Quantcast
Channel: On front page – Grow
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 16

Breeding for Flavor

0
0

On a sticky weekday morning in August, a new restaurant called Estrellón (“big star” in Spanish) is humming with advanced prep and wine deliveries. All wood and tile and Mediterranean white behind a glass exterior, the Spanish-style eatery is the fourth venture of Madison culinary star Tory Miller. Opening is just three days away, and everything is crisp and shiny and poised.

But in the dining room, the culinary focus is already years beyond this marquee event. This morning is largely about creating the perfect tomato. Graduate students from UW–Madison working on a new program called the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative have set the table with large sheets of white paper and pens. At each place setting are a dozen small plastic cups of tomatoes, diced as if for a taco bar. Each container is coded.

Chef Miller takes a seat with colleagues Jonny Hunter of the Underground Food Collective and Dan Bonanno of A Pig in a Fur Coat. The chefs are here to lend their highend taste buds to science, and they start to banter about tomato flavor. What are the key elements? How important are they relative to each other?

Despite their intense culinary dedication, these men rarely just sit down and eat tomatoes with a critical frame of mind. “I learned a lot about taste through this project,” says Hunter. “I really started thinking about how I defined flavor in my own head and how I experience it.”

This particular tasting was held last summer. And there have been many others like it over the past few years with Miller, Hunter, Bonanno and Eric Benedict BS’04, of Café Hollander.

The sessions are organized by Julie Dawson, a CALS/UW–Extension professor of horticulture who heads the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative (formerly called the Chef–Farmer–Plant Breeder Collaborative). Her plant breeding team from CALS will note the flavors and characteristics most valuable to the chefs. Triangulating this with feedback from select farmers, plant breeders will get one step closer to the perfect tomato. But not just any tomato: One bred for Upper Midwest organic growing conditions, with flavor vetted by some of our most discerning palates.

“We wanted to finally find a good red, round slicer, and tomatoes that look and taste like heirlooms but aren’t as finicky to grow,” says Dawson at the August tasting, referring to the tomato of her dreams. “We’re still not at the point where we have, for this environment, really exceptional flavor and optimal production characteristics.”

Nationwide, the tomato has played a symbolic role in a widespread reevaluation of our food system. The pale, hard supermarket tomatoes of January have been exhibit A in discussions about low-wage labor and food miles. Seasonally grown heirloom tomatoes have helped us understand how good food can be with a little attention to detail.

But that’s just the tip of the market basket, because Dawson’s project seeks to strengthen a middle ground—an Upper Midwest ground, actually—in the food system. With chefs, farmers and breeders working together, your organic vegetables should get tastier, hardier, more abundant and more local where these collaborations exist.

Fine palates choose the best: Horticulture professor Julie Dawson, standing, getting data about the taste and texture of various breeds of tomatoes from (left to right) celebrated chefs Jonny Hunter, Tory Miller and Dan Bonanno. They conducted the tasting at Miller’s new restaurant, Estrellon. Photo by Gerhard Fischer

Julie Dawson decided she wanted to be a farmer at age 8. By her senior year in high school she was hooked on plant breeding and working in the Cornell University lab of Molly Jahn—now a professor of agronomy at CALS—on a project developing heat tolerance in beans. Dawson stayed at Cornell for college and continued to work for Jahn and Margaret Smith, a corn breeder who was working with the Iroquois to resurrect traditional breeds. By the time she finished college, Dawson had a strong background in both plant breeding and participatory research. During her graduate education at Washington State University she began breeding wheat for organic systems. As a postdoc in France, she started working on participatory breeding with bakers and farmers, focusing on organic and artisanal grains.

In September of 2013, barely unpacked in Madison, Dawson found herself traveling with CALS horticulture professor and department chair Irwin Goldman PhD’91 to a conference at the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture north of New York City.

Organized by food impresario Dan Barber, author of The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, the conference gathered chefs and breeders from across the country to talk about flavor. Barber knew what could happen when chefs and breeders talked because he was already working with Dawson’s graduate advisor at Washington State, wheat breeder Stephen S. Jones.

In the 1950s, as grocery stores replaced corner markets and California’s Central Valley replaced truck gardens, the vegetable market began to value sizes and shapes that were more easily processed and packed. That a tomato could be picked early in Florida and ripen during the boxcar ride to Illinois was more important than how it tasted. Pesticides and fertilizers also became more common, buffering differences between farms and providing a more uniform environment. Packing houses and national wholesalers dominated the market, and vegetable breeding followed.

Breeders have at their disposal a huge variety of natural traits—things like color, sugar content and hardiness. Over the course of decades they can enhance or inhibit these traits. But the more traits they try to control, the more complex the breeding. And flavor has been neglected over the last few decades in favor of traits that benefit what has become our conventional food system. “Breeders were targeting a different kind of agricultural system,” explains Dawson.

Barber wanted to reverse that trend, to connect farmers and plant breeders and chefs. It appealed to Dawson’s sense of where food should be going. “Breeding for standard shapes and sizes and shipping ability doesn’t mean that breeders aren’t interested in flavor,” she says. “It just means that the market doesn’t make it a priority.”

New to Madison, Dawson hadn’t met Tory Miller, but they connected at the Stone Barns Center, and together realized Madison was the perfect place to pursue this focus on flavor: A strong local food movement supporting a dynamic and growing number of farms, world-class chefs, and—through CALS’ Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics Program—one of the highest concentrations of public plant breeders in the world.

They decided to get started in the summer of 2014 by growing a collective palette of many varieties of the most common vegetables. Dawson approached the breeders, Miller rallied the chefs, and both reached out to their network of farmers. “The main idea of the project is to get more informal collaboration between farmers and plant breeders and chefs—to get the conversation started,” says Dawson. “We can really focus on flavor.”

When the chefs are done tasting tomatoes, they wander over to a table of corn and cucumber. They are magnetized by the different kinds of corn: an Iroquois variety, another type that is curiously blue, and large kernels of a corn called choclo, which is very popular in the Andes.

These are just a few jewels from the collection amassed over four decades by CALS corn breeder Bill Tracy, who works in both conventional and organic sweet corn. Tracy leads the world’s largest research program focused on the breeding and genetics of organic sweet corn, with five organically focused cultivars currently on the market. He was recently named the nation’s first endowed chair for organic plant breeding, with a $1 million endowment from Organic Valley and Clif Bar & Company and a matching $1 million gift from UW alumni John and Tashia Morgridge.

The support gives Tracy more room to get creative, and Dawson is helping to develop potential new markets for his breeds. Despite his focus on sweet corn, Tracy has always suspected there might be interest in corn with more flavor and less sugar. “We know from sweet corn that there are all sorts of flavors and tendencies,” Tracy says. From soups to the traditional meat and potato meal, he thinks savory corn deserves a place.

And building from deep Mexican and South American traditions of elotes and choclo corns, Tracy sees vast potential for new varieties. “Corn is one of the most variable species,” he says. “For every trait that we work with in corn there is an incredible range of variation.”

The chefs went crazy last year when Tracy introduced them to some of the Andean varieties. “Amazing,” says Bonanno of A Pig in a Fur Coat. “I want to make a dish like a risotto or a pasta dish or some type of salad. I don’t want the sweet on sweet on sweet. I just want the corn flavor. I want savory.”

Tracy’s modest sampler inspired chefs Hunter and Miller as well, and they started brainstorming potential growers for 2016. If the experiment takes off, the corn could start infiltrating Wisconsin restaurants this summer.

With so much genetic potential, the chefs help focus the breeding process. “Breeding is a craft,” Tracy says. “The great chefs—and we have some great ones in Madison—are truly artists. They are fine artists at the same level as a fine arts painter or musician. The creativity is just mind-boggling.”

And there is little question that they understand flavor. “They are able to articulate things that we can’t. We might be able to taste the differences, but we can’t say why they are different or why one is better than the other. The chefs are able to do that,” says Dawson. “And that’s useful for the whole food system.”

Eating their veggies: Members of the public, including these children, were invited to learn about and offer feedback on various breeds of vegetables at an Organic Vegetable Field Day at the West Madison Agricultural Research Station last summer. Photo by Joan Fischer

A food system has so many pieces— chefs, farmers, retailers, processors, consumers—but perhaps the most fundamental unit is the seed. After decades of consolidation in the seed industry and a significant decline in public breeding programs at land grant universities, many sectors of the food movement are turning their attention to seed.

One fortunate consequence of the industry concentration has been to create a market opening for smaller regional and organic seed companies. They, along with a few public breeders, still serve gardeners and market farmers. One goal of the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative is to systematically support breeding for traits that are important for local food systems.

These small companies develop their own breeds, but also adopt interesting varieties from public breeding programs. They have the capacity to target regional seed needs, and are usually okay with seed saving. “It’s almost like working with nonprofits because they are really interested in working with the community,” says Dawson.

After Adrienne Shelton MS’12 completed her PhD in 2014—she studied sweet corn breeding under Bill Tracy— she moved to Vitalis Organic Seeds, where she works with growers to find cultivars best suited for the Northeast. As a graduate student in CALS’ Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics program, Shelton was a leader in establishing the Student Organic Seed Symposium, an annual national gathering to offer information and support to young researchers focusing on breeding organic varieties.

“Getting farmers’ feedback is critical,” says Shelton of the opportunity to work with the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative. “The more locations, the better, especially in organic systems where there is more variation.”

The organic movement deserves a lot of credit for the trajectory of new food movements. “Organic growers often have a higher bar for the eating quality of produce because that’s what their customers are demanding,” Shelton says. “Putting a spotlight not just on the farmers but all the way back to the breeding is helping the eater to recognize that all these pieces have to be in place for you to get this delicious tomato that you’re putting on your summer salad.”

These kinds of seed companies will also help make local and regional food systems more resilient to climate change. “It’s fairly easy to breed for gradual climate change if you are selecting in the target environment, because things change over time,” says Dawson. “The most important thing is to have regional testing and regional selection.”

Overall, a more vigorous relationship between breeders and farmers promises a larger potential for varieties going forward, Dawson notes. The ultimate goal is to make plant breeding more of a community effort. When chefs and farmers and consumers participate in the selection process, says Dawson, “The varieties that are developed are going to be more relevant for them.”

Amy Wallner BS’10, a CALS graduate in horticulture and soil sciences, has worked behind both the knife and the tiller. While farming full-time, she spent six months working nights at a Milwaukee farm-to-table restaurant called c. 1880. Now she’s the proprietor of Amy’s Acre—actually, an acre and a half this year—on the margins of a commercial composting operation in Caledonia, Wisc., south of Milwaukee.

A team of students led by horticulture professor Julie Dawson (center, in cap) and agronomy professor Bill Tracy (second from left) prepare vegetables for the chefs’ tasting. The students conduct a tasting of their own to determine which varieties go on to the chefs. Photo by Joan Fischer

She sells to a co-op and a North Side farmers market, but her restaurant clients—c. 1880, Morel and Braise RSA (also part of the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative)—are integral to her business. Before she orders seed for the next growing season, she’ll drop off her catalogs for the chefs to study, returning later for in-depth conversation. “Chefs who want to buy local foods want to have a greater understanding of the whole process,” Wallner says. “I just like to sit down and talk about produce with somebody who uses it just as much as I do.”

Knowing the ingredients they covet, and what kinds of flavors intrigue them, helps Wallner narrow her crop list. Joining the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative took it further. As a student Wallner had worked in the trial gardens at the West Madison Agricultural Research Station, and now she can truly appreciate the farm value of that research. “I wanted to stay connected to UW,” she says.

This will be Wallner’s third season as part of the group’s trials. In her excitement, the first year she grew more than she could handle. Last year she trialed beets, carrots and tomatoes alongside radicchio and endives. “I took on a smaller number of crops because I wanted to be able to collect more extensive observations,” she says.

Wallner hopes getting the breeders involved may lead to strengthening the hardiness of early- and late-season crops. “In the Upper Midwest, that’s when you’re doing the most gambling with your crops. If we can continue to find things that can push those limits out a little bit …”

Eric Elderbrock, of Elderberry Hill Farm near Madison, has similar practical concerns: With the region’s incredibly variable climate, he’s always looking for something that isn’t going to require the most perfect growing conditions and is also resistant to disease and insects: “For it to be a realistic thing for me to be able to grow, it has to meet these demands.”

When he was growing up, Elderbrock didn’t pay much attention to where his food came from. It wasn’t until he spent a college semester in Madagascar that he began to realize the relationship between the food and the land around him. For him, the collaboration is a form of continuing education.

“It’s helpful to me as a farmer to have a sense of what’s possible as far as the breeding side,” says Elderbrock. “I love seeing all of the different colors and flavors and textures. It helps keep farming interesting.”

As picturesque as these relationships are, the business has to work. High-end cuisine doesn’t reflect most daily eating, but these chefs are very committed to helping Wisconsin farmers stay in business and make a good living.

“The chefs always seem to be a couple of years ahead,” Elderbrock notes. This year he is continuing to experiment with artichokes, a crop typically associated with dry Mediterranean climates like Spain and California. Chef Dan Bonanno is encouraging the research in part because of his Italian heritage and culinary training, which included a year in Italy. He would be thrilled to find Wisconsin variations on some traditional Italian ingredients like the artichoke.

And sourcing locally also leads to a robust cuisine. “Italy has 20 regions and each region has its own cuisine because they source locally,” notes Bonanno.

This past February, a few weeks before growers would start their seedlings, the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative gathered to tweak plans for this year’s trials.

At L’Etoile, Chef Tory Miller’s flagship establishment in Madison, beautiful prints of vegetables adorn the wall. But the tables that day were rearranged in a horseshoe. The distinctive conference seating suppresses the normally refined air. Only the curvature of the bar and its adjacent great wall of bourbon suggested a more sensual approach to food.

After introductions and a quick review of last year’s progress, Dawson opens the floor to feedback. The ensuing conversation distills into savory glimpses of market baskets and menu flourishes to come.

They’ve been talking about running a trial for tomato “terroir”—drawing from the wine enthusiasts’ notion that differences in soil can have subtle and profound impacts on flavor. Dawson is a little concerned about logistics, but Miller is persistent: “I think it would be a mistake to not include terroir.”

They discuss what they can do for unsung vegetables like rutabaga and parsnip—produce particularly suited for the Wisconsin climate, but generally unloved. They learn about a new trial focusing on geosmin, which produces the earthy flavor of beets. The chefs wonder aloud if it’s possible to preserve the beautiful purple hues of some heirlooms. Dawson regrets to inform them that changing the physical chemistry involved—the pigments are water soluble, and flush easily from the plants—is a little beyond their powers.

They talk about what makes perfect pepper for kitchen processing. Is seedless possible? Dawson smiles wryly and reminds them of the intrinsic challenge of a seedless pepper.

The conversation gets very detailed over potatoes. Researcher Ruth Genger from the UW’s Organic Potato Project has about 40 heirloom varieties of potato from the Seed Savers Exchange that will be grown out over the next few years. Chef Bonanno asks a technical question about starch content for gnocchi, and then Chef Miller goes off on French fries.

Delicious results: Chefs involved in Seed to Kitchen (including Troy Miller, front left, and Jonny Hunter, back left) serve dishes using the vetted produce at a special event last fall. Photo by Anders Gurda

“I’ve been working on trying to break the consumers’ McDonald’s mentality on what a French fry should be,” Miller says. The sheer volume is a perfect example of how hard it can be to assemble the pieces of a sustainable and local food system. “We’re talking about thousands of pounds of French fries,” he says, the other chefs nodding in agreement. “You want to have a local French fry, but at a certain point it’s not sustainable or feasible. Or yummy.” One recent hitch: a harvest of local spuds were afflicted by hollow heart disease.

Genger’s heirloom potato trials have focused on specialty varieties—yellows, reds and blues—but Genger has an alternative: “We have some white potatoes that are pretty good producers organically, but what I tend to hear is that most people don’t like white potatoes.” The chefs don’t seem worried about the difference. “There are some good, white varieties from back in the days when that was what a potato was,” Genger continues, making a note. Knowing that the interest is there, she can make sure farmers and chefs have a chance to evaluate some white heirloom potatoes.

It’s a short conversation, really, but shows the potential value of having everybody at the table. If the breeder has the right plant, the farmers have a good growing experience and the chefs approve, perhaps in another couple of years there could be thousands of pounds of locally sourced organic white French-fried potatoes ferrying salt and mayonnaise and ketchup to the taste buds of Wisconsin diners.

“We try to make the project practical,” says Dawson. “The food system is so complicated. It feels like this is something we can make a difference with. This can help some farmers now, and in 10 years hopefully it will be helping them even more.”

Bill Tracy puts the program in an even bigger context.

“The decisions we make today create the future,” Tracy says. “The choices we make about what crops to work in and what traits to work in literally will create the future of agriculture.”

Farmers, gardeners and chefs are welcome to join the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative. You can learn more about project events at http://go.wisc.edu/seed2kitchen or email Julie Dawson at dawson@hort.wisc.edu.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 16

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images