Best Food Writing 2013

by Holly Hughes

  It’s easy to imagine why. Many plants need animals to distribute their seeds by physically carrying them through their digestive tracks or on their fur and by tamping seeds in the soil with their feet, piercing the top crust of soil and pushing the seeds into the earth. In the LoveTree fields, chomping, pooping sheep play the roles that deer and bison did on the prairie. Then the sheep turn those wild plants into milk. The milk retains the taste of fringed blue aster,

  Indian paintbrush, and purple prairie clover, making it much different from the milk of cows raised in Switzerland or California or on a confinement dairy-cow lot down the highway.

  Mary gathers that milk and, in its raw state, separates the curds and whey.

  The importance of making cheese from the raw milk of ewes who graze one particular patch of land can’t be underestimated. Humankind’s understanding of the microbiome—the cloud of bacteria, yeast, protists, and fungi that circulate in, on, and all around us, from the deepest cave to the top of the tallest building—is in its infancy. Recently, scientists from the Human Microbiome Project announced that each and every one of us has 100 trillion microbial things living in and on us, turning food into usable nutrients, moisturizing our skin, and defending our lungs against invaders. Without them, we’d be dead.

  Without the right ones, or enough of them, we might just be sick. Research into whether our microbiome plays a critical role in human health is just beginning, but preliminary research suggests it plays a role in everything from obesity to asthma and autoimmune diseases. Research into the flavor complexities of aged foods such as prosciutto, salami, wine, and especially cheese suggests that microbial complexity correlates to the complexity of the finished product’s taste. But how does the native complexity of a stand of predator-filled woods in northeastern Wisconsin affect the taste of cheese?

  To find out, Mary had her husband take out part of a hill with a Caterpillar. It was a red clay hill, and Dave is comfortable doing things like that, because he used to build silos for a living. “She looked at me and said, ‘We’re going to put cheese underground,’” Dave remembers. “I had never heard of that.”

  Once the hill was gone, Dave constructed a concrete room with ventilation leading out to the woods. Over the years he took that hill apart with a Caterpillar several more times, eventually discovering that the best shape for a cave was round, like a silo. It’s best because of the way the air circulates, in a circle up to a ventilation hole, and for the way the moisture drips down from a pitched, round roof, keeping humidity even throughout the space.

  When Mary shapes her individual cheeses, she brings them to her cave to age. (The whey from the cheese production is also blended into the guard dogs’ food, perhaps strengthening the dogs’ attachment to their flock.) Many of Mary’s cheeses are pure sheep’s milk, but some are a blend of sheep’s milk and her outdoor-pastured cows’ milk. The cows are descended from a Scottish Highland-Angus-Jersey cross and are majestic animals with soaring horns that make them look like bulls, but they’re actually milkable ladies. In the cave, the young cheeses are hand-rubbed—a treatment that encourages a rind to form on the outside—and are then flipped every day or so, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for many months, depending on Mary’s own personal sense of when a cheese is ready. It is inside this humid, refrigerator-like, woods-connected silo of a cave that the cheeses become what they will become.

  What they become is absolutely unique, a true American original cheese unlike anything that has ever been made, or tasted, on earth. Her Trade Lake Cedar looks like a rock or mushroom; the rind tastes earthy and ashy, an umami non-fruit world of hay and mineral, whereas the interior is tangy and chalky and meadow-like. Her dry Gabrielson Lake tastes a little like Parmigiano-Reggiano, but is freaked with little crystals of concentration and tiny red lace points of mold.

  The cheeses come and go, and Mary often makes one-of-a-kind batches that reflect some event on the farm, some week of too much milk or too little. “When I think of Mary’s cheeses, in terms of a world analog, what comes to mind are principally the cheeses of Sardinia and the Pyrenees,” Steven Jenkins tells me. “Though Mary’s are more graceful and unctuous.” And they’re essentially only available to people in the Minneapolis and St. Paul metro area. But she isn’t very well known, even among foodies. In fact, an informal poll of people I know outside of the restaurant industry suggests that almost no one has heard of LoveTree.

  “It’s funny, there’s a sort of Minnesota paradox when it comes to something on this level,” says Lenny Russo, chef at Heartland and owner of the only market to which Mary will sell. “The Minnesota paradox is, people who live here think it’s the best place in the world, even if they’ve never been anywhere else. At the same time, there’s this inferiority complex, where something not from here immediately gets a leg up. If you say this is one of the best cheeses in the world, there are a lot of people here who just won’t believe you. But they’ll pay a super-premium for something from France or Italy that essentially comes from a factory. This indigenous inferiority complex is what will probably keep her from succeeding the way she should. If she was making this cheese in California or New York, she’d be world-famous.”

  But Mary isn’t even as famous here as she should be. The only places to buy LoveTree farm cheeses are at the St. Paul Farmers’ Market (year round), Heartland Market, the summer Kingfield Farmers Market, and the LoveTree farm, at their new farm store. You can also taste them at the LoveTree farm on Pizza by the Pond days. Every Sunday, from 2 pm to 8 pm all year long (weather permitting), Mary trades in her shepherd’s crook for a pizza peel and melts some of her LoveTree cheeses on top of her four-day-fermented pizza dough, made with flour from Great River Organic Milling, just down the river, and mixed with a sourdough culture developed from her cheese.

  Before the pizza-farm events, she forages for such idiosyncratic toppings as fiddlehead ferns or wild wood nettles, or she trades ingredients with neighboring farms or friends from the farmers’ market. Try the plain cheese—it’s as bold a plain-cheese pizza as you’ll ever have in your life. I’ve also tried the wild watercress, which tastes like something straight from Sardinia, iron-y and green and fresh. I’ve also had the Old Man Dave, which comes with different sausages from the day’s farmers’ market or is topped with meats from a neighboring farm, Beaver Creek Ranch, and vegetables from nearby Burning River Farm. The pizzas are delicious, but more than that, they’re exquisitely true to their place. The whole scene reminds me of one of those ridiculous magazine features where writers are eating some salad of wild-foraged greens and locally grazed but unnamed cheese on an island in Corsica that no one could ever get to. But this is in Wisconsin, not too far from a Dairy Queen. The pizza oven is located in another part of the hill that Dave bulldozed, then lined with tire bales, built out with logs from the property, and roofed.

  The Politics of Cheese

  I talked to Mary in the pizza enclosure one hot day, as some strange beetle gnawed loudly on a log overhead, occasionally sending down a shower of sawdust. She was terrified about the raw milk crackdown that’s happening nationally and in Wisconsin. She’s convinced that they’re coming for the cheesemakers next.

  Currently, raw-milk cheeses are allowed in the United States if they’re 60 days old or older. She’d of course like to be making younger cheeses, as she has now and then and sold as “fish bait: not fit for human or animal consumption.” She has sold it at the St. Paul Farmers’ Market, where presumably avid fisher-people snap it up. “We don’t have much money or many material things. All we have is what comes from nature,” she says. “And that’s a good thing. All you have to do to have raw milk and raw milk cheeses is regulate it. I’m not afraid. My milk is much cleaner than pasteurized milk.”

  The way the state of Wisconsin regulates its milk is by counting absolute numbers of bacteria, the standard plate count. Milk, after it has been already pasteurized, can have an SPC of 20,000 bacteria per milliliter. Milk destined to be made into cheese
is allowed to have an SPC of 1 million bacteria per milliliter. Mary says her raw milk is consistently measured with an SPC of less than 10,000 bacteria. If any, or all, of these numbers sounds high, you might have an incorrect notion of how many bacteria actually surround you and everything you see. Adults have two to three pounds of microbes—that is, bacteria, yeast, and other tiny creatures in and on us—at all times; they’re also currently in your garden and on your walls and on everything you can see, except the moon, sun, and stars. Heavily pregnant women’s whole microbiome changes, with digestive microbes moving to the birth canal; the act of being born is also a biological christening with necessary bacteria.

  The way Mary sees it, good cheese does not repudiate its connection with nature; rather, it is the land from which it comes, from the wolves and eagles to the invisible microbes, that makes the caves of France taste like the caves of France and the caves of Wisconsin taste like the caves of Wisconsin. “I remember that first time I felt the cheese in the vat: What is that? That’s the curd firming up. And that understanding: This is the milk I have, so how can I get to the flavor I want? Why are people so afraid of nature?”

  She launches into a complicated scientific argument about how the cheese-making process destroys pathogens, about how the fact that food has microbiology at all is a foreign idea to many. We understand antibacterial soap, but we don’t understand that without the microbiome of bacteria on our very own hands, our skin wouldn’t work; it would crack and split. We understand killing bacteria in food. We don’t understand that bacteria are not an outside thing, they are part of the thing—they are part of the wolves and the flowers and us. She leans back and listens to a blue heron baying from a nearby pond. “But I don’t know if most people even understand where cheese comes from,” she muses. “It’s easier to be afraid than to learn something. Between the politicians and the coyotes, I prefer the coyotes.”

  A SNAIL’S TALE

  By Molly Watson

  From Edible San Francisco

  The San Francisco area is fertile territory for curious foodists like Molly Watson, a freelance feature writer, recipe developer, blogger (thedinnerfiles.com) and local foods expert for about.com. You never know where culinary curiosity can lead you—in this case, it all began with escargots.

  As I stood over our kitchen sink scrubbing slime and bits of snail poo out of a plastic bucket I did not feel heroic. I did not sense the triumph of the urban forager feeding her family with found edibles. I had no swell of locavore pride in preparing tiny creatures plucked from my yard. I did not even give myself a pat on the back for being such a dedicated food writer.

  Instead, I knew that despite my fears, I couldn’t be too bad of a mother if I was willing to purge snails for my son.

  Shortly after this last Christmas, my 9-year-old son and I were lucky enough to find ourselves walking past L’Escargot Montorgueil, an old Parisian restaurant with a giant bronze snail hanging over its awning. The previous day he had been stunned by the fact that a steak and fries is a widely available lunch option, and now he saw that snails were on offer. He can be an adventurous eater and our trip to Paris was bringing out the best in him.

  It was morning, so the restaurant was closed. But when a friend and I planned the menu for our New Year’s Eve feast, I mentioned my son’s newfound fascination with escargots. Our friend’s French pride kicked into high gear and he insisted on buying the specimens himself.

  The day of the party, he handed me an aluminum tray with a stiff white paper lid bedecked with the Le Grandgousier sticker on top. These weren’t just snails, they were the best escargots from the snazziest traiteur on the Rue St-Honore. Inside were three dozen fat tan snail shells, each about two inches across and filled to the rim with bright green butter. We baked them in the oven for the recommended 15 minutes and brought them to the table already adorned with baguettes and a bottle of Montrachet.

  As the other adults helped themselves to a few shells and sipped their wine, the snail buyer focused on my son, watching him pick up the first shell, dig around with a toothpick (for we had no designated two-pronged escargot forks), pull out a fat squiggle of gray meat dripping with seasoned butter, pop it in his mouth and chew. I’m not sure whose eyes lit up more brightly with delight when it became clear that the long-awaited taste of escargot lived up to so much expectation.

  “Mom,” he said, “you should write a story about snails!”

  Both the French and the Americans at the table laughed. No no, they all asserted, California garden snails aren’t the kind you eat.

  But they are. They are exactly the kind (or, to be exact, one of the kinds) you eat. In fact, according to UC Davis, California has brown snails (Helix aspersa) because a Frenchman brought them here in the 1850s in order to make escargots (we were actually tucking into Helix pomatia, the other snail species commonly eaten in France, which tend to be bigger and have distinctive tan shells). Heliciculture didn’t take off in the Golden State, but like so many others before and since, the mollusks loved it here.

  In Search of Helix Aspersa

  Once upon a time, our garden was full of snails. Big fat dudes who left slime trails across the concrete stairs and hid under deck chairs and along the sides of plant containers. I went on a crusade that consisted of leaving saucers of beer all over the place. The snails drank and the snails drowned. And they haven’t returned. It ends up that, like the French, raccoons are fond of eating snails. We definitely have raccoons—they dig up the ground cover under the gravel sections of the yard looking for treats and leave their scat on the cocoa shells I use to mulch the center garden plot.

  In short, I have no snails in my garden. This is, as most San Franciscans know, usually considered a good thing. It’s not, however, such a great thing if you’re writing a story about harvesting snails from your garden. Lucky for me, others are not so lucky, so one early March night I grabbed a flashlight and a large bucket and my son donned his camping headlamp and we headed out into the dark of a friend’s yard and garden that we had been promised was infested with snails.

  Snails are largely nocturnal and like things damp and dreary. Thus, they really dig foggy San Francisco. They like to hang out on the underside of succulents and stalk-y or long-leafed plants. Since it was dark, we found plenty of them just crawling about on rocks and sidewalk edges.

  If you know there are snails in your garden, make things easy on yourself: Set up a board on some rocks or bricks or whatever will keep it a few inches off the ground over some soil in a shady part of your yard. Check it in the morning. Chances are there will be scads of snails clinging to the underside of the board.

  At first the snails we saw seemed way too small. Their shells were less than half the size of the snails we ate in France. Then, we started noticing how big the snails were outside their shells. The phrase “bite-size morsels” came to mind. We started picking them up and dropping them in the bucket. In quick order, we had five dozen snails to take home.

  The Tending of Snails

  We covered the bucket, set it in the corner of my study—a place that stays cool and dark—and threw in a few stalks of fennel. My son went to bed. I sat down to read but had to retreat upstairs. The noise of the snails crunching on the fennel was distracting. Hilarious and distracting.

  For the next nine days we fed them herbs, then cornmeal, then nothing in a process called “purging” to clean the snails from the inside out. The whole process can easily be sped up to five days. The key points are:

  •Choose a container from which the snails cannot escape but in which there is a free exchange of air. A bin topped with a screen weighed down with a brick works, or a container with a plastic lid that snaps on and into which you have poked some holes is good. I used a plastic bucket with an old pair of black tights as a lid (legs of the tights cut off and tied closed). The tights had the advantage of being something that I could dampen each day to help keep the container slightly damp without having standing water in it. A large glass
jar with holes punched in the lid lets you see just how much slime and poo they produce. Whatever container you use, sprinkle the snails with a bit of misty water each day after you clean the container, but make sure there isn’t a bunch of standing water on the bottom.

  •Keep the container in a cool, dark place. That’s what snails like. I wouldn’t keep them outside. Both raccoons and skunks love to eat snails and who wants to bother with building a raccoon-proof snail bucket?

  •To purge the snails, start by feeding them greens and herbs for a day or two. This lets you know what you’re starting with. Then feed them cornmeal or oatmeal for a day or two. Since this diet turns their poo white, you’ll know other stuff is out of their systems. (Note: Gordon Ramsay recommends giving them carrots for this stage, since it turns their poo orange!) Then give them nothing for a day or two before cooking them. (Note: Some people skip the starving stage, finding it cruel. I saw how much poo these little things make; I didn’t want to eat snails full of it.) Some people chill their snails before cooking them—sending them into a fake semihibernation. I found no difference in the taste or texture of the snails that I had chilled versus those I had not.

  •Clean the container daily. You may be tempted to skip a day, thinking it won’t be that bad. It will be. It will be more than twice as gross. Part of the ick factor comes from the poo, of course, but just as much (if not more) comes from the slime snails leave all over everything. Two days worth of slime takes more than twice as long to clean and scrub out than does one day of slime. Trust me.

  •Before you clean their container, transfer the snails to a large bowl or other container. You might want to keep the temporary container covered. A snail’s pace isn’t quite as slow as it’s made out to be.

  Snail Cookery 101

  You would think you could now just cook them, but turning snails into something not just edible but tasty and appealing is just a wee bit more complicated than that. There is parboiling, removing their shells, and then a quick cook in acidulated water to de-slime them. I tried skipping this last step and just cooked them with plenty of acid. I ended up with an inedible slimy mess that looked not unlike vomit.