Hasta La Ideas The Adventures of Star Wars Figurines in Nature Archives

Feb 16

Blue Hill Farm at Stone Barns

Posted in: farming, locallysourced, sustainable

Locally made jams and apple butter now available through partnership with New York Mouth

Since 2004 Blue Hill Farm at Stone Barns in the Pocantico Hills has been on a mission to raise awareness about the effect of food choices on our everyday lives. Now the gastronomic purveyors behind New York Mouth are helping make some of the natural flavors of the gorgeous food prepared in Dan Barber’s award-winning kitchen available at home.

Jars of apple butter, Hudson Valley honey and plum elderberry, quince and cherry jam make the flavors of Blue Hill ripe for the picking. The intensely rich apple butter comprises just apples, apple cider and brown sugar. The jams are made with the best seasonal ingredients carefully chosen by the Blue Hill chefs, and the Hudson Valley honey is a raw, unpasteurized wild flower variety with a deep color. All of these jars would beautifully compliment a brunch spread or cheese plate set on one of J.K. Adams‘ North American Maple cow-shaped cutting boards.

Shoppers can also get their hands on Blue Hill pickles, made with Kirby cucumbers and grown by Cherry Lane Farms in Bridgeton, NJ. The New York Mouth team describes the brine as an “incredibly complex” flavor that will “change on your tongue”.

New York Mouth is careful to select hand-crafted healthful food products made with local ingredients by independent companies in and around New York. The new partnership with Blue Hills fits in perfectly with their philosophy on food and sustainability initiatives. “We are sort of like an indie music store for food—indie food,” says New York Mouth’s Craig Kanarick.

With a deep respect for Blue Hill’s love of locally sourced ingredients and high-quality foods, New York Mouth is proud to be the only place for people to buy the new jam flavors and apple butter outside the Blue Hill at Stone Barns on-site store.

Dec 19

The Scholium Project

Posted in: farming, grapes, napa

A philosopher’s reductive approach to wine challenges the palate and the industry

The idea of switching careers in mid-life may seem far-fetched for most, but for philosophy professor Abe Schoener this aspiration became a reality when he decided to turn the tables in 1998 and become a student of viticulture. Taking sabbatical from St. John’s College, Schoener headed west where he enrolled as an intern at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa to gain some insight on the biology behind grape growing. Under the tutelage of Napa native and prolific winemaker John Kongsgaard, Schoener soon created his own varietal and has been experimenting with the non-intervention approach to making wine ever since, naming his small-batch operation the Scholium Project. (Scholium means a marginal note or explanatory comment made by a scholar.)

Rather than manipulate the juice with additional nutrients, bacteria or enzymes, Schoener simply lets the liquid ferment to become his wine. This Taoist-like tack to producing wine is rooted in Schoener’s background in ancient philosophy. He tells us, “There’s no doubt about it that my wine-making has been influenced by the philosophies that I study, and to the degree that I am a non-interventionist, that is for sure a philosophical position, and one that I enjoy very much.” Schoener’s theoretical stance may be to let nature take its course, but this technique is also warranted through several years of trial and error where he saw that problems occurring during the process typically corrected themselves. “Once you learn that wine is self-regulating, you learn to stay out of the way.”

Schoener likens the more traditional method of controlling the wine fermentation process to simply a culture fixated on minimizing losses. While he admittedly lost an incredible amount of wine in the beginning, like any good scholar, his relentless research and experimentation has led to a real understanding of wine’s microbial components and a greater ability to control loss. Schoener’s approach is like a surfer who pushes the limits of every wave to get the most out of the ride, but understands that, no matter how skilled you become, Mother Nature is deeply complex and there is always a degree of chance.

While Schoener recognizes that winemaking is actually a simplified process—he’s far from a beaker-toting chemist—he is aiming to put a little artistry back into it, creating vintages and blends that “make you sit up a little bit, but at the same time give you pleasure.” The philosopher’s position is ostensibly to challenge an industry that tends to unconsciously run on a flavor treadmill powered by controlled consistency on a grand scale. Schoener aims to put a delicate poetry back into the bottle by creating good wine that has evolved out of an accumulation of knowledge on the fundamentals of biology and reduction.

Finding a harmonious intersection between pure science and sheer artistry, Schoener’s philosophical mind for oenology leads to controversial wines that—whether “right” or “wrong”—have a distinct flavor personality that awakes your senses. Scholium Project wines sell from the online emporium (or can be tasted at San Francisco’s Press Club, where we enjoyed a glass). Bottles typically span $20-$85.

Nov 29

Stumptown’s Colombia Source Trip

Posted in: fairtrade, farming, roasters

A short film takes an inside look at vertical integration

As fair trade business practices and sustainability issues become increasingly important in the food industry, it’s still easy to forget that there are actual values behind the buzzwords. A new short film from Stumptown coffee roasters gives a face to vertical integration as it explores the growing communities that make its brews possible. The Portland-based company traveled to Colombia with filmmaker Trevor Fife to create a gorgeous and informative record of their people and process.

While the company sources coffee from all over the world, the video focuses on their Colombian growers at Finca Augas Blanca, Finca Los Cauchos and Finca La Esperanza. When building a relationship with a new grower, Stumptown frequently takes this type of trip to ensure that the systems of production meet their high standards. Eventually, all growers incorporated into the Stumptown family are treated as in-house units of the company’s global process. The growers in the video repeatedly mention the importance of family in the culture of coffee growing, offering an element of poignancy to Stumptown’s unique vision.

Aside from the gorgeous mountain vistas and sumptuous details of the harvest, drying and roasting processes, the short film focuses on the individuals involved in the early stages of production and their commitment to the final product. “It’s not so much about the job itself, but the passion you put into it,” explains Walter Peña of Finca Aguas Blancas. “And the… feeling of belonging. It’s the most important part of being a coffee farmer.”

Check out more videos about the Stumptown process as well as their surprisingly useful brewing guide for use when preparing your next cup.

Nov 29

ChocoVivo

Posted in: fairtrade, farming

Stone-ground chocolate from a bean-to-bar purveyor’s new shop

The recently opened sweets boutique ChocoVivo in Venice, CA exemplifies owner Patricia Tsai’s guiding mantra, “simple is better.” By grinding chocolate from direct-trade growers with lava stones, Tsai is committed to staying transparent in its production after growing concerned over the source and nature of our food. ChocoVivo’s products not only taste good, they’re thoughtfully derived, and each label is printed with information about the geographical origin, bean variety and fermentation period of the ingredients.

From the delightfully clean 75% cacao to special blends featuring limited-run flavors like blueberry and lavender, the chocolate’s simple ingredients create spectacular results. ChocoVivo avoids the temptation to over-process and doesn’t even temper its chocolate, which does result in a slight white film on the surface of its bars but makes for a more natural product. The brand sources its chocolate from a family-owned grower in Tabasco, Mexico, a region with a rich history in cacao production reaching back to ancient Mayan and Aztec times.

In addition to bars, the company also sells their own cacao nibs and novelty items like the Nutella-trumping almond chocolate butter and cacao powder for hot chocolate. The shop also sells assortments of the chocolate products in holiday gift sets.

ChocoVivo products are available from the e-shop, with prices for bars starting at $6.

Nov 24

Le Marche

Posted in: craftsmanship, farming, oliveoil, smallbatch

A delicious day in the life and land of Nudo’s collaborative community

Since we covered Nudo’s “adopt-an-olive-tree” program a few years back, we’ve been repeatedly impressed by their commitment to bridging the gap between consumers and their food. With a global community of adoptive tree “parents” as well as a localized community of collaborative growers, the Nudo family goes far beyond their fields and presses. It’s a close community as well, with owners traveling to visit their trees and help with the harvest. The farm-to-table connection results in an olive oil that bears the innovative personality of those involved. On a recent visit to Le Marche as the brand’s guest, we met the trees, farmers, and olive millers who define Nudo Italia.

Beginning our day of immersion we left Casal Dei Fichi—our residence for the visit—early for the olive groves. Driving through Le Marche, it’s easy to become hypnotized by the textures of the trees and vines that decorate the landscape like massive bolts of corduroy. We arrived at Rosalio, the Nudo groves, where we picked and raked olives from the branches, which were collected and gathered on nets that ran down the hillside. When asked whether olives could be eaten straight from the tree, Nudo’s founder Jason Gibb explained that fresh olives are extremely bitter and even peppery (I tried one anyway. He was right.). He then told a story about a tree that grew by a cove, its olives falling into the sea. Washed in the seawater over time, the olives were found and enjoyed by a passerby—the reported discovery of brining. Gibb’s story fits with the Rosalio vibe, which is itself a kind of Italian fairy tale.

Leaving the groves by mid-morning, we arrived at the Corradini olive press to make lemon olive oil. Our freshly harvested olives were separated from their twigs and leaves, washed and sent into a basin where three granite wheels pulverized the fruit. Lemons were tossed whole into the mash, which let off a citrus scent of the infusion at work. After an extended cold mixing and going through a series of centrifugal presses, the oil was finally extracted and bottled, ready to be consumed after sitting for a month. This modern pressing process minimizes the olive paste’s exposure to air ensuring optimal freshness and the brightest possible flavor.

Gibb explained that the press charges by weight, so many farmers harvest later in the year when the olives are lighter, having begun to desiccate on the tree. He also notes that older growers prefer the traditional nylon press, which is more of an open-air process that results in an oil that goes rancid more quickly. Tasting oils produced in both the new and old ways I found the difference to be remarkable—olives pressed in the traditional manner had a much more basic, even blurry flavor. Nudo harvests their olives when they are just becoming ripe, paying a higher price to produce a better product.

Lunch came courtesy of Nudo collaborator Paolo Beretta and his wife Paola. The two run an “agriturismo” in Cossignano called Fiorano, where they grow olives for oil and grapes for wine production. Beretta worked most of his career as a dentist—a detail that’s evident in his impeccably maintained groves, vines and wine production facilities. Paola prepared our lunch alongside her mother, who were the keepers of a transcendental stuffed olive recipe that they were kind enough to share with us (see below).

Their “Olive Ascolane” was a delightful appetizer alongside the Fiorano wine. The olives were stuffed, then battered and fried in a mix of the family’s extra virgin olive oil and sunflower oil. The fleshy “tenera ascolana” olives are favored in this rustic dish, which is named for the town of Ascoli Piceno. The piping hot morsels were filled with mortadella and parmesan cheese, as well as minced turkey, beef, and pork.

Our route to dinner in the charming village of Loro Piceno was met with a pleasant interruption at Peppe Cotto, the local butcher. The unrestrained character of Piceno serenaded us with a pigskin trumpet—which complimented his bowtie, also made of pigskin—as he served up vino cotto, or cooked wine, with a wheel of sausage on the rim of the glass.

Before leaving, he found time to give a live performance of a composition that was written on a sheet of dried skin. His fat sculptures were truly mesmerizing, decorating the display case with familiar characters and animals. Of all his eccentric performances, it was the puppet show enacted with the carcass of a chicken that left us reeling on the way out the door.

Visiting this community made the experience of tasting Nudo’s product even more special. As a region with a blossoming agriturismo business, it’s a definite destination to add to any foodie’s vacation wish list. In the mean time, to get a taste for yourself, check out Paola’s mother’s recipe for “Olive Ascolane” after the jump.

Photography by Josh Rubin and Masiar Pasquali

Olive ascolane

Ingredients for 4

“Tenera ascolana” olives

Pork—200g/7oz

Turkey breast—200g/7oz

Beef—200g/7oz

Mortadella—100g/3.5oz

Parmesan—80g/2.8oz

Eggs—4

White wine—1 glass

Nutmeg—to taste

Salt—to taste

Pepper—to taste

Bread crumbs—as required

Flour—as required

Extra virgin olive oil—as required

Sunflower oil—as required

Brown the chopped meat in a pan with a little oil, add salt and pepper and drizzle with white wine. Cover as soon as the wine has boiled away and cook for another 10-15 minutes. Place the cooked meat in an oven dish with the finely chopped Mortadella, the grated Parmesan, nutmeg, salt, a whole egg and a yolk. Mince finely with a chopping knife or with the mixer until smooth and thick. Stone the olives by cutting off the flesh in a spiral—start at the top of the olive and try to cut the flesh off in one piece. Take a piece of meat about the size of the original olive in your hand, roll into a ball and spiral the flesh of one olive around it. Then dip the ball first in the flour, then the beaten eggs and finally the bread crumbs. Do this for all the olives. Heat up the extra virgin olive and sunflower oils until boiling and deep fry the balls until golden brown. Serve hot or warm as a nice starter.

Nov 14

Intelligentsia’s Geoff Watts

Posted in: farming, la, southamerica, sustainable

Our interview with a veteran green coffee buyer on building relationships with sustainable farmers

As the vice president of coffee for Intelligentsia and a green coffee buyer, Geoff Watts travels the world searching for the best beans, working to build relationships with the farmers that have helped make Intelligentsia a leader in the specialty coffee industry. We recently met with Watts in Los Angeles during their three-day Extraordinary Coffee Workshop (ECW), where we talked to the coffee guru about his tenure with the brand and the journey to select the best beans from around the world.

When did your work with coffee turn into a career?

In 1997, I came to a crossroads. Part of me wanted to go back to Berkeley to pursue a graduate degree in music. I was playing with two bands at the time and was working at Intelligentsia as a roaster. The bug was already deep in me because when I started as a barista, I learned how you have the ability to really change the way coffee tastes by the way you prepare it. Then I started roasting and entered a world of chemistry, a bridging of art and science. It’s an endless learning experience. Coffee just won out. It was impossible to say no.

Where was the first country you visited to see a coffee field?

The first coffee field was in Guatemala. That changed everything. After learning to roast and prepare coffees, I learned we are still limited by what is locked inside that green coffee bean. Going to Guatemala I discovered there were thousands of farms, little microclimates, and that even on a single farm there was a range of tastes and flavors being created there. I learned about how the coffee is processed and picked and that even the week’s weather affects the beans. That was the moment when I realized how limited our vision had been in the beginning—when I would just pick from thirty bags of beans sent to me in Chicago. After spending just a week on farms in Guatemala, we discovered there was an opportunity to bring coffees into the market that we had never had access to before. We could shorten the route between the farm and the consumer.

How did you originally build relationships when you were the only buyer covering large territories in Mexico, Central and South America?

Part of it was abandoning the rest of my life and living out of a suitcase for about six years from 2003-2009. In 2002 we were just working with Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras. Then we added Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru. I would try to build my schedule around the harvest. Every year in January, February, and March I would be in Central America, then May, June, and July in Colombia and other parts of South America, with a few trips to East Africa thrown in there. We were really able to connect with some incredible people. In the beginning there was a lot of physical work to get things set up at the farms and work with the producers.

How did you express what you were looking for in a specialty coffee?

We did a project four years ago in Rwanda in conjunction with an NGO. The farmers there generally treated coffee as a cash crop and did not have a culture of consuming it. We’d learned so many times over the years, that if you are not consuming the product that you are creating, it is a lot harder to be motivated to pursue better quality. We started the program in Rwanda to teach coffee farmers how to prepare and consume their own coffee so they could be their own quality control. We built several hundred kits with little pans, a mortar and pestle to grind the beans, a sample of how the coffee should look when it was ready to brew, and an illustrated manual for coffee roasting in the local language. Then we did trainings in small villages. We taught the farmers to roast coffee over a fire. You can roast decently in a pan. It’s not ideal, but you get surprisingly tasty results. For many of them it was the first time they had coffee, even though it was growing in their backyard for years. Others had tasted coffee, but not their own. It was a moment of revelation for them. Now when a buyer comes along and is talking to them about the coffee quality, they can actually relate. There is a common language now.

Many of Intelligentsia’s baristas say their favorite coffees are from Kenya. What is so special about Kenyan coffee?

The Kenyan farmers have figured something out. Their coffees are fascinating and complex. In 2004 I went to Kenya for the first time with a few other roasters. We asked, “What’s the secret? Is it the soil? The variety?” Ultimately it’s a mix of things. Soil has something to do with it, but I am convinced it’s the variety. We have seen that with the famous Panama Geisha Esmeralda. It’s a coffee grown in Panama that is grown with seeds taken from Ethiopia in the 1930s. Those seeds carried their taste with them. That is one of the most powerful examples of what determines what the coffee’s real flavor character is going to be. Its potential is genetic.

The Kenyans use a cultivar seed called SL-28. The rest of the coffee world owes them a big debt of gratitude to the genius who cultivated that seed. The other thing is their coffee never gets exposed to high temperatures or humidity until it is on its way out of the port. Most of the mills in Northern Kenya are in areas that are cool. In many other situations coffee that is grown in the mountains has to come down to warmer dryer areas to get milled, bagged, and processed. It suffers from that change in temperature. But in Kenya and Ethiopia it stays at the perfect temperature and humidity and arrives with intensity and vibrancy.

Several people from Kenya participated in the ECW, including Charles Muriuki. Tell us about him.

Charles Muriuki is one of the most impressive and admirable guys I have met in coffee. He runs a union of co-ops called Gikanda and works with thousands of individual farmers. Muriuki is like their great granddad. His job is to help them access better incomes. He’s made all the right decisions. I see so many co-ops fail from bad leadership. You need the right people to keep it on track. In Kenya most of the co-op chairmen get elected, it can be a popularity contest. Most of them are short term. Charles has run Gikanda for about nine years. They keep bringing him back. They know it’s hard to do better than Charles. He has steered them to a place where this year they had the highest rate of return to the farmers of any co-op in the country.

What inspires you to keep going?

The goal that I have is to keep innovating with what we are doing. Coffee has a long way to go. For us and for me personally that’s the motivation. There is nothing else we consume that requires so much effort. The number of different people who need to take care of quality along the way is staggering. It’s like a relay race. The beans have to go through all of the steps at the farm, it takes four years from the time you put a seed in the ground to be able to harvest the cherry, then de-pulp them, ferment them, wash them, dry them, sort them bean by bean, then they get roasted [and undergo] a complex set of chemical changes. People think coffee is a simple thing, but there are close to 800 organic compounds in coffee, that contributes to flavor and aroma. That makes it the world’s most complex beverage.

Nov 08

Airdrop

Posted in: climatechange, farming

A lo-tech air harvester aims to alleviate the effect of drought on agriculture

Dependent on regional agriculture for sustenance and economic security, rural communities are often the hardest hit by droughts. Following a twelve-year spell in southeastern Australia’s Murray Darling basin, Edward Linnacre saw the need for a lo-tech solution to maintain agriculture in particularly arid climates. The Swinburne University of Technology student created the Airdrop, an “air harvester” that collects and distributes critical moisture to crops during droughts, and earning him this year’s James Dyson Award.

With a deceptively modest design, Airdrop filters hot environmental air through a turbine, feeding it through a copper tubing system—with copper wool to maximize surface area—and into the earth where it cools and releases moisture. The dry air is then re-released into the atmosphere and the collected water pumped through semi-porous hoses to the plant roots. In his initial prototype, which was much smaller than the current design, Linnacre was able to produce a liter of water per day.

The Airdrop’s wind turbine takes its inspiration from everyday rooftop turbines and can be powered through a solar panel in low-wind conditions. Critical to Linnacre’s design was simplicity—the Airdrop was created to be used by anybody, anywhere. As Linnacre explains, “A lo-tech solution is perfect for rural farmers. Something that they can install. Something that they can maintain themselves.” According to his research, even the driest air can produce 11.5 millimeters of water per cubic meter, and Airdrop’s low energy solution to irrigation is a sustainable alternative to other methods like desalinization.

As part of the award, Linnacre will receive £10,000—and his university receives an additional £10,000 prize—for further research and development on the Airdrop, which is still in prototype mode.

Aug 05

Weeping Radish

Posted in: brewing, farming, locallysourced, locavore, northcarolina

North Carolina’s oldest microbrewery churns out tasty beers and more from their eco-farm

After leaving his home in Germany to study large-scale farming in England, Uli Bennewitz moved to the U.S. to work in agribusiness. His beer-brewing hobby soon became an obsession, and 25 years ago he started Weeping Radish, now North Carolina’s oldest microbrewery. The craft beer project has since grown into a fully-developed brewery and nitrate-free farm, serving up award-winning charcuterie (handcrafted by their master German butcher, Frank), alongside an assortment of German-style beers.

Weeping Radish brews their beer according to the Reinheitsgebot Purity Law of 1516, a regulation made by Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria stating beer could only be made using malt, hops and water to maintain quality. Later amended to include yeast, Bennewitz and his team include the fourth ingredient in their recipe.

Bennewitz, passionate about utilizing local North Carolina ingredients, is a working example of value-added agriculture. Not only does the brewery’s pub menu follow a “Farmer to Fork” ethos, they also add the beer to ‘brats and use watered-down distilled beer to fertilize crops. They also work with the small farms that supply them beef to create sausages and charcuterie products at Weeping Radish that are then sent back to the farms to be sold.

For their 25th anniversary this year, the “hobby out of control” incorporated cascade hops grown on a farm in the mountainous region of Ashville, NC into their India Pale Ale. Bennewitz says eventually they will, “go to the next level, grow our own barley, have it malted and bring it back.” While we found the that the IPA could have been hoppier, the mild flavor was still palate-pleasing. Their current lineup of regionally-inspired flavors includes OBX Kölsch, Radler, Corolla Gold, Fest and Black Radish. The creative chefs behind nearby Boot Local Kitchen & Wine Bar told us they made regular trips to Weeping Radish for their Altbier brew, a “top notch” top-fermented beer with a slightly crisper taste.

Weeping Radish brews sell from their online beer store for $39 per case of 12 swing-top bottles.

Images courtesy of Boot