But what happens when you pick up a menu and all the words are new—utterly exotic—to you? That’s the experience at Blue Hill at Stone Barns and it’s wonderful.

Think of venturing into a new world without a map. Terrifying for some, perhaps, but a thrill for others, especially when your guide is chef Dan Barber.

Here is a sample—of ingredients, and of the ways that Barber has chosen to group them.

greenhouse:  focea lettuce, ching chang bok choy, ruby chard, wild arugula, red deer tongue, green swiss chard, watercress, mokum carrots, bay leaves, rosemary, oscarde, golden frills, blackhawk, kohrabi, red Russian kale, dwarf pak choy, sulu,  Annapolis lettuce, firecracker, Italian parsley, Bordeaux spinach, Tuscan black kale, Tokyo bekana, mizuna, tango, truckee, troutback, purple garnet, bok choi, claytonia, mache, galisse, starbor kale, ruby streaks, purple komatsuma, sage, bright lights chard, minutina, garnet giant, magenta lettuce

pasture:  finn Dorset lamb, African goose, honey, Berkshire pork, eggs from our hens

field:  green garlic, golden beets, stinging nettles, merlin beets, mokum carrots, rutabaga, purple kale, day lily shoots, eight row flint corn, Bloomsdale spinach, parsnips, Forono beets, Tuscan kale, Orion kale, Tropea onion, Samantha cabbage, celery root, rose geranium

ocean:  Maine oysters, Long Island porgy, Bouchot mussels, wild Alaskan king salmon, bluefish, squid ink, black drum,  Woodbury clams, dulse seaweed, Quahog clams, razor clams, hake

river/lake:  sturgeon caviar

preserved:  panther soybeans, arcuri garlic, fennel, shelling beans, crosnes, kobacha squash, raspberries,
green tomatoes

Hudson valley:  white button mushrooms, ramps, wild onions, green onions, dandelion, upland cress, watercress, nasturtiums, pastured beef, La Belle Rouge chicken, rainbow chard, chiogga beets, tat soi, salsify, savoy cabbage, sunchokes, spring onions, horse radish, titan parsley, bartlett pears, granny smith apples, purple Peruvian potatoes, seckel pears, broccoli, maple syrup, nelson carrots, mutsu apples, Frederick wheat, emmer wheat

beyond:  porcini mushrooms, black trumpet mushrooms, hazelnuts, Meyer lemons, blood oranges, figs, pineapples, pink grapefruit, Mandarin oranges, pomelo

More Reading

Learning to Love Stinging Nettles

Nothing Quite as Beautiful as the Wild Ramp

Dandelion Wine: “Summer Caught and Stoppered”

I am looking for one in particular — the dandelion.  The French named this flower dens leonis, or “lion’s tooth” referring to the jagged points on the leaves. You know the yellow flower or the puff ball after the flower goes to seed.  But dandelions offer more than momentary entertainment or irritation.

Weed ‘Em and Eat

In France people grow dandelions to eat, just as we might grow lettuce. It’s best to collect dandelion leaves in early spring and then harvest again in late fall. As Wildman Steve Brill tells us:

“Dandelion greens are wonderful in salads, sauteed or steamed. They taste like chicory and endive, with an intense heartiness overlying a bitter tinge. People today shun bitter flavors; they’re so conditioned by overly sweet or salty processed food. But in earlier times, we distinguished between good and bad bitterness. Mixed with other flavors, as in a salad, dandelions improve the flavor.”

Some good news, too, for locavores and for nervous parents. There are no poisonous look-alikes for dandelions.

And it’s a rare weed indeed that  has a book named after it:  Dandelion Wine is Ray Bradbury’s recreation of a boy’s childhood, combining moments from his life and his imagination.

“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.”

I tried dandelion wine for the first time at Moon on the Pond Farm, where farmer Dominic Palumbo had just steeped a pot of dandelion flowers and was adding orange and lemons to a huge crock.

Dominic Stirs Summer with a Spoon

Then he poured a glass from a bottle of dandelion wine that had been produced last summer.

The wine was light—Prosecco light— and captivating. I wanted more. I could imagine serving it to friends with fish. Or a summer salad with watermelon. Sipping it by a lazy stream as the sun disappears into a warm, steamy night. More.

It’s time to make my own. So I am heading out late Sunday morning to pick a bag of dandelion flowers and try my hand at bottling summer.

Further Reading and Recipes

Jack Keller: More Than 42 Dandelion Wine Recipes

Such Good Taste

Summer is almost on us. If you’re old enough to remember a time when summer meant something in relation to the food we eat, then this is happy time.

Summer was the season when we could get almost any fruit or vegetable we desired.  Food was fresh and it was something special. Now, we can get everything all the time, regardless of season. Our kids take it for granted. But something besides taste is lost with this total 24/7/365 access food. Produce comes in from all over the world. If nothing else, it feels different that we can no longer associate certain foods with their harvest season.

We can only skip traditional seasons because varieties have been developed for their shipping characteristics rather than their eating quality. Older varieties, which may have had shorter spans of maturity, were too soft for long-distance shipping; those different shapes and sizes have been replaced by varieties specifically bred to be firm and uniform for efficient packing.

These new fruits and vegetables are usually picked before they are fully ripened (for longer shelf life), so they never develop the natural sugars that fully mature produce possesses. Local farmers, with shorter time to market, plant varieties that taste great and possess natural sweetness. They pick the produce when it is ripe and not green. Fresh, local foods do taste better.

Your Local Economy

No one needs to be reminded about the economy. Local produce may sometimes be a little more expensive than what you can get in the grocery stores. It seems ironic that something shipped in from a long distance is cheaper, but economy of scale is at work here. Industrial farms are usually many thousands of acres; in Eastern NY, the average farm is well under 500 acres. Yet local farmers live on their land, pay local taxes and buy their supplies locally—making their living from what they produce, and adding to their neighbors’ prosperity. But you have to sell a lot of lettuce and tomatoes to buy a new truck or afford a new television.

Robin and Allen Cockerline, Whipppoorwill Farm, sell most of their farm's output through their charming farm store

Farms Are a Precious Resource

Try to look at farms as a resource, equivalent to trees, iron ore, or even oil.  Once they’re gone, they’re gone—they’re only renewable if we support them. We should do everything we can to keep agriculture where we live. Do you really want to depend on other countries to supply our food?  Less than two percent of the United States population is farmers; they’re an endangered species.

And don’t forget our concerns about energy conservation: The average distance your food travels is 1,500 miles. That’s a mighty lot of time and fuel.

Build a Relationship with a Farmer and an Environmentalist

When buying produce at a farm stand or farmers market, you are building a relationship.  It’s personal. You can ask about his kids. You learn about a specific varietal. You can give feedback to the grower on what to grow next season. It feels good.

And farmers are environmentalists. To make your living from the land, you must take care of it. Growers are constantly doing good things for the land. They rotate crops, plant crop covers, and generally take care of the soil so it will take care of them. Besides providing open space for livestock and wild animals, farms provide green space to keep our water and air clean. In the long run, it is much better to have land in farms than in development.

Good Farmers Equal Safer Food

The food safety issue has probably done more to bolster local agriculture than anything else. There have been a number of food scares in the last few years. They have all been a result of the lack of “controls” on big, industrial farms. So much can go wrong on a big operation. Just think about the number of times produce is handled between when it is picked, rinsed, packaged, stored, loaded, shipped, unloaded, stored again, repackaged, trucked and then handled again before you buy it.  Local produce receives a minimum of handling. The people selling the produce are the ones who picked and transported it, and you have a personal connection them.

To me, all food is personal. You can tell when fruit and vegetables are fresh. You know it’s local if, when eating a peach, you need two or three napkins to soak up the juice on your face. You know a local tomato because there’s a difference between cardboard and flavor. Eating locally grown fruits is a pleasure that cannot be experienced year round. That’s what makes it so precious and so wonderful.

That quote from a recent Atlantic Magazine article on successful teachers applies equally well to chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

Barber is the chef and owner of several restaurants, including Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York. How celebrated are his artistry and integrity? When the President wanted to take his wife out dinner in New York City, they went to Blue Hill.

Food and Wine, TIME, and the James Beard Foundation have all singled Barber out for praise and honors. He was invited to speak at the 2010 TED Conference about his efforts to keep fish on the menu as wild stocks dwindle. So in addition to being smart and appealing and enormously talented, he’s environmentally responsible—and absolutely committed to sustainability.

Even critics are wowed. Ed Levine of New York Magazine wrote:

“Blue Hill at Stone Barns is the most important and gutsiest restaurant in America right now (emphasis theirs). Barber has taken the ideas of locavorism, nose-to-tail cooking, and farm-to-table to groundbreaking places, and in so doing he is laying the foundation for a truly different kind of restaurant-going experience with far-reaching implications.”

The Best Teachers Inspire You to Learn

Running a restaurant is a nightly sprint but running Blue Hill is a marathon that demands true grit.

Think, for example, of the perseverance and passion it took to convince a wealthy benefactor, David Rockefeller, to convert a sizable piece of property in Westchester County (NY) into a four-season farm and education center.

Or to attract an equally passionate farm manager like Jack Algiere, as well as the hundreds of people who educate us day and night at Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

Dan Barber has made the dining room his classroom and the kitchen his laboratory. Because of his reputation, I was glad of the opportunity to attend that classroom for a four-hour seminar earlier this month.

When the first course came out—a series of spring vegetables arranged on a picket fence with a crust of salt—I was charmed. Great flavor for sure. Subtle textures. More than that, that construction makes you stop and observe, and consider the vegetablea in front of you. Indeed, if you’re not too hungry, to marvel.

It’s All A Question of Scale

An architect I met recently said when you see something “in miniature,” you re-see it. Our relationship with the object has changed because we have seen it in a new way. He was talking about the importance of scale in art and architecture. He continued, “Seeing something like a toy reduces the real world down to our scale—an understandable scale—and, in the end, a world that we too, can participate in.”

All this from a vegetable or two the size of your pinky? Absolutely. There is something truly spectacular and worthy here: a direct connection between the soil, the farmer, and the chef—who is confident enough in his produce to present something with little or no pretense.

And that gets you thinking about big and little things—like taking the time to really engage. To make your own connections to texture, taste and how things can be. To consider what can be done with less, not more. To inspire in others what Dan Barber and his family at Stone Barns can achieve with a single course.

The staff brings out many ingredients ahead of time to show you what they are like in the natural state. A parsnip that has been underground all winter is compressed into a brick-like “steak” of and served with a red cabbage ketchup. Stinging nettles, which gardeners and hikers steer clear of, is converted into a puree. The invasive Japanese knotweed is paired with bluefish, a strong, oily protein that challenges even the most sophisticated chefs, into something delicate. And it all works.

Farran Adrià, the chef of Spain’s acclaimed elBulli restaurant, in his profile of Barber for the TIME Magazine 100 said the following:

“One of the ways humans communicate is by way of the kitchen, and this is what Barber, 39, does through his dishes. But he is something more than just a chef. His ethics—conservation, the use of vegetables and animals that are grown and raised within the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture—are a model for all chefs and all those who love good food.

Continue Reading

Chef Peter Hoffman of Savoy Why a Great Meal is Better than New Watch

Chef Joel Hough of CookShop on Making Sustainable Attainable

Concentrated Sweetness

But don’t start whipping up a stack of flapjacks immediately: just like any other type of farming, turning sap into syrup takes time and work.

First you’ll need a maple at least 10” in diameter. One tap hole can yield five to 15 gallons of sap, though under ideal conditions a tap may yield between 40 and 80 gallons. Depending on its girth, a tree may support up to three tap holes.

Forty gallons of sap boils down to just one gallon of syrup. To accomplish that boiling-down, some Native Americans heated rocks and dropped them into hollowed-out logs filled with sap. Hard work, but think of the reward.

A “Tree Whose Juice Weeps”

In fact at one time maple syrup and sugar were an important part of the North American Indian economy. When impatiently awaiting the bounty of Spring, a happy distraction is welcome; so are the nutrition and much-needed calories.

In 1663 English chemist Robert Boyle described the process this way: “there is in some parts of New England a kind of tree whose juice weeps outs its incision, if it is permitted slowly to exhale away superfluous moisture, doth congeal into a sweet and saccharine substance.”

Tapping a Sugar Maple Tree, Sharon, CT

Verily I say maple syrup rocks.

After tapping your trees you’ll need a hobby-sized evaporator, ideally something you’re going to use outside or in a sugar shack. Boiling 40 gallons down to a single gallon involves a lot of moisture and fuel. A super-sweet sauna of sorts.

Your sap becomes syrup when it reaches 66% sugar content. You’ll know that because you will already own a candy thermometer. Usually, the boiling temperature is 219 degrees Fahrenheit, or 7 degrees above the boiling point of water. Different altitudes can have different temperatures.

Maple Sap Becoming Syrup

Let’s Get Cooking

An excellent source of minerals like calcium, potassium, manganese, magnesium, phosphorus, and iron., maple syrup is a true organic product and a great way to sweeten dishes quickly with a far more complex flavor than white or brown sugar.  Go with Grade B and you’ll get that richer flavor for a few bucks less per quart.

If there is still snow on the ground and it hasn’t taken a dingy tone, try this quick dessert I first had in Montreal:

Pour hot syrup on a line of fresh snow. Then use a stick to roll up the syrup. According to one site the French call this the “Tire” dessert or Maple Taffy.

I like Brussels sprouts prepared simply, but they rose to another dimension when I added maple syrup.

Toss the Brussels sprouts in the oven with some olive oil until they’re heading toward crispy. Then it’s over to the stovetop where I add salt, pepper and maple syrup.  Some people like a bit of crispy bacon. The vegetal bitterness of the spouts is perfectly balanced by the other flavors. A family favorite that, after a little experimentation, you’ll do with your eyes closed.

Sweet.

Resources

How to Tap Maple Trees and Make  Syrup