Sustaining farms
Irene Sax reports.
| More Front Burner in this issue |
| Discovering America bite by bite |
| Let them eat cake |
| My dinner with the pope |
| Beery endings |
| Beef, bees, and buffalo |
New York City—Some people collect stamps. Some collect baseball cards. Jake Brach collects small family farms, the kind that produce food in a way that preserves the land for future use. He collected nine of these farms in a book he calls The Sustainable Chef: Cooking with the Farmers of New York State.
There's Flying Pigs Farm in Shushan, home to free-range heritage pigs. There's the Blackman Homestead Farm in Cambria, which not only grows apples and pears but raises fresh turkeys for Thanksgiving. And there's Sprout Creek Farm near Poughkeepsie, a 200 acre working farm that teaches children where their food comes from by enlisting their help.
Writing is far from Brach's day job. A Culinary Institute of America–trained chef, he works near Buffalo for Rich Products, a global foodservice company with offices from South Africa to Singapore. In his position as regional culinary manager, he travels all over the country but especially through the northeast. When he's free at the end of a traveling day, there's nothing he likes as much as locating some farm that he's heard about and talking to the farmers about what they grow and make and how they market it.
Being a chef, he also asks them for recipes. Every chapter in the book comes with six to eight recipes, some from the farmers and some of Brach's. The Merle Maple Farm in Attica has Grandma Merle's baked beans; the McDonald Farm in Seneca Falls has Peter McDonald's herb roasted pork loin; and the Blackman Homestead Farm has Margaret Blackman's cinnamon apple crisp. When Brach got back to Buffalo, he tested all the recipes and served them for family dinners. (His favorites, we asked? The cinnamon apple crisp and his own vinaigrette, which he believes is just about perfect.)
Not everyone can visit the farms in the book, but Brach hopes they will get to know their own local farmers' markets. He gives suggestions on how to get the best when you shop there. Choose a day when you've got time to browse; get an early start to get the best produce; bring small bills; ask the farmers if you don't know how to cook something. Be flexible: the point of shopping at farm markets is to buy what's fresh that day. And most of all, include your children in the trip so they'll know that real people grow the food that they eat.
For info: www.thesustainablechef.com.
