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Guerilla Grilling: Part 10 – River Rock Farm

May 11, 2009 in Guerilla Grilling | 1 comment

: Ahh, back on the farm! We grilled spring veggies to compliment the beef.

Six years ago my husband Ken returned from a trip to the Davis Square farmer’s market with an armload of frozen meat—skirt, sirloin and flank steaks, hamburger patties, and one-pound packages of stir-fry beef. His explanation? “I met this really cool guy who’s selling naturally raised beef.” Really? In my husband’s vocabulary the word “met” often translates into “encountered for the first time and had a detailed conversation about an obscure topic of mutual interest.”

: River Rock offers all cuts of beef – the only one they have trouble selling is liver.

The man was Jon Konove of River Rock Farm. Ken and Jon had a mutual dislike for the feedlot system that is the predominant model for raising cattle in the United States. They talked about how River Rock Farm was raising pastured cattle on a mixture of grass and grain, about the effect of recently enacted legislation regulating the use of the term “organic” in food labeling, and finally, why Jon and his family had made the decision not to pursue organic certification for their beef. Whether they discussed all of this during that first encounter I can’t say. But I do know that for years Ken was given to introducing some speck of agricultural arcana with the phrase “John Konove and I were talking…” Tragically, Jon was killed in an automobile accident in 2006.

We have remained devoted fans of River Rock Farm beef. We like knowing the people who produce what we eat. If we can see the animals that will eventually become our food, even better. The business is too small to supply Rialto with meat except as specials, but when it comes to my family shopping dollars, the portion I spend on beef goes to River Rock. If we want to splurge, stocking up before an annual trip to the Cape for example, nothing beats a River Rock Farm dry-aged, three-inch Porterhouse steak for grilling. We order it ahead of time and then pick it up at our farmer’s market.

: Angus-Simmental steers greated us upon arrival at River Rock.

I chose River Rock as a destination for our Guerrilla Grilling team a couple of weeks ago because I wanted to see for myself how the farm was doing since Jon’s death, and to give my staff a close up look at how some of the animals we choose to eat are treated on a representative family farm in Massachusetts.

: Seth

: Joanna

Seth and Joanna McDonough and Joanne Johnson took over as farm managers in January of this year. The young couple previously managed a vegetable farm together and wanted to get experience with cattle so River Rock seemed a natural fit for them. Joanne also teaches art in the local school system and at one point during our tour she stopped to bottle feed a calf whose mother is having problems producing milk. “Seth does most of the work,” she says, a claim that he denies. With his pony tail, beard, and cammo baseball cap, their shared muddy boots and the nursing calf they look like a farming couple straight out of central casting. The desire to own their own farm someday is a big part of their motivation. “It’s great work, and it’s outdoors. I like working hard,” Seth says. He laughs. “You have to like working hard, and not making money.”

: A classic New England family farm.

Making money was the last thing on Ron and Kay Konove’s minds when they purchased the 100-year-old working farm in Brimfield in 1993 as a weekend retreat and as a home for Kay’s horses. Most family farms in Massachusetts are less than fifty acres—River Rock has twenty-eight. As you pull into the driveway, you’re nestled between a small farm house above and a red barn below. Your eye travels down a dirt road past the barn down into a valley outlined with fences that contain a few horses, clusters of steers in muddy pastures and a mother cow with her baby. Chickens roam freely.

: Roo-pops and his hens.

The Konove’s wanted to keep their farm active, but they didn’t set out to establish a beef business. Initially they only wanted to raise a few Angus beef steer for their freezer. In 2002 their son Jon postponed his entry into veterinary school to help them with their cattle, which had expanded from those early steers into a “beef program” with a herd of twenty. He moved onto the farm several months later, veterinary school disappeared from the radar screen and he spent the next four years overseeing the treatment of the cattle, as well as marketing, delivering and selling River Rock beef all over the Boston area. He became a fixture at farmers’ markets, well-known and well-liked (especially when cooking samples on the portable grill at farmers’ markets).

: Joanne coulnd’t help but naming this little guy Shamus.

Jon was invested in River Rock Farm as both a farmer and a family member, with a motivation to work around the clock. His death required some rejiggering of how things got done to make the job of farm manager doable for an outsider. The man who delivers hay to the farm was hired to make the weekly trip to the slaughterhouse with steers. On occasion, the farm even gets a little volunteer labor. Louise (in the blue vest below), whose high school son Nathan (with the red headband) works part-time on the farm during the school year, comes around once a week just to pitch in, simply because she enjoys it. She’s been doing it for years. “She’s the farm super star,” Seth says, “She can do anything.” Anything can encompass caring for the farm horses to her current undertaking—repairing pasture fence lines.

: The whole team – It’s amazing what these four can get done.

Do Seth’s and Joanne’s friends ever come to help out? The idea of their friends working on the farm strikes them as laughable. “They like to visit,” Seth says. “I think they like the farm atmosphere,” Joanne adds. They share a look. “But they don’t come to work.”

: Early signs of spring at River Rock.

The work at River Rock revolves around the care of the farm’s steers. Most of the beef in the United States comes from steers, that is, castrated male cattle. The farm buys young steers from “cow-calf operations,” farms that concentrate on breeding heifers and then selling the calves. When they arrive at the farm they’re roughly a year old and range in size from 600 to 1000 pounds; at slaughter, eight or ninth months later, the steers weigh between 1300 and 1350 pounds. The variability in age and size is accounted for by the fact that River Rock buys steers year round, just as they send steers to slaughter year round. Cow-calf operations tend to focus on specific breeds or crosses, so for example while one farmer may only sell Black Angus, another’s calves may be an Angus-Simmental cross, and yet another may offer Herefords.

: Angus-Simmental steers, Simmental and Heiffer-cross.

From Seth’s perspective all of these produce flavorful beef so the particular composition of the River Rock herd is always changing. One of the things that distinguish River Rock Farm beef from the typical supermarket product is the healthy and humane way the former raise their steers. “We have two things going for us,” Seth says, “how our beef tastes, and how we treat our animals.” Part of that humane treatment (and part of what contributes to the beef’s flavor) is the fact that for most of their lives the steers that end up at River Rock Farm roam freely in pastures, eating grass. Most supermarket beef comes from cattle raised on feedlots, fattening on a diet of corn, soy and molasses fortified with antibiotics and hormones to promote rapid weight gain (thus lowering production cost).

: A well-marbled dry-aged River Rock steak.

River Rock cattle’s grass diet is supplemented with grain for three months before slaughter to encourage marbling in the meat. But their diet contains no added hormones or antibiotics. If a cow becomes sick, Seth isn’t averse to treating it with antibiotics, but only as a curative measure. River Rock describes its beef as “natural;” if they were to pursue a certification as organic any steer treated with antibiotics would have to permanently culled from the herd, which they don’t want to do.

Joanne and Seth keep a couple of breeding cows and their calves to remind themselves of the life cycle that supports them, but as a practical matter River Rock does not raise steers from calves to maturity. “Cow-calf operations tend to be pretty pasture-intensive, at least the ones that offer grass-fed steers in the numbers that we need them,” Seth says. Forty steers, give or take a few, is about what River Rock Farm’s twenty-five acres of pasture can handle. River Rock boards another couple of dozen steers on a farm in Connecticut where they can be pastured.

The River Rock story is still evolving. It started with two steers and grew to around eighty under Jon Konove. Counting the steers sent out for boarding, the farm has about three-quarters of that now. What happens next? The Konove family and Seth are trying to figure out how to dovetail the future with Jon’s vision. What do the customers want? What does the farm want? Seth says, “River Rock customers are people who prioritize food in their lives and are able to pay premium prices for River Rock beef.” Is that customer base changing in the economic downturn? Is there a way to make the meat less expensive? “Grain is the most expensive ingredient in the process, aside from purchasing the animals.” The grain Seth is describing is corn. “If we could grow our own grain, we would save money.” It’s something to consider, just as Jon’s unrealized ambition to bring lambs onto the farm is worth thinking about.

: These beautiful sirloin rump steaks are worth their premium price.

The company is vertically integrated, meaning they raise the steers, arrange for slaughter, dry-age the beef and market the product. While this gives River Rock control over all aspects of the business, it may not be the most efficient way for them to grow. If they were to grow, how would expansion affect the character of the business? All of these are questions for the future. Seth and Joanne are still settling in. ”Basically, what we’re focusing on is a better product.” He only has two things to sell, he repeats, ”How we’re raising the animals and the quality of the product.”

: Jody breaking bread.

This season, River Rock Farm will have a stand at farmers markets including Lexington, Davis Square in Somerville, Brookline, North Hampton and Harvard (the town, not the university). They also sell to a few restaurants, co-ops and specialty food markets. Check out their website for an up-to-date list of where to find them: www.riverrockfarm.com. River Rock Farm also encourages people to visit them in Brimfield, get a tour of the property, meet the farmers and buy some of that yummy beef. It’s an easy trip down the Pike.

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Tags: Farm, Grilling, Guerilla, Jody Adams, Nuno, Rialto, River Rock Farm, Spring

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Nine – Cambridge Brewing Company

May 11, 2009 in Guerilla Grilling | No comments

: Cambridge Brewing Co. classics on tap

The ragtag Rialto GG team blew into Cambridge Brewing Company on a raw sleeting Monday morning in March. It was early, but were up to the challenge of a beer tasting so early in the day. After all, beer is food.

Our visit proved this plaque true, fresh beer is best!

The Cambridge Brewing Company, the oldest brew pub in the Boston area, is housed in the old Boston Woven Hose and Rubber Company factory at One Kendall Square. Although it’s a restaurant and brewery (all is one), it still feels like a factory with high ceilings, exposed wooden beams, and brick walls. The interior is simple, with oak tables and chairs, paintings by local artists, stained glass window depictions of beer scenes and a bunch of awards and medals. My guess is not much has changed since Phil Bannatyne built the place in 1989. But then the décor is not what’s central to this business. What’s central is the beer.

CBC Murals and Stained Glass

Smack dab in the middle of the restaurant, surrounded by tables, are two gianormous stainless steel mashing tuns with a warren of pipes like octopus arms leading into other tanks where the beer is fermented and stored.

Every morning at CBC starts with mashing in creating a giant porridge of malts

That’s where we gathered and met master brewer Will Meyers, our host, tour guide and instructor for the day. In contrast to an archetypal jolly portly German brewer, Will looks like a veteran triathlon athlete—wiry, intense, and fit.

Will Meyer's CBC Master Brewer

He confessed that he had studied music theory and composition and had wanted to be an opera singer. “But the available jobs were in musical theater, not my favorite. “After one too many productions of The Pirates of Penzance I turned my attention to a back burner passion–home brewing–and decided to get serious.” He beefed up his amateur’s knowledge with organic chemistry and microbiology and did coursework at UC Davis in Brewing Science. In 1993 he landed a position at Cambridge Brewing Company and has been there ever since.

From barley to beer

Listening to Will, I rapidly concluded that I knew next to nothing about how beer is made—or used to be made–and was way out of the loop when it came to current trends in American beer brewing. I knew I liked a good IPA, appreciated and supported microbreweries and that the last time I drank a Budweiser Jimmy Carter had been president. Like most American diners I take for granted a shopping list of custom-made beers and ales from artisan brewers, but only a couple of decades ago the dominant model in American brewing was one of mass production, national distribution, and bland flavor.

There's nothing like grilling in the snow on a Monday morning

Phil and Will were part of a movement to take beer back to its roots, with an emphasis on smaller batches of beer and a greater reliance on local, seasonal ingredients—and customers. Even today, two decades after its founding, CBC’s client list has less than fifty business names on it, all of them in Cambridge, Somerville and Boston, and eighty-five percent of the beer it makes is sold in the restaurant. You can’t get much closer to home than that.

Owner Phil Bannatyne and Jody enjoying a GG lunch

During Will’s tenure, Cambridge Brewing’s repertoire of offerings and their approach to beer making has evolved and changed. When Phil Bannatyne first opened the brewery, it was a learn-as-you-go enterprise, concentrating on a handful of traditional beers. Will brought all the passion and creativity he previously devoted to music, channeled it into making beer, and moved CBC into woollier, wilder terrain. He still makes the CBC classics… Regatta Golden, Tall Tale Pale Ale, Cambridge Amber, and Charles River Porter but pushes the envelope by experimenting with whimsical additions–known as adjuncts in the business–like heather, spices, honey, orange peel, cocoa nibs and fruits. Ten years ago he started playing around with blending and aging wild yeast beers. CBC was the first American brewery to make Hefferweitzen, a traditional wheat beer, with a yeast film.

Will bestowing his knowledge as we soak it in

The basement of CBC, or “Hall of Solitude” as Will refers to it, is where the brewmaster most likes to hang out. The space is cramped, with low ceilings and rows of barrels packed tightly together. It’s a place only a brewmaster or a stowaway could love. This is where Will blends the concoctions that altered the way I think about beer. The beers downstairs are primarily Belgium-style brews, inoculated in open air and allowed to spontaneously ferment in oak barrels. Wild yeast strains contribute their own specific flavor notes and are therefore carefully manipulated by Will. The barrels, which once lived in far away distilleries and wineries where they aged sherry, chardonnay, pinot noir and Madeira, add another layer to the beers’ distinctive richness. No wonder these basement brews have inspiring names like Resolution, Reckoning and Om.

The CBC Beer Cellar

One of Will’s basement beers completely bowled me over. Benevolance, as the award-winning brew is called, begins life in a barrel placed out on the CBC patio, where it is allowed to age in the sun, another of the techniques in Will’s magic brewer’s kit bag. Benevolence is the brewer’s defense against the accusation that beer makers are short-term thinkers in comparison to their compatriots who work with grapes. Benevolence is a complex product that easily tries the patience of a brewer as much as wine does a vintner. The bulk of artisan beer is served shortly after brewing. Benevolence, however, is aged, doled out in abstemious tastes as it matures over five or ten years, a long time for any beer lover to wait. My first sip of Benevolence forever blurred my notions of beer’s taste terrain, sending it over the line into territory occupied partially by wine and partially by something else—single-malt Scotch, maybe? The flavor was both tart and complex, with the kind of long finish I’d previously only associated with upper-end distillates or good wine. Visit cambridgebrewingcompany.com to learn more about the wine cellar.

Smokehouse sausage, grilled veggies and some beer to wash it down

This was the end of our tour and after our usual Guerilla Grilled lunch, Will loaded us up with growlers of Charles River Porter and sent us on our way with a warm buzz and our heads spinning with beer science and inspiration.

Trying to keep up with Will

To be honest, I got lost in some of Will’s technical vocabulary. My pen was scribbling doubletime across my notebook page–crystallized malt, wort, diastatic powder, acrospire. Somewhere along the line I confused how a gruit is made with the details for brewing a lambic. What I did take away is that for Will it starts and ends with flavor. He brews what he likes and he likes to experiment. His favorite beer is the next one, even if he took his inspiration for it from music, art, or a daily experience. “We’re not trying to be all things to all people, but we figure…if you think you don’t like beer, you just haven’t found a beer that you like.” Not a problem.

Tags: Beer, Cambridge Brewing Company, Grilling, Guerilla, Guerilla Grilling, Jody Adams, Rialto

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Eight – Fiore di Nonno and Taza Chocolate

May 11, 2009 in Guerilla Grilling | No comments

Guerilla Grilling’s mission is to learn first hand about local food. Folks teach us about chocolate, oysters, cheese, turkeys, vegetables—food still at its source, or if processed, done so in a fashion that emphasizes a manual or artisan tradition. In exchange, we take their wares and turn them into a meal. Gathering around the table at the end of our visit solidifies the people-to-people connections we make on these adventures. A lot of culinary crosstalk gets exchanged. Both cooks and producers share a stake in primary ingredients and are eager to learn from each other, and by the time everybody sits down to lunch the meal feels like a big family gathering. Food is the great connector.

Our Motley Crew

It just wouldn’t be the same if we visited a widget factory.

Which is what leads us to Somerville for a Guerilla Grilling double-header, back-to-back tours of Fiore di Nonno Cheese and Taza Chocolate.

Not that finding them is easy. We drive down Cambridge Street, take a left on Windsor. . . and wander deep into a neighborhood of rutted byways, anonymous warehouses and scrap metal yards wrapped in chain-link fencing topped with razor wire. Where is the chocolate? Where is the cheese? In search of directions we pull into a parking area, by a nameless loading dock, then watch, dumbfounded, as a crane hoists a red Chevrolet into the air and drops it into the maw of a metal compactor, where with a grinding screech of metal it is crushed to a pancake. This isn’t a Guerilla Grilling adventure—it’s the movie Brazil.

Eventually we find ourselves at the right building, it seems the loading dock is the main entrance. The building has recently been renovated and houses a circus of enterprises. We glimpse an old fashioned printing press, signs for dance and yoga studios, a pointer to a woodworking shop, various offices, and then a sign for one of our destinations—Taza Chocolate. No listing for Fiore di Nonno. A second Taza sign at the base of a stairwell pointed up, for three flights. . . to a puzzle of empty white corridors. We tried a couple of doors. Knock-knock. Hi, we’re looking for chocolate or mozzarella. No luck. Everything is new, white, without windows, and empty. Spooky. We run into a man in a white turban and ask directions. He hasn’t heard of either company. A second man also pleads ignorance. We get kind of goofy and begin making Twilight Zone noises that echo back at us from the empty corridor. Time to return to the ground floor and reconnoiter.

We're lost...

...until Aaron finds us!

Aaron Foster, the marketing guy for Taza chocolate and our host for the day, is waiting as we descend the stairs. He smiles knowingly and says, “Oh… that sign,” pointing to the one we had followed. “That’s a red herring—we moved.” We moved, I think, but we left the old sign in place, ha-ha! Interesting marketing strategy.

We are scheduled to visit Fiore di Nonno first, so after a very brief stop at Taza’s new offices so we’ll know how to find our way back, we follow Aaron back upstairs to a hallway we missed and there, behind a door, waits Fiore di Nonno.

The business operates in a large open space, uncluttered, immaculately clean, with light from big windows streaming down on stainless steel tables, a refrigerator, a sink, a hot water dispenser, a computer and a boom box. Lourdes Fiore Smith, the founder and owner of Fiore, and her assistant Natasha Boltukhova, are expecting us. But we’re late, and cheese can’t wait, so Lourdes and Natasha have already gotten started making mozzarella and burrata.

Lourdes always starts on time at 9 am to make her same day deliveries

On first impression making mozzarella seems like the simplest, most uncomplicated, low tech business you can imagine. A short list of ingredients, a little cutting and soaking, a little hand-shaping, a little sitting, and presto—melt in the mouth magic.

Curd...the backbone of one of life's perfect foods

Life should be so simple. Lourdes begins with curds. Curds, in case that cheese-making experiment you did back in the fourth grade has slipped your mind, are semi-solid lumps of curdled milk; the leftover liquid is whey. Little Miss Muffet, of tuffet fame, was probably enjoying something not far off from fresh cheese when arachniphobia ended her meal. You can make your own curds, if you like, from milk, vinegar, rennin or enzymes, but on even a modest commercial scale D.I.Y. curds involve a level of quality control and environmental management that can be finessed by simply purchasing fresh curds, as Lourdes does. Her curds come from New York, not surprising since she learned to make cheese in the Hoboken shop founded by her great-grandfather and still owned by one of her grandfather’s apprentices.

Natasha breaking up and tempering the curd

By the time we arrive Lourdes has already cut that days batch of New York State curds into manageable sizes and is soaking them in a vat of warm Somerville water. The water temperature is important in making it possible for Natasha, a petite woman wielding a paddle almost as large as she is, kneads and stretches the curds for a few minutes. In Lourdes’s view Somerville water also imparts a special flavor to her mozzarella that makes it a true product of terroir. Different curds, different water, different cheese.

And Natasha moments later, stretching the cheese

While Natasha paddles, kneading and stretching, Lourdes tells us her story. After more than two decades in the food business–line cook, pastry chef and then corporate chef—she needed a change. “I wanted a way of working that was true to my heart, spirit and passion.” She went way back to her roots and learned the cheese making technique that her great-grandfather brought from Italy to America in 1908.

The orignial Fiore cheese shop in Hoboken, NJ

After the kneading and stretching comes the real handwork, forming the warm, stretchy curds into balls, a skill that directly translates into the quality of the finished mozzarella’s texture. The pleasure of fresh mozzarella lies in the marriage of buttery flavor to a delicate texture, neither too firm nor too soft. That texture is the result of practice on thousands of mozzarella balls and Lourdes’s arms and hands are unmistakably strong. As she works she seems rooted to the floor, only her hands and arms moving, manipulating each piece of curd until it emerges as a perfectly smooth ball of cheese. She drops each smooth sphere into a brine of Somerville water and pretzel salt, where the mozzarella will sit for a few hours at room temperature before being sold and—ideally—consumed that day.

Lourdes shapping the mozzarella

As Lourdes works she tears small pieces of cheese from a curd, dips them in brine and passes them to us to taste. All of us utter a simultaneous uuummm as the buttery flavor flooded our mouths. In addition to fresh mozzarella Fiore also produces scamorza, a low moisture mozzarella with a sweet mild flavor that is a winter specialty, and braided string cheese of fresh mozzarella seasoned with coarse sea salt and nigella seeds.

Fiore di Nonno's "other" cheeses

We watch as Natasha flattens a second bath of cheese into discs for burrata, balls of fresh mozzarella molded around a core of different fillings. The traditional filling for this Apulian specialty is a mixture of fresh curd with sweet cream, but it is in the filling that Lourdes adds her own wrinkle. A half-dozen fillings are laid out on the table—plain mascarpone, fig, zatar, orange and thyme and garlic and onion. “Which ones do you want to try for lunch?” Lourdes asks. We want everything.

Sinful burratta filling

We find our way back to Taza’s offices, our stomachs growling, and follow Aaron to the roasting and winnowing room on the ground floor. Nuno and Peter peel off to set up the guerilla kitchen and start the grills outside. The rest of us meet Alex Whitmore, co-founder of Taza with Larry Slotnick, Mike Schechter production manager and Sara Ossi sales assistant. Taza Chocolate, we soon learn, is devoted, in their words, to “keeping the bean in the bar.”

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Taza, Alex explained, is a “bean-to-bar” company. That is, they begin with whole cacao beans and control the entire process through the manufacture of chocolate bars. There are only a handful of bean-to-bar chocolate companies in the US and Taza claims to be the only one make 100% stone ground chocolate (more later). Most chocolatiers simply buy pre-made blocks, which they then melt and use to mold their own bars or truffles.

Ligthly toasted cocao beans

The farmers remove the beans from ripe pods, then allow them to ferment for six days, so they develop a complex “chocolate” flavor. The fermented beans then spend another six days drying in the sun, before they’re packed in big burlap bags and shipped to Somerville.

Chocolate production at Taza relies on a variety of machinery, but the type of machines and how they’re put to use distinguish Taza from large scale producers as much as the company’s insistence on sourcing ingredients in a way that promotes environmentalism and social responsibility.

Jody ponders the wonders of the winnower

Taza’s machines aren’t digitally driven stainless steel automatons. They remind me of illustrations from children’s books, big bold affairs with lots of exposed gears and colorful paintjobs. I tell myself not to make any references to Willy Wonka. We’re introduced to an enormous red German roasting machine, dating back to the 1950’s. Next we see the Italian winnowing machine from the 1960’s, a behemoth whose legs had to be temporarily removed so Alex and Larry could get it out of the candy store in the Dominican Republic where they found it. A gorgeous copper machine coats almonds with chocolate. A sea green wrapping machine that they bought with the winnower and are still working on how to use best completes the collection.

The beans are roasted by convection and tumbled with hot air

Taza beans benefit from a light roast, a technique that brings out complex flavor notes that aren’t yet detectable in unroasted beans, and would be overwhelmed by a darker roast (if this sounds a lot like the thinking behind lighter roasts of coffee, it is). We taste beans before and after roasting. Un-roasted beans have a light, almost coffee flavor while the roasted beans have a complex fruity flavor reminiscent of raisins and a deep chocolate taste. Dark roasting chocolate, like dark roasting coffee, masks both defects and distinctive flavors. This may be good for a giant company that wants to emphasize consistency in its product. But as Alex noted, Taza wants to emphasize a broader spectrum of flavors, not bury them. As I tasted the roasted beans my mind went to ways to use unsweetened chocolate and I wondered if I could get used to eating/drinking this chocolate without sugar, as I have with coffee.

A whole lot of nibs

Once the beans have cooled they are winnowed to separate the beans from the papery chaff. After beans are roasted and winnowed they naturally fragment into pieces called nibs. The nibs are transported upstairs to the cheery Taza Factory with yellow and orange walls. Here the grinding, molding and packaging take place. Unfortunately for us it’s a quiet day, there is no production, but two women sit quietly wrapping chocolate by hand—the younger one has the pinkest hair I have ever seen.

An example of Alex's craftmanship

Alex stands next to the molinos, the grinders, while explaining what I think is the coolest part of this story. Taza emphasizes the fact that their chocolate is stone ground. It’s one more piece in the bigger, more complex flavor story. Commercial steel milling, whether of grain or cocoa nibs, results in particles of uniform size and shape—and a sameness in the ultimate taste experience. Grinding chocolate with stones results in a certain inconsistency in the shape and size of the particles in the ground chocolate. The result is a certain coarseness in the mouth feel of the chocolate—and much larger spectrum of flavor.

Alex actually dresses the stones for the molinos himself, with a hammer and chisel. He learned how to do it in Oaxaca, cutting shallow spiral wedges at very specific angles into the heavy round stones. If the stones are cut poorly or worn and need to be redressed, they won’t grind properly. Although Alex claims that he’s still an amateur stone mason, his grindstones have been producing chocolate since 2007. In the molinos the chiseled surfaces of the opposing stones churn within centimeters of each other, grinding the nibs and any flavoring–cinnamon, vanilla, chilis, almonds–to a thick liquid.

Taza makes two styles of chocolate, “Mexican” and “bar,” and what happens next depends on the style of the batch under production.

Discs of Mexican Chocolate

Mexican chocolate is made by simply adding organic cane sugar to the chocolate liquid, tempering then mixture, and finally pouring it into round molds. The molds are disk-shaped, with spiral cuts in them, producing little chocolate replicas of the grindstones in the molinos.

Bar chocolate is ground once again to break down the sugar crystals, then tempered and molded. Taza has 60%, 70% and 80% bars which means that the 40%, 30% and 20% is made up in sugar and a little cocoa butter to fatten up the bar. As you might imagine, the bar chocolate is more refined both in flavor and texture.

Taza's Chocolate Bars

Without a doubt Taza chocolate has–and there’s no other way to describe this–a certain grittiness. For someone accustomed to the blandishments of Swiss or Belgian chocolate Tasa’s texture can take some getting used to. Or not. “People who love us are fanatic about our chocolate,” Alex says. “And the people who don’t love us hate us. No, they don’t just hate us—they think we shouldn’t be on this planet.” In Alex’s view, the coarser texture of Taza chocolate is intimately connected to its broader, more complex flavor.

It’s an interesting question: What makes great chocolate?

There’s something so undeniably appealing in Alex and Larry’s story. Smart college educated entrepreneurs. They think they want to open a chocolate shop. They go to Oaxaca, Mexico to see how they make chocolate. They fall in love with the chocolate culture and hang out with some chocolate makers to see how it’s done. They learn about chocolate, then they find the farmers and get to know them. Then the chocolate guys teach them about roasting, winnowing, grinding and sweetening. They realize that it makes more sense to make chocolate bars than open a chocolate shop. One of them becomes a stonemason, for God’s sake.

Alex wear's his heart on his shirt, not his sleeve

Do we buy it? Is gritty chocolate great? Or are we drinking the Kool-Aid? Do we want Taza chocolate to be great because the passion of Alex, Larry and the Taza team is itself so compelling? Are we uncritically buying in to a belief that because something is local it must be better?

I think not.

Sicily popped up while I was pondering this. In May I visited the town of Modica which is famous for its chocolate tradition that dates back to the 16th century when Spaniards, who had visited Mexico, brought the Aztec chocolate techniques to Sicily. Modica is in the process of getting the first in the world IGP (like DOC) designation for their chocolate because they are convinced that preserving and celebrating their chocolate tradition is critical. Their chocolate is even grittier than Taza’s and it’s un-tempered and when it shows a bloom of white cocoa butter it looks like a mistake. I was fascinated by the process and intrigued with the different flavors—black pepper, ginger, cinnamon—but in the end, it wasn’t much fun to eat. It ripped the roof of my mouth. Italians in Turin modified the Mexican technique by conching and adding dairy products to chocolate to soften both the texture and the flavor, essentially creating the model that most of us think about when we imagine an ideal chocolate today. This silky chocolate has made people happy for centuries. Why go back?

In a word, flavor. All the Taza bars are fabulous, but if you really want to taste the essence of the cacao bean in the bar, try the 80% and judge for yourself. Close your eyes, put a piece on your tongue and let it melt. It will take a little time since it is pure chocolate and raw sugar, but if you take the time to really taste it’s as though you’ve never tasted chocolate before. It’s made for eating, but eating carefully. You wouldn’t sit down and inhale an entire bar in a sitting as you might a milk chocolate bar. You’d keep a bar on the shelf in the kitchen or a drawer in your desk and break off a small square and nibble on it in the afternoon, or serve it after dinner on a plate with nuts and dried fruits. It’s not a truffle, but it doesn’t aspire to be.

Alex explains the Taza way to Jody

Taza approaches chocolate as food rather than candy. The Mexican style of chocolate, whether from Oaxaca, Somerville or Sicily is made for drinking or as an ingredient in cooking. Bar chocolate is meant for savoring, the way good wine is meant for savoring. Once you start thinking this way, you approach this chocolate from a different angle. Taza is offering us a new local tradition with healthy superior tasting chocolate. You don’t need much.

I’ve concluded, after tasting both their Mexican and bar chocolate daily for the past week, that I do buy it. Taza chocolate is the real thing and I just have to figure out how to incorporate it into my life. Rather than chocolate being a guilty pleasure, think of Taza as a healthy responsible addition to your diet. It’s organic, local and delicious.

Anyway…on to the lunch:

Bean to table - cacao dusted venison and coco powder sprinkled mushrooms

It was the GG team, the folks from Taza and Fiore di Nonno around the table. The sun pouring in was so strong Alison wore sunglasses. The biggest deal was the venison that Nuno rubbed with crushed cocoa nibs before grilling. I found that I couldn’t get enough of the flavor with the venison so I sprinkled more crushed nibs on top. It was an amazing marriage; instead of jumping out at you, the chocolate flavor kind of melted in with the meat to give a rich round flavor. We also enjoyed a wonderful burrata with a fig filling, which turned out to be an unbelievable pairing with the chocolate venison, Nuno also grilled some scamorza and heirloom polenta from Anson Mills and there were portabella mushrooms and Rialto bread to grill as well. Arugula salad was a refreshing balance to the rich grilled food. We had Charles River Porter from the Cambridge Brewing Company and—how could we not?–hot chocolate. The refrain was…this is sooooo good.

A portrait of the afternoon's bounty

We left with goody bags, full stomachs and new friends. And later that afternoon when our energy was lagging, we found that the chocolate nibs and the new not-yet-released chocolate covered almonds helped get us over the hump into service.

My favorite things from the day were the simple unflavored burratini—little bundles of joy—and the chocolate covered almonds. You can find further information on both Taza Chocolate and Fiore di Nonno fresh mozzarella at www.tazachocolate.com and www.fioredinonno.com.

Tags: Cheese, Chocolate, Fiore di Nonno, Grilling, Guerilla, Guerilla Grilling, Jody Adams, Rialto, TAZA

Guerilla Grilling: Part Seven – The Smokehouse

May 11, 2009 in Guerilla Grilling | No comments

Murals throughout the Smokehouse neighborhood

I drive through Roxbury at least once a month on my way to visit my mother in Providence, but I’m always in too much of a rush to stop and poke around, and with each passing barbecue joint or bodega with a stencil of green platanos in the window I promise myself next time.

Next time came this past December, when the Guerilla Grilling team made its first urban expedition, to the Smokehouse (otherwise known as the Boston Sausage Company), just off Blue Hill Avenue. Located in a neighborhood of triple-deckers, auto body repair shops and the occasional boarded storefront it seemed a world away from our usual destinations off in the country or somewhere near the ocean.

This sign wasn't on the main street, we did a few Uturns before finding it

More than a foot of snow had been predicted for the weekend and I was greeted in the parking lot by Trey Goodwin, the Smokehouse manager, and my GG crew who were clutching coffee cups, stomping their feet, and eying the gray canopy of clouds overhead. It was 9:30 and Nuno was already fast at work unloading his truck and setting up the grills.

As we climbed the stairs to the loading dock a familiar-looking white haired gentleman was stacking boxes. I thanked him for allowing us to invade the Smokehouse and introduced myself. This was Victor Nosiglia, who with his son Dave had started the business. I first met him over 20 years ago when he delivered sausage at Hamersley’s Bistro. His eyes lit up with recognition and he said, “Oh yes…of course my dear. It’s been many years.” Gordon and I would start our night with a couple of grilled slices of Smokehouse andouille sausage dipped in Chris Schlesinger’s Inner Beauty Hot Sauce. We were younger and heartier then!

Victor Nosiglia and Trey Goodwin

Trey gave us an introductory lecture about USDA safety standards. Sanitation is a big deal at the Smokehouse. We donned shower capped-shaped headgear and Trey pointed out the foot-level nozzles at the threshold of every room. The nozzles spray sanitizer at brief intervals, disinfecting everyone’s shoes. At least we wouldn’t need to wear booties. A few of us shivered. Processing meat requires a chilly environment—below 50 degrees in the working room and below 40 degrees in the packaging room. We kept our coats.

USDA approved hairnets

The Smokehouse is inspected every day. Hours of operation are restricted by law and employees are required to wait until seven a.m. before so much as picking up a knife. This enables inspectors to insure that working areas are cleaned and sanitized every day. If employees were to start cutting at 6:50 and the inspector came at 6:59, they would have to throw everything away, then scrub and sanitize all over before resuming work.

A standardized weekly schedule with different meats handled on different days is an additional guard against cross-contamination:

Monday: pork
Tuesday: fresh poultry
Wednesday: Morning–cooked and smoked pork sausage
Afternoon–fresh sausage
Thursday: packing and shipping
Friday: cooking and cutting big muscle stuff–hams
Saturday and Sunday: cooking and smoking of bigger stuff: hams and turkeys

Christmas Ham!

It was Friday, and we were there to see large hams prepared for the Christmas season. In the month of December the Smokehouse sells four-hundred hams a week in addition to their other products. From their origins on the Cape a couple of decades ago to their current operation in Roxbury the Smokehouse output has grown from five or six hundred pounds to seven or eight tons of sausages and smoked meat a week.

Sabba

Jorge

The processing room was a study in well-lit, gleaming stainless steel surfaces. One table held a mound of hams, but everything still looked spotless. Trey introduced us to the two cutters, Juan Carlos and Sabba, tough strong-looking men, practiced in the art of butchery – it is cold, wet, slippery and repetitive. Although the smokehouse relies on a variety of machines this is a manul-labor intensive business. Hands touch the meat at each stage of the process. Instead of each man boning an entire ham they share the steps of removing the three large bones and trimming the ham between them. The men were cordial, but clearly intensely focused as their knives separated meat from bone. Part of their concentration was motivated by safety and part, as Trey explained, by the desire to get through the pile of hams and on the road home before the big storm hit later that afternoon. Some of the ham was destined for tasso, a highly seasoned, smoked Cajun specialty. Other hams would be brined, then netted and allowed to cure for 24 hours before packaging.

Hams Post-Brining

Smoked Provolone

After the processing room we visited the room-sized smoker, where provolone was being smoked. Of course, klutz that I am, I dropped my pen into a bin of hickory, mesquite and apple chips. Fortunately, I was able to retrieve it before the chips were used. Smoking was more complex that I would have guessed, involving three fifteen-minute cycles, each cycle warmer than the one before, with a five-minute drying period between each smoking cycle. Smoke won’t penetrate wet surfaces of meat or sausage, so the drying is important. A final smokeless cooking period follows. Meats are cooked to an internal temperature of 160 degrees, then cooled to 40 degrees. Generally, it takes much longer for the meats to cool than to cook.
On our next stop we checked out a variety of machinery used by the Smokehouse. The first was a vacuum tumbler. The proteins of meat tumbled in a vacuum migrate to the surface where they stick together, making the meat easier to handle. (Who invents these things?) The tumbler was used for a boneless turkey breast intended for slicing. Next up we saw a brand-new sausage stuffer, unfortunately idle (Friday is ham day, remember?). In the course of its twenty-five year career the old stuffer had packed over a million pounds of seasoned meat into sausage casing. Two final examples of mechanized labor were a brining machine that sent needles into the meat so the brine would penetrate faster, and a mechanical packer sealing pork loins in plastic containers.

For our final stop Trey led us down to the basement storeroom. Stacks of spices—cinnamon, cumin, paprika, nutmeg, cayenne, fennel, marjoram, coriander, allspice, ginger, cloves, and anise—testified to the complex recipes that result in the fabulous Smokehouse flavors. Dave Nosiglia earned his chops as a Master Sausage Maker after completing a demanding three-year apprenticeship in Germany, an education he rounded off with an additional stint in Louisiana.

Hanging Andouille

And then it was time to feast. Nuno had been grilling outside on the loading dock as snow thickened from flurries into something more serious. A makeshift buffet table complete with white tablecloths had been set up downstairs with platters of sausage, coleslaw from Rialto, our ubiquitous saffron peppers and grilled squashes.

Our banquett

We sat down and dug in, a minute elapsing as everyone snatched at napkins to control the juices squirting over fingers and down chins. Blood sausage, bratwurst, chorizo and weisswurst! We all gave up at the same time, grinning through the dribbles. Worrying about a little messiness seemed quibbling in the face of such incredible flavor. After the meal and cleanup all of us bought of sausages in anticipation of the upcoming holidays.

GG's doing some holiday shopping

The snow was heavier as we loaded up our gear and waved goodbye to Trey. Our adventure had taken us into a part of Boston we never visited and revealed it in an unexpected light. Like a lot of the small food entrepreneurs we visit, the Smokehouse has the feeling of a family. Trey Goodman took a job as a part-time delivery man for the Smokehouse twenty-one years ago; now he’s the manager. Dave Nosiglio didn’t want to go to college. Hey! Let’s make sausage! The business has grown organically out of a passion for making and selling the best sausages possible. People taking pride in making a high-quality product and serving a loyal community. They still make small 50-pound customized batches for their customers. How great is that? The next time I drive down Blue Hill Avenue I won’t feel quite so much the curious passerby. I may even stop and buy some sausages.

A perfect Smokehouse sandwich

The Smokehouse has a small retail store located at 340 Washington Street in Norwell (781.659.4824). Smokehouse products are also available at Savenor’s Market and Pemberton Farms.

Here’s a recipe inspired by the adventure:

Bucatini alla Guerilla Grilling with Eggs and Tasso Ham

Tags: Bacon, Grilling, Guerilla, Guerilla Grilling, Jody Adams, Pork, Rialto, Smokehouse

Guerilla Grilling: Part Six – The Watts Family Farm

May 11, 2009 in Guerilla Grilling | 1 comment

The Watts family's classic red barn

As we headed into the holiday season it made sense to find a local New England family turkey farm to add to the notches on our Guerilla Grilling belt, but it wasn’t as easy as we had anticipated. It seems not many people want to farm turkeys in Massachusetts anymore and we were curious to find out why. We finally found The Watts Family Farm in Foresdale near Sandwich on the Cape. It’s owned and farmed by Peter Watts, his two sons Ajay and Andrew and Ajay’s wife Laura and their two kids Isabella and Evan. We arranged a GG visit for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and were hosted by Ajay, the eldest son who is clearly in charge. Peter, wise elder that he is, had left in his RV the day before on his annual journey to sunny Florida.

Ajay, Isabella, Evan and Laura Watts

We had quintessential Cape Cod weather for our trip to the farm. As we climbed into our cars at 8 in the morning in Cambridge, we congratulated ourselves on choosing a day with clear sunny skies and 50ish degree temperature. We were traveling against rush hour and people hadn’t yet headed over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house so traffic was light. Without warning a huge black cloud moved in from the west as we approached the turn off for The Watts Family Farm.

Hail on Melanie's gloves when we first arrived

The skies opened up with sleet and rain as we unloaded Nuno’s truck. We were cold and wet and wanted to keep moving so we ditched Nuno and followed Ajay toward the barns to learn about turkey farming. Anyway, we knew Nuno wanted to set up the cooking station by himself and was happy to see us go. The sleet and rain had turned to hail as we slogged through the muddy trenches in the road followed by 8 adorable free range pigs.

Very happy pigs in mud

The barn and pen where Amanda and I had met 250 Broad Breasted Giant White turkeys just 7 days before was eerily empty as they had been killed on Saturday and sold on Monday. With pride, patience and a respect for the birds, Ajay described the life of a Watts turkey to the group. Although he clearly cared about the health, safety and quality of the birds, he said when the time came, he was happy to see them go.

The turkey's just days before their collective march of death

The turkeys come to the Watts’ when they are 2 weeks old and established from Rainbow Farm in Rehoboth Massachusetts. Ajay and his father used to take them younger, but found that the first week of life is critical and they’re better off allowing natural selection to take place before they arrive at Watts. They take 250 of them and focus on making sure they have enough water for the first 3 days. Then they grow them for 21 weeks.

The Watts take very good care of their birds. They feed on an all natural soybean, corn and wheat-based grain treated with just a small amount of necessary antibiotic to prevent the dreaded Blackhead disease from infecting the birds. The birds are never artificially fattened so their body weight may range from 15 to 30 pounds at the end of their lives. They range free during the day on what begins as a patch of grass in the spring, but by November it has been picked clean. At night they’re herded back into the barn, safe from raccoons and other predators, where they peck from groovy orange hanging feed pendants. Ajay pointed out the fine mesh wire running 2 feet up from the ground at the base of the fence around their pen. It’s necessary for the prevention of a gruesome raccoon trick. If they can reach a paw through a chicken wire fence, a raccoon will grab a turkey and rip off its head, leaving the body behind.

Turkey processing tools like a plucker and gizzard peeler are hard to find. The Watt's bought theirs from a farm in Michigan.

With this image in our heads, we were ready for anything and gathered inside the processing plant to hear how the birds get from barn to table. Although there were no birds left to see processed, Ajay’s description was accurate and thorough enough to create a vivid picture. In the first step, the birds receive a very low voltage shock (not more than what you’d get from an electric fence) in the neck to slow them down. Next, they’re turned upside down–head sticking out of the bottom of a cone over a stainless steel trough. With a swift cut the necks are slit and the birds are bled for 1 ½ minutes. Without the shock, the birds would be flailing around and the bleeding could take significantly longer—not what anyone wants. Once drained of blood, they get a quick 45 second scalding dunk in a hot water bath and are then swiftly transferred to the plucker, a drum with many rubber fingers, for another 45 seconds. Next they’re ready to be evisorated and beheaded, and finally they’re plunged into an ice bath to bring their temperature down quickly. Once chilled for 5 hours, they’re dried and bagged and ready for the oven.

“These are,” Ajay reported, “delicious moist birds with lots of white meat…and you can’t dry them out”.

Nuno enjoying the juice bird

Peter Watts and his family have been farming and selling turkeys since he bought the property 20 years ago. Their turkey seeking following shows up at 6:30 am the Monday before Thanksgiving, and waits in the cold, clutching steaming cups of coffee, until the gate opens at 8:00. It’s such a seller’s market that the Watts don’t take orders, don’t guarantee size, and sell out of their 250 birds by noon. It wasn’t always this way. At the height of their turkey farming, they grew over 1000 birds at both Thanksgiving and Christmas, but with the rise in labor costs and the increase in the cost of grain in recent years, the Watts found that turkeys just don’t pay anymore. So now the birds they do grow are a labor of love for their community of loyal customers. These happy free-range farm raised turkeys take 21 weeks to grow, and at $3.09 a pound dressed, don’t turn a profit.

The skys cleared up over the Watt's composting site

What does turn a profit in 21 weeks is compost. Someone whispered into Mr. Watt’s ear in the early ‘90’s, that there was a market for dirt. After much trial and error and in collaboration with Stop and Shop and local horse farmers who pay to dump their manure with the Watts, the family developed a system for turning Cape Cod Potato Chips, cranberries, leaves, wood chips and bruised produce from local supermarkets into organic compost used by gardeners, landscapers and garden centers around the Cape. It’s a simple, process, one that is local, sustainable and organic and the only carbon footprint left is from the really cool big bold earth moving machines used to turn, strain and transport the dirt. They mix 3 parts manure to 1 part vegetable waste, keep it between 150 and 180 degrees, and turn it as often as they can when the wind blows north, (so as not to offend the neighbors south of them) for 6 months. It’s then strained of stones, sticks, large shells, baseballs, plastic rope etc resulting in 1500 cubic yards of clean smelling deep dark black dirt each year.

Compost is the Watt's pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

We had heard about the composting and were eager to take a look. As we stepped out of the processing plant, the sun was out, the hail had stopped and a rainbow swept across the clouds. It definitely had been a day of perfect Cape Cod weather…one of everything. We took a quick tour of the compost business, found a baseball, played around on the equipment, and then headed to the grills followed by our cute piglet friends to see what Nuno was up to. We were happy to know that the pigs, once grown, were sent out to auction and not slaughtered on the farm so we didn’t have to hear details about how they were killed.

Playing on "big kid" toys

Since roasting a whole bird would have taken too long, he broke it down into legs and breast and prepared it in two different ways. The legs, with herbs under the skin, were deep frying in a pot over a propane stove under Nuno’s watchful eye. We nibbled on olives and antipasti with the Watts family and prepared the rest of the meal. As I was slicing the breast into cutlets to be wrapped in pancetta, one of the pigs came by, snagged our bacon and made a run for it. It caused a bit of a raucous as Melanie and Peter chased the pigs and 2 big beautiful lunky brown labs chased them. No luck… but there was some justice in a pig eating stolen pork goods.

There was something just in knowing the pig had stolen the bacon

I topped the thick turkey slices with sage, smeared them with some of my fig-ginger jam and improvised with prosciutto for the pancetta. Onto the grill they went with whole red bliss potatoes and dumpling squash. Nuno had baked an entire apple pie over embers. We’d also brought garlicky greens, gravy and pomegranate seeds for eye appeal and a little acidic crunch to round out the dinner. We gathered around the table, the Watts family and the Rialto rag tag Guerilla Grillers, and had a feast.

Nuno traced the Watt's hands to make the pastry turkeys for the top of the pie

The mission of our Guerrilla Grilling trips is to see, smell, touch and taste the food we eat at the source, to get to know the stewards who grow our food, to have a ton of fun and to learn some new stuff. Success!

All the fixin's for a Thanksgiving feast, Guerrilla Grilling style

P.S. FUN FACT: the standard American Thanksgiving turkey is a selectively bred Broad Breasted Giant White. They can’t naturally reproduce because of the enormous size of their breast and their skinny weak legs. We worried they might be sexually frustrated.

Tags: Farm, Grilling, Guerilla, Guerilla Grilling, Jody Adams, Rialto, Watts Family

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Five – Island Creek Oysters

May 11, 2009 in Guerilla Grilling | No comments

A study in denim - some of the guys from Island Creek

I’m spoiled. The first time I ate an oyster was in Brittany, sitting on a sunny patio overlooking the Belon River.  I was intimidated, but intent to make the French proud.  Without hesitation, I slurped down a flat, briny, metallic Belon oyster, naked of a condiment, and followed it with some sanctioned brown bread and butter and a glass of crisp Muscadet. That became the paradigm, the archetype and epitome of oyster eating for me all in one slimy bite. It set the standards fairly high for any other poor oyster.Recently, on a late summer day visiting Island Creek Oysters in Duxbury, MA, my paradigm began to shift. With about a dozen Rialto guerrilla grillers, I got an intensive crash course in Duxbury Island Creek Oysters…how to grow, harvest, taste and celebrate them.  Meatier, and with a different flavor profile,  these fresh from the bay oysters stood up to my memory of those first ones I tasted in Brittany and the guys growing them were far friendlier than their French counterparts.

Skip Bennett started Island Creek Oysters in 1992. After trying to grow quahogs in Duxbury Bay, he decided to try oysters instead. They had never been grown in this bay and it was a huge risk. Sixteen years and much trial and error later, he now heads up an oyster cooperative with twelve farmers and four employees in the wholesale business. Skip and his fellow farmers have learned to grow the perfectly round, three-inch, bivalve that tastes of the particular “maroir” of their bay. The temperature, salinity and tides all contribute to make an oyster that is rich and briny.

With his waders and faded Red Sox hat, Skip may look like a classic New England fisherman, but he is really true innovator, introducing sustainable aquaculture to the area. We laughed at a t-shirt one farmer wore that read “Island Creek Oysters – Carbon Negative.” It turns out that oyster shells are about 95% calcium carbonate. By harvesting thousands of oysters per year, the Island Creek guys are actually removing carbon from the environment. Cool trick. gg5-3

In addition to oysters we caught lobsters and steamers

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Cool is actually exactly the word to describe the whole operation. The Island Creek guys spend their time out in the beautiful Duxbury bay, on the water, doing exactly what they want to be doing, with like-minded people who take their work seriously but know that having a good time is equally important. They don’t take anything for granted, and strive to grow the best possible example of the Duxbury oyster. In their case, innovation isn’t only about technology but rather paying attention and really getting to know the oysters and how they respond to natural changes. We learned that oysters can be coaxed to grow deep with round shells to host rich oysters rather than long, flat and watery ones. If their shells get damaged, given the right circumstances and care, they repair their shells in 24 hours.

Skip caringly inspecting the oysters

We sat crouched on the side of a motorboat while Skip dragged his hand through the water, scooping up a handful of adolescent oysters. He carefully turned each shell over, inspecting the shape and color, searching for any nicks and scratches. The delicate, almost intimate, relationship between oyster and oysterman was juxtaposed against the large expanse of the water. It seemed amazing that one could care for these tiny mollusks in this large bay. Skip does it and does it well.

Oyster Creek "oysterplex"

This year Skip built an “oysterplex,” a floating, covered dock where he processes the oysters. A long narrow table set with a checkered tablecloth transformed the plex into the perfect venue for our guerrilla feast. Bright orange fish crates served as chairs as well as the ideal color complement to the palate of blues from the sea and sky. We joked that it was really an Island Creek club house.

Sous Chef Nuno breaking down a 20 lb Bass

bassAs we were licking our lips and getting ready to feast, Mike (another farmer), pulled up in his boat with a huge, flopping striped bass. It must have weighed 20 pounds if it weighed an ounce. We all whooped and then watched the adrenaline rush through our sous chef Nuno as he was pulled to the fish like a magnet. Man confronted fish against the backdrop of sea and sky. Hemingway would have been proud. Nuno wrestled, gutted, cleaned and filleted the bass with alacrity and grace. We stood around in amazement, jaws dropped and drooling.

Nuno had set up the guerrilla kitchen with sous chef Drew as well as Meggie from Island Creek. They grilled bread and lemons, steamed clams and lobsters with seaweed, opened oysters, sliced radishes, chopped almonds, spooned out romesco, salsa verde, aiolo and chervil butter from our Guerrilla Grilling go-to pantry. We had heaps of farm greens with perfect end-of-the-summer tomatoes, an antipasti platter with sausages and cheeses, three wines to pair with the oysters and on and on. Most of us couldn’t sit still, but bounced from crate to crate to be sure we tasted everything and had a chance to talk to everyone. The afternoon was perfect and completely shifted my paradigm.

Check out The Boston Globe’s article on the trip here.

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Tags: Boston Globe, Grilling, Guerilla, Guerilla Grilling, Island Creek Oyster, Jody Adams, Nuno, Oyster, Summer

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Four – Carlisle Farmstead Cheese

May 11, 2009 in Guerilla Grilling | No comments

Tricia Smith - engineer and anthropologist

Tricia Smith and Michael Holland are pioneering a new model of suburban farming at Carlisle Farmstead Cheese. They live in a low-slung, mid-century modern home off a shaded road in pastoral Carlisle, Massachusetts. They have neatly organized garden plots, certainly not a full-fledged farm, but an abundant, intensive operation. Tricia’s small herd of gentle and curious Oberhasli goats live in an immaculate, fenced-in barn just opposite the house. The compact cheese-making lab, with its custom equipment designed by Tricia, is tucked under the house below a gracious patio with an outdoor oven. It is a farmstead, reinterpreted in 21st century, suburban terms. Tricia Smith has developed a model of small-scale, cheese-making in a high-end bedroom community.

At Rialto, we serve Tricia’s cheeses on our cheese plate. Our Guerrilla Grillers had been clambering for a trip to see where these delicate mini-tommes came from. The sign-up sheet was posted, quickly filled, and we were off.

Wearing both sweaters and sunscreen, we arrived at the Farmstead with the first gusts of fall. We passed no neon signs or aluminum sided-houses on the way out there. Instead, we drove by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house and reflected on what he and his friends, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the Alcotts, would think of today’s “eat local” movement. Would they think we were too earnest? Would they think it odd that we had ever parted from these traditions? Either way, we were off to enjoy a special feast with food made by local friends.

I remembered something I had once read by Emerson: ”Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.” It seemed that Tricia was living by this axiom. She brought together her degrees in engineering and anthropology to shape her work with the goats. The cheese lab had all the dials and thermometers and precision of an engineer’s lab. The barn hosted a micro, goat culture, where Tricia understood the nuanced relationships between mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers. Perhaps no career-counselor at MIT (Tricia’s alma mater) would have recommended “cheese-making” to Tricia as the right path but it seemed that it was the perfect way to engage her varied skills.

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Wearing delicate, embroidered, L.L. Bean-style collars with names like “Lea” and “Ada”, the goats seemed like the next generation of Little Women. Their wide-set eyes, slightly cocked faces and nuzzling noses made it hard not to anthropomorphize the whole herd. It was clear they were family to Tricia. She cares for her happy animals with extraordinary care. And it shows. Tricia told us that her unpasteurized milk has far less bacteria than most pasteurized milk. A clean, comfortable living space allow the animals to live an unstressed life and produce milk that is healthy and delicious.

As we entered the sterile cheese-making lab, we took off our shoes, washed our hands and held our breath, hoping we would not contaminate anything that Tricia and her goats had worked so hard to produce. We watched as she measured, weighed and tested. Some of us carefully helped her ladle milk into forms. Her studied hard work has paid off – her cheeses win top honors with their lemony and slightly earthy flavor.

Tricia's cheeses

Earlier that morning (around 6 am) Michael had prepared the outdoor oven. This required not just building the fire but also calling the local fire department to warn them lest they think suburban Carlisle had an early morning smoker. Michael is both an accomplished engineer and baker. Tricia and Michael had worked together as engineers for many years. On the weekends, the couple would often hop on a tandem bike and visit state fairs. On their outings Tricia was inexplicably drawn to the goats. She followed her instincts, and the cheese venture was born.

We had heard of Michael’s bread-making skills and were looking forward to learning from him. By the time we got there, the floor of the oven measured 800°F and 1000°F in the dome. We were off to a hot start.

The outdoor oven

Our group gathered on the patio in front of the arched oven. There were baskets of basil, green and purple tomatillos and sweet ground cherries in their husks. A bag of corn straight from Verrill Farm in Concord was leaning against the oven.

In addition to the Rialto guerrilla grillers, Tricia and Michael had invited some of their food-loving friends. Jen of Backyard Birds, who we’d met in Dracut, and her husband Pete of Backyard Birds had brought four different kinds of chickens—Cornish Cross, Red Bro, Multi-colored, and Kosher King. They had blanched the chicken feet and marinated the hearts in a soy, ginger and garlic sauce. Annette and John from Allandale Farm brought an enormous box of the season’s first delicata squash.

Shapely delicata squash

Jim, an opthamologist friend of Jen and Pete’s, provided wonderful Pinot Noirs. Linda and John, who support the Lexington Farmers Market, brought locally-made vanilla extract. It was going to be quite a feast. A pied piper quality had begun to emerge from these grilling adventures as we collected people along the way.

Michael with vegetables

In addition to learning about Tricia’s cheese making, we had wanted to taste test the different chicken varieties. Per Jen’s suggestion, we simply seasoned half of each bird with salt and pepper. We sexed up the second half with basil and prosciutto under the skin and a marinade of garlic, fennel seeds and hot red pepper flakes. We quartered the birds, marked them with tooth picks so we could keep track of the different varieties and fed them into the hot oven.

Chickens - on the board and in the over

We split the squash, took out the seeds and rubbed it with garlic, evoo, mustard seeds and balsamic vinegar. In they went as well. The unhusked corn was thrown on the grill and covered. Once the husks blackened, we let them steam for a few minutes off the heat. With the husks pulled back, the silk slid right off and we smeared the yellow cobs with more evoo, lime juice and chopped basil.

Corn - on the grill

...and off

Seasoned and grilled, the chicken feet were all crispy deliciousness once you got over thinking of them as arthritic old hands. The chicken hearts were not for the faint of heart but were tender, smokey and oh-so yummy. Who knew a chicken had such a big heart?

Hearts and bones

All the food was ready, but no one was willing to dig in until Tricia ascended from the lab. When she did, we ate with gusto and glee. We loved all the birds and to be honest, did not do a serious, scientific taste test. It was too much fun just eating. But the favorite bird for texture and flavor was the Redbro with its rich, tender and, slightly darker, meat.

Scientific notes on four chicken varieties

Food tastes better when you know where it comes from. It tastes even better when you are in the place it comes from with the people who made it.

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The hosts - Pete and Jen and Tricia and Michael

Tags: Carlisle Farmstead, Cheese, Grilling, Guerilla, Guerilla Grilling, Jody Adams, Rialto

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Three – White Gate Farm

May 11, 2009 in Guerilla Grilling | No comments

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It was a beautiful July day with all the usual components of summertime on a New England farm: blue skies, warm air, white barn, newly harvested vegetables. A standard-issue bucolic scene. In fact, this landscape hosted a cast of unlikely colleagues with stories of hard work, blinding tragedy, determination and gratitude. Over the course of our visit to White Gate Farm in Dracut, we met an assortment of remarkable people, each as intriguing as the next.

The Director

Jennifer Hashley had invited us out to White Gate. She’s the Director of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project (NESFP), a Tufts University program that helps immigrants with limited resources begin farming in Massachusetts. Young, bright and smiling in a flowered T-shirt, jeans and work boots, Jennifer looked the part of someone who lived the happy, healthy farm life she had carefully chosen.

Jennifer’s left hand was wrapped in a fresh white bandage. It looked serious and, by the way she was holding it, painful. “Oh,” she told us. “I caught it in our truck. It took off the last knuckle of my baby finger and they couldn’t reattach it. I’ll be fine. Yes, it’s hurts. And I shouldn’t lift anything heavy.” The accident had happened just the day before, but it hadn’t interrupted her busy, committed schedule. She’d already been up since 5 am to help another group of farmers with a Mobile Poultry Processing Unit that she’d helped design. Clearly, Jennifer is a strong, tough woman.

Flowers from Jennifer's garden on a tablecloth she brought

THE FARMERS

As we unloaded the grill from the truck, Jennifer introduced us to Mr. Kim who stood in front of his small farm plot.

Mr. Kim arrived in the United States from Cambodia in the early 1980s. He’s a slight, gentle, elegant man who wore a light blue, collared button-down shirt with a black baseball hat. In the U.S., he worked at Hewlett Packard as a mechanic for many years and was also a backyard gardener. Around 1998, after being introduced to a few farmers’ markets, he heard about the Tufts program and began farming a plot of land at White Gate in Dracut.

Mr. Kim's lettuces, waiting for the fields to dry out

Mr. Kim, like other farmers who participate in the NESFP, sells his Asian produce to a CSA, a good way to spread the risk associated with farming. At White Gate, he had stately rows of lemon grass and water spinach, burly amarynth, a simple elegant structure covered with bitter melon vines, a blanket of garlic chives, rows of green onions, cilantro, Thai basil, and a tangle of squash plants peppered with bright orange blossoms.

Mr. Kim takes “a snout to tail” approach to eating squash as well as just about everything else on his farm. He blanches the leaves and eats them tossed with garlic. Stems are peeled, chopped and stir fried with the blossoms. The squash is cooked in a variety of ways and, of course, the seeds are saved for next year.

Some of Mr. Kim's harvest

As we listened to Mr. Kim describe how he grows and prepares various vegetables, Rechhat arrived, another Cambodian farmer with NESFP. Rechhat pulled a wagon of beautifully arranged and bundled vegetables worthy of a glossy spread in a Martha Stewart magazine. Sitting in the wagon were little purple eggplants and round green Kermit eggplants, a handful of cherry tomatoes, peppers, Asian and pickling cucumbers, water spinach, green onions, garlic chives, jalapenos, fuzzy melon, a bundle of mint, Thai basil and something called frost lake or Asian celery.

Rechhat on the go with his wagon of veggies

While we were talking, Rechhat darted back to the car and brought out a thermos of hot tea. Made from dried garlic chives, it had a copper color and a prominent garlic aroma but a mild flavor and had been sweetened with just a hint of honey. We loved it and all felt much better after drinking it, hoping it would give us the energy that Rechhat seemed to have. Like many of the farmers in the NESFP, Rechhat works two jobs. This morning he picked 40 pounds of Thai basil and 100 pounds of cilantro to fulfill an order.

Garlic chive tea, from nursery to cup

We climbed up Rechhat’s pumpkin patch on top of a mounded hill. It was glorious to be up there in the sky surrounded by pumpkin blossoms—a Dorothy in the poppy field, or rather pumpkin patch, experience. We picked some of the “male” blossoms (with their long green stems) for our lunch. They don’t produce fruit so we weren’t picking a potential squash.

Jody and Rechhat in the pumpkin patch

Male pumpkin flower, obviously

We visited his hot, humid, green house where he grows mustard greens in kiddie swimming pools, dries garlic greens on screens for his tea, and starts his seedlings for the fields. It felt like a little plant factory where Rechhat’s energy was infused into all those green shoots.

Rechhat's nursery

THE LAND & THE LANDOWNERS

As we meandered back towards the grill to begin preparing lunch, Jennifer told us about White Gate.

In the late ’90s, John Ogonowksi, the owner of the farm, had been approached by then Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Gus Shumacher to participate in the Tufts project by renting land to immigrant farmers. Coming from an immigrant, farming background himself and with some excess land on hand, John was enthusiastic about the idea and agreed wholeheartedly. He not only provided land but helped the farmers in the fields, lent advice and often waived their rent.

In addition to owning land and growing crops, John was an accomplished pilot for American Airlines. On September 11th, he was the captain aboard flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Towers.

Although we had never met him, we could only imagine the generous, brave kind of man he was. It seemed his spirit lived on in the fields at White Gate and in the lives of the people who worked his land. After the tragedy of 9/11, John’s brother, Jim, stepped in to manage the farm. We met Peg, John’s wife, when she passed by walking her dog with one of her three daughters. She expressed fondness and admiration for the farmers as well as gratitude that John’s project lives on.

Friends from White Gate - Peg, Rechhat, Mr. Kim and Jennifer

THE FEAST

After walking and climbing and talking, we were hungry. Nuno, our guerilla griller extraordinaire, had been hard at work back at the Weber cooking up our lunch. Knowing that we would be visiting Cambodian farmers and cooking Asian vegetables, I had asked Nuno to add some soy sauce and ginger to our pantry of guerrilla grilling essentials. He had also brought shrimp to grill along with sausages, some olives, cheese and peaches. By far and away the stars of the day were the vegetables – the water spinach, bitter melons, tomatoes, Asian cucumbers, Kermit eggplant, and, in particular, the grilled garlic chives and stuffed blossoms. It reminded us once again that putting vegetables in the center of the plate and using animal proteins almost as condiments is the best thing to do for the body, soul and planet.

A plate of farm-fresh veggies, with a side of shrimp and sausage

Jennifer, Mr. Kim, Rechhat, Peg, all the folks from Rialto and some other new friends as well sat down under the shade of a tent for the feast. Mr. Kim sat next to Peg and shared his thoughts about John and expressed a tremendous sadness over his death. We passed the vegetables around the table and talked about different ways to prepare various dishes. We laughed and ate and talked and relaxed. No one wanted to pack up to go home but eventually it was time.

Relaxing at the table, Peg and Mr. Kim

Tags: Farm, Friends, Grilling, Guerilla, Guerilla Grilling, Jody Adams, White Gate Farm

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Two – Sweet William Farm

May 11, 2009 in Guerilla Grilling | No comments

Caroline, Brittany, Briana and Rob Nicholson

Forty-five minutes west on I-90 and south down I-495, sits the semi-rural town of Upton, Massachusetts. A grandmother, her son, his wife and their two young girls live there on a 90-acre plot of land with Arabian horses, mixed-breed chickens, Sicilian donkeys and loads of vegetables. The scene is idyllic, pastoral and precarious. Precarious because a modern-day small farm in New England must continually fight to define itself against bigger farms with lower costs and real estate developers with larger bank accounts. The second installment in our Guerrilla Grilling adventures took us to Sweet William Farm where the Nicholson family works to keep their farm afloat.

Summer squash and rows of lettuce

Leaving the restaurant in the morning, we felt a little weather cocky at how well we had planned our guerrilla grilling day—we predicted gentle, short-lived showers in the morning followed by bigger storms in the afternoon when we had all safely returned to Cambridge. We had it backwards.

At 9:00 am buckets of water were dumped from the sky and the lights dimmed. It felt like dusk in a car wash. Fortunately, we were just around the bend from the farm so we crawled into the parking lot of the Sweet William Farm and raced for shelter. As we dripped and snacked on freshly baked coffee cake and hard-boiled eggs, Gail and Rob (mother and son) told us the story of their farm.

Gail bought the farm as a haven for an Arabian horse some twenty years ago. The horse should have been dead, as he was so cruelly neglected. Gail adopted him and named him Sweet William. Today he thrives and is the prince of the farm.

Left: A descendant of Sweet William; Right: Sofia and Lucia

Gail, a fearless adventurer, (she’s ridden horses in Africa, India and other far away places) was joined by her son Rob and daughter-in-law Caroline and their first daughter Bentley (Brittany came a few years later) to save the farm. They put up a little store and sold ice cream for a few years. They hosted families and parties. But this wasn’t enough. The land needed to be farmed.

Rob started with what he knew – hops. He’d always had a passion for making beer. Later, it was on to vegetables. Gail jumped when Tufts University asked if they’d like to participate in a chicken project.

The chickens - free to do as they please

Today, Rob has 30 chickens that collectively produce on average 80 delicious eggs/day. They’re a mixture of Rhode Island Reds, Leghorns and Aracona and produce an egg the color of a weathered beachside house—sort of light greeny, bluey, silvery gray. The eggs have thick shells, big perky saffron yolks and dense firm whites. The chickens are free to run around the yard pulling up worms and bugs and Rob regularly lets them roam along the grassy edges of the driveway. As one hen in the coop fluffed her feathers, she revealed a blue beautiful egg. (You can purchase these eggs at the farm for $2.50/½ dozen or $5.00/dozen.)

Frittata - from hen to plate

Nuno (the grill-meister) had started the fire and laid out a platter of antipasti for nibbling as he set to making a basil frittata and grilling zucchini from the garden.

Antipasti plate

Tom and Michael, delightfully resourceful, washed lettuce and tatsoi in rainwater as it ran off the roof of the tent.

Lettuce and rain water

We made a salad and grilled the tatsoi. The vibrant yellow eggs played the lead role at the table.

Tatsoi on the grill

Jody enjoying grilled tatsoi

We watched the hops growing in the garden and asked Rob about his making beer. We insisted we try it…all four kinds.

A portrait of beers with Michael

Rob has continued to grow his knowledge and skills as a farmer. This year he successfully started a CSA that includes 20 local folks. He figured out what people want—simple regular vegetables like squash, spinach, lettuce, peppers. When he offered bok choy and tatsoi, there wasn’t much interest. That’s where we come in. We want variegated round eggplants with a custardy texture, Tuscan kale, kohlrabi, cardoons, puntarelle and other deviant vegetables. We’ll meet with him in the winter and talk about alternatives for next summer.

A farmer on a farm like this works in the dirt and often works alone. Single-handedly he is providing a weekly supply of vegetables for 20 families. Next year he plans on 100.

Seedlings in the greenhouse

The family wants to hold onto their land. They’ve learned to grow vegetables and chickens, they’ve revamped their store and offer a gathering place on Friday nights with music. A step they did not know they would have to take is development of the land. They’ve decided to take one piece of the farm and build a series of comfortable, green, houses for people who are interested in raising their family in farmland. It’s clear that this was not an easy decision for Gail, but she knows it’s necessary for the protection of the farm as a whole.

Rob and his family are students of the land. They are learning as they go and are committed to growing the healthiest food they can. It is not an easy life, but if you ask them, they will tell you they feel lucky. Lucky to raise their girls in such a beautiful place.

The Guerrilla Grillers

Tags: Farm, Grilling, Guerilla, Guerilla Grilling, Jody Adams, Rialto, Sweet William Farm

June 9th, 2008: Guerrilla Grilling Part One – Nesenkeag Farm

May 11, 2009 in Guerilla Grilling | No comments

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At 8:00 am on Monday, June 9th I found myself with seven Rialto cooks, servers, busers and managers crawling up 93 North towards Litchfield, New Hampshire to visit Eero Ruuttila and Liana Eastman at their Nesenkeag Farm. We were off on our first Guerrilla Grilling adventure. After some strong coffee and crisp toast, we hit the road – Nuno with his flat bed truck loaded with a grill, a cooler and service for 12 and Catherine in her Honda with most of the staff.

From 93 to 3 to 3A, the roads narrowed, the view opened but housing developments dominated and my heart sank. I remembered from other visits that the soil in this particular stretch of southeastern New Hampshire is exceptionally fertile. Zillions of years ago glacial run-off from the White Mountains paved the earth with highly productive loam—great soil rich with organic matter and perfect for farming. To see it planted with rows of look-alike houses instead of rows of tomatoes was depressing.

Finally, after three miles of suburban sprawl, we reached Nesenkeag—a haven of organic farming. We drove through the gate and pulled up next to a barn filled with tractors and equipment. A bright red, gleaming Ducati motorcycle sat beside a slightly faded red cultivator (the cultivator is Eero’s, the Ducati is the delivery man’s).

Red vehicles - tractor and Ducati

On this record-breaking 95 degree day, a small work area remained cool under the shade of shag bark hickory trees, a lean-to constructed by a group from the Timberland company and the gurgle of the nearby Merrimac River. A fat, warty toad enjoyed the shade, almost fading into the color of the wooden pallet and the brown leaves below.

A nicely camouflaged toad

Newly harvested, cleaned greens are spun dry in three old Maytag washing machines, stripped down to their colander-like drums. An old truck converted into a refrigerated walk-in keeps everything fresh until the Ducati-loving delivery person picks it up and takes it to Rialto and other Boston and New Hampshire restaurants.

On the side of one shed a small altar honors the culture and history of Cambodia, the home of many of the farmers who work at Nesenkeag. A compelling photo makes you stop and take a closer look. It is of a Cambodian genocide memorial.

The work area is cool and humid. The Cambodian workers don conical hats and prepare to weed the fields. It doesn’t feel quite like typical New Hampshire.

Cambodian women working in the fields at Nesenkeag Farm

We all load into the back of Eero’s faded blue pick-up truck, feeling carefree to be seatbelt-less, perched on the rails of an old truck, bouncing up, down and over dirt roads.

On the pick-up truck

In the pick-up truck

Eero gives us a tour of the fields—pointing out the soil differences between the rich upper fields and the lower, sandier fields closer to the river. Spring flooding the last few years inundated these lower fields with water, destroying crops and sending the farm into a re-organizing frenzy.

Eero and the Guerrilla Grilling team touring the farm

Nesenkeag is an 100% certified organic farm. Keeping this certification has become increasing difficult because of the time-consuming and often ridiculous paperwork that the Federal government now requires. Eero uses a green manure system, planting wheat and legumes in combination to help fix nitrogen to the soil and increase microbe growth. Peas & oats, winter rye & hairy vetch are planted on rotation with other plants. About 1/3 of his fields are fallow each year.

Lush red clover and iddy biddy spinach just peeping up

In one field, rows of tall red clover alternate with young potato plants—Eero’s technique for tricking the not-so-sharp potato beetles into thinking there are no tender potato plants anywhere around. The clover forms a barrier so the bugs can’t find the potato plants.

A hidden row of potato plants

Eero is a true steward of the land. He responsibly and respectfully tends to it, working it and resting it, educating visitors about it, sharing its yields with food banks and restaurants alike. The land is owned by a land trust and Eero has been its manager for the last 22 years and hopefully for the next 22 and the 22 after those as well.

LUNCH

A full plate

A shaded feast

Nuno lit the Smoky Joe and everyone helped set the table. Liana, Eero’s wife, had borrowed a little tent, tables and chairs and even brought red-checked tablecloths. Olives, salami, Parmigiano Reggiano, mixed nuts with dukkah, Tuscan rolls, confit artichokes and garlic yogurt (all from the Rialto kitchen) adorned the table. As we waited for the coals to heat, we nibbled: garlic yogurt smeared on Tuscan bread topped with a quarter of an artichoke and a shard of Parmigiano Reggiano. A delicious snack.

The garlic yogurt (check out our recipe here) turned out to be our secret, guerrilla grilling weapon—a cultural and culinary translator of sorts, bridging the divide between East and West, between Rialto, Nesenkeag and Cambodia.

Garlic yogurt - an internationally appreciated secret weapon

The cool yogurt worked equally well atop the grilled green garlic bulbs that had just been yanked from Eero’s soil, as alongside the beef sate with lemon grass that the Cambodian women workers had added to our feast. We tried it with the Cambodian salad of green papaya, cucumber and carrots tossed with vinegar and sugar as well as with the homemade picante Portuguese chorizo that Nuno’s Dad had made.

Green papaya salad with garlic yogurt

Cambodian beef sate with Nesenkeag greens

Chorizo, grilled bread and antipasti

Central to our feast, were the very first Spring salads from Eero’s fields—a mix of tender mesclun greens with a squirt of lemon and olive oil and a few handfuls of baby spinach with a balsamic vinaigrette and fresh mint, lemon balm, chive and sage flowers.

Eero's Mesclun greens and tender Spinach

The garlic yogurt not only took care of any lingering colds, lurking vampires or upset stomachs but also brought us all together around a table—cooks and servers, farmers and friends. Seeing, smelling and tasting where our delicious food came from told a vivid and important story that we took home with us.

Jody, Eero and Liana

Thank you, Eero and Liana, for hosting us, sharing with us your farm and produce and teaching us what it means to work an organic farm on a slip of land in the corner of New Hampshire.

GUERRILLA GRILLING

A FOUR STEP GUIDE

Step one: Find a farmer with green garlic Step two: Season green garlic

Step three: Grill green garlic

Step four: Plate and eat green garlic

Tags: Farm, Friends, Grilling, Guerilla, Guerilla Grilling, Jody Adams, Nesenkeag, Nuno, Rialto

Grilling

Guerilla Grilling: Part 10 – River Rock Farm

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Nine – Cambridge Brewing Company

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Eight – Fiore di Nonno and Taza Chocolate

Guerilla Grilling: Part Seven – The Smokehouse

Guerilla Grilling: Part Six – The Watts Family Farm

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Five – Island Creek Oysters

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Four – Carlisle Farmstead Cheese

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Three – White Gate Farm

Guerrilla Grilling: Part Two – Sweet William Farm

June 9th, 2008: Guerrilla Grilling Part One – Nesenkeag Farm

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