, and that’s because there’s no central way of getting them, they are expensive, and they aren’t available not-frozen. Meat is a seasonal product when it’s grass-fed and not factory-farmed, and most of the northeast’s slaughtering takes place in the fall. Even well-aged beef won’t survive that long.
As for expense, I just read an anecdote from David Kamp, author of The United States of Arugula, that Niman Ranch, known for its high-end free-range meats, contracted with a fast-food restaurant to provide Niman pork for its carnitas, resulting in a dollar increase in the price of each carnita. “To everyone's surprise, the Niman connection was not a loss-leader but a bottom-line enhancer – sales of the carnitas burritos went up by 250%. Another indication that it's not just NYC and Berkeley freaks who care about better-quality food.” So money is not always the deciding factor. I would pay 50 cents extra for a sandwich with a local tomato on it.
Sometimes, at least in the case of meat, you have to travel for good food, or IT has to travel to you. In a New York Times article, “Food that Travels Well,” James E. McWilliams cites a study that found that “lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed [grain]. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard.”
McWilliams goes on to argue for a looser interpretation of “Local”, advocating a hub-and-spoke system of food production and distribution, “with the hubs in a food system’s naturally fertile hot spots and the spokes, which travel through the arid zones, connecting them while using hybrid engines and alternative sources of energy...” The Brattleboro Co-op has a large section of its meat department dedicated to Wolfe’s Neck Farm in
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By the way, those
Lacking a source of
Peach and Tomato Salsa
Peel four peaches by placing them briefly in simmering water and then stripping off the skin, halve them to the pit around the middle equator, then thinly slice vertically, and gently remove the slices from the pit into a bowl. Add a large tomato, peeled in the same way, cut in bite-sized chunks. Mince ½ to 1 jalapeno pepper (to taste), ¼ large white onion, 1 large garlic clove, and a handful of cilantro leaves and add to the peach/tomatoes. Sprinkle with sea salt (1 tsp.), a grind of pepper, and a bit of balsamic vinegar. Let this meld together for an hour or two before dipping it up with water crackers or tortilla chips.
Peach & Blueberry Upside Down Cake:
For the topping (in this case, the bottoming): In a 10” cast iron skillet melt 1/3 cup butter over low heat. Turn off the heat and sprinkle with ½ cup brown sugar. Peel six peaches (see above), halve them, gently twist each half in opposite directions, remove the pit, and place round side down on the sugar. Sprinkle blueberries in the spaces between the peaches.
For the cake: Heat oven to 350 degrees. Into a mixing bowl stir 1 ½ cups of cake flour or 1 1/3 cups of regular flour, 1 cup sugar, 2 tsp. baking powder, ½ tsp salt. With the mixer going slowly add 1/3 cup room-temp butter, 2/3 cup milk, 1 tsp. vanilla and 1 Tbsp. lemon juice. Beat 2 minutes medium speed. Add an egg and beat 2 more minutes. Pour the batter over the fruit and bake 40 to 50 minutes. Immediately run a knife around the inside of the pan, place a serving plate over the pan and turn upside down. Leave the upside down pan for a few minutes to allow the cake to loosen. When you remove the pan use a spatula to patch up the top of the cake. Serve warm with crème fraiche or unsweetened whipped cream.
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There used to be a restaurant up on the mountain that was said to’ve been the place that chefs and cooks at other restaurants would eat when their shift was over, or on their days off. Presumably that was because the chef’s chef at this restaurant prepared very simple things very well, and served something out of the ordinary, a terrine, a pate’, a pot-pie, a rabbit stew, something other restaurants did not find it worth their while to have on the menu because the average customer didn’t order it, or so they assumed.
Food Arts is a magazine for and about the restaurant industry that offers some great ideas for flavor combinations and techniques. “Semolina dusted sweetbreads with wild mushroom ragout, lardons, sorrel puree, & frisee,” is one that jumped out at me recently. I am intrigued by that. I would pay good money and time for it. But they’re not going to make it just for me.
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