Ómós Digest: #27 Remember your roots
Dan Barber, locally grown food and cooking from the ground up.
Welcome to the Ómós Digest. This newsletter will hopefully bring you on that journey about the food you were looking for, or perhaps never knew existed. It is our quest to expand on what we don’t know and to share with those who care. If you haven’t read Newsletter #1 yet, it can be found here.
There are certain books you read on holiday: novels, autobiographies, or that recommendation from a friend whose taste you invariably trust. Books with the potential to navigate you into the distant world that is your holiday; a portal to fantasy and an escape from well... reality. Then there are books you pack but don't necessarily read (and never intend to read), but for one reason or another carry with you for the entirety of your trip. Lastly, there are books that were never intended to be read by the seaside but turn out to be educational, inspiring and simply brilliant. The Third Plate by Dan Barber is one of those.
Dan Barber is the chef and owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, an incredible restaurant located in New York. Everything about the restaurant speaks perfection. The space is beautiful, situated in an enchanted location on the outskirts of New York. A pilgrimage only rivalled by perhaps Restaurant Faviken. There's a giant team whose service is thoughtful with endless resources and incredible menus served. The structure is not dissimilar to the few great restaurants around the world. What I love about Blue Hill is their approach which is initiated by Dan. He continues to blur the lines between the dining experience and education, bringing the principles of good farming directly to the table.
Sitting on a flight to Valencia, my headphones stowed away in my checked luggage and with the inability to sleep, I glanced down towards said book. The Third Plate’s cover was glaring up at me, taunting me in an almost I dare you manner. After all, the purpose of the trip was to decompress, eat tapas and discover the wonders of ‘Almuerzo’. I reluctantly pick up the book but once again, like many times before, I fall into Dan’s thought-provoking world of gastronomical activism. While this is not a book I have read cover to cover, it is so brilliantly worded and accurately descriptive. A book that is equally challenging and educational all at once, so much so that within a number of paragraphs I'm engaged in note-taking and conjuring up newsletters. My excitement (and partial exhaustion) is stimulated by one man's comprehensive compilation of content sourced through an entire community's knowledge.
A key theme in The Third Plate is the prerogative of the chef. Dan states that, “A chef’s worth is largely determined by his interpretation of great ingredients.” When asked who I think are great chefs, my interpretation would be the leaders in our field championing great ingredients, not those who can cook the best (chef being the French term for chief right?). Today as chefs (chiefs), we have a responsibility to cook morally. Dan recounts a truly formative moment in his career, a revolutionary eating experience at restaurant Chez Panisse. Following a meal largely composed of seasonal vegetables - cookery that allowed the product to do the talking - he was served a dessert of a peach. A single peach. Initially humoured by the starkness of the fruit on a plate before him, he called over to the pastry kitchen, sarcastically acknowledging the hard work involved with creating this ‘dessert’. Surely a peach was not a justifiable demise to a meal, especially in a restaurant like Chez Panisse. Then he took his first bite. Dan’s New York City attitude diluted as he was engrossed by the Californian sun, peach juices running down his chin. Having eaten many fruits that appeared just like this one, Dan realised that this was his first real peach. Grown by Mas Masumoto, an organic grower in California, the peach tasted like a great wine should - its acidity and sweetness in blissful harmony. It was a true expression of seasonality and reflection of place.
Reading Dan’s anecdote of what a perfect dessert might entail reminded me once more of the staggering experience at Noma Mexico. On the tasting menu was half a barbecued avocado. It was brûléed with piloncillo sugar (an unrefined local cane sugar), brushed with a conserve of sour orange and extremely acidic imported Danish ants, and finished with a scoop of avocado sorbet. Sounds good? It was average at best. A dessert with a host of techniques, concepts and ideas promising to heighten an ingredient that tasted better in a guacamole! In the bar however was a simple yet incredible serving of Mango Piña: a tropical green-fleshed mango with notes of fresh pineapple. Considerably smaller than the mangoes imported to Northern Europe, the taste is delicious enough to stand alone on a plate. With its flesh firmly attached to the stone, the whole ripe fruit was hand bruised to release the natural juices. A hole was then made on top of the mango and the juice and pulp was sucked from within. All we did was source perfectly ripe fruit from a local farm, massage each one and serve in a bowl of ice. Yet it became the perfect end to a summer meal.
Two weeks ago I visited Dermot Carey’s farm. As I was walking the fields, I saw pumpkins, squash, Italian varieties of broccoli, onions, late-harvest tomatoes, peppers and aubergines. It was a chef's paradise. When making our way back to the house, we passed a long row of purple beetroots. These beets were the size of footballs, bulging, splitting and past their best. There were more planted than could be harvested. When asked why they had been allowed to grow to this stage (reaching the point of no return), the answer was a lack of demand. What is not harvested is converted to compost and the energy returned back into the soil over time. Farmers like Dermot are rare. He listens to chefs and understands their motive to innovate while being fueled by a challenge. But in this challenge, shouldn’t we source what is abundant and innovate through creative constraints? Seeing the beetroot imploding in the rows by my feet stood with me.
Woah writing on a plane can feel quite creative - amirite? No emails, no Instagram, no distractions… Am I naive to question if Ryanair's resistance to in-flight wifi is a calling for creative writing? The allure of a panini is not quite doing it for me but back to the book, damn I wish I brought a highlighter, Dan’s perspective is invigorating. I am thinking he is a genius but at the same time, I wonder how much he practices what he preaches? Is it possible to be so politically perfect?
Dan’s dessert experience at Chez Panisse is an interesting perspective on what can be achieved when good sourcing and context are combined. It makes sense after all. If good cooking starts with great agri, then surely we should start with growing on our own doorstep. Thomas Keller of French Laundry restaurant in California, once wrote, “It’s easy to cook a filet mignon well and call yourself a chef, but that’s not real cooking, that's heating. Preparing the tripe, however, is a transcendental act.” You can follow a recipe that works, provide clear value to the customer (like serving foie gras) and you will achieve applause, but what exactly are you contributing towards? I am in agreement with Dan when he says that “we should expect transcendence from chefs, in the same way that we expect it from artists. To lift us out of our usual understanding of things, of what we know.”
Maybe an Irish beetroot doesn’t possess quite the same balance of flavours of a mango eaten in Mexico or a peach served minutes from its farm, enough to stand alone on a plate at least (who knows with the right growing conditions). However, there is something wonderful about celebrating food in its best state, dictated by good agriculture and provenance. With this in mind, I decided to honour the humble beetroot which grows almost 12 months of the year in Ireland. Could a taproot vegetable be transformed into a flower, both physically and metaphorically? Could a story be told in the process? In our quest, we created a vegetable serving of sliced beetroot shaped like a rose and cooked in blackcurrant wood oil. The rose was served with a chilled broth of clarified whey, infused with sloe and hip berries that grow in the same land as the beets. The infusion of the berries into the whey was reminiscent of the malolactic flavours found in some wines: a bi-product of fermentation. The dish was finished with berries and shoots preserved throughout the year.
A final note from Dan Barber:
“Through transforming nature’s superior gifts into something transcendent, it’s possible to make a gift on a plate even more brilliant. When you get the professional side involved it trickles down to everybody.”
