Columbia Empire Farms: It’s the berries
Like America itself, black raspberries seem to have a manifest destiny. Once native to eastern forests, they made their way across the continent and are now chiefly grown in Oregon, where berry processing has become big business. This is especially true for Columbia Empire Farms. With its 400 acres of berries and its chain of retail stores, Columbia Empire has developed a recipe for success—premium varieties, a little experimentation, and a healthy helping of jam.
The company prides itself on its black raspberries—small and intensely aromatic fruits that a century ago were as familiar to many Americans as the red type prevalent today. The reds may have triumphed because of their greater productivity and resistance to disease, but one taste of inky, flavorful black-raspberry preserves demonstrates why the darker fruit is making converts and why Columbia Empire is making the effort. Conventional strawberries and red raspberries, as well as hybrids like Marionberries (a tender blackberry-raspberry mix), also have a firm presence in Columbia Empire’s fields.
But what’s most exciting to Columbia Empire president Floyd Aylor is the farm’s experimental plantings of two unusual fruits, lingonberries (a relative of the cranberry) and huckleberries.
In northern Europe, lingonberries are prized as the best-flavored of the cranberry family and are frequently used in sauces and preserves, yet cultivation is just beginning in North America. On a clear morning late last September, Ed Walker, who supervises berry farming for Columbia Empire, inspected his first lingonberry harvest while workers searched the low bushes for ripe red fruits.
Nearby, a new patch of waist-high bushes bore the farm’s first major crop of huckleberries, small, dark fruits with a strong, wild flavor. The termhuckleberryhas been used to refer to many different species of blueberries and related fruits—Columbia Empire’s are the evergreen huckleberryVacciniumovatum, a variety until recently found only in the wild. The farm’s cooks liked the taste so much that Aylor decided to cultivate them to guarantee a dependable supply.
“By growing the fruit we process, we can make preserves out of Grade A stock that typically would be going into ice cream or yogurt,” Aylor says. Columbia Empire not only packages and distributes nationally but also owns eight Portland-area Your NorthWest fancy foods stores, where it sells its products. (They also grow hazelnuts and wine grapes.) From fields to market shelves, Columbia has built an empire where experimentation and innovation have resulted in some of the finest berries in the West. —David Karp
Columbia Empire Farms sells jams, preserves, and syrups by mail order (888-252-0699; www.yournw.com), as well as fresh berries, in season, at Your NorthWest stores and Portland farmers markets.
Virginia Gold Orchard: A perfect pear
The story of Paul Estabrook and his Virginia Gold Orchard is one of boy meets girl … and boy meets pear. Estabrook, a Boston-born engineer, was in Korea on business in 1972 when he met YoungSuk Jung and fell in love with her. He fell in love again when he tasted the Asian pears from her family’s orchard. “I immediately knew that I had been missing something special in America,” Estabrook recalls. Combining the flavor and juiciness of a ripe European pear with the firm crunch (and shape) of an apple, the Asian pear is, he says, an amazing fruit. Three months later, he and Jung married, and the couple resolved that one day they would have an Asian pear orchard of their own.
It took a while, but when Paul retired, in 1985, he and YoungSuk planted 500 Asian pear trees on a farm they had bought in New Hampshire. But after five harsh winters in succession, they dug up the trees and transported them to Natural Bridge, Virginia. There, on 100 acres of red clay soil at the southern tip of the Shenandoah Valley, the Estabrooks devote 20 acres to 40 varieties of this luscious fruit. Yellow-skinned types such as 20th Century and Shinseiki, prized fortheir refreshing juice and crunch, arerepresented in the orchard, as are several mild-flavored, pear-shaped Chinese varieties. But the Estabrooks’ specialty are the russeted, candy-sweet pears—such as Arirang, Hosui, Shinsui, and Shinko—thatare beloved by Koreans.
At the time the couple started their new venture, Asian pears were rarely grown in the United States outside of California. “We virtually had to reinvent the wheel,” says Paul. “There was so little information about markets, climate, and farming practices on the East Coast.” Today, a handful of other eastern farms produce the fruit, but the Estabrooks’ crop, grown using organic methods, is exceptionally sweet and flavorful. They use no herbicides and have developed their own trellising system to admit maximum sunlight into the foliage. To make picking easy, most trees are kept trimmed to a height of six feet. And YoungSuk plays a vital role in making the farm an innovative operation. She breeds her own varieties of Asian pears, selected from thousands of seedlings for flavor, disease resistance, and keeping quality. The test orchard now contains around 25 experimental varieties.
In August, when the harvest begins,visitors drop by the orchard to feast on pears and to buy gift boxes and the Estabrooks’ own pear blossom honey and fresh pear pies (the fruits keep their shape splendidly). “I like to see people’s faces the first time they taste a sweet, juicy Asian pear,” says Paul.“Their eyes just light up.”
And if your eyes are dull with a cold, the Estabrooks can help. Their pears cooked in honey, a traditional Korean winter cure for coughs, should set you right in no time. —DavidKarp
Virginia Gold Orchard sells Asian pears August through December at the farm (100 Asian Pear Way, Natural Bridge, Virginia; 540-291-1481; www.virginiagoldorchard.com). Mail orders are shipped September through February, but order early. They often sell out by Thanksgiving.
Paso Almonds: History, handpicked
The almond blossom festival was once one of the biggest annual events in Paso Robles. Before World War II, this little town midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles was considered the almond capital of the world. But after the war, the almond industry shifted farther inland, to the Central Valley, where vast irrigated orchards of densely planted trees produced more fruit and proved more profitable than those dry-farmed in Paso Robles. Soon, the almond-processing plants in Paso Robles closed, and the Almond Blossom Festival faded into history.
Not all the almonds have disappeared from town, though. Somewhat quixotically, farmer Rusty Hall still tends his ancient almond orchard here. He’s absolutely convinced that dry-farmed nuts, grown organically, taste better. “Central Valley growers get larger, moister almonds, and can get thirty times the crop per acre,” Hall says. “But the ones I grow have more intense flavor.”
This rolling hill country is part of Hall’s family history. His great-great-grandfather, who had come to California during the Gold Rush, owned a cattle ranch nearby. And in 1974, Hall, whose formal training is in architecture, took over the almond orchard that his family had been farming for four years. It hasn’t always been an easy road that he’s followed, but the amiable Hall, now 53, remains undeterred.
He is determined, for one thing, not to mechanize his harvesting, as farmers in the Central Valley have done. Instead, come the first week of September each year, Hall and a few workers gather the crop from his 93 acres by hand. A long, thin trailer laden with tarps is hooked up to an old Caterpillar tractor. Hall parks alongside each tree, and the workers spread the tarps and knock the tree with long poles that have rubber mallets affixed to them. The almond fruits, which resemble small, thin-fleshed, split-open apricots, hail down on the tarps. Later, the nuts are spread out in the sun to dry.
As if the work of caring for his own orchard weren’t enough, Hall also sharecrops almonds from up to a dozen local growers. This, he believes, encourages the renovation of once-derelict orchards. “I see it as the agricultural equivalent of architectural restoration, when you take an abandoned building and make it useful again,” he says.
Man cannot live by almond sales alone, however, so Hall has also created several almond products—brittle,biscotti, and butter—that he actually makes himself at a commercial kitchen in nearby San Luis Obispo. Those specialties also allow Hall to help support the community that has supported him for years. Ten percent of his sales are devoted to a literacy program, called—what else?—“Nuts About Reading.” —David Karp
Paso Almonds From October into the spring, Rusty Hall sells almonds and almond products at farmers markets in Santa Monica (Arizona Avenue and Third Street; Wednesday, 9a.m. to 2p.m.) and Santa Barbara (Cota and Santa Barbara streets; Saturday, 8:30a.m. to 12:30p.m.). Mail order is available year-round (888-549-9126; www.pasoalmonds.com).
Chino Farm: The most beautiful crop
In California, in the food world, just about everybody has a story about the Chinos, who grow what everyone agrees is the best-tasting and most eclectic selection of produce in the state. It might be about the way they lost the family farm when they were interned by our government during World War II. (They entrusted it to a family friend who sold it out from under them. But there’s a good end to that story: Their father, Junzo, became a sharecropper and bought land nearby.) Or perhaps it’s the story about how Junzo’s nine children went off to become doctors and scientists only to return to the farm when their parents needed help. It might be about the Chino tomato test, which involves growing dozens of different kinds of tomatoes every year in hopes of finding the best. It might be about the celebrities who park their fancy cars at the roadside stand, ogling the incredible variety as they try to decide between corn so sweet and tender that it tastes terrific raw, carrots in half a dozen colors, perfumed melons, and eggplants the size of marbles.
The conversation sometimes turns to the Chinos’ eccentric generosity—if they like you, there will be endless gifts. Or it might be about the long hours they work, or about the fact that they now occupy some of the world’s most expensive real estate, plunked down amid the mansions and golf courses just north of San Diego.
Many people talk about the few lucky chefs—Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Mark Peel—upon whom the Chinos bestow their bounty, and the fact that not one of them actually places an order. They simply take whatever the Chinos decide to send them. “It’s like a little surprise package,” says Waters of the box that arrives at Chez Panisse every week.
My own Chino story is from 20 years ago. I was taking a flat of their strawberries back to Berkeley, sitting on the plane with the fruit on my lap. The intense aroma wafted enticingly throughout the cabin. One by one, the other passengers filed past, begging for a taste.
The Chinos must know that they are a constant topic of conversation. And I suspect that they are secretly pleased about it, although Tom Chino once told me, “If people don’t like what we grow, it doesn’t bother us too much.” They know that they are the rock stars of the produce world—elusive, slightly arrogant artists in pursuit of perfection. They grow the best produce they possibly can because they simply don’t know any other way to work. “If you don’t have a beautiful crop,” says Tom, as if explaining everything, “you feel terrible about picking it.”—Ruth Reichl
Chino Farm’s roadside stand, The Vegetable Shop (6123 Calzada del Bosque, Rancho Santa Fe, California; 858-756-3184), is open Monday through Saturday, 10a.m. to 4:30p.m., and Sunday, 10a.m. to 1p.m. Closed Monday in winter.
Tatums’ Produce: This is pea heaven
Vivian Tatum and her husband, Buck, work 150 acres of land just north of Montgomery, Alabama, near the community of Pine Level. Their gray-and-white trailer home sits at the center of the family compound. Buck’s mother lives here. So do two of the Tatums’ four children and a host of grandchildren.
“I married Buck back in 1965,” says Vivian. “That was the last year his daddy planted cotton. We stick with vegetables now, like the truck farmers who used to drive their pickups from house to house, selling corn and beans off their tailgates.”
In addition to butter beans and corn, watermelons and potatoes, Tatum raises lady peas, the delicate, bisque-white beauties that some folks call cream peas. What’s more, the auburn-haired 51-year-old is a font of pea lore, willing and able to hold forth on the relative merits of lady creamers and their kissing cousins, the earthy and ubiquitous black-eyed and the sweeter pink-eyed.
Tatum is a woman of strong opinions. Given the least bit of prodding, she’ll tell you that, no matter the variety, “hand-shelled peas are best.” She says this not because of some precious predilection for doing it the old-fashioned way, but because shelling-machine paddles are likely to bruise the peas, causing them to shed their hull and, as a result, absorb too much liquid when cooking.
On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings, she works her stall at the Montgomery Curb Market. In continuous operation since 1927, the market is a vestige of yesteryear, an open-air cinder-block shed lit by dangling bare bulbs and topped by a tin roof. Because only local farm-grown goods can be sold here, it’s also one of the best produce spots in the Deep South. That’s Tatum’s booth near the back right corner, the one with the sign that welcomes customers to “pea heaven.” Stop by on a summer day, and you’ll have your pick of bushel after bushel of sweet corn, with some of the ears incised in a windowpane fashion so that you can see just how plump the white kernels are. Tubs and tubs of speckled butter beans and calico crowders are there, too. And, of course, lady peas—Lord, the peas. If you ask for the ones Tatum shelled by hand, she’ll nod her approval and charge you a premium of 50 cents per pound. —John T. Edge
Tatums’ Produce has a stall at the Montgomery Curb Market (1004 Madison Avenue, Montgomery, Alabama; 334-263-6445), open Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, 5:30a.m.to about 1:30p.m. Lady peas are also available at many farmers markets throughout the South and by mail order, in season, from Tatums’ Produce (334-361-1569).