Earlier this week, we invited a group of national, regional and local food writers to join us at our client Montinore Estate in Forest Grove, Oregon, to learn about the biodynamic agricultural methods that Montinore uses in the vineyards and the winery.

We spent six hours in education mode — touring the grounds, examining the vines, and yes, holding cow horns, with owner Rudy Marchesi and biodynamic soil consultant Philippe Armenier.  Armenier is the former owner of a winery in Chateauneuf du Pape and now works with wineries in Washington, Oregon and California.

We ate delicious food prepared by Kristin Marchesi of Montinore – drank wine, of course, including several from Montinore as well as biodynamic wines from some Old World wineries, in France, Italy, Germany and Austria.

The discussion bounced between Armenier’s deep-rooted philosophical beliefs in the biodynamic principles outlined decades ago by Rudolph Steiner and Marchesi’s practical “hey, I’m doing it and it works” explanations of the biodynamic methods used at the estate.

The day invited interest, curiosity, skepticism, wonder — and hopefully more interest in biodynamics as a whole.  At Watershed, we’re certainly intrigued and will be digging deeper into the subject.

Check back soon for more photos and a short primer on the basics of biodynamics.

Next Monday, Watershed will help bring together national and international experts and writers to demystify the often controversial and misunderstood methods of biodynamic agriculture.  Hosted by Montinore Estate, this event will include experts such as Philippe Armenier, a leading biodynamic agriculture consultant to more than 30 wineries in California, Oregon and Washington.

Interest in biodynamic methods is increasing in the media and positive articles like the recent Wall Street Journal story “Discovering Biodynamic Winemaking” definitely help the BD cause.  But rarely is the word “biodynamic” mentioned without controversy lingering around the edges. Take this reader response from the article’s comment section:

“It continues to baffle me how otherwise intelligent, thoughtful winemakers can subscribe to such bizarre and indefensible practices.”

At the boot camp, we’ll be thrust feet first into the controversial world of biodynamic methods and we hope to answer some questions, like:

1.  Are biodynamic methods appropriate for all forms of agriculture?

2.  What are the additional investments (time and financial) of practicing biodynamic farming over conventional farming?

3.  What’s with the sheep horns and chamomile sausage?

4.  Can we taste the difference?

Surely, there is much more to discover, and we intend to share that with you in a follow up post. But for now, we’d like to hear what questions you’d have. What have you always wanted to know about biodynamics, but didn’t have the expert-on-hand to ask?

That’s a question that we don’t necessarily hear directly from restaurant clients, but we know it’s something that many restaurant owners ask themselves. In a recent New York Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/dining/30comp.html that addressed the issue, chefs are squawking a bit:

“No one can afford to give food away in this economy,” said Scott Conant, the chef and an owner of the Scarpetta restaurants in the meatpacking district and in Miami.”

We can understand why – when a writer comes in for dinner, either on their own or with a publicist, why shouldn’t they pay, just like a regular customer? They gets to eat delicious food!

We thought we’d offer up a mini-case study to demonstrate how a “free meal” might look from the writer’s perspective, and to highlight the potential long-term value that can come from this comped transaction.

One of our account managers brought a freelance food and lifestyle writer to a client’s restaurant. The writer was doing general research for a future article in a local magazine, and also wanted to get familiar with this restaurant in an effort to stay abreast of the scene at large.  The writer’s agenda was just discovery, nothing specific.

The next week, this writer got an assignment from The New York Times (to keep this anecdote anonymous, let’s say the topic was vegetarian lunches). Though the writer hadn’t been assigned the Times story at the time of their free meal, they now have our restaurant fresh in their mind and in fact, while there, they had gotten a chance to learn that the vegetarian lunch menu looked excellent. So who do you think will be one of the examples in the Times story?

But let’s be clear: with a serious writer, it’s never a case of quid pro quo. This writer is not including our restaurant in the article as thanks for the free meal. They’re including it because the restaurant is a perfect fit for the story. The reason they knows it’s a perfect fit is because they now have a fresh, first-hand experience as a reference.

And the reason the writer was able to get that experience was because the meal was comped. There are very few writers, if any, who can afford to pay full freight to eat and drink in all the places they need to know about. Bigger publications have dining budgets, so their writers generally don’t accept comps, which makes it even easier for everyone, but the freelance world isn’t so (and those dining budgets are shrinking, too).

So when a restaurant owner is authorizing that comp meal, they should remember that it’s not really a “free meal” to the writer, it’s a tool that lets them do their work.

Believe us, most freelancers would prefer NOT to be dining out on a Tuesday night with a publicist, turning a meal into a reporting session—even if the food is great. Sure, there may be a few genuine freeloaders in the world, but legitimate writers are out seeking information, not freebies. The writer is the advocate for their audience and they need to experience the same thing a paying customer will experience so they can write with authority. Whether that experience results in publicity for a restaurant in the short or long term, it’s always a good investment.

On August 1st The Oregonian reported that the Columbia River has experienced a sockeye salmon run that is “the highest since the Bonneville Dam started operating in 1938.”

photo courtesy of Bill Carter

For a little context I asked filmmaker & author Bill Carter what the average run is for the Egegik River in Bristol Bay, Alaska – the river he fished in his acclaimed memoir Red Summer.  He said during a typical year, fishermen on the Egegik will pull in close to ten million fish during a 30 day period!  Roll on Columbia, roll on!

But despite the relatively positive news, I wondered why this sudden abundance of Columbia River sockeye salmon?

To get some more insight I contacted David Finkel, Director of Development & Communications for Portland’s Wild Salmon Center, an organization whose mission is to identify, understand and protect the best wild salmon ecosystems of the entire Pacific Rim region.

Both Finkel and The Oregonian pointed out the abnormal run may be attributed to several factors including (court mandated) spillage over Columbia River dams and favorable ocean conditions.

Finkel added that many of the returning fish are of hatchery origin.  Therefore, they are not considered “wild” fish.

Initially you might be inclined to cast this as a victory for conservationists, or the complex network of hatcheries spanning much of the West Coast.  After all, these fish will bring valuable nutrients to ecosystems and fuel the local commercial fishing economy.

However, there is also a significant amount of science suggesting that the hatchery fish that are able to survive in the wild will develop less effective genetic traits as a result of what takes to survive in hatchery conditions – and when they return to spawn they leave fewer offspring than their wild relatives.  If you get those hatchery fish breeding with wild fish, then eventually the wild stock suffers.  For more information check out this article.

It’s a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” scenario (no pun intended).  And it got me wondering about the long-term costs of our current hatchery system.  Will salmon evolve to become the cattle of the sea and become dependent on humans to nurture and manage every aspect of their existence?  Will we ever see ten million fish in the Columbia?

I don’t pretend to know the answer or to have any solution.

But I do know that in the meantime, David Finkel and the rest of the Wild Salmon Center crew are hard at work preserving the healthiest remaining wild salmon rivers in the entire Pacific Rim region.  For more information about their amazing work, check out their website.

Other organizations and people worth checking out:

SalmonAid – CA

Trout Unlimited – AK

Salmon Safe – OR

Wetlands Conservancy – OR

North Olympic Salmon Coalition – WA

Bill Carter – AZ

Well, at least a few people at Meatopia wanted to learn about sustainable meats. Panelists: Peter Hoffman, Jacquie Berger, Bev Eggleston, Alberto Gonzales, Ken Jaffe

Earlier this month I went to a meat-fest on Governor’s Island in NY called Meatopia, organized by food writer Josh Ozersky and restaurateur and Slow Food proponent Jimmy Carbone. The event – which was essentially a giant meat-focused dine-around – was intended to promote sustainably and locally raised meat.

At the event itself, NY beef farmer Ken Jaffe of Slope Farms noted that he wasn’t finding much local meat being served by the 30+ restaurants, a fact he found immensely troubling. He’s not alone, as you can see in this article he passed on to me – super interesting reading.

To me, it’s not the no-sustainable-meat-at-the-sustainable-meat-celebration that’s interesting, it’s the underlying causes of this regrettable — but understandable –occurrence.

I think we’re at the stage in the local food movement where we’ve moved past the warm-and-fuzzy part and we’re into the “ok, if we really mean it, now what” part. Especially in ag-rich places like Portland, it’s hard to find a chef who isn’t trying to source responsibly and deliciously, and we all think it’s a grand concept. But how do we grow beyond the small-scale farmer selling to a small group of quasi-affluent urban consumers? That model probably works for some, but those economics  aren’t sustainable for anyone — I think most farmers would like to make more than $10K a year from farm income, and as we see in the article – and in a forthcoming piece from Leslie Cole in The Oregonian – food service operations have a hard time executing on the local-sustainable promise.

Meat seems to be the paradigm where these issues are screamingly apparent, given the nature of how animals need to be raised (over many months with lot of $$ up front) and how they’re constructed (you can’t just plant a few more rows of tri-tip if you think there will be demand next grilling season).

I think it’s time people get past the mindset of either-or. Either it’s virtuous family farm/CSA-type operations or unacceptable industrial feedlots. But there are options in the middle.

Take Organic Prairie (our client). They raise animals as well and humanely as any small local family farmer because they actually are a bunch of family farmers, but they operate as a coop mostly in the mid-West, so the availability of supply is greater and more flexible. They would be considered local if you live in Wisconsin, for example, but not local if you’re in New York City.

In order to expand the good food system beyond small pockets, it may be necessary to prioritize – satisfying volume, selection, delivery time, local, carbon footprint, humane animal treatment, and overall sustainable agriculture all in one package  (not to mention that the meat needs to be delicious…does anyone talk about flavor anymore?) may not be possible in today’s world, so choosing what matters most and compromising on the rest is not a bad thing.

If the purpose of Meatopia was to showcase local farmers and stimulate the local ag economy, then the meat really needs to be local – in which case you won’t get that 1,000 pounds of skirt steak, as Ken points out. But if the key feature was to promote meat that was humanely and sustainably farmed, then looking to a source like Organic Prairie – what you might call “ag of the middle” – can be a solution that takes the movement to a new place.

Meat’s definitely at the center of Watershed’s plate these days, as we expand on the research we started last year with our study on consumers’ attitudes around meat, called The Carnivore’s Dilemma.

As part of a branding project for our new client Organic Prairie, we spent several weeks examining the cultural context for meat: what the conversations are around meat buying, butchering, cooking, eating, safety, nutrition, meat’s role in environmental issues…even meat as entertainment.

And then we went to the source of all that meat – farm country in Wisconsin, headquarters of Organic Prairie and its parent company Organic Valley – to get a first-hand look at some organic farms and farmer-ranchers, as well as to meet the whole Organic Prairie management team. The most interesting challenge I learned about was the fact that Organic Prairie needs to sell the whole animal, but not in the way a small farmer sells an entire animal to a restaurant or through cow-shares. Organic Prairie is a co-op that raises, processes and sells its own animals, so they’re responsible for finding a market for all the meat from every animal. This is the flip side of having so much quality control over their animals – but we love challenges!

Grilled tri-tip: our blind tasting revealed some surprises

Last month, I saw a fascinating side of the beef industry…namely, SIDES of beef, lots of them, hanging in a butcher’s walk-in. I was part of a small group of chefs (I was the token non-chef) invited by Cory Carman to visit Carman Ranch, her grass-fed beef operation in the Wallowas in eastern Oregon. She and food-writer/beef-guru Lynne Curry organized an awesome butchery demo by Kevin Silveira at Valley Meat Services, who custom-cuts her meats.

The chefs — Cathy Whims of Nostrana, Dolan Lane of ClarkLewis, James Green and Mark Harris, both from Bon Appetit Management Co. — were mesmerized by Kevin’s skill, and all the chefs left with a deeper understanding of meat-cutting and  beef quality.

Kevin Silveira shows how to custom-cut

After the demo, Carman used us as a focus group. We did side-by-side blind tastings to test dry-aging vs. wet-aging and fresh vs. frozen beef. The results?  1) The group generally had the same preferences, so the differences truly were discernible,  2) we preferred the dry-aged meat (which is Carman’s standard practice), and 3) we preferred the texture of previously frozen meat…that was a surprise.

But it’s knowledge that may help Carman provide meat year-round, and is of interest to other ranchers, too. Later in the month I spoke with rancher Ken Jaffe of New York’s Slope Farms Beef, who was fascinated with Carman’s findings. He’s experimenting with dry-aging the split cows first, then wet-aging the primals (big sections of meat) for another few weeks, to develop even more tenderness and flavor. I was gratified to learn about all the decisions that go into creating delicious, sustainably raised meat.

Carman burgers and rabbit sausages

We ended the weekend with a cookout, of course, with burgers made from beef that we custom-ground during our butcher session. How’s this for a mix: miscellaneous trim from all the cuts, plus 3 chuck roasts, and about 10 pounds of lusciously fatty short ribs…who needs kobe burgers when you’ve got grass-fed succulence like this?

With Spain’s recent Wold Cup victory, the country that popularized tapas and late night dining is top of mind, and on everyone’s lips…

I visited Spain last month – Barcelona to be exact – and was fortunate enough to spend the end of last year there too.

Barcelona is a magical place.  I could write a novel about the beauty in the landscapes, breathtaking cities, warm and welcoming culture, relaxing beaches and world-renowned artwork.  For now, I’ll just focus on the unique foodie culture that makes Spain so wonderful.

I love Barcelona’s outlook on life.  They don’t live to work like we do here in the states, they work to live.  They prioritize life around spending time with the ones they care about.  Some of my best memories include enjoying tapas and wine over casual conversation and playful banter.

The Spanish culture is all about socializing, which means they love their food and drink.  The freshest food in Barcelona is found at the local market located on Las Ramblas, near the beach.  You’ll find seafood (caught the morning of) still squirming and clawing as you pass by.  Every spice you can imagine orcandy ever craved can be found at this hidden gem of a market.

Spanish cuisine is heavy on the seafood, which is readily available since it borders the Mediterranean Sea.  This is especially true for Barcelona, where fresh seafood can go from ocean to plate in mere hours.  There are thousands of recipes and dishes that make up the varied cuisines of Spain. These range from croquetas (a small fried food roll containing mashed potatoes and/or minced meat, often encased in breadcrumbs) to rare Spanish sea urchin.  One thing is certain; you will not be disappointed or bored with the food offerings.

Spain’s most common dishes include: potato omelet (tortilla de patata), cheeses, various stews, migas, sausages (such as embutidos chorizo, and morcilla), jamón serrano, and of course paella.  Seafood paella is a popular favorite throughout Spain and typically includes rice, seafood and seasoning.  This dish dates back to the 15^th century and is tender, flavorful, and exotic.

While Spain has a traditional paella style, creative chefs worldwide have given their own twists using local ingredients.  For those of us in the Pacific Northwest, Chef Cathy Whims from Nostrana has a delicious version that features chicken and chorizo.  Portland Monthly recently featured this recipe as a great option for a summer meal with friends. Try it out and let us know what you think. And enjoy a few of my favorite photos from Spain!

Help raise funds for the Gulf Coast with our friends @ Irving St. Kitchen! Chef Sarah Schafer will be roasting a pig from Carlton Farms (with all the fixings), Wine Director Nicole Burke organized a walk around Oregon Pinot noir tasting, there will be live blues and your (ALL inclusive) $35 ticket will help benefit the New Orleans Foundation’s Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund.  Not bad, eh?

Check out details below…

I confess!  The 4th of July is one my favorite holidays.  No, I’m not going to sew myself a homemade American flag dress, or sing the Star Spangled Banner out my apartment window for all of Northeast to hear.  For me, this holiday is about slowing down and being grateful – over a huge slab of ribs and a lot of laughs.

The last few 4th of July parties I’ve been to have lacked one thing, a great cocktail!  So this year I asked Brandon Wise, bartender at Irving St. Kitchen, for a delicious and easy-to-execute cocktail recipe that I can mix up on site (and impress my friends with, of course).

His answer:  Pimm’s Punch.  It’s a classic English summer recipe that’s perfect for a festive BBQ, or cocktail party, and can be done in larger batches – perfect!  Bonus, it’s a gin cocktail and I love gin.

Hey Britain, we don’t want your King, but we’ll sure keep your cocktail!  Check out Brandon’s recipe.

Pimm’s Punch from Brandon Wise of Portland’s Irving St. Kitchen

Ingredients:

2 parts Pimm’s No. 1 (Pimm’s is a gin based spirit that should be available at your local liquor store)

2 parts London Dry Gin

2 parts fresh lemonade

1 part soda water or seltzer

Seasonal fruit salad (Brandon likes to use strawberries, cucumber, lemon and mint, but says you can also use what’s fresh in the garden)

Directions

Mix ingredients together in punch bowl with ice and add your summer fruit salad.

Cool ice cube twist…

Another fun way to use seasonal produce is to take an empty plastic container (or any mold you have around the house), fill it with water and fresh fruit or herbs, and freeze it into a large ice block for the punch bowl.  Keep your eyes open at resale or antique shops for great bargains on vintage punch glasses and punch bowls.

Cocktail, check.

Ribs, not so much. Last year, I was asked to ‘man’ the grill, but was quickly booted back to the veggie station.  This year, I’d like to avoid that… so I asked Irving Street Kitchen’s Chef Sarah Schafer for three simple tips to achieve success on the grill.

Sarah Schafer’s Three BBQ Tips:

1. Injection, injection, injection. With the right combination the flavor cuts right to the bone.  When I inject my ribs I like to use a combination of onion, garlic, Tabasco and butter.

2. Moisture! – when smoking.  When the smoker is full of meat more moisture gets trapped creating more humidity and more tender meat.  You can also use a water pan to add more moisture to the environment.  I like to put ketchup in the smoker to create smoked ketchup.

3. Thighs before breasts.  When cooking chicken remember if separate cook thighs first.  If it is a half chicken, use indirect heat with the thighs pointed toward your fire. This will produce a more evenly cooked bird and a better tasting breast.

Happy 4th everyone!  May your cocktails be balanced, and your grill smokey!

God bless America.