FOOD AND ENVIRONMENT
MAY 2016
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FOOD AND ENVIRONMENT ISSUE
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How the Farm-toTable Movement is Helping Grown the Economy BY BRUCE SCHOENFELS
38 A Few Questions About the Specials BY ALISON LEIBY ILLUSTRATION BY MONICA RAMOS
56 Animal, Vegetable, and Miracles TEXT BY STEVEN L. HOPP
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Spice Hunting: Fennel Pollen BY MAX FALKOWITZ PHOTOGRAPHY BYMIKE JOHNSTON
20 Chef Magnus Nilsson on the Story of Fäviken BY GABE ULLA PHOTOGRAPHY BY MAGNUS NILSSON AND PHAIDON PRESS
63 Organic Agriculture, Environment and Food Security BY FRED MAGDOFF
71 A Matter of Taste? Art and Food TEXT BY WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ ILLUSTRATION BY FEDE YANKELEVICH
80 Yes, Healthy Fast Food is Possible. But Edible? BY MARK MAYBITTMAN 2016 GARLIC PRESS
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how the
Farm to table
movement is helping to grow the economy by bruce schoenfeld
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s the summer sun glints off a pyramid of scarlet-and-yellow Rainier cherries, at least one customer can't contain himself. "I know I can't buy yet, but can I sample?" he asks. It's Wednesday afternoon in July in Seattle's Columbia City neighborhood, and the weekly farmers market--one of 40 in King County alone, up from nine a decade ago--is set to begin. Customers mass around the two blocks of stands, ogling bok choy and baby turnips, positioning themselves to get the ripest tomatoes. At 3 p.m., a bell rings to open the proceedings. Almost immediately, money flies across tables in flashes of green. Think farm-to-table dining, and you may envision tree-hugging elitists rolling up to urban markets in expensive cars to fill cloth bags with expensive lettuce and free-range chicken. But look closer. The Columbia City customers are a disparate lot. Many are immigrants, going stall to stall to buy produce as they did at home. Others live in downtrodden neighborhoods nearby, one reason that this market has recently started accepting food stamps. “A lot of people here don't fit the stereotype,” says Lauren Keeler of Columbia City Bakery, which sells breads and cakes made just down the street. “It’s not just some kind of yuppie thing. We get Asian immigrants, African immigrants, middle class, lower-middle class. It's amazingly diverse.” Locally sourced food is a big deal in Seattle, and the economic tendrils of the movement reach deeper than anyone might imagine. Throughout the city, in one ZIP code after the next, you’ll find restaurants that have made local ingredients both a guiding principle and a marketing tool-from Local 360 in Belltown to emmerrye (“seasonally inspired, locally derived”) in Queen Anne to Wallingford’s Tilth, which is named after the Oregon organization that certifies organic farms. But that’s Seattle, right? In much of the rest of the country, one might assume, farmto-table is a niche within a niche, as offbeat and beyond-the-mainstream as vegan meatballs or homemade soap. In reality, though, it’s big business almost everywhere. Consider Cleveland, which nobody would confuse with Berkeley, Burlington or Boulder. 6
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e land, Ohio. Th arket, Cleve s nn Bi ll West Side M Bi oto by source. //Ph public food
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Foodies flock to Ethan Stowell’s Anchovies & Olives, an Italian seafood house on Capitol Hill, and eat their way through geoduck crudo; soft-cooked eggs with capers; king salmon with turnip, asparagus and bacon; and fried oysters with Savoy cabbage, secure in the knowledge that every one of the ingredients in those dishes--and in many others on the menu--comes from nearby farms or fisheries. For Trellis, inside Kirkland’s Heathman Hotel, executive chef Brian Scheehser grows vegetables on his own land in Woodinville and occasionally races there himself to replenish his pantry during service. He has been known to arrive in the dining room with a plate of food and tell a diner, “This spinach was in the ground 24 minutes ago.” At Taste, inside the Seattle Art Museum, Northwest-sourced ingredients reach 89 percent in season, according to executive chef Craig Hetherington. “At the height of the summer,” he says, “we're buying from between 50 to 70 different local farms and other purveyors. It drives the woman who does our accounting crazy.” Adds Bryan Jarr, co-owner of Seattle's Madison Park Conservatory: “We don't even promote it because people just expect it.” In Seattle, even Chipotle--the fast-food Mexican chain with more than 1,100 units in 35 states--buys extensively from local purveyors, “as high as 85 to 90 percent for some ingredients,” according to a company spokesman. Add it up and you have a profound economic impact. King County farmers markets alone, estimates indicate, gross $30 million annually, and that doesn’t include ancillary revenue such as parking lots that surround the markets. Small farms are--forgive the metaphor--sprouting up throughout the area, ringing up annual sales ranging from $10,000 to more than $1 million. “We’re talking about a huge section of the economy,” says Richard Conlin, president of the Seattle City Council. Set in the heart of the Rust Belt, the city turns out heavy, Eastern European food--the goulashes, paprikashes and schnitzels favored by immigrants from either side of the Danube. Clevelanders aren’t particularly healthy--in 2007, Men’s Fitness magazine dubbed the city the “junk food capital” of America--and their
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income falls below the national average. Whole Foods Market didn’t put a store there until it had 183 others positioned around the country. Yet you’ll find farm-to-table dining thrives there, too, often hiding in plain sight. At the popular Fire Food & Drink in Cleveland’s Shaker Square suburb, chef-owner Douglas Katz has filled his menu with local products in stealth-like fashion: a squash blossom here, a pork loin there, the eggs, honey and butter in the popovers. By August, when the growing season is in full swing, he’ll be spending half his food budget on locally sourced items. “I don’t want to go to Costco and get a package of pea tendrils,” Katz says. “I want to go to a grower and establish a relationship. I’m supporting the local economy, my food tastes better--and my customers can tell. In all kinds of ways, it makes sense.” The return of locally sourced produce
is a recent phenomenon. At the turn of the 20th century, most of the food that we ate came from within 50 miles of where we were eating it. But as the American demographic shifted from rural to urban, many local food sources disappeared. Aided by improvements in distribution from interstate highways and overnight shipping, we started looking farther and farther away from home for our food. Or, rather, we weren’t looking at all. We’d walk into supermarkets or restaurants and choose from the bounty of products that the big trucks had dumped at our doorstep. Shopping locally inevitably cost more because small growers lacked the economy of scale that industrial farming enjoys. And, until recently, it stood without honor in its own land. Nothing intimated quality in a food item so much as calling it “imported.” That’s where we were when the locavore movement began in earnest a decade or so
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The table-to-farm movement would not only increase the income of agriculture per state. But also not only would each state relay on only one food crop but in many. As well the amount of money it is lost in the importing of food crops would no longer exist. In fact if all the Americans would eat product only grown in America the agriculture business would thrive.
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“Our customers who start at the market and end up with farm shares.” ago. These days, the average metropolitan area in America still grows or raises less than 2 percent of the food it consumes--and it consumes a lot of food, some $15 billion of it in northeast Ohio alone each year, including the breakfast cereals, fast-food burgers, bottled condiments, frozen pizzas and soft drinks that are the staples of many diets. That makes the economic arguments for farm-totable food compelling. Moving the needle just 5 percent in Greater Cleveland would mean $750 million more in revenue for local purveyors. The last time a $750 million business relocated to Cleveland was ... well, probably never. So it’s easy to see why politicians and policymakers are excited about the possibilities. Recently, five entities combined resources to commission a study by local-business-development analyst Michael Shuman and his two partners on what would happen if northeast Ohio managed to produce 25 percent more of the food it consumed. The report calculated that such a shift would create more than 27,000 new jobs, increase annual regional output by $4.2 billion and grow tax revenue by more than $125 million. “Local food is fast becoming a powerful economic development strategy,” it concludes. In 2007, Cleveland became the first city in the country to zone for community gardens. It also now subsidizes farms in the abandoned city core, turning a blight into an asset while providing access to locally grown produce for a segment of the population that has been deprived of it. This summer, a farm
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stand opened in a metal shed on the grounds of a 6-acre plot in the middle of Cleveland’s Ohio City neighborhood. The stand serves the knot of restaurants within a few blocks’ radius, but it’s also adjacent to Riverview Towers, a low-income high-rise housing hundreds of families. A Riverview resident now has the opportunity to buy fresh produce just outside the building--closer than the nearest Safeway or Kroger or fast-food outlet--at a 50 percent discount from the regular price. In Cleveland, too, a landowner can now grow crops and raise chickens and bees without a permit. That makes sense in a city of first- and second-generation Americans. “As the immigrants died off, all those backyard gardens I grew up with started disappearing,” says Karen Small, a Cleveland-raised chef and restaurateur whose Italian grandfather grew crops on a tiny plot behind his house. These days, Small buys more than $150,000 worth of local meats and produce annually for her Ohio City restaurant, the Flying Fig. She gets much of it delivered, but most afternoons finds time to visit a market, too, to source tomatoes or figs or basil from urban farmers trying to replicate the garden-grown tastes of their youth. “There’s a market pretty much every day of the week,” she says. “It’s a ritual that I can’t miss, even though most of my food gets delivered.” Many of the city’s restaurateurs feel the same way, along with a whole lot of other people. In 1995, the Shaker Square market opened with six vendors and a handful of
curious customers. Now it attracts 60 growers and as many as 4,000 consumers each week and generates $3 million in annual sales. “And that doesn’t count chefs who come here and meet growers and make relationships with them and then set up their own deliveries,” says Donita Anderson, who runs the Shaker Square market and six others throughout the area. “Or customers who start at the market and end up with farmshares. It also doesn’t include Dewey’s Coffee Cafe, the Shaker Square Popcorn Shop and the other small businesses within walking distance of the market that sometimes serve
as many customers on that one day as the rest of the week. But economic opportunities also exist in the gaps between growers and consumers. Kari Moore doesn’t harvest a single vegetable, doesn’t run a restaurant and doesn’t work at a market. Yet she makes a living through the locavore movement. Her company, FarmShare Ohio, distributes produce from small farmers to retail customers at drop-off points throughout the area. “People have started to understand the
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value of local, seasonal eating, and they’re willing to pay more to get it,” says Moore, who grew up in Seattle, came to Cleveland in 1996 and has been involved in local food since 2002. “I still have to do a ton of education with my customers--and $35 a week for a bag of produce is still too much for a lot of people. But it’s an exciting time and, I think, a huge business opportunity. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if it wasn’t.” The same sense of opportunity
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is attracting well-educated entrepreneurs to farming. These are sons and daughters from professional families who wouldn’t have considered making a living with a rake and a hoe even a decade ago. In Duvall, Wash., a half-hour east of downtown Seattle, Jason Salvo carries his 1-year-old son, Felix, in a back harness as he helps his wife, Siri Erickson-Brown, tend to business at their Local Roots farm. Both 32 years old, Salvo and Erickson-Brown attended the University
“People have started to understand the value of local, seasonal eating, and they're willing to pay more to get it” of Washington, and earned graduate degrees. (Salvo went to law school at Seattle U; Erickson-Brown has a master’s in public administration from UW.) But instead of working in offices, they’re out in the field growing 10 acres of turnips and radishes, kohlrabi and carrots. They sell vegetables and herbs to two dozen restaurants, including some of Seattle’s best, and have a subscription list of more than 100 individual families. If all goes well, they’ll gross $200,000 and net perhaps half to a third of that. Erickson-Brown has been an entrepreneur of sorts all her life. “I was the kid who made paper valentines and sold them outside when I was 6,” she says. She’d been interested in farming since reading books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. But only recently did she realize that she could make a living uniting the two. “Our education has really helped us,” she says. “We have a connection to a major urban area. We understand the business model. I mean, there are so many steps that go into a bed of carrots before you actually plant it.” “We’re capitalists,” Salvo says. “We speak the language of a lot of the people who shop from us.” At the other end of the chain are restaurateurs such as Anchovies & Olives’ Stowell, who now has
enough sources of local produce that he can depend on it night after night, season after season. None of Stowell’s four restaurants are conspicuously farm-to-table, but all source locally, including the authentically Italian Tavolata, which manages to transport diners thousands of miles away even as they eat food largely grown in their hometown. This year, too, Stowell has started consulting for Major League Baseball’s Seattle Mariners, who are upgrading the concessions at their decade-old ballpark. When he started, Stowell says, the amount of money the team was spending on local food sources “was essentially zero.” Now, the Mariners serve burgers made from 100 percent grass-fed beef and buy meat from suppliers in Seattle, Walla Walla and Portland. “All that money that was going to IBP and Swift,” Stowell says, referencing two major national meat processors, “is staying home. And you’re talking about a ton of money, as much as my restaurants make in an entire year in one three-game series. Next, we’ll do the produce.” Such mass-market participation, coupled with efforts by Chipotle and other enlightened chains to buy from area purveyors, is increasing at an exponential rate the number of consumers who are eating locally sourced food. It’s enough to keep local farms thriving. And though Salvo and Erickson-Brown’s $100,000 of net income isn’t a huge amount for a couple who each have graduate degrees, it’s far better than the subsistence-level living they would have been making a decade ago--and perhaps enough to attract the next entrepreneur who sees agriculture as an opportunity. How high is the sky? For the industry’s ultimate success story, go back to northern Ohio, where Lee and Bobby Jones have created an
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“Today, The Chef's Garden is one of the premier suppliers of top-quality, naturally grown heirloom fruits and vegetables”
Blue Hill Farm-fresh Vegetables// Photograph by Ben Aslop 14
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international business from what started as a 6-acre plot. For decades, Bob Jones Sr. had been farming commodity crops--corn, wheat, soybeans--on 1,200 acres. By 1983, he’d become unable to compete with the massive Third-World growers and the supersize farms around America that are many multiples of his size. His farm went bankrupt and was sold at a sheriff’s auction to pay off the debt. With the few implements and 6 acres of land that remained, Jones’ sons started over. It was clear they couldn’t grow commodities--couldn’t compete against the scale that big agribusiness was able to muster--so they decided to source heirloom vegetables for the handful of chefs and outlets that had an interest. “Soon, chefs were coming to us saying, ‘If you grow it, we can use it,’”Bob Jones says. “Those magical words.” Today, The Chef’s Garden is one of the premier suppliers of top-quality, naturally grown heirloom fruits and vegetables to 1,500 of America’s best restaurants, and more in 11 countries. Each night, painstakingly packaged boxes are sent off via FedEx, to reappear the following morning at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, Spago in Los Angeles, Jean-Georges in New York and many, many places like them. So it’s no wonder that The Chef’s Garden is thriving, enough to have grown the farm to 300 acres. That’s a credit to the quality of their produce, but also to the
quality of their marketing. “Farming’s in vogue,” Bobby Jones says, “but it’s not sustainable to be just a farmer. You need to be a businessman, too.” Lee Jones’ trademark look--the white dress shirt, suspenders and red bow tie he wears whether out in the field or receiving a James Beard Foundation award--has actually been trademarked. Each year, some 500 chefs visit the farm to learn how the Jones family works. With each visit, its reputation grows. The Chef’s Garden’s economic contribution to American farming remains minuscule. Some 90 percent of the produce consumed in the U.S. is grown in the Third World, Lee Jones notes, and the majority of the rest comes from corporate farms vastly larger than his. In a sense, the Joneses aren’t even contributing to the local food movement. These days, only 10 percent of the food they grow is consumed in Ohio. But by standing the agribusiness model on its head, bringing dollars into the area for produce shipped outside it, it illustrates what a small farm can achieve. Recently, Bobby Jones ruminated about what had gone wrong for his father. “American agriculture lost its way,” he says. “Much of the problem was the disconnect between the product and the consumer.” These days, an increasing number of Americans appreciate the importance of that connection. And all of a sudden, it seems, they’re willing to pay to get it.
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FÄVIAK chef Magnus Nilsson on the story of
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hen Magnus Nilsson got to Fäviken, a remote estate in northwestern Sweden, in 2008, he didn’t want to cook. He had recently come back to his homeland after working some of the great kitchens of Paris, with the goal of becoming a wine expert; he was there to help develop a cellar. But Nilsson liked it, and the opportunity evolved. He eventually took over the restaurant, which to that point had earned a decent reputation for serving fondue to skiers, and turned it into one of the most talked-about dining destinations of the last few years. Nilsson had always kept the notion of building an ambitious restaurant at the back of his mind (“It’s the only thing I was familiar with”), but he never aimed to be a symbol of hyperlocal cooking or preservation or even less, New Nordic cuisine. He wanted to do great food, and it just so happens that many of the practices that have earned him acclaim — and comparisons to neighbor and admirer René Redzepi — just naturally follow from that. Here, in part one of our interview, the chef talks about how it all happened.
When you got to Fäviken, you didn’t want to cook, right? That's true. In the beginning of Faviken, I worked with wine. To go back a bit further, I basically stopped cooking after I stopped worked in France, where I was at L’Astrance. As you know, the French have a tremendous culture when it comes to produce and things like that, but when I moved back to Sweden, all the produce was less good than what I had in France. Also, everything that I was cooking looked like something extracted from Pascal Barbot’s restaurant. They felt like inferior copies of someone else’s cooking [laughs]. Inside of the restaurant Fäviken in Sweden. Decorated in authentic Swedish old style // Photo by Magnus Nilsson
You also were at L’Arpège. Yes, I worked at L’Arpège for a couple of weeks. I was fired from there, you know.
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But that was because of the language barrier? I couldn’t perform because I couldn’t understand anything. No one spoke English, either. When I went to France, I thought I spoke French, but I really didn’t. But I spent like three years with Pascal.
Now back to Fäviken. I decided that I wanted to be a wine writer instead of cooking when I came back to Sweden. I went to oenology school and found it very interesting and all that, and then I had a friend who would cater the hunting parties for the family that owned Faviken. He asked me if I wanted to come to the estate and help the family establish their cellar and teach them about administering and buying wine; that's how I met them. I was supposed to work there for like three or four months, but at the end of that initial period when we had been getting along very well, they asked me if I would propose something for the restaurant. The restaurant already existed since 1986, but it wasn't doing very well. They had gotten the restaurant in the deal to buy Fäviken in 2003, but they didn’t really like it because it didn't correlate with their vision for the estate. They had worked to improve everything about the estate, but the restaurant wasn't quite there.
What did you propose? I thought that in order to have
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someone travel that distance, it needed to be very high quality. I also thought that it couldn’t be too big, since you need to be able to fill it. Then, we wanted to use as much as possible of the products that were already being produced on the estate — quite a lot of game, root vegetables. I decided I would stay one year to help them implement all of this, and during that year, I realized the potential of the place and the produce and the fact that you are actually able to get people to travel there for the food. I had a hard time believing it.
So it wasn’t empty or anything like that? People were already coming. The restaurant was rather well known, but not for high end or ambitious cooking. They were known for doing moose fondue for corporate groups! It was popular because it was near a ski resort, but mostly in the winter. People started coming more and more because the food was better, but I didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be to recruit people. I thought it would be much easier. I had promised them that I was going to find someone else to do this for them within one year, but after eight months, it was still just me working there. I had a communal table for eight people and I would do both the service and the cooking. Then, when I finally found someone to work in the dining room after about eight months, I
Scallop I Skalet Ur Elden cooked over burning junier brancher // Photo by Magnus Nilsson
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Chef Magnus at Fäviken in Sweden // Photo by Erick Olssen of Fäviken
began to realize even more that people were noticing the food. That is when we sort of transformed into what I see as a proper restaurant — November 2008.
At that point, was your vision for the restaurant fully formed? Yes. By the end of 2008, I started to realize that it was going to be possible — the thing is, I’m kind of pricklish in that I’m not happy to work anywhere that isn’t a really ambitious restaurant. If ever I was going to run a restaurant by myself, it was going to be that kind of restaurant. When I got into wine, I thought I didn’t want to be running a restaurant, but that feeling was still there. I always dreamt about running that kind of place earlier in my career. It stayed at the back of my mind, because that is the only restaurant I'm familiar with.
What I was getting at was more the idea of producing on the estate, preserving through the seasons, and using exclusively what was around you. What’s interesting and kind of very good about that is that was just a very small part of the restaurant — using produce from our own region. The preservation started little by little, and as time went by and we started employing more people, we saw the possibilities of getting produce from the region and growing more on the estate. About two years ago, in 2010, we had gotten to the point that we had so much produce that we had either grown or gotten from the region that we didn’t need to buy anything. All of the basic stuff — the onions, the potatoes, the carrots — were all there, so we didn’t have to order a thing. And we also stopped buying
lemons and things, because we never had enough “other stuff” on the list to make it worth the green grocer’s while to bring them. So, things just evolved in that direction. I realized that having those limitations, while kind of self-imposed but not consciously so, was really good for the creativity. You need to find different solutions when you’re not in a big city where you can get everything. If you don’t have that luxury of availability, it can yield very interesting results. When I realized that, we decided we were going to not just being sloppy and not ordering the lemons but to work with only the produce from the region.
Adam Sachs called Fäviken the most daring restaurant in the world. Just how difficult and extreme is it, in your view? Or, at the very least, what are the challenges? It’s actually not that difficult [laughs]. Up here, it just makes sense to do these things, because people have always done them. For me, running a restaurant or any business is to make the most out of the possibilities that are present in your surroundings. If you run a restaurant in a big city, me, personally, I don’t see the meaning in doing the things that we are doing here. You have different limitations and different realities than we have. If you have someone that can supply your carrots all year round, you might as well buy them if they are good enough. If you don’t have that, then you need to find yourself a solution. But it’s not that extreme or that difficult — we just do it ourselves. If you buy a carrot in New York City this time of year, it won’t be fresh. Someone will have stored it for
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you. The difference is that we grow the carrot and have perfect control over it in the summer, and then we store it ourselves. The good part of it is that we have a level of control you don’t have when you buy your produce, but the bad part is that you have a lot more work and take the risk that you might not succeed and have your products go bad. The big challenge is to keep the flow of produce going the whole year so that you have the same quality, no matter what the season. In the summer, there is so much produce up here. You get anything and you get any quantity. In the winter, who knows? So for us it’s all about planning and acquiring enough quantity and storing in the right way so we can account for seasonal fluctuations and even everything out.
What are some of the most important methods or resources you’ve developed to supply the restaurant while accounting for the change in seasons?
Chef Magnus Nilsson // Photo by Anders Husa
The most important one is they store all the vegetables for winter storage versus just root vegetables. We also salt and dry food quite a lot, because that’s something that up here — you fatten your pig over the summer, kill it in the autumn, and then you preserve it through
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the winter. So we have a big curing room for pork, mainly. We also have the fish pond, which is one of those things that is very useful in the winters. In the summer, we may go into the mountains and get more fish than we need, so we just put them in the pond and keep them there. In other words, I can serve trout in January without having to take a snowmobile anywhere. I just go three hundred meters and poke a hole in the ice. You don’t talk about localisms in the “fervent” way that some chefs do, which I honestly didn’t expect. We are so well known for being local and environmentally friendly and all that stuff, but the only criterion we've used when developing produce has been quality. We never strived to be super local or to have the highest possible degree of respect for the environment. Those things are great, but they were secondary, in the sense that we didn’t come to realize that until later stages. Surprisingly, very often quality just correlates with those ideas.
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SPICE HUNTING fennel pollen Your guide to the world of herbs and spice; how to spot them, where to get them, and how to cook with them.
by max talkowitz picture mike johnston
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Most of the accomplished cooks I know don't like the idea of a "secret ingredient." They insist that every ingredient is important, that technique and taste matter as much as the prices of your shopping list, and that no amount of truffles or foie gras can rescue bad or mediocre cooking. I'll buy that, but it's hard to ignore the near-magical qualities of some ingredients. They may not turn us into chefs overnight, but they do have the power to transform good cooking into something truly memorable. Take, for instance, fennel pollen. It's a trendy spice, bandied about in cheffy circles and locavore forager networks. In an article for Saveur, the food writer Peggy Knickerbocker waxes poetic, "if angels sprinkled a spice from their wings, this would be it.” This is only slight hyperbole. Fennel pollen is an incredibly powerful spice, with notes of licorice, citrus, and handmade marshmallows. It tastes like pure summer joy. By way of more concrete analogy, the fennel pollen compares to leafy fennel fronds as a rich, golden chicken stock compares to powdered bouillon cubes. It has an authority to it, and lends a confidence to dishes as if they were to say, this is what food should taste like. So no, it won’t save a bad recipe, but it makes a good one resplendent. I hate to say you can use the spice on everything, so I won’t, but it is remarkably versatile. It can tread wherever fennel and anise do when you want that flavor more pronounced and nuanced. Some of my favorite uses: pork and chicken, roasted, sautéed, and (especially) made into sausage. Use fennel pollen to season meat with a dry rub of salt, or sprinkle on just before serving.
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Light summery soups, of the kinds filled with tomatoes, eggplant, and the like, gain headiness from a light sprinkle at the table. In colder times, when my oven churns out roasted vegetables with Fordian efficiency, fennel pollen is close at hand. Grains of all kinds take well to fennel pollen. Think rustic plates of quinoa and tabbouleh, grains with gusto to stand up to fennel pollen’s intensity. But milder starches work well too. Add to slices of crusty peasant bread lavished with butter, or toss into this week’s recipe: a minimalist spaghetti dressed with olive oil, orange zest, and mint. Also pay attention to the sweet side of the starchy spectrum. Specifically: squat buttery cookies and tall loaf cakes, rich with olive oil. The trick to fennel pollen is not to overuse it. A little really does go a long way, and even a gingerly pinch may be too much. So go slow, add with care, and use mostly towards the very end of cooking so as to preserve its flavor. Depending on where you get your fennel pollen, it may be more gritty than powdery. A quick whizz in the spice grinder will decrease its shelf life but vastly improve its texture. Fennel pollen can be harvested wherever fennel grows, so it’s popular with foragers (The Atlantic’s got you covered on that). But pay attention to pesticide use in that area to ensure you aren’t eating toxin-spiked pollen. You can also buy fennel pollen at farmer’s markets, specialty spice shops, and online from merchants like Pollen Ranch, Zingerman’s, and The Spice House.
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ways to use the fennel pollen
Pork and fennel pollen is a classic Italian pairing, one that Boston chef Barbara Lynch discovered for herself in the porchetta sandwiches she ate during her first stint cooking in Northern Italy. Ms. Lynch has used fennel pollen as the principal aromatic in a rub for pork ever since, either mixed with kosher salt or in concert with complementary spices such as ground celery seed or cumin. Try rubbing this spice onto a pork shoulder before cooking it until fork-tender. It also makes a wonderful flavor enhancer when dusted onto pork ribs, salmon, skin-on turkey or chicken breasts. Napa Valley chef Michael Chiarello loves the way that fennel pollen marries with ingredients like veal, mushrooms, spring vegetables and citrus in pastas and risottos. To make a veal Bolognese sauce that really sings, dust the meat with a teaspoon of fennel pollen before browning it on the stovetop. You can also cook asparagus, leeks and baby carrots in olive oil with a teaspoon of fennel pollen for a pasta or risotto primavera with unusual depth of flavor. At his restaurant Bottega, Mr. Chiarello mixes fennel pollen with ricotta, a dash of crème fraÎche and lemon zest for a ravioli filling. To give homemade pasta an added kick, mix a teaspoon or two of the pollen right into your dough.
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3 in cookies,breads & crumbles
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2 as a rub for pork poultry or salmon
To Jonathan Waxman, chef and owner of Barbuto in New York, fennel pollen has the rare power to transform sweets from ordinary to exceptional. He especially loves its impact on recipes containing oatmeal, cinnamon, orange, lemon and chocolate. Mr. Waxman makes oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with a tablespoon of fennel pollen mixed into the dough. The chef also sprinkles cinnamon buns with a hit of fennel pollen before they enter the oven, and mixes it into a streusel that he puts on everything from blueberry crisp to coffee cake.
MAY 2016 GARLIC PRESS
33
ISSUE NËš 10 2
61640
95971
garlic press MAY 2016 FOOD AND ENVIRONMENT
$6.99