® edible NEW MEXICO ISSUE 81 · FALL SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2022 MEMBER OF EDIBLE COMMUNITIES THE STORY OF LOCAL FOOD, SEASON BY SEASON investments
r a d i s h a n d ry e . com 50 5 . 93 0 . 53 2 5 505 CERRILLOS, SANTA FE Proud recipient of EDIBLE'S LOCAL HERO AWARD Best Restaurant 2016 Best Cocktail Program 2018 Best Bartender 2020 and this year. . . BEST CHEF 2022! Thank you for your support!FARM I N S P I R ED C U I S I N E
EDIBLENM.COM1 DEPARTMENTS 3428246423842 GRIST FOR THE MILL By Willy Carleton and Briana Olson LOCALCONTRIBUTORSHEROES Second Street Brewery, Blades' Bistro, YouthWorks Social Justice Kitchen, and Wild Leaven Bakery FORAGING Acorn Abundance by Ellen Zachos WILD THING Drying Wild Mushrooms by Anna Marija Helt EDIBLE SPOTLIGHT Grab and Glow by Maria Manuela BACK OF THE HOUSE Something Special by Jason Conde EDIBLE ARTISAN Like Water for Bread by Ungelbah Dávila-Shivers 6660807446 COOKING FRESH Technique: Stir-Fry by Stephanie Cameron LOCAL SOURCE GUIDE AND EAT & DRINK LOCAL GUIDE LAST BITE Mile-Hi Farmers’ Market SEED STORY The Genius of Local by Christie Green STATE OF THE MEAT MARKET A Drive to Build Local Processing Capacity by Briana Olson FEATURES ON THE COVER Seeds from top left, clock wise: butternut squash, Chimayó chile, Aquadulce fava, devil's claw, Flor del Rio popcorn, and lima bean. Photo by Stephanie Cameron.® edible NEW MEXICO ISSUE 81 FALL SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2022EDIBLE COMMUNITIES THE STORY OF LOCAL FOOD, SEASON BY SEASON investments SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2022 A SANTA FE TRADITION REBORN Executive Chef Douglas Hesselgesser 142 West Palace Avenue, Santa Fe 505-919-9935 · palaceprimesf.com Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday Kitchen: 5–10pm · Bar: 5–11pm * Friday + Saturday Kitchen: 5–10:30pm · Bar: 5–11:30pm * Happy Hour (Front Patio + Lounge) Wed–Sun: 4–6pm Prime Steaks + Seasonal Seafood + Fresh Pasta BEAUTIFUL PATIO COMPLIMENTARYSEATINGVALET
Stephanie and Walt Cameron EDITORS
PUBLISHERS Bite Size Media, LLC
Willy Carleton and Briana Olson COPY EDITORS Marie Landau and Margaret Marti
In life, as in bread, the perfect conditions may never exist. But, these stories suggest, if we invest wisely, not only in infrastructure but in land and in people, we might cultivate communal health without them. Whether it’s the resilience of the Las Vegas restau rant scene and the communities impacted by a disastrous fire season; the resilience of seeds, pollinators, and soils; the resilience of Albuquerque’s Nob Hill; or the resilience of locally rooted supply chains, the ability to recover and adapt results from enduring care. FOR THE MILL
edible New Mexico six times a year. We distribute throughout New Mexico and nationally by subscription. Subscriptions are $32 annually. Subscribe online at ediblenm.com/subscribe No part of this publication may be used without the written permission of the publisher. © 2022 All rights reserved.
Willy Carleton and Briana Olson, Editors
The local heroes featured in this issue also take the long view, whether by investing in local farmers’ capacity to cultivate heritage grains, investing in youth, or investing in the social fabric of their communities.
It’s easy to forget, watching birds forage at the peak of summer, that they may be mapping months into the future. According to Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds, a single Clark’s nutcracker might gather thirty thousand pine seeds over the course of a summer, burying them in some five thousand different caches located across many square miles. Squirrels are also scatter hoarders, caching acorns and other treats across many acres near their dens.
2 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
GRIST
DESIGN AND LAYOUT Stephanie Cameron PHOTO EDITOR Stephanie Cameron EVENT COORDINATOR Natalie Donnelly VIDEO PRODUCER Walt Cameron SALES AND MARKETING Kate Collins, Melinda Esquibel, Gina Riccobono, and Karen Wine PUBLISHING ASSISTANT Cristina Grumblatt CONTACT US Mailing Address: 3301-R Coors Boulevard NW #152, Albuquerque, NM 87120 info@ediblenm.comediblenm.com
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The questions with an investment are often: Is this money well spent? What is the likelihood that I’ll get a return? Not all investments, though, are so easily quantified. In this issue of edible, we consider investments in a more holistic sense. Whether exploring investments in ecological health or in labor, what seems to surface again and again is slowness. Good things take time, and time takes memory.
At its most elemental, an investment is an act trained on survival. Some of the stories in these pages, like Anna Marija Helt’s tips on drying wild mushrooms and an in-depth feature on the state of New Mexico’s meat market, key into humans’ historic practices for preserving food for the winter and in times of scarcity. Others, like Christie Green’s meditative report on the genius of seed, explore investments in the health of the ecosys tems to which humans belong and on whom our long-term future as a species depends.
Uncork a Memory St. Clair — good memories, great wine.
CHRISTIE GREEN Christie Green is a mother, hunter, and writer, and the principal landscape architect at radicle. Raised in Alaska and on her grandfather’s farm in West Texas, she now resides in Santa Fe. With food and water as catalysts, Ms. Green seeks to pique sensual connection and uncomfortable curiosity.
CONTRIBUTORS
STEPHANIE CAMERON Stephanie Cameron was raised in Albuquerque and earned a degree in fine arts at the University of New Mexico. Cameron is the art director, head photographer, recipe tester, marketing guru, publisher, and owner of edible New Mexico and The Bite.
JASON CONDE Jason Conde is a writer and educator. Until recently, he lived in Las Vegas, New Mexico, with his partner and their daughter.
UNGELBAH DÁVILA-SHIVERS Ungelbah Dávila-Shivers lives in Valencia County with her husband, Larry, and daughter, Tachi’Bah. She owns Silver Moon Studio in Bosque Farms.
ESHA CHIOCCHIO Esha Chiocchio is a Santa Fe–based photographer who uses her knowledge of visual storytelling and sustainable communities to highlight environmental and social solutions.
ANNA MARIJA HELT Anna Marija Helt, PhD, is a writer, microbiologist, and practicing herbalist in the Four Corners area. Through Osadha Natural Health and other organizations, she engages people with the natural world for their own well-being and that of the planet.
MARIA MANUELA Maria Manuela is a freelance writer based in Santa Fe, where she was born and raised. She works with publications like New Mexico Magazine and Hyperallergic, focusing on stories about creative New Mexicans. She spends all her free time with her partner, Joel, and their three pups, Darla, Hamlet, and Pea. She’s working on a collection of short folktales based in the Southwest.
ELLEN ZACHOS Ellen Zachos lives in Santa Fe and is the author of eight books, including the recently released The Forager’s Pantry. She is the co-host of the Plantrama podcast (plantrama.com), and writes about wild foods at backyardforager.com. Zachos offers several online foraging courses at backyard-forager.thinkific.com.
WILLY CARLETON Willy Carleton is the co-editor of edible New Mexico and The Bite. He is the author of Fruit, Fiber, and Fire: A History of Modern Agriculture in New Mexico, which explores the cultural and environmental history of apples, cotton, and chiles in our region.
BRIANA OLSON Briana Olson is a writer and the co-editor of edible New Mexico and The Bite. She was the lead editor for the 2019 and 2021 editions of The New Farmer’s Almanac
WASHINGTONAVE. MARCYST. LINCOLNAVE. 150 WASHINGTON RETAIL Prime Corner Restaurant/Retail/Office Space in Historic Downtown Santa Fe Immediate Availability Underground and Curbside Parking Directly across from two Hotels One block from Plaza For Leasing contact Alex Gordon ctoreit.com(407)agordon@ctoreit.com770-8895 Historic Santa Fe Plaza Palace of Governorsthe Inn of the Governors Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi Hotel Chimayo de Santa Fe Santa Fe ConventionCommunityCenter New MuseumMexicoofArt GeorgiaMuseumO’Keeffe
Rod Tweet, a brewer and engineer by training, joined Second Street in August 1996 as the opening brewer. In 2000, he became an owner and president/brewmaster, leading the company through three expan sions of restaurant operations and multiple phases of brewery opera tions expansions. Before all that, he had a stint as a DJ—“not a very good one, but one nonetheless”—with his own show at his college radio station, KTEC, at Oregon Institute of Technology. “I did play good stuff, though!”
LOCAL HEROES
No, Second Street Brewery is no longer on Santa Fe’s Second Street. Since opening there in 1996 as a brewery/restaurant in a ware house building, they have expanded their restaurant operations and brewing capacity. Second Street is now packaging in twelve-ounce and sixteen-ounce cans, as well as serving from draft accounts. They currently have a pub/restaurant in the Santa Fe Railyard district and two brewing sites, including their production brewing and packaging facility, which is also a full-service restaurant.
SECOND STREET BREWERY
6 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
BEVERAGE ARTISAN: BEER AN INTERVIEW WITH ROD TWEET, PRESIDENT AND BREWMASTER
An edible Local Hero is an exceptional individual, business, or organization making a positive impact on New Mexico's food systems. These honorees nurture our communities through food, service, and socially and environmentally sus tainable business practices. Edible New Mexico readers nominate and vote for their favorite local chefs, growers, artisans, advocates, and other food professionals in two dozen categories. (Winners of the Olla and Spotlight Awards are nominated by readers and selected by the edible team.) In each issue of edible, we feature interviews with a handful of the winners, allowing us to get better acquainted with them and the important work they do. Please join us in thanking these Local Heroes for being at the forefront of New Mexico's local food movement.
Beer flight at Second Street Brewery's Rufina Taproom.
Photos by Stephanie Cameron
for menus & reservations CompoundRestaurant.com 653505.982.4353CanyonRoadSantaFe lunch • dinner • bar photo: Gabriella Marks Weston Ludeke NewChef-OwnerMarkKiffinwelcomesExecutiveChef
You joined the New Mexico brewery scene early, in 1996. What was the inspiration? What were some of the early challenges? How has the beer business changed between then and now?
The brown, which also won the gold the year before at the Great American Beer Festival [GABF], is a really well balanced, focused formulation—just Centennial and Cascade hops—and it obviously fits the style. As far as a go-to beer, that’s hard to answer—I have like five.
8 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
This year, you won a medal for your brown ale at the World Beer Cup. What makes that beer special? What is your go-to beer?
The first few years were pretty rough, honestly. Like a lot of start-ups, we opened long on great ideas and enthusi asm but short on enough cash and experience running restaurants. We made it through, and by 2001 or so, we kind of reached some stability as a business and the Santa Fe locals really supported us. Brewpubs were still a really new thing back then, so there were a lot of things that were different, including that people didn’t necessarily get what we were doing.
I had recently finished up the American Brewers Guild program in California, including my apprenticeship, and was looking for an opportunity. At that time, I was really interested in a brewpub start-up because of the freedom that would allow. I was hired when I was working up in Seattle, and I basically arrived to find a construction site. So getting the original 5 bbl brewing system, which was a whole variety of fairly primitive used equipment, assem bled into a working system was the first big challenge.
I still like IPAs a lot, I have been really focused on pil sners the last several years, I love Märzens/Oktoberfests, and maybe the Double X ESB/RBB from our lineup.
Yes, in 2019, Mariah [Cameron Scee, our director of art and branding,] chose the Santa Fe River near Dia blo Canyon for the can design. We worked with the conservancy again in 2020, and Mariah put the Santa Fe Canyon Preserve on the can label. They’re no longer doing the OktoberForest program, but we continue to Rod Tweet in front of a tower of Second Street's 2920 IPA.
There was also only a small fraction of the suppliers that there are now. It was a pretty primitive scene in New Mexico; I think there were maybe fourteen breweries total in the state. I have to say that the quality of beer in the state, on a whole, has improved immensely since then. New Mexico is a really competitive market with an impressive number of great brewers.
In 2019, you partnered with the Nature Conser vancy for their OktoberForest campaign, producing an amber lager with a can design inspired by the Santa Fe Canyon Preserve. From a brewer’s perspective, what is high-quality water, and how does water influence the flavor profile of a beer?
www.blackdiamondcurio.com 219 W San Francisco Street in Santa Fe next to the Lensic home kitchen provisions gifts books vintage
Oh sure, lots. I have my own personal favorite, one of her early ones, but I still really love the Agua Fria Pilsner label, but that has won. I really like the current Zombie Star Double Hazy IPA label, and 1 for 5, and I think the Kölsch is a really great one. We have a lot of options for future winners, but as far as what gets entered, Mariah pretty much makes those calls.
Obviously, I have a huge amount of personal history with that location, having built so much of it myself, so it was an emotional decision for me and a lot of other people too. Knowing how much people loved that place, I knew a lot of people would be upset about it and that weighed pretty heavily on us. Aside from the lease being up, it was also a strategic decision, and I feel that as a local business and employer, the overarching responsibility we have here is to remain successful and viable going forward. Closing one of the restaurant footprints—especially in the current climate—will allow us to better focus on the beer production and the two remaining restaurants. And I don’t think we have even seen the full potential of Rufina yet. It’s still a work in progress, and getting busier all the time. This award is for beer, but Second Street also serves food. To what extent do the kitchen and brewery collaborate?
Yes, we do donate the spents to a farmer that raises goats. We also have been giving our used fryer oil to Reunity Resources, along with the moisture barrier bags that our specialty malts come in.
Mariah Cameron Scee, your director of art and branding, has won awards for her beer can and barley wine packaging designs. Is there a design you think should win that hasn’t?
1607 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, 505-989-3278; 2920 Rufina, Santa Fe, 505-954-1068; secondstreetbrewery.com
Speaking of artwork, you recently relocated a mural from your orig inal location to the lounge at your Rufina Taproom. How does it feel to have left the Second Street venue behind? What’s in store at Rufina?
Mural by Mariah Cameron Scee. Tank at Rufina brewery.
The kitchen does utilize beer as an ingredient in several things. We have done more collaboration in the past, and we will probably return to more of that in the future now that the restaurant operations are slowly returning to the “new normal.”
Well, with the amount of rain we have been getting, my family and I have really been enjoying foraging the bolete mushrooms up on the mountain. So it’s been nice to get all the moisture for multiple reasons.
Is there a local food issue that is particularly important to you?
In what other ways does a concern for conservation influence practices and decisions at Second Street? Are you still donating spent grains for farmers to use as livestock feed?
make the Oktoberfest (it won the silver medal for German Märzen at last year’s GABF) and in that beer, water is everything! It can get into some pretty deeply nerdy science, but the upshot is that, while it varies from style to style, the mineral content of any given regional source has a huge influence on the flavor of a beer and, critically important, how a beer finishes. As brewers, we spend a great deal of effort on the details, including pH management and making adjustments all throughout the process to suit the style.
Photos by Stephanie Cameron
LOCAL HEROES
Kevin Bladergroen began his culinary career forty-seven years ago in the kitchen of Casa Vieja in Corrales. It was a fortuitous start to a great and fruitful journey, made with the sustaining support of his partner in life and in business, Anja, who has supported the dream that is Blades’ Bistro. Several years later, he was working for a chef in Atlanta who encouraged him to apply to La Varenne cooking school in Paris, and the education he received there guides him today. During his first ten years in the culinary arts, Bladergroen was fortunate to work under accomplished European chefs. “Those experiences provided a foundation that has carried me through an exciting and demanding career,” he says. Returning to New Mexico in 2006, he felt as if he were completing a circle with Blades’ Bistro in Placitas.
Kevin and Anja Bladergroen on the patio of Blades' Bistro.
12 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
BLADES' BISTRO RESTAURANT, GREATER NEW MEXICO AN INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN BLADERGROEN, CHEF AND CO-OWNER
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Wine and more wine!
One of the most profound French culinary influences on my own cooking is how I make sauces. Another significant element of Euro pean cooking is working with plenty of wine. My experiences both in Paris and other parts of Europe inspired the dream to have a bistro of my own. Blades’ Bistro is the American version of my travels. How does seasonality influence your menu? What are you most easily/consistently able to source locally, and what other consider ations inform your decisions about what ingredients to use?
The past couple of years have been particularly challenging for the restaurant industry. Has the pandemic and/or its ripple effects changed anything about your approach to running a food business?
Experience makes an excellent soup. Forty-five years of experience in soup making is a great ingredient for a memorable and deeply satisfy ing soup that contains excellent flavors.
Blades’ Bistro sources seafood from Santa Monica Seafood (formerly known as Seattle Fish). We get an amazing combination of fresh seafood in the high-mountain desert, with a great airport in Albu querque that facilitates getting almost anything. I love to cook with seafood. My favorite is grouper, which I first started cooking with right off the boat years ago in Florida.
Describe the perfect meal for a day off.
Why do you think you won this award?
Fish and seafood dishes are prominent on your menu. How do you approach sourcing seafood, and do you have a favorite fish?
The phrase “French culinary influences” is sometimes associated with snobbery, but at Blades’ you emphasize “uncomplicated, unpretentious food.” What was your favorite way to eat in Paris, and how did your experience there influence the culture and menu at the bistro?
The Watermelon Gazpacho is also a favorite.
Yes, the seasons do influence our menu. We used to source locally here in Placitas, but COVID made that more difficult—although we are still able to get our microgreens from a Placitas grower. Availability determines what ingredients we can use and these times have made that very unpredictable.
What a great question! The love, the encouragement, and the moti vating appreciation Blades’ Bistro has received during the past two and a half years has been off the charts. The community of Placi tas and beyond would not let us disappear; their support has been unwavering the whole time. In the face of such challenging circum stances, we came together as one. At Blades’ Bistro, we are part of a great community, and thank you all for being part of that community.
14 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
It turns out that there are many elements within the phrase “French culinary influences.” For me, walking around Paris, hearing, seeing, and smelling the different parts of the city was educational in so many ways. During my time there, I discovered many small, tucked-away bistros serving uncomplicated, unpretentious, fresh food.
Among the many soups you’ve served, is there one that customers love best? What makes for an excellent soup?
For a chef who has been cooking for everybody else all week, some thing as easy as a flavorful breakfast works fine.
Absolutely! The pandemic has had an enormous effect. It impacted everything about our business on a daily basis. It is still an ongoing struggle, although it helps that I have been around the block a couple of times. It must be extremely tough for the younger chefs today deal ing with these ongoing problems.
221 Highway 165, Ste L, Placitas, 505-771-0695, bladesbistro.com
The Wild Mushroom Bisque is, by far, our customers’ favorite soup.
It was and continues to be the team effort from our staff at Blades’ that makes every day possible.
New Mexico New York Strip served with pommes frites and topped with herb butter. Chicken Cordon Bleu.
If you were going to center a multicourse meal on a single herb or spice, what would it be?
1600 Lena St. & 314 S. Guadalupe St. in beautiful Santa Fe Pre-order food and coffee for take-out or dine-in @ FreeIconikcoffee.comparkingeverywhere Amazing incrediblecoffee,food.
16 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
AN INTERVIEW WITH RACHEL MOORE, WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR, AND JACKIE GIBBS, YOUTHWORKS SOCIAL JUSTICE KITCHEN DIRECTOR
LOCAL HEROES
For youth who have had doors closed and are motivated to start some thing new, YouthWorks Social Justice Kitchen provides mentorship and opportunity. In a certified commercial kitchen that employs and trains young people for the workforce, participants prepare and deliver homemade daily meals to children, youth, and other in-need community members. The kitchen also prepares meals for school food service and sum mer meals programs, runs a food truck, provides off-site event catering, and operates an events café. The varied culinary and hos pitality outlets provide program participants multiple opportuni ties to gain paid job training and experience in a safe, controlled, and nurturing environment. What is the backstory? How did the Social Justice Kitchen come to be? We started by needing to provide meals for our own youth. At first we started by employing just a couple of interested youth to cook and we made family-style trays, served on paper plates—enchiladas, lasagna, mac ’n’ cheese, french bread pizza. Soon after, we found grant
YOUTHWORKS SOCIAL JUSTICE KITCHEN NONPROFIT
From left to right, top row: Maria Blackowl, Gabriel Vigil, Amanda Barber, Jerome Tapia, and Michael Dunn. Bottom row: David Sundberg, Marcos Martinez, Jaydin Loredo, Nathan Torres, and Daly Ann Griswold. Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
VEGETARIAN KITCHEN Fine International Vegetarian and Vegan grab and go including ready to serve complete meals. ALBUQUERQUE La Montañita Co-op–Nob Hill & Rio Grande Lowe’s Market on Lomas Moses Kountry Natural Foods Silver Street Market Triangle Market in Sandia Crest Lovelace Main Hospital Presbyterian Rust Hospital - Rio Rancho Optimum Human & Southwest Women's Oncology Keller's Farm Fresh Market - Eubank and Candaleria Find our Fresh and Delicious Food at: Dine on our patio in Nob Hill 116 Amherst Dr SE, Albuquerque, 505-266-6374
Photo by Stephanie Cameron.
Renee Ramos and Carlene Martinez prepping meals at YouthWorks Social Justice Kitchen. Photo courtesy of YouthWorks.
How can interested edible readers contribute or become involved?
What does a typical day at the kitchen look like?
You can find more information and donate at santafeyouthworks.org or contact us at culinary@santafeyouthworks.org
. We love having vol unteers join us in the kitchen! Please email Rachel Moore at Rachel@ santafeyouthworks.org to learn about our volunteer opportunities. You can catch us and try delicious creations by the YouthWorks Social Justice Kitchen at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Del Sur Market every Tues day from 3 pm to 6 pm, or at El Rancho de las Golondrinas café weekends until September 30. We are available for catering business meetings and luncheons. We would love to host your next office lunch or group meeting. Contact Jackie Gibbs at culinary@santafeyouthworks.org for menus and prices.
YouthWorks engages young people with work experiences that go beyond food, including building projects, farming, and environmen tal restoration projects. Is there anything about working with food in particular that you’ve found uniquely helpful for young people?
The most fulfilling part of working with the Social Justice Kitchen has been seeing young people grow and come out of their shells within the program. The kitchen provides young people a safe, supported place to work and gain skills and social connections while overcoming challenges in their own lives. We create space for youth to be them selves and to work through any issues they are navigating. In this nontraditional work environment, there can definitely be challenging days, but the kitchen crew is committed to the work and to each other, and it is uplifting to see how the crew members support each other in showing up even when things are hard.
Gabe Romero at Campo.
We start every day by getting every young person ready for their job sites. We work on basic skills and a task list each day, sometimes breaking into groups and working on the order sheets. On a daily basis, we are doing emergency meals, catering, contract meals, and youth training crew meals.
Jackie Gibbs: Yes, personally, being a graduate and participant in the YouthWorks program when I was in my teens, and now working as the director of the YouthWorks Social Justice Kitchen, I can say that growing and being part of the program has allowed me to gain many skills in the kitchen but also, more importantly, life skills that will always serve me. Youth graduate from the program knowing how to feed themselves and their families well and for little cost. Youth also step out of the culinary program knowing how to work as a team, how to get to work on time, and how to problem solve and adapt. These skills will serve these youth in any job they take on going forward. What has been the most fulfilling part of working with the Social Justice Kitchen? What has been the most challenging part?
Is there anything else you’d like to share with edible readers?
We at YouthWorks Social Justice Kitchen are honored to be recog nized as a Local Hero and we are so proud of our youth and staff! Thank you to our beautiful community for your support!! santafeyouthworks.org
FALL
We have grown over the years from simply feeding our own paid youth crews to responding to the emergency need for meals during the COVID shutdown to providing over one million meals to our com munity in just two short years—and most recently, in spring 2022, collaborating with World Central Kitchen to prepare and deliver over seventy thousand meals for community members impacted by the fires in northern New Mexico. The amazing part has been to watch youth from the kitchen step up—especially early on in the pandemic. In spring 2020, our youth came to the kitchen every day to work together as a team to make sure those in emergency shelters in the city had a warm meal to eat. We have grown to become a resource in Santa Fe for free, prepared meals to any individual that is in need; this includes providing meals in homeless shelters and working with our local government to fill gaps in food security.
18 edible New Mexico | 2022
funding to buy a small food truck, and moved it to work sites to feed our own youth in YouthWorks paid training crews, and the commu nity started to take notice. We began to expand our operation with skilled mentors and talented local chefs training youth in the kitchen, and started a catering operation supported by a youth kitchen crew who gained certifications and college credits. Now the kitchen trains dozens of youth and provides thousands of meals for the Santa Fe community every year. How has the Social Justice Kitchen evolved over the years? Is there a facet of it now that you would have never anticipated when you began?
In addition to using local grains that offer a unique terroir, your breads also incorporate local wild yeasts. Do these yeasts provide a special flavor, and, if so, how would you characterize that flavor?
Jessica and Andre Kempton at Wild Leaven Bakery in Santa Fe.
20 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
Wild Leaven Bakery is a small family business that began as a Taos Farmers Market vendor in 2012, then opened a retail location in Taos in 2016. In December 2021, owners Andre and Jessica Kempton opened their second location in downtown Santa Fe. Specializing in artisan sourdough bread, pastries, sweets, and soups, they proudly support local and organic farmers and producers from northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.
LOCAL HEROES LEAVEN BAKERY FOOD ARTISAN AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDRE AND JESSICA KEMPTON, CO-OWNERS
Your breads use locally grown and milled heirloom grains such as White Sonora wheat. Describe the process of working with farm ers to aid the resurgence of this heirloom variety. What character istics make this wheat unique to work with as bakers? It has been super exciting to see the resurgence of ancient and heir loom grains in the last fifteen to twenty years. For the last ten years, the bakery has been buying seeds from respected regional millers and farmers and working with New Mexico farmers to grow a few varieties of heirloom and ancient grains so we can have a steady supply to bake with. We buy flours and grains from La Villita Farms, Moun tain Mama Milling, and La Montañita Co-op, among others. White Sonora wheat, which we buy from Big Wheel Farm and New Green Organics, is very desired by bakers for its buttery, nutty, and sweet flavors, and we are now baking with it in many of our breads, pastries, and cookies.
Wild yeasts and bacterias are very exciting to work with. Each sour dough culture will have its own unique makeup of yeast and bacteria, giving its bread a subtle flavor of its own. Also, bakers are able to encourage and discourage the growth of different yeasts and bacteria to bring about desired flavor profiles in the final loaf of bread.
WILD
Photos by Stephanie Cameron Ahmed Obo, founder and chef-owner of Jambo Cafe.
EDIBLENM.COM21 OPENING LATE SUMMER 2022 1318 4th Street NW Downtown | Albuquerque LOSPOBLANOS.COM87102 TASTING ROOM SHOP
Yes, local food security is very important to us. To achieve this, we need to be able to feed ourselves as a community for many months, especially if our access to outside food is cut off. Local food secu rity includes grain storage to feed the community and animals, seed saving for fruit and vegetable planting, animal breeding for community members to raise their own livestock, and connections of local producers with consumers. Describe a perfect day off.
216 Paseo Del Pueblo Norte, Taos; 130 N Guadalupe, Santa Fe; wildleavenbakery.com
The opening of our Santa Fe shop is a mark of our growth and the continuous support from our valued customers. This year, we’ve made the decision to restructure our operations to have fewer moving parts and focus on direct sales with our customers. We’ve been pleased with the support we’ve received so far.
In a profile we did on your bakery last year, you described the twenty-four-hour process of fermentation as “a dance.” We’re curious to hear more about what this dance looks like for you and how it has evolved.
A perfect day off will be staying home all day, cooking our favorite meals together, gardening, taking care of our land and chickens, and going on a hike or walk together.
Top: Almond croissant. Bottom: Various pastries and cookies.
What’s your favorite way to eat a slice of sourdough?
You opened a new shop in Santa Fe this past winter, and you recently made the decision to move away from selling to a handful of grocery stores to focus on in-store and farmers market sales only. How has this transition gone? Do you see expanding back to grocery sales at some point?
For example, to achieve a super sour, tangy bread, you can ferment at higher temperatures for a longer period of time using a very wet sourdough starter. To achieve a less acidic, sweeter taste with Belgian beer notes in the loaf, a baker can use a stiff (drier) starter, fermenting at cooler temperatures for a long period of time. One of our all-time favorite breads is the Christmas Italian sourdough bread, panettone. With this bread, traditionally, one does not want any sourness to the loaf. Low acidity is achieved by encouraging yeast to dominate the culture, discouraging lactic and acetic acid bacteria from multiplying by building a stiff sourdough starter with added sugar or honey, all while fermenting for many days at a very cool temperature. The end product is light and fluffy with a bubbly crumb and a sweet flavor. The Italians have been making this sourdough enriched bread for hundreds of years.
Toast the slice of sourdough, then spread on good butter and housemade jam. Is there a local food issue that is particularly important to you?
22 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
We use an all-day and overnight fermentation process for our breads, which allows the microbes to break down the starches, proteins (including gluten), and sugars in the dough to produce a full-flavored, digestible bread. This process is like a dance because the bakers are constantly needing to adjust the starter amounts in the dough, and are controlling room temperature as much as possible to move with the constantly changing outside temperatures in the high desert. In this scenario, it is essential to use a very small inoculation amount of sourdough culture in the dough to prevent over-fermentation. We also use a fridge to slow down fermentation in some of the doughs. We began using this overnight, room-temperature fermentation of large pan loaves after many years of trial and error and just experi menting with different methods. The results are a large, sliceable loaf with a uniform but bubbly, moist crumb. It has an excellent shelf life due to the acids and alcohol buildup from the yeast and bacteria being allowed to do their thing.
OPENING EARLY FALL 2022 201 Washington Avenue | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 lospoblanos.com
Some acorns fall from the trees in late summer or early fall with their caps attached. These nuts are not good eating. A healthy nut will separate from its cap when it falls.
24 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
FORAGING
ACORN ABUNDANCE
Sooner or later, almost every forager gathers acorns. They’re an excellent source of starch and fat (two things that aren’t always easy to forage for), they’re available almost everywhere, and they are a versatile, delicious wild food. But is it really worth the trouble of collecting, shelling, leaching, and grinding the nuts? Yes. Yes, it is.
The characteristic lobed leaves of the oak tree make it easy to iden tify, and all acorns are safe to eat when properly processed. Some peo ple prefer white oak acorns to red oak acorns (white oak acorns are rumored to be sweeter), but I suggest you forget about the species and gather the largest acorns you can find. The most labor-intensive part of processing acorns is the shelling. If you can gather fifty large acorns instead of a hundred small acorns, you’ll get the same amount of nut meat for a lot less labor. Collect your acorns as soon as they’ve fallen from the trees, and discard any nuts with a small hole in them. This is the exit hole of the oak weevil larva, which has been feeding on the nut all summer. When acorns fall to the ground in autumn, the larva chews its way out of the nut and pupates in the soil, emerging the following year as a full-grown weevil, which then lays its eggs inside a young acorn.
Words and Photos by Ellen Zachos
Acorn shells are thin and easy to crack, and you can shell them a few at a time by placing the nuts between two dish towels and
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1/4 cup fresh mushrooms 2 bay leaves 1/3 cup sherry or white wine
4 cups chicken or mushroom stock Salt, to taste 1/2 cup nonfat Greek yogurt
Mushrooms and acorns bring rich, umami flavor and satisfy ing texture to this soup. It’s filling, delicious, and, thanks to its low fat content, very healthy. You can use any mushroom (wild or cultivated), but I suggest hen of the woods, oysters, or porcini. Their flavors can hold their own with the acorns.
ACORN MUSHROOM SOUP
1 celery stalk, chopped 1 medium onion, chopped 2 tablespoons butter or oil
Sauté the carrot, celery, and onion in the butter (or oil) until they soften. Add mushrooms and acorns, and stir to com bine. Sauté for another few minutes. Add the sherry or wine, bay leaves, and stock, and simmer for an hour, covered. Let the soup cool, then purée mixture in a blender, and add salt to taste. Reheat soup, and use additional stock to thin the mixture, if necessary. Remove soup from heat and stir in yogurt, then top with chopped parsley and serve. cracking them with a rubber mallet. You might also consider a Davebilt nutcracker. It isn’t cheap, but it’s well worth it if you’re going to process acorns on a regular basis. Shelled acorns must be leached of their tannins before you eat them. Not only do the tannins in unleached acorns taste bitter, but in large amounts, they reduce the efficiency with which your intestines absorb nutrition. Before leaching your acorns, taste an unleached nut. Yes, it will be bitter, but it will give you a baseline flavor so you can monitor your progress as you leach your acorns. Hot-water leaching is the simplest method for leaching acorns. Fill a large pot one-third full with shelled nuts, then cover them with an equal volume of water. Bring the water to a boil, and boil until the water turns dark brown. Pour off the water, and repeat the process multiple times.
Chopped parsley, to garnish
26 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
1 1/2 cups acorn pieces, shelled and leached 1 carrot, peeled and chopped
Some foragers say to repeat the leaching process until the water remains clear, but rather than rely on the color of the water, rely on your taste buds. Taste an acorn after the third or fourth change of water. When there’s no trace of bitterness, your nuts are leached. Depending on the acorns, this may be as few as four or five changes of water or as many as fifteen. You may also read that acorns should be moved from one pot of boiling water to another, rather than out of boiling water into cold water that is then brought to the boil. Some foragers swear that cold water sets the tannins in the nuts, making them permanently bitter, but I have not found this to be true.
Hot leached acorns make an excellent stuffing ingredient, a beautiful baklava filling, and a tasty falafel base. They also make for a wonderful soup, hearty and thick on an autumn evening.
Words and Photos by Anna Marija Helt
Boletus rubriceps at different stages.
Oyster mushrooms are valued as food in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Their medicinal usage dates back thousands of years, and some of these uses, such as for respiratory infection and blood sugar regulation, are also supported by clinical research.
After a good rain, aspen oysters (Pleurotus populinus) and lung oys ters (P. pulmonarius) fruit—often in clumps—on dead or dying aspen and cottonwood trees. The mushrooms are fan or oyster shaped and range in color from creamy white to light buff to gray brown. The light-toned gills underneath radiate from one side of the mushroom. There may or may not be a short, off-centered stalk with the gills run ning down it. These fungi smell pleasant and mushroomy, sometimes with notes of anise. Their mildly sweet, earthy flavor works well with risotto, scrambled eggs, and “sweet” seafoods like scallops.
Mushrooms abound in New Mexico, and those featured here are delicious and easy to identify. That said, proper identification is critical, involving much more than a photo or article. Use a couple regional guidebooks. Join the New Mexico Mycological Society. Go on forays and take classes led by experts. Mistaken identification can provoke a prolonged trip to the bathroom, or to the hospital, or—in rare cases—to the cemetery. Be well educated on your mushroom of interest to avoid being in one of these unfortunate groups.
The joy of finding wild mushrooms can be prolonged by making a cooked mushroom powder for year-round use in the kitchen. The powder doesn’t need reconstitution in water before use and adds flavor, protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, and other good stuff to your recipes.
28 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 WILD THING
OYSTER MUSHROOMS
PUFFBALLS
Like oyster mushrooms, puffballs are eaten around the world. They’re also applied as treatment for burns and abrasions, and even used for entertainment. (Puffball soccer, anyone?)
The western giant puffball (Calvatia booniana) is, arguably, the tasti est puffball in New Mexico. Found in open grassy areas and shrublands, this mushroom can surpass a basketball in size. The tough outer surface is whitish and textured, and is removed prior to cooking. The inside
DRYING MUSHROOMSWILD
Why the name puffball? Well, they’re more or less round and release their (often brownish) spores in a puff. The latter is the reason behind their various other names in North America and Europe that reference flatulence.
Fresh Italian Kitchen 505.780.5279 • RusticaSantaFe.com 2574 Camino Entrada, Santa Fe Across from our sister restaurant: The Ranch House Welcome! Sourdough Bread| Pastry| Sweets| Soups Family Owned Business We proudly support local and organic farmers and producers TAOS | SANTA FE wildleavenbakery wildleavenbakery.com Made in the Global South Inspired b y Nature 125 E Palace Ave, #33 Sena Plaza , Santa Fe, heritageb yhand.com @heritagebyhand
BOLETES
MAKING A COOKED MUSHROOM
POWDER
3. Powdering: Grind cooked and dried slices in a blender or well-cleaned coffee grinder. Store in an airtight jar in a cool cabinet. Shelf life is 1 year for the powder, or 2–3 years if you store the slices whole and grind as needed.
30 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 starts out bright white, darkening as the mushroom spores develop. Once the color change begins, puffballs are no longer considered edi ble. Another reason to cut open a puffball is to verify that it’s not a baby amanita, which is also round. To check, halve the putative puff ball top to bottom. An amanita will have an outline of an embryonic cap and stalk inside; a puffball will not. Add powdered puffballs to alfredo sauce, or to ricotta stuffing for tortellini, ravioli, or manicotti. The powder is also a tasty soup and stew thickener.
4. Using: Amounts to use depend on the mushroom and the recipe. For example, for mushroom gravy, 1 tea spoon of bolete powder or 2 of oyster or puffball pow der per cup should do it. A quarter to a half teaspoon works for a mushroom “tea” in hot water or for the aforementioned bolete hot cocoa. The fiber content of mushrooms means they can have a laxative effect if you overindulge, so don’t go too crazy.
1. Cleaning: Remove dirt and debris with a brush. Cut off any stubborn dirt. Rinse in cold water if desired, but dry mushrooms afterward with a paper towel.
2. Baking/drying: Evenly slice mushrooms about 1/4 inch thick and place in a single layer on a lightly greased baking sheet. Bake at 200°F. As mushroom slices shrink and begin to brown, scrape them around with spatula. Pull the sheet out every 5–10 minutes to remove slices that are dry before they turn dark brown or burn. (Prac tice the technique with store-bought mushrooms to get the hang of it.)
The mountains of New Mexico are a hot spot for boletes during monsoon season. The delectable Rocky Mountain red (Boletus rubriceps) and Barrow’s bolete (B. barrowsii) grow in association with spruce and pine. (Older guides list the reds as king boletes— B. edulis—but that is actually a different species.) With the burgundy to brownish-red caps of Rocky Mountain reds and the whitish tops of Barrow’s boletes, these sizable mushrooms are easy to spot. Beneath the cap of the young boletes is a firm, white pore surface that turns to a yellowish or olive-colored sponge with maturity. This spongy layer is usually removed before cooking. The large, whitish stalks are straight to bulbous in shape, and the inside of the mushrooms are white, with little to no bruising when cut. The rich, nutty flavor of boletes is excellent in gravy, sauces, and soups. Combining bolete powder with cocoa, cinnamon, and red chile makes an amazing hot chocolate or a delicious pork ten derloin rub. Beyond the kitchen, bolete species have a history as medicine, particularly in China, where multiple species are used for low back pain. Avoid boletes that bruise black or blue upon slicing, or those that have a red pore layer under the cap. Some of these species can be seri ously poisonous, but these markings make them easy to distinguish from Rocky Mountain reds and Barrow’s boletes.
Final notes: Cooking enhances mushroom flavor and ren ders them digestible. Don’t eat them raw. When trying a mushroom for the first time, have just a little bit. Idiosyn cratic reactions are possible just as they’re possible with other foods. Mushrooms can accumulate heavy metals and absorb herbicides and pesticides, so be picky about where you forage. Be smart, be safe, and have fun! Western giant puffball. Aspen oysters on a log.
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32 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 OBSER VATION DECK Balloon Skylines & Philanthropy VIP BAL C ONY VIEW S & DINING THE VIP MUSEUM DINING DURING BALLOON FIESTA • OCTOBER 1–9 Enjoy the views of the 50th anniversary of Balloon Fiesta from above the crowds at the Balloon Museum. With breathtaking and panoramic views, delicious food & drink, VIP parking, museum elegance and amenities, THE OBSERVATION DECK is a one-of -a-kind experience and a fundraiser for the Balloon Museum. Choose breakfast with morning launches or dinner with evening glows and fireworks—many patrons choose both! ADVANCE PURCHASE TICKETS REQUIRED • AVAILABLE ONLINE BALLOONMUSEUM.COM
mexican inspired cuisine happy hour wed-sun 3pm-6pm inside sawmill market Wed-Fri 11AM-9PM | Sat-Sun 10AM-9PM | Weekend Brunch 10AM-3PM 1909 Bellamah Ave. NW, Albuquerque | SawmillMarket.com @flora_restaurant_nm
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Have you ever tasted something so good that it gives you an entirely new appreciation for a dish? My first bite of hummus at Mata G Veg etarian Kitchen, a grab-and-go restaurant in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill, was like that. Smooth and creamy, topped with a splash of olive oil and a sprinkle of paprika, the blend of tahini and garbanzo beans and a dash of lemon juice was so delightful it made me grateful that co-owner Gurubachan Kaur had suggested I get the larger size. Once I got home, I ate half the container standing at my kitchen counter with a big smile on my Kaurface.practices
Sikhism and is an avid Kundalini yogi and teacher. Ideals from the way Kaur lives her life show up in her kitchen. “We believe that whatever you cook should be with a good energy and vibra tion,” she tells me as we hang out on the patio outside the restaurant on the corner of Amherst Drive and Silver Avenue. “You have to put that love into your food. We have a very beautiful, peaceful energy in the restaurant. When you have love for cooking, it shows in the food.”
Growing up in a big Lebanese family in Mexico City, Kaur watched her mother and grandmother master the kitchen. “My whole family is into food. My mother and my grandmother were wonderful cooks. My family were meat eaters, so when I became a Sikh and vegetarian in 1972, I started trying to make things my mother and grandmother made, but without the meat. In the beginning, it was hard, but I think it’s in the blood that I cook well.”
EDIBLE SPOTLIGHT GRAB AND GLOW MADE WITH LOVE AT MATA G
Photos by Stephanie Cameron
By Maria Manuela ∙
She raised her three children on meatless diets and found that she loved cooking for her spiritual leaders and her entire community. Her youngest son encouraged her to take her culinary skills beyond her own kitchen and open a restaurant. He made the logo and came up with the name Mata G. “Mata means mother and G means beloved mother.
34 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
Left: Asian Hot Dish with rice noodles, stir-fried fragrant vege tables, and organic roasted tofu, served with organic coconut cream peanut sauce. Right: Grab-and-go refrigerator at Mata G.
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A good dish starts with fresh ingredients, and Kaur uses only the freshest. She sources from the Sikh community farm in Española and from other local growers, making seasonal dishes with veggies when they are at their best. “In the fall, we will start making recipes with butternut squash, and things like that.” They make specials during the holidays with Thanksgiving and Christmas favorites on the menu.
The cookies are too good to miss. I am really sensitive to sugar, but I have the biggest sweet tooth. So finding sweet treats made with honey and coconut sugar, which metabolizes differently than the regular white refined kind, was an extra bonus. My favorite is the Tahini Nirvana Cookie with chocolate chips and cherries.
Dishes from a plethora of traditions fill the Mata G menu. “It’s a whole mixture of international food because I want people to under stand that, in any nationality, you can cook vegetarian food that is healthy, good for you, and tasty,” Kaur says.
Mata G’s menu has delicious drinks too. The Hibiscus Cherry Iced Tea has a deep red color like a glass of fine wine. Sweetened with just a little honey, it has a refreshing and tart finish. Fresh lemonade made with honey and mint hits that perfect balance of sweetness and the flavor only fresh mint delivers. The fresh yogurt lassis are created with house-made yogurt from a starter passed down from Kaur’s grandmother.
The restaurant serves food in a grab-and-go style. You walk into the calming, bright space and pick what you want from an array of readymade items shelved in a refrigerated section to the left of the entrance. It’s convenient, something Kaur thinks is important. “I want to cook for people who work all the time,” she tells me. “And mothers who are working and busy and don’t have time to cook for their kids. It’s really good food, and fast, but healthy.”
Now Mata G products are stocked in supermarkets, health food stores, and cafeterias around the state, including all the La Montañita Co-op locations, Intel, and some hospitals.
116 Amherst SE, 505-266-6374, mata-g.com Kaur, a.k.a. Mata G.
36 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 That’s what my kids called me when they were growing up, so it was the perfect name.” The restaurant opened in November 2018, when Kaur was sixty-seven years old.
The ready-to-go case includes an assortment of burritos complete with breakfast versions. One is made with golden hash browns and cheese and another with a tofu scramble with tomatoes, onions, jalapeños, and olives. Imagine that breakfast burrito you nab after a night of one too many margaritas actually making you feel better, because it’s made with fresh ingredients and a dollop of love.
Gurubachan
For Kaur, cooking for others is a way of spreading happiness and nur turing her community. She tells me her favorite part of owning Mata G is meeting new people who become regular customers and friends. “I love cooking for people and meeting new people who enjoy the food. It’s very fulfilling knowing I am helping people eat healthier. It feels like I am nurturing people.”
The diverse offerings range from complete meals to little sides. The Mexican Hot Dish offers an enchilada casserole with roasted poblano, cilantro rice, and calabacitas. The Indian Hot Dish comes with cau liflower curry, tomato masala, raita, and a twice-baked potato made with onions, garlic, ginger, and cottage cheese. There are spiced olives, which have quite a nice kick, and that luscious hummus, which I will forever crave.
EDIBLENM.COM37
Left: The Chupacabra Mescal Martini. Right: Cinnamon stick being smoked and dropped into the Byron T. Photos by Stephanie Cameron.
Las Vegas is a tough old town. It doesn’t have the bright lights of its Nevada namesake. It doesn’t have the droves of tourists, the party appeal, or the spectacle. What it does have is nationally registered historic architecture, its Old West legacy, and the surrounding natural landscape with its new gloomy awe in the wake of the Calf Canyon / Hermit’s Peak Fire. There’s the Gallinas River Walk, a drive-in movie theater outside of town, and the Plaza. For those passing through, Las Vegas can be a quick trip through time, a tour of locations from favor ite television shows and Hollywood movies, enough to keep busy for a charming weekend. But for those from here, particularly those with deep roots to the community and people, the sense of home is strong.
Both left Las Vegas—Sara Jo went off to college and worked at dif ferent restaurants throughout New Mexico; Ryan did the same, but throughout Alaska, Colorado, and California. Both returned home, staking their claim where they grew up.
PRAIRIE HILL CAFÉ SETTLES INTO AN OLD WEST LEGACY
By Jason Conde
38 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 BACK OF THE HOUSE Something Special
Sara Jo Mathews and Ryan Snyder, owners of the Prairie Hill Café and Byron T’s Saloon at the Plaza Hotel, are native Las Vegans with generational ties to the community. Both started their restaurant careers in their teens at the Plaza Hotel, though at different times.
At twenty-seven years old, Sara Jo opened Borracho’s Craft Booze and Brews on Las Vegas’s historic Bridge Street and enjoyed a fourand-a-half year run until the pandemic shuttered business. “It was pivotal,” Sara Jo says. “We had the opportunity to get out of the business or dig deeper. We dug deeper.” Not long after closing Borra cho’s, Sara Jo organized a volunteer coalition consisting primarily of friends—the Vegabonds, they called themselves—and used her time
(c)PhotoNadelbachDanielPhoto: (c)PhotoNadelbachDanielPhotos:
Weekly Performances by Doug Montgomery open daily 7:30am35northcoffee.com4:30pm Local Mexican restaurant and brewery with a full bar on the south side of Santa Fe. 4056 Cerrillos Rd, Santa Fe | 505-438-1800 hiddenmountainbrewing.com
Housed on the first floor of the historic Plaza Hotel, the Prairie Hill Café and Byron T’s Saloon opened on the Fourth of July in 2021, with a menu centered on Southwestern comfort food with northern New Mexican flavors. Their beef is from Mathews Land & Cattle, Sara Jo’s family beef program operating from their 125-year-old ranch outside Las Vegas. On the menu, local food traditions and histories converge. There’re the Biscuits Rancheros with creamy gringo green or rojo bechamel. The humble Wid Slick breakfast, named after a local legend and past renovator of the Plaza Hotel, has eggs, herb-roasted papas, and sausage or bacon. There are nods to neighboring localities and regional classics, like the Santa Fe Yuppie Crunch salad—with brussels sprouts, cardamom-candied piñon, house-pickled water melon radishes, a champagne-rose vinaigrette, and rose petals—and a Hatch Cowboy Burger with batter-fried onions and bacon. There are also options with a more European influence, like This Little Figgy, a prosciutto sandwich with fig jam, gruyère, and swiss cheese on paninipressed sourdough and served with truffle fries.
Sara Jo credits her great-grandmother Essie Mathews for sparking her lifelong passion for food and cooking. A student from one of the first graduating classes at what is now New Mexico Highlands Univer sity, Essie was a home economics teacher who worked with other local rancher women to put together cookbooks. Sara Jo remembers baking with Essie as early as the age of three and listening to her big-fish tall tales about cooking on the cattle trails. “So many beans they had to be cooked in a bathtub,” Sara Jo recalls. From her family, she learned cooking for other people is a way to show your love. “We don’t know how to not make extravagant, decadent food,” Sara Jo says. “My dad thinks it’s normal to make prime rib on a Tuesday night.”
Left: This Little Figgy panini. Middle: Lavender French Toast. Right: Hatch Cowboy Burger. Photos by Drea Torres.
There’s a patio area overlooking Plaza Park, and in the lobby there’s a coffee shop that offers fresh-squeezed juice and Prairie Hill’s housemade breads and pastries.
It’s said that a restaurant’s first year is its toughest. For Sara Jo and Ryan, there have been months of major public construction along the surrounding Plaza and Bridge Street business corridor, as well as the lasting and wide-ranging effects of the pandemic. Then the Calf Canyon / Hermit’s Peak wildfire, the largest in state history. Prairie Hill Café was one of the many restaurants that closed temporarily when the wildfire neared the edge of town. It was also one of the many restaurants to partner with World Central Kitchen to provide hot meals to evacuees and first responders. “Every single restaurant gave something,” says Sara Jo. “Even in the face of catastrophe, it’s the spirit of the community.”
Across the lobby, Byron T’s Saloon, named after a former owner of the Plaza Hotel who’s said to haunt room 310, serves quality drinks in the spirit of Sara Jo’s beloved Borracho’s and extends into the Ilfeld ballroom, a venue for live music, dancing, and, occasionally, karaoke.
Sara Jo and Ryan don’t seem too surprised to be back in town and at the Plaza Hotel where they started in the industry almost twenty years ago. There’s a lot in Las Vegas to be proud of and to work for. “If we stop investing in our community when things get tough, there will be nothing left. The culture, the history, the food, and the talent in Las Vegas is worth showcasing,” Sara Jo says. “There’s something special about this place. It has its own energy. It draws you back.”
40 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 and space to help distribute over $40,000 worth of food to disabled, elderly, and homebound people in the community. And then, amid the pandemic, Sara Jo and Ryan launched Prairie Hill and Byron T’s. “The world was upside down,” recounts Sara Jo. “It was a very unfriendly time for new businesses in Las Vegas, restaurants in par ticular, but we did it anyway.”
230 Plaza St, Las Vegas, 505-434-0022, prairiehillcafe.com
8114 Edith NE, Albuquerque • 505-433-4076 • eldorachocolate.com
A poem by Japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa wraps around each cup sleeve that leaves Ihatov Bread and Coffee. The title is “Ame ni mo makezu,” meaning “Undefeated by the rain,” and the poem is about resilience and inner peace—the two main ingredients that have turned Yuko Kawashimo and Nobu Mizushima’s business into a unique success in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill. They opened their doors in March 2020, mere weeks before the first pandemic shutdown, but say it turned out to be the perfect time because the pandemic allowed them to connect with their community on a deeper, more personal level. Across America, a theme from the early pandemic days was a widespread desire to bake bread. Looking back, it’s easy to see why. Bread is a slow art form. It connects you to yourself but also to the elements, and when it is finished and drip ping with butter, there is no food on earth more comforting to hold in your hands. It was in this atmosphere of human vulnerability that Kawashimo and Mizushima nurtured their neighbors with loaves of sourdough made from a start that was created over forty years ago by their mentor, Willem Malten, owner of Cloud Cliff Bakery in Santa Fe.
Mizushima, whose day begins at 2 am with preparing the doughs that will rotate in and out of the oven from around 6 am until noon,
42 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
LIKE WATER FOR BREAD BAKING IN PEACE AT IHATOV
Words and Photos by Ungelbah Dávila-Shivers EDIBLE ARTISAN Yuko Kawashimo and Nobu Mizushima.
Local Spanish-style tapas restaurant with fine wine and beer. 1025 Lomas Blvd NW, Albuquerque · 505.503.8645 · debajoabq.com ROASTERY | TASTING ROOM | COFFEE BAR 1208 RIO GRANDE BLVD NW, ALBUQUERQUE Agua es Vida café es amor CUTBOWCOFFEE.COM
He says that a recipe is just the base, designed to work under perfect conditions. But perfect conditions never exist. The bread responds to its environment—heat, humidity, emotions—so Mizushima’s chal lenge is to work with each day as it comes and keep “good vibes” so the bread can be happy as well. That happiness comes to life in an oven they imported from France, which took a technician from New York a week to assemble.
44 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 says he takes a zen approach to baking. “Making bread is like art,” he says. “Your emotions affect the bread, so I try to keep calm to influ ence the bread and be like water. Water always changes and adapts, and if there is a log in the way, it finds a way around.”
3400 Central SE, Albuquerque, 505-539-5445, ihatov.us
The couple moved to Santa Fe from New York City about nine years ago to find a more down-to-earth lifestyle, which, without their planning it, manifested in baking at Cloud Cliff for seven years. It was here that they learned the art of bread from Malten. Eventually, the demand for bread at the Downtown Growers’ Market became so high that the couple decided it was time to set up shop in Albuquerque. Their background in art, photography, and design is apparent as soon as you walk in the door. The bakery is full of plants and storied wooden furniture that beautifully accents the various browns of the bread on display, giving the entire space a warm, earthy energy. Large north-facing windows let in the morning sunlight that falls across the patio and indoor dining area, where guests relax and enjoy coffee, muffins, croissants, breads, menu items such as sun-dried tomato and brie sandwiches with wasabi mayo, and all the good vibes coming from the kitchen.
If one were to describe what a mother’s love tastes like, it would be this bread: boules and baguettes flavored with chunks of fresh pear and black pepper or Nigella sativa and caramelized onions, a rustica loaf made with whole wheat berries sprouted in-house, a buckwheat and amaranth loaf, ciabatta, and more. The space smells like heaven before you even open the door—fitting for a bakery called Ihatov, a word cre ated by Miyazawa to name the utopia in which his poems take place. It is loosely based on the poet’s home in Japan’s northern prefecture of Iwate, about seven hours north of Tokyo, where Kawashimo and Mizushima emigrated from twenty-five years ago.
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In the midst of a lot of debate about stir-frying techniques, we looked for guidance to the expert J. Kenji López-Alt, author of The Food Lab, and his new book, The Wok. Although the wok is very versatile, we are focusing on the art of the stir-fry specifically. López-Alt says, “Stir-frying is fun. If you enjoy activities that are simple enough for a first-timer to get good results, but also reward you greatly as you practice and improve your skills, you may think it is fun as well.” If you get hooked on cooking in your wok as we did, we highly recommend geeking out with López-Alt in The Wok and learning everything from velveting your meat to master ing wok hei (the breath of a wok). He encourages you to practice your tossing technique with uncooked beans in a cold wok—it actually helps. We are including some notes on tools and ingredients, execution, and some simple recipes. Having these basics of stir-frying in your toolbox and letting your creativity be your guide means you are sure to have fun.
Cooking Fresh STIR-FRYTECHNIQUE:
We want to empower our readers so you can cook up any combina tion of things you have in your pantry and fridge, along with finds from the many farmers markets still bursting with produce. In this edition of Cooking Fresh, we are diving into stir-frying. This technique is easy to use in the fall and you’ll get all your nutrients in one meal. Stir-frying is similar to sautéing but amplified—the heat is higher, and the action is faster, keeping the food in constant motion.
Stir-frying involves specific hand skills that emphasize the rapid movement of food through different heat zones, all in an effort to regulate heat and maximize flavor. The pan commonly used is a round-sided wok, allowing the food to be continuously turned, tossed, and stirred. Butter is not used because it burns easily at high heat. Food is cut into small, thin pieces for fast-paced cooking. If uncomfortable flipping food in your pan, use a proper spatula to agitate the food continuously.
46 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
Words and Photos by Stephanie Cameron
THE COMPONENTS OILS Any fat with a high smoke point is ideal. Options include peanut oil, canola oil, corn oil, avocado oil, rice bran oil, grapeseed oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, and animal fats like lard. Sesame oil is an excellent addition to flavor but should be used sparingly as part of a stir-fry sauce or drizzled at the end of cooking.
WOK SPATULA (CHUAN) This shovel-like utensil is designed to follow the curvature of the wok. It’s thin enough to get under all ingredients, to scoop up and redistribute the food. A thin fish spatula can work as a substitute.
STAINLESS STEEL SKILLETS have slanted sides similar to a wok, though the sides aren’t as high. It is crucial not to overload the pan, and ingredients should fit in a single layer, so you may need to cook in batches.
NONSTICK is a no go. It cannot withstand high tempera tures without a chemical breakdown of coatings, which can be toxic.
AROMATICS Stir-fry aromatics can include garlic, ginger, and green onions, but fresh chiles, lemongrass, herbs, or preserved and pickled vegetables are also good options. They flavor the oil in the early stages of the stir-fry.
TITANIUM STAINLESS withstands incredibly high heat. In the edible test kitchen, the Hestan NanoBond molecular titanium stainless steel chef’s pan is my favorite substitute for the wok. It has high sides and withstands temperatures up to a scorching 1050°F. The only downside is that it is 100 percent nonreactive, so it lacks the benefits of seasoning.
PROTEINS In general, meats need to be sliced and marinated before cooking. Like vegetables, the pieces should be roughly the same size. Chicken thighs or breasts, ground beef or pork, flank steak, and shrimp are all options for stir-fries. Stir proteins minimally to maintain undisturbed contact with the hot pan and acquire a seared exterior. Tofu is an excellent protein option for vegetarian stir-fries. For the most straightforward approach, select firm tofu; drain and squeeze out as much water as possible. Slice into 1- or 2-inch cubes or rectangles, about 1-inch thick; pieces should be uniform in size. Fry in batches, cooking in a single layer and turning as few times as possible, until golden. Drain on paper towels and remove excess oil before return ing to the wok and adding sauce.
THE TOOLS THE WOK A seasoned wok—one that has had many layers of a protective coating of polymerized oil built on top—is the choice recommended by many professional chefs when stir-frying. For most Western stoves you will want a flat-bot tom wok, not one with a rounded bottom.
WOK LADLE (HOAK) Like the wok spatula, the wok ladle’s shape fits the wok’s curvature. It is essential for adding oil, stock, and liquids and can be used in conjunction with the wok spatula to toss ingredients. A regular ladle can be substituted for add ing oil and liquids to the wok but is not suitable for tossing.
CAST-IRON SKILLETS hold heat well and have the added benefit of seasoning, the same as their counterpart, the wok.
ALTERNATIVES TO THE WOK López-Alt argues that a wok makes a superior stir-fry, but if you aren’t ready to add one to your arsenal yet, there are other options.
VEGETABLES The key to successfully stir-frying vegetables is selecting vegetables with similar cook times and cutting them to a uniform size to ensure even cooking. You can combine your vegetables with a fungus during cooking because mushrooms cook through quickly but never really become overcooked. Vegetables should always be dry before they hit the wok and must be stirred often to cook through quickly without any part getting mushy. Some vegetables great for stir-frying are mushrooms, carrots, broccoli, white or yellow onions, bell peppers (any color), green beans or long beans, green onion, and cabbage. More tender veg gies that can be added at the end of stir-frying are sugar snap peas, bean sprouts, bok choy, and other greens.
Keep in mind that a proper sauce for stir-fries combines something salty with something a little bit sweet, some acid, and maybe some heat. Having a well-stocked pantry gives you the ability to whip up something great using ingredients on hand.
SOY SAUCE adds saltiness and umami to the sauce; swap for tamari or coconut aminos.
OYSTER SAUCE is a thick, complex sauce with savory notes.
MISO is salty and savory and can range from funky to sweet.
GINGER AND GARLIC build aroma and depth of flavor.
48 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
Sauces are where the magic happens for stir-fries, and the combinations are endless.
SHAOXING WINE is typically used for marinating meat and is also found in sauces; substitute with dry sherry.
PANTRY ESSENTIALS FOR SAUCES AND MARINADES
HOISIN AND MIRIN can be great sweeteners.
RICE VINEGAR fulfills the acid component of stir-fry sauces, but lime and lemon can also be great acidic additions.
SPICY INGREDIENTS such as red pepper flakes, fresh peppers (like Thai red chiles), sriracha, or Korean chile paste will all add some heat.
SESAME OIL adds aroma and flavor and should be stored in your refrigerator to avoid becoming rancid.
CORNSTARCH is used to thicken some sauces and helps the sauce stick to the meat and vegetables; substitute with arrowroot powder. GARNISHES brighten your stir-fry with herbs, sprouts, nuts, sesame seeds, scallion greens, pickled veggies, or fresh citrus.
FISH SAUCE delivers a funky, umami-rich intensity and adds depth to stir-fry dishes.
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Add liquid only after everything finishes cooking. Once the protein cooks through, add sauce to the pan, and heat through. Drizzle sauce down the sides of the pan with a ladle. If using tofu, simmer for several minutes in sauce before adding veggies.
López-Alt does note that “Asian stir-fries tend to be far drier than their Asian American counterparts, with just enough sauce to add flavor and a glossy sheen to meat or vegetables. Both styles can be delicious if done right.” So think of saucing as salting your food—ease into it, adding half of your sauce first and tasting to see if you want more.
4–6 cups veggies (6 cups if using leafy greens only) 2 cups cooked rice or noodles 1/2 cup stir-fry sauce
EXAMPLE OF 1:1 (PROTEIN AND STARCH TO VEGGIES)
STEP 7: PULLING IT TOGETHER
Add more oil to the wok, if needed, and cook veggies for 5–7 minutes, until hard veggies like carrots or broccoli are softened but still crisp. Add tender veggies like bok choy or bean sprouts to soften during the last minute of cooking. Remove the veggies from the pan and transfer them to a large bowl. Pro tip: Not all vegetables cook at the same rate, so do not overcrowd your pan. Cook in batches, so they don’t release too much liquid.
4–6 cups veggies (6 cups if using leafy greens only) 2 cups meat or tofu 1/2 cup stir-fry sauce
STEP 3: COOK AROMATICS FIRST Aromatics are used to flavor the oil. Cook them quickly, spoon them out of the pan, and set them aside. They can be added again at the end if desired.
If using a wok or cast iron, you want to season it every time you cook. Heat the dry wok first until it is ripping hot, add 2–3 tablespoons of oil, and swirl and discard into a holding vessel. You can use this oil, again and again, each time you season your wok. Then you will add oil for cooking.
STEP 2: SEASON THE PAN
2 cups cooked rice or noodles 1 cup stir-fry sauce
STEP 5: COOK PROTEINS Add more oil to the pan, and then add your protein. Cook until your protein is cooked through; the length of time will depend on the protein you are cooking. If cooking tofu, you may need more oil; start with as much as 1/2 cup and add another 1/4 cup if your tofu sticks.
The key to a successful stir-fry is to prepare all the ingredients before turning on the heat—once the heat is on, things move quickly. Have your ingredients chopped, meat marinated (unless using tofu), and your liquids measured before starting, and have all your tools and ingredients within arm’s reach so you can add things quickly.
2 cups meat or tofu 4–6 cups veggies (6 cups if using leafy greens only)
Pro tip: When adding soy sauce or other sauce mixture to a stir-fry, it’s best to avoid dumping it into the center so it doesn’t cool down the center of the wok, resulting in unwanted steam.
50 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 THE TECHNIQUE
Add veggies and aromatics (optional) back to the stirfry, and toss everything up. Add noodles, toss, and heat though. Taste and determine if you want to add back in the aromatics cooked in step 3. Garnish and serve.
MAKE-IT-YOUR-OWN STIR-FRY Serves 4 For a stir-fry that is meat and vegetables, use a ratio of 1:1 or 2:1. The 2:1 can go either way, depending on your pref erence and the dish. If using noodles or rice as a base, the starch teams up with your protein or stands on its own with the same ratio rules above.
EXAMPLE OF 2:1 (VEGGIES TO PROTEIN)
STEP 1: PREPARATION
EXAMPLE OF 2:1 (VEGGIES TO STARCH)
Once golden, remove the tofu and drain on paper towels, and remove all but 3 tablespoons of oil before returning tofu to pan.
THE RECIPES
STEP 4: COOK THE VEGGIES
STEP 6: ADD SAUCE
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STEP 4: COOK VEGGIES Add more oil to the wok if needed and cook carrots, cabbage, mushrooms, and scallions for 5–7 minutes, until they are softened but still crisp. Don’t crowd your veggies, and cook in batches, using more oil if necessary. Add snow peas to soften during the last minute of cooking. Remove veggies from pan and transfer them to a large bowl.
STEP 6: ADD SAUCE Once the protein cooks through, add sauce to the pan by drizzling down the sides. Heat through. Start with 1/2 cup sauce and taste, add more if desired.
STEP 7: PULLING IT TOGETHER Add veggies and aromatics (optional) back to the stirfry, and toss everything up. Add noodles, toss, and heat though. Taste and determine if you want to add back in the aromatics cooked in step 3. Garnish and serve. OF MAKE-IT-YOUR-OWN STIR-FRY: SKIRT STEAK AND UDON
STEP 5: COOK PROTEINS Add more oil to pan and add steak. Heat until cooked through, 2–3 minutes per side. Cook in batches to avoid overcrowding the pan. Avoid overturning the meat so it can get a nice sear. (See technique notes above if using tofu.)
OUR VERSION
1/4 cup Shaoxing wine 2–4 tablespoons avocado oil 1-inch knob of ginger, minced 2 garlic cloves, minced 1 pound skirt steak (approximately 1 pound), thinly sliced into 1/2-inch-wide, 4-inch-long pieces 1 cup carrots, diced into 1/2-inch pieces 1 cup cabbage, thinly sliced 1 cup mushrooms, thinly sliced 2 scallions, chopped and greens reserved as garnish 1 cup snow peas, cut in 2-inch pieces 2 cups udon noodles, precooked 1 cup Chinese stir-fry sauce (see recipe on page 56) Before beginning, reference the techniques on page 50 to ensure a successful stir-fry.
STEP 3: COOK AROMATICS FIRST Place wok back on high heat and add 1 tablespoon of oil. Add ginger and garlic and cook them quickly, spoon them out of the pan, and set them aside.
STEP 2: SEASON PAN If using a wok or cast iron, heat the dry wok first until it is ripping hot, add 2–3 tablespoons of oil, swirl, and discard into a holding vessel. Skip this step if using stainless steel.
STEP 1: PREPARATION Marinate steak in Shaoxing wine. Marinate for 15–30 minutes at room temperature. Pat marinated steak dry with paper towels before cooking. Have all your aromatics and veggies ready to go in the pan; cook noodles according to instructions.
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STEP 7: PULLING IT TOGETHER Add noodles, toss, and heat though. Taste and determine if you want to add back in the aromatics cooked in step 3. Garnish and serve. Choose garnishes with recommenda tions provided for the different stir-fry sauces. NOODLES
STEP 2: SEASON PAN If using a wok or cast iron, heat the dry wok first until it is ripping hot, add 2–3 tablespoons of oil, swirl, and discard into a holding vessel. Skip this step if using stainless steel.
2–4 tablespoons avocado oil 1-inch knob of ginger, minced 2 garlic cloves, minced 1 zucchini, 1/4-inch slices cut in semicircles 1 cup carrots, diced into 1/2-inch pieces 1 red pepper, thinly sliced lengthwise 1 orange pepper, thinly sliced lengthwise 1 cup mushrooms, thinly sliced 2 scallions, chopped, greens reserved as garnish 1 cup baby bok choy, thinly sliced 2 cups rice noodles, soaked and/or cooked according to instructions (we used pad thai noodles) 1 cup Coconut Sweet Chile stir-fry sauce or Thai Lime Basil stir-fry sauce (see recipes on pages 56 and 58) Before beginning, reference the techniques on page 50 to ensure a successful stir-fry.
STEP 4: COOK VEGGIES Add more oil to the wok if needed and cook zucchini, carrots, and peppers individually for 3–4 minutes, until they are softened but still crisp. Don’t crowd your veggies, and cook in batches, using more oil if necessary. Remove each veggie from the pan and transfer to a large bowl before adding the next kind. Add more oil if needed and cook mushrooms and scallions together for 5–7 minutes until mushrooms are browned and caramelized. Add bok choy and cook for 2 more minutes. Add back in the other veggies and skip to step 6.
OUR VERSION OF MAKE-IT-YOUR-OWN STIR-FRY: VEGGIES AND RICE
STEP 6: ADD SAUCE Add sauce to the pan by drizzling down the sides. Heat through. Start with 1/2 cup sauce and taste, add more if desired.
STEP 5: COOK PROTEINS Unless adding tofu or another vegetable-based protein, skip to step 6.
STEP 1: PREPARATION Have all your aromatics and veggies ready to go in the pan; soak and/or cook noodles according to instructions.
STEP 3: COOK AROMATICS FIRST Place wok back on high heat and add 1 tablespoon of oil. Add ginger and garlic and cook them quickly, spoon them out of the pan, and set them aside.
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2 teaspoons sesame oil 2 tablespoons fresh ginger, minced 3 cloves garlic, minced 1 tablespoon cornstarch
COCONUT SWEET CHILE STIR-FRY SAUCE
Pro tip: You can use a 1/4 cup of stir-fry sauce as a marinade for your meat before you add it to the skillet.
Combine all ingredients in a jar or bowl. Whisk or shake (with a tight-fitting lid on the jar) until thoroughly combined. Use immediately or refrigerate in an airtight container for up to one week.
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes, sriracha, or sweet chile sauce (optional for spicy sauce)
2 tablespoons soy sauce 2 teaspoons lime juice
1/4 cup sweet chile sauce
Combine all ingredients in a jar or bowl. Whisk or shake (with a tight-fitting lid on the jar) until thor oughly combined. Use immediately or refrigerate in an airtight container for up to one week.
1/3 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons hoisin 1 tablespoon oyster sauce
This sauce complements all proteins. Garnish with sesame seeds and scallion greens. Serve with rice or udon1/2noodles.cupchicken broth (or vegetable broth or mushroom broth)
CHINESE STIR-FRY SAUCE
This sauce complements proteins like chicken and shrimp, and vegetables like cauliflower and green beans; garnish with cashews and cilantro. Serve with rice or pad thai noodles. 3/4 cup whole-fat coconut milk
STIR-FRY SAUCES
Changing up just a few ingredients in your sauce can take your tastebuds on an entirely different journey with your stir-fry. The possibilities really are endless.
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
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This sauce complements proteins like chicken or ground pork, and veggies like bell peppers, cabbage, and bean sprouts; garnish with cashews and cilantro or basil. Serve with brown rice or quinoa.
Combine all ingredients in a blender. Purée until thoroughly combined. Use immedi ately or refrigerate in an airtight container for up to one week.
STIR-FRY SAUCES
This sauce complements proteins like beef and chicken, and veggies like broccoli, snow peas, or snap peas; garnish with Thai basil and crushed peanuts. Serve with rice or rice noodles.
1 cup mango, cubed into 1/4-inch pieces 2 teaspoons lime juice 1 teaspoon sesame oil 1 tablespoon water (to thin) 1 clove garlic, minced 1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes 3 tablespoons brown sugar 1/2 teaspoon Chinese five-spice 1/2 teaspoon cornstarch
Combine all ingredients in a jar or bowl. Whisk or shake (with a tight-fitting lid on the jar) until thoroughly combined. Use immediately or refrigerate in an airtight container for up to one week.
1/3 cup chicken broth (or vegetable broth or mushroom broth) 2 tablespoons soy sauce 1 tablespoon fish sauce 1 tablespoon oyster sauce 3 tablespoons brown sugar Juice of 2 limes (approximately 3 tablespoons) 1 teaspoon cornstarch 1 Thai chile, chopped and deseeded 1 bunch of Thai basil leaves, cut into a chiffonade (sliced into thin ribbons)
THAI LIME BASIL STIR-FRY SAUCE
MANGO STIR-FRY SAUCE
SEED STORY
THE GENIUS OF LOCAL
Words and Photos by Christie Green Gallinaceous birds' crops, also known as craws, filled with seeds.
EDIBLENM.COM61
One farmer whose ranch I hunted on years ago told me, “I pull those craws from the birds I hunt and open them up. I don’t just throw them away. I cast the seed from them back out onto the land to sow the next generation. May as well keep the seed stock local, keep propagating what comes from right here.”
Each day, approximately six thousand acres of open space in the United States are converted into other uses, to the detriment of forests, grasslands, waterways, and wildlife. Revegetation in these disturbed areas around new construction is critical for regenerating denuded soil, fragmented habitat, and diminished species diversity. Although bulk quantities of seed may be sourced from afar, even internation ally, restoration ecologists, farmers, land stewards, and government agencies are discovering that local seed stock proves more successful. The genius of the seed, and its ability to propagate, germinate, and become established, is embedded within its body’s “DNA,” which directly relates to location.
C
In response to the need for locally grown, genetically resilient grass, perennial, and annual wildflower and shrub species, IAE coordinates the Southwest Seed Partnership to increase the supply of native seeds for habitat restoration and conservation. IAE coordinates wild seed collection and then contracts with local farmers to grow out those native seeds in agricultural settings, often taking advantage of mar ginal croplands. The farmers are paid to grow the plants for one to three years and harvest the seed, with the seed harvests returning to partnership stakeholders, like the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), US Forest Service, and National Park Service, for use in res toration or applied research projects. This locally sourced native seed should be more resilient at establishing even under harsh climatic conditions and the warming climate, requiring fewer inputs from farmers and increasing restoration success.
Winged seeds take flight on air, prickly and sticky seeds hitch rides on animal fur and on fabric, such as socks and shoelaces. Palatable seeds, cloaked in juicy pulp, pass through a bird’s digestive tract and become scarified (or opened) to germinate. Some seed, like Stipa neomexicana, a cool-season native grass, lets go from the stem as it ripens, falls to the ground, and corkscrews itself into the soil like a self-propelled drill.
Landowners, conservationists, and government agencies are embracing collaborative stewardship grounded in the genius loci, or spirit and wisdom of a place. Investing in these local seeds, along with their growers, collectors, and distributors, fosters long-term ecological, economic, and cultural resilience.
anola. Soybeans. Corn. Flax. Buffalo berry. Pea shrub. Kochia. Russian thistle. Barley. Oats. Bearberry. Acorns. I pull the translucent, gummy skin of the crop, also known as a craw, from the turkey’s chest. This pouch extends from the esophagus of gallinaceous birds and is part of the mechanical digestion process. I tug the crop from the tubes and mus cles that embed them within the slender throats of this and other upland birds I hunt. I twist the skin to seal the little pouches and set them to dry on the piano. The crops rest, like plump, translucent orbs, with the seeds inside pushing against the thin skein as it dries like a veiny shrink wrap around them.
The seeds within the bodies of these birds tell a story of time and place, of connection among plant, animal, and human, between domestic agriculture and wildlife habitat. Birds like pheasant, grouse, partridge, quail, and turkey sip from cool acequias and peck insects while cruising the fields. They meander between rows of cultivated food, in dense shelter belts that protect against wind and soil erosion, and traverse property boundaries, ducking under barbed wire and fly ing over barns. A flock of twenty-three turkeys moves like methodical grazers from a cottonwood bosque through an alfalfa field in Springer, late winter snow melting into their iridescent wings and fringed tails.
The armature and architecture of each individual seed tells the story of family, place, geographic preference, and propagation method.
I learned from Maria Mullins, assistant Southwest director at the Institute for Applied Ecology (IAE), that prioritizing and investing in local sources of native plant seed stock is an increasingly important complement to the soil and water conservation essential to habitat restoration projects. Such IAE projects include removal of invasive plants like Russian olive trees that compete with native species in wet lands. Restoration practitioners and land managers are discovering a dearth of locally sourced native plant species suited to local climate, soil, and growing conditions. Seeds that are sourced and grown in different regions may have lower success germinating and establishing in the arid Southwest compared to ecotypic plants that are collected and grown closer to home.
The landowner tells me they’re there all the time. She can’t believe anyone would find it hard to hunt them. “They’re everywhere!”
Seed from a place becomes of that place. The wisdom of how to adapt to conditions such as alkaline soil, saline water, and extreme heat, drought, and cold is literally inherent.
“We’ve partnered with local farmers at Rio Grande Return, Man dy’s Farm, and other farms to grow out seed stock. It’s beneficial for
62 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 them because these types of crops are perennials with deep roots. Once established by the third or fourth year, they require few inputs and little water, and actually serve the farm in terms of attracting pollinators and beneficial insects, providing erosion control services with deep roots and diversifying revenue streams,” Mullins explains. When I ask Mullins about what species are in most demand by partner organizations, she says, “Forbs like Mexican hat, yarrow, and milkweed are in demand but grasses are the easiest to grow out. We’re experimenting with different plants, including ‘workhorse’ species like sand dropseed that are good in disturbed areas and grow everywhere.”
IAE also maintains a collection of seed in short- and long-term seed“Localbanks.plants need local things—like insects, pollinators, birds, snakes, mammals—to be in the local cycle of life,” says Gail Haggard, proprietor of Plants of the Southwest (PSW) since 1976. “Each needs the other.” In other words, each plant is one of many relations within an ecosystem. New Mexico State University (NMSU), in collaboration with the US Natural Resource Conservation (NRCS) New Mexico Plant Materials Center in Los Lunas, has been testing upward of two hun dred mostly native plant species to learn how they grow, adapt, and attract pollinators. There are over four thousand species of native bees in the United States, and more than 75 percent of US-grown fruits and vegetables are pollinated by native bees and honey bees. Some species of most of the six families of native bees are found in New Mexico. Native bees, along with other pollinators including moths and butterflies, are particularly adapted to and critical to the survival of native plant species. Native vegetation makes up 90 percent of New Mexico’s nearly seventy-eight million acres. These vast networks of native vegetation and pollinators depend on robust and resilient plant and seed stock to counterbalance and offset the impacts of disturbance and development. Haggard has been collecting seed in the Southwest for at least four decades and supplies approximately 50 percent of the PSW stock of native plants (except grasses) from locally harvested seed. “I’m not a purist,” she tells me. “I mean, seed travels the globe at similar latitudes, so it’s going to get into that pool.” Nonetheless, Haggard emphasizes the importance of native, local seed as the foundation of local ecosystems.
Mark Peabody in a field near Friona, Texas, where a farmer had grown out sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula). While visiting this farmer’s fields of sideoats, blue grama (B. gracilis), and buffalo grass (B. dactyloides), he shared the importance of starting small before launching into larger-scope production. “The farmers are diversifying their existing ‘known’ crops such as corn and sorghum and testing out these new, perennial, lower-wa ter-use plants. They need to see how it works in their operations.”
Peabody emphasizes the importance of spreading the risk by grow ing crops among various locations to minimize damage from wind and hail. “It’s also risky for farmers because there’s no federal insurance for native seed crops. But when you have a good year, it’s definitely possible to get native seed crops established profitably over time.”
“The Pecos sunflower is a keystone species,” says Olivia Carril, co-author of Bees in Your Backyard: A Guide to North America’s Bees “If you remove them from the ecosystem, everything changes; all other species have to shuffle.” She goes on to explain that, since the Pecos sunflower is listed as a rare plant species, it has yet to be studied in-depth, so pollinator species exclusive to it have not been identified. However, these sunflowers are critical because they attract both gen eralist bees and bees that only specialize on sunflowers, such as the sunflower chimney bee and long-horned bee. Rather than view the Pecos sunflower as a plant-versus-human problem, the community of Santa Rosa, the Quivira Coalition, New Mexico State Forestry, and New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Nat ural Resource Division, along with the IAE, worked creatively and collaboratively on multiple projects. The Pecos sunflower became the catalyst for the educational curriculum—highlighting the value and beauty of rare plants and wetland habitats, cienega (wetland) and wildlife habitat regeneration, local economic stimulation, and cul tural heritage celebration.
The Pecos sunflower, Helianthus paradoxus, which thrives in alkaline, wetland soil, is a federally threatened and New Mexico endangered species. With annual bloom from August to November, the sunflower reaches one to three meters tall and branches at the top, with three to five flower heads per branch that are five to seven centimeters in diameter. The flowers have bright yellow petals and a deep purple-brown center slightly smaller than in common sun flower species.
Fueled by Thompson’s enthusiasm and leadership, the City of Santa Rosa embraced the sunflower by hosting the first annual Pecos Sunflower Festival in 2021, garnering affection for the flower and its vulnerable wetland habitat while also stimulating educational oppor tunities and economic activity for the city.
The 116-acre Blue Hole Cienega Nature Preserve near Santa Rosa was identified as a core conservation area to direct recovery efforts including rehabilitating eroded areas and removing invasive plant spe cies. Within four years of restoration work, the number of rare Pecos sunflowers increased nearly fivefold.
As an annual, the plant depends on replenishing its own seed stock each year and can grow in groups of a few dozen to thousands of flowers. Pecos sunflower habitat is increasingly at risk as wetlands diminish and dry due to prolonged drought, aquifer depletion, and competition from non-native species like Russian olive and salt cedar.
Another project exemplary of the importance of native plants and seed that IAE helped steward, along with multiple other partners, is the Pecos Sunflower Project.
One of the biggest challenges now is from the devastation of wild fires, Haggard says. “I should have much more of a bank of certain species, but I just don’t and now, after the fires, well . . .”
“When the students go out there, they can identify plants and insects by name and know their role in the environment, what’s seasonal, and what conditions affect their distribution and density. Another piece that’s exciting is that I’ve had former students go into conservation— botany and environmental science,” Thompson says, beaming.
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“We’ve sourced seed from local plant materials centers like the USDA/NRCS . . . and we’ve been growing native grasses for decades,” Peabody tells me. Clients of Curtis & Curtis include landscape contractors, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the US Department of Transportation, the BLM, and the US Forest Service. Farmers contract with the company to grow out annual and cover crop seed like barley, triticale, and small grain crops, as well as native grasses and forbs. “It requires a lot of inputs in terms of water, equipment, and infra structure to begin and get established, so it may be overwhelming for new farmers, but it’s possible. We have developed relationships with local farmers we’ve worked with for years, and we also have a few hundred acres of our own near Clovis and in Texas.”
Mark Peabody, manager of Curtis & Curtis Seed in Clovis, echoes Haggard’s and Mullins’s experience with and belief in native stock.
Estela Thompson, a middle school science teacher who has taught for twenty-one years with the Santa Rosa Consolidated Schools, had the opportunity to work with botanists, hydrologists, and conserva tionists and utilize the Pecos sunflower as a hands-on teaching tool. Located within a six-mile sinkhole, Santa Rosa’s unique cienega set ting provides its own special sort of classroom.
When I ask Peabody about effective methods for successful sowing and establishment of native grass seed, he describes a sort of successive partnership between annuals and perennials: “It works wells to have an annual cover like rye, wheat, barley, or triticale, to utilize that and then terminate it [allow it to germinate and grow, then cut it], making sure to have six to ten inches of stubble cover, then drill-seed the grass seed right in, which keeps it from washing and blowing away. It’s a good way to get native grass established.”
In July 2022, the first-ever BioBlitz was held at Blue Hole Cienega, featuring birding workshops, field research, plant and animal species monitoring activities, and field sample collecting. Botanists, herpetol ogists, ornithologists, and other scientists came in for the weekend and surveyed the entire cienega to get a sense of what species are endemic. Other rare species endemic to wet, alkaline soil include Wright’s marsh thistle (Cirsium wrightii) and Great Plains Ladies’ Tresses (Spiranthes magnicamporum). The Pecos sunflower, with its late summer and early fall bloom, is particularly important because it attracts pollinators when other plants aren’t in bloom. Thompson emphasizes the significance of this event and how it is a unique attraction for a diverse group of skilled scientists: “There are day and night collections. This level of scientists in the field in our community is phenomenal!”
My boots cut tracks across those of coyote, deer, elk, and cougar. A roadrunner skitters past, a red-tailed hawk lands on the power line above. I roll a scaled quail crop between my forefinger and thumb, and let another one rest, light, in my palm. I feel the texture of miniature grains of grass, papery shrub seedheads, dried insects, and shriveled pods of dried berries. During the walk, I slow to scratch a crop or two into the soil beneath the shelter of fallen piñon, one at the confluence of two arroyos and a few under the lips of a lichen-covered stone. I release the seed from its miniature spherical packaging, trusting the depth of intelligence at hand.
Blue Hole Cienega Nature Preserve near Santa Rosa.
Pecos sunflower (Helianthus paradoxus
Saving Beauty, a film by Christina Selby and Arturo Anzures, features local stewardship voices and provocative imagery that tell the story of the plant and its unique cienega habitat to educate and inspire further conservation efforts. The film screened at the BioBlitz and will again be shown at the second Pecos Sunflower Festival, September 9–11.
As land is developed into agricultural production, residential neighborhoods, and commercial sites, different sorts of edges are cre ated. Borrow ditches, alleys, sidewalk promenades, sports fields, and multiuse trails become areas of human and nonhuman circulation, water conveyance, and plant production. Wild and domestic collide and connect in dynamic adaptation.
64 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
Edge zones, where ecological communities like meadows and forests and streams and grasslands intersect, are species-rich and dynamic. This includes the intersection of developed and untamed edges, such as roadsides where surface water runs off pavement to adjacent shrub, grass, and wildflower plants like scarlet globe mal low (Sphaeralcea coccinea) and annual sunflowers. Sites where agri cultural land converges with the uncultivated are equally vibrant.
A few weeks later, the turkeys’ crops, lined up like science class samples atop the piano, rattle as I pick them up and shake the seeds inside. The globe of skin has dried; the seeds pucker within their shell-like skeins, now loose. I slip a few into my vest pocket as I head out for a walk west of Santa Fe where the Rio Grande cuts a canyon, golf courses scream green, cattle graze, and recre ationists walk, ride, and camp.
)
Corn, beans, squash, and chiles, growing near riparian corridors and irrigated by the river water that also hydrates native cottonwood species, provide forage and habitat for overlapping bird, insect, mammal, and reptile species. Just one example is the barn owl, perched in cottonwood cover, which preys on the pocket gopher from the field. At the edge, where diverse plant and animal species meet, life thrives.
As we humans traverse rural and urban boundaries, species “blending” will continue. Such development and disturbance require creative regeneration techniques and partnerships. Land owners, conservationists, and government agencies are embracing collaborative stewardship grounded in the genius loci, or spirit and wisdom of a place. Investing in these local seeds, along with their growers, collectors, and distributors, fosters long-term ecological, economic, and cultural resilience.
The BioBlitz also hosted a youth camp in partnership with the Asombro Institute (asombro is Spanish for “wonder”), a Las Cruces–based nonprofit “dedicated to increasing natural science literacy through engaging, place-based education.”
Join The Circles Explorers, the Museum of New Mexico Foundation’s newest membership program tailor-made for those with an adventurous spirit. We’re pioneering a new way to engage in the art, culture and history of New Mexico beyond the walls of our four state museums in Santa Fe and eight historic sites statewide. For more information call Cara O’Brien, Director of The Circles, at 505.982.6366, ext. 118 or email cara@museumfoundation.org or visit museumfoundation.org/explorers.
Become a Circles Explorer!
Art, Culture, History and Beyond
STATE OF THE MEAT MARKET A DRIVE TO BUILD LOCAL PROCESSING CAPACITY
By Briana Olson
Photo by Esha Chiocchio.
“W
“We started direct marketing the beef we raise in 2013,” Casados told me, and eventually “ventured into retail and then into
closed down or reduced capacity in response to COVID outbreaks among plant employees. It was a moment of reckoning for the doc trine of efficiency.
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“People have been shocked to find out this service exists,” Freeman continued, referring to the mobile slaughter unit that allows him to travel directly to farms and focus on “completely low-stress on-site harvesting.” Lucet Mobile Butchery is what’s known as customexempt, meaning that meat from the animals Freeman harvests cannot be sold commercially, and his purpose in joining the union meeting by phone was to advocate for “super small-scale producers being able to sell meat directly.” ~ According to Google Trends, search interest in the topics of “meat processing” and “meat market” peaked in May 2020. So did search interest in “slaughterhouses near me.” I don’t know if producers were driving that interest, or if consumers, panicked about reports of impending meat shortages, were looking for places where they could harvest live animals. I do know that in April of that year, thousands of pigs and millions of chickens were shot or gassed or otherwise “depopulated” when some of the nation’s mega-slaughterhouses
“We see a huge potential to shift, using what we have to produce beef here,” Tommy Casados said. “The processing facility is really the missing puzzle piece to create that local market and local distribution network.”
Like most producers in northern New Mexico—C4 is based in Tierra Amarilla (colloquially, TA), about two hundred miles and four hours from Mountainair—Casados did not need COVID bottle necks to know that there was a shortage of small-scale processors, although “COVID made it more obvious that we need more pro cessing.” (While there are around thirty processors in New Mexico, most of those are custom-exempt, like Freeman’s, meaning that meat harvested and butchered there cannot be sold commercially.)
In January 2022, the Biden administration announced a $1 billion plan to make the meat and poultry supply chain fairer, more com petitive, and more resilient. The consolidation of the meat market is not news in itself; most of the stats laid out in the administration’s fact sheet have been roughly true for years. (The USDA published a report examining the causes of consolidation in 2000.) In beef, four meatpacking companies, known as the big four, control 85 percent of the market. In pork, the top four processors control 70 percent of the market. Year after year, farmers receive less and less of each dollar consumers spend on meat.
~ “We have had to use Mountainair [Heritage Meat Processing]. Mel’s [Custom Meat Processing] in Romeo and Salazar [Meats] in Manassa and Sunnyside are all still booked out eight to ten months,” Tommy Casados of C4 Farms told me in June.
“T heir quality of death is the most important thing,” Matt Freeman said, his voice spilling out of a phone held out for everyone to lis ten in at a Rocky Mountain Farmers Union meeting in April. His heritage sheep farm outside Las Vegas had been spared from the Calf Canyon / Hermit’s Peak Fire, but he was un able to join the meeting in person. The topic of the day was “meat processing,” as the harvest and butchering of animals is known, and, specifically, the State of New Mexico’s intent to reboot its own meat inspection program some fifteen years after having ceded that right (and responsibility) to the USDA. But how do you measure quality of death? Is it the serenity and control of the setting, the surprise of the departure? Is it the number of miles traveled to the slaughter facility? The cumulative moments preceding the final one? The kindness and spaciousness with which one was fed, run, handled during breeding and birthing and all the rest of life? Might it also be how one’s body is handled afterward— what one is turned into? And what about the hands and bodies of those who harvest? I’m thinking not only of their skill, their accuracy and swiftness, nor only of whether they say something like a prayer, but also whether they are recognized for their work. Whether their own lives and deaths are honored, considered, cared for.
What is news, or what at least was newly felt—and felt by a much wider percentage of the human population—is that consolidation weakens supply chains. A system that produces mad abundance (fourpacks of pork tenderloins, endless racks of five-dollar roast chickens, etc.) in “normal” times may provide a sense of food security, but when fifty plants are processing almost all the cattle, closing a single one has an outsize impact. In the administration’s words, “Our overreliance on just a handful of giant processors leaves us all vulnerable, with any disruptions at these bottlenecks rippling throughout our food system.”
“You have to have a HACCP [pronounced ‘hassip’] plan for every process, one spelled out for slaughter, one spelled out for aging, one spelled out for raw processing not-ground products, one for raw
It was “basically brought about by the COVID situation,” said Belinda Garland, executive director of the New Mexico Livestock Board, when I asked her what was behind the renewed interest in rebuilding the state’s meat inspection program. “The reason there’s been bipartisan support of this program is that it really gives the state control of its own destiny. It helps the state be self-sufficient for the consumers out there.”
There’s a catch, though. In order to run an in-state program, “you have to enter into an agreement with [the USDA] Food Safety and Inspection Service [FSIS].” For New Mexico, this means (among other things) focusing on the areas that FSIS cited as reasons for withdrawing their agreement back in 2007: staffing, training, and funding.
Casados received a grant from the state to build a USDA-certified processing facility in 2019. “People were coming forward because a lot of people like us were taking their animals to Colorado or even down south,” he said. “Our ultimate goal is really to start working with neighboring ranching cattle producers here—buying [animals] at weaning and putting them into our forage pasture-based program. We want to provide another market for local producers.” According to Casados, the cow herd in Rio Arriba County is estimated to be thirty-seven thousand head, and most of those are currently being exported out of the county. “At our facility, we have USDA kills waiting, on call till we get inspection. We’re already booked out till the end of this year.” ~
In part, this is because the program will allow the state to con trol how many plants are operating, she said. “Right now, part of the federal restrictions on us is they don’t have enough employees.”
Top: The skull of an Icelandic sheep, raised at TerraVita Heritage Ranch and harvested by Lucet Mobile Butchery, photo by Briana Olson.
By July, the livestock board had adopted a set of rules from the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), which will guide their setup of the program. This includes “9 CFR, Part 313, humane slaughter of livestock,” a nearly four-thousand-word definition of humane slaugh ter that emphasizes “a minimum of excitement and discomfort” and “immediate unconsciousness.” It also includes “9 CFR, Part 417, haz ard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) systems,” an overview of the quality control protocol that small-scale producers like Freeman often perceive as an administrative burden too big to bear.
Bottom: A grassfed, humanely raised Angus heifer harvested by Lucet Mobile Butchery, photo courtesy of Lucet Mobile Butchery.
She described a vision of hiring meat inspectors based around the state, “so if we have a small plant out there that doesn’t need a fulltime inspector,” they could be shared between different plants. “We’ve got a vision of assisting small processors as well. We have heard from other states that people coming on have found it easier to work with them than with the federal [system],” she said.
68 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 value-added products. Starting in 2017 we got into value added— snack sticks, jerky, summer sausage. Then got into fresh sausages and bratwurst. We started renting a commercial kitchen here locally. That spurred on wanting to process these products ourselves, you know, the traditional carne seca that is very popular here.”
“We really get intimate with these applicants,” Roper said. “We like to ask them a lot of questions about what their goals are, why they’re trying to start a meat processing facility. Who they want to feed, what size of facility they want to build, if they actually want to slaughter animals, do added value. . . . And then it kind of gets down to what you can afford to do. It’s all scale. What their labor pool looks like, what the market looks like. And then we help them achieve their goals.”
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~
“When I was working with tribes in Oklahoma,” Roper said, “we were focusing on food security before COVID ever hit. We had coolers and freezers, and were able to store and distribute. We were able to supply our own stores. We had beef, we had bison, nobody had to worry about food security in our community.”
More than a quarter of that $1 billion will be granted to indepen dent processors. Some funds will leverage guaranteed loans. Some will be allocated to training programs.
“It’s a difficult business, and particularly for small processors. When the administration made this $1 billion commitment, they knew that if they just put money out there for grants [to get new plants started], they would fail,” said Dave Carter of the Flower Hill Institute. “This program is the most expansive that’s ever been done. They knew they needed a whole cadre of folks with different expertise.”
USDA funds are available for a wide range of projects, from building new plants and converting custom-exempt processors into USDA-inspected processors to accessing capital for improving dis tribution infrastrastructure (cold storage, for instance). One person the team at Flower Hill has talked with is a retired teacher trying to put together a community kitchen so that she and her neighbors can process their chickens and market them at the farmers market.
~ “There’s nothing here, job-wise. The majority of jobs are govern ment provided. Schools. The economy is only as strong as what it produces, so my thought is we need to provide them,” Casados said. “There are a lot of kids who want to stay, who don’t want to move to Ewe and lambs from TerraVita Heritage Ranch.
Photo by Briana Olson.
ground products, heat treated, heat treated fully cooked shelf stable,” said Casados, who used funds from a USDA meat and poultry expansion grant to buy a custom smokehouse and get training in some of those processes.
The Flower Hill Institute, cofounded in Jemez Pueblo by Roger Fragua, is serving as the coordinator for the USDA Meat and Poultry Processing Capacity Technical Assistance Program. During the pan demic, Fragua and Carter worked together with Chris Roper (now also with Flower Hill) to help the Osage Nation set up a USDAcertified plant within seven months.
“At smaller plants,” Carter added, “it’s not just the people on the floor—it’s the plant manager, marketing, food safety, and sanitation.”
Photo by Esha Chiocchio.
At the time I spoke with Casados, he and his wife, Jessica—C4’s plant manager and certified HACCP person—were getting ready to submit their application for a USDA grant of inspection, with hopes of being up and running by the end of August. C4 had six open posi tions. That may not sound like much, but most estimates put Tierra Amarilla’s current population under five hundred, and 75 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line. ~
“We’ve even talked with colleges about programs that develop plant managers,” Roper said. “It’s hard to find someone with processing experience, management experience, accounting, teaching. I think that’s a benefit. A lot of people don’t want to be stagnant.” ~
“What we’re seeing now is a need for professional butchers,” Carter said. “You can’t take someone who’s been working in a JBS or Tyson plant and put them in a smaller plant. These smaller plants need some one who can go all the way from the kill floor to the retail counter.”
70 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 the city. We’re actually looking at hiring a kid [from Chama] with a marketing degree from NMSU. Using a marketing position in TA, who would’ve thought of that?”
I visited with Freeman in the East Mountains, where he and Schaeffer had evacuated with their animals, so I didn’t have the chance to see his mobile slaughter unit. But he described the process C4 Farms.
“I typed ‘butcher’ on Craigslist,” Freeman said when I asked what training opportunities had been available in California, where he lived before he and his wife and business partner, Alyx Schaeffer, decided to return to her home state of New Mexico. What he found on Craigslist was a mobile butcher, and harvesting on-site resonated with their philosophy. Freeman showed up to shadow for a day, loved it, and signed on for a four-month apprenticeship in Sacramento County and Northern California. That stint also included a day shadowing a master butcher in a brick-and-mortar shop, who broke down eight hogs a day with the help of three employees.
“Some meat departments still have workers who are doing cut ting and grinding,” Roper explained, but “people from grocery departments don’t know how to break down a carcass. They’re used to portion-cutting a primal or maybe grinding hamburger through a grinder and packaging into a retail package. . . . There’s big gaps when you think about working in a processing facility versus a gro cery department versus charcuterie. In a large plant, say you’ll have five hundred workers. The person will stand every time a carcass lands in front of them; think of an automobile factory—these meat plants are the same way. Maybe you’re pulling a hide down or cutting a tail, but you have one job.”
EDIBLENM.COM71 in detail. His approach meets—or maybe exceeds—the federal code for humane slaughter, but his definition is simpler: “Animals are being animals until they’re not.” He emphasized limiting stress, sanitation, meticulous cuts, the importance of getting it right. ~
With Trilogy, Encinias said, “we harvest every week out of Western Way in Moriarty.” Western Way Custom Meat Processing is New Mexico’s longest-running multispecies slaughter facility with a USDA grant of inspection, and is fifteen minutes from the Encinias family ranch. “We have a long-standing relationship with the Minifie family. They do a good job, they’re multigenerational,” he said, noting that by processing locally, Trilogy maintains a low carbon footprint and supports the thirteen employee families on Western Way’s payroll.
As far as who’s signing up for these trainings, he mentioned a recent in-person butcher training in Wisconsin where the students “came from all aspects of the community, from hunter to plumber to physical therapist.”
“We’re also providing training for culinary experts. Especially work ing with restaurants, getting restaurants to better understand the chal lenge of being a small [producer]. Everyone knows what a rib eye is. We’re hoping to have more people get into whole-carcass utilization.
Encinias is a fifth-generation rancher whose family launched Trilogy, a now-thriving local beef business, just before the pan demic. He also runs a consulting business and is a professor and discipline coordinator at Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari. I get the impression that one of the only times he sits down is when he’s driving, which he happened to be doing on the afternoon we talked.
In Encinias’s view, training is paramount. “Because we’re actively involved in the meat business as a family, we’re very much aware of [the needs] for workforce,” he said. He echoed Carter’s view that expand ing independent processing has to be multifaceted. “There’s no sense in building a $20 million facility that runs at 50 percent efficiency because they don’t have the people to run it,” he said. Previously, “the feds have invested in capacity to build but those plants are not run ning at max because they don’t have the trained workforce.”
“Meat cutting is an art,” said Manny Encinias of Trilogy Beef Community. “It’s a skill set. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
He described the program at Mesalands as highly adaptive—a com bination of a standard hybrid curriculum and in-person training cus tomized for businesses. “I just got off a call with one of the new plants coming under USDA inspection. Focused on doing some needs assess ment. What employees are they looking for? What type of equipment do they need training on? Every one of these plants has different needs, they have different equipment, and they have different challenges.”
Tommy Casados’s eldest son, Jacob Casados, at C4 Farms in Tierra Amarilla. Photo by Esha Chiocchio.
If there’s a thread that runs through all the notes I took while interviewing for this story, it’s a vision of local and regional selfsufficiency. Autonomy. But the drive to build local processing capacity is also about what goes into these animals. It’s not only that travel is stressful for animals, and that wait times at existing federally inspected plants are long; it’s how the animals live, what they eat, and the human labor involved in the intensive rotational grazing practiced at ranches like C4.
~ Almost immediately after greeting me, Freeman handed me a small skull. It was from a sheep he’d raised, meticulously cleaned but unbleached. “I really like the natural bone color,” he commented as I turned it in my hands, looking at the hole where the captive bolt had entered, a clean shot that rendered the animal insensible, uncon scious. Later, he showed me the salted pelt of another sheep.
New Mexico’s state meat inspection program and the federal ini tiative to strengthen small-scale processing are works in progress, and there are many open questions. Is the livestock board agile and creative enough to truly support small-scale processors while meeting federal regulations? Will training programs help butchery become a viable field in the state? Can new plants buck the historic pattern of opening and closing, being bought and sold, as so many processors have done since the consolidation of markets began? Not least, will chefs and consumers join the effort and buy meat locally even if the price point means eating a little less meat? Can we live into the truth that we, too, have a hand in the quality of life and death of the animals we eat—and in the lives of those who raise, harvest, and butcher them?
~
Right: Mesalands Community College instructors, Eddie Behrends and Arquímides Reyes, demonstrate the initial break of a beef forequarter at a beef fabrication training held at Oneida Nation outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, in June 2022.
“We see a huge potential to shift, using what we have to produce beef here,” Casados said. “The processing facility is really the missing puzzle piece to create that local market and local distribution network.”
“We’ve trained our cows to eat thistles, invasive weeds, and sage brush in the winter time,” Casados said. “We use them more as a tool to steward our land. We claim ‘forage fed,’ so they’re eating grasses and legumes and forbs, a smorgasbord of plant species to feed on.”
“People spend a lot of time raising these animals,” Freeman said as he described the options Lucet Mobile Butchery offers customers. “Very little goes to waste.”
Left: Fifteen-year-old Elia Encinias uses beef-cutting skills learned at Mesaland Community College to carve top round for custom beef jerky for an upcoming movie.
Photos courtesy of Manny Encinias.
72 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
So at Mesalands, the focus is not just on meat training, but to help from production [at the ranch] all the way to the plate.”
In bureaucratic parlance, these might be what’re called “valueadded products,” but they don’t feel that way to me. They feel like love—perhaps an odd claim if you’re someone who unilaterally opposes killing animals, but not odd at all for anyone who’s spent time visiting with farmers who raise animals for food.
Most cattle in the United States, including most of those raised in New Mexico and shipped out of state for processing, are “grain finished,” typically spending their final months in feedlots near the mega-slaughterhouse where they will be processed and packaged, often labeled with one or another fake farm name used by the big four.
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Heritage Hotels and Resorts Hotels in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, and Las Cruces. hhandr.com Hotel Andaluz Andaluz evokes the passion and pride of the region of Spain that has inspired the hotel’s decor and architectural style. 125 Second Street NW, Albuquerque, 505-388-0088, hotelandaluz.com Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Organic Farm 4803 Rio Grande NW, Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, 505-344-9297, lospoblanos.com Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi Sophisticated modern aesthetic celebrating the southwestern spirit. 113 Washington, Santa Fe, 505-988-3030 Sarabande B & B Comfort, elegance, and simplicity. 5637 Rio Grande NW, Albuquerque, 505-348-5593, sarabandebnb.com The Parador Our 200-year-old farmhouse, Santa Fe's oldest inn, is located in historic downtown Santa Fe. 220 W Manhattan, Santa Fe, 505988-1177, elparadero.com
74 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
A community of people that actively invests in our food system. Eat local. Eat seasonal. Eat outside the box stores. Delivering across New Mexico. newmexicoharvest.com Owl Peak Farm Grains grown and milled in La Madera. Order online at owlpeakfarm.com Skarsgard Farms Delivering fresh, local, and organically grown produce and natural groceries to doorsteps across New Mexico. 505-681-4060, skarsgardfarms.com St. Clair Our grapes are grown on our Lescombes family-owned vineyard in southwest New Mexico. stclairwine.com
We offer a wide range of herbs, vitamins, supplements, and high pH H2O. 4056 Cerrillos, Unit D-1, Santa Fe, 505-780-8687, daisysholistichealth.com
SLOWFOODSANTAFE.ORG SANTA FE Linking the pleasure of good food with local community.WOMAN-OWNED | WOMEN-LED Secure, Stable, Scalable Websites. aquarianwebdesign.com 923 Cerrillos Road at St. Francis Drive 505-988-1630 tinneeann2@gmail.com TIN-NEE-ANN Trading Co. Family Operated - Family Friendly Since 1973 Hatch Chile — e Best Chile Daisy’s takes a unique approach to Holistic Health. We offer a wide range of Bulk Herbs, Supplements,Vitamins,andHighpHH2O. 4056 Cerrillos Road, Unit D-1, Santa Fe daisysholistichealth.com ∙ 505-780-8687 Daisy’s Holistic Health is locally owned and dedicated to great customer service. Museum of Spanish Colonial Art Our magnificent site with breathtaking views is available to rent for your special events indoors and out. 750 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe SpanishColonial.org/site-rental MARKET PLACE LOCAL FINDS Your support for the advertisers listed here allows us to offer this magazine free of charge to readers.
AlbuquerqueRETAILERS
Black Diamond Curio Modern mercantile in downtown Santa Fe. 219 W San Francisco, Santa Fe, 505-390-2025, blackdiamondcurio.com Carver Family Farm No-till, hand-trimmed, organically-grown cannabis producer and dispensary. 8917 Adams, Albuquerque, 505-508 5910, carverfamilyfarm.com
76 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022 Slow Food Santa Fe Slow Food is about enjoying food and the community it creates. Intrigued? Learn more at slowfoodsantafe.org.
Coffee Equipment We're your source for coffee equipment sales, service, and abqcoffeeequipment.commore.
The Perfect Gift Shoppe
Spanish Colonial Arts Society
Our magnificent site with breathtaking views is available to rent for your special events indoors and out. 750 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe, spanishcolonial.org/site-rental
LOCAL SOURCE GUIDE edible new mexico Pantry Box Brought
Next Best Thing to Being There
OTHER AquarianSERVICESWebStudio
An eclectic shop for handmade products. 1315 Mountain NW, Albuquerque, 505-433-3204, beingthereabq.com Sage Work Organics Topical magnesium, herbal remedies, and more. 5401 Lomas NE, Ste D, Albuquerque, sageworkorganics.com Sarabande Home We have a passion for finding the perfect gift. 4022 Rio Grande NW, Albuquerque, 505-344-1253, sarabandehome.com Spirit of the Earth 108 Don Gaspar Ave, Santa Fe, 505-988-9558, spiritoftheearth.com
The perfect place to find something for everyone. 901 Rio Grande NW, Ste D-126, Albuquerque, theperfectgiftshoppe.com Tin-Nee-Ann Trading Co. Family operated and family friendly since 1973. 923 Cerrillos, Santa Fe, tin-nee-ann-trading-co.myshopify.com505-988-1630, to you by Flyby Provisions
Living Threads 100% natural ingredients from around the world. 1610 Lena, Ste D, Santa Fe, 505-6637784, livingthreads.org Mountain Standard Time High-desert bodega and corner store. Coming soon. 504 Galisteo Street, Santa Fe, 505-699-1067, mtnstd.com
Heritage by Hand Made in the Global South and inspired by nature. 125 E Palace Ave, #33 Sena Plaza, Santa Fe, 505-795-1337, heritagebyhand.com
artisanal
AtHomeBeFIT Transformative fitness programs for women in the Albuquerque / Santa Fe area and livestreaming nationwide. athomebefit.com Rio Grande Credit Union Multiple locations in Albuquerque. riograndecu.org
Kitchenality Irresistible and gently used gourmet cooking and entertaining ware. 1222 Siler, Santa Fe, 505-471-7780, kitchenangels.org
ediblenm.com/pantrybox
Each shipment contains a selection of locally made and carefully curated products, designed to give you a taste of the bounty and diversity of New Mexico food, while supporting the small businesses we all love.
Flyby Provisions Enjoy shopping for boutique local New Mexico gifts—thoughtfully selected and packaged with care. flybyprovisions.com
Secure, stable, scalable aquarianwebdesign.comwebsites.
413 Montano NE, Albuquerque 505-803-7579, trifectacoffeeco.com We roast coffee, and brew it in unique ways utilizing some of the best methods available. All of our baked goods, sweet, and savory are made in house. TRIFECT A COFFEE COMP ANY www.b-cow.com · 505-473-7911Est. 1984 300+ Cheeses from around the World Chef and owner Kevin Bladergroen brings together fresh ingredients, artistic vision, and European flair in every dish. Award-winning wine list. Creative Casual Cuisine 221 Highway 165, Placitas 505-771-0695, www.bladesbistro.com Genuine Food & Drink Enchanting, Dusty... Wild West Style Celebrating 5 Years! 28 MAIN STREET LOS505.438.1821CERRILLOS Thursdayblackbirdsaloon.comSunday (505) 310-0089 | 922 Shoofly St. SF, NM BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER & BRUNCH cafecitosantafe.com | @cafecito.santafe Barrio Brinery SANTAFE NewMexico Santa Fe's source for fine fermented foods. Our lacto-fermented pickles, sauerkraut, and escabeche are hand-crafted in small batches. 1413-B West Alameda, Santa Fe www.barriobrinery.com ∙ 505-699-9812 Le Pommier THE FRENCH BISTRO EXPERIENCE Lunch: Friday & Saturday 11:30-2:30 Dinner: Wednesday–Saturday 5:00-8:30 Sunday Brunch: 11:00–2:30 Reservations available on OpenTable 7 Caliente Rd, El Dorado at Santa Fe Reservationslepommierbistro.comOpenTable.com Weddings, Special Events, Catering
EAT & DRINK
The Grove Cafe & Market
Savoy Bar & Grill California wine country in the Northeast Heights. Farm-to-table dining and a casual patio. 10601 Montgomery NE, 505-294-9463, savoyabq.com
Farm & Table Enjoy delectable seasonal dishes created from scratch, sourced from local farmers and our beautiful on-site farm. 8917 Fourth Street NW, 505-503-7124, farmandtablenm.com
The French bistro experience located in Eldorado. 7 Caliente, Santa Fe, 505-466-3235, lepommierbistro.com Loyal Hound Locally sourced modern comfort food paired with craft beer, cider, and wine. 730 St Michaels, loyalhoundpub.com505-471-0440,
GREATER NEW MEXICO
Pig + Fig Comfort food for everyone using highquality, ethically sourced, seasonal ingredients. 11 Sherwood Blvd, White Rock, 505-672-2742, pigandfigcafe.com
Sophisticated yet casual—Rustica serves fresh, homemade Italian food. 2547 Camino Entrada, 505-780-5279, rusticasantafe.com SkyFire Restaurant Textured and multilayered cuisine at Bishop's Lodge. 1297 Bishops Lodge Rd, Santa Fe, aubergeresorts.com/bishopslodge
SANTA FE RESTAURANTS
Le Pommier Bistro
Prairie Hill Café Local farm-to-table restaurant that serves classic Americana comfort food with an epicurean flare. 230 Plaza Street, Las Vegas, 505-434-0022, prairiehillcafe.com Revel Farm-to-table, elevated comfort food, in a fast-casual environment. 304 N Bullard St, Silver City, 575-388-4920, eatdrinkrevel.com
Campo at Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Organic Farm Rio Grande Valley cuisine rooted in seasonal organic ingredients from our own farm. 4803 Rio Grande NW, 505-344-9297, lospoblanos.com Cutbow Coffee
Ohori’s Coffee Roasters The original source for locally roasted coffee beans, gifts, and gathering. 505 Cerrillos and 1098 St Francis, ohoriscoffee.com505-982-9692,
Palace Prime Steaks, seafood, and pasta. 142 W Palace, Santa Fe, 505-919-9935, palaceprimesf.com Paper Dosa Bringing fresh, authentic homestyle South Indian dishes to your table. 551 W Cordova, 505-930-5521, paper-dosa.com Pranzo Italian Grill Upscale Italian cuisine. 321 Johnson, 505-984-2645, pranzoitaliangrill.com Radish & Rye Farm-inspired cuisine: simple yet innovative food and drinks sourced locally whenever possible. 505 Cerrillos, 505-930-5325, radishandrye.com Rustica
Pajarito Brewpub & Grill Open for lunch Tuesday–Sunday. Open for dinner every day. 30 craft beers on tap. 614 Trinity Dr, Los Alamos, pajaritobrewpubandgrill.com505-662-8877,
78 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
Arroyo Vino We serve progressive American fare inspired by our on-premise garden and local purveyors. 218 Camino La Tierra, 505-983-2100, arroyovino.com Cafecito Cafecito is a family-owned business blending cultures to bring you a delicious menu in a beautiful gathering space. 922 Shoofly, 505-310-0089, cafecitosantafe.com
Unmistakably comforting, uncompromisingly fresh, and undeniably delicious. 116 Amherst SE, 505-266-6374, mata-g.com Mesa Provisions A playful, Southwest-inspired menu. 3120 Central SE, Albuquerque, 505-494-5264, mesaprovisions.com
ALBUQUERQUE RESTAURANTS
Little Toad Creek Brewery & Distillery Taste Southwest New Mexico. 200 N Bullard St, Silver City, 575-956-6144, and 119 N Main St, Las Cruces, 575-556-9934, littletoadcreek.com
BlackRESTAURANTSBirdSaloon
Michael’s RestaurantKitchenandBakery
Regionally inspired eats with a tongue-incheek menu in a casual space. 304-C N Pueb lo, Taos, 575-758-4178, michaelskitchen.com
Trifecta Coffee Company We roast coffee and brew in unique ways. 413 Montaño NE, trifectacoffeeco.com505-803-7579,
Charlie's Bakery and Cafe Charlie’s offers New Mexican cuisine, break fast, and classic pastries. 715 Douglas Ave, Las Vegas, charliesbakeryandcafe.com505-426-1921,
Dolina We serve modern American brunch with Eastern European influences. Closed on Tuesdays. 402 N Guadalupe, 505-982-9394, dolinasantafe.com Iconik Coffee Roasters Amazing food, unique coffees roasted on-site, and superfast high-speed internet. 314 S Guadalupe and 1600 Lena, 505-428-0996, iconikcoffee.com
TerraCotta Seasonally changing, globally inspired cuisine and an extensive, value-priced wine list. 304 Johnson, terracottawinebistro.com505-989-1166, The Compound Restaurant Chef Mark Kiffin preserves a landmark tradition of elegant food and service at his Canyon Road institution. 653 Canyon Road, 505-982-4353, compoundrestaurant.com Wild Leaven Bakery Artisan sourdough bread and baked goods using organic, local grains and ingredients. 130 N Guadalupe, wildleavenbakery.com
MÁS Tapas y Vino Inspired by the bold flavors, rich history, and the exuberance of Spanish cooking. 125 Second Street NW, hotelandaluz.com/mas-tapas-y-vino505-388-0088, Mata G Vegetarian Kitchen
Sawmill Market Eclectic collection of bars and eateries, plus an expansive courtyard. 1909 Bellamah NW, sawmillmarket.com Seasons Rotisserie & Grill Oak-fired grill, local and seasonal ingredi ents, and the best patio dining in Old Town. 2031 Mountain NW, 505-766-5100, seasonsabq.com
Genuine food and drink, Wild West style. 28 Main St, Los Cerrillos, 505-438-1821, blackbirdsaloon.com Blades' Bistro Chef Kevin Bladergroen brings together fine and fresh ingredients, artistic vision, and European flair in every dish. 221 Hwy 165, Placitas, 505-771-0695, bladesbistro.com
Debajo Local Spanish-style tapas restaurant with fine wine and beer. 1025 Lomas NW, 505-503-8645
One of the nation's most accomplished artisan coffee roasters, Paul Gallegos. 1208 Rio Grande NW, 505-355-5563, cutbowcoffee.com
The Grove features a bustling café experi ence serving breakfast, brunch, and lunch. 600 Central SE, thegrovecafemarket.com505-248-9800, The Shop Breakfast & Lunch Serving breakfast and lunch Wednesday through Sunday. 2933 Monte Vista NE, 505-433-2795, theshopabq.com
The Skillet American, Southwest, vegetarian friendly. 619 Twelfth Street, Las Vegas, 505-563-0477, giant-skillet.com Wild Leaven Bakery 216 Paseo Del Pueblo Norte, Taos, wildleavenbakery.com LOCAL GUIDE
Anasazi Restaurant & Bar Contemporary American cuisine inspired by locally sourced seasonal ingredients. 113 Washington, innoftheanasazi.com505-988-3030,
EIGHT FINALISTS. YOUR VOTES WILL DETERMINE THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE WINNER. ALBUQUERQUE: EL ROI • MESA PROVISIONS TIKKA SPICE • UPSCALE BURGERS & SHAKES SANTA FE: LUMINARIA AT INN & SPA LORETTO LOS ALAMOS: PAJARITO BREWPUB & GRILL SOCORRO: YO MAMA'S GRILL TURTLE MOUNTAIN BREWING CO. an edible event 2022SMACKDOWNIT’SCHILE-LICIOUS! THE SMACKDOWN HAS ONE SIMPLE GOAL: TO DETERMINE THE BEST BURGER IN NEW MEXICO! September 10 12:30PM–5:30PM, SANTA FE BREWING CO. ediblesmackdown.com #EDIBLESMACKDOWN THE GREEN CHILE CHEESEBURGER SMACKDOWN
Left and above: Daughter and mother, Tyler Steffens and Kay Steffens of Ravenswood Farm, produce various fruits, vegetables, and flowers. They are in the East Mountains at the base of the Manzanos, and you can find them at the Mile-Hi and Cedar Crest farmers markets. Tyler and her mom are continually growing new veggie varieties to share with their customers.
MILE-HI FARMERS’ MARKET
Mile-Hi Farmers’ Market opened in 2014 and is creating a community around food. It features a mix of local produce and arts and crafts vendors. They are open Sundays from 10 am to 1 pm, June through the end of September at Alvarado Park, 2000 Alvarado Drive NE in Albuquerque. The Last Bite is brought to you by Rio Grande Credit Union and highlights New Mexico’s food entrepreneurs and small businesses.
80 edible New Mexico | FALL 2022
LAST BITE
Left and above: Four Hands of Healing Light is a farm owned by Rebekah Macho (pictured) and William Zamora. They are inspired to be stewards of the soil and have adapted to growing the three sisters. Their unique crops are their Meyer lemon trees and kumquat trees. They sell their produce, carvings, and jewelry at the Mile-Hi and Rail Yards farmers markets in Albuquerque.
“Check Please.” Savor the Taste of Rio Grande505.262.1401Rewards.|RIOGRANDECU.ORG/REWARDS WE UNDERSTAND.
A R R O Y O V I N O C O M 5 : 0 0 P M ARROYO VINO Restaurant and Wine Shop 10 Years Serving Santa Fe! @|2 1 8 5 0 5 9 8 3 2 1 0 0 | A R R O Y O V I N O WINE SHOP: TUESDAY–SATURDAY 11AM-–7PM
