Visits

A Morning with Salt, Fire, and Time

Last month I visited my parents in the Pacific Northwest (they live in a small town in Washington called Yelm). Along the way I stopped by and toured a few health-minded food producers in the area. First on the list: Salt, Fire & Time, a traditional healing foods kitchen in Portland, Oregon.

As expected, they had a variety of tasty and healthy food items (more on that later), but what stood out to me about Salt, Fire & Time is their journey to find the best way to bring health to its customers. It got me thinking about how businesses have to find a common ground between themselves and their community, so we’ll talk a bit about that, too.

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A Weekend at Tendergrass Farms

Last month, I wrote about how I wanted to take my blog in a new direction by visiting and writing about food producers around the world, in order to better understand how the food we eat gets onto our plates. Off the bat, I knew that one of my first destinations needed to be where the whole “food” thing starts. At a farm.

Choosing a farm to visit was easy. Last summer I met David Maren, founding farmer and general manager of Tendergrass Farms, and we quickly became friends through our mutual love of languages and our mutual disdain for our country’s rampant, negligent farming practices. We’ve also been working together over this past year; he sends me samples of food to cook and eat, and I take pictures of that same food for his website. It’s a pretty sweet deal for both parties, hearkening back to humanity’s bartering days: he gets free photography and my family gets free food.

David’s small farm is located near Floyd, VA (about 4 hours from us), so we made the drive down a couple weekends ago to check out and talk about his company. Here is what I found out.

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My Day with Tessemae’s

Salad dressings are an important part of many cuisines. Leafy greens were eaten in prehistory, and despite common misconceptions that early agriculture was entirely focused on grains, many of the first gardeners grew spring greens. The Ancient Greeks often mixed salads with oil, herbs, and seasonings (the word salad comes from the Latin salata, meaning “something salted”). Green salads were especially popular in Medieval Europe, and lettuce seeds were brought to the New World colonies, where salads were eventually redefined; the 20th century saw the advent of French, Russian, Thousand Island, Green Goddess, and even the mighty Ranch – all in the dressing-obsessed United States.

Today, the salad dressing aisle of every supermarket in America is downright embarrassing. Every dressing promises health, high quality and natural ingredients, and not a single one makes good on its promise. I dare you to try and find a dressing that is free of sugar, corn, soy, wheat, seed/grain oils, or chemically-extracted ingredients (hint: you won’t). It’s infuriating, especially coming from a product whose sole existence is to make salads more palatable and nutritious (adding oil increases the bioavailability of the fat-soluble Vitamins A, D, E, and K found in leafy greens). Salads have always been associated with health, but modern dressings have made it more difficult for us to make that connection. The salad dressing industry is so untrustworthy that after first switching my diet I resolved to just eat my salads with olive oil, sea salt, and black pepper.

Enter Tessemae’s All Natural. Our family has been enjoying their salad dressings since 2011; their dressings were first sold in the Annapolis Whole Foods (one of our local markets), so we’ve been riding on the Tessemae’s bandwagon from nearly the start. In fact, last year I used their Lemonette dressing to help secure my win in a bacon competition.

It’s relatively easy, albeit unglamorous and time consuming, to develop your own salad dressings. But I’m a man of simple truths, and the simple truth is that Tessemae’s dressings are so tasty, and contain such high quality ingredients, that I haven’t felt a need to make my own. Essentially, this is the basic principle of supply and demand; thanks to their supply, we carry no demand. Honestly, as a consumer I’d much rather depend on the convenience and reliability of a quality product than figure my own out. There is honor in creating one product, and doing it well – very rarely today do we find true craftsmen and artisans. This is something that Tessemae’s does unequivocally with their dressings and sauces.

I had the pleasure of visiting their Baltimore-based headquarters (lovingly called “the Treefort”) twice over the past few weeks. Here is what I learned.

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A New Direction

When I started this blog nearly four years ago, I didn’t have many expectations. I simply wanted to have a better understanding of the food we put in our bodies. A recurring element in my recipes has been the individual histories of each dish I create; I think it’s important to know how recipes came to be, and I really adore following the culture that hides behind every dish. But to tell the truth, as of late, simply doing internet searches on food history or relying on my previous travels for culinary and cultural insights simply hasn’t been enough for me. Don’t get me wrong – I still love food history and sharing traditional/classic recipes – I just want to step it up a notch.

Consider the pizza in the picture above. It’s probably fair to say that this little pizza recipe has made a huge contribution to my current readership. Heck, I thought it was important enough to put on the cover of my cookbook, since it’s an excellent representation of classic, traditional, and modern cuisines. And while it’s cool that we can make pizza easily at home and say that we made it from scratch, the pizza above wasn’t really made “from scratch.”

Who harvested the cassava, and how was it processed into tapioca starch? How were the tomatoes grown and transformed into pizza sauce? Under what conditions was the milk produced, and how was it turned into cheese? Where did the salt, white pepper, and oregano come from? These questions aren’t easily answered, even in today’s information age. It’s much easier for me to tell you that oregano is a variety of wild marjoram native to the Mediterranean region than it is to figure out how the oregano in my spice rack actually made it into my home.

So I’m taking The Domestic Man into a new direction, partially inspired by my recent tours of The Culinary Institute of America and my local Whole Foods. Along with continuing to post new recipes every Tuesday, I’m going to start doing a little investigative work on the side. I’ll be traveling to and touring farms, manufacturers, and other organizations involved in the food industry to gain a better understanding of the processes in place to get food onto our tables. I plan on working with everyone from small, family-owned businesses to large, faceless corporations in order to better my understanding of how things work. And obviously, I’m going to share the results of my work with you.

The goal of this project isn’t to judge these food producers as being “good” or “bad”, but rather to look at the environment they are working in and how that affects us as consumers. I’m not an investigative journalist, policy maker, or food scientist; I’m simply a home chef with a nagging feeling that there’s more to what we eat than what we eat.

I should mention that if you are a farm or company involved in something related to food, send me an email so we can brainstorm some ideas. Bear in mind that these travels will be limited by my (constantly shrinking) free time and budget, but overall I’m very excited to get started. As always, thanks for sticking around.

Russ

A Morning with Whole Foods Market

Over the weekend I was invited to a one-on-one tour of my local Whole Foods Market in Annapolis, Maryland. Although we shop at this store often, it was enlightening to walk around the store with their resident Healthy Eating Specialist and discuss some of their programs and policies. While we had a few opposing food philosophies, the amount of overlap between their goals and my health principles was impressive and encouraging. So, let’s talk about what I discovered.

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My Trip to the Culinary Institute of America (and a Recipe)

A while back I received an email asking if I’d like to come visit the Culinary Institute of America’s campus in Hyde Park, NY. At first, I was hesitant to accept the invite – what did they want from me in return? – but it turns out they simply wanted to show me their program in case I wanted to share it with my readers. Eager to have an inside look at one of the biggest and most-respected culinary schools in the country (I mean, come on, Anthony Bourdain!), I accepted the offer and spent a couple days on campus. Along the way, I familiarized myself with their program and ate some delicious food. The folks at the school were also kind enough to share one of their recipes with me, which I’ve included below.

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