FOOD TATTOOS • DUELING TOMATOES GRAPE EXPECTATIONS

edible
IDAHO
Summer 2016 • Number 15
®
Celebrating the food culture of Idaho
FOOD TATTOOS • DUELING TOMATOES
GRAPE EXPECTATIONS • WILD CRAVINGS
Member of Edible Communities
Contents
2
GRIST
4
EDIBLE READS
6
IDAHO FINDS
11
REDESIGNING GARDEN CITY
36
Artisans blend drinks and design in urban
environment
THE SYMPHONY OF THE SEED, PART II
38
The spawning of the seed
BUILDING A BACKBONE
The Local Food Alliance creates a community
of support in the Wood River Valley
STARS (AND LAND TRUST) ALIGN
41
25
Sizing up the stiff competition
at the Western Idaho Fair
GRAPE EXPECTATIONS
New Koenig Vineyards tasting room is part of
a flurry of investment in Sunnyslope
ANCIENT BIRD, MODERN MEAL
Kuna’s McCoy Ranch—Home to American
Ostrich Farms
By Tim Atwell
43
WHAT'S IN SEASON
By Mike Landa
45
WILD CRAVINGS
Swift River Farm thrives in Salmon
By Cindy Salo
DUELING TOMATOES
By Tara Morgan
By Jamie Truppi
19
Eating local could help keep you ticking
to 100 and beyond
By Casey O’Leary
By Casey O’Leary
16
GOING THE DISTANCE
By Carissa Wolf
By Scott Ki and Linda Whittig
14
34
FOOD INK
How eating on the trail makes you yearn
for just about anything else
When it comes to tattoos, every picture tells a story
By Jessica Murri
By Guy Hand
30
HOW FRENCH FRIES ARE GROWN
49
COCKTAILS
Clip. Create. Clink!
From the field to the fryer, a look at the world's most
popular potato product
By Melanie Flitton Folwell
By Blake Lingle
COVER Artist and former farmhand Saratops
McDonald with a stylized tattoo of honeycomb and
gears. Photo by Guy Hand
EdibleIdaho.com
1
GRIST FOR THE MILL
edible
IDAHO
PUBLISHER
Claudia Sánchez Mahedy
MANAGING EDITOR
Guy Hand
EDITORS
Tara Morgan
Scott Ki
As the newest member of Edible Idaho’s editorial team, I’d like to introduce myself. For me, like
many people, certain foods and restaurants induce a warm feeling of comfort and familiarity. I can
trace these emotions back to kindergarten and first grade when my mom worked as a short order
cook at a diner. My dad would drop me off there after school and I’d romp around in a red vinyl
booth for a few hours until mom ended her shift. Essentially, a diner was my daycare.
Several decades later, I’m a former news reporter who has written several stories for Edible
in the past, including a profile of Lisa Peterson of a’Tavola Gourmet Marketplace and Café that
featured Guy Hand’s photograph of her son’s tattoo. In this issue, Guy again captures the creative ink of local farmers and food purveyors in his photo essay on food-related body art.
One of the reasons my wife and I decided to move to Idaho was the state’s abundance of rivers,
forests and mountains. During the summer, this means hiking, camping and backpacking. In this
issue, Jessica Murri explores how forays into the wild on backpacking trips heighten our appreciation for all types of foods, even the most basic, when we return to civilization. We wish Jessica well
as she hikes the Pacific Crest Trail.
When we first arrived in Boise, we were fortunate to sample wine from Koenig Winery and
Distillery. Since then, we’ve had a bottle or two for special occasions and always seem to have their
vodka in our freezer—for medicinal purposes only, of course. The Koenigs are in the middle of
completing a new tasting room at their vineyard, as are the folks at Williamson Orchards &
Vineyards, in the Sunnyslope of the Snake River Valley AVA. Tara Morgan updates us on their
progress and identifies several issues area winemakers face as their operations grow and expand.
Summer also marks the beginning of fair season as Idaho’s agricultural bounty begins to
fully erupt. Farmer and writer Casey O’Leary gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the stiff competition she encountered at the Western Idaho Fair as she squared off against other growers.
Next to the Western Idaho Fairgrounds, Garden City seems to be erupting with modern
buildings that house food and drink artisans. Linda Whittig and I explored some of these new
additions to the burgeoning Garden City food scene.
For some, summer means running Idaho’s many rivers. The Middle Fork of the Salmon is
at the top of the list, but the town of the same name gets much less recognition. Cindy Salo describes a “harmonic convergence” there that helped out a young farming couple as they sought
to purchase land. Cindy also provides a few food and drink suggestions for those new to Salmon.
This Summer 2016 edition of Edible Idaho also explores an ostrich ranch, the secrets of living beyond 100 years old and sheds light on how french fries are grown. Contributors also take
us to the Wood River Valley and establishments in small towns like Troy and Parma, where I’m
certain I’d feel like I was 6 years old again, waiting for mom to finish her shift at the diner.
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SUMMER 2016
COPY EDITORS
Doug Adrianson
Robin Zimmermann
CONTRIBUTORS
Tim Atwell • Gabriel Border
Michelle Cushing • Melanie Flitton Folwell
Joe Jaszewski • Scott Ki
Mike Landa • Blake Lingle
Guy Hand • Ilona McCarty
Matt McKain • Tara Morgan
Jessica Murri • Casey O’Leary
Cindy Salo • Jamie Truppi
Felicia Weston • Stacy Whitman
Linda Whittig • Carissa Wolf
DESIGNER
Melissa Petersen
WEB DESIGN
Mary Ogle
AD DESIGNERS
Jeanne Lambert
Meg Bell
CONTACT US
Edible Idaho
P.O. Box 192, South Salem, NY 10590
208.928.7150 • [email protected]
EdibleIdaho.com
SALES & MARKETING
Jessica Norris • [email protected]
[email protected]
Every effort is made to avoid errors, misspellings and omissions. If,
however, an error comes to your attention, please accept our sincere
apologies and notify us. Thank you.
Edible Idaho is published quarterly by La Nueva Mesa, LLC. Telephone: 208.928.7150. Distribution is throughout Idaho and nationally by subscription. All rights reserved. Subscription rate is
$28 annually. Published seasonally: spring, summer, fall and winter. Call or email us to inquire about advertising rates, deadlines
or subscription information. No part of this publication may be
used without written permission of the publisher.
EdibleIdaho.com
3
EDIBLE READS
THE THIRD PLATE: FIELD NOTES
ON THE FUTURE OF FOOD
By Dan Barber
Every once in awhile, a book
comes along that profoundly
changes the conversation
about food. The Third Plate is
one such book. In a very similar structure to Michael Pollan’s bombshell The Omnivore’s
Dilemma, Dan Barber takes
readers on four separate yet
interconnected journeys to explore the ways food gets to
our tables. We travel with him
through soil, land, sea and
seed, crossing multiple continents and landing behind the
scenes at his critically acclaimed farm-to-table restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns.
Barber’s accolades as a chef—from multiple James Beard Awards
to being named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in
the world—are extremely well-deserved, judging from the thoroughness with which he explores the supply chain of all the ingredients in
his restaurant.
All food has a rich story that connects it to a regional culture and
to the entire planet. Barber’s overwhelming reverence for food, and the
stories about how it came to be, shine through every page of this book.
Blue Hill at Stone Barns has its own seven-acre farm, where farmers
grow much of the produce and some of the meat for the restaurant.
Barber clearly cherishes diverse varieties and beautiful farming practices. And all of the other foods they serve have an off-farm story, which
Barber tells spectacularly.
In the “Sea” chapter, he describes a disaster he had in his restaurant serving endangered bluefin tuna to some Gourmet writers, then
zooms out to explore the controversies surrounding farmed fish versus
wild-caught fish and the larger issue that the oceans are in grave danger. With a singular focus on quality, Barber searches for truly sustainable seafood. He visits an almadraba, a traditional tuna fishing cultural
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SUMMER 2016
practice on the Strait of Gibraltar. He also visits Veta La Palma, one of
the world’s most promising examples of a sustainable fish farm.
Ultimately, the conclusion Barber draws in every chapter is that we
need to eat lower on the food chain. Whether it’s buckwheat and rye
from an organic farmer’s soil-building crop rotations or phytoplankton from the ocean, he advocates for the smaller, foundational species
over the larger trophy species. He recognizes the chef ’s rise to pop culture icon status and implores chefs to take the responsibility inherent
in that celebrity seriously. He lauds chefs who make five-star meals from
undervalued but more sustainable ingredients, pointing out that they
have an enormous power to shape the public’s perception of delicious
food.
Though most Idaho readers will be left with a yearning for what
is possible but not yet reality here, little by little we’re making headway.
Restaurants like The Modern Hotel and State & Lemp served local
cover crops on their menus for the first time this spring, proving the
point: The Third Plate is profoundly changing the conversation about
food.
—Casey O’Leary
THE EARTH MOVED: ON THE
REMARKABLE ACHIEVEMENTS OF
EARTHWORMS
By Amy Stewart
If you think worms are gross,
or simply uninteresting, prepare to be blown away. In her
signature quirky and engaging
style, Amy Stewart, the author
of The Drunken Botanist and
Wicked Plants, introduces us
to the humble yet extraordinary earthworm. Stewart
refers to her beloved subject as
“the intestines of the soil,”
“nature’s plough” and “the
custodians of the planet.”
With Charles Darwin as
her mentor and the worms in
her garden as her muse, she
dives into their biology and
abilities with infectious excitement.
Darwin’s last published book was about earthworms and Stewart
describes the elderly scientist patiently studying his subject just outside
his house at night, setting up detailed experiments with hundreds of little paper triangles to see how the worms pull objects into their burrows. Darwin estimated as many as 50,000 earthworms could be living
in an acre of soil. Earthworm scientists now know that the actual number is much higher. In the fertile soil of the Nile Valley, scientists estimate over a million earthworms live in each acre, depositing over 1,000
tons of nutrient-rich castings (worm poop). The gardeners among you
understand the mind-boggling value of this free fertility. Earthworms
pass the top few inches of soil through their guts every year, aerating
and fertilizing it naturally.
Stewart points out that we know more about what’s happening in
outer space than we do about the ground just under our feet. Not only
have worms and the vast number of soil organisms that cohabitate with
them been undervalued as subjects, they are also extremely difficult to
study because we have to destroy the soil they’ve built to attempt it.
Still, despite the odds, a growing number of worm aficionados are
discovering remarkable things about them. Stewart proves to be an excellent guide through the wide world of weird worm people, combining the curiosity of a scientist with the passion of a gardener. She takes
us on a journey from her home worm composting bin to a huge municipal wastewater treatment plant employing millions of worms to
clean up a city’s sewage. Even Idaho’s Giant Palouse earthworm gets a
nod. The reader discovers that worms can help fight plant diseases,
clean up toxic waste sites and even become invasive pests in certain
ecosystems.
It is rare to find a natural history book that succeeds in delighting
readers as much as educating them. Stewart’s engaging style has us
falling in love with her blind, deaf, lung-less, spineless slime-tube of a
subject, which Darwin calls “a worker of vast geological changes, a
planer down of mountainsides … a friend of man.” Never will you look
at the earth under your feet the same way again.
—Casey O’Leary
EdibleIdaho.com
5
IDAHO FINDS
APPLE LUCY’S DRIVE-IN
In past years, if you arrived late at Boise’s Capital City Public Market
on a sunny Saturday morning you knew the disappointment of seeing
the “sold out” sign at the Apple Lucy’s booth. It was a sad sight for a
palate prepared for sweet huckleberry filling sandwiched between flaky,
buttery crusts. This season, that disappointment will be even more pronounced: For the first time in 11 years, due to changing family obligations, Apple Lucy’s won’t be a regular at the Capital City market.
Thankfully, fans of Apple Lucy’s won’t be shut out completely.
They’ll just have to make the drive to Parma.
Apple Lucy’s Drive-In is not exactly a pie shop. Sourcing beef from
Homedale, they serve up fresh burgers, fries, finger steaks and milkshakes—including their pie shake, which is exactly what it sounds like:
your choice of pie blended with soft-serve ice cream. Order at the
counter and hope to find a spot among the locals at one of the six indoor tables.
Michelle Davis and her family have a decades-long history of running restaurants and serving legendary pie in Parma. In the ’50s, her
great-grandma, Helen Anacabe, ran the Dutchess Restaurant down the
street from the drive-in, formerly known as Rory’s. The Davises took
over the latter in 2007 to supplement the pies they were selling to a
few restaurants, grocery stores and at the farmers market.
Pie making starts by 6am most mornings in the commercial
kitchen located next to the Davis home, taunting the field hands with
the smell of country air infused with fresh-baked pastry. The pies are all
handmade using a family recipe handed down by Davis’s aunt. When
asked if the recipe is a secret, Davis’s husband, Steve, said, “Sort of.
Michelle has given it out to a few select people, but no one ever seems
to be able to reproduce it the way she does.”
To make pie fillings, they hand peel hundreds of apples each year,
sourcing as much of the fruit as possible from local orchards such as
Symms Fruit Ranch. At the height of the season, they bake 100 4-inch
pies and 50 to 60 full-size versions each week. With all that baking,
the Davises’ daughter, Holly Mote, and Michelle’s dad, “Doc,” are on
deck to lend a hand.
If you’ve noticed by now, there’s no Apple Lucy mentioned as a
member of the Davis family. So who is she? Turns out, she was the family’s beloved golden retriever who had a taste for apples. Even though
she’s gone, her love of fresh fruit lives on at her namesake drive-in.
—Linda Whittig
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Apple Lucy’s Drive-In
203 N. 9th St., Parma
Facebook.com/AppleLucysBakeryAndDiner/
Open Monday–Saturday, 11am–8pm
BOISE HOTSPOT
Beer is fairly low-tech. For thousands of years, industrious imbibers have
crafted the beverage with little more than grains, water and yeast. But
now, Boise HotSpot has upped the technology on pint pouring. Located on the second floor of Boise TechMall—a hodge-podge of techrelated retail and office spaces located near Overland and Cloverdale
Roads—the HotSpot features Idaho’s only automated beer wall.
Those familiar with BodoVino will understand the basics: You load
a card with cash, swipe it and receive a predetermined amount of booze.
But instead of selecting a one-ounce, three-ounce or five-ounce pour,
the HotSpot allows you to dispense your own beer and you’re charged
for however much or little you splash into your glass.
“There’s a lot that goes into it,” said Sean Andreas, relations manager at Boise TechMall. “There’s a computer that runs every two taps. …
In the back end, there’s an electromagnet and a flow-meter. So when
you scan the card it activates the electromagnet, which then allows beer
to flow, which activates the flow-meter. That relays back to the computer, which then relays back to our point of sale to say how much you
poured and deducts it from your card.”
Though it sounds complicated, this technology essentially allows
you to be the beertender. Just select a pint or tulip glass, refrigerated or
room temperature, then choose from among 16 tap handles that feature
an array of local and regional craft brews. On a recent trip, that list included everything from Boise Brewing’s Broad Street Blonde to Stone
Brewing’s Enjoy By … IPA to Bourbon Barrel Aged Arrogant Bastard
Ale.
“We do six barrel kegs, so we’re constantly changing them,” said
Andreas. “We try to keep it fresh all the time.”
Boise HotSpot hosts regular tap takeovers and trivia nights. There’s
also an adjacent café, serving snacks like spicy chicken wings and
smoked pork-topped Cuban nachos.
—Tara Morgan
Boise HotSpot
Second floor of Boise TechMall
1550 S. Cloverdale Rd., Suite 210, Boise
208.219.5774
BoiseHotSpot.com
EdibleIdaho.com
7
THE FILLING STATION
The Filling Station, a gas station turned cafe and eatery, sits along quiet
Highway 6 in Troy, population 900. Just a dozen miles east of Moscow,
Troy is bordered by cedar trees and the fertile Palouse, with its green
and gold rolling hills ripe with wheat and legumes.
Having quickly become the figurative heart of Troy since opening in
2009, The Filling Station provides a cozy meeting place for locals and
travelers alike, while boasting a menu full of flavor that also caters to
dietary restrictions—low sodium, gluten free and low fat.
Judy Bickford, a long-time cook, moved to Troy after visiting and
feeling quickly at home with the small-town pace, the generosity of its
residents and the leaning barns that speckle the region. During the
facelift of a barn on her property, Judy first met her now-husband Tim,
an Idaho renovation expert. Together, they decided to combine their
talents to open The Filling Station.
Initially the Bickfords intended to offer only coffee and dessert,
but the town’s residents implored them to make The Filling Station a
place where they could dine. With Tim’s background in construction
and Judy’s cooking skills, they decided to oblige. After more than two
years of saving money, applying for appropriate permits, reconstructing the station and crunching the numbers, they opened their doors to
diners and coffee drinkers.
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Much of the food at The Filling Station is locally sourced, from the
huckleberries picked alongside the Clearwater River to the pork from
pigs raised in the Bickfords’ own backyard and butchered at the University of Idaho. The Filling Station also supports Landgrove Coffee, a
Troy coffee roaster that sells fair-trade beans.
Its menu also caters to local appetites. “The Strom,” for example,
was conceived to satisfy bacon-loving Strom Electric employees, a business just down the street. The whole-wheat sandwich is a triple-decker
featuring thick slabs of bacon, house-made basil pesto mayo, tomatoes,
mixed greens, oil and vinegar.
With the relatively high cost of locally sourced ingredients and
labor-intensive food preparation, the Bickfords say running The Filling
Station at a profit is a challenge. But as Judy says, “Why do it if it’s not
your best?” This commitment to quality arises from the Bickfords’ faith
and belief in serving others. For them, that means their mission is to
nourish their customers as best they can.
—Michelle Cushing
The Filling Station
502 S. Main St., Troy
208.835.2300
Tu–F 5am–6pm,
Sa 8am–4pm
EdibleIdaho.com
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REDESIGNING GARDEN CITY
Artisans blend drinks and design in urban environment
BY SCOTT KI AND LINDA WHITTIG
PHOTOS BY GABRIEL BORDER
In the past few months, new breweries, wine tasting rooms and bakeries have popped up in
Garden City. Four of these new locations not only offer tasty craft food and drink, they also emphasize interesting design. From Powderhaus Brewing on one end to Telaya Wine Co./Coiled
Wines on the other, and with Meriwether Cider and Wildflour Bakery in-between, Garden City
is sporting an updated look.
Garden City officials have embraced craft food and drink makers—hoping to bring a little design edginess to the community. “It is a conscious effort on the part of the city and it really started with the [2006] Comprehensive Plan, looking to target artisans and to increase
livability within the city,” says Jenah Thornborrow, Garden City’s director of development services. “The city is hoping to encourage new construction where it lends itself more to a place
where people want to be rather than a pass-through city.”
It may be hard to imagine among the mobile homes and strip malls that dot its topography but Garden City once thrived with abundant farmland worked by Chinese immigrants,
who supplied Boise residents with fresh produce, according to the Association of Idaho Cities.
These agricultural roots eventually gave way to a city that housed gambling dens and, more recently, bars and restaurants that allowed smoking indoors. With its checkered past, it seems
only fitting that a town originally named after Chinese gardens has come full circle to embrace
food and drink purveyors—along with aesthetic design—as a means to reinvent itself as a destination.
POWDERHAUS
BREWING COMPANY
Commuters driving on Chinden Blvd. near
the western edge of Garden City can’t miss the
towering grain silo with “Powderhaus” emblazoned in bold, block capital letters. The silo
stands guard over a metal and wood warehouse that evokes an industrial rustic look.
The 8,500-square-foot facility provides
ample space for the production of nearly a
dozen beers as well as a tasting room and
creekside garden. Handmade wooden doors
standing 14 feet tall greet visitors as they
make their way inside. In keeping with the
sporting lodge theme, skis, poles, snowshoes,
rod and reel hang on the walls along with
taxidermied deer and buffalo heads.
The Schmidt family, which owns and
operates Powderhaus, has used reclaimed materials throughout including lighting from
the old Rodeway Inn and a urinal in the
men’s room crafted from a beer keg. Lisa, the
family matriarch, says, “It’s all about getting
outside—skiing, fishing, kayaking, hiking or
whatever you’re doing to enjoy Idaho, and
then coming back at the end of the day to
enjoy a great beer.”
9719 W. Chinden Blvd., Garden City
Open M–Th 3–10pm, F–Sa noon–10pm,
Su noon–7pm
EdibleIdaho.com
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TELAYA WINE COMPANY
AND COILED WINES
On the eastern edge of Garden City sits the
new 12,000-square-foot building that's
home to Telaya Wine Company and Coiled
Wines. The look is industrial, but more refined than rustic. It also blends in well with
some of its neighbors in the Surel Mitchell
Live/Work/Create District.
Sitting on the patio in the morning sun,
Owner and Winemaker Earl Sullivan motions to the Greenbelt and Boise River and
says, “It’s hard to beat.” Fitting in with the
surrounding environment was paramount to
Earl and his wife, Carrie, when designing the
new space. Beige and at least three different
shades of gray coat the exterior, accented by
reddish-brown wood beams and trim, and
floor to ceiling windows. Other touches include Frank Lloyd Wright–style entry lights
and an interior filled with metal and wood
tables and chairs.
MERIWETHER CIDER
COMPANY
Meriwether Cider Company is a familyowned business exuding an industrial rustic
vibe. “One of the reasons we chose Garden
City was the emerging craft beverage industry here,” says Molly Leadbetter, while filling
a growler for a customer.
Ann and Gig Leadbetter, along with
daughters Molly and Kate, opened the doors
to their new tasting room in the 1,900square-foot space vacated when the owners
of Crooked Fence Brewing relocated to
Crooked Flats in Eagle. The Leadbetters kept
the concrete floors but removed an interior
wall to open up the space, added handmade
pine tables, plywood wainscoting and a red
wall that bursts in contrast to the bluish-gray
ones. Highlights of the interior are a wall
filled with antique farm implements and a
bar made from circular cross sections of trees.
5242 Chinden Blvd., Garden City
Open Th 4–8pm, F 4–9pm, Sa noon–9pm
and Su 2–6pm
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240 E. 32nd St., Garden City
Telaya Wine Company Tasting Room:
Tasting room open daily noon–6pm or by
appointment
Coiled Wines Tasting Room: Tasting room
open daily noon–6pm or by appointment
WILDFLOUR BAKERY
AND COFFEE
Mary Cogswell, owner of Wildflour Bakery,
had a vision of a black metal building with reclaimed barnwood over the entryway and
shared this idea with architect Cathy Sewell.
Working within the constraints of a small, narrow lot, Sewell designed the new 2,000square-foot facility.
The bakery and coffee bar stands in stark
contrast with a few mobile home neighbors,
but plays off the basic warehouse shape of surrounding businesses. Inside, an L-shaped
walk-up counter that displays baked goods for
sale fronts a Simonelli espresso machine. A
high table and a few chairs supplement the
modest space and tall windows allow natural
light to flow in while offering customers a view
of life on 42nd Street.
304 E. 42nd St., Garden City
Open M–F 7am–1pm, Sa 8am–noon
Linda Whittig frequently bikes along the Greenbelt towards Garden City in search of a tasty libation.
Read more about her food adventures at BistroOneSix.com.
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13
THE SYMPHONY OF THE SEED, PART II
THE SPAWNING OF THE SEED
BY CASEY O’LEARY
ILLUSTRATIONS BY FELICIA WESTON
As our end of the Earth tips closer to the
sun and the frost migrates southward,
gardeners among us begin transplanting our coddled babies outside. One
by one, we tuck them into freshly
prepared soil, give them a hearty
drink of water and reluctantly retreat
like nervous parents waving goodbye on
the first day of kindergarten.
The world is vast for a tiny seedling, as the
shelter of the greenhouse gives way to the outside world
beyond it. Now it’s a baby in an orchestra that becomes, in Wendell
Berry’s words, “a music so subtle and vast no ear hears it, except in fragments.” Delicate bright white roots touch the soil of their new home
for the first time, tickled by literally millions of teeming soil microorganisms. The harsh sun sears its leaves and the wind whips at its stem.
So much could go wrong in such a vulnerable state.
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It learns, as all beings must, how to
occupy a seat at this incomprehensibly
interconnected table with strength
and grace. It must etch minerals from
rocks and grow strong but flexible in
the wind, like the hardened trunks of
trees that still sway in the breeze. It
learns to share of itself, but not too much.
We humans have a distaste for bitterness, so we have bred it out of our beloved garden
vegetables over centuries, transforming bitter wild plants
into sweet cultivated ones. Because we’ve taken away our plants’ natural bitter defenses, we must also play an important role in protecting
them. Thus, we are inducted into the concert as our cultivated gardens
become members of the orchestra, working alongside the ladybugs and
mantises to keep others from eating our dinner.
Leaves multiply rapidly when roots can drink from the soil, and
our baby plants soon grow voluptuously large. Their breath and ours intertwine in the elegant exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Yet the
seed has a higher purpose: to make more seeds.
The reproductive method the plant employs is the stuff of sonnets—the very definition of beauty for some. While some plants, like
tomatoes, can pollinate themselves, the majority of our cultivated vegetable crops need help. Without the ability to move, a plant must lure
in an unwitting accomplice to aid it in the act of copulation, to move
its sperm to another plant’s egg.
Thus, plain green stems birth garish flowers, splaying petals, pistils and stamens open for the taking and wafting alluring scents into the
air, hoping to catch the attention of a passing pollinator. Guided by
ultraviolet maps on petals unseen by human eyes, a pollinator reaches
the sweet cache of nectar the plant generously provisions, covering her
hairy body with sperm-filled pollen in the process. Plants don’t get insects to do their bidding through force or violence, they do it through
irresistible sweetness and beauty. And through unique mechanics.
Plants from the Umbelliferae family, like dill and carrot, shoot up
umbrellas of tiny flowers on tiny stems, attracting tiny pollinators like
solitary bees and small flies. Big squash flowers are better suited to big
pollinators like honeybees and squash bees. Scrophulariaceae plants
provide a little pedal of a petal for the bee to land on, releasing a pollendrenched anther on a long filament to bop her on the bum while she
drinks. Tomatoes shed pollen only for bumblebees who can buzz perfectly on pitch. Thus the intrigue continues for the curious gardener,
who passes awed summer hours observing the ingeniousness of flowers
and the industriousness of bees.
Often we think of germination as something that only happens to
seeds, but pollen grains germinate too. When a pollen grain lands on
the sticky stigma of the female flower, it grows a pollen tube that
stretches down the style of the female, unleashing the sperm to swim
in and fertilize the eggs inside. The fertilized eggs will grow to become
the seed babies of the plant, housed in an ovary as large as a pumpkin
or as small as the button of a chamomile flower.
Now that the sexy work of pollination is done, there’s nothing to
do but wait for the seed to ripen, which is the very definition of summer’s bounty. The juicy tomatoes, spicy peppers and buttery squashes
we covet are simply the houses for hundreds of ripening seeds, seducing us as the flowers seduced the bees into doing their bidding. We
feast on their excessiveness as we await autumn’s chill.
Casey O’Leary is a writer and owner of Earthly Delights Farm, a humanpowered urban farm in Boise specializing in CSA vegetable production, retail seeds and on-farm education.
EdibleIdaho.com
15
BUILDING A BACKBONE
The Local Food Alliance creates a community of support in the Wood River Valley
BY JAMIE TRUPPI
PHOTOS BY STACY WHITMAN
At Syringa Mountain School in Hailey, Taco Tuesdays don’t involve a
speck of mystery meat. The grassfed beef is raised at Double Springs
Ranch near Challis; the onions originate at King’s Crown Organics in
Glenns Ferry; the bell peppers, cilantro and lettuce ripen at Thousand
Springs in Hagerman; the black beans come from M&M Heath Farms
in Buhl; and fresh salsa is prepared up the road at Despo’s in Ketchum.
Depending on the season—and which vegetables from Syringa’s
school garden are ripe—the taco ingredients change from week to week.
Part of the success of this pilot farm-to-school lunch program,
which offers locally grown meals five days a week at Syringa, is involving kids in the process. Syringa incorporates edible education into its
curriculum and, in turn, not only does the school garden’s bounty offset some of the food costs, but the kids eat meals they might never eat
at home, like ham and bean soup.
“It’s the right thing to do for the kids, for their nutrition and to
support the farmers,” said Al McCord, school lunch chef and owner of
Wood River Sustainability Center. “It’s not an economic driver—it’s
an ethical one.”
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edible IDAHO
SUMMER 2016
This program serves about 350 kids each week and involves the
synchronistic efforts of several local entities. To make the program a
reality, the Local Food Alliance—an organization that acts as a catalyst
for the progression of food projects in the Wood River Valley—coordinated logistics between Syringa and the WRSC. As a team, they tackled concerns like food availability and affordability, allergies,
technology, logistics and implementation. After the school board approved the program, LFA helped bring in consulting chef Ann Cooper,
who formerly worked with Alice Waters of Berkeley’s famous Chez
Panisse.
The Stanford Social Innovation Review has called organizations
that do this kind of behind-the-scenes work “backbone organizations,”
or entities that facilitate “large-scale systemic change through collective impact.” Local Food Alliance founder Ali Long was intrigued by
this concept. A philanthropist interested in using social investment to
stimulate food systems, Long said she saw the opportunity “to impact
a large number of issue areas, especially bringing food systems back to
the local and sustainable versus global.”
In 2013—impressed by the various Wood River Valley organizations working to create a more robust food economy—Long cofounded Local Food Alliance with food writer and school food strategy
advocate Stacy Whitman.
“We formed in order to support existing efforts—we’re not just
another nonprofit,” Long said. “We aim to be the go-to source of all
food-related information and efforts. Everyone in the business of food
should know that we support them.”
Like a backbone to a body, LFA’s support is foundational. With
the farm-to-school lunch program, for example, LFA worked hand-inhand with other organizations to facilitate outreach and education programming.
“They have been the liaison between WRSC, farms and faculty in
terms of integrating the program with the school,” said McCord.
Not only has this program directly impacted individuals, businesses, producers and transporters, but it has also created a model that
can be implemented into other schools.
Another model program facilitated by Local Food Alliance and
the Wood River Community YMCA in Ketchum is a solar-powered
educational greenhouse, officially named Bonni’s Garden & Learning
Lab, where kids can learn about plants and dig their hands in the soil.
“[We hope to] instill a love of gardening and fresh vegetables at an
early age,” said YMCA Director of Youth Development Teressa Johnson. “The kids love eating fresh spinach.”
In addition to its educational efforts, the Local Food Alliance also
helped facilitate last September’s HarvestFest, a one-day, communitywide food event highlighting Hailey restaurants. Chefs from spots like
CK’s Real Food, Rasberrys Catering and DaVinci’s prepared small
plates utilizing food from regional farms. Attendees roamed from
restaurant to restaurant, snacking on local food and sipping drinks, before a final party at the Wood River Sustainability Center. The Local
Food Alliance worked closely with the WRSC, Idaho’s Bounty, The
Hunger Coalition and an array of restaurateurs to create this sold-out
event.
The Local Food Alliance is also committed to building enthusiasm for what’s happening in the local food system. On their website,
LFA’s food event calendar informs the public about film screenings,
guest speakers, farm-to-table dinners and volunteer opportunities. Long
and Whitman also pen a sponsored column in The Weekly Sun, which
provides a deeper look at food-related news and local profiles.
Long says that the LFA’s recent merger with Sun Valley Institute
for Resilience—a newly formed organization that focuses on energy,
food, water, environment and community to benefit the quality of life
in the Wood River Valley—will allow the organization’s food efforts
“to be coordinated with other systems.”
“It’s about local people, local impact,” said Long. “Like a concentric circle, food is a way to connect with and interact with the community.”
Jamie Truppi is pursuing her master of science degree in nutrition and integrated health. Aside from studying and writing, she attempts to balance experiments in the kitchen with being a mom and wife, exploring the outdoors
and the practice of yoga.
EdibleIdaho.com
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SUMMER 2016
STARS
(AND LAND TRUST)
ALIGN
Swift River Farm thrives in Salmon
BY CINDY SALO
PHOTOS BY ILONA MCCARTY
When Jessica McAleese and Jeremy Shreve moved to Salmon, they
knew they had chosen the right place, but weren’t sure how their future
would unfold. Since their arrival in 2013, their Swift River Farm has
taken shape, grown, moved to a different location and thrived due to
the support of not only the community, but a regional land trust willing to bet on the future of two young local farmers.
Shreve, 41, and McAleese, 35, both worked on farms and cultivated their love of growing food before they met. McAleese started a
community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm with a friend in
Pocatello in 2008. After she and Shreve met, they raised crops together
and helped develop a tight-knit community of local members, supporters, family and friends. By the fall of 2012, however, they were
forced to uproot their lives and their Pocatello farm. Circumstances
had changed for their 95-year-old landlord, so the young couple lost
their lease on the land.
Although they were reluctant to leave Pocatello, McAleese and
Shreve stored their farm equipment and planted their 20 varieties of
garlic seed stock in a friend’s garden. They then hit the road to scout out
the Pacific Northwest for a permanent home. McAleese recalls that they
“fell in love with lots of places, but kept coming back to Salmon.”
There, they found people who valued hard work and good food and
who watched out for each other. The town, nestled in a valley at the
foot of the Bitterroot Mountains, had been founded on ranching, mining and logging. These roots grew a self-sufficient community able to
hang on through good and bad times, isolated by long distances from
major metropolitan areas.
EdibleIdaho.com
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Shreve and McAleese saw in the Salmon community a remote area
starting to rebuild a local food system that had thrived before commercial agriculture and modern transportation made food appear magically on grocery store shelves. Salmon had a local foods group, a land
trust, farmers market and community conservation organization. The
couple was also encouraged by the growing number of young people
from Salmon moving back home to start small businesses and families.
In 2013, they rented a house there and started jobs at a local bakery. “We left the blinders behind,” McAleese said. “We’re both big believers in putting our passion into action and in being flexible enough
to allow the world to unfold around us.” That winter, a local couple
saw an opportunity to promote local food in Salmon while helping the
farmers. Sherry Elrod and John Treankler leased Shreve and McAleese
an acre of former pasture on a bend in the Salmon River for $1 a year.
Early 2014 found the couple retrieving their farm equipment and
supplies from Pocatello. Friends and family convoyed north with their
greenhouse, hoop houses, high and low tunnels, miles of drip irrigation
tubing and hoses, hundreds of flats, pots and trays, mountains of tools,
stacks of bins, buckets and baskets, fencing, tarps, wheelbarrows, a giant
seed collection and a few (dozen) plants they couldn’t leave behind.
The last load arrived on the first day of spring.
In early April, with snow still covering the peaks of the Continental Divide to the east, Fergie the Tractor revved up and started turning the soil for Swift River Farm’s first growing season. Shreve and
McAleese believe they’ve mastered the secret to farming north of the
45th parallel. “It’s not a secret: It’s season extension,” they said. Spring
comes early and fall lingers late inside greenhouses and hoop houses
protected by an elk-proof fence.
But season extension is labor intensive. On each end of the growing season, they must open their greenhouses in the morning to prevent
overheating and close them in late afternoon to protect the tender
plants. This is a routine chore if you live on your farm, but if you live
eight miles away like Shreve and McAleese do, it’s a twice-daily, timeconsuming, fossil-fuel-sucking trek.
Swift River Farm’s first year was packed with harvesting weekly
CSA shares, attending the Saturday Lemhi County Farmers Market
and filling orders from local river outfitters. A realtor cleared the parking lot in front of her Main Street office each week for a Wednesday afternoon farm stand. At the height of summer, 100 varieties of
vegetables, fruits, flowers and culinary and medicinal herbs flourished
at the farm and tumbled into the walkways. McAleese and Shreve spent
many summer nights in their teepee at the farm. As they listened to
the Salmon River slide past, the couple dreamed of farming and living
on their own land.
With their first growing season in full swing, the couple looked for
a way to fulfill this dream. As first-generation farmers, neither was
going to take over a family farm. They knew the odds were against them
finding a place they could afford. As McAleese explained, “Small parcels
are often priced for residential development. So, like many young farmers, we found ourselves up against a real estate market designed for
ranchettes, not agriculture.”
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SUMMER 2016
In early spring 2015, Shreve and McAleese found a suitable parcel
with an owner who could wait while they hatched a plan to buy it. The
couple tested the soil and watched the land over the growing season as
they drove to and from their leased land. By fall, they knew it was the
right place for them. They made an offer and turned to financing the
purchase. McAleese and Shreve started at the USDA’s Farm Service
Agency. Their farming experience and detailed financial and production
records qualified them for a new farmer land loan at a low 1.5% interest
rate. There was just one catch: These loans cover only half of a land purchase and require a second lender to pick up the balance.
At the same time, the Lemhi Regional Land Trust was reviewing
investments for their stewardship fund. This fund pays for monitoring
and enforcing conservation easements in perpetuity. With a “forever”
investment horizon, the land trust focuses on low-risk investments with
steady returns. As Kristin Troy, LRLT executive director, listened to the
organization’s financial advisor, she worried about the gap between the
land trust’s investment strategy and its mission. When she voiced her
concerns, the former board chair, a local rancher, agreed. He mused,
“We should probably be investing in land.” Ranchers started the LRLT
to protect the area’s ranches. Lemhi County is not alone in this. A 2010
Land Trust Alliance survey found that over 60% of their members focus
on protecting working ranches and farms.
EdibleIdaho.com
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A few days later, Troy picked up one of her last CSA shares of the
2015 season. McAleese pulled her aside and said they were looking for
a second lender for their land loan. McAleese asked if Troy had any
ideas. She answered, “Funny you would ask.” Troy called the events
that cascaded from that conversation on Main Street a “harmonic convergence.”
The details of the LRLT loan fell into place within six weeks. It was
a natural fit for the land trust. “We know land,” Troy said. “And we all
knew that piece of ground was a slam dunk, as it was collateralized,”
Troy said. The FSA program protected the land trust from loss. The
loan was a way for LRLT to fulfill its mission, build the local economy
and preserve the agricultural land and rural lifestyle of the valley. The
attractive interest rate the land trust was able to give Shreve and
McAleese helped the young couple promote similar goals.
Wendy Ninteman, western director of the LTA, said in an email,
“This is what makes Lemhi Regional a true leader in the western land
trust community. Land trusts are good at doing the obvious thing—
saving land. But when they go beyond the obvious, and start leveraging their skills for the broader good of their community, that is true
success.”
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SUMMER 2016
Next, McAleese and Shreve held a traditional barn raising with a
21st century twist. Instead of logging trees and hewing logs, over 200
supporters logged on to Kickstarter and pledged funds to reach, and
surpass, the couple’s goal. The crowd-funded barn will give the community a solid connection with the farm—a connection people will
see as they head out to an event at the fairgrounds, a day of huckleberry gathering or a rafting pickup at the river takeout north of town.
Shreve and McAleese know they’ve made the right choice, but
they’re not sure how they’ll get everything done this summer. In addition to running their farm, they’ll be building the barn, sinking a well,
connecting power and building an elk-proof fence. The couple promises they’ll take time off for an end-of-season celebration with members, supporters, family and friends. The first harvest to fill Swift River
Farm’s barn will be one brought together by the local community and
a land trust willing to take a chance on a novel way of financing young
farmers.
Cindy Salo is a plant ecologist who writes about science, agriculture and natural resources and is based in Boise.
A TASTE OF
SALMON, IDAHO
Odd Fellows’ Bakery, 510 Main St., Salmon, 208.756.1122
Jessica and Craig McCallum grew up in the area and bucked the
trend of young people leaving rural Idaho for cities. They came
home after college and opened the bakery with its wood-fired
oven. Their business partner, long-time chef Ken Korn, creates
pastries, special-order desserts and lunch fare. The Lemhi County
Humane Society bought the neoclassical revival building in 2009
to house its Rags & Wags Thrift Store, with room left for the bakery. (See the feature Edible Idaho wrote on Odd Fellows’ in the
Spring 2013 issue.). Open M–Sa, 7am–5pm. Additional seating
in the upstairs loft.
The Junkyard Bistro, 405 Main St., Salmon, 208.756.2466
“Eat something with a bite,” is The Junkyard Bistro’s motto. coowner Mary Whalen explained, “I try to tweak every recipe so it’s
a fusion of different flavors.” Although the bistro serves eclectic,
modern fare such as tapas and rice bowls alongside sandwiches, salads and soups, the owners also preserved a bit of Salmon’s past: a
carved wood back bar from the Silver Spur, a watering hole that
preceded it in the narrow spot on Main Street. The Junkyard Bistro
is open for lunch and dinner seven days a week. Beer (PBR on tap)
and wine are available. Eat on the back patio in warm weather.
Bertram’s Brewery, 101 S. Andrews St. (Main & S. Andrews),
Salmon, 208.756.3391
Nick Bertram brews 10 different beers at his namesake brewery,
including the award-winning Mount Borah Brown Ale, plus seasonal styles. Tuck into pub food, including bread made from the
brewery’s spent grains and baked by Odd Fellows’ Bakery, locally
raised, grass-finished burgers, sandwiches, entrees or a soup and
salad bar. Bertram’s Brewery is open for lunch and dinner seven
days a week. The brewery also serves breakfast on weekends. Other
beers, wine and “beertails” (beer cocktails) also available.
The Owl Club, 505 Main St., Salmon, 208.756.4152
A somewhat divey bar and a Salmon institution. Look for the 20foot owl out front.
Greyhouse Inn Bed and Breakfast, 1115 Hwy. 93 S., Salmon,
208.756.3968
Stay in a room in the main house or rent a cabin. Located along
the Salmon River outside of town. Raft and ride packages available. www.greyhouseinn.com
— Cindy Salo
EdibleIdaho.com
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edible IDAHO
SUMMER 2016
FOOD INK
When it comes to tattoos, every picture tells a story
STORY AND PHOTOS BY GUY HAND
When I first began photographing food tattoos around Boise for this
issue of Edible Idaho, I thought I might have to slip into the world of
Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain’s testosterone-fueled late-night
fever dream of life in the tatted-up, coked-out world of restaurant
kitchens. What I found was far more clear-eyed and thoughtful: a love
of grandparents and children; a fondness for gardens and cooking; all
kinds of memories.
Here are some of those stories.
Mandy McCord Collins, who works at the nonprofit Nutrition
Works, invited me to her airy Eagle home to photograph a large tattoo
of beets on her back, done in the style of a 19th century botanical print.
“I got really sick about five years ago,” she told me. “I got rheumatoid arthritis and that was kind of a wakeup call to me. It really got me
to thinking of living my life with intention and living more healthy
and stress free ... Beets are super healthy, they’re full of magnesium and
all these vitamins and I love them, so it’s just kind of a testament to my
living a life in a healthy way and making choices that are going to be
good for my body and mind.”
The four beets in the tattoo represent Collins and her three children. “It’s kind of fun,” she said through a grin, “to ask my kids which
beet you are.”
Toni Hodge, who owns Shangri-La Tea Room, got her tattoo as a
Mother’s Day present from her tattoo-artist daughter, Natalie Hodge.
“It’s a teapot hovering over a lotus flower,” she said of the tattoo
on her right shoulder. “It is also the logo for our business ... and it’s
been 10 years since we started Shangri-La Tea Room and Vegetarian
Restaurant. I decided it was time for me to mark it—so I did.”
Marking something significant was the motivation for everyone I
photographed. Jed Glavin, winemaker and owner of Split Rail Winery, had a stylized grape root etched onto his left arm like a viniferous
lightning bolt. Dana Wallace, sous chef at Cloud 9 Brewery, had an
array of vegetables inspired by an 18th century French seed catalog tattooed on her right arm. Rob and Keely Landerman, brewers and owners of Woodland Empire Ale Craft, got celebratory tattoos as
anniversary gifts for each other.
Justin Moore of Fiddler’s Green Farm with one of his food tattoos
EdibleIdaho.com
25
Dana Wallace
Jed Glavin
Andrea Semple
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SUMMER 2016
Angi Hronek
Justin Moore
Mandy McCord Collins
Toni Hodge
EdibleIdaho.com
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Keely Landerman
Christina Eglin
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edible IDAHO
Rob Landerman
SUMMER 2016
Nicole Ferguson
Jamie Drysdale
“We had a friend in Austin,” explained Keely Landerman, “who
had one that said, ‘Making Lemonade’ and it had a little cut lemon on
it and we thought that was super cool, a way of saying when life gives
you lemons.” So Rob got one with chickpeas that says, ‘Making Hummus’ and Keely got one with limes that says, ‘Making Mojitos.’
The most diminutive, most rustic food tattoo I found belonged to
Jamie Drysdale who has a pizza slice the size of a guitar pick and barely
more elaborate. Yet even it marked a significant moment: When he and
five North Carolinian friends, who’d visited a local dive pizza joint every
week of their friendship, were finally leaving the state, they decided to
commemorate their departure with pizza tattoos.
“And it was done by a friend who had some ink left over and a
needle at the end of a ball point pen,” said Drysdale. “We had a lighter
to disinfect the needle.”
On the other end of the scale, Nicole Ferguson, who works at a
local nursery, has fruit and vegetable tattoos that tumble cornucopialike from her left rib cage down to her ankle.
“There’s something so primal about fruits and veggies,” she said.
“I got some mushrooms because they look cool; I got a coconut and
some ginger root and some hops, but first it was tomatoes and apples.
I’ve got a pomegranate on there, avocado.”
Justin Moore of Fiddler’s Green Farm has a large kale plant inked
along the inside of his right arm, its bare roots spreading downward
like mildly gothic blue veins. On the backside of that same arm, a single onion plant stands, its long, tangled leaves reaching upward for his
shoulder.
“I started with the kale tattoo,” Moore said while standing in one
of his fields. “I traded a CSA share for it back seven years ago. I would
truck food over to [my tattoo artist] with my bike cart every week, deliberating on what kind of tattoo I was going to get and thought, ‘I’m
going to get a kale tattoo.’ So I ripped up a kale plant from the garden
and brought it in to her and said, ‘This is what I want.’”
In turn, Moore paid Angi Hronek, a friend and herbalist, for helping out on his farm with a garlic tattoo that unfurls along her upper
spine.
“Garlic is probably the most tasty medicinal root that I know,”
Hronek said with the earnest air of a true herbalist, then broke into a
smile. “Instead of getting paid cash, I got paid in tattoo.”
Guy Hand is a writer and photographer who specializes in the subject of food
and agriculture and the managing editor of Edible Idaho.
“It was done by a friend
who had some ink and a needle
at the end of a ball point pen”
(Jamie Drysdale)
EdibleIdaho.com
29
HOW
FRENCH
FRIES ARE
GROWN
From the field to the fryer,
a look at the world’s
most popular potato product
BY BLAKE LINGLE
PHOTOS BY JOE JASZEWSKI
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edible IDAHO
Wherever you find cooking, you find fries.
Most fries are initially cooked in factories—
McCain Foods (the largest producer of frozen
fries worldwide) makes one in every three fries
around the globe—and then cooked again in
homes, restaurants or friteries. Fresh, hand-cut
fries are made in all those places, too, but
those fries are less common. Regardless, you
won’t have to slog into the middle of the
Amazon to see where fries are grown. You’ll
just have to visit your neighborhood restaurant—or scale the barbed-wire fence at your
nearest fry factory.
J.R. Simplot—a fellow Idahoan whose
ubiquitous presence in my hometown, Boise,
has convinced me that I’ve seen or hugged or
smelled him on many occasions, though no
such occasions can be substantiated by reality—deserves credit for founding the eponymous J.R. Simplot Company, which invented
the mass-produced fry. Two of Simplot’s top
agribrainiacs, Ray Dunlap and Ray Keuneman, did the actual inventing in 1948. In
SUMMER 2016
1953, the Rays developed a frying method that
continuously purifies and circulates the oil,
eliminating the need to fry taters in batches
and thus streamlining mass production. It took
another decade, however, before frozen fries
got hot. Homemakers embraced them initially,
but restaurants did not. Then J.R. met another
Ray in 1965, Ray Kroc, and the fry universe
as we knew it changed forever. Kroc was an Illinois businessman who had acquired the McDonald’s restaurant chain from its founding
brothers, Richard and Maurice McDonald, a
few years prior. Kroc wanted to conquer the
fast-food world. Simplot wanted to conquer
the fry world. And together they conquered
both. McDonald’s became and remains the
most supersized fast-food operation, and the
largest buyer of potatoes, in the world. Simplot became (yet no longer remains) the most
supersized frozen fry operation in the world
(that crown now belongs to McCain Foods).
Mass-produced frozen fries are now welcomed worldwide, largely for three reasons:
consistency, ease of use and cost. Consistency
is ensured by plucking potatoes during peak
season (fall, in most of the United States) and
then properly storing them in a dark (no sunlight), damp (95% humidity), and cool (45 to
48 degrees Fahrenheit) facility—thus preventing entropy, that cruel vixen, from getting her
witchlike hands on them—before a 20-step
process happens (more details on that below).
This process ensures that only the best and
brightest taters are fashioned into fries. Bad
taters—small, bruised, defective, ugly, stupid,
temperamental, judgmental—are eliminated
or reconstituted into other products. And
somewhere during this process, some—not all,
mind you—mass-produced fries are also
coated with dextrin, sugar, breading, artificial
flavors, and/or other chemicals that require a
chemistry degree to enunciate, in order to
achieve ideal color and crispiness. They’re mechanically made wonders: perfect crispy esculents that even novice cooks can prepare. Just
remove them from the bag and bake or fry.
Easy-peasy. And cheap. Frozen, mass-produced
fries cost approximately $1.50 less per pound
for peeled taters and $0.50 for skin-on taters
than freshly prepared fries when factoring in
the costs of goods (potatoes, oil and labor) and
yield. That’s a significant savings.
Given the manufacturing prowess required to produce frozen fries, a virtual oligopoly exists. Three major manufacturers
account for 80% or more of the American
market: McCain Foods, the J.R. Simplot
Company and Lamb Weston (owned by
ConAgra Foods). And these gigantic corporations are constantly taking bites out of one
another’s business. A few farthings per pound
is often the difference between winning a contract or not; those farthings add up quickly
when contracts are for millions and millions
of pounds. Together, these companies have
helped create the most popular fast-food item
in America.
Unfortunately, mass-produced fries have
contributed to bad agricultural practices, ex-
panding in proportion to their popularity,
which farmers often embrace to remain competitive. Proper crop rotation gets replaced by
continuous planting of single-crop fields. Manual by mechanical. Small by massive. Organic
becomes chemical. Natural becomes genetically
modified. These practices create a vicious cycle
of dependency. Farmers rely on biotech companies and agribusinesses for the seeds to plant
and the chemicals to spray to increase yields and
decrease prices. Agribusinesses want cheap
taters so they can sell cheap fries. Yet less than
2% of the price of a mass-produced fry returns
to the farmer, which has driven many farmers,
especially the small guys, out of business; Idaho
alone has lost over half its potato farmers in the
past three decades.
It’s easy and obvious to blame big, ugly
agribusinesses for the demise of the small, idyllic farm. Agribusinesses and biotech companies are broad-side-of-the-barn targets. The
economics major, free-market proselytizer and
businessperson in me, in contrast, wants to
EdibleIdaho.com
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20 STEPS FOR MASS-PRODUCED FRIES
(steps vary by manufacturer)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
Potatoes are plucked during peak season.
Potatoes are transported to a factory.
Potatoes are stored in a dark, temperature-controlled warehouse.
Potatoes are dropped onto rollers, which remove foreign matter such as dirt, rocks,
plant parts and the eyes of the potatoes.
Potatoes are washed with water jets in a revolving cage.
Potatoes are conveyed to a sorting machine that divides potatoes by size.
Potatoes are collected in bins.
Bins open and potatoes are dropped into steamers.
Potatoes are conveyed from steamer to peeler, where large, rolling bristles remove skin.
Skinless potatoes are conveyed to workers who inspect and remove green and rotten
potatoes.
Potatoes are sliced by either a rotary cutter or a hydraulic system (running water forces
potatoes through cutting blades).
Pieces are passed by a camera and computer; those of substandard size are flagged and
blown off the production line.
The good pieces are dropped into a water tank to remove sugar from the flesh of the
potato.
Pieces are blanched: first cooked in hot water and then shocked in cold water.
Pieces are fried in oil for approximately two minutes.
Excess oil is knocked off on a grated conveyor belt.
Fries are passed through a freezer until frozen, which takes approximately 10 minutes.
Fries are deposited by an oscillating conveyor into chutes; each chute has a built-in
scale set to the package weight.
Fries are dropped into plastic bags and sealed.
Fries are stored frozen and then shipped across the world.
blame consumers. Econ 101 teaches us that
consumers drive commodity prices, right?
Supply and demand—if the consumers want
cheap fries, then golly gee goshdarnit, they’ll
get cheap fries. Retailers, restaurants, wholesalers, importers, brokers, manufacturers—the
entire vertical supply chain—can only respond
to their whimsy. Toss in government subsidies—direct subsidies, crop insurance, conservation subsidies, marketing loans, disaster aid,
trade barriers, commodity price supports, production controls, et cetera—and the influence
of a plethora of commodity interest groups,
and the blame gets even more difficult to assign. Basic supply-and-demand principles
don’t seem to apply; chicken-versus-egg economic principles seem more appropriate.
Until all the links in the industrial food
chain, from businesses to consumers to the government, change their practices, small farmers
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SUMMER 2016
remain at risk. The good news for small farmers and their supporters, however, is that things
are indeed changing. The number of small
farms rose between 2002 and 2007 for the first
time since the Great Depression. That’s mostly
attributable to the local and organic food
movements. The US organic market is expected to exceed a 14% compound annual
growth rate until 2018. Despite these gains, as
of the 2012 US Department of Agriculture
Census of Agriculture (the most recent on
record), small farms (those with less than
$250,000 in annual sales) account for less than
12% of total agriculture production, and organic farms account for less than 1%. In my
corner of the forest, the Northwest—contrary
to popular belief, Idaho is in the Northwest,
not the Midwest—more and more restaurants
are supporting local, organic and small farmers, in response to customer demand. Agribusinesses aren’t, of course, blind to the trend.
Lamb Weston now has an entire line, Alexia,
of organic, trans fat-free and non-GMO fries.
Small farms must tow uphill both ways
to compete with supersized farms. While I’m
tempted to make a quasi-intelligible economic argument about why a large number
of small farms is better for the economy than
a small number of large farms, I’ve digressed
enough.
I do feel, however, that a place exists in
the freezer for mass-produced fries, I’d just
like to see those fries cleaned up a bit. No
chemicals and other crap. Just potatoes. Pure
and simple. Unadulterated frozen food can
taste as good and be as healthy as fresh food;
ultimately, quality dictates the taste and nutrients. While I still may not buy mass-produced fries at restaurants—I prefer hands, not
machines, making my food—if I ever find
myself stranded on a desert island with nothing but frozen fries, peanut oil and a solarpowered fryer, I don’t think I’d starve myself.
At least not for more than a few days.
Blake Ligle is the co-founder and co-owner of
Boise Fry Company restaurants headquartered in
Boise. This excerpt was first published on
LuckyPeach.com from Ligle’s new book Fries! An
Illustrated Guide to the World’s Favorite Food.
EdibleIdaho.com
33
GOING THE DISTANCE
Eating local could help keep you ticking to 100 and beyond
BY CARISSA WOLF
Mario Lombardi plans to celebrate his
104th birthday in December. But before
he makes specific party plans he wants to
plant a garden and tackle harvest season.
The Twin Falls transplant credits 103
years of farm-to-table eating, plenty of
time outdoors and a blissful 65-year marriage for his long life.
“We did everything together,” the
great-grandfather says of his late wife.
The pair spent much of their time together outside, playing tennis, exercising
and digging in the dirt. Lombardi still
digs in the dirt and he’d still be driving
his car around Twin Falls if other motorists weren’t so careless, he says.
Not everyone can count on marital
bliss as a pathway to membership among
the growing number of Idaho centenarians, but we’ve all got stomachs to fill and
researchers think Lombardi’s plate might hold the secret to a long and
healthy life.
University of Idaho nutritionists took a closer look at the diets of
centenarians, including Lombardi and others from around the world,
to look for clues to the equation that equals a long life.
So far, the research points to protein.
Americans often bulk up on protein but a high-protein diet alone
isn’t likely to get you to a three-digit birthday. The secret is to spread
your consumption of protein throughout the day, according to two
Idaho-based researchers.
U of I associate professor and nutritionist SeAnne Safaii and her
research partner, nutritional gerontologist Sue Linja, traveled the world
from Hiroshima, Japan, to Sardinia, Italy, and back to Idaho to try to
determine the kind of diet that fuels 100-plus years of healthy life. They
found that it’s not just about what you eat, but how you eat it.
“If you think about how the elderly eat in the United States, what
do they do? They go to Chuck-A-Rama for dinner or one of those buffets and have one big meal. The elderly in Italy and Japan that we studied don’t do that. They eat three to four meals throughout the day and
they are high in protein.”
And those meals look a lot like what Lombardi eats. Much of his
backyard bounty makes it into the Italian soups that remain the cornerstone of his diet.
“I eat a lot of everything,” he says.
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SUMMER 2016
Safaii found that the centenarians
she studied do the same thing. They garden. They eat a lot of soup. And what
comes from the garden bulks up those
soups along with vegetable-based proteins. Lentil-rich minestrones round out
the daily diets of the Italians Safaii studied and the aged in Japan eat a diet rich
in tofu and vegetable-stocked miso soup.
Both groups ate bounties of vegetables
and in Italy, the day often started with
Greek yogurt while fish made regular appearances on morning menus in Japan.
What didn’t Safaii find a lot of on
the plates of her centenarian subjects?
Meat.
“The beef council kind of got mad
at me for all of this work,” Safaii joked.
But Idaho lentil growers might send
Safaii some thank you notes. The humble protein-packed legume figured prominently in the diets of the centenarians Safaii studied. Beans made their way into minestrone soups,
soy proteins bulked up miso meals and pod-bearing vegetables crawled
through the gardens of her elderly subjects.
Idaho’s Palouse region yields some of the largest lentil harvests in
the country, making it easy to eat local while eating protein-dense
foods. Safaii suggests topping a baked potato with spicy lentils for a
filling and protein-rich dinner. Or do as the Sardinians and Lombardi
do and plant a garden for seasons of vegetable and lentil soups.
Longstanding dietary recommendations advise that people eat 0.8
grams of protein per kilogram of weight. Safaii says that doesn’t need
to change—the protein, roughly 25 to 30 grams of it, should just become a part of every meal.
The protein distribution becomes especially important in middle
age when people start to lose muscle mass that can lead to falls and
bone fractures, Safaii says.
“We’re just not as efficient at utilizing the amino acids to build muscle and we slowly start losing our ability to build muscle,” Safaii says.
“Otherwise there would be Olympic athletes in their 50s and 60s.”
Carissa Wolf is a freelance journalist. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, The Idaho Statesman, the Boise Weekly and more than 50 newspapers across the country.
IDAHO MARKETPLACE
EdibleIdaho.com
35
DUELING
TOMATOES
Sizing up the stiff competition
at the Western Idaho Fair
STORY AND PHOTOS BY CASEY O’LEARY
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The Western Idaho Fair has usually occupied a significant place in my
rituals of summer—from the crazed anticipation of childhood to the
harsh teenage reality of gainful Pronto Pups employment. My extension-agent grandpa schlepped us kids all over southern Idaho in the
’80s, offering his expertise as a produce judge at various county fairs.
While he pored over boring vegetables on boring tables with other boring adults, we mastered the fine art of not puking up cotton candy
while riding The Zipper a half dozen times.
But as time has passed, I’ve found myself wandering through the
rows of canned goods and giant pumpkins in the Expo more than cruising the Midway. Call me old, but last year I decided I wanted to participate in those Expo rituals.
Since the Western Idaho Fair’s inception in 1897, people have
come from all over the West to show their agricultural wares. The sevenacre carnival that defines the fair for 4-H-deprived city kids was more
of an afterthought, though it did boast what was reportedly the first
Ferris wheel west of the Mississippi.
I’m not going to lie—I felt pretty confident about my entries: Purple cayenne peppers, Aunt Molly’s ground cherries and the coup de
grâce—a voluptuous Zefa Fino fennel bulb.
“I’m a professional,” I pontificated to my dog on the drive over. “I
grow vegetables for a living. It’s almost not fair (no pun intended) to
be competing with home gardeners.”
From the moment I walked into the cavernous Expo building, I
knew I was in trouble.
Dozens of folks buzzed around long tables preparing their entries
on little paper dishes. They greeted each other excitedly, scoping out the
competition as it arrived. Elegant vases held single chard stems near
huge blocky bell peppers I’d practically kill for and 25-pound watermelons. Off to the side, a woman polished cherry tomatoes.
“Yeah, we went easy this year,” I overheard a guy telling the woman
checking him in. “Only 42 entries, plus the canned goods.”
I was fumbling around in the mayhem when a guy walked in with
a wheelbarrow full of squashes topped with a sunflower that easily
stretched 20 feet across the room. His son supported the head as he
rolled up, drawing nods of approval from the seasoned veterans.
Upon officially entering my specimens, I beelined it to the tomatopolishing woman, Michele Detwiler. She was still at it—dozens of
dishes flanked her on the table, each holding a different variety. Detwiler is a professional opera singer who enters veggies with her kids,
who are active in 4-H.
“It’s my favorite time of year,” she smiled, positioning ramrodstraight lines of perfectly polished cherry tomatoes in the dish. “Whatever [money] I make on vegetables we use for birthday parties. Now the
kids decide what we should enter based on what can make the most
money.”
Witch Hazel extract wasn’t the only trick in her arsenal.
“They’ve got to be uniform. I clip each cherry tomato stem at the
same spot above the first knuckle. Last year, a couple of the tops popped
off and I had to hot-glue them back on,” she said, laughing.
This jovially cutthroat atmosphere stretched from the competitors
to the volunteers to the judges. Reggie States, of the locally famous
fruit stand Reggie’s Veggies, has been judging for almost a decade.
“I love it,” he said. “You don’t know who grew [the entry], could
be a little kid or a 65-year-old grandma. Everyone is on equal footing;
everybody has the same chance.”
“Does anyone ever try to bribe you?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, grinning. “I’ve had offers of pie and other
foods, which I have accepted. It doesn’t give the name of the person
on the entries, so it’s OK.”
“Any other tips for prospective new participants?” I asked.
“Follow directions,” he said. “It’s not all about eye-appeal.”
Indeed, the guidebook for entering items into the fair is thick,
with excruciatingly specific instructions for each finely dissected subcategory. Entering becomes as much an exercise in precisely following
rules as in growing superior specimens.
In the era of the multimillion-dollar sports industrial complex,
what refreshing frivolity to cavort with people who take vegetables so
seriously. Like every good sporting event, there are heavy hitters who
take home dozens of ribbons—their names are spoken reverently by
volunteers, adding excitement and lore to the tradition. Each year, some
folks pass away and some enter for the first time.
My inaugural foray proved modestly, uh, fruitful. We won a blue
ribbon and a $4 prize for our ground cherries. Grandpa would be so
proud.
Casey O’Leary is a writer and owner of Earthly Delights Farm, a humanpowered urban farm in Boise specializing in CSA vegetable production, retail seeds and on-farm education.
EdibleIdaho.com
37
GRAPE
EXPECTATIONS
New Koenig Vineyards tasting room is part of
a flurry of investment in Sunnyslope
STORY AND PHOTOS
BY TARA MORGAN
A gravel road cuts through an arbor of lush maple trees as it winds
up to the new Koenig Vineyards tasting room, situated atop a small
hill in Sunnyslope. Neatly trellised vines stretch into the distance,
while the Owyhee Mountains jut up through the haze hanging on
the horizon.
Winemaker and co-owner Greg Koenig has been producing wines
in a warehouse here in the heart of Southern Idaho’s Snake River
Valley American Viticultural Area since 2009—everything from his
popular Riesling Ice Wine to the lush Cuvée Amelia Reserve
Syrah—along with wines for other local labels like Bitner Vineyards,
3 Horse Ranch and Williamson Vineyards. But Koenig’s tasting
room has remained in its original location, two miles east in a small
chateau opened in 1995 near the idyllic intersection of Plum Road
and Grape Lane where his brother, Andy Koenig, converts fresh fruit
into delicate, Austrian-style eau de vie.
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SUMMER 2016
“The last few years, wine tasting has become pretty popular and we’ve had more
and more traffic,” said Greg Koenig. “My
old tasting room—which 20 years ago
was perfectly big enough for what it
was—is now crowded and we can’t really
give people good customer service.”
So the Koenigs decided to consolidate their winemaking under one roof.
From harvesting to crushing to barrelaging to bottling to tasting, you can now
follow the chain from grape to glass at
Koenig’s new space.
“People want to drive out here to
wine country and see wine country, so we
made the decision to put our tasting
room, production, everything together
on the hill,” he said.
On a recent warm afternoon, the
screech of a hawk pierced the rumble of
construction equipment pushing piles of
dirt this way and that. Koenig, who studied architecture at Notre Dame, animatedly described the new patio terrace, which will feature a limestone
replica of his favorite fountain in Tuscany and an Italian tower with a
winding steel staircase.
“You can go up into it and can see over the valley,” he said. “It’s just
21 feet up, but it’s amazing how much the valley opens up; you get this
awesome view.”
From that vantage point, Sunnyslope might still look like a sleepy
agricultural community, but zoom in and you’ll find a flurry of new
development. In fact, just behind Koenig’s new facility, on a steep,
south-facing slope that Koenig calls “the warmest in Idaho,” sits J Victor Vineyards. Owned by Boise businessman Jay Hawkins, the property
boasts 32 acres of freshly planted red wine vines—everything from
Cabernet Sauvignon to Merlot to Tempranillo to Sangiovese—which
the Koenig brothers will manage.
“That’s going to give Idaho wineries, ours and other small wineries, a whole other source of high-quality fruit,” said Koenig.
As the Idaho wine industry continues to flourish and more new
wineries open, Koenig says sourcing grapes has become increasingly
more difficult.
“There’s kind of a glass ceiling; we don’t have enough fruit here
right now to keep up with demand,” he said.
Martin Fujishin, one of Koenig’s longtime employees and owner
of Fujishin Family Cellars, seconds that problem.
“With the newfound interest in Idaho wines, it’s really changed the
landscape for the small wineries around here,” said Fujishin. “There’s
new wineries cropping up all the time and there hasn’t been really a lot
of investment in new vineyards.”
But that’s starting to change. Not far from J Victor is another new
vineyard, Scoria Vineyards. The 250-acre property is owned by Syd-
ney Weitz-Nederend and her father, Joe
Weitz. In 2014, they planted eight and a
half acres of Malbec and Petit Verdot and
this spring they planted nine more of
Cabernet and Merlot. Nederend and
Weitz are hoping to harvest their first
grapes this fall.
But Pat Williamson—vineyard
manager for Williamson Orchards &
Vineyards, which owns 45 acres of vines
adjacent to Koenig’s new facility—doesn’t agree with the notion that there’s a
grape shortage.
“A lot of people are saying that more
grapes need to go into the ground but, as
a grower, we’ve been growing for a while
and we’ve not been seeing enough people taking everything that we can grow
and leave nothing to hang,” said
Williamson.
Nonetheless, Williamson has made
some changes to its vines. Last year, they
removed six acres of Riesling and planted
some new vines, including Cabernet and Malbec.
“We just planted six acres this year, six acres last year and we’re
thinking about doing another six acres next year,” said Williamson.
In addition, Williamson is building a new tasting room in a remodeled shop off Highway 55, a couple of blocks south of The Orchard House—the only restaurant in Sunnyslope.
In Fujishin’s opinion, that’s another thing Sunnyslope is lacking:
more amenities like restaurants and boutique hotels.
“When people come to wine country, they need the full wine
country experience. … I think those are some infrastructure issues that
will definitely get sorted out as we go forward,” said Fujishin.
But for now, Koenig’s sprawling new tasting facility is a step in
the right direction—a needed investment in both infrastructure and
the future of the Sunnyslope wine region.
“It’s exciting times,” said Koenig. “After all these years, 21 years
later, we have all this interest in Idaho wine combined with some new
investment, so it’s fun.”
Tara Morgan is a freelance food and booze writer who regularly contributes
to Edible Idaho, VIA Magazine, SipNorthwest and Cidercraft Magazine. She
founded the website BoiseFeed.com and runs a boutique catering company,
Wild Plum Events and Eats, with her husband.
EdibleIdaho.com
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ANCIENT BIRD, MODERN MEAL
Kuna’s McCoy ranch is home to American Ostrich Farms
STORY AND PHOTOS BY TIM ATWELL
Strutting around the arid farmland of rural Kuna, the McCoys’ ostrich
flock moves with prehistoric swagger, bobbing their heads and shaking
their feathers as they size up visitors approaching their enclosure.
“A lot of people liken them to dinosaurs. In a way, they are kind
of a relic,” said Boyd Clark, vice president of the board of directors for
the American Ostrich Association, a national trade organization for the
US ostrich industry. Ostriches’ lineage can be traced back 20 million
years to the Miocene period, an age when many modern animal families began to appear.
At the McCoy ranch, a few of the birds have grown up to nine
feet tall and weigh more than 300 pounds. Despite their impressive
height and weight, ostriches can run up to 40 miles per hour and perform a hypnotic dance. During mating season, the males woo females
by hunching forward, spreading their wings and shaking their feathers.
Ostriches are also polygamists; the males typically have a harem of three
or four females at a time.
While Americans generally associate the world’s largest bird with
zoos or the plains of Africa, the McCoy family is working hard to bring
ostrich to Idaho and beyond. Alex McCoy, founder of American Ostrich Farms in Kuna, first discovered ostrich meat while working in
South Africa.
“People here don’t know about it because it’s not a native animal,”
McCoy said. “In Africa, they’ve been eating it forever.”
He likened ostrich steak to “a high-quality filet mignon, except
with more iron, less cholesterol and far less fat.” According to the
USDA National Nutrient Database, a raw ostrich filet contains more
than six times the iron, about three-fourths the cholesterol and significantly less fat than raw retail cuts of beef.
But odd, ancient birds aren’t the only innovation the McCoys are
working on.
The McCoy ranch uses solar panels to heat its buildings, and
McCoy’s father, Brian, is working on developing a hydroponic barley
fodder box system that will use just a fraction of the water that traditional barley growing methods consume. The barley fodder box is a recycled boxcar that is filled with shelves of barley sprouts. This allows the
farmer to regulate temperature, humidity and other variables (it is similar to the technology some marijuana growers use in states where
cannabis is legal). The elder McCoy is experimenting with multi-colored UV lights over the barley, because plants react differently to each
of the color wavelengths.
“That’s why I got into this,” Alex said. “If it wasn’t helping the environment, I wouldn’t be doing it.”
When the McCoys bought their ranch in 2013, there were just a
couple of buildings and a large tract of farmland. Now there are over
100 ostriches, an egg incubation system and the barley fodder box.
Currently, they are working to fulfill meat orders for the Kickstarter
donors who helped fund the project, but they hope to start selling meat
to stores and restaurants within the next year.
And yet, it won’t be the first time a hopeful rancher has tried to sell
ostrich to American consumers.
EdibleIdaho.com
41
There has been a market for ostrich products in the US since the
1880s, when the first ostriches embarked on a voyage to the New
World. Feathers were fashionable at the time, and trendy women wore
ostrich feathers on their hats and dresses.
The market spiked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when ostrich meat was marketed as a healthier alternative to beef. Investors
started selling the birds to farmers with promises of a soon-to-be-booming demand for ostrich meat. Speculators sold birds for high margins,
sometimes without ever seeing the birds. Eggs sold for hundreds of dollars, without any guarantee they would hatch. With a high demand for
live breeding birds and a low supply from sellers, the price of live ostriches skyrocketed.
“If you buy a bird for $10,000, and you can only make $3,000
from slaughtering it, it doesn’t make any sense to slaughter,” Alex said.
Since a retail market was never established, the ostrich industry
imploded. People who bought the birds as part of a “get-rich-quick”
scheme ended up without a viable plan to sustain their ostrich farms.
Although modern farmers have learned from the mistakes of the past
and are making efforts to prevent a similar situation, there are still
plenty of challenges.
Convincing consumers to switch from beef to ostrich might be
the biggest. The McCoys have been working hard to spread the word,
but sometimes it’s difficult.
“Americans love beef,” McCoy said.
While the transition might take time, Boyd Clark of the American Ostrich Association believes that people are more willing to try ostrich than they were 20 years ago.
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SUMMER 2016
“What has changed is the palate of the consumer,” Clark said.
“They are more willing to try new, novel foods for health reasons that
20 years ago probably weren’t as big of a concern.”
According to Clark, most people who try ostrich enjoy it. For that
reason, when stores start selling ostrich burgers or steaks they often set
up sampling booths so people can try it out before they buy it.
Another challenge to getting the meat into stores is a simple lack
of birds.
“Right now there is a big demand for the meat. There’s not enough
of it being produced to meet the demand,” Clark said.
According to a study by Dr. Joan S. Jefferey of Texas A&M, in
2008 there were between 40,000 and 60,000 ostriches in the US. She
estimated that a slaughterhouse would need to “handle 200,000 ostriches annually to operate economically.”
Currently, the cost of ostrich is higher than other red meats, but
Clark predicts costs will decrease as the industry grows. Online, ground
ostrich meat sell for about $15 per pound, and ostrich steak sells for
about $30 per pound.
In the meantime, the McCoy family will be carefully tending their
flock and prepping their ranch for what they hope is high demand.
This could finally be the era of ostrich burgers, ostrich filet mignon
and—since a single ostrich egg is the equivalent of two dozen chicken
eggs—ostrich-sized omelettes.
Tim Atwell studies English at Boise State University. He works as a freelance
writer, a lifeguard and an intern at The Blue Review. His hobbies include
running, brewing beer and making music.
EdibleIdaho.com
43
Illustration by Mike Landa
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WILD
CRAVINGS
How eating on the trail makes you yearn
for just about anything else
We covered 44.5 miles before we collapsed on the uneven floorboards
of the Sawtooth Lodge’s rustic old porch in Grandjean. We peeled off
our heavy backpacks and told the cooks they didn’t know what we’d
been through as we ordered Reuben and BLT sandwiches with extra
meat, macaroni and potato salads, milkshakes and beer. We bought
toffee-covered almonds and sour gummy worms for dessert.
Leading up to that, we’d walked through nonstop rain, climbed
switchback after never-ending switchback, traversed a field of avalanche
debris and got caught in a terrifying thunderstorm on a craggy ridgeline in the Sawtooth Mountains.
BY JESSICA MURRI
PHOTOS BY MATT MCKAIN
The whole time, my thoughts bounced between the beauty of the
wilderness, the pain of my backpack straps and the possibility of nondehydrated food in my future.
Never before that moment had a watery vanilla milkshake brought
me so close to tears.
I covered 60 miles of the Idaho Centennial Trail in the summer of
2015. My friends accomplished the far more impressive feat of thruhiking the entire 900 miles, from the Nevada border up to Canada.
On that trip, it wasn’t the tough dried steak strips or the bag of justadd-water spaghetti or the occasional fruit cup I remembered.
It was the real food: the dictionary-sized “Chickenator” calzone
stuffed with chicken, bacon, artichoke hearts, fresh tomatoes and
steaming creamy garlic sauce in Stanley. It was the all-you-can-eat taco
bar in the only restaurant in Atlanta. It was the juicy Hebrew National
all-beef kosher hot dogs someone shared with us at a campground.
EdibleIdaho.com
45
There’s something about the deprivation that comes from living in
the backcountry that makes everyday food taste (and feel and smell
and look and sound) so good.
This summer, I’m taking on the biggest challenge of my young life
thus far: I’m hiking the Pacific Crest Trail with my dog, Marcy, from
Mexico to Canada.
The trail stretches 2,650 miles through 25 national forests, six national parks and three states. Our departure date was April 11, which
means we’ll be somewhere in the Sierras when this article publishes.
Eating on the trail is not as simple as picking up a couple of dehydrated meals from REI—although I’ve done that. I have 34 resupply stops along the way, which involved packing 34 boxes of food to
send to myself over the five-month journey. I’ll pick each of them up
at a post office near the trail.
Buying months of food at one time was overwhelming. My grocery list included 300 granola and protein bars, 100 packets of oatmeal, 70 packets of Idahoan instant potatoes, four pounds of Craisins,
more Pop-Tarts than I care to admit, quinoa, instant rice, freeze-dried
raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, apples and bananas, 150 bags of
tea and 35 dried pig ears—for my dog. (At time of publication, Jessica's dog, Marcy, had to be sent home from the trail.)
I thought buying everything was overwhelming, but then came
packing the resupply boxes. Each one took me roughly two hours,
times 34. I meticulously measured out serving sizes and calculated calories. According to DietAndFitnessToday.com, the average female burns
almost 600 calories per hour while hiking with a 30-pound backpack.
That’s around 5,500 calories per day.
Which means I have to eat a lot. Olive oil gives 120 calories per
tablespoon; I pour it over everything. Whey powder offers an additional 170. Pistachios? One cup gives you 700 calories and 56 grams of
fat. Yes! Want to order that second dessert? Go right ahead.
The vast majority of the food I eat on the trail comes in some sort
of powdered form. Brands like Backpacker’s Pantry and Mountain
House offer a colorful selection of meals, from Turkey Tetrazzini to
crème brûlée (I’m still waiting for dehydrated sushi or freeze-dried
birthday cake), but that never compares to eating a five-pound burrito
in a tiny town in the middle of the wilderness. I’ve heard of people crying tears of joy over Otter Pops.
This is part of the happiness of trail life, though. You might crave
Indian food like a pregnant woman for three weeks straight, and when
you finally get it, you appreciate it more than you could have possibly
imagined.
I won’t finish my trek until mid-September, when I finally hit the
Canadian border. In the meantime, would you—kind reader—please
send me several packets of Golden Double Stuf Oreos?
Jessica Murri is a staff writer for the Boise Weekly and lives in the North End
with her dog, Marcy. Together, they backpack, mountain bike, ski and kayak.
Right now, she’s hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and you can follow her journey at JessicaMurri.Wordpress.com.
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GOURMET BACKPACKING
My father-in-law, Divit Cardoza, takes backpacking seriously. As
one of the founders of the Boise Co-op Wine Shop, he’s equally serious about food and wine. Though gourmet backpacking meals
might seem like a contradiction, that’s not the case when you hit
the trail with Cardoza.
Every year, he concocts a new plan for shaving weight off his pack,
while still incorporating fresh ingredients from his home garden. He
plugs in the dehydrator and turns everything from summer tomatoes
to salami to fresh potatoes into just-add-water flavor bombs.
“It is a lot of work to save an ounce, but the older you get, the
more ounces weigh,” said Cardoza, with a laugh.
I’ve heard stories of campfire meals consisting of spicy ramen
with fresh ginger, hot chili paste and cilantro; creamy garden potato, bacon and thyme soup, blueberry crepes and even sour cherry
upside-down cake with cognac and pecans. Camping with Cardoza
is like dining at a pop-up restaurant in the middle of the woods.
And it’s the meticulous prep leading up to the trip that results in
such epic high-altitude meals.
“Everything tastes better in the mountains, but flavors and textures still matter,” said Cardoza.
For Cardoza’s Backpacker’s Pasta Puttanesca, the secret is his dehydrated “Black Crack” tomato paste. A tablespoon of this concentrated condiment is enough to add ample tomato kick to any dish.
— Tara Morgan
“BLACK CRACK”
DEHYDRATED TOMATO PASTE
By Divit Cardoza
For this recipe, you can use store-bought tomato paste, but
Cardoza prefers to use a paste he’s made from reducing his
own garden tomatoes and running them through a food mill.
⅓ onion, minced
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 splash red wine
½ teaspoon ground fennel seeds
1 teaspoon each of fresh rosemary, oregano and basil, minced
6 ounces tomato paste
Salt and pepper to taste
Sauté onion in olive oil and add a splash of red wine. Cook
until onions are softened and add rosemary, oregano and
ground fennel seeds. Add tomato paste, fresh basil, salt and
pepper. Simmer on low for 30 minutes to an hour. Spread
onto a baking sheet in a ¼ inch thick layer and cook in the
oven overnight at 150°. Remove from oven and crumble into
pieces. It’s now shelf stable.
Photo by Tara Morgan
BACKPACKER’S PASTA PUTTANESCA
By Divit Cardoza
According to Cardoza, angel hair pasta is the best choice for backpacking. “It’s important that you get something that’s going to cook really
fast,” he said. “The biggest thing that you ration is fuel.” Cardoza packs his chopped wet ingredients—capers, olives, anchovies—into twoounce plastic canisters that he tops with extra caper juice, anchovy oil, garlic and fresh herbs. You can also use zip-top baggies to save additional weight. He grates fresh parmesan onto a paper towel and leaves it to dry on the counter for 24 hours. Before the trip, he rolls the
parmesan up in the paper towel and packs it in with the other ingredients. The entire meal fits into a one-quart zip-top bag when the pasta
is broken in half. It clocks in at only 14 ounces and feeds four backpackers.
8 ounces angel hair pasta, broken in half
2 tablespoons Kalamata olives, chopped
2 tablespoons capers, chopped
1 ounce anchovy fillets, chopped
1 or 2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon tomato paste powder, aka “Black Crack”
1 ounce grated Parmesan
Fresh minced oregano, thyme, rosemary
Bring 6 cups of water to a boil in a quart pot over medium heat. Add pasta and cook until slightly al dente, about 4 minutes. Reserve 1 cup
of cooking liquid to loosen sauce. Combine hot water, olives, capers, anchovies, garlic and dehydrated tomato paste powder. Once rehydrated, toss sauce with pasta and fresh herbs. Crown with a tuft of Parmesan.
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