www.eatlocalchallenge.com

Bread meets conceptual art

I live in an area with some extraordinary bread: complex naturally-leavened creations from Acme or Semifreddi's, surprisingly light 100 percent whole wheat from Vital Vittles and many other great offerings. And yet I still bake most of my own bread (even sourdough on occasion). 

The transformation of the uninteresting ingredients of flour and water into something that is alive and aromatic is a magical experience for me.  Bread baking is a physical act, an observational act, an exercise in patience, and eventually a wonderful sensory experience.

Bread presents a locality problem for Northern Californians, as not much wheat is grown in California. There are a few sources of wheat, to be sure, like Full Belly Farm in Yolo County.  And bread doesn't have to be one-hundred percent wheat -- loaves can loaded with goodies like nuts, seeds, grains and fruits.

So for the past year, I've been experimenting with what I call the "local loaf," a loaf of bread made using many ingredients available at the Berkeley Farmers Market or from local sources:  whole wheat flour from Full Belly Farm in Yolo County, pecans from Sonoma County, honey from Napa County, milk from Straus Family Creamery in Marin County and brown rice from Massa Organics in Butte County (the locations are mapped after the jump).  In the end, around sixty percent of the raw ingredients (by weight excluding water) were from local sources.   

As I worked on this project over many months, I thought about conceptual art.  In conceptual art, the concept behind the work takes precedence over the aesthetics of the piece.  Tom Marioni's Walking and Drawing a Line as Far as I Can Reach, for example, are explorations of human activity -- the actions of walking and reaching, respectively.   If I wanted to stretch some words a bit, I could almost call the project of making bread from local ingredients "conceptual baking."  That is, the concept of using local ingredients took precedence over flavor and texture (but not too much precedence -- the bread is quite tasty).

After the jump, I present my recipe for this bread and a map showing the source of the local ingredients.

The best eat-local cookbooks

by Jamie S.

To begin to integrate local eating into your day-to-day life, you need to do a little research: Where do your nearby market gardeners sell their wares? Are there buying clubs? Community-supported agriculture plans? Farmers’ markets? How can you get hold of meat, seafood, eggs, and grains that are grown or caught sustainably in your area? Who has apples and strawberries in season?

This is a learning process, and--let’s be honest--it takes a while. Luckily, one discovery usually leads to another. Over the course of about two years, we’ve slowly become intuitive local shoppers. Honestly, we don’t notice anymore that we do it; we just have a different set of desires and values when it comes to buying food.

But for many would-be local eaters, cooking local food is just as challenging as finding it. So many of us are used to the effortlessness of convenience foods. Those of us who love to cook may tend to go to the grocery store with a list of items we need for certain recipes. Eating local requires you to start from the other end of the equation: This is what I have--now, what in the world do I do with it?

Celebrating the Last of Summer's Best

by Expat Chef

Ah, tomatoes. Between the farmers market and our CSA, we have around eight pounds of these gracing our table weekly. I rarely have a plan when I buy them. I just know that we will eat them somehow.

August is the best month for tomatoes, the peak of season. As this month winds down, so does the tomato crop. My advice, and I follow it wholeheartedly, is to enjoy them while I can.

I love the different flavors of heirlooms with just basil, balsamic and olive oil and some fresh mozzarella, but if you are going to prepare these beauties, here are a few of my favorite ways this season.

Fresh Salsa
3 large tomatoes, cored, seeded and diced
1 small red onion diced
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1 green pepper or mild green chile, seeded and diced
1 red pepper, seeded and diced
1 jalapeno, cored, seeded and diced (2 for hot)
1/2 tbs. vinegar
1 tsp. lime juice
kosher salt to taste

Once everything but the garlic and cilantro has been chopped and measured and put in a bowl, take about 1/3 of the mixture and place in the workbowl of a food processor. Add the whole garlic cloves. Pulse until chopped fine, but not total puree. Add the mixture back to the bowl, add the cilantro and adjust the salt to taste. You can adjust the heat by adding an extra pepper (or using more mild green chile), or even using a hotter variety of pepper, right up to a habernero, if you can take the heat. I also like to use yellow, orange, green and red tomatoes for extra color and flavor instead of all red ones.

Local plum jam

(Editor note:  This September, the Eat Local Challenge blog will be hosting an international, month-long eat local challenge in association with the Locavores.  This particular challenge will have a special focus of preserving, canning, and putting food up for the winter.  Stay tuned to this site in the next few days for more information. Meanwhile, this first post from Marc discusses making plum jam at home.)

By Marc

The grounds around my apartment have two plum trees that become heavy with fruit in the mid-summer.  The first few years I lived here, I didn't do anything with them except perhaps eat a few, only to rediscover that they are almost all pit and skin.  But last year my upstairs neighbor taught me how to make plum jam, so this summer I was sure to spend part of each weekend on a ladder harvesting as many plums as I could, even creating a strange contraption called "the depluminator" to pick fruit growing on high boughs beyond my reach.

Jam or jelly can be a fantastic way to preserve the bounty of local summer fruit.  A significant non-local component, however, is often required in the form of large quantities of sugar.  Much of the sugar sold here comes from the tropics, often produced by ill-treated workers on ill-treated lands.  Sugar beets are another source of white sugar, with California produces only about 6 percent of the U.S. crop (most comes from Minnesota and North Dakota). (An episode of the Deconstructing Dinner radio program goes into great detail about sugar, stevia and honey). 

Roasted Ratatouille

by Expat Chef

No, I haven't seen the movie. But I've known about Ratatouille for a lot longer than the Pixar version. It's one of those long-standing classic dishes, but until recently, I could not tell you why the dish made so much sense. Not until last summer at the farmers market while I was shopping what was fresh and in season for mid-summer.

Consider what is in season right now: tomatoes, peppers, onions, eggplant, okra, zucchini, yellow squash, garlic. All in season, all together, all in the one recipe. Makes perfect sense to build a dish around those ingredients, right? I just never got that point. The recipe existed before the corner Megamart with anything and everything regardless of season. It was built around the vegetables that were available, fresh, and in grown in one's garden. Simple. Rustic. And delicious.

One Local Summer 2007

by Liz

Looking for an easy way to introduce local eating into your lifestyle?  Join us at One Local Summer, where as a group, we are preparing one entirely local dinner (or as close as we can get) each week of the summer. It's a great way to explore the bounty of what your state has to offer, and start learning when certain things come into season.

There's really no better time to start eating local produce than in the summer when vegetables are at their peak in freshness and flavor, and farmers markets are in full swing.

Simply in Season, a book review

by Liz

Once upon a time, many people in the US grew at least some portion of their own food.  They ate what was grown nearby, according to the seasons of the year.  Staples like flour, sugar, dry goods and spices were always readily available, but the fresh produce of the moment was determined by the season of the year.  It would have been unheard of to have access to asparagus in February; asparagus is a spring food, meant to be eaten in large quantities when the tender shoots emerged from the patch in your backyard.  Not to mention, the backyard asparagus is basically free compared to that $6 asparagus from the organic market.

Since the advent of the industrial revolution, we have been straying from our agricultural heritage, and have turned to much more energy-intensive methods of food production.  Instead of small, diverse farms peppering the landscape, the majority of our food today is grown on mega-farms not limited to corn and soy.  Monocultures of tomatoes, spinach and carrots stretch as far as the eye can see in certain parts of California, dependent on large machinery, petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides, farm subsidies, cheap migrant labor and cross-country refrigerated trucking.  Is this the kind of food system to be proud of?

Reducing Kitchen Waste by Eating Chard Stems

By Marc

Chard -- red, white, or yellow -- is one of my favorite leafy greens.  The flavor is mild, it is available all year at the Farmers' Markets in the Bay Area, and it is a perfect side dish for a wide variety of main courses.  I typically cook it with a bit of garlic, but it also works in a tortilla casserole, or a filling for pastry (the one in the May/June 1998 Saveur magazine is especially delicious). 

But I never eat the stems, and this waste of vegetable matter always bothered me.  So I recently started a project to sell myself on eating the chard stems, otherwise known as "stem sell research."   

Spring Greens

by Expat Chef

Finally! I did not think I could get tired of winter squash, but I am sick of orange and brown and really ready for local green. Green grass, green leaves, greens. The arrival of early spring means the heartiest of greens will be in season and at the farmer’s market soon! These early spring, nutrient-dense veggies include items like kale and kohlrabi. To celebrate my anxious anticipation for my farmer’s market to open, I thought I would post a couple recipes for spring’s coming bounty.

I just got a new recipe idea from Ali at The Cleaner Plate Club blog on making Kale Chips. Here’s my version.

Pickling in Winter

By Marc

Where citrus grows, winter can be a time to preserve the bounty by making pickles and preserves.  In each of the last few years, I have spent a day or two making Indian lemon pickles:  pieces of lemon (peel and all) bathed in a spicy, salty, oily sauce.   

So far I have made two different pickles using the lemons from my backyard tree.  These pickles are not completely local because the salt, spices and oil are produced in some location that is outside my 100-mile circle. To estimate their local percentage, I weighed each ingredient and found that about 75% of the weight was local (lemons) with the remaining 25% being non-local (salt, oil and spices) .