Best Food Writing 2011

by Holly Hughes

  June Russell, who manages farm inspections, strategic planning and regulations for the Greenmarket, was the force behind that tasting, and says local grains are gaining ground. Since last June, the Cayuga Pure Organics stand has sold wheat, buckwheat and rye flours, as well as cornmeals and whole grains such as emmer, barley and oats, all grown upstate.

  “Chances are, we’re going to sell everything that can be grown this year, which is fantastic,” Russell says. “That signals to the growers that there’s a demand for it.”

  For home bakers used to the consistency of supermarket commodities, small-batch flours require some adjustment—just as grassfed beef requires different cooking techniques than its cornfed counterpart. But the variations in local grains, once you’ve learned to work with them, are precisely what make them worth the trouble. The mass-produced Midwestern wheat in supermarket flour—even so-called whole-wheat flour—is a product grown for yield, not flavor. It’s then roller-milled to chalky shelf-stability, stripping it of the wheat germ and fibrous bran that can give flour its character and nutritional value, then sifted and mixed to precise gluten levels. When local farmers grow heirloom grains and grind them in small batches, the product is as different from that supermarket bag as a seedless White Thompson grape is from a juicy purple Concord.

  Pastry chef Alex Grunert discovered that when he came to work at Blue Hill at Stone Barns and made the acquaintance of local grain: “Flour is not flour,” he says.

  Of the flours Blue Hill buys from upstate farmer Klaas Martens, Grunert says, “It’s a complete different smell from when you just open a bag from a commercial company. Sometimes there’s an earthy smell, like a grain field. Then there’s the taste.... We’re using spelt, emmer, oats. Everything has their own character and their own flavor.”

  Now he uses local grains and flours in many of his baked goods, including brioche and a golden beet cake he makes with ground freekeh, a green smoked wheat often used in Lebanese cuisine. The variability in gluten levels, texture and water absorption is a challenge, Grunert says—“Honestly, it just didn’t work out all the time”—but he likes to combine different flours to add depth of flavor and texture.

  Blue Hill chef de cuisine, Trevor Kunk, serves Martens’s freekeh in a soup, pureeing the cooked grains with bacon, carrots and shallots. This spring he simmered emmer with nettles, spinach and fiddleheads. Kunk also sees the variability of local grains as an asset.

  “I think that’s one of the greatest things about the grains,” he says. “They change year to year.... It makes them that much more interesting. Each grain is a little bit different in itself.” Martens, who has been growing organic grains with his wife, Mary-Howell Martens, on their Finger Lakes farm for over a decade, echoes this sentiment. “I think we’ve bought into a false definition of quality with the industrial food system, and that quality is uniformity. With uniformity you bring up the worst, but you also eliminate excellence.”

  But when it comes to Northeast flour, the real miracle is loaves—that is, bread. Area farmers have had success growing soft wheat, the variety traditionally grown here, which is preferred for pastries, pancakes and cookies. In our climate it’s more difficult to grow so-called hard wheat, whose higher levels of gluten give yeasted bread its structure, producing the big air bubbles we’ve come to love in our loaves.

  Some maintain that bread can be made from the Northeast’s traditional soft wheats. David Poorbaugh, president of McGeary Organics in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, bakes bread with his company’s pastry flour, called Daisy Flour. The loaves that come out of his oven don’t have the airy texture we’re used to nowadays, he says—but they’re delicious.

  “Sliced bread is an invention of the 1900s,” Poorbaugh explains. “Before that, you had a denser, more compact loaf, and you tore a bit off and dipped it in your soup or spread apple butter on it. These tall loafs today, half of them are air.”

  Just two or three years ago, hardly anyone in the state was growing the hard red spring wheat favored for bread flour, says Elizabeth Dyck, coordinator of NOFA’s Wheat Project. But now some farmers are bucking conventional wisdom by planting heritage red fife and other hard red spring wheats; today she works with farmers growing 400 acres of organic hard red spring wheat statewide, and she expects a higher acreage of hard red winter wheat this year. That may not sound like much, but in a state where wheat production has dropped too low to even be counted by the federal government, Dyck says, “Those are hard-won acres.”

  New York’s hard wheat flour has slightly lower gluten levels—around 12 percent, compared to the 14-percent flours of the Midwest, which are generally considered best for bread. But the strongest retort to arguments that New York can’t grow good bread flour is a slice of the “Ultimate Whole Wheat” loaf developed by Keith Cohen, owner of Orwasher’s Bakery on the Upper East Side. This domed loaf, which is on sale at Orwasher’s and at Cayuga’s Greenmarket stand, was inspired by Irish brown bread and features local whole-wheat flour from hard red winter wheat. It’s rich, nutty and moist, substantial and wheaty without being dense—a brown bread that evokes a farmhouse table, rather than a health-food store.

  “I’ve always wanted to do it,” Cohen says of baking with local flours. “But for many years there wasn’t a great supply of it. Recently it’s come to the forefront.”

  He created a special starter to build the bread’s volume and structure, and taught the recipe to Cayuga’s bakers, who rent out space in his bakery to produce it. Sure, it might not be as uniform as what comes out of a factory, but Cohen says that individuality is part of its charm.

  “If you want perfect,” he says, “you can go buy Wonder bread.”

  No one is more excited about the growing popularity of local grains than Dyck, who has been working for years to revive the region’s wheat industry. But she’s aware that the region’s limited processing infrastructure means there’s a lag time before demand can be met. After January’s tasting, a baker asked where he could get 30,000 pounds of Warthog wheat. She had to tell him that only one test acre had been grown.

  “I don’t want this to be just a flash-in-the-pan fad,” she says, aware that chefs and bakers could lose interest before local production can scale up. “The infrastructural elements still need to be worked out. That takes a little time. I’m hoping demand hangs on.”

  Hudson Valley baker Don Lewis knows what it’s like to build one’s own infrastructure. When he started stone-grinding local grain a decade ago, he says he spent $30,000 on milling, sifting and storage facilities, and today he still has to drive almost four hours to get his grain de-hulled. But response has been so strong that Lewis is in the process of doubling his milling capacity and has opened Wild Hive Bakery and Café up in Clinton Corners, where he sells bread, pastries—and just-ground flour to bake your own at home.

  “In my own case, I just did it,” Lewis says. “But, ultimately, from the education of the consumer comes the expanded demand of the future.... The demand always precedes the production.”

  Klaas Martens learned long ago that demand drives production. He and his wife began growing grains in Penn Yan, New York, in the early 1990s, mostly as cover crops, and were able to cash in on the mid-1990s organic milk frenzy, when dairy farmers needed organic grain and there wasn’t enough supply to meet the sudden demand. Since they began producing grain for human consumption, the Martenses have grown spelt, emmer, soft white wheat, buckwheat, hard red wheat and oats—over 600 acres, on top of their animal feed business.

  Now it looks like the Martenses are again ahead of the curve. But Klaas knows that a real regional wheat economy will require more than fashionable ideology. Farmers have to entice customers to put their money where their mouth is.

  “It doesn’t really help to only like the concept,” he says. “You have to have tangible benefits, and they have to be tangible right away.”

  Those benefits, Barber maintains, are nuances and depths of flavor that our collective palate has forgotten a
fter decades of industrial flour.

  “We’ve lost an ability to pinpoint iconic flavors through these grains,” says Barber. “To convince people to bake biscuits with 20 percent spring wheat, you have an uphill battle, because white flour is so sweet, it’s so fluffy, it’s what your grandmother did.”

  There’s hope, Martens says, that we’ll rediscover flavors beyond what that battered bag of all-purpose on our shelf can offer. But it will take some work.

  “The baker and the farmer should be working together,” says Martens. “That’s how it happened for millennia. And now it’s happening again.”

  A FIG BY ANY OTHER NAME

  By Gary Paul Nabhan

  From Gastronomica

  Conservation biologist, nature writer, seed saver, forager—Gary Nabhan has been called “the father of the local food movement” (Mother Earth News). He can be like a detective on the trail of food origins, but tracing the history of figs soon became a personal quest as well.

  Among the earliest memories I have of my grandfather are his soliloquies in broken English regarding overripe fruits and their fate in America. “Papa” John Ferhat Nabhan would often arrive at our house weary, after a long day of driving his blue-gray fruit truck through the sand dunes trying to sell its entire load of fruit. He was a Lebanese immigrant, formerly a sheep-herder and camel drover, who had become an itinerant fruit peddler is his newfound land. Inevitably, when his workday was done, he would bring to us a basket of slightly bruised but “supremely ripened” fruit that none of his customers had wanted—perhaps a medley of golden peaches, purplish figs, crimson cherries, greenish plums, and yellow, egg-shaped apricots.

  White-haired and thin, with sparkling but sorrowful eyes that often seemed close to crying, Papa always wore a cardigan sweater and a snap-button cap the same blue-gray hue as his fruit-peddling truck. When he came through the door, he would take a basket of the day’s rejected fruit to the kitchen table, set it down, and then take his cap off and see who was around. When I appeared, he would reach his hand out to shake mine, then pop his thumb up in the air, straighten his index finger into the shape of a pistol barrel, and curl up his other fingers below it. I would do the same.

  “Hold it right there! Stick ’em ub,” he’d say in his best Lebanese cowboy dialect.

  “No, you stick ’em up, Papa.”

  He would raise his hands above his head and wink, then take my hand and sit me down, snuggled in close to him at the kitchen table in front of the basket of fruit. Even though I was sixty years his younger, he would talk to me as if I were his business partner.

  “Not so good, the busy-ness today. Tell your Baba this, my habibi, what is wrong with these ‘Mericanyi that they don’t buy my ribest fruit? How we gonna sell all this fruit, so delicious? My truck still full, what I am gonna do? Look at all of those beautiful color, lovely shabe, they don’t want it none. Look, I say to them, I show you, I say, I cut it oben and give you one free, a taste you won’t forget...”

  His long, expressive hands would reach out and caress some of the fruits in the basket. He would feel each one until his right hand came upon a particularly voluptuous fig, one whose body appeared as if it were ready to burst out of its purple coat. He raised it up to me, and smiled.

  “Say tiine, my habibi, for tiine is what we call fig in the Old Country ...”

  He had placed his pocket knife next to the basket on the table in front of us, but rather than slicing the fruit he would simply press his two thumbs into the skin on the top of the purplish-black fig and give a little push. It would immediately pop open, revealing hundreds of creamy golden and pink strands of sugary flesh attached to pale seeds.

  “See all the Fig beoble inside?” he would ask me, pointing to the seeds and softly chuckling. “It’s like what we show you how to make with your hands when you go to Sunday School: See the church, see the steeble, oben the doors, and see all the beople!”

  I peered into the fig, and atop each of the hundreds of sinuous, glistening strands there was a seed that looked like a little boy’s head. Together, they looked like hundreds of little boys leaning, pushing to get onto a bus and out of the rain.”

  While Papa held the fig in his right hand, he cradled my head with his left and gently tipped it back. “Close your eyes, habibi. Let me give you a taste of Heaven. Close your eyes ...”

  I did as I was told—sort of—squinting with my left eye so that I could see for sure what Papa was going to plop into my mouth. With his index finger and thumb he slowly moved half of the fig toward my lips. I opened my mouth wide like that of a baby bird, and my tongue darted out to lick the arriving fig. Some of the pulp smeared against my lips and my nose, and it seemed as though I were absorbing the fresh and cool flesh through my own skin.

  Papa was right: the tender fig was so heartbreakingly sweet and rich with flavor that I sucked its pulp into my mouth and happily imbibed it, not quite sure if it was liquid or solid.

  “Now you know why I almost cry at the end of the day when I come back to you and the truck is still full. These ‘Mericanyi, they don’t know what they are missing! The tender fruit is the better fruit, but they call it sboiled!”

  I saw his eyes tearing up so I nodded, but the flavor of the fresh fig still overwhelmed my senses, pervading the zone all around my mouth and nose.

  “Habibi, my dear little Gary Baul, your Baba make a wish for you: that you never say no to tender fruit. For your Baba’s sake, don’t ever become like the ‘Mericanyi who don’t know the good fruit from the bad fruit. Now what do you say, stick ’em ub?”

  “Stick ’em up, Papa!”

  While I sit at a table fifty years later, remembering Papa’s words, I glance at a bowl of fully ripened fruit in front of me. The ceramic bowl is decorated with images of olives and artichokes, but in it are two of my favorite dessert fruits: Mission figs, and the prickly pear cactus fruits that are known to some as Indian figs. They are so ripe they are leaking purple juices into the bottom of the bowl.

  As I stare out the window at the dry land in which I now live, I spot one of the spiny heaps of prickly pear pads in the yard; its pads are pointing and poking every which way, as if they are counterbalanced against one another to keep standing above the parched earth.

  I remember that at the same house where Papa would place the figs and peaches and apricots on our kitchen table, we had a sandy backyard where a scraggly little prickly pear patch once grew. I stayed away from its stickers, but loved to see its yellow flowers. I don’t ever remember Papa telling me its name in either Arabic or his broken English, but I’m sure he remembered that there were also some kinds of prickly pear planted back in his Middle Eastern homelands. They had originally come to Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria from the Americas, roughly three centuries before he left the Middle East to make America his home.

  As I turn from the window and look back at the fruit in the bowl before me on the table, I am amazed that I have never before noticed just how much the fruits of the prickly pear cactus actually look like the fruits of the Mission fig. They are nearly the same length, width, and volume, although the particular prickly pear fruit I have before me is a bit more tapered and less pudgy than the fig. The skin of the Mission fig is purple with little golden striations running up its sides like rays. The prickly pear fruits are purple as well, but their skin is punctuated every now and then by a cluster of miniscule stickers known as glochids that are also golden in hue. The scar of former attachment—where the fruit was situated on the mother plant—is blunt but lined with more golden stickers on the prickly pear. When you pull the short stem off a fig, its scar of attachment leaks a milky sap. In terms of shape, however, their scars are not all that far apart.

  But that is about where their botanical similarities end. The fig, of course, is really a receptacle for hundreds of hidden flowers pollinated by some very allegiant fig wasp. The prickly pear tuna, as it is called in Spanish, is a fruit not unlike a giant rose hip, and its top is a sca
r from a dazzling flower that once attracted dozens of different kinds of bees. Both have juicy, succulent fresh that can be sundried, then rehydrated, but the texture and color of their pulp are altogether different from one another.

  And yet, when the earliest naturalists from Europe and Africa stumbled upon the prickly pear fruits of Mexico and the Caribbean West Indies, they immediately named them Indian figs. The Spanish term tuna—the most widely used word in the world today for prickly pear fruit—is apparently derived from tiine, the ancient term in Semitic languages for the fruits of figs, olives, and dates. That term traveled and morphed as it went from the Arabian peninsula to the Levant to northern Africa to Andalusian Spain, and then to the Caribbean and Mexico with the Spanish: tiine, tiin, teyn, tuun, tuna.

  Fig and Indian fig; tiine and tuna.

  In the caves not far from the Rio Grande, the remains of two kinds of edible plants begin to appear in the feces of hunter-gatherers about eight to nine thousand years ago. The two desert-adapted plants—prickly pear cactus and mescal, the succulent century plant—were apparently eaten and perhaps vegetatively propagated long before the first corn or beans were sown down below the caves, along the sinuous floodplain of the river that now forms the border between the United States and Mexico. By the time Estevanico el Negro became the first Arabic-speaking Moslem to arrive in the Desert Southwest, he found hundreds of nomads he called the Fig People congregating in the cactus patches of south Texas, where giant prickly pear trees produced enough fruit to nourish them for weeks on end.

  Around the same time, figs begin to show up in Middle Eastern ruins; in fact, they too were staple foods for desert dwellers long before the broadcasting and full domestication of wheat, barley, chickpeas, and lentils. Like the first cultivated prickly pears, the first cultivated figs were simply propagated by transplanting cuttings pruned off older trees when the rainy season came to Persia, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey. Ancient sun-dried figs, just like sundried prickly pears, have been sporadically found in caves where they were cached for later eating, and seeds found in human scat testify that the eating did indeed occur. Willow baskets full of figs were left in the Egyptian tombs of Pharaohs, so that those legendary figures could take the esteemed fruits along with them on their journey into the next life.