The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (54 page)

Will Blue wheat one day make its way to Blue Hill Farm in Massachusetts? Maybe. But in the meantime our Blue Brioche will get buttered with Blue Hill Farm’s “single udder” butter, which we already use today.

The idea for single udder butter started with the first delivery of grass-fed milk from our family’s newly converted farm. But you could argue it really began a few years earlier, when my brother David and I began to notice the forest encroaching on Blue Hill’s pastureland.

It was two decades after my grandmother Ann had passed away. The beef
cattle were gone, and that vibrant edge of semiwilderness I’d studied as a child from my perch on the tractor looked increasingly like plain old wilderness. More bramble, thicker ferns. Our grandmother’s cherished fields were slowly shrinking. Which is why, in 2006, David and I decided to resurrect the farm as an all-grass dairy. The grazing cattle preserved the integrity of the open space; the dairy began supplying the restaurants with grass-fed milk.

Soon after the first batch arrived, the farmer we’d hired to oversee the land posed a question: Did I know that cows with names produce more milk than cows without names? Apparently he knew as much, so he hung signs on every stall: Annabelle, Daffodil, Jillian, Sunshine, and twenty others. Different names, but also different breeds, and mixes of breeds—a United Nations of bovine diversity. 

For me, it brought to mind a slightly different question: do cows with names produce more
distinctive
milk than cows without names? If the answer was yes—and it wasn’t hard to imagine, watching the parade of colors and sizes on display as the herd filed into the barn twice a day, that it
had
to be yes—why blend all that distinctiveness into one vat?

As soon as we began separating the cows’ milks, their differences became clear. Annabelle, a Dutch Belted cow, is a catholic grazer, producing butter that is bright yellow. Sunshine, a cross of Kerry and Shorthorn, is more discerning. Her butter is ivory white, except in the heat of summer when it turns golden and tastes like pound cake.

Connecting the butter to the personality of the breeds is one thing; connecting it to the condition of the grass is another. Without the flavor-flattening effect of grain feed, the character of the butter changes according to the quality of the grass. We already taste the differences from season to season. A generation from now, we’ll go deeper. A recent visit to the restaurant from an older French chef got me to see how.

The chef tasted Annabelle’s butter. Mildly disappointed, he declared it a bit bland. He offered rain as a possible cause. (It had, in fact, rained earlier in
the week at Blue Hill Farm.) Then he asked where the cows were grazing—close to the barn, or in a field farther away? He guessed farther away. When I called the farmer to check, he confirmed the cows had been grazing in the field farthest from the barn.

How did the chef know? As Eliot Coleman once taught me, in an all-grass dairy, the most distant pasture is usually the least grazed. The soil in these fields is sparsely fertilized as a result, and the grass is almost always less lush and nutritious. The chef, apparently, could taste the difference.

When Klaas and I walked his fields, he schooled me in the mechanics of identifying a healthy pasture. “The trick,” he told me, “is to learn the language of the soil.”

Single udder butter will help with the translation. Grass-fed cows produce butter that’s varied not only by season or by week but also by field and breed. The next generation will know this for sure because they’ll be able to taste the difference.

The second course is really an ode to the first. The secret to great wheat, I had learned, is that it’s not about the wheat. Klaas’s complex rotations of small grains and legumes create much of the flavor of what he harvests, and they all require gastronomic support. I had already imagined a role for milky oats on my menu. Could I create a dish honoring more of these lesser-known crops?

I did it just recently, serving them in the style of a risotto, with the grains replacing the rice. There was rye (Klaas’s go-to crop to build carbon in the soil), barley (weed suppression), buckwheat (the cleanser—ridding the soil of any buildup of toxins), and millet (important for drier weather conditions). And I included legumes, like red kidney beans and soybeans (nitrogen fixers).

Without the high starch of risotto rice, the grains lacked a creamy consistency. So I stirred in a puree of brassicas—kale, broccoli, and cabbage—representing the mustard plants (also nitrogen boosters) in Klaas’s rotations. The porridge took on the uniformity of a risotto and, with its dozen or so grains and beans, was deeply flavorful.

We called it Rotation Risotto, and it’s been on Blue Hill’s menu in the city ever since. One night I walked through the dining room and heard a diner ask, “What’s rotation risotto?” The waiter fielded the question with a fine explanation, and then he added, “It’s the plant equivalent of ‘nose-to-tail’ eating.” The analogy struck me as exactly right. Nose-to-tail means cooking with the entire animal, not merely the most coveted parts; Rotation Risotto means cooking with the whole farm.

I can be certain that a version of Rotation Risotto will appear in the future, and that’s not only because I feel confident about Klaas’s rotations continuing, and continuing to evolve through the work of his son Peter, but also because Blue wheat has already introduced a whole new system of rotations to Stone Barns.

Having managed to persuade Craig to give up a full acre of pasture for the project, Jack mapped out a series of crops that would follow the wheat. He was thinking about the soil, of course, and how best to enrich it. I was thinking about my menu, and how many other new grains I could add into my Rotation Risotto.

“You might get a few, we’ll see,” Jack told me when I asked what to expect. “But you’ve got your head stuck in Klaas’s system. He’s a grain farm. We’re not.” Instead, Jack described a very different set of rotations. “After the wheat is harvested, we’ll plant rye and a cover crop to rest the soil,” he said. “Some may go to you, some may go to feed the pigs; since we took this land out of Craig’s pasture rotations for a while, he’ll have to benefit somehow. After that we’ll follow with Mazourek’s winter squash.”

Jack was referring to the Cornell University breeder Michael Mazourek, who years earlier had admitted to me that no one ever asks him to breed for flavor. Upon our request, Michael had developed a super-sweet variety of
winter squash, experimental line number 898, which Jack had been trialing for a few years. It looked like a shrunken butternut squash, with an intense sweetness and an almost pudding-like consistency.

I couldn’t believe my luck—a full acre of it to work with. Grains are terrific, but this squash was like nothing I’d ever tasted, and from Jack’s point of view, it would make a lot more money than grain. Even better, Michael assured us it would yield only slightly less per acre than conventional varieties of butternut squash. That’s because this new variety, like those Mountain Magic tomatoes, was designed to produce good yields for the farmer.

One certainty for the menu of the future: chefs won’t just celebrate heirlooms. In a half-century, as long as we embrace like-minded breeders, the idea that feeding a growing world requires sacrificing deliciousness for yield will be considered a silly, antiquated idea. So will the one-size-fits-all mentality of seed breeding. Working together, chefs and breeders can help ensure the production of flavorful and nutritious crops ideally suited to their localities.

Dishes like Rotation Risotto, with a puree of 898 squash swirled in, will help broadcast the message.

The future of nose-to-tail eating? Bone to blood. And a few decades from now you will have it at Blue Hill, because I’m predicting Stone Barns will one day raise more pigs.

That’s an odd conviction in light of what Steve Jones said later during his visit to Stone Barns, and yet it’s one I’m prepared to stand by. We had stopped at a group of Berkshire pigs hustling around the grain bin for their lunch. I mentioned that they’d provide enough manure to fertilize the land where we’d be growing wheat.

“A lot of growers think,
Well, I’ve got manure from the animals, so I’ve got
plenty of nitrogen and phosphorus to fertilize my soil
,” Steve said, measuring his words carefully as he stood next to Jack. “But where’s the manure coming from? It’s from grain.” 

As he pointed out, we were still importing nutrients extracted from another farm in the form of grain feed in order to get the manure (and therefore the fertility) for our soil. “You’re a bit like a mining operation,” Steve said cheerfully. His point was an unconscious nod to Wes—how long could a system like this last? 

But then, over the next several months, I started to see a different system take shape, and the culinary results were as exciting as the ecological impact. Craig, who may or may not have overheard Steve calling out our Achilles’ heel, began removing the dead and unproductive trees from a small area of forest just behind the greenhouse. He used the pigs to clear the underbrush, rotating them around the land and planting grass seeds in their wake.

I happened to pass the area one afternoon the following spring, and what I saw amazed me. I swear it looked like a replica of the
dehesa. 
There were no oaks—or rather, there were a lot of oaks, just not the manicured and prolific acorn-producing ones of Extremadura—but there was an abundance of grass and roots to forage, and the trees created the same savanna effect.

Craig’s plan, unannounced but long in the making, was to replicate this
dehesa
-like system around the entire perimeter of the pasture. The goal was to reduce grain imports and ramp up the potential for homegrown forage.

“Sustainability by way of disturbance,” Jill Isenbarger, the director of Stone Barns Center, told me one day about the project. Disturb the land by sculpting it to be more productive but also more in balance with what the environment could provide.

I thought back to Miguel’s description of Veta la Palma as “a healthy artificial system.” (“Yes, artificial,” he said. “But what’s natural anymore?”) As he showed me, the best ecosystems do not preclude human intervention—in fact, they often depend on it, as long as people operate in service to the ecology. It seemed as though Jill had the right idea.

To this Craig added two more ideas, which is where the culinary benefits began to align with the environmental ones. Perhaps inspired by his mini-
dehesa
, or by the breeding genius of Steve, or both, Craig purchased an Ossabaw boar and had it sire two of his Berkshire sows. Direct descendants of the Iberian pigs of the
dehesa
,
Ossabaws have the same barrel-like design, muscular legs, and long, pointed snouts, perfect for sniffing out acorns.

The resulting offspring—we nicknamed them “Crossabaws”—were, by far, the best pork I’d ever cooked, with a layer of outstanding fat that was so integrated throughout the muscle of the animal that it was hard not to think of Eduardo proudly holding that slice of
jamón
up to the light. It was also hard not to think of how many more Crossabaws Craig might raise for the restaurant in the next several decades, their flavor improving (to be honest, that
is
hard to imagine) as the land continues to thrive.

The second culinary benefit was a kind of gravy—not necessary, really, but I feel very lucky to have it as part of the pork plate. It started when Craig created a program to convert those dead and unproductive trees into charcoal, a nice benefit for Blue Hill’s grilling station, which up until that point was using store-bought charcoal.

Inspired by the range of homemade wood charcoals, each one offering its own aroma, we got to thinking about carbonizing other things as well. It was the leftover bones from the pigs that first caught our attention. We’d always used the bones for broths and sauces at the restaurant, extracting the flavor and then tossing them in the trash. What if they were carbonized instead, just like wood? And what if, just as with wood, we could retain some of the flavor when we grilled? We succeeded in doing both. The grilled Crossabaw is seasoned in the cooking process by the pig-bone charcoal, and it’s outstanding.

And the pigs’ blood? Adam Kaye, our charcuterie maker, will use this other overlooked part of the animal for his version of a 
boudin noir
, a traditional French blood sausage that often incorporates grains or discarded meat scraps. Adam’s version, marrying superior technique and the miracles of coagulation, is pure blood. It’s intense, a sausage with an attitude. And the next
generation of eaters will be ready for it. Celebrating the whole animal will mean celebrating 
every
 part of the animal, blood and bones included.

Before writing this book, I would have predicted that a generation from now there would be only a sad selection of fish left for our menus. Having met Ángel, and seen his approach to the oceans’ offerings, I’m more optimistic. His imaginative sourcing and cooking will inspire other chefs (who will inspire home cooks) to seek out and celebrate less well-known—and lower trophic level—alternatives.

One such alternative appeared last year, when Jack was exploring the forest acreage around Stone Barns. He stumbled upon an old trout ladder, a simple apparatus that uses the natural current to raise the fish upstream. The structure had been built in the 1940s to raise fish for the Rockefeller family.

Right now, almost all farm-raised trout in the United States comes from enormous aquaculture ponds, where the conditions are as questionable as the quality of the fish. But trout, fed the right diet and farmed in conditions that mimic nature, can be incredibly tasty.

Down the road, Jack hopes to supply Blue Hill with brook and rainbow trout, which will feed on compost worms that he is cultivating near the greenhouse. The worms will break down waste from the restaurant’s vegetable scraps, providing a nice little sanitation service for the kitchen, and, at the end of the day, some farm-raised fillets of trout.