The Chef Apprentice

Note: This notebook originally appeared on July 9, 2005 on The Bee's editorial page. I present it as evidence that an editorial writer doesn't necessarily need to abandon food writing upon returning to the job.

On the hottest days in the Central Valley, the coolest shade can be found beneath the boughs of an old fig tree. One recent afternoon, I sought refuge under one of these shady seniors, and was immediately taken back to my hometown - Fresno.

Fresno, named by the Spanish for the ash trees that lined the San Joaquin River, once boasted the largest concentration of figs in the Western Hemisphere. Fresno competed with the whole of Greece and Turkey to be the Big Fig of the fruit world. Then in 1922, a developer named J.C. Forkner had the ripe idea to sell "fig farms" to doctors and lawyers who, like Adam and Eve, might want to lead a modest life surrounded by fig leaves.

That was the beginning of Fig Garden Village. And it was the beginning of the end for the figs.

As every Fresno kid knows, you don't want to take a nap under a ripe fig tree. Fall asleep in the cool shade, and ants will crawl into your snoring nostrils. When the figs are ripe, you pull out the ladders, call your friends and pick the fruit. Otherwise, the ground becomes an open-face sandwich of fig jam.

Residents of Fig Garden Village eventually grew tired of this relentless bounty. They cut down the fig trees and planted hedges to screen their hot tubs from the neighbors. Fed by land speculation, the city sprawled north and abandoned its downtown. The remaining commercial orchards soon became subdivisions.

For this reason and others, California has lost much of its fig heritage. The peak year was 1933, when 46,400 acres were planted. That has now dropped to fewer than 13,000 acres, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While California remains in the top three of world production, the future of this tear-shaped fruit remains fragile, like a fig.

California, as has been said many times, doesn't know what it's losing. In New York City, people pay $5 a carton for figs. Here they fall to the ground, scorned and ridiculed. Few people know you can cook them into jam, mix them with walnuts and cinnamon, and then tuck them into buttery dough that turns golden in the oven. Nor do they know you can wrap them with prosciutto, skewer them with rosemary and grill them for a few minutes. It's a little taste of heaven.

Aside from being healthy and full of antioxidants, figs are one of our links with the old world. They are frequently mentioned in the Bible and in the works of ancient philosophers. Pliny the Elder once said these fruits "increase the strength of young people, preserve the elderly in better health and make them look younger with fewer wrinkles."

In other words, figs are better than Botox.

Now there's a marketing pitch for the California Fig Commission.

Bee photo by Florence Low.

Many of us who tend vegetable gardens tend to be whiners.

We complain about snails and white flies. We gripe about being smothered by squash. Gosh, isn't it awful-- we have to water our plots everyday!  And by summer's end, we end up becoming enslaved to our bounty. The sheer volume of produce determines what we eat for lunch or dinner.

Yet even as we gripe, most of us gardeners are, at our core, grateful. Growing food is a magical thing. You stick seeds or sprouts in the ground, water them, and they produce luscious fruits and vegetables.

And as every gardener knows, there is simply no comparison between a store-bought tomato or pepper and one picked at its peak of ripeness.

In the photo above, you can see some of the bounty I am currently growing at the 19th Street Community Garden in Midtown, where I've tended a plot for several years.

Going clockwise from the bottom right, you can see:

Brandywine tomatoes: Incredibly juicy and sweet. My plant is six feet high and very prolific. I am making sauces and soups from these.

French white squash: Sweet, and crisp. You have to pick these early or they grow the size of a football.. The larger one I skin and seed, then roast them in chunks in the oven with salt and olive oil. The smaller ones I saute or throw on the grill.

In my column today, I ruminate about the food adventures of writer Waverly Root and one of the specialties he encountered across Italy - mostarda.

Mostarda is a sweet-savory relish made with various fresh or dried fruits. Think of it as an Italian chutney, without the intensity of ginger.

I recently helped Oliveto Chef Paul Canales make a peach mostarda, which you can see to the right.

He later served it with Paine Farm pigeon al mattone, smeared with a liver mousse, seen below.

(Al mattone means "under a brick," an ancient Italian method of flattening and searing a piece of fowl on both sides. At Oliveto, the chefs don't use an actual brick. Instead, they achieve the same result by cooking the meat between two hot pans).

You, too, can make a mostarda. Here's a recipe by Mario Batali that offers one basic blueprint. Here's another by Amy Sherman. Here's another from Food and Wine.

And if any of you have your own mostarda recipes, feel free to share.

Garlic scapes are another culinary revelation that the chefs at OU - Oliveto University - have added to my curriculum.

Scapes are the stalks that shoot up from the center of the garlic plant. As you can see from the photo, they are a snaky form of flora, which makes them a bit tricky to dice.

To force more energy into the garlic bulbs while they are growing, many gardeners and farmers simply cut them the scapes and throw them away.

Merde! The scapes from garlic are delicious! (Not so for scapes from onion and leaks.) The trick is finding scapes that are tender and not tough, and knowing how to prepare them.

On Saturday, I cut up a few cups of garlic scapes for a salad dressing that line chef Kelsey Bergstrom was preparing. These were added to an equal amount of walnuts that I mortared, and Kelsey then tossed in some salt and olive oil.

Later that night, she added champagne vinegar to the mixture. (Adding it earlier, she said, might have discolored the scapes.) The final dressing was spooned over a salad of avocado and red beets, adding some bright color and texture, along with a hint of garlic.

Sorry, I don't have a photo of the final dish. But trust me -- it was a winning combination.

For weeks, the chefs at Oliveto have been waiting for the porcini to arrive. Now they are here, and these fresh mushrooms are wondrous - bigger and more flavorful than the norm, by far.

A staple of Italian cuisine, wild porcini grow profusely in California, particularly in pine forests. But you have to be an expert to differentiate them from lookalike varieties. They also require certain conditions -- rain and humidity -- at the right times. The conditions this year are producing a bumpercrop of porcini.

Chef Paul Canales jumps on these mushrooms when they arrive in the kitchen. With an expert eye, he uses his paring knife to cut off mushy chunks of the mushrooms that, if left alone, would quickly spoil the entire batch.

Chef Paul cleaned up a few boxes of porcini today. Then it was my job to cook up a portion for cannelloni filling. This was a delicious assignment, partly because my task involved seasoning and sampling the mushrooms all through the process.
 

One delight of spring is getting a call from my friend Judy Michalowski, who raises organic raspberries and other produce on land she owns in West Sacramento.

Judy is a certified producer for the California Farmers Market Program, and is a longtime advocate for local agriculture. Every spring, she calls friends to help with harvesting roughly 50 pounds of berries that spring from her well-tended raspberry patch.

It's a good deal all around. Judy gets help in harvesting her berries, which she sells to restaurants and customers at the farmers markets. We get to take a few baskets home, while sampling some as we pick.

Yesterday, on my day off from the kitchen, I spent a couple of hour picking berries with Judy and her friends. It's a prickly and challenging job. Raspberry bushes have thorns, like other berry bushes, and the berries tend to hide behind leaves to shade themselves from the sun. 

So you have to bend and stoop to find these little gems, but it is so worth it. Raspberries are rich in anti-oxidants, and there is no better accompaniment to vanilla ice cream on a hot day.

Or, if you are feeling festive, drop a few of these in a glass of bubbly Prosecco and celebrate spring, while it lasts.

Photo by Stuart Leavenworth  

A large crate of morels arrived at Oliveto on Thursday. Yesterday it was my job to prep these wild beauties, using the power of my lungs to clean them.

Nearly everyone at the restaurant was in awe of these mushrooms. The largest was as big as my fist. They came from the Mt. Shasta area, harvested by a mysterious forager named "Anthony," who dropped off a crate after previously failing to sell Oliveto a far less superior product.

Morels, also known as morchella, are often associated with French cooking, but they can be found all over the world, including California. They tend to grow in forests that are sufficiently cold in winter and humid in spring. Often they spring from the soil two or three years after a forest fire.
 

My day at Oliveto usually starts with several close encounters with vegetables.

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time with boxes of artichokes, asparagus, fava beans and baby carrots.

I'm also gaining expertise in the preparation of green garlic - a seasoning agent for all sorts of spring dishes on the menu.

Green garlic is the stock of a garlic clove that hasn't fully matured. It resembles a scallion. Some cooks prefer it because it doesn't have the clingy, oily and sometimes overwhelming flavor of regular garlic.

So how do you prepare it? Here is one way:

First you trim the tops of the green garlic, leaving about 2 inches of the green leafy part above the white stock. Then you use your well-sharpened chef's knife to finely chop the white stock and remaining green part.

This chopped garlic goes into a mortar and pestle - something that should be part of every home chef's armory. At Oliveto, the kitchen is equipped with a pair of heavy stone mortars, like those used by the Aztecs.