USA Today
With spring here, freshness is in season -By Anne Goodfriend Special for, USA TODAY
April 2006
In spring, a young chef's fancy turns to ... fennel? Yes, and nettles, sweet peas, morel mushrooms, soft-shell crabs, shad roe, asparagus.
"Every year we get so excited" about the fresh produce, seafood and meat available "as close as you can get," says chef Guenter Seeger, who changes the menu daily in his eponymous Atlanta restaurant.
Increasingly, food that doesn't have to travel by truck and isn't exposed to the chemicals of agribusiness is gaining star status. And in spring, menus coast to coast are showcasing fresh, local ingredients.
At this time of year, Seeger says, "we don't need the exotic" vegetables imported from California: "Our local growers bring us bok choy, sugar snap peas, tiny turnips like candies," and in May, wild passion fruit. He'll ask his favorite supplier, Woodland Gardens, for purslane, a green that grows wild in the area. And he'll buy local organic roses for soups and sorbets.
Among the spring dishes at Seeger's will be a non-traditional gazpacho: With the tomatoes, "we'll use carrots, young beets and white asparagus" instead of the usual cucumbers, onions and pepper, accompanied by a white asparagus mousse (and perhaps a starter of focaccio with sautéed strawberries, fresh basil and black pepper).
"People are becoming more concerned about where their food comes from," says Dana Cowin, editor of Food & Wine magazine, which "leads them to the high-end ingredients" supplied by artisan farmers raising everything from fava beans to fiddlehead ferns, as well as livestock.
In the 1960s, the motivation for hippies who grew organic food on communal farms was "a holistic Utopia," Cowin says, "but now it's a mainstream concern for health." The organic option has spawned "upscale communities where people are raising their own chickens and cattle."
Near Denver, for example, the multimillion-dollar residences at Maytag Mountain Ranch come with access to trout fishing, daily fresh eggs and "permaculture (year-round) gardening." And in the upscale community of Tehama, in Carmel, Calif., Cowin says, organic food giant Earthbound Farms "has planted all the vegetable gardens."
California, of course, put the "oh" in organic years ago: Restaurants such as Alice Waters' famed Chez Panisse in Berkeley — the grande dame of locally, carefully raised ingredients and the families who farm them — and The French Laundry, Thomas Keller's showcase in Yountville, draw international clientele.
"If we don't see it at the farmers market, we don't use it," says Jean Pierre Moulle, chef de cuisine at Chez Panisse. "We're not trendy: The most exotic things we use are wild nettles (on pizzas at the café upstairs) and wild fennel and watercress. Thirty or 40 local farmers grow everything for us."
The restaurant's menu changes daily, relying on produce picked the day it's served. "We use the same ingredient in different ways"; for example, asparagus will appear grilled in a warm salad, then show up in a spring ragout.
Meat matters, too: In addition to such standbys as spring lamb, Moulle is trying new poultry these days — guinea hens and squab — from several suppliers.
In New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, fresh spring crops have helped cheer chefs and diners. "You barely have to cook" the local legumes, says chef John Besh, owner of The Besh Steakhouse and the restaurant August. "Spring means so much to us now: the rebirth of the city, the food becoming more fresh, new, light, vibrant," he says.
"We change two to three dishes a week," keeping pace with the season: "By mid-May, there'll be no more crawfish." But Besh is using them now in a new dish: agnoletti filled with crawfish and tossed with hickory-smoked fresh sweet peas, spring garlic and white asparagus.
He's incorporating the season's "great new flavors like dandelions, sweet English peas, wild onions, spring garlic" — a green, sweet and pungent onion-like bulb he uses in "everything from soups to stews, or pickled in salads."
The restaurants' staple dairy products and fresh cheese come from the Smith Creamery in Mount Harmon, La., which also supplies Besh with organic veal.
"The less fatty cuts" of meat are in demand nationwide, says Patrick Martins, co-founder of Heritage Foods USA, "a virtual farmers market" that contracts with suppliers in 18 states to sell "rare, undervalued" American meat by mail order or online (heritagefoodsusa.com).
With consumers more conscious of obesity and the effects of pollutants, pesticides and preservatives on their food, he says, there's "an upswing in lighter cuts" like pork loin, country ribs and chops instead of, say, shoulder or belly. "Pork is enjoying a renaissance," he says, now that farmers are raising lighter breeds like Red Wattle and Tamworth. "Bison is very lean, too."
Like a growing number of food suppliers these days, the company emphasizes its products' "traceability," Martins says, to ensure that "people can be confident of where their food comes from." Heritage labels its meat with the farm of origin, what the animals were fed and the date they were slaughtered.
Though such products may cost more, fine diners and cooks increasingly seem willing to spring for the most carefully cultivated ingredients they can find.
