For stage 2 of my wholegrain quest I set myself a double challenge: first, devise a whole-grain pasta dough and from it make ravioli; second: make it seasonal, and make it local (they are, after all, synonymous). This time of year in the Northeast cooking seasonally is certainly a challenge: the farmers at the greenmarkets are reaching into the bottoms of their storage bins and you think you can’t face another dish of root vegetables. But have hope! With a bit of imagination you can make yet another delicious dish without having succumbing to the supermarket’s flown-in-from-Chile asparagus (mmm… asparagus…)

But I digress. I decided that my ravioli would be filled with celery root, because I love its flavor – so bright for a root vegetable. And for my whole grain I would use spelt flour, because I found a bagful of it in my fridge (and what could be more local than that?)  For advice about spelt flour pasta I turned to the King Arthur Whole Grain Baking cookbook, but it was no help: it contains not a single recipe for pasta dough. I looked next in my favorite Italian cookbooks. But there were no hints from Lidia Bastianich, whose white-flour pasta recipe is a favorite of mine; and certainly not from Marcella Hazan, who sternly admonishes that pasta dough must never contain anything except eggs and all-purpose or semolina flour. Surprisingly enough even the internet wasn’t much help: there was nothing at all on Epicurious, and Google returned only a couple of dubious hints that spelt flour in pasta might work.

So there was nothing to do but plunge in headlong. I took my favorite pasta dough recipe, from Lidia Bastianich’s Italian American Kitchen, and substituted, one for one, spelt flour in place of all of the white flour. I stirred in eggs until the dough came together, then turned it onto a floured board and kneaded. And kneaded and kneaded. And kneaded. The dough did start to stiffen, as pasta dough must do, but it never really took on the elasticity and satiny sheen of pasta dough. When I poked the ball of dough with my thumb it stayed poked – the indentation didn’t push itself back out, even after I’d kneaded strenuously for 20 or 25 minutes. When I pulled a pinch of the dough to test its stretchiness, it tore off in my fingers. I foresaw filled pouches of this stuff dropped into a pot of boiling water: it would surely be a huge mess.

Take two. I made a second batch of dough using half spelt flour and half unbleached all-purpose flour. When I kneaded this batch it acted much more like a pasta dough should act. It firmed up. It sheened. It pushed back when I poked it. It developed the sort of skin that tears ever so slightly during kneading. It was pasta dough.

I passed it through the rollers of my pasta machine and clamped circles of it around a simple fillings of pureed celery root (and for good measure a second filling of pureed beet). The finished ravioli needed only a few short minutes in boiling water. It was nutty and hearty. It didn’t have the pillowy lightness of fresh white flour pasta, but made up for with a fortifying whole grain flavor. And they were further improved when, after boiling, I tossed them in a skillet with a bit of melted butter until they became brown and toasty. Healthy and delicious. I tried another batch with the “half white” wheat flour, grown and milled upstate by Cayuga Farms – also delicious, and now truly local.

The real revelation though was the sauce. I found this recipe which featured a chicken broth into which kernels of sweet corn are pureed. Fortunately my freezer is full of delicious summer sweetcorn that I’d put up on August, which worked perfectly for this broth. It was quite delicious but too brothy – it didn’t coat my nutty, skillet-toasted pasta like I wanted. So, in another pan I made a butter-and-flour roux and stirred the broth into it: sweet corn veloute. I finished it with salt, pepper and chopped parsley and was a happy man.

In a bookstore recently I thumbed through a copy of Marion Nestle’s What to Eat, a book that’s long been on my ‘ought to read’ list. I read paragraph or two about sugar. She didn’t rail venomously against high fructose corn syrup as I hoped she would; from the body’s point of view, she said, it’s the same as sugar. (The problem with it is that it’s too prevalent in too many foods.) She went on to discuss the similarities between sugars and starches, and said that, from the body’s point of view, white sugar and white flour are very close to the same thing.

I don’t know whether I believe that — certainly I don’t want to believe it. It did remind me though that for quite some time I’ve wanted to incorporate more whole grains into my diet. Most of my grain intake lately has been in the form of a delicious white sourdough bread that I get from a local bakery (Napoli and Sons on Williamsburg’s Metropolitan Avenue) which I justify with the very convenient but not very dependable belief that the fermented complexity of sourdough makes it just as healthy as whole grain. (This is one of the tenants of the Dave’s Kitchen Convenient Nutritional Guidelines.)

Regardless whether science will ever catch up with my nutritional beliefs, there’s no denying that whole grains are very healthy, and that they can be quite satisfying and delicious as well. I want to cook with them a lot more often. In this pursuit I have a few advantages: access to the Paisley Farm CSA; proximity to grocery stores that stock Bob’s Red Mill Flours; and the excellent King Arthur Whole Grain Baking book.

Recently, the Paisley Farm CSA delivered a bag of spelt berries. For some reason I kept forgetting they were spelt and thinking they were farro, which is why I prepared a dish based on this recipe for farro risotto. I parboiled them for a long time in salted water to which a large amount of olive oil was added; then cooked them further in a quasi-risotto style, in two cups of chicken stock added a cup at a time and stirred until the berries had soaked it up.

I was expecting a creamy, risotto-style dish, but the spelt never quite absorbed all of the broth. Nor did it slowly give up its starches into the broth as Arborio rice will do. But it did produce a hearty, brothy, healthy-tasting and delicious dish. I mixed in some parboiled diced carrot and some blanched chopped kale, which added a lot of depth to the broth, and a grating of parmesan cheese for a salty, nutty tang. The leftovers were easily microwavable for an excellent office lunch. A victory was won in my Wholegrain Quest.

The butcher at the Meat Hook lit up a little when I asked if he had beef tallow. The Meat Hook is Brooklyn’s newest purveyor of farm-raised meat and center of carnivore culture. It’s a joint  venture between the Brooklyn Kitchen and the minds and cleavers behind Marlow and Daughters, and best of all, it’s only a few blocks from my apartment. Obviously, this was the place to look for a hunk of beef fat. I wanted it for making a pie crust, I explained to the butcher. “Rendered or unrendered?” he asked.

This wasn’t the first time I’d used animal fat in a pastry dough. A few years ago the New York Times ran an article by Melissa Clark that compared crusts made with various combinations of butter, beef fat, lard, duck fat, and shortening. It sang high praises for the beef fat version.  Inspired, I made an apple pie with a crust that was half butter and half beef suet, and I remember being happy with the results.

I thought of that crust again this past week while dreaming up a recipe for the pie contest at K&M bar here in Williamsburg, a benefit for BK Farmyards. I wanted to make a seasonal quiche — ‘seasonal’ at this time of year meaning, of course, root vegetables. I had on hand a big bag of potatoes and a bulb of celeriac (a.k.a celery root), and I wanted to add parsnips too, but not simply as roasted parsnip chunks mixed into the filling (though I’d this recently done with good results).  I thought instead of stirring parsnip puree directly into the eggs and cream that make up the quiche’s custard. This trick, I imagined, would make a heartier pie, and enhance the dusky flavors that I like in winter dishes.

And hence my idea for beef fat in the crust. The subtly darker flavor, described by Melissa Clark as “rich and slightly meaty, though not identifiably beefy” would boost those hearty winter flavors as well. I opted for the unrendered beef fat, which I supposed would taste richer.

Actually, what I got was probably suet, not tallow — tallow is the rendered stuff.  I was definitely working with an unrefined product – it had veiny red flakes and other odd bits in it that I did by best to cut out or cut around. If you’re squeamish about handling meat, particularly meat with suspiciously unidentifiable parts, this stuff isn’t for you.

This time around I didn’t bother using half butter – I simply substituted the beef fat, cut into small cubes, one-for-one in place of the butter in my favorite pastry recipe. It went into the food processor with flour and salt, and after a few spins of the blade it was cut into the familiar pea-sized pieces. The fat didn’t assimilate itself into the flour in quite the same way that butter does — even after moistening it with cold water and giving it a rest in the fridge the dough was still pretty crumbly and not terribly easy to work with. I had to muscle it a bit in order to hold it together and roll it out. I feared this would make the dough tough in the end but fortunately it didn’t. I might suggest using half butter though, if you don’t like fighting with powdery pie dough.

For my quiche filling I roasted two small parsnips with a clove of garlic until they were soft, then pureed them, garlic and all, with half-and-half until very smooth. To this I added enough additional half-and-half to bring the mixture to 2 cups, then whisked in 3 eggs. Meanwhile, I cut 3 medium potatoes and 1 medium celery root into thin slices and blanched them briefly in boiling salted water. I then transferred them to a skillet in which I’d sautéed  4 or 5 sliced shallots, cooked the mixture until the celery root began to brown slightly, and flavored it with chives, thyme, and lots of salt and pepper.

Into the pre-baked, beefy pie shell I spread a layer of shredded gruyere cheese and topped it with the potato mixture. I then carefully poured the parsnip custard over it and baked until firm. The finished quiche was rich and flavorful, slightly sweet from the parsnips and with a bit of brightness from the celery root.  A real winter pie.

And a prize-winning pie! The judges awarded it first prize in the savory pie division. One of them told me I’d scored a few extra creativity points for using beef fat in the crust. I’m glad he liked it, and I’m glad to have such a good source nearby for the stuff. And I’m glad to finally be living in an era when cooking with beef fat meets with such high approval.

“What is that thing?” The members of Paisley Farm’s winter CSA were lingering at DBA bar in Williamsburg Brooklyn, where they’d each just picked up a box of potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, squash –  the first CSA pickup of the winter season. Sitting on the table in front of us, among pints of Six Point ale and mugs of bourbon-laced hot cider, was a long, pale, and… well… phallic-looking root. None of the guesses we threw at it seemed right. It wasn’t a parsnip. It wasn’t a potato. Some kind of turnip maybe? Finally we gave up, finished our drinks, donned our hats and gloves and hoisted our boxes of vegetables into the January cold.

Once at home though, a quick Google search on “root vegetables” solved the mystery: a daikon radish. Karol, who coordinates the Williamsburg CSA pickup for Paisley, was relieved to have this thing identified, but knew she needed to share this information quickly with the rest of the CSA members. “Your challenge now,” she said to me, “is to find some use for this daikon, and post about it on Dave’s Kitchen.” I accepted the challenge. Honestly though I had no idea what to do with this thing.

Daikon is actually not so unfamiliar to anyone who has eaten sushi or banh mi. It often comes as a garnish of fine threads with the former, and pickled, with carrots in the latter. My first thought for Karol’s Daikon Challenge was to create some kind of banh mi-inspired dish – a salad of watercress topped with pickled daikon matchsticks, perhaps, with a side of cilantro-spiced pork meatballs. Using the daikon merely as a garnish, though, or even as a salad-topper, wasn’t likely to use up very much of it, and I had a vision of a hundred half-used daikon radishes moldering in the crisper drawers of a hundred CSA members. No, I’d have to look deeper to find a dish that puts this odd root onto center stage.

With some further investigation I found that daikon sometimes goes by another name: mooli. Mooli, it seems, is a Hindi word for ‘radish’ (sometimes appearing as ‘muli’ or ‘moolangi’), and it’s found surprisingly often in the indices of Indian cookbooks or on Indian recipe websites. Mooli Paratha is a skillet bread stuffed with cooked radish. In a  Madhur Jaffrey cookbook I found “Phool gobi aur mooli ka achaar”: cauliflower and white radish pickle.  On the Indian cooking blog Mahananda there’s a short discussion of the health benefits of mullangi, and a $2 download of a recipe for daikon dal (proceeds go to support a school in India). But maybe most appealing – and certainly easiest – was this recipe I found for aloo muli – potatoes cooked with radish.

The recipe is quite simple: cook a chopped green chili (I used a jalapeno) in a small amount of hot oil, then add equal amounts of diced daikon and potato, with ground coriander and tumeric. Stir to combine, lower the flame, cover and cook for 10 to 12 minutes. I was not using a non-stick skillet, so I added just a tablespoon or so of water to keep the mixture from sticking. Unfortunately I didn’t have the radish greens the recipe called for, so I simply did without (though when I make this again I might add chopped spinach or kale to make up for them)

The textures and flavors of the radish and potato were nicely complementary, and the subtle spiciness of the radish stood up nicely to the bolder jalapeno and turmeric. I served the aloo mooli with Mark Bittman’s red-lental dal, along with a very simple and delicious salad of grated carrot tossed with toasted mustard seeds (also taken from Madhur Jaffrey), and some crispy mini papadums.

Aloo mooli is a dish I’d make again, and not just out of obligation to use up a CSA daikon. For this dish I’d actually seek out a mooli of my own. Karol, I consider the daikon challenge well met.

Recently, I threw a holiday dinner party and served what I thought to be a traditional holiday menu: roast beef with jus, mini Yorkshire puddings, dauphin gratinee (a.k.a. scalloped potatoes), mushrooms cooked with chestnuts and roasted brussels sprouts. I splurged on a good cut of beef – a New York strip roast. When the dishes and empty wine bottles were cleared I found that, happily, there was a good-sized chunk of it left.  As planned.

Leftover roast beef, like leftover turkey, makes great sandwiches. But there are sandwiches and there are, you know, sandwiches.  My chunk of leftover beef was not  some random supermarket roast. The steer it once walked around in had been raised on a small nearby farm. Its meat had been butchered with love at Marlow and Daughters, standard-bearers of the Brooklyn artisanal food scene. It was tender and deeply flavorful, cooked just right. A sandwich made from beef this good would need something more than a slather of mayo and a slice of rye bread.

What kind of sandwich could honor such noble beef? To start with, how about adding some veggies. They’ll add contrast to the flavor and texture, stretch the leftover beef, and maybe contribute some measure of healthfulness. It would need to be something hearty to stand up to the flavor and bite of the beef: kale. I wanted mushrooms too, because they pair so perfectly with beef.  The final plan, then: braise the kale with the mushrooms and some onion in the leftover roast beef jus. Stir in thin slices of the beef just long enough to warm them – being careful not to allow them to cook any further. Pile this juicy mixture onto some thick slices of grilled bread. Top with cheese and give it a quick run under the broiler. Serve open-faced. Delicious.

That’s a sandwich for a special occasion though. I don’t expect to have leftovers from a top-quality cut of roast beef lying around very often? Nor  homemade roast beef jus for braising liquid? There should be a every-day version of this sandwich too. It’d need to use less extraordinary ingredients: sliced roast beef from the supermarket deli, say, and plain ol’ beef stock. The flavor wouldn’t match the Holiday Dinner Party Leftovers version, but then I wouldn’t have to wait until my next diner party to enjoy it.

Here’s a Steak Sandwich Recipe

In Brooklyn this week the temperatures dropped below freezing for the first time: Winter is here. It means the last of my seasonal favorites will disappear from the farmers markets, and I’ll be subsisting on root vegetables until ramps, rhubarb, asparagus and strawberries reappear in May. But it also means it’s the time of year for the hearty, bracing cold weather fare I love: hot soups, casseroles, peppery, flour-thickened, fortifying stews, and of course chili. Chili’s good year-round, but for me it goes down especially well on cold fall and winter days. It’s food to eat while watching snow fall through a frosted kitchen window.

A steaming bowl of chili, topped with shredded cheese and sour cream (and my personal favorite, sliced avocados), doused with Tabasco, and served with a hunk of cornbread, is truly a delight. But chili is an extremely versatile dish — having a batch on hand in the fridge gives you the starting point for any number of quick dishes. There’s the chili dog, of course, and chili mac, and chili cheese fries. I love to use chili as filling for an omelet (served up with sweet-potato home fries), or for quesadillas or tacos. Sometimes I’ll poach a couple of eggs directly in a skillet of bubbling chili and wrap them in hot tortillas for a quick Dave’s Kitchen version of tex-mex huevos rancheros. I’ll also layer scoops of chili with tortilla chips & grated cheese and bake them into a plate of nachos.

What exactly is chili? Is it even possible to answer that question? There are certainly purist definitions of what chili is or isn’t, but really there are more definitions, variations, and recipes for chili than you can begin to imagine. A search for ‘chili’ on Epicurious brings up 1095 results. There are vegetarian chilis and all-meat chilis. Red, green and white chilis. Mild chilis and deathly hot chilis. In recent chili cookoffs here in Brooklyn, winning chilis featured pozole and pineapple. Some serve chili on spaghetti. In the house where I grew up, we ate chili was over white rice.

The possibilities for chili recipes can be as unlimited as your imagination, or they can be bound by the contents of your pantry, or maybe both. This past week I thought I’d make a batch of chili to use up some things in my freezer. There was chorizo left over from this summer’s hot dog cookoff and chicken leg-and-thigh quarters left from god knows what. I also found some farmer’s market sweet corn that I’d put up in August. I began to notice a pattern as all those ‘c’s added up, and so I went with it: toasted cumin seeds, minced cilantro, and diced carrot went into the pot as well. The chili had a deep red color from the chorizo, and a satisfyingly hearty flavor from the chicken, which I browned directly in the rendered chorizo fat, fricasee style. With a pack of tortillas, a chunk of cheddar cheese, a ripe avocado and a carton of eggs, this batch of chili kept me going all week. Now, if we could only get some snow.

Here’s a recipe for Chicken -  Chorizo Chili — Enjoy!

It was not my day to take the prize last Saturday, at the McCarren Park Greenmarket winter squash pie cookoff.  The laurels went instead to my friend and esteemed colleague Jane Grenier. Her masterful hazelnut-topped butternut-squash adaptation of Epicurious’ Pumpkin Ginger Cheesecake Pie (not to mention her vote-collecting two-pie strategy) won over the crowd of greenmarket shoppers. She won the day’s winter-squash crown and a bagful of market goodies. Congratulations Jane!

My own creation didn’t play nearly so well with the pie-loving crowds. It was a delicata squash custard layered atop chocolate granache.  I dreamed up the recipe one day at work while eating leftover pumpkin pie and a chocolate bar simultaneously. It was good, I thought, and if chocolate and pumpkin can be combined in pumpkin bread, why not in a pie? And while I’m at it, why can’t I use delicious, honey-sweet delicata squash in place of the pumpkin? Hm? Why not?

It turned out that the cookoff crowds had some reasons why not, since so few of them voted for my pie. But even so I felt I was onto a promising recipe, if only because of the gorgeous autumn-sunset-yellow color of the finished pie. It was at least worth another round in the Dave’s Kitchen test lab.

From Jane’s pie I took the idea of adding hazelnuts to the chocolate layer. And to give some bite to the squash custard layer I added orange peel and lemon juice. It may yet be a prize winning pie – I’ll find out this weekend when I enter it into the 1st Annual Brooklyn Pie Bake-Off Benefit at Spacecraft in Williamsburg. Come on out and see if I’ve made a competition-worthy pie after all!

My current version of the recipe for this pie can be found here.

This Saturday, November 14, there will be a winter squash pie contest at the McCarren Park Greenmarket. The  best pie wins its baker a bag of goodies from the market booths, but the real winners of the contest will be the market customers, who get to taste each pie and vote for their favorite. I’ll have an entry on hand, though its exact recipe is still being formulated in the Dave’s Kitchen test labs. The lovely Karol Lu, decorated veteran of the Brooklyn Cookoff scene, will also be there, as will Jane Grenier, whose tarte tatin was a hit at last month’s Greenmarket apple pie contest. There’ll be other contestants besides, and we’ll be pulling out the stops to make some delicious pies. Come out and try ‘em!

Remember that the market has recently moved, and can now be found at Union between Driggs & N 12th.

From market manager Lauren, here’s some of what else you’ll find at the market this weekend:

Red Jacket has apple butter and delicious ciders.  Hot cider will be available at the market.

Osczepinski has a wide variety of winter squash. Once you’ve been inspired by the masterful pies at the cookoff you can pick up some squash and make your own.

Healthways has great potatoes.  Perfect for your winter soups and stews.

Arcadian pastures has whole rabbits and chickens.

Dipaola is accepting orders for Thanksgiving.  Turkeys (in a range of sizes) can be pre-ordered and picked up at the market.

And on Saturday the 21st, Daily candy will be hosting a “buy a bag” event.  Customers can buy a bag of produce (specific list of produce TBA) from the market and simply drop it off at the Daily Candy tent.  All proceeds go to NYC Food Bank!

See you on Saturday!

Julia, who runs the weekend stands at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall and Carroll Gardens greenmarkets, led me around to the back of the Farm Market at Fishkill Farms to meet Josh Morgenthau.  Josh and his girlfriend Hannah Geller (who sometimes writes for Serious Eats) talked with me for a long while in the farm’s small office before Josh took me on a tour of the farm. Josh, who has the scruffy, bearded look of an urbane, young back-to-the-land farmer, is about the age his grandfather was when he started the farm. He speaks deliberately, forming his thoughts carefully,  with a knowledge of farming that’s surprising from someone who’s been at it only for a year. He’s a Yale-trained artist, and when he returned to Fishkill a couple of years ago (he’d visited here throughout his childhood) it was to paint, not to farm. However, it happened that the farm manager they’d hired didn’t work out, and they couldn’t find a qualified replacement, so Josh stepped in to run things. To prepare himself for the job he went for advice (and sometimes even for equipment) to other knowledgeable, environmentally conscientious growers like Steve Clark of Prospect Hill Orchards, and he read every book he could find about growing apples. Michael Phillips’ “The Apple Grower: A Guide for the Organic Orchardist” stands out for him as a wealth of information on sustainable apple growing. For insight into conventional growing, Josh relied on Cornell University’s Pest Management Guidelines, and on  Cornell’s Extension Service, whose agents visited the farm many times over the season.

By all accounts this was a pretty rough year to start in as farm manager. To begin with, tragically, the farm’s historic barn burned down early in the season – a devastating loss both of equipment and storage and of farm and family heritage. Then there was the prolonged rain and cool weather that dominated the early part of the season, and the much-reported tomato blight that, in Josh’s words, “clobbered” their tomatoes.  Josh estimates that Fishkill produced probably only half of the vegetables of a normal season. But where some farms, particularly organic farms, lost their entire crop of tomatoes and plowed under many of their other crops besides, because of the tenacity of Julia and her crew the farm brought a steady flow of produce to the market, including a good number of tomatoes. And in the orchards they’re currently enjoying a good crop of apples as well.

Fishkill’s vegetable beds are fully organic, but the orchards, Josh says, are a “tough nut to crack” when it comes to growing organically.  To begin with, half of the orchard’s 40 acres are given over to McIntosh or apples in the McIntosh family – a legacy of the orchard’s history of catering to the wholesale market. These varieties are popular favorites, but are also among the most dependant on conventional fungicides, as they’re particularly susceptible to apple scab, a common and pernicious fungal disease.

They’d like to transition these parts of the orchards over to newer varieties that are just as tasty as the McIntosh but less susceptible to disease. But there is typically a long waitlist for seedlings, which then require several years before becoming productive apple trees. Economically, it’s a very difficult decision to de-commission trees at their producing peak, and many of the McIntosh blocks of the orchard are at that stage. On top of that there is the mandatory three-year wait once an orchard begins using organic methods before it can gain full certification — during which time they’ll be farming with more expensive organic methods but still only able to charge conventional rates on the wholesale market.

And even those portions of the orchard that are run organically need to undergo considerable spraying, particularly in a wet year like this one. It’s a point that Josh takes pains to explain. “The prospect of a no-spray orchard in New York State is pretty much non-existent,” he says, since the wet, relatively cool climate is particularly hospitable to the fungus that causes scab.  “Even the really devout ecological growers, intensely managing a couple of acres with compost or rotations of animals in the orchards will still spray at least several times a year.” At Fishkill, Josh sprays sulfur, the most commonly used organic fungicide, to combat scab. And he uses Surround, a spray made from a kaolin clay, to deter insects. The clay-based spray is completely non-toxic (it works by simply gunking-up the legs or mouth parts of insects that would otherwise damage the fruit), but it leaves a white reside that customers often mistake for a harmful chemical.

“It’s one of those funny things where there’s a gap between the reality of the farm and what people know,” says Josh.  Closing that gap, communicating directly with customers about their growing practices, is an important goal at Fishkill, especially where they’re striving to use sustainable growing practices but don’t yet have — or may not be trying for – organic certification.  Certification is always important, because it gives the customer an easy, recognizable way to know that the food was raised without synthetic inputs. But it also forces the farmer to adhere to an externally-determined set of practices that may or may not be best for his farm. Organic pesticides can, in fact, be more toxic than their conventional alternatives, and given the fact that organic growers often have to spray more frequently, they can be, cumulatively, more environmentally disruptive.

That said, in some blocks of the orchard a strictly organic regimen has seen promising results, and organics remain an important part of the strategy of sustainable growing at Fishill. But organic growing and organic certification are not the ultimate goals in Josh’s vision for Fishkill. “The key to being truly sustainable,” he says, “lies in replacing the trees with new varieties, and working over time to boost the immune response of the trees themselves, so that we can rely less on spraying, organic or otherwise.” This means encouraging populations of beneficial insects, and adopting techniques like pasturing sheep and chickens in the orchard, where their manure will not only fertilize the trees but will also help to decompose the fallen leaves, where the worst diseases overwinter.

Such practices are still fairly experimental. They aren’t required for organic certification but are guided instead by principles of Integrated Pest Management. IPM is grounded in ecological ideals, and aims to significantly reduce or completely eliminate the use of pesticides, but also allows the farmer the freedom to determine the pest control strategies that work best for his farm.  Since IPM is less recognizable and less easily explainable than the familiar organic label, the ability to talk directly with customers about it, to describe exactly what Fishkill’s growing practices are, is crucial. It works well to do that with the pick-your-own traffic that provides much of the farm’s business, but it doesn’t help in the wholesale market, where much of their crop is still sold. Still, Josh is confident that his approach is best for Fishkill’s orchards and will in the end be better for the farm’s business. “Having certification is always important,” Josh says, “but it’s ideal if you can communicate with your customers directly. Then you’re not a victim of fads. Right now there’s an organic bubble and people are already saying it’s going to burst. But if you have that direct relationship, whatever happens in terms of the market isn’t going to damage you.”

The booth for Fishkill Farms at the Borough Hall Greenmarket is not one of the market’s larger setups — it’s dwarfed by the sprawling pavilions of Wilklow Orchards and Phillips Farms across the plaza. So although I’ve enjoyed their excellent produce this summer, I was a little surprised when David Sherman, the market manager, suggested that I pay Fishkill Farm a visit and write about them, as I’d done last year for Wilklow Orchards. Why would he recommend them over all the other farms at the Cadman Plaza market?

It turns out that Fishkill has a quite distinguished history. It was started in the nineteen-teens by Henry Morgenthau Jr., a distinguished public servant and Father of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. The son of a prominent lawyer and ambassador, Henry Morgenthau somehow became interested in farming, studied agriculture at Cornell, and started Fishkill Farms while in his twenties. He went on to serve in a number of agriculture-related posts under Franklin Roosevelt, both in Albany and in Washington, before becoming Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury in 1934. FDR himself, as Fishkill’s website recounts, was a frequent visitor to the farm.

The farm has remained in the Morgenthau family since its beginnings.  It began as a diversified farm but early on developed a focus on apple orchards. Over the last decade and a half, after the retirement of the farm’s long-time manager, the orchards were leased to outside growers and primarily produced apples for the wholesale market. But recently the farm is again being diversified and is again under the direct oversight of the family. Josh Morgenthau, Henry’s grandson, has taken over management of the farm, is working to revive the farm and move it toward organic and sustainable growing practices.  Along with its 40 acres of apple orchards, Fishkill now produces peaches, pears, cherries, plums, berries and a wide range of fully organic vegetables. The farm continues to sell apples to the wholesale market, but today also sells directly to customers at a number of farmers markets and through a robust pick-your-own business.

Julia, who runs the Brooklyn Greenmarket stands (Borough Hall on Saturdays and Carroll Gardens Sundays),  arranged for me to visit, and she was there to greet me one recent Thursday morning after I’d made the drive up the Taconic. Fishkill is in the eastern Hudson Valley about ten miles east of Beacon, an hour and a half north of Brooklyn.  It lies just off the northern slopes of the Hudson Highlands – the Appalachian Trail passes by only a few miles to the south – and low, outlying mountains surround the farm in all directions. At the end of the farm’s long driveway is the cheery, bright red building that houses the farm market.  The market is the center of the farm’s pick-your-own business, and is also well stocked with cheeses, jams, and other products from farms and business in the area. It sits on a low hilltop, with the farm’s orchards and vegetable gardens  spread around and below it.

Check back soon for part 2 of my visit to Fishkill Farms.