BBC World Service - The Food Chain, Dan Barber: My life in five dishes
"‘Dan thought he’d try out his single udder butter on the three star Michelin chef’
‘I gave him a slice of bread and he took the butter and he slathered it on the bread and he smelled and he brought it to his nose. I mean, it was, just the whole thing was watching him was so cinematic in some ways. And at the end of it I, in my best possible French, um, could you give me some feedback on, you know, on the butter because I'm, but, it's butter from the family farm and I'm very excited about the milk that we're producing. And I remember him. He said it's, it's tres bon, you know, and I just thought like, is it? No, it's like, no it's not. It's not. You could just tell.’
‘Dan pressed him a little and eventually Alain asked him, had it rained a lot lately? Flummoxed, Dan admitted that there had been terrible rain for the last two weeks. Ducasse’s palate was so sensitive, it could detect that the cow had been feeding on watery grass, producing watery milk, which he could then taste in the butter’
‘To his credit, like, he could taste weather, was basically what I was thinking which was just awesome. And I was like more thinking this guy's a Jedi. And then you know, he was like got ready to leave, his assistant was like rushing him out and he turned around. He's like, you know. I had another question for you. Was the, was the butter made by hand or was it made in a robo coop, in a, in a food processor? And I said no, it's made by hand because we know that we're mixing the butter, makes for a much smoother and more unctuous butter and, and he said oh okay, and you know, sort of apologized for even insinuating that the butter was made in a machine.’
‘Dan was perplexed but didn't think any more of it until a few days later, when he realized that Alain's taste buds had sussed something out. Something that Dan hadn't even known himself at the time.’
‘A week later, I was up in the pastry kitchen. I was watching a young intern make the butter. In a robo coop’...
‘Taste is the soothsayer. You know, it's the truth teller. Taste does not lie unles you allow it to lie. Unless you add sugar and fat and salt and dadada. Which you know, which are fine in in the right proportions but in the American diet, they are the only thing. And what that obscures is, is, you know how things are grown so real flavor, true flavor is great agriculture actually’
‘Fascinated with how agriculture could deliver real flavor, Dan began traveling the world for answers in the mid 2000s, eventually turning those escapades into a book. His research meant visiting a great many producers who'd got it right. And it was during this process that Dan made a realization that was to call into question his entire farm to table, eat locally and seasonally ethos. Dan had been using wheat from a farmer named Klaus Martins to make his restaurant bread for many years. But when he went to take a closer look at the fields, Dan was shocked to see there wasn't much wheat at all.’
‘I mean, what I saw was rye and barley. I saw buckwheat, I saw clover like cover crops. I saw a lot of leguminous crops.’
‘In order to grow the wheat, Klaus said grown a number of other crops in strict rotation, keeping the soil full of nutrients without chemical fertilizers.’
‘What I learned in that moment, the first five minutes of my time with Klaus in the first day of my setting out to research my, my farm to table treatise was that I was a joke. I was a, I was an emperor without clothes. How was I the farm to table chef? I was sitting here, you know, luxuriating in being the farm to table chef when, when I wasn't supporting the farm. I was supporting one tiny slice of the farm. This wheat actually was meticulously timed in a rotation around his farm all to build the kind of soil fertility that gives you the flavor. They gave me the wheat that I was so celebrated for. And so most of what he grow went into, either was plowed into the soil or went into animal feed and got pennies on the dollar.’
‘And that realization led Dan to create the third dish he wants to share with us on the Food Chain from the BBC World Service. He wanted to shine a spotlight on those unloved grains and show the world how delicious they could be.’...
‘I work a lot with vegetables and grains as mainstay actors on the plate and that's’... that's not
‘Like your fourth dish, the carrot steak’
‘Yeah and that the carrot steak is an example of that, is elevating this, the carrot to the center of the plate like we elevate the steak to the center of the plate. We have these carrots that we grow under a lot of stress in the winter like after multiple small freezes and get the carrots sweet and really filled with flavor. And then we air, we hang them to dry like like you dry age steak, we dry dry age them with with beef tallow, which we rub on the carrots and then they just take on this funkiness that's just extraordinary and, and we roast them like a steak but we serve that with sides like creamed spinach and potatoes and, and rich sauce of meat, which is, it's not a vegetarian dish at all. It's just that meat has its place on the plate and then the root vegetable takes center stage and if you grow it right, starting with the seed and you grow it right, the right soil. But key to this is the gastronomy. If you put the right gastronomical technique to it, the vegetable easily stands up to the steak’"
