The Things I Love About Switzerland (Part Two)

Swiss Craftsmanship

I don't think most Americans are aware of the high level of craftsmanship that seems to flow through the veins of the Swiss people. For those who have ever known any Amish folks may have an idea of what I'm talking about, since the Amish are of Swiss origin. I'm referring to people who have been using skills from the seventeenth century to make their way in the world. This may not sound terribly romantic to those of us deeply entrenched in our modern gadgetry...but any craftsman would appreciate the skill of making a barn from a six-foot sawblade and a wood plane, or fixing the wheel of a horsedrawn carriage. I grew up in Missouri, so maybe I had more exposure to the Amish community than some, but as a kid, I thought their way of life was pretty cool.

Over the Easter holiday, I was preparing dinner at my friend's home in the Swiss Canton of Valais. They have a fairly modern kitchen, but my eyes lit up at the sight of their mandolin. I always appreciate seeing kitchen gadgets, since a good gadget can make my life so much easier. This was a charming tool made of three pieces of wood, an adjustable blade, and no glue whatsoever. It's a lot like a wood plane, upside down, with a notch in the front leg to wedge against the counter, and a finger hole for ease of moving or hanging. The simplicity of the design and the building materials was a marvel for me, and it was the tool I used more than anything else except the stove.

Of course, there are other designs for the mandolin. The French model (Matfer) shown is all stainless steel, also with an adjustable blade, and can be folded for storage after use. That's nice enough, except that it's heavy and quite expensive. Then there is the plastic Japanese model (Benriner) that has dominated the professional market because it is small and cheap. It also has an adjustable blade, but the plastic parts tend to bend and perform unevenly with sustained usage. So, if you have the space, for the best performance and the most charm, I recommend the Swiss model.

Cool Tools Modernized

One of my favorite things about cooking in another country is finding these special tools. Yes, their mandolin is cool, but I'd used mandolins before. I was pretty excited to see one of their many specialized waffle irons. This dandy is an electric appliance that makes a pressed cookie like something between a tuile and a Belgian Waffle. The Swiss call these treats bricelets or brezeli, and they can be made either savory or sweet. While they are warm, they can be shaped like a tuile, light and crunchy! You can shape cones or cigars, make tile shapes or just leave them flat. The original waffle irons were pattern-engraved cast-iron plates on the end of long iron handles, so they could be warmed in the fire.

You pour the batter into the press and close it. The batter cooks very quickly, and stays crisp as long as they are dry. I wanted to use them as a kind of tartine covered with sweetened ricotta, poached rhubarb and mandarins, not a traditional preparation, but tasty nonetheless.

The Swiss Betty Crocker

If there is one cookbook author that is universally recognized in Switzerland, it is Betty Bossi. She has collected and published extensive recipes from across the country. Taken as a whole, her works are much like a Swiss Joy of Cooking. I found a nice bricelet recipe, but perused another hour through the culinary repertoire.

The Things I Love About Switzerland (Part One)

Foraging in the Alpes

Several years ago, I was working at a small chalet in Switzerland. As the Spring snow began to melt, the chef would take me into the wooded hillsides to gather young shoots he called "l'ail des ours," or bear's garlic. As the name indicates, this is one of the first foods of the bear's coming out of hibernation. I had never heard of them before. They were very fragrant, and patches were abundant. We would gather large bags full of the leaves and make them into pureed sauces or pestos with a flavor and aroma of leeks and green garlic.

On a recent visit to Switzerland this Easter, I saw them again at the farmer's market in Zug. This beautiful lake town is in the German-speaking region, where the plants are called "baerlauch," or bear's leek. What I did not know of until then was the two toxic look-alikes of baerlauch, the herbstzeitlose (colchicum autumnale), and maiglockchen (convallaria majalis). I thought about how carefree I used to gather them with my chef. He didn't seem too concerned about the toxic imposters.

Every year, as the season approaches, newspapers and televisions show pictures of the three plants to minimize the annual incidents of food poisoning. If this sounds unfamiliar to most American cooks and foragers, it is because the bear's leek, ramsons (allium ursinium) as they are known in English, do not grow in North America. Instead, we have ramps (allium tricoccum), whose name comes from its European cousin. Ramps have fewer leaves and a handsomely developed bulb. To my palate, the flavor of ramson is more like wild garlic, whereas a ramp tastes more like a wild spring onion. The ramps pictured below are the first of the season. As time goes on, the bulb near the roots becomes more pronounced.

Both plants offer an early taste of spring in these fresh, green and fragrant plants. It is a fleeting harvest with a season of usually less than a month. In Switzerland, we were canning ramson sauces to extend the season into summer. We'll be pickling ramps in the next few weeks. Unfortunately, my foraging friends and I have finally accepted the fact that ramps do not grow in this part of the country. What we have comes to us from the Great Lakes and the Appalachians, but we'll enjoy whatever they send our way. We often yearn for distant flavors, and the memories that come with them.

The Noble Spring Vegetable

Asparagus has a long and proud history. It was cultivated by the ancient Romans, and brought into prominence in the French and Italian aristocracy around the sixteenth century. Today, asparagus retains its noble character, while being available to the everyday citizen. It is a vegetable we love for more than it's own virtue, but what it represents. It announces the end of winter roots, and a new season of colorful vegetables and variety.

Asparagus spears do not come from planting seeds. They are the young shoots of a perennial fernlike plant in the lily family. It thrives in cooler climates with sandy soils, especially along riverbanks and valleys. The "crown," or root mass stores its sugars and energizes the rapid growth of spring shoots. The eight inch spears we buy at the market are usually one days growth.

In Europe, especially France, Germany and Belgium, they cultivate white asparagus by gradually banking the soil over the shoots as they grow, or covering the beds with plastic. This technique protects the plants from the sunlight that triggers photosynthesis, yielding the prized pale blanched spears. White asparagus is very brittle, since it lacks the more pliable chlorophyll cell walls. If you manage to find it, handle with care. They are gaining popularity in American markets and restaurants, but the extra labor involved makes them considerably more expensive. Those who prefer white asparagus swear it is worth the extra effort. So beloved is this vegetable in Alsace and Western Germany, the entire spring season seems to revolve around it. When I was working in Switzerland, where they simmer the spears in water with salt and a little sugar, they even drink the cooking liquid with a squeeze of lemon juice as a digestif. It seemed to me like an asparagus hefeweizen.

When buying asparagus, pick out smooth, brightly colored spears with tightly closed, firm and nascent tips. Fresh asparagus is sweet, and has the feel of squeaky, wet rubber. Old asparagus will begin to look wrinkled at the base, where it is dehydrated, or the tips will have begun to bolt, or flower. The leaves will have elongated, opening and spreading apart. These spears will be tougher, more bitter, with a fainter sweetness. Asparagus spears continue to grow even after they are cut. They are usually stored and transported lying on their side. This is why you often see the tips curving sideways, still trying to grow toward the sun until they run out of energy. Like most vegetables, the natural sugars begin converting into starches the moment they are harvested, so the fresher the better.

The stalks vary in size, from pencils to cigars in thickness. As for a preference between thick and thin spears, it depends on what cooking method you intend. The thin stalks are ideal for grilling, stir fry or saute, which gives them an earthy, caramelized depth of flavor. I prefer the thick spears, which have a higher ratio of tender inside to fibrous outside, and have a more pronounced grassy, herbal flavor. Some people don't like the extra step of peeling the skins from these larger stalks.

When preparing asparagus, the root end needs to be trimmed of its tough, woody base. Hold the stalk in the center, grab the root end and bend it sharply. It will snap off the woody stem at just the point where it is too tough to eat. Of course, we rarely use this method in the restaurant, because we are working with a higher volume. We usually cut the spears evenly to about six or seven inches from the tip for speed and uniformity. To peel the thick stalks with a swivel peeler, pinch the tip and peel off the fibrous layer, starting one or two inches from the tip to the root end.

When cooking asparagus, eggs have long been considered the perfect compliment, whether in an omelet, baked in a quiche or frittata, poached or fried over easy with some mushrooms. They are especially good with spring morels and verpas, if you can find them. The Europeans prefer their asparagus with an egg sauce, a cool mayonnaise or aioli, or a warm hollandaise or maltaise, a special hollandaise sauce finished with blood orange juice. My grandmother used to serve it over toast with a cream sauce, and on warm spring days, my friends always look forward to my chilled soup, a sort of asparagus vichyssoise.

Asparagus shines in simple presentations as well. It can be thinly sliced raw, dressed with a nice, grassy olive oil and sprinkled with grated parmigiano reggiano, or toss them with some olive oil and salt and simply throw them on the grill with some chicken or sausages, and drink a hefeweizen.

The Color Purple

As soon as the cold nights give way to warmer days, nature begins her vibrant show of purple blossoms. They often start before the first day of spring and continue into midsummer. This year, rosemary blossoms have come quite early, to be followed by a parade of purple lilac and chive blossoms in April, borage, thyme and gentian sage in May, then anise hyssop and lavender in early summer.

In these last days of winter, I like to use them to bring a little color to my cooking. I decided years ago to bring savory herbs and vegetables into my desserts rather than use tropical fruits. This way, I can stay local and the dishes offer more than just sweetness at the end of a meal. I like them to offer a little reflection on the flavors used throughout the meal. At the moment, Park Kitchen serves a rosemary infused panna cotta, with a sweet and sour huckleberry sauce, and garnished with salted pine nuts and rosemary blossoms. The blossoms bring more than just a pretty color. It has a slight earthiness and of course, a bittersweet floral note. It creates a nice bridge between the herbal cream infusion and the rich sweetness of the huckleberry puree.

The chef who first inspired me toward this idea of savory ingredients being used in the final course was Pierre Herme. I remember the revelation of his desserts in 1996, particularly a cake accompanied by strawberries, red beets and a black peppercorn syrup. I had been thinking about a dessert of chocolate and red beets ever since. This year, it finally came onto the menu with a rich chocolate cake covered by a beet flavored ganache and beet chips, and served with pistachios and a pistachio puree. Okay, so beets aren't exactly purple.

Part of the pleasure of tasting these flavors in a sweet context is that they create entirely new associations for our taste buds. By adding the earthiness of beets to the bittersweet chocolate, you taste something unexpected, like a hint of coconut or berries. In the panna cotta, the rosemary and salty pine nuts make the cream taste sweeter against the huckleberry. I've never had a sweet tooth, so I had to find a way to make dessert more exciting for myself as well as the guests.

Where the Wild Things Are!

Gleaning the First Flavors of Spring

The warmth of this month has many of our food plants in a state of confusion. A mere three weeks after Groundhog Day, we have nettles on the menu at Park Kitchen. This is the earliest I've ever seen so many foods we normally associate with the coming of spring. The Spring Equinox usually arrives without much fanfare in the garden here in the Northwest. Our first local peas and rhubarb are still some weeks away. We have to find other means of bringing some color and vibrancy to the table.

This is where Oregon shines. Foraging here is a wonderland of wild edible plants. Most climates provide a few edible weeds, like nettles, dandelion, miner's lettuces and chickweed. We really have it all, our forests filled with wild mushrooms year round, fiddlehead ferns and wood sorrels, rivers and streams lined with ramps and watercress, and on and on...

Here is a winter bed of treviso radicchios, surrounded by a wild ground cover called chickweed (stellaria media). It is one of the early wild greens I use to bring some freshness to a dish while we wait for the first spring produce. These nutty flavored leaves garnish a dish of egg, artichoke and leeks with a nettle puree and grated grana padano.

Of course, stinging nettles (urtica dioica) are a well known weed, sometimes more cautionary than culinary. Their tiny stinging spines contain an irritating toxin that dissolves rapidly with cooking. They are usually plunged into boiling water, then pureed or chopped before use. Their flavor to me has always been like a deeply flavored spinach with a resemblance to seaweed. Like those greens, it is very high in vitamins and nutrients.

Another early wild edible plant is the dandelion (taraxacum officinalis). The name comes from the French term "dent de lion," meaning lion's tooth, describing the sharp ridged leaves. When I was working in Switzerland, we made the famous Salade Lyonnaise of egg, bacon, croutons and dandelion, and in that archaic region, we called it Salade Dent de Lion. Today, most of the French speaking world call the dandelion "pissenlit," which means "piss the bed," because of the diuretic nature of the root. It is a very nutritious weed, albeit a bitter one. It must be gathered before it begins to flower or it becomes irretrievably bitter. The young plant can be tamed by pairing it with flavors rich in fats, like cheeses, eggs, bacon or duck confit, and the acidity of citrus or vinegars. It is perhaps the most widely known and loved edible weed.

Another wild edible weed I enjoy is miner's lettuce (claytonia perfoliata), also known as claytonia or spring beauty. It has two types of leaf shape, the cordate basal leaves, and the petiolate head leaves shown in the picture. As with most wild plants, the eating is good until the flower develops too much. This plant has a delicate texture and a subtle earthiness that I like to use with mushrooms and seafood.

Another nice way to bring some life to a late winter dish is by sprouting beans or nuts, and using them in salads as you would any hearty grain salad. Shown here are bean sprouts with miner's lettuce, pickled elderberries from late autumn, and a puree of nettles. I have a dish on the menu at Park Kitchen right now that uses this format, although it is composed of sprouts, sunchokes and radishes, and garnished with the tartness of wild wood sorrel (oxalis acetosella).

These are the first tastes of spring that nature offers here in the Northwest. With our extensive transportation agriculture, we see the early signs of spring in the grocery store long before they are local, asparagus from Mexico, peas and favas from California. These are often good, but not great. In the days before spring begins in earnest, greatness comes from the little things.

A Reason to Love January

There is something I always look forward to in the New Year, and it's not a new winter reading list, or a new batch of New Year's resolutions. It is a new edition of the Ayers Creek Farm calendar. Everyone who knows Anthony and Carol Boutard, the keepers of Ayers Creek Farm, appreciate more than just their wonderful grains and roots and berries. With each of their harvest newsletters, they share their keen observations of life on the farm, and this has been extended to the photos and captions of their calendar. In years past, they have shared the beauty of speckled eggs camouflaged in a killdeer nest, or the wonder of wild watercress on the banks of the canyon where water drains from their fields. One of my favorite photos came from the 2008 calendar, a deep burgundy head of Rossa di Chioggia radicchio covered with frost, which increases the sugar content of these bitter winter greens. In their own words, the Boutards introduce this years calendar:

When we published our first Ayers Creek Farm calendar in 2005, the text merely identified the various crops shown in the photos. Over the next three years, this simple caption evolved into a short essay about the photo's subject. Last year, we balked at the increasingly formulaic approach of scenic farm pictures, and put together a thematic calendar exploring the various legume crops we grow. This 2010 edition takes us to a level of the farm most people never see.

At heart, we are naturalists as well as farmers. No, we are not that type of naturalist; we remain fully clothed on the farm befitting our straight-laced New England upbringing. We grew up with Golden Nature Guides and the nature writing of Jean Henri Fabre, Rachael Carson, Edwin Way Teale and others. In that spirit, this edition of the calendar will provide a glimpse of the natural history of the farm. We will show you life beyond the fruits, grains and vegetables we sell, the non-monetized and usually unseen world of the insects, spiders, slime molds and fungi at Ayers Creek Farm.

In The Life of the Ant, the Belgian naturalist and playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck, calls these "pastoral ants." They tend flocks of aphids like sheep, protecting them from predators such as syrphid fly maggots. In exchange, the ants draw honeydew from the aphids to sustain the ant colony. One of the ants on the left has collected some honeydew in its mandibles. The aphids are parthenogenic and viviparous through much of their life, that is, producing live young asexually. Like nested Russian dolls, you can open a large aphid and find smaller ones inside, open one of those and yet smaller ones will be found. They molt periodically to increase in size. These aphids have colonized the husks of late ripening corn ears, rich in available sugar and minerals. The last generation of the season's aphids, winged and sexual, will mate and lay eggs. Some of the pastoral ants collect the aphid eggs and store them in their nests, setting them out the next spring to generate a new flock.

The slime mold, fuligo septica, starts life as individual amoeboid creatures, visible only with a microscope. A chemical stimulus brings the individuals together and they fuse to form a new organism. The slime molds aggregate and sally forth in July and August, moving across the ground consuming yeasts, bacteria and fungi. Their movement is determinant, not random, guided by chemical cues released by their food sources. Research has also shown they develop memories, even keeping track of time, and can navigate mazes, wrinkling some of our measures of intelligence. Despite the name, they are completely unrelated to fungi. In fact, there are three major categories of slime molds that are unrelated to one another. These ephemeral colonies are harmless in every respect. As the food supply dwindles, the slime mold produces spores and collapses.

No, we are not lapsing back into the old plum-in-September formula; the creature upon the violet ovoid is the object of this snapshot. The Pacific Tree Frog, hyla regilla, is found throughout the farm, more often heard than seen. Here one awaits the evening upon a Seneca Prune, over a half-mile from the nearest pond. They need open water only for reproduction. The frogs' coloration is variable, and changes with habitat. Those living in the sweet potatoes assume a distinct purplish hue, while in other crops they are pure green or brown. Less frequently encountered are the Red-Legged Frogs, rana aurora, that live in the canyon bisecting the oak savannah at the heart of the farm.

These are not merely indulgent diversions unfolding like an episode of Planet Earth. At the simplest level, every gardener knows what benefit or harm comes from bugs and critters. Every organic farmer knows that living with these insects and micro-organisms makes up the complex biosymbiosis of a healthy farm, and a way of life that chemicals and fertilizers have not been able to supplant.

James Beard Foundation

The James Beard Foundation was born in 1986, when Peter Kump bought the late James Beard's Greenwich Village brownstone at 167 West 12th Street, now the host site of guest chef dinners and classes to benefit the Foundation. It has since been a non-profit organization seeking to promote American culinary arts in wine and cooking, service, hospitality, writing and scholarship. Emerging in the same period as The Food Network, the Foundation has been enormously successful, with the exception of the embezzlement scandal of 2004 and 2005, which shook the reputation of the JBF. It has since taken steps to improve it's management and the scope of it's promotional purposes. The Park Kitchen team took to the streets of Manhattan to give New Yorkers an impression of what we do here in Portland. We set out to pair a five-course Oregon-focused meal complemented by crafted cocktails and wines. Our cocktails were prepared using House Spirits, and our wines were provided by Soter Vineyards. Many of us who labor in the craft of food and drink in the Pacific Northwest share the sentiment stated on House Spirits home page, "We are in good company."

The greatest challenge of an event like this, executed in another city, is that you are not using your familiar equipment, or the full resources of your staff and purveyors. At the Beard House, you also have no access to the facility until the day of the event. In order to execute a quality five-course meal, you need more than one day's worth of cooking, even if you are shipping finished products from your own restaurant to New York. In other words, planning is everything!

You are also serving eighty portions of each course all at once, so timing is crucial. Dinner started at seven o'clock. We served four hundred plates over the course of a three hour meal, which means cooking and plating a dish, mixing and pouring a cocktail every two minutes for three hours straight! The team that pulled it off tonight consisted of Shane Feirstein, our bartender at Park Kitchen, Scott Dolich, the owner of Park Kitchen, myself, Ethan Snyder, a Park Kitchen alumnus, currently sous-chef at Locanda Verde in New York, and Reed, our assistant bartender from Savoy in New York. Cheers!