There’s a farmer in New Jersey who grows remarkable heritage varieties of cranberries. Johanna Kolodny wants to reach her.
The farmer doesn’t have e-mail, however, and her new cell phone doesn’t deliver voice messages. It just lets her know the phone numbers of people who called.
“She calls you back if she wants to,” said Kolodny, who recently was hired by Print, a new restaurant in New York’s Ink 48 hotel, as the on-staff forager.
“I’m trying to track her down,” she added.
Kolodny doesn’t actually do the foraging herself. She’s one of a growing number of specialists who are trying to fill in the missing links in supply chains of some of the more hard-to-find items at a time when sourcing and sustainability are becoming more important to consumers.
“Everybody can go to the farmers market or buy from the established channels,” said Matthew Accarrino, chef of SPQR, a fine-dining restaurant in San Francisco. “Certainly, once you get to the upper echelons, we’re all dealing with the same purveyors. Obviously, you differentiate yourself through cooking, but also in accessing products that might be unique to your restaurant.”
When Accarrino worked in Italy at Antonello Colonna, a 20-seat, one-Michelin-star restaurant in Labico, outside of Rome, that had only one dinnertime seating, he was out at 7 a.m. with his co-workers, getting goat milk from local farmers and picking wild arugula.
But most chefs, having kitchens to run, don’t generally have time to wrangle with reclusive farmers and quirky foragers, or to hunt through the woods on their own for obscure ingredients.
That’s where people like Kolodny come in, or Erin Littlestar, who recently was hired to be the sustainability and sourcing manager, or “sourceress,” of Sweetgreen. The fast-casual salad and frozen-yogurt chain just opened its fourth unit in the Washington, D.C., area and is on target to open two more units this year.
Sweetgreen partner Nicolas Jammet used to spend Sundays at the farmers market and negotiated with growers to deliver food to his restaurants.
“But now it’s too much,” he said, adding that he felt a need to have someone dedicated to putting a system in place to establish relationships with small but reliable suppliers across the country. He said such a system would allow him to live up to the promises he was making to customers to serve food that was as sustainable as possible.
Littlestar had been working for DC Central Kitchen, which prepares 4,000 meals each day that are sent to homeless shelters and other places that serve people in need. She succeeded in getting about 100,000 pounds of food from Virginia farms between June and October of last year, and realized that if she could get items like those into homeless shelters, surely she could get them into restaurants.
“I’m systematically going through the menu they already have and am looking at what’s there that could be better,” she said. “Could we be buying higher-quality shrimp? What can we get that’s the closest [geographically] or the best that still works for us business-wise in terms of price point and consistency?”
What can be procured consistently goes on the regular menu, along with items that customers demand but that come from far away, such as avocados.
But more obscure or seasonal items from nearby are featured on the “local” list, and the chain promises that customers can have a 100-percent local meal—with all ingredients coming from within a couple hundred miles of the restaurant—if they want one. Customers have responded well, Littlestar said, noting that they recently switched to a local bacon supplier.
“We used to go through 10 pounds a week; we just went through 20 pounds in two-and-a-half days,” she said.
Littlestar, a devout “locavore” who says she only eats food that comes from the Chesapeake Bay watershed, said seasonal items tend not to be too expensive compared to food trucked in from across the country, because transportation costs are so high and because everyone in the supply chain has to make a living.
But Kolodny says it depends, and of course some items simply aren’t available locally.
“Dates and citrus don’t grow here,” she said.
And some items come from far away, but are still unique, such as the chestnuts she has procured from the University of Missouri’s Horticulture and Agroforestry Research Center.
“I’ve learned not only about the growing of chestnut trees, but how we store them is totally wrong,” she said, noting that the nuts should be refrigerated as soon as they’re harvested and kept cold until two to three days before you plan to eat them. That warming-up period lets the nuts cure a bit and develop a sweeter flavor, she said. It’s also about how long it takes to ship them to New York.
She has found a date farmer in San Francisco—“He does something like a dozen different varieties of dates,” she said—as well as cream that’s so good that pastry chef Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez churns her own butter with it.
Full-time food procurers are one route to go for restaurateurs seeking unique ingredients. Another is working directly with foragers who hunt through the countryside collecting delicacies.
“These guys are usually ex-loggers who know all the good spots for wild things,” said Vitaley Paley, chef-owner of Paley’s Place in Portland, Ore. “They disappear in the woods for days and come into the restaurant with some amazing wild stuff—mushrooms, truffles, huckleberries, nettles, mustard blossoms, wild ramps, watercress, miner’s lettuce.
“They are also a very elusive group of folks,” he added. “One day they just disappear. So we wait for someone else to show.”
Other chefs take a more active relationship in working with foragers. That’s what Drew Belline did when he was working at Bacchanalia in Atlanta and developed a relationship with forager Ken Zinkand.
“He just walked in the back door about five years ago with a really beautiful bag of chanterelles and asked if we wanted to buy them,” Belline said.
He took that relationship with him when he moved to Bacchanalia’s sister restaurant, Floataway Café, where locally foraged items find places of honor on the menu.
“It’s very much celebrated when Ken comes in the back door,” Belline said.
He might bring in wild muscadine grapes, blackberries, figs or his specialty, mushrooms.
“We do tasting menus themed on his mushrooms,” Belline said, “especially when he brings in the big hen of the woods mushrooms.”
He’ll bring in up to 50 pounds of chanterelles at a time, which Belline preserves by sautéing them with garlic, stopping the cooking with Champagne vinegar and then covering them with olive oil and storing them in jars.
“He goes out in the woods and picks them, and within 30 minutes of them being picked, they’re in the back door,” Belline said of Zinkand. “They’re like sweet corn. They lose their flavor and their aroma just a couple of days after being picked.”
And the cost isn’t bad, Belline added—about $12 a pound.
But Zinkand said he doesn’t collect the mushrooms for money anyway. He has a day job—as a freelance convention center freight manager—but because he loves mushrooms so much he takes the summers off to pursue his hobby.
“The money makes it all that much more enjoyable, because I can justify staying in the woods longer,” he said.— [email protected]
