Tag Archives: farmers market

Are we losing Kimchee?

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The fate of South Korea’s kimchi industry rests on whether China considers it pickled or not.

When China reclassified the fermented cabbage dish several years ago, Korean exports of kimchi evaporated. As a pickled product, it did not meet China’s strict import hygiene standards.

Now, China has pledged to reconsider the designation, a concession that could pave the way for a new boom in exports since the two countries sealed a broad trade deal.

The episode over kimchi, a source of deep culinary and cultural pride in South Korea, reflects the sometimes complicated relationship that China has with its neighbors. As China looks to deepen its regional trade ties, such pockets of tension could flare up, creating challenges for its ambitions.

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/business/international/chinese-trade-rules-put-south-koreas-kimchi-industry-in-a-pickle.html

Watch the Reakted Video – http://nyti.ms/1JS2mVy

 

 

The Miracle of Preserves – The New York Times

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For as long as I can remember, I have had an unfathomably strong affection for pickles and potted meats and jellies and jams. I was thrown into the preserving pond early. I sat as a toddler, I am told, several summers running, in the cool shade of a tidy old trailer in Canaan, Me., playing with snails as the mobile home’s fleshy mistress, Louise, taught my mother to select cucumbers and beets and pole beans from a dense trailer-­side garden — packing them into heavy glass jars and then gently heating them in a worn tin pot.

I don’t think I ever tasted any of Louise’s many preserves. (‘‘Oh, they were terrible!’’ my mother tells me. ‘‘Horribly sweet.’’) The omission might help account for my obdurately romantic view of what the British writer Hugh Fearnley-­Whittingstall refers to as the ‘‘extended family we call by the rather austere name preserves.’’ All preserves strike me as good. They reach me at such childish, religious depths that I have wondered if, even before Louise’s trailer and my rapturous secondhand consumption of jarred delicacies in books, some supernatural pickle pot or jelly didn’t offer me a miraculous taste of itself in a dream.

If cultivating soil was what let humans settle, it was harnessing bacterial cultures that let us unmoor.

I have felt lucky, as a grown person, to discover that this thing I loved in innocent abstraction had real importance. Salting and drying meat and fish helped human beings to last through long winters, sea voyages and treacherous overland trails. If cultivating soil was what let us settle, it was harnessing bacterial cultures and sugar, salt, acid, fat, sun and wind to paralyze microorganisms and save food from decay that let us unmoor, discovering all the world that was not visible from our cabbage patches. Basque cider allowed seamen to cross oceans. Dutch pickled herring fueled the exploration of the New World. Vikings spread cod in the riggings of their ships to dry and stiffen in the cold wind, then traded on it as they battled through Scandinavia, the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Cheese was first a way of preserving milk; wine, of grape juice; sauerkraut, of cabbage; prosciutto, of pork. In this sense, all preserved things are additionally miraculous, in that they all are also ways of storing other things: part vessel, part content

via The Miracle of Preserves – The New York Times.

Seven Lobster-Buying Tips | Lucky Peach

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In “Lucky Peach #13: Holiday,” Peter Meehan wrote about his annual Christmas party—where, among many other things, he makes the lobster rolls from Jasper White’s book Lobster at Home. The front matter of the book, about how to shop for and kill lobsters, is succinct, spot-on, and very useful! We’ve published his rules for purchasing live lobsters below. (And after finishing that, you can check out his recipe for lobster rolls here.)

Source: Seven Lobster-Buying Tips | Lucky Peach

From the Farmers’ Market to the Freezer – The New York Times

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When the Manhattan chef Marc Meyer opened Rosie’s in the East Village in April, reports focused on the Mexican restaurant’s upscale tortilla-making station in the middle of the dining room.

But the more interesting feature may be the one hidden in the basement — a walk-in freezer left behind by the building’s previous tenants.

“The minute I saw it, I thought, ‘I’ve got to be taking advantage of this,’ ” said Mr. Meyer, who over the next few months plans to fill it with seasonal fruits, tomatoes and tomatillos, all bought from local farmers at their lowest price and at their sun-ripened prime.

While dedicated home cooks buzz over pickling, canning and curing projects, Mr. Meyer has joined a growing number of chefs who are quietly employing another time-tested method of preservation: the freezer.

Other techniques rely on sugar, brine or bacteria to conserve foods, said the chef Paul T. Verica of Heritage Food & Drink in Waxhaw, N.C., but freezing doesn’t change the way things taste.

via From the Farmers’ Market to the Freezer – The New York Times.

EDIBLE FLOWERS becoming more available and sought after

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From our friend across the “pond”

In Issue NÂș6 we are celebrating the ingredient EDIBLE FLOWERS. We meet the wonderful Jan Billington, an organic flower farmer in Devon who believes that edible flowers should not just as a pretty addition on the side of a plate. The lovely Johanna Paget, communications manager at the Soil Association will be popping by to explain the importance of good/organic/healthy soil. The talented Matthew Mason, Head Chef at The Jack in the Green, talks about his love for good local ingredients and shares a couple of incredibly tasty summer dishes. Plus, barbecue expert Marcus Bawdon will be showing us how to cook up some tasty wood-fired recipes. We take a look at the Kitchen Table Projects, a brilliant new London-based initiative that is passionate about helping artisan food producers get their product out there. All this on top of the usual good stuff you’ve come to expect!

READ ISSUE NÂș6: groweatgather.co.uk/

via EDIBLE FLOWERS on Vimeo.

 

Where to Find the Best Celery in the World | Lucky Peach

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I was first clued in to the funny relationship some chefs have with celery a decade or so ago, when I worked for a summer at Chanterelle, the long-running and now-departed restaurant of David Waltuck. While there was certainly celery in the kitchen, Waltuck banished it from his stocks and braises—it was an outcast, an unacceptable aromatic. In The French Laundry Cookbook, Thomas Keller notes that he doesn’t use celery in stocks either, citing its bitterness. And Jacques Pepin has talked about being clonked over his jeune tete with a head of celery during his apprenticeship. (Or was that George Orwell while he was down and out in Paris and London?)

Either way, I think these guys may just have never met the right celery—that, of course, being the bleached celery of Lancaster County, PA. Unlike the stringent, vegetal stuff you find wilting in crisper drawers across America, Lancaster celery is feathery, delicate, and pale yellow—so sweet, so nutty, so tender that common celery pales in comparison. It is shorter and smaller than supermarket celery, and more or less string-free.

via Where to Find the Best Celery in the World | Lucky Peach.

I Think I Cran | Lucky Peach

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Jessika Tantisook of Starvation Alley Farms knows the image everyone has of cranberry farming. “Yes,” she laughs, when I ask about the Ocean Spray ads featuring guys in waders submerged to their chests, surrounded by floating berries. “It’s just like that.” For a few weeks each year, anyway.

In 2010, Tantisook and her partner, Jared Oakes, moved to Washington to take over ten acres of cranberry bogs from Oakes’s parents. They decided to turn it into the state’s first organic cranberry farm—despite all expert advice to the contrary.

Five years in, the farm is now certified organic. They produce their own raw, unsweetened cranberry juice, which has found devoted customers among health-seekers, craft-cocktail connoisseurs, and farmers’ market shoppers alike. And the pair is working with neighboring farms to help them make the same transition to organic. Tantisook estimates there are fewer than twelve organic cranberry farms in the country, totaling three hundred acres—compared with about forty thousand acres of cranberries grown nationally.

via I Think I Cran | Lucky Peach.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Asparagus* | Lucky Peach

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IN THE FIELD

It’s a spring afternoon in the middle of asparagus season, and I’m crouching in a field with Jim Durst, an organic farmer in California’s Yolo County, northwest of Sacramento. Here and there green spears poke upward through the dirt. These asparagus will be picked tomorrow; they can grow whole inches overnight. “It looks totally different in the morning,” Jim tells me. “It looks like a little forest of trees, sticking up. And after they harvest, it looks like somebody logged it.”

Asparagus is a member of the lily family, so it has very extensive root systems. It grows mostly along waterways. The roots can go down about anywhere from twelve to twenty feet.

The warmer soil temperature stimulates growth, so as soon as it warms up in the spring, the spears start to emerge. We harvest every day, because the spears can grow two to three inches a day. The spear is actually a branch trying to get up and get going. Once you cut a spear off, the plant sends up another shoot. So harvesting stimulates production—it keeps it going. During the harvest time, we are cutting the field every day. We harvest particularly spears of a certain height, ’cause that’s what we put in our box. The market determines that to be nine and a half inches.

via Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Asparagus* | Lucky Peach.

This Video Explains How So Much Food Gets Wasted In America

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There’s a certain school of thought about sustainability that argues that the worst problem in the food system today is waste. The idea is that we expend a tremendous amount of resources — water, gasoline, fertilizer, pesticides, labor — growing food that never actually feeds anyone. Food waste advocates also argue that the world’s farms already produce enough food to end hunger for good, if only the food that’s currently thrown out could make it to the dinner plates of those in need.

The most obvious source of food waste is in the home. Who, after all, hasn’t had the experience of buying five or six bags of groceries at the supermarket, only to end up throwing out a good portion when it spoils before you have a chance to eat it?

via This Video Explains How So Much Food Gets Wasted In America.

The Jolly (Micro) Green Giant | Lucky Peach

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It’s a sunny day at Windfall Farms in upstate New York, and Morse Pitts, the owner, is trying to explain to me one of the many reasons his microgreens cost so damn much: anywhere from sixteen to sixty-four dollars for a quarter pound, which barely enough to fill a bowl. But he tells me that’s still far from breaking even.

First off: every shoot sold comes from a single seed. A sunflower shoot takes up to three weeks to mature. New seeds are planted twice a week for the duration of winter—which, this past year, lasted four and a half months. To keep their stand at the Union Square Greenmarket sticked they had to plant over 750 pounds of sunflower seeds (at $185 per 50-pound bag)—and that’s one of the dozen-plus microgreens they sell. They also grow micro mesclun, mustard, pea greens, sunflower shoots, amaranth, buckwheat, Hong Vit radish, arugula, and an assortment of edible flowers. The flavor of these greens is intense (also, they’re cute), and they’re considered the gold standard by many New York chefs. But the real reason Pitts grows them is so that his dozen or so workers have something to do in the slow months.

via The Jolly (Micro) Green Giant | Lucky Peach.

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