We’ve got plenty of Plenty

The future may be hiding in plain sight, in a 100,000-square-foort warehouse in the Kent Valley south of Seattle. That’s where an outfit called Plenty is growing hundreds of varieties of produce in 20-foot tall towers. The climate-controlled facility uses LED lights to simulate sunshine but does not use pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, or GMOs.

This Dr. Strangelove system uses thousands of infrared cameras and sensors to collect data in the farms, which is then analyzed using machine learning to optimize how the plants grow. The first plant was built in San Francisco in 2013, the second in Kent four years later.

Plenty says that its technology can achieve yields up to 350 times greater than traditional agriculture, yet uses one percent of the water and barely any land compared to conventional methods. Plenty’s farms can also grow plants — up to 300 variants of produce — year-round, regardless of season, which helps increase efficiency. Its proximity to cities also means that produce doesn’t sit in trucks for days or weeks before ultimately arriving on your kitchen table.

The Kent facility alone is expected to grow 4.5 million pounds of greens annually, which is enough to feed almost 200,000 people. To date, Plenty has raised over $200 million, some of which came from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

[As it happens, the Washington Post this morning “discovers” the same thing happening in Ohio. The report is here.]

Plenty’s CEO explained that he picked Seattle, in part, because it was the West Coast’s “best example of a large community of people who really don’t have much access to any fresh fruits and vegetables grown locally.” Well, that’s certainly untrue, a slap in the face to outfits like Tilth that advocate for local farmers. Meantime, we’re still looking for that first head of lettuce from Plenty. A spokesman says “later this year.”

Indoor agriculture, or vertical farming, as it’s also known, could well be the solution to feeding our teeming cities. You can easily conjure up visions of urban farms built into office complexes and high-rises housing developments. Alongside the requisite shafts for elevators, there would be an indoor silo for microgreens, another for romaine.

Garbage in, fertilizer out

You may have seen this thing down at the Pike Place Market. It looks like an overgrown ice machine at a chain hotel, with a big green tank attached. It’s called the WISErg Harvester, and it may save the world.

The Harvester eats food scraps and turns them into a soup of nutrients. Everything is monitored, so the system knows when the tank needs to be emptied; back at the main plant, the soup (or slurry) is converted into fertilizer. This isn’t a gadget for home use; it’s for supermarkets (overripe fruit, spoiled vegetables) and restaurants (fish bones, beef bones, food scraps, and so on), as much as two tons of food waste a day for large commercial installations.

The machine is neither a composter (producing greenhouse gases as a byproduct of anaerobic digestion) nor a compactor (requiring additional energy) but a new process entirely, invented here in Seattle by a couple of Microsofties. Customers can buy or lease; installation can be inside or outdoors. And that’s just the “garbage in” part of the equation. The end product is a completely organic fertilizer that can be applied to farmland as well as home gardens. One day, soon, these devices will be everywhere. For now, they’re being rolled out as quickly as the fledgling company’s finances will allow.

80 years ago tonight

Just as we marvel that it’s been 55 years since MLK’s March on Washington, we reflect as well on the unspeakable that took place across Germany 80 years ago.

My grandfather, Samson Hochfeld, one of Berlin’s senior rabbis, had been dead for 17 years and did not see the mindless attack on his elegant synagogue in the Fasanenstrasse on that night, November 9th, 1938. Nor the wave of well-orchestrated destruction and killing across Germany, known as the infamous Kristallnacht, literally “The Night of Broken Glass.” Synagogues and businesses owned by Jewish merchants were targets, tens of thousands were arrested and deported, dozens killed.

The response? Almost none. Germany’s Nazi government took the world’s silence for tacit approval, and the worst genocide in modern European history continued unhindered. Meantime, my parents, with great foresight and determination, had already arrived in the US.

Not an easy journey to undertake. Dad (Max Michael Hochfeld, known to all as Peter), having lost his father at a young age, was raised by well-to-do relatives (the industrialist Ottmar Strauss), earned a PhD from a prestigious university and, in the 1930s, was not allowed (under the punitive Nuremberg laws) to become a lawyer but had instead launched a practice as a tax & financial adviser in Cologne. My mother, Trudy, was the one who most feared the antisemitic rumblings, and made arrangements for the family to escape, virtually unnoticed, into the safety of Holland, and, eventually, to America.

What would Rabbi Hochfeld have made of all this? He’d become known for his World War One sermons, the Kriegspraedigte, that reminded his congregants that–despite the antisemitism of the Kaiser–they were nonetheless Germans. In the decade following Rabbi Hochfeld’s untimely death (at the age of 49!), the humiliated German people were looking for scapegoats, and it was all-too-easy to blame the Jews (less than one percent of Germany’s population at the time). Hitler’s rise to power and his appalling campaign of National Socialism would have baffled Rabbi Hochfeld, as it did most Jewish leaders.

We cannot rewrite history, of course, but I cannot help wondering what might have happened, had Rabbi Hochfeld lived for another decade or three.

Cense and sensibility

New phone, who dis? More to the point, perhaps, what dis?

Cense, it turns out, is a new, low-alcohol wine made by Precept for Weight Watchers. Two flavors, a very bland sauv blanc (from New Zealand), and an equally bland rosé (from California).

Aaack! Who drinks stuff like this?

Turns out, a lot of people. The whole category of low-alcohol, low-calorie beverages is growing apace, says Alexandra Evans, Precept’s chief marketing officer. Not just wine, but buzzy seltzers (malt-based). Cense has been around for a couple of years now, with a patented process to remove alcohol from wine, down from over 12 percent to a more modest 9. The easiest way to drop alcohol is to add water, but that’s not the case for Cense.

Who’s buying? All those wanna-be-thin moms on treadmills, all those overstuffed dads looking for an alternative to Bud Lite. Weight Watchers is psyched: a glass of wine’normally “costs” four points; Cense is only three.

Geography as destiny

We are fortunate, here on the northwest coast of North America. Our climate is mild, and our biggest volcano is dormant. Our harvest–apples, cherries, grapes—is bountiful. Our waters teem with big fish, our ports thrive with commerce.

In fact, we live in an idyllic bubble, protected somehow by the spirit of our sacred salmon and our magic mountain. The rest of the world is dark, dangerous and unpredictable.

Geography and politics often interconnect, sometimes on the battlefield, sometimes at the ballot box, sometimes on the world’s dinner plate. It’s worth remembering that the great westward migration of America came about after tobacco plantations exhausted the soil of the colonies. Elsewhere, the Arab Spring uprising wasn’t a spontaneous, pro-democracy demonstration but a protest against food shortages.

Two examples, in the past couple of years, of natural phenomena that affect our global, interdependent food system, with very different results. One on land, one by sea.

First the oceans. Early in 2012, there were storms off the coast of Peru. As a result, the anchovy harvest dropped. Anchovies account for some 20 percent of all global fishing; they’re used in fish oil and fish meal, not just in Caesar salads and as pizza toppings. They’re also a key ingredient in the feed for farmed salmon.

The shortage in fish meal came on the heels of a second meteorological event beyond human control, the drought in America’s heartland. As a result, the corn crop dropped by almost 50 percent, and the price of corn almost doubled that year.

Those perky yellow ears of corn on the grocery shelves are deceiving; the vast majority of America’s corn is used for ethanol, animal feed and sweeteners. One reason that American beef became significantly more expensive is that much of the vastly reduced corn crop was diverted from feed lots to distilleries, distilleries that produce ethanol for fuel, aside from the conversion of corn to high fructose corn syrups as industrial sweeteners.

Parenthetically, because it’s getting so much more expensive to fatten cattle with grain, some feed lots have supplemented their diets with vast quantities of out-of-date candy, according to an article in Huffington Post, because it contains corn-based sweeteners.
Meanwhile, with fewer cows shuffling to their fate at the kill line, you’d think there would be more buyers for lower-priced pork. Hog farmers, though, can’t afford the feed either; they’re slaughtering their herds prematurely, putting the carcasses into cold storage, and hoping for the best.

Now back to the fish farms, most of which are in the icy waters off Norway and Scotland. Because of the smaller anchovy catch, it’s becoming more expensive to raise salmon, even as the demand for farmed fish is skyrocketing. Water temperatures in the North Atlantic have been a couple of degrees warmer than normal. This has had a big affect on the appetite of salmon, which has led to record harvests, up 30 percent this year.

The American consumer, whose diet relies more on beef than fish, will simply end up paying more for dinner. The big winners in all this are the international banks (who finance the Peruvian anchovy fleets, for example) and the low-profile international commodities brokers: the Swiss firm Glencore is very big in wheat, ADM in corn, Louis Dreyfus in rice, Cargill in just about everything. Glencore told The Guardian that the anchovy shortage “is good for business.” These are the outfits who compete fiercely for the business of buying up the food supply (whatever the price) and moving it to market. It’s an almost unregulated, global industry with trillion-dollar profits, which makes money in good weather and bad, and it’s the reason you could soon be paying an extra buck for your burger.

We can’t avoid it. Not even here in the enchanted, oversize fishing village that we call Seattle.

Prince of Chicken Livers

Le Pichet, the French café on First Avenue, owes a lot of its charm to the neighborhood bistros of Paris, but perhaps even more to the informal bouchons of Lyon, where workmen gather noon and night to eat hearty plates of pork sausage, pike quenelles and beef tripe in side-street storefronts that once housed stables and made themselves known by hanging a bundle of brush—known locally as a bouchon, which means cork in Bordeaux and Burgundy. No corks at a bouchon in Lyon, however; the wine comes straight from the cask. Chicken livers are also on the menu, not as a mousse or pâté but puréed and baked and served with tomato sauce. Paul Bocuse, the towering Lyon chef who reinvented French gastronomy, has a highly refined version, gâteau de foies blonds de volaille de Bresse, sauce écrevisse that’s served warm, with a delicate sauce of crayfish.
ump-cut to Seattle and a restive Jim Drohman, UW grad, aeronautical engineer at Boeing, who chucks it all, moves to Paris, and spends 18 months learning to cook professionally at the École Supérieure de Cuisine. Back in Seattle he begins to work as a line cook, eventually becoming exec chef at Campagne. His wife’s uncle is Joe McDonald, who owns the private supper club The Ruins, where he meets his business partner, Joanne Heron. Together they open Le Pichet, and Drohman decides to adapt the Bocuse recipe for his new place.

The chicken livers (free range chickens, naturally) are delivered by Corfini Gourmet, a classy restaurant supply house. Poached, then emulsified and blended with cream, eggs and a Madeira reduction. Seasoned with orange peel, thyme, clove and allspice, the whole thing strained through a fine sieve to remove the fibrous bits. Then it’s baked, like a terrine, in a bain-marie, unmolded, and served chilled: a thick, four and a half-ounce slice, topped with a line of gros sel that provides crunch as much as saltiness. At Le Pichet, the garnish is cornichons and two kinds of mustard; at its sister restaurant, Café Presse on Capitol Hill, it’s served with a cherry compote.

“We take modest products and turn them into tasty food,” Drohman says. Food that pleases Drohman himself. You can’t get a Caesar salad at Le Pichet, certainly no caviar. It’s not an “I want” restaurant for fussy diners, it’s a “show me” place for 32 eaters at a time, lucky enough to eat whatever Drohman and his kitchen turn out. Fortunately, the gâteau au foie de volaille is on the all-day, casse-croûte menu.

Unctuous seems the right word for the gâteau, a mouth-feel much smoother in texture than traditional chopped liver, with richer flavors than a foam-like mousse and lighter than a traditional pâté. Spread it thickly on the crusty slices of Grand Central baguette that they serve alongside it, add a petite salade drizzled with hazelnut oil and wash it down with a glass or two of Beaujolais, and you will be happy.

A new salmon & wine tasting at the Market

Flight of smoked seafood at Made In Washington store.

Salmon is our deity, right? We live for it, it dies for us, and so on. At the Pike Place Market, they throw salmon around like baseballs. But where can you actually get a taste of salmon? At Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, you can buy go-cups of crab and shrimp cocktails, but in our town, the best you can do is a go-cup of chowder. (And piroshky, I know.)

However, there’s now an alternative. The venerable Made In Washington store at the heart of the Market has just put itself through a remodel, revamping, and rebranding. Some years back, MIW became part of SeaBear, and now the star of the renovation is SeaBear Wild Salmon: MIW has added cold case seafood product alongside their signature Smokehouse Tasting Flight – direct from the company’s smokehouse in Anacortes.

SeaBear got its start as a fisherman’s smokehouse, and over the years has grown substantially; it employs 100 people in Anacortes, and bought out a high-end smoked-salmon label, Gerard & Dominique a few years ago. They also took over the Made In Washington stores (originally in the Market, now five locations) founded in 1984 by Gillian and Jack Matthews.

For five bucks, you can treat yourself to a “flight” of smoked seafood, starting with the cold-smoked, European-style salmon (“Nova lox”) that G&D began offering when Gerard Parrat and Dominique Place created the company in 1990. Next up is the better-known “warm smoked” salmon from SeaBear; a smoked halibut mousse; a smoked scallop; and finally a SeaBear Smokehouse Slider (potato roll, Walla Walla sweet onion mustard, smoked salmon, topped with Mama Lil’s pickles). And then, of course, you decide to buy a pouch of whichever one you liked best. Walk away? That’s okay, too, but I’ll bet you don’t.

Oh, that glass of red wine: it’s a pinot noir (the variety that does the best job of matching up with salmon) from Chateau Ste. Michelle called “Fringes.” Why? Because the grapes grow on the fringes of the Columbia Valley, specifically the Columbia River Gorge. A limited release, well worth seeking out.

Getting steamed

Walk into Ba Bar on a Saturday or Sunday and you’ll see this man standing in a cloud of steam.

His name is Mr. Chau, and on weekends he prepares a dish called Banh Cuon. It’s a Vietnamese rice crèpe, filled with ground pork (Carlton Farms) and wood mushrooms, topped with slices of cha lua (Vietnamese ham) garnished with cucumbers and bean sprouts, and a generous sprinkling of the sweet dipping sauce called nuoc cham.

The trick is getting the crèpe to the proper, gossamer-thin consistency, which Mr. Chau does by grinding rice and adding just enough water to make a slurry. (“Rice only; cornstarch is cheating!” he says.) He steams a ladle of the (slightly fermented) batter on a cloth stretched across a of pot of steaming water. Taken off too soon, they fall apart; left on too long, they become chewy.

An order of three Banh Cuon is $10. Perfect for breakfast

And here’s the same item, banh cuon, being prepared for the America’s Test Kitchen Seattle EATS tasting this afternoon at the Bell Harbor Conference Center. Long line, as you can imagine.

 

Copper River salmon, black cod

Summer of 1975 and Wayne Ludvigsen, with one more year of high school to go, finds a summer job packing herring on the dock at Ray’s Boathouse. The following year he moved inside, washing dishes and busing tables. Ray’s, with fishermen lined up to supply their prize catch, was Seattle’s premier seafood restaurant, and Ludvigsen proved a natural in the kitchen. Within three years he was in charge. When Jon Rowley brought in the first-ever Copper River Kings to Seattle, he took one to show Ludvigsen. “It was fat, not slender, and had a unique color, persimmon,” he recalls. “We’d never seen anything like it.. Our hands would be covered with orange fish oil.” The fashion was to poach salmon, or to barbecue it, or to bake it; Ludvigsen’s approach was minimalist: grill it with a bit of herb butter until it just lost its transluscency, then serve. Ideally, according to wine steward Jeff Prather, with one of them newfangled wines called pinot noir.

Salmon wasn’t the only thing, though. There was also black cod, also called Alaskan sablefish. Shiro Kashiba was marinating it in lees from the sake-brewing process at his restaurant, Nikko, in the International District; Ludvigsen tweaked the recipe to American tastes (by making it less alcoholic), curing it in lees and sugar for at least 24 hours, then broiling it to caramelize the sugar. Not all that complicated, but easy to screw up.

In 1997, Ludvigsen left Ray’s but stayed in the industry as director of national accounts for Charlie’s Produce. A chef selling to chefs, in other words. Charlie’s, which provides produce to restaurants, groceries, the maritime industry, institutions, and even other wholesalers, is owned by Ray Bowen, Charlie Billow and Terry Bagley under the corporate umbrella Triple-B Corp. It’s the largest grocery wholesaler on the west coast with four distribution centers. In Seattle alone, there’s a sprawling warehouse complex in the Sodo district and a fleet of over 200 trucks that deliver everything from kale to carnations. From the outset, over 30 years ago, Charlie’s has worked directly with a network of local and regional farmers to help them plan crops and guarantee them a market; in turn, their customers (independent groceries and restaurants) have a reliable supply of locally produced items.

Ray’s most recently has partnered with Long Live the Kings to help restore salmon runs.

Back to the black cod for a moment. It’s actually a very traditional Japanese dish, kasu being the lees of sake. And zuke meaning “to apply.” Sablefish is also prized for its high fat content, and in New York delis it’s very popular smoked, like salmon. These days, it’s the most famous dish on the menu at Nobu, in Manhattan, but it was Wayne Ludvigsen, in the wilds of Ballard, who gave it life in America.

 

The snappy tomato

Talk about a coddled piece of produce! These babies arrived FedEx Overnight from a California outfit called Flavorful Brands, They’re promoting a hook-up with Bejo Zaden, a 100-year-old Dutch company that produces innovative, non-GMO seed varieties. Today’s delivery, tomatoes, will be marketed under the Tasti-Lee brand; it’s just the first step in their licensing deal. Others: Sweet Heart “Lettage” (cabbage that’s packaged like lettuce), kohlrabi (think kale), and another weird Franken-veg called flathead cabbage.

I get it, you want to de-commodify supermarket produce. And the tomato that exec chef Enza Sorrentino sliced for me and served as a caprese salad at Mondello was quite tasty. But that’s because she knows her way around tasteless tomatoes: add salt, extra virgin olive oil, black pepper, balsamic vinegar reduction, and freshly torn basil; mamma mia!

Fact is, you could (and should) do this at home, too, with every tomato you bring home from the supermarket.

Today’s tomatoes were Tasti-Lee beefsteaks, but Romas (at half the price) are fine, too. Not so sure about the Sweet Heart Lettage, however.