Last weekend, the Good Fork's Sohui Kim shared her kimchi-making prowess at Pioneer Works in Red Hook.

To start: A chat about the health benefits of kimchi (which are huge), a little white wine and a copy of the secret recipe.

Quartered heads of napa cabbage, washed in brine, lie in wait.

Kimchi paste essentials: garlic, onions, something sweet (Sohui uses red bell pepper), ginger and daikon radish.

The mise en place.

Farm fresh green onion and daikon radish are next to the knives.

Daikon radish complements the taste of raw or oily foods, and aids digestion.

The daikon and green onion: mixing it up.

Enter the Robot Coupe. (A sexy food processor)

Traditionally, Korean women would grind the kimchi paste by hand. Crikey!

At the Good Fork the kimchi is vegan, but for this class salted shrimp are added.

Korean red pepper, also known as Gochugaru. A no-joke amount.

Gochugaru is said to release endorphins, lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease. And so pretty!

The mixture is worked with gloved hands until it becomes paste-like.

Salt to taste.

Bits of cabbage are combined with samples of the pepper paste to determine the balance of seasoning.

The paste is applied to the cabbage, leaf by leaf.

The smell is a marvelous tickle of spice and pungent brine.

Accumulation.

The kimchi is moved into containers, where it will finish fermenting.

A wealth of riches, kimchi-style.

Refrigerate for one night and store for up to a year.

As if. Kimchi and brown rice breakfast with egg and green onion. For the third time this week. It's a good thing I have the recipe!

Before opening Palo Santo in 2006, chef/owner Jacques Gautier spent a year exploring and eating his way through the markets of Latin America. His research created the foundation upon which his menu rests today.

Jacques Gautier, chef and owner of Palo Santo in Park Slope, grew up crisscrossing the Caribbean and Central and South America, making frequent trips to visit family scattered across the region and tagging along as his father, who worked for the O.A.S., traveled on business. He absorbed the languages and cultures, and fell in love with the food.

Years later, when he was ready to open his own restaurant, he knew he wanted to specialize in Caribbean and Latin American cuisine, but first, he had some work to do. Jacques spent a year exploring, immersing himself in the life and experience of Latin American market culture – endlessly eating, collecting recipes, and beginning to piece together a menu for his future restaurant.

One of his favorite finds? Picante de mariscos – a traditional Peruvian market staple of shellfish in a stewed in a spicy, creamy sauce made with fermented chili paste and coconut milk. On a recent visit to Palo Santo, Jacques took us on a journey through the dish.

So Jacques, what should we have today?

We just got some really nice fresh, local razor clams in today, and I’m going to use them in a traditional Peruvian dish called picante de mariscos. Picante de mariscos is a dish that you’ll find at markets everywhere in Peru. Bolivia too. It’s a very traditional dish. It’s basically a spicy shellfish stew, that we make with a fermented chili paste, sofrito, fish stock, coconut milk, chayote and chickpeas. It’s a really nice dish. I think that would be a good one to try.

Tell us about it.

There are a lot of different versions of picante in Peru. It’s not just made with shellfish. It’s a loosely defined kind of dish. Picante just means ‘spicy’ in Spanish. The common thread is that they’re all spicy stews that are made with various types of chili pastes and various kinds of proteins. The picante de mariscos is made with shellfish. Picante de lengua is made with beef tongue. Ají de Gallina is made with chicken – Ají is what they call chili peppers in Peru.

There are three different chili pastes that are most commonly used to make picantes. The spiciest is rocoto, which is made with rocoto peppers, which are very common in Peru. They don’t have habanero or Scotch bonnet peppers in Peru. They use rocoto. It looks like a miniature bell pepper, but it’s very, very spicy. Easily as spicy as a Scotch bonnet.

Picante de mariscos is a traditional Peruvian dish featuring shellfish in a spicy, creamy sauce of fermented chili paste and coconut milk. Today's version at Palo Santo features razor clams and chayote.

Then there’s the panca pepper, which they use to make panca paste, or pasta de ají panca. The panca is not as spicy as the rocoto. It has a dark, dark red color and rich flavor, a little like dried fruit. That’s the kind that’s typically used in picante de mariscos.

The third kind of paste you’ll typically see used in a picante is the ají amarillo paste. It’s the mildest of the three. Still spicy, but relatively mild. The Amarillo pepper is bright yellow, and so is the paste. The ají de gallina, which is the version of picante made with chicken, is usually made with that bright yellow ají amarillo paste.

So those are the three different kinds of chile pastes that you’ll typically see used as a base for really traditional Peruvian picantes. Most picantes also use either cream or coconut milk. Some don’t use either, but most do. It depends on the region. Generally up on the altiplano or in the mountains, they use cream or llama milk. On the coast they typically use coconut milk. Our picante de mariscos is more of a coastal-style picante, so we use coconut milk.

In his versions of traditional dishes, Jacques isn't bound by orthodoxy. While a paste made with fermented panca peppers is traditionally used in picante de marsicos in Peru, Jacques makes his own paste with fermented guajíllo peppers, Fresno chilis, red ripe jalapanos, Thai chilis and Scotch bonnets. When it comes to the seafood, it's all about fresh and local. Today, the dish features fresh, local razor clams.

We make our own fermented chili paste here for our picante de mariscos. It’s very similar to the panca paste you’d find in Peru, but it’s a little different because we can’t easily get panca peppers here. You can buy commercially produced panca chili pastes, but with those, instead of really fermenting the chilis, they usually just grind them up and add msg for that instant umami flavor. I tried those when I first started making this dish, but we like to do everything from scratch here. With everything we serve, we like to start from scratch with fresh ingredients, so I just learned how to make it myself.

It’s hard to find panca peppers here – there’s somewhat limited access to real Peruvian ingredients. Guajíllo peppers are the closest thing I’ve seen on the market here to the panca. They’re very similar, so we use guajíllo in our paste. We use a mixture of dried guajíllo peppers with fresh Fresno chilis, fresh red ripe jalapenos, and a few of those little Thai chilis and Scotch bonnets. So we use a blend of peppers to recreate the flavor of a traditional Peruvian panca chili paste. It helps with consistency throughout the year too – if we only used red jalapenos and we couldn’t get red jalapenos one day and we used Fresnos instead, the whole sauce would be totally different. By using a blend, each of the peppers adds its own flavor and it allows you have a more consistent flavor regardless of which peppers are available in any week.

To make the paste, we pack the mix of chilis in sugar and salt, with a little garlic and cumin, and we let them ferment in the cooler for like three months. We turn them over every week or so. The peppers really sweat as they ferment. The salt draws out all the water from the fresh peppers, and that liquid creates a kind of brine. The chilis basically soak and ferment in that brine. The salt slows down the fermentation. The sugar feeds it. So they sort of cure and ferment for a few months. When they’re ready, we puree them in a blender with a little bit of oil and some of their own brine, and that’s your paste. That’s our interpretation of a traditional Peruvian pasta de panca. It’s very, very close to what you’d find there. It ends up being really savory and really spicy, with the underlying rich, fruity flavors of the chilis and a nice, heavy umami flavor from the fermentation.

When we’re ready to actually make the picante, we start with a sofrito. Sofrito is just your traditional base in pretty much all Latin American and Spanish dishes. You make it with some onions, garlic, tomato and some fresh hot peppers sautéed in olive oil. Once you have your sofrito going, you add the chili paste and let it cook a little. Cooking it mellows the flavor a little bit and melts it into the sofrito. When it’s ready, we deglaze the pan with a little beer. Traditionally in Peru, they would use chicha, which is an ancient kind of corn beer. It’s made with yellow corn that’s germinated, toasted, and brewed and fermented just like beer.

I actually did make chicha once. I was teaching a class on pre-Colombian cooking in Latin America, so I had to be really careful to use only things that actually existed in the Americas before colonization. I researched very old recipes for picante and found that they used to be made with chicha. It was pretty easy to make. You’ll still find chicha made and served all over Peru. Supposedly, they originally chewed the corn and spit it back into the fermentation pot because the enzymes in the saliva would kickstart the fermentation process. But we don’t do that here. [laughter.] We use beer – just to deglaze, to pick up all those brown caramelized flavors from the pan and to add a little of its own flavor.

After we deglaze the pan, we add our stock. For the picante de mariscos, I use fish stock. If you were making an ají gallina – the picante with chicken – you’d use a chicken stock. If you were making a picante lengua – with beef tongue – you’d use beef stock. You use whatever stock it makes sense to use depending on the type of picante you’re using.

Like everything here, we make our fish stock from scratch. We take fish heads, carcasses and mirepoix – mirepoix is classically just carrots, onions and celery, but I always like to add ginger and lemongrass too, just because I really like those aromatics, along with the stems from whatever fresh herbs we have around – cilantro or whatever. So into the pot go the fish heads, the mirepoix of carrots, onions, celery, ginger, lemongrass and herbs, and then white wine and water to cover everything. Then we cook it down until it’s really rich – when it’s done, it’s basically a gel. We do the same with our chicken stock – we let it go overnight. We let it cook in an oven overnight so it gets really rich, really thick. That’s how I like my stocks.

There are a lot of different ways of doing stocks. Do you know that book ‘The Making of a Chef,’ by Michael Ruhlman? There was an interesting thing in there about making stocks. He basically went through the program at the Culinary Institute of America and wrote about it for the book. The French guy teaching them to make French stocks had a completely different way than the Chinese instructor making Chinese stocks. The Chinese let their stock boil away. When it cooks down, they top it off with more water and just keep it going and going. The French would never do that. They say, “Don’t move it. Don’t stir it. Don’t let it boil. Don’t let it get cloudy. Don’t let it go too long.”

Latin American stocks are much more about just throwing flavorful ingredients in a pot and letting them cook down to concentrate the flavors. That’s it. That’s all that matters. I don’t mind my stock being cloudy. If I’m going to use a stock in something like a picante or a molé, I don’t need or want some French style consommé. It wouldn’t make sense.

So now we have the sofrito, the fermented chili paste, the beer and the stock in the pan, and we cook that down a bit, and then we add coconut milk. We stir it in and let it simmer to bring the sauce together. I like to let it reduce to thicken a little bit, but it’s traditional in Peru to thicken the sauce by adding cracker crumbs, or by stirring in a paste made with crackers and a little bit of stock or water. If you need it, you add that to the sauce and it thickens right up.

Then come the chickpeas and chayote. You find chickpeas all the time in Peruvian cooking. They add a nice light, nutty flavor to the dish. Chayote is a fruit that’s native to Central America. It’s very popular throughout Latin America. It looks like a green, wrinkly pear or avocado, and it grows on vines. When it’s farmed, they let the vines climb up and across trellises like you’d see in a vineyard, and the fruit hangs down from the vines. Chayote has a pretty crisp, light flavor and a nice texture – it’s sort of in between a zucchini and an Asian pear or between a potato and cucumber, but a little more subtle. I like to use them because they add texture and they lighten up the dish a little bit. They’re not heavy at all. You don’t have to use chayote. Sometimes I use potato or other root vegetables in the picante. You can use whatever’s in season, really. That’s the whole point of a picante, really – they’re very versatile and you can make them with whatever you have. In summer, I really like to make the picante de mariscos with a whole cob of corn. You just throw it in the pan and let it simmer in the sauce – it’s really nice. But today, we’re using chayote.

So we let the chickpeas and chayote simmer in the sauce for a while, just to soften a little bit. The razor clams go in right at the very end. They cook very quickly – maybe a couple of minutes. They release their juices into the sauce, which adds a lot of flavor, and then that’s it – it’s ready to serve. I don’t know whether they have razor clams down in Peru. I’m sure if they do have them they’d use them in picante de mariscos, but with any kind of seafood dish we’re really most interested in using whatever’s fresh and local. That’s what’s it’s all about when it comes to seafood.

We work with a company called Mermaid’s Garden. They source fish and shellfish directly from fishermen in the northeast. They have a CSF that brings deliveries of really fresh stuff to people in a bunch of neighborhoods in Brooklyn each week, and they supply a bunch of restaurants too. So today they brought us these beautiful razor clams that came off a boat yesterday. It doesn’t matter whether they have them in Peru – they’re perfect for the picante. But like I said, it’s a really versatile dish. You can use any kind of shellfish – it’s good with shrimp, lobster, scallops, or regular clams like Littlenecks.

The picante de mariscos at Palo Santo - razor clams, chickpeas and chayote in a sauce of sofrito, fermented chili paste, fish stock and coconut milk.

In the end what you have is a really richly flavored, spicy, creamy shellfish dish. It’s savory and spicy, with a lot of umami flavor from the fermented chili paste, the razor clams and the fish stock. The coconut milk gives it a creaminess and really light sweetness that really balances the spice of the chili paste and brings all the flavors together in the sauce. I really like creamy shellfish dishes like chowders, and the picante de mariscos is like the classic Peruvian version of that kind of dish.

What about you Jacques? How did you end up here, doing this kind of food?

I grew up in Washington D.C. My dad is from the Caribbean, from Haiti. We had family all over the Caribbean. My dad’s grandparents were Dominican. We had family in Puerto Rico. My older brother was born in Cuba. My dad worked for the Organization of American States, which is this organization whose function is to promote peace and economic and political cooperation between Latin American countries. So between his work and our extended family, we traveled around the Caribbean and Latin America a lot.

Because of all that too, I grew up eating Caribbean food. That’s what we ate at home. When I decided to open my own restaurant, that was the kind of food I wanted to cook. Those were the influences I wanted to use. But limiting myself to just Caribbean cuisine – it felt like it wasn’t broad enough, you know? There is a lot of amazing food beyond the Caribbean, in Central and South America too. I wanted to explore all that.

Before I opened this place, I spent a year traveling through the Caribbean and Central and South America, to do research to really understand the food, to absorb the cultures and gather recipes. And the way that you do that in Latin America is by eating in the markets.

Markets still dominate the traditional cultures throughout Latin America. That’s something that the Spanish brought. Everywhere in Latin America, the market is the center of the town, in every way – geographically, socially, culturally, economically. That has changed to some degree in more cosmopolitan areas, which is an unfortunate result of globalization. So while in some places, supermarkets have come in, in most places, it’s still all about those central markets.

In my experience traveling down there, what you see is that market culture is kind of segregated. Richer people and higher-end tourists kind of stay away from the markets, which is probably for the best when it comes to preserving that market culture. The markets are gritty places, just thriving with people and all kinds of foods. The last thing you’d want would be for someone to try to clean them up or change them in any way to make them more palatable to tourists. You’d lose a lot very quickly if that happened.

In all of my travels down there, Mexican food and Peruvian food were my favorites. In Peru, where this dish is from, there are still markets everywhere, even in big cities like Lima, which is a huge, very cosmopolitan, very modern city on the Pacific coast. I spent a month in Lima, hanging out in the markets every day, studying the culture and the food.

Each market sells vegetables and seafood and raw meats and spices and everything you need for cooking. To the side of the markets, they have all these food stalls, where they sell prepared food made with stuff from the market. In Peru, most of the stalls at any market are going to be picanterias. All around the markets you’ll find picanterias. You’ll have a stand with picante de mariscos, another one with picante de lengua, another with ají de gallina – all different picantes made with different chili pastes.

You’ll see other stuff too, like anticuchos, which are grilled organ meats served on skewers – they’ll take beef hearts and marinate them in chile paste and a creamy sauce and then grill them on skewers. So it’s a different dish, but it uses those same kinds of ingredients – the fermented chili paste with coconut milk or cream. You see those ingredients everywhere in Peru – they’re really at the heart of true Peruvian cuisine. You find them over and over again in dishes that go way, way back.

If anyone travels to Peru and really wants to understand what the place and the culture are all about, I would say that the one thing you have to do is go and eat at the markets. Ignore the warnings about how dangerous they might be. They’re more poor and grimy than they are dangerous. Poor and dangerous aren’t the same thing, you know? If you’re not bothered by a little grime, you’ll eat incredible food – some of the best food in the world. If you’re scared, you can stay at your hotel or go to a restaurant to eat insipid, watered-down versions of the same thing at twenty times the price. It’s up to you.

Palo Santo is located at 63 Union Street, between 4th and 5th Avenues, in Park Slope.

Photography by Heather Phelps Lipton. All rights reserved.

Diego Perez-Olave and Ramiro Lescano, two friends from Uruguay, opened Tabaré in Williamsburg because they were tired of having to go to Queens to find Uruguayan food. We stopped by to learn more about Uruguayan cuisine and to try the chivito completo, a steak sandwich named after a goat, and the ultimate Uruguayan dish,

While growing up in Uruguay, Ramiro Lescano never imagined having a restaurant in Brooklyn. When he was in his early twenties, he grew tired of his economic studies in Montevideo and decided to visit friends in New York. He ended up staying, and making Williamsburg his home. After working in restaurants for a few years, and growing tired of having to go to Queens for a taste of Uruguayan food, he and his friend Diego Perez-Olave decided to open Tabaré, their own Uruguayan restaurant, in Williamsburg.

We stopped by to talk with Ramiro, to learn a little about Uruguayan cuisine, and to try Tabaré’s version of the chivito – a steak sandwich named after a goat, that can be found everywhere in Uruguay, from the finest restaurants to stalls on the street

So Ramiro, what should we have today?

I think if you’re going to try one thing here at Tabaré, it would have to be the chivito completo. It’s a traditional Uruguayan sandwich made with filet mignon of grass-fed beef, bacon, black forest ham, mozzarella, caramelized onion, roasted red peppers, green Spanish olive, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. And also, it’s topped with a fried egg. It’s a very, very good sandwich.

The chivito is basically the most classic Uruguayan dish you can find. Most of our cuisine, we share with Argentina. The cuisine of Buenos Ares and the surrounding area is very much the same as the cuisine in Uruguay. Buenos Ares is right next to Uruguay, just across the border actually. In both countries we have a lot of Italian and Spanish immigrants and their descendants. So the food is very similar. But the chivito is ours. It’s completely Uruguayan – unique to us. And in Uruguay, you find it everywhere. You will find chivito in fine dining restaurants and at stands on the streets. People make them at home too. They’re everywhere.

Uruguay is a little different from most countries in South America, because almost all of the people are descendants of European immigrants, mostly Spanish and Italians, but also some Germans, some French, some British and Irish. When the Spanish conquistadors first came to the region in the 1500s, there was a very small indigenous population there. They fought very hard against the Spanish, but eventually most of them were killed.

In the 1600s, a Spanish conquistador brought cattle to Uruguay for the first time and realized it was a perfect place to raise beef. There is a lot of open grassland in the countryside. It’s very easy to raise beef there. So quickly, the production of beef became a very important part of Uruguayan culture and the economy.

In the 1800s, there was a lot of fighting between the Spanish and British and Portuguese for control of the region. Eventually Uruguay declared independence from them all, and then there was a long civil war between political groups who wanted control of the country.

After the war, there started to be a very big influx of Italian and Spanish immigrants coming to Uruguay, to escape wars in Europe and to start a better life. Because of all that, Uruguay has a very strong European influences. You see that in the food. We have a lot of pastas from the Italians, a lot of seafood and octopus from the Spanish and Portuguese. In Uruguay we eat Spanish tortilla – the omelette with potato and onion that is like the national dish of Spain. We also have South American dishes like empanadas. And beef is everywhere. In Uruguay you see cattle being raised on the grasslands everywhere in the country. So grass-fed beef is very important, and very popular there.

In the chivito, you can see a lot of those influences – the beef which is truly Uruguayan with the mozzarella from Italy, the olives from Spain, the black forest ham from Germany. It’s really the one dish most unique and typical to Uruguay.

I can tell you a little about the history of the sandwich if you would like.

Please.

There is actually a legend behind the chivito. The story says that in the 1950s, a woman who had travelled all the way from Chile, through Argentina, to Uruguay, arrived at a place called Punta del Este. Punta del Este is a resort town on the southeastern coast of Uruguay. It’s like the San Tropez of Uruguay – a very upscale place, very beautiful, on the beach.

So this woman arrived in Punta del Este after a long journey, and she went to a restaurant on the beach called El Mejillón, which means ‘The Mussel.’ It was a nice place, run by a well-known chef. She was very hungry and it was very late, and she asked if she could have some chivito. Chivito is the grilled meat of a baby goat. It’s very common in Chile and Argentina, where she had come from. She loved chivito, and that’s what she wanted to eat more than anything else at the end of her long trip.

It was a complicated night at the restaurant. They had no power because of a blackout. They also had no chivito – in Uruguay, we eat beef. We hardly ever eat goat in Uruguay even though it is very common in the neighboring countries. But the woman was very tired and hungry, and the chef said, “There is a blackout and it is very late, so I can’t really cook much for you, but I will make you something.”

He went into the kitchen and he looked around at what he had. He put together a sandwich with a thin cut of steak and some ham, lettuce, tomato, olives and some butter, some mayonnaise. He brought it out to her. She wanted chivito but she loved the sandwich that he made for her, even though there was no goat meat on it. So that’s the reason they call the sandwich the chivito.

The woman liked it so much that the chef decided to keep it on the menu. From there it became very popular. The chef started serving many, many chivitos – hundreds each day. Everyone was talking about the chivito. It was a sensation. From there, it became very popular and spread all across Uruguay. Today, you find chivito everywhere in the country.

On a chivito, almost always you’re going to have a thin slice of grilled steak with onions, mozzarella, olives, tomato, lettuce and mayonnaise. Very often you will find it with ham, bacon, and fried egg too. As it became more and more popular, people started to experiment with some different ingredients. Just a few things here and there, to be creative. But it’s not the kind of thing where you go and put whatever you find in your refrigerator in a chivito. Some people make it with bacon, others without. Some with red pepper, some without.

So there is some improvisation with the exact ingredients, but it’s not a random thing. That collection of specific ingredients – the filet mignon, onions, mozzarella, olives, tomato and lettuce – is what makes a chivito a chivito. There are a lot of different things in the sandwich – a lot of flavors. Those ingredients all work together in a specific way that makes the chivito something really delicious.

The chivito completo at Tabaré. The chivito is the de facto national dish of Uruguay. At Tabaré it's made with thinly-sliced grass-fed filet mignon, black forest ham, bacon, mozarella cheese, caramelized onions, roasted red peppers, green Spanish olives, lettuce, tomato, and a fried organic egg.

Can you tell us a little about how you make it?

The key to the chivito is that the steak you use has to be filet mignon. It has to be. A thin slice of filet mignon is at the heart of every good chivito. Filet mignon is very expensive to use, but the tenderness of the cut is very important. There are a lot of things on the chivito, so it’s important that you have a very tender slice of steak so that every bite can be nice and clean. If you don’t have a very, very tender cut of steak, the whole thing will fall apart.

So to start we take the onions and we sauté them on the grill a little bit until they start to caramelize. Then we take them off and we cut a thin slice of the grass-fed filet mignon and pound it a little bit to make it even more tender. Then it goes on the grill, just for a minute on each side. When it’s almost done, we put the ham and the mozzarella on top, to melt. Then we put the bacon, then the onions on top of that, and the roasted red bell peppers and the olives, and then the lettuce and tomato, and a lightly fried organic egg. To finish it, we toast the bread on the grill a little, with some butter. When the bread is ready, we add some mayonnaise and put the sandwich together.

It’s not exactly a light sandwich, but it’s really good. You have the very tender filet mignon, the sweet and salty mozzarella, the smoky, crisp bacon, the rich flavor and light smoke of the ham, the kind of warm sweetness of the caramelized onion and the roasted red pepper, the bright, briny flavor of the olive, the nice tomato and the cool crunch of the lettuce. When you bite into it, the creamy yolk of the egg runs down into all of the other things. All together, the flavors all work very well together.

It’s a big sandwich. It’s something that’s messy to eat. It’s supposed to be that way. There’s no getting around that. But you are supposed to pick it up and eat it with your hands. That’s the way it is meant to be eaten. When we see people trying to eat it with a fork and knife we approach them in a good way and we recommend to them to eat it with their hands because that’s the way you are supposed to eat it. That’s how it’s done in Uruguay.

So Ramiro, how did you end up here, doing this?

I grew up in Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay. It’s a big port city, on the Atlantic coast. I lived there until I was twenty two. I was studying economics at the university and I realized it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. I had some friends who were living here in New York, so I decided to come here for six months to try it out, and I ended up staying. It’s been six years now.

I ended up going to college here, and got a degree in hospitality and management at CUNY in downtown Brooklyn. At the same time I was working in restaurants. When I first came here my father suggested to me that I should look for work in restaurants to make some money while I was in school. So that’s what I did. I ended up working at an Italian restaurant in the East Village with my friend Diego. We were both waiters and managers, and we learned a lot there.

What we realized was that there is not a lot of Uruguayan food in New York. We wanted to eat Uruguayan food, but you could only find it in Queens. We missed the food from home, and we thought people here who had never had it would like it a lot too. So we decided to open Tabaré. We lived here in Williamsburg, and eventually we found this space.

We started out with no money. We built the entire place ourselves. All the wood you see in here was free wood that we found on Craigslist. We did the tables ourselves, the bar, the floor. The kitchen is very small. Normally, a Uruguayan restaurant would have a big grill where you could cook all the meats and blood sausage and chorizo and everything like that. There’s no room for a big grill here, but we learned how to make it work. Now we have been open for two years. We have a lot of people from the neighborhood who come in, and a lot of Uruguayans from all over the city. I never really imagined that some day I would be living in New York City with my own Uruguayan restaurant, but you know, it’s been really great.

Tabaré is located at 221 South 1st Street, between Driggs and Roebling, in Williamsburg.

Photography by Morgan Ione Yeager. All rights reserved.

Papa Diagne moved from Senegal to Brooklyn over twenty years ago. It wasn't until he got here that he found his calling in the kitchen.

When Papa Diagne moved to Brooklyn from Dakar a couple of decades ago, he had never cooked a thing in his life. Not because he didn’t want to – see, in Senegal, men just don’t cook. If a guy were to try, people would think him…crazy, basically. Of course, things are different here. As Papa says, “Here, it’s a whole different reality.” It was here, watching his siblings prepare dishes from home in their kitchen in Bed-Stuy, that Papa found his calling.

He fell in love with cooking and started a business making Senegalese food at home and delivering it to fellow expats working in downtown Brooklyn who craved taste of west Africa at lunchtime. Before he knew it, he was delivering his food to a cross section of Brooklynites with roots extending far beyond west Africa, and knew he was onto something.

Eighteen years ago, he opened Joloff, the restaurant in Bed-Stuy where he showcases his own take on traditional Senegalese cuisine. We stopped by to meet Papa and to try his tiebuu jeun – a vegetable, fish and rice three-act stew known officially as the national dish of Senegal.

OK Papa, what should we have today?

I think of course you should try our tiebuu jeun. Tiebuu jeun is what we call the national dish of Senegal. In Wolof, our language in Senegal, tiebuu jeun means just rice and fish. Basically it is fish, rice and vegetables all cooked in stages in a tomato-based sauce. It’s our signature dish here at Joloff.

You will find this dish in every household in Senegal. Senegal is on the west coast of Africa, on the Atlantic Ocean, so over there, we have a lot of fish. Fish is very important in our cuisine. If you walk by three or four houses in the afternoon in Senegal, the people will be making tiebuu jeun in at least one of them. Probably two. This is what everybody eats all of the time.

It’s a very, very good dish. For most people from Senegal, it’s their favorite thing to eat in the whole world. The only thing is that it takes a very long time to cook. You have to be very patient to make tiebuu jeun, because everything has to cook very slowly. You cannot rush it. This is a dish that will take you at least one hour to make, but that would be only if you are very, very fast, and you don’t really want to be very, very fast when you make this dish. For most people, the way they like to make it will take a lot longer than that.

To make the tiebuu jeun, you have to start with the sauce. It starts as a tomato sauce, but then it changes as you cook more things in it. First, you sauté some onions. In Senegal, we usually use palm oil, but any vegetable or olive oil can do. You sauté the onion and then you add your tomato paste. We always use tomato paste to make this dish in Senegal. The flavor of the tomato is really concentrated in the paste, so we like to use that.

You let the tomato paste and the onions simmer a little bit, and then you add some water, so that you have enough liquid to stew your vegetables. You season it too – just some salt and pepper. Then you add your vegetables to cook in the sauce. You can use cabbage, carrot, cassava, okra, eggplant…whatever you have in the season, you can use. Cauliflower, pepper, anything. It’s a very versatile dish. It’s ok to use whatever type of vegetable you have for the season.

Here at the restaurant, we are using cabbage, carrot and cassava now, because they are the kind of thing you can find at this time of year. Greens work very well with it too – collard greens, spinach. But today, we have cabbage, carrot and cassava. We just add the vegetables to the pot, to cook into the sauce. They simmer down nice and slowly until they become very soft. They give some of their flavor to the sauce, and the sauce gives some of its flavor to them. When they’re all done, you pull them out of the pot, and put them to the side.

Back at home in Senegal, we add some dry fish to the sauce and the vegetables too. It has a very powerful flavor. It’s hard to find that kind of Senegalese dried fish here in New York, and not everyone likes that very strong flavor, so for those reasons we don’t use it here. But also we always make this dish with bluefish. Bluefish has a very nice, strong flavor on its own, so we don’t need to have even more fish flavor from adding dried fish. It’s very good on its own.

So after we cook the vegetables and we put them to the side, then it’s time to cook the fish. We cook it in the same sauce, in the same pot as the vegetables. In Senegal, people use any kind of fish. Whatever fish they have, they use. All the fish in Senegal is fresh fish. You catch it yourself or you buy it as it comes off the boat, or you buy it at the market, from the fisherman’s wife. You can use, snapper, barracuda, bluefish. Any kind of fish. But it’s best to use bigger fish, firmer fish, so that it doesn’t break up when you cook it in the sauce. Here, we always use bluefish. It’s a very good fish for this dish.

In Senegal and here at Joloff, we always stuff the fish with herbs. We take the fillets of the fish we are going to cook in the tiebuu jeun, and we cut into them with a knife and we stuff them. Here, we stuff them with fresh parsley and garlic. We grind up the parsley and garlic and stuff them into the fish. Then the fish goes into the pot, into the sauce, to cook. First the vegetables give their flavor to the sauce, now the fish.

You let the fish cook slowly in the sauce for a nice long time, until it is ready. You let the sauce really cook down while you simmer the fish, so when the fish is finished, it’s very red on the outside. As it cooks, the fish absorbs the flavor of the tomato and the vegetables in the sauce, and the parsley and garlic stuffing in the fish cooks too, giving it even more flavor. The fish and the stuffing give their flavor back to the sauce, too, so the sauce keeps changing, you see? When it’s done, the fish is very, very tender, very moist. You take it out of the sauce, and you put it to the side.

The last part of the dish is the rice. Joloff rice, we call it. To me, it’s the best part of the dish. All over west Africa, people have their own versions of Joloff rice. The Nigerian people, they say Joloff rice is theirs. In Ghana they say it’s theirs. In Sierra Leone, the same. Everyone says, “This kind of rice is our own.” But in Senegal, we know Joloff rice really originated in Senegal. [laughter.] We know because a long time ago there was an empire called the Joloff empire. It was based in Senegal. The language we speak in Senegal is Wolof, just like Joloff, you see? The people are called Wolof. So we know it is really from Senegal. But I say to everyone, “It’s ok! We can all share it! It can be everyone’s rice.” [laughter.]

What makes Joloff rice so special, is that we cook it in the same sauce we used to cook the vegetables and then the fish. First we cook the vegetables in the sauce, then we cook the fish in the sauce, then we cook the rice in the sauce. So the rice absorbs the flavors of the tomato sauce and of the vegetables that cooked in that sauce and of the fish that cooked in that sauce. It’s very, very rich and nice in flavor by the time you use it to cook the rice.

The rice we use has a very nice flavor of its own to begin with. It’s jasmine rice – a nice, aromatic rice. In Senegal, we always use broken jasmine rice, so it’s a very short grain. That’s what we always use because it’s perfect for this dish. So the rice goes into the same pot with the same sauce used to cook the vegetables and the fish, and you cover it up and the rice absorbs all of the rest of the sauce and all of the flavors of the things that came before.

When it’s done, the rice is nice and red, just like the fish and the vegetables. In Senegal, normally we make tiebuu jeun and serve it all on one big plate. Everyone sits around the plate, on the floor or at a table, and we all eat the tiebuu jeun together, with our hands or with a fork, whatever you like. Here, we don’t do that. We serve it on one plate for each person.

The thing that I like about this dish is that everything is stewed in stages. It’s a simple dish, but there are many things going on. The vegetables cook in the sauce and take on the flavor of the tomato sauce, and give it their own flavor back. They make it more complex. Then the fish is stuffed with that nice bright green parsley and garlic, and it cooks in the sauce and absorbs the flavors of the sauce and the vegetables that cooked in it before, while giving the sauce back its own flavor. It makes it more complex again. It adds another dimension. And finally, the rice is cooked in the sauce again, and it completely absorbs all of the flavors of everything that came before it in the pot, and it’s just beautiful.

The tiebuu jeun, the national dish of Senegal, at Joloff. in Wolof, the official language of Senegal, tiebuu jeun means 'rice and fish.' The dish begins with a tomato-based sauce. Vegetables are cooked in the sauce, then set aside. Fish is then simmered in the sauce and set aside. In the final act, Joloff rice is simmered in the same sauce, absorbing all the flavors of the vegetables and fish that came before it.

So while the colors on the dish are the same, and everything is cooked in the same pot, and there are not a lot of ingredients, each bite still has its own little special thing. One bite maybe you have the fish with rice, another bite, the cabbage with fish, or the cassava with rice, or you take a bite of the fish and get taste of that green parsley stuffing, which is like a nice surprise. You can have many, many different bites and flavors in this dish. It’s not complicated, but there are many layers of flavor.

So like I said, in Senegal, this is the dish that everybody loves. Everybody eats this, everybody loves it, and now you can see why, right? [laughter.]

What about you Papa? How did you end up here in Brooklyn doing this?

I was born and raised in Dakar, which is the big capital city of Senegal. I lived there until I was in my early thirties. Dakar is very different from here. It’s very different from the rest of Senegal too. It’s like its own country, Dakar. It’s a beautiful place. Lots of people. Friendly people. If you go there once, you’re always going to try to go back, because you’re going to love it.

Dakar is on a peninsula, almost surrounded completely by the Atlantic Ocean. There are beaches all around Dakar, and many are covered with hundreds and hundreds of fishing boats. A lot of people in Dakar fish from these small, open boats. They go out and they fish. When they come back, you can buy fish from them on the beach. Some of them, when they come back from the sea, their wife or sister will bring the fish to sell at the market. So you can get it at the market too. That’s why you have fish all the time in Dakar. It’s everywhere.

Growing up, I used to go out fishing a lot. I loved to go fishing. I would come home in the afternoon with fish. One of my friends, her mom used to sell fish at the market. We would bring the fish to her at the market to sell for us, and we would bring some home to cook. I really liked that – fishing as a kid.

I never thought one time growing up that I would be a cook. Cooking was something…I don’t know how to put it…in Senegal usually it is the women who cook. If a man tries to cook, the women say, “Are you crazy?,” and they come and cook for them. Over there, it wasn’t considered proper for a man to cook. Here, it’s a whole different reality.

I moved to New York when I was in my early thirties. I came for the same reason so many people come here, I think – for greater opportunity of making money and a better life. People come here from all over the world to make money, because they think it’s going to be easy, but it’s not easy. That’s what everybody finds out when they get here. [laughter.]

When I moved here, I had never even fried an egg in my life. Seriously. Everything I learned about cooking, I learned it here. When I first moved here, I was living in a house right here in Bed-Stuy with my siblings. Every day, somebody else was supposed to cook dinner for the house. After work, everyone would come home and we would all eat together. I was still looking for a job. I wasn’t working yet. I was home, and I was watching my siblings cook, and the more I watched, the more interested in it I became.

I started to learn to cook, and the more I learned, the more I fell in love with it. I learned to do it pretty well. One day, I had an idea. I thought, “You know, I know a lot of Senegalese people who live around here and who work in downtown Brooklyn, around Fulton Street and that area. They’re buying lunch. They’re paying for food that they don’t even like to eat. Why don’t I cook and I’ll take it there to them and they can pay me for food that they actually do like to eat! [laughter.] Everyone will be happy!”

So that’s how I started cooking for a living. I started with people from Senegal that I knew who worked around there. I said, “I can bring you lunch. Do you want it?” They said, “Oh yes. I would like that.” I was cooking food at home, and delivering it to them for lunch. At first it was six people, all Senegalese. I knew them from the neighborhood. But in less than two months, I had a whole variety of customers. I had Spanish people, Japanese people, any kind of person you can think of.

You see, they would see one of my neighbors eating my food. They would smell it. “Mmmm, that smells good,” they would think. “What is that? What are you eating?,” they would ask. They would say, “When the guy comes next time, can I get some?” So the people who knew me, they would call me up and say, “What do you have today? I have one guy over here, he wants to try your food.” I would say, “Okay, I’ll bring him a plate.” It happened more and more and more and more.

Soon, I was cooking for a lot of people. I was cooking Senegalese food in my apartment kitchen six days a week and bringing it to all these people. Sometimes if it was late, somebody would call me at home and say, “Do you have anything left? I’ll come and pick it up. I really want that food. That’s what I want tonight.”

I learned how to cook other stuff too. In Senegal, everything we eat has fish or chicken or meat. When I got here, I became friends with some Rastafarian guys. They were musicians and they used to hang out by my house. Like I said, in Senegal, when we eat we take a big plate and we put it in the middle of the table and everybody eats together. We always invite our friends, everybody, to come and eat with us. But these guys, when they came to our place they couldn’t eat with us. Rastas, you know, they are vegetarian. We did not like that they couldn’t eat the food we were serving.

I said, “You know, I have to find a way to make something these guys can eat.” So I learned how to cook vegan, vegetarian Senegalese food. In Senegal, that doesn’t even exist, but in Brooklyn, it does. I made it. [laughter.] And that’s a part of our menu to this day.

I loved all that. I cooked for people out of my home for two years, and then I got together one day with my siblings to talk about opening a restaurant, and we decided to do it. That was over eighteen years ago. Now, I’ve been here for a couple of decades. My kids were born here and raised here. When I came here, I remember I had a single gray hair on my head, right here. Now, I have more gray hair than anything else. But it’s ok. Now, Brooklyn is my home, and I love it. I enjoy myself here. It’s amazing. Being a cook? Having a family, raising my family here on the other side of the ocean from where I come from? I never would have imagined it. Never, ever would have imagined it.

Joloff is located at 1168 Bedford Avenue, between Putnam and Madison, in Bed-Stuy.

Photography by Morgan Ione-Yeager. All rights reserved.

Louis Coluccio's grandfather opened the iconic D. Coluccio & Sons Italian specialty foods shop in Bensonhurst over fifty years ago. Louis and his wife Alison chose to carry on the family tradition by opening their own shop, A.L.C. Italian Grocery in Bay Ridge, last fall.

A little over half a century ago, Domenico Coluccio and his two teenaged sons moved to Brooklyn from the mountainous region of Calabria in southern Italy. Here, they found a community of fellow expats who ceaselessly bemoaned the beloved foods from home they couldn’t yet find here – things like provolone and pannetone that today seem utterly commonplace. And in just that lies this story. Domenico heard the complaints and had a very simple idea – why not bring that stuff over here? And so he did, founding D. Coluccio and Sons in 1962 to import specialty foods to serve the Italian community in Brooklyn.

Last fall, Domenico’s grandson Louis Coluccio carried on the family tradition by opening his own place in Bay Ridge – A.L.C. Italian Grocery. We stopped by to chat with Louis and to try one of his house specialties, the porchetta sandwich with ‘nduja and crucolo cheese – in which a slice of orange brings together three generations of family history.

So Louis, what should we have today?

How about our porchetta sandwich? We make it with ‘nduja and crucolo cheese. It’s a really good sandwich.

Tell us about it.

When we opened the shop we knew we definitely wanted to have porchetta on the menu. I love porchetta. You know porchetta, right? It’s pork belly and pork loin rolled up, stuffed with herbs and spices, roasted really nice and slow, then sliced. It’s a classic Italian comfort food. It started in central Italy, but it’s really popular all over the country. People eat it at home, but a lot of the time traditionally you’d find it being sold as street food, from guys out on the streets with carts. They’d slice it really thin and serve it on a nice bread as a panino, with a little of the juice from the roasting pan. As a neighborhood grocery, we liked the idea of doing it that way, as a sandwich – something you can sit down and eat, or take with you back home or wherever.

Porchetta is a really simple food. It’s not complicated, but some people like to put their own stamp on it by playing around with the spices and herbs. We wanted to find a way to make our porchetta our own thing – to make it a little unique. The idea we came up with was to use slices of fresh orange along with a bunch of fresh herbs to season the meat.

Sometimes you might find citrus zest and that kind of thing in traditional porchetta recipes, but you’re not usually going to see whole slices of orange in there. We loved the idea. We thought it would work really well – bringing a nice kind of burst of fresh, sweet and tart citrus flavor into what’s otherwise a really rich, fatty, savory dish. We also liked it a lot because it ties in with our family history.

A.L.C.'s porchetta is Berkshire pork lion wrapped in pork belly, stuffed with lots of fresh rosemary, thyme, and slices of orange, that's rolled and slow roasted for five or six hours. "Everything slowly becomes one," says Louis.

See, my grandfather, Domenico Coluccio, is from Calabria, in the southern part of Italy. He started out selling oranges for a living. Eventually, he came over here. He brought my father with him. My father was fourteen years old. There was this whole community of people from Calabria and all over Italy living in Brooklyn. All they ever talked about was the food from back home that they missed so much. They couldn’t get it over here. The talk never stopped – “Oh, provolone! I miss it so much.” Or, “Pannetone! I’d kill for a taste of pannetone!”

When he’d heard enough of it, my grandfather decided to start a business bringing in provolone and pannetone and all the other stuff for people from Italy who couldn’t get it here and couldn’t stop talking about it. He opened the shop in Bensonhurst about fifty years ago, in 1962, with my father and uncle – his sons. I grew up in the store. We lived right upstairs from the place. So this business has been the life my family has lived for three generations here in Brooklyn. We really liked the idea of finding a way to tie what we’re doing here into how this all started, with my grandfather selling oranges all those years ago in Calabria.

And so, we have oranges in the porchetta. Of course, we wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t really delicious too.

How do you actually make the porchetta?

So what we do with the porchetta is, we start with a nice piece of pork belly, and a nice piece of pork loin. Both come from Berkshire pigs. Berkshire pork is really juicy and flavorful – really nice. We rub each piece of meat with olive oil, garlic, fresh rosemary, fresh thyme, slices of orange and salt, and then we let them marinate overnight, to absorb as much of that flavor as they can.

The next day, we assemble it. We lay out the pork belly, then we lay out the loin on top of that. We spread out the garlic, rosemary, thyme and oranges – lots of them – across the loin, and then we roll them up, so you have this round cylindrical roast with the pork belly on the outside, and the pork loin with the herbs and oranges on the inside. Once it’s rolled, we tie it up and roast it really slowly over low heat for about five, six hours. We keep turning it, basting it while it cooks. The fat on the outside of the pork belly crisps up and gets really delicious. The fat on the inside part of the belly just melts and renders into the loin. The herbs and orange slices marinate and perfume and infuse the meat. Everything slowly becomes one.

When it’s done cooking, the belly, loin and seasonings have all kind of melded together. When you untie it, it all stays together – nothing starts to fall apart or anything. It’s a little crispy on the outside, and on the inside, it’s just juicy. The Berkshire pork has a really nice earthy flavor. The fat from the pork belly has an almost sweet kind of flavor that melts right into the loin and runs through the whole thing. The fresh herb flavors of rosemary and thyme and that fresh sweet, tart, juicy bite from the orange all balance the rich, fatty, pork, you know?

'Nduja is a traditional Calabrian spicy, spreadable sausage made with pork meat, pork fat, and both sweet and hot Calabrian red peppers. The ingredients are ground together, then smoked, and cured.

So that’s the porchetta. Next is the ‘nduja. ‘They say the name ‘nduja comes from andouille – the French sausage. Nduja is a classic Calabrian thing. It’s basically a kind of spreadable sausage made with really fatty pork and lots of hot, spicy, red Calabrian peppers. If you see the boot shape of Italy on a map, Calabria is where you see the foot of the boot, in the very southwestern part of the country. It’s pretty mountainous there. It’s traditionally a pretty poor region – lots of small farms, and lots of chestnut groves that have been used to graze pigs forever.

‘Nduja is something that probably came from necessity. It was a way to use and preserve all the parts of the animal. They used to make it with all kinds of leftover trimmings of pork. Now that’s it’s become a little more popular, they use some different like meat from the neck, along with fat. And then the peppers – in Calabria, peppers are a very important part of the cuisine. People love their peppers. They love them really hot. You’ll find those hot, spicy peppers everywhere in Calabrian cooking.

To make the ‘nduja, they grind up the pork meat and fat with salt and Calabrian sweet and hot peppers. That’s it. Then they put it in a casing and smoke it and cure it to let it dry out for a few weeks. Because of the fat and the peppers, you end up with a paste that never hardens as it cured, like most sausages do. It remains a kind of soft paste that you can spread on bread or whatever you want. It’s very meaty, very spicy, but not overpowering. It has a pretty intense savory, meaty, spicy flavor that adds a whole new layer to the earthy, almost sweet pork and herbs and orange of the porchetta.

Crucolo cheese is produced at the foot of the mountains in northern Italy. It's buttery, grassy and floral, with a little tang.

The last thing on the sandwich is the cheese. For the cheese, we go to the north. We use crucolo, a cow’s milk cheese from an area right at the foot of the mountains in northern Italy. It’s aged for about sixty days, so it’s semi-firm. It’s got a buttery flavor, but it’s also really nicely grassy and floral with a little bit of tang. It’s a really nice cheese. It melts fantastic. The creaminess of it when it melts, and the grassy, floral flavors work with the herbs and orange in the porchetta to balances out the meatiness and spice of the rest of the sandwich.

The bread, we get from Il Fornaretto in Bensonhurst. You know that place? It’s been there forever. It’s one of the last of the old-school Italian bakeries – a real place, not a factory. It’s the bread we grew up on. You don’t get bread better than this – baked in a brick oven fresh every morning. It’s firm enough to hold up to the sandwich on the outside, but nice and soft so it absorbs just the right amount of flavor from the ‘nduja, porchetta and cheese to bring everything together on the inside.

When someone orders the sandwich, we cut the bread, spread it with ‘nduja, slice the porchetta and put it in there, then the cheese. It all goes in the oven for a few minutes to let everything melt together, and it’s ready to go.

A.L.C.'s porchetta sandwich - porchetta with 'nduja and crucolo on bread from Il Fornaretto Italian bakery in Bensonhurst.

So Louis, what about you? How did you end up opening up your own place here?

When I was growing up, my grandfather and my father and uncle were running the store in Bensonhurst. Like I said, we lived right there. That was my life. Everything was about the store. It was a neighborhood grocery store. We all knew everyone who came in personally. They knew us. Everyone was on a first name basis. It was a real neighborhood place. I loved everything about it. There were places like that in every neighborhood, and it had been that way forever, but that idea of the neighborhood grocery got away from us all I think. You don’t see that much anymore – a real neighborhood place where everyone knows each other by their first names. It got too generic, too impersonal in most places.

Of course, my father’s store is still going. It’s a great business. I could have stayed there, but I guess I wanted to take a chance at doing my own thing. I wanted to feel that entrepreneurial spirit that my grandfather and father experienced when they opened their place fifty years ago. It’s completely different than coming into something that’s already established. My father comes in and checks up on me here, and I love that. I think he wanted me to experience what he experienced when he was my age – that whole thing of opening up your own shop and doing everything from scratch.

What we’re doing here isn’t all that different from my father and grandfather’s place. It’s definitely in the same spirit. I wanted to do my own version of the old neighborhood grocery, where there’s always a conversation going on about the products, the neighborhood, whatever. My wife and I live here in Bay Ridge. We love the mix of old and new here. There are a lot of Italian, Polish, German and Scandinavian families that have been here forever, and there’s a new generation of people coming in too. We wanted to give the neighborhood a place to come in and grab a homemade meal, some really great unique imported items from Italy, or local products like milk from upstate New York.

Where my grandfather and dad and uncle really specialized just in imported Italian things, here we’re really open to all the great new stuff being made here in Brooklyn today too. This whole artisan thing isn’t anything new. People have been doing it forever. Italians especially. The whole thing that people love about Italian food is that everything is made by hand, from scratch, with the most amazing ingredients. It isn’t new at all. I think the whole ‘made-in-Brooklyn’ thing is just the next stage of that. We like to call those new Brooklyn things ‘Italian-style’ products, because they’re made with passion, with love. That’s what old-school Italian is all about too. So of course we’re going to carry that stuff here too.

A.L.C. Italian Grocery is located at 8613 3rd Avenue, between 86th and 87th, in Bay Ridge.

Photography by Morgan Ione Yeager. All rights reserved.

At Kings County Distillery, based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, corn grown on the shores of Seneca Lake at Lakeview Organic Grain, is transformed into moonshine and bourbon.

Is there anything more American than corn? Back when adventurous Europeans still lived in fear of falling off the edge of a flat earth, native Americans had cultivated corn, adapting a rainbow of varieties to flourish in the soil of their deserts, mountains, forests and plains. In the centuries after Europeans arrived, the continent went corn crazy. Today, for better or worse, our plains are still fruited with corn, albeit with a much less diverse collection of modern hybrid breeds.

Corn has become a part of our cultural DNA. While we may sigh at the thought of the insidious seep of corn syrup or ponder the wisdom of growing corn for fuel, who doesn’t harbor gauzy memories of shucking sweet corn on a summer afternoon, inhaling the intoxicating aroma of cornbread baking in a winter oven, or watching someone we love stirring a pot of polenta or grits over a hissing flame?

But what about whiskey? Distilling whiskey spirits with corn is one of the grand American traditions, and the recent passage of laws loosening the restrictions on commercial distilling have led to a blossoming of craft distillers in New York state. Even New York City, home to not a single distillery between prohibition and 2010, is now home to eight.

Kings County Distillery, based in a hundred and thirteen year old building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was the first of this new generation. Since 2010, Kings County partners Colin Spoelman, David Haskell and Nicole Austin have been making an unaged corn whiskey (better known as moonshine) and bourbon, with spirit distilled from organic corn grown in central New York by farmers Mary-Howell and Klaas Martens of Lakeview Organic Grain.

For this edition of Field to Fork, we travel north, to the western shores of Seneca Lake, to talk with Mary-Howell and Klaas about corn and the resurgence of organic grain farming in upstate New York, then follow their corn back to Kings County to chat with Colin about how whiskey is made.

From the Field, at Lakeview Organic Grain, with farmers Mary-Howell and Klaas Martens…

Klaas and Mary-Howell Martens of Lakeview Organic Grain. Klaas and Mary-Howell started out as conventional farmers, but converted gradually to organic in the 1990s. Since then, they've seen the demand for their grains explode.

So Mary-Howell and Klaas, can you start by telling us a little about what you grow here at Lake View Organic?

Mary-Howell: We’re a fairly large, commercial, organic grain farm. We plant several varieties of corn and soybeans, a whole bunch of small grains, like flax, barley, spelt, oats and wheats, and some peas and beans too. We farm about fourteen hundred acres up here on the western shore of Seneca Lake, so it’s not a small operation. We harvest with combines and that sort of thing, which is not something everyone associates with organic farming. But we are strictly organic, and have been since the mid-nineteen nineties.

We also own a grain mill in the town of Penn Yan, a few miles from here. We bought it from Agway when they were going bankrupt and going out of business a little over ten years ago, so nowadays we not only farm, but we mill our own grains and grains from other organic farms in the area, and we distribute them all over the region.

Most of what we grow is sold as feed to certified organic dairy farmers, but a growing volume is going to specialty manufacturers like Japanese tofu makers, new local distilleries and breweries, bakers and chefs, and to smaller-scale farmers – people who might have chickens in their backyard and want organic feed. We sell a good amount of organic seed as well.

Corn grown for grains is left to dry on the stalk before harvest. As the corn dries naturally, the kernel locks in nutrients and flavor.

Since we began farming organically in the early nineties, the market for organic grains has really evolved. It’s grown very dramatically.

Can you tell us a little about corn specifically? Different types, varieties?

Mary-Howell: Well one thing that some people get confused about is the difference between sweet corn and corn grown for grain.

Sweet corn is the corn you buy at a farm stand in August, and eat off the cob. People have been eating sweet corn for a long, long time. The native Americans had sweet corn, and people have continued to cultivate and eat sweet corn varieties right through to the modern day. But those older varieties of sweet corn were very different than the sweet corn we have today. The sweet corn that we eat off the cob today is grown almost exclusively with special hybrid varieties developed in the 1950s.

Relative to the older varieties, modern sweet corns are considered super-sweet. In those hybrids, the sugar lasts much longer in the kernels after they’ve been harvested. The older varieties were sweet on the plant, but very shortly after picking, the sugars in the kernels would break down into starch, so if you ate it a day after picking it, it would be pretty starchy. You had to cook and eat the older varieties right away. In the modern hybrids, they’ve added a couple of genes to increase sugar production in the kernels, and to stabilize the sugars so they have a longer shelf life.

Klaas: There’s a whole range of varieties of corns, from soft starch sweet corns all the way up to very hard starch corns used for grain. Actually, the vast majority of corn varietals are no longer being planted at all. The corns people grow today are such a narrow piece of what’s out there historically. There’s a whole range of old varietals that no one grows anymore, but there’s some growing interest in tapping into that.

The Martens grow several varieties of corn - both modern hybrids and heirloom breeds.

Sweet corns basically exist at one end of a very large range of varietals. Sweet corn is loaded with soft starches, so it can be eaten fresh, but most varietals are dried then milled for feed or grain. Here at Lakeview, we just grow a little bit of sweet corn for our own consumption. Just about all of the corn we grow commercially are varieties used for grain.

You can see that by looking at our fields. Corn grown for grain is allowed to dry out on the stalk, so we don’t harvest our corn until the very end of the season, in November. Sweet corn is harvested when it’s fresh and green on the stalk. We let our grain corn turn brown on the stalk and dry out naturally as much as we can because as the kernel dries on the cob it becomes very stable. The drying kernel locks in the natural germs and oils and preserves them beautifully.

Mary-Howell: There are two main classifications that we use here for the corn we grow for grain. One is the hybrid corns, which were developed in the 1930s. Those were developed for higher yield. They’re more uniform, more consistent. It’s a very efficient type of corn. You can look across a field of it and it looks uniform. The stalks are the same height, the same color. The kernels are the same size and color. There’s very little variability. Each plant is almost genetically identical to every other one. They’re very stable and predictable and that’s what makes them good for farming.

Organically grown hybrid corn, if it’s grown in healthy soil anyway, is of a much higher quality than the same variety grown conventionally. It’s of a higher quality, and it has more flavor and nutritional content when it’s grown in healthy, nutrient-rich soil. Now, not all organic corn is grown in healthy, nutrient-rich soil, and if that’s the case, it’s not going to be more flavorful or nutritious, but that’s how we do things here. Everything we do starts with healthy, living soil.

The other kind of corn we grow is called open pollinated corn. Those are the older heritage or heirloom varieties. In those varieties, not every plant is genetically the same. You’ll look across a field of open pollinated corn and you’ll see stalks of different sizes. The ears will be located in different places on the stalk. You might get some yellow ears, some red ears. There’ll be some consistency within a varietal depending on where you’re farming and how that variety is adapted to your region, but there will be much more variation in it than in the hybrids, so it doesn’t yield as well.

We still grow primarily hybrid corn on our farm, because most of our corn is grain corn and we need the yield, and it’s a high quality product that we’re quite proud of. But the open pollinated varieties are very intriguing to us as farmers, and they represent a natural diversity that’s something we’d like to see more of in the future.

There are all kinds of varieties of the open pollinated heirloom corns. There’s blue corn, a really red corn called bloody butcher, there’s green corn – we grew a green variety one year called Oaxacan Green that was very high in oil content so the flavor of the corn meal we made with it was almost buttery. It was fantastic, but you had to use it right away or it would go rancid. So, it wasn’t practical.

Lakeview Organic Grain is a large operation - fourteen hundred acres in all. Combines are used to harvest corn.

One of the varieties we grow here is called Wapsie Valley corn. Wapsie Valley is a place in Iowa, and the variety is an old native American strain that one local farmer stuck with while all of his neighbors were switching to hybrids. A farmer in Canada named Victor Kucyk adopted it and did a lot of work to promote it and since then it has really had a lot of impact in getting people to think about open pollinated varieties again for the first time in a long time.

We get our Wapsie Valley seed from him and grow it here. It’s beautiful corn, with big, waxy yellow, almost orange kernels, with these bright red ears that show up in about one in twenty plants.

Klaas: The nice thing about the open pollinated corn varieties is that you can select seeds to really adapt them in a lot of different ways. You can plant say an acre of it, then go out right before harvest and pull off the ears from plants that are particularly well-adapted to your climate and soil. You look for big ears, red ears, whatever you like, pull them off and use them for your own seed stock the following year, which will push your stock in the direction of the characteristics you want. It’s interesting how much of an affect one person can have on a varietal by selecting seeds to tailor it for the specific conditions on their farm.

With the hybrid corn, you don’t have that level of genetic variation to work with. It’s a good crop, but it’s not as malleable. You can’t adapt it to suit your own conditions and purposes because hybrid seeds don’t come true. That means you can’t save the seeds from one season’s crop to use the next year. It won’t grow as seed. You have to buy more seeds from the seed companies every year. So with the hybrids, you can’t save the seeds and select the best seeds to improve your own stock for your own specific conditions.

Corn is loaded directly from the combine in the field to a truck that will transport it to the mill owned by the farm in the town of Penn Yan, a few miles away.

Having variety in the types of corn we’re growing is important. It’s not just about flavors and the types available for us to eat, it’s about diversity on an environmental level. The Hopi in the Arizona desert grow their own variety of corn in conditions so dry that you wouldn’t think anything at all would grow there. But over hundreds of years they’ve selected seeds for corn that can survive those conditions. In the Gaspé Peninsula way up north in Canada, the native Americans have a variety of corn that grows in extreme cold, over a  really short growing season. Over hundreds and thousands of years in the Western Hemisphere, people selected and cultivated varieties of corn that were adapted particularly well to their specific environments – from the sub-arctic to the desert and everywhere in between.

So it’s not that the modern hybrid is a bad thing. It’s a good thing in many ways, and when it’s grown organically in good soil, it’s a great benefit to farmers and consumers. It’s just that it would also benefit the environment and be more sustainable and secure for us all if we were growing more varieties of corn in more places alongside those hybrids. The good thing is that we’re starting to see more interest in those heirloom varietals, but there’s a long way to go.

Can you tell us a little about your own experience with organic farming here? How does it work?

Mary-Howell: The approach goes back to the three sisters concept of native American agriculture. The native Americans in this area based their agriculture around the staple crops of corn, squash, and beans. They grew them all together in bunches in one field, and the plants would sustain each other while providing a balanced nutritional diet to the people growing them – beans would provide protein, corn would provide sugar and starch and squash would provide vitamins, color and calories.

Some older equipment is still used on the farm too. Here, a picker from the 1950s is used to harvest another field.

Klaas: In terms of the approach to growing, the interesting thing is in how the plants work together. The big, broad, squash leaves shaded the roots of the corn stalks and the beans, keeping them cool and keeping moisture in the soil from burning off. The corn stalks provided support for the bean vines to grow up into the sun. And each of the plants provided nutrients in the soil that the other plants needed to thrive.

Mary-Howell: The organic system, in order for it to work, is based on intentional biodiversity just like you see in that three sisters system. It’s based on having a large variety of plants in the fields. Conventional farming is just the opposite – it’s all about monoculture, and intensive, large-scale production of one crop in one place. For us, the greater the number of species we have on our farm, the better, because they’re going to form a system that’s in balance, that can sustain and nourish and protect itself through its own diversity, without needing intervention in the form of chemical fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides. That system includes both animals and plants, and it includes the animals you see and the animals you don’t.

We like to say that we don’t have many cows on our farm, but we have thousands of species of animals. They’re just really, really small, and they live in the soil. I’m talking about the microbes and the earthworms and all the other life in the soil that are really what our farm and any organic farm is all about. They’re the ones who cycle all the nutrients. They break down nutrients left in the soil by one plant into nutrients that can be used and absorbed by another plant the next season. Those are the things that give you healthy, living, soil, and healthy, living soil is what creates the conditions for healthy, nutritious, flavorful, thriving crops.

Alvin Leid, one of the farmhands at Lakeview, is from a Mennonite family nearby. Many Mennonite and Amish have moved to the area to start small family farms in recent years.

One key to giving all of those little animals that create such healthy soil the conditions they need to thrive is crop rotation. We’re always rotating different crops, different varieties of a crop and different cover crops on our fields from season to season, so we’re constantly replenishing the nutrients in the soil. Healthy, living soil allows the plants growing in it to be much healthier and more resilient. They’re better able to compete against weeds and pests, and they’re going to be healthier and more flavorful than conventionally grown versions of the same plants.

Klaas: In organic farming you take a a very different approach to managing weeds and pests. In conventional farming, you see a weed, you think, “How am I going to kill that weed as quickly and effectively as possible?” You go and get your spray rig and spray the field with chemicals to eliminate the weed.

In organic farming, we think of weeds and pests as a good things, in the sense that they act as our teachers. They show us when something is out of balance in our fields. We pay attention to them, and we try to understand why they’re here. Rather than saying, “There’s something here, we don’t want, so let’s kill it,” we say, “What did we do to create the conditions that attracted these things that can damage our crops in the first place?”

If we see weeds in a part of one of the fields, we say, “Why here? What’s different about this field or this part of this field than a field just across the way that’s not having a weed problem? What did we do differently here, and what’s naturally different here?” Everything is connected. Is it the terrain, the species of plants we’re growing, that are causing the weeds to thrive? What can we do to naturally change the underlying conditions in the soil and the field to create a situation that’s not hospitable to pests or weeds, without spraying it with chemicals?

A red ear of Wapsie Valley corn, one of the heirloom open-pollinated breeds grown at Lakeview Organic.

In conventional agriculture, you assume the problems are just random and inevitable, and you treat them to make them go away. In organic agriculture, you see the problems as teachers, as feedback from the soil and the plants. They’re telling us something. They’re showing us where something is out of balance or harmony in the ecosystem of the farm.

Mary-Howell: You have approaches to agriculture that are being held out as alternatives to organic, like Integrated Pest Management, or I.P.M. The idea there is that you don’t spray indiscriminately and proactively, you spray conservatively. You spray only when you find symptoms of problems with weeds or pests. The idea is that it’s less bad, because you’re using less chemicals.

But it’s still not sustainable. We’re not interested in less bad. We want to understand the causes of the condition, and we want to find ways to address the underlying condition. It’s not about just killing the insect with a spray, it’s about asking the question of what can we do to develop an environment in this field that will attract more beneficial insects and less harmful ones.

Of course, it’s not a perfect system. It doesn’t always work perfectly. You’re always learning and adjusting and adapting. The weather is a huge wild card these days because it’s so erratic, and that’s something you cannot control. The systems at work in the soil, in the fields, in the plants, from week to week within the season and across the seasons are very complex. Our understanding of it all is very incomplete. But we’ve found that by approaching agriculture the way we do, with a focus on the underlying conditions, that we’re able to do quite well, and to be just as productive, if not significantly more so, than many conventional farms.

What led you to take the organic approach? Have you always been farming organically or did you make the transition from conventional at some point?

Mary-Howell: Klaas grew up farming. He’s farmed his whole life. I’m not from a farm background. I’m from Long Island. I came to Cornell to study and work. I was working in their grape breeding program. I met Klass then. I was basically in charge of planning the spray programs for our breeding vineyards.

We were completely conventional farmers back then. We knew how to spray and we were good at it. But we also knew that our land, our clothing, our children were getting the lion’s share of those chemicals we were spraying, and it wasn’t something we felt good about. We knew it wasn’t good. But at that time it was something you just didn’t talk about. If you were a farmer, that’s just what you did.

At the same time we were feeling the economic pressures that all smaller-scale conventional farmers were feeling. We realized that farming five hundred acres of corn, soybeans, wheat and hay conventionally just wasn’t going to bring in enough money for us to survive. The commodity prices were just too low.

So we started looking around at various niches, different value-added opportunities, but nothing really caught our attention, and when it did and we started penciling out the economics, nothing really added up to something that would sustain the farm.

In 1991, we were sitting here at the table one evening, looking at the local paper. There was an ad in the classified section at the back of the paper that said, “Wanted: Organic Wheat.”

Now, nobody wanted organic wheat back then. Nobody grew it. Nobody even talked about it. But we looked at each other and thought, “Eh, of course it won’t work, but why not give it a try?” So we did, and it did work. Much to our surprise, there was a market for organic wheat. There was a real demand out there for it. It paid far more than conventional wheat, and it allowed us to start moving away from spraying.

Freshly harvested corn is stored in a silo until it's needed at the mill.

We didn’t just completely switch from conventional to organic at once. We started converting more and more acreage of the farm to certified organic production, year by year. Back in about 1995, we were still partly organic and partly conventional. Klaas went out to spray some of the conventional fields one day with a very commonly used weed killer called 2,4-D. While he was spraying, he suddenly felt his whole right side go numb. It happened out in the field.

Klaas: I knew I was getting a lot of spray. The smell was really strong, coming into the tractor. All of a sudden, my arm wouldn’t move.

Mary-Howell: He went to see a local doctor, who just prescribed him some pain pills and muscle relaxers. There, in the middle of June, a farmer comes complaining of numbness and nausea, and no one even thought to ask, “What have you been spraying?”

Klaas: Eventually I went to a chiropractor and he put me on a major detox, and it took me close to six months to recover. But that incident was the one that prompted us to make the transition to completely organic farming. The day my arm was paralyzed was the last time I ever sprayed. We made a decision that we couldn’t ethically hire someone to do it for us. We didn’t want to.

Mary-Howell: It had been going on forever. Whenever Klaas would spray, he’d come in in the evening with a splitting headache, feeling nauseous. It wasn’t just him either. When you talked to any of the neighbors they’d end up admitting to the same thing. So that just put us over the edge, and it’s turned out to be a very good thing.

Klaas: In the beginning, when we first started transitioning, we knew nothing. People were convinced it was going to be an utter disaster. There was no production system out there for us to look at and copy. We had to figure out how to do it on our own.

Mary-Howell: But we did figure it out. The more we tried, the better it worked. And we started to discover that there were a few other organic farmers in the area, kind of quietly growing grain. The problem early on was that there weren’t enough of us growing grains organically to create enough of a critical mass for markets to come here to buy. We weren’t producing enough for it to be worth their time.

But we started working with a few other farmers, and we slowly got to a point where together we were producing enough organic soybeans and grains that it made sense for buyers to come up here. Once we were producing enough for them to put together truckloads of grain, they started coming and buying from us and they never stopped.

The mill was originally owned by Agway, once a large agricultural feed company. Today, Lakeview Organic operates the mill full time, with a staff of seven. Today, "We're grinding more grain than Agway ever did," says Mary-Howell.

Klaas: And it just started to grow really quickly. Once people could see that what we were doing was working, that you could actually farm this stuff organically without all those toxic sprays, and you could get a much higher price for it, more and more of them started to convert.

Mary-Howell: By the mid-nineties, there were enough of us growing organic soybeans that we were able to start selling to Japanese buyers, who would send it to Japan for tofu. Around that time, about the first three organic dairy farmers came to us and said, “Would you start growing organic feed for us?” We said, “Sure,” assuming it wouldn’t be a big deal. By 2001 we had over a hundred dairy feed customers.

Of course, you need to be able to grind your grains for feed and other purposes, and we were sending all of ours out to be milled. At that time, Agway, one of the big feed companies at the time, was dismembering. They were going bankrupt and selling off all their property. They had a feed mill in town that had been sitting idle for about ten years. The demand for our grains for organic feed was growing so quickly that we decided to buy it.

We thought back then that we’d run it part time. At this point we have seven full time employees, two trucks on the road making deliveries throughout the region, we’re grinding more grain there than Agway ever did and it’s all certified organic.

The mill grinds grain primarily for feed for certified organic dairy farmers. In recent years, they've grown as demand has surged from distillers, brewers, bakers and chefs.

The demand for the stuff has continued to grow from all kinds of unexpected places. The demand for organic feed for dairy farmers has started to plateau because it’s such a difficult business. The cost of organic grain is high and the price the dairy farmers can get for organic milk isn’t high enough to bring in enough money to allow most of those farmers to grow.

In recent years, it became legal for smaller-scale distilleries to make whiskey and spirits in New York State again. That’s taken off. So now we’re supplying organic corn and barley and rye to about six different distilleries. Microbreweries have taken off too, so there’s a new unexpected market for organic barley.

We even supply a kosher matzo bakery in Brooklyn. We never would have imagined that twenty years ago. You’d never even know it’s there. It’s tucked away inside this old tenement building. You walk inside, and there are probably sixty Hasidic guys, rolling matzo like crazy and cooking them in a wood and coal-fired furnace hearth. It’s an incredible scene. You feel like you’ve stepped back two hundred years in time. And then you go upstairs and you see a whole different thing – the head rabbi is in an office in front of a wall covered with closed-circuit television screens. They have cameras recording every step of production, so if there’s ever a question about any kosher law being broken, they can rewind and replay. [laughter.]

Even the whole backyard chicken thing has created a new market. I’ve got one guy who raises a few hundred chickens for eggs and meat that he sells at a few local farmers markets. He came in one time and said, “If you all weren’t doing what you’re doing, I couldn’t do what I’m doing.” And I think that’s what’s really neat about all this. Because we grow organic grains, we can have the mill. Because we have the mill, we can produce organic feed which allows that guy to raise chickens. Because he has chickens, people in Rochester and all around here can have really great eggs and meat, and be amazed by how much better they are than any other eggs or chicken meat they’ve ever had.

Inside the mill, corn is ground fresh to order rather than being ground and stored for long periods. This allows the grain to retain much more flavor and nutritional content.

Or with a place like King’s County Distillery – we can provide fresh-ground organic corn that’s of a much higher quality than the conventional alternative to a guy like Colin, who uses it to make whiskey, and then he’s able to provide a really high quality whiskey to people in his community. These are the kinds of things that we just think are really neat.

So what’s next? Seeing any trends in interest in what you’re doing from new directions out there?

Mary-Howell: What I hope is next is the whole idea of fresh-ground grains. We’ve been working with Dan Barber of Blue Hill for the last five years. He said, “The whole idea of fresh fruits and vegetables has really been driven home.” Everybody knows fresh tomatoes are better, fresh greens, even fresh, pastured meat is better. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the same applies to grains.

When corn or wheat or any kind of grains are ground and packaged commercially, a lot of the good stuff in them, like the oils and germ which carry a lot of flavor and nutritional value, all get removed so that the product doesn’t go rancid. You have to remove them to give them a longer shelf life. So when you buy whole wheat flour at the grocery store, it isn’t whole wheat. The oils and germ have been removed. It’s also probably old. It may have been ground six months or more before you get it.

What a lot of people haven’t realized yet is that if you get freshly ground grain, it’s going to have a much shorter shelf-life, but it’s going to have more flavor than you could ever imagine. Fresh cornmeal or fresh flour? Their flavors are much more intense and complex. And that’s one of the things we specialize in here. Freshly-ground organic grains. That’s something that people are just starting to really understand and it’s something we’re really excited about it.

Freshly-ground corn, headed for Kings County Distillery.

So are you seeing a continuing shift to organic farming in this area?

Mary-Howell: It’s changing, but it hasn’t completely changed. There’s a lot of talk about the changing landscape of agriculture in the northeast, and I just don’t think a lot of that talk is true.

I was at a conference a few months ago – a regional feed dealers’ conference that we have every year. Someone was giving a big presentation about how we have more and more farms in New York growing in size, from five hundred cows to a thousand, or from one thousand to three thousand. They were talking about how consolidation and large-scale farming is the way of the future.

For our perspective, it’s really not. As far as we can see, the way of the future is the forty-cow Amish or Mennonite farm. This part of New York state is being invaded by Mennonite and Amish farmers, and it’s the best thing that’s happened around here in a long time. Around here, when a farm goes up for sale, it’s usually a Mennonite or Amish family buying it.

They’re all about small farms, run mostly on family labor. I can’t tell you how many of these farms have been set up around here in the recent past. We’re shipping feed today to close to two hundred Amish and Mennonite farms in this part of the state, and those are just the certified organic ones. There are many, many more.

It makes for a much healthier rural economy. When I moved up here thirty years ago, vast stretches of this county were abandoned. Now they’re all being farmed. Because we have all of these family farms, we’ve got a very healthy fire department, ambulance corps, library, hardware stores, farm supply stores. It’s different than an area occupied by huge farms because there are a lot more people here. There’s a community. In some places where there are a lot of huge farms and not a lot of people, like in Iowa, the small towns are dying. Here, they’re thriving because of this influx of Amish and Mennonites who center their whole lives on the small family farm.

What’s strange is that it’s obviously happening right here, right now, but the powers-that-be and the policy makers seem to be blind to the trend. It’s literally like they don’t even see it.

…To the Still, at Kings County Distillery with founder Colin Spoelman

Kings County Distillery founder Colin Spoelman, grew up in a dry county in Kentucky. When he moved to New York, he started making moonshine for fun in his Williamsburg apartment. Here, he shows off the charred interior of an oak barrel used to age bourbon at the distillery.

So Colin, tell us about corn, and whiskey.

Well the art of distilling whiskies really matured in Europe, most famously in Scotland and Ireland, centuries ago. The first official records specifically relating to the distilling of whisky in Scotland go back something like five hundred years.

So for a long time over there, whisky was distilled with malted barley or other grains, but not corn. Corn of course, is native to the Americas. When Europeans began settling here, they made corn beers, but continued for the most part to use rye and other grains they were familiar with from Europe to distill whiskey.

In the late 1760s, Daniel Boone first explored the area that would eventually become Kentucky. It was considered to be a part of Virginia at the time. A few years later, in order to encourage people to venture west and settle there, the state passed a law saying they’d grant a bunch of land in Kentucky to anyone who settled there, built a cabin, and planted corn.

Freshly-ground corn from Lakeview Organic Grains awaits the mash. The distillery uses about a ton of Lakeview corn each week.

There were a huge number of Scotch-Irish coming into the country at the time, and a lot of them settled in Kentucky and the surrounding areas. They knew how to make whisky from back home, and they started making it in Kentucky, and since there was so much corn being grown there, eventually they started making whiskey with corn. So, in conjunction with this effort to promote settlement and cultivation of the frontier, the very American tradition of making whiskies with corn was born.

Here, we make both a moonshine, which is an unaged corn whiskey made with eighty percent corn and twenty percent barley, and a bourbon which is made with seventy percent corn and thirty percent barley, before it’s aged for a year upstairs in oak barrels.

When we started out, it wasn’t explicitly our mission to make whiskey with local or organic corn. It was our mission to make good whiskey. Early on, when we were experimenting, we were using a conventionally grown corn called brewers corn. It’s a flattened, steamed cornmeal. It was processed like rolled oats – broken down and crushed between two hot rollers. It was very easy product to use in distilling, but because it had been processed the way it had been, it wasn’t a fresh product. A lot of the elements within the kernel had been removed or compromised or just altered in some way by the processing.

Sacks of corn fill the distilling floor.

Eventually, we tried Lake View Organic’s corn. Honestly, I think we found them by googling ‘New York state corn,’ or something. They’re very tech-savvy for a farm, which basically means they have a website. [laughter.] We liked the sound of what they were doing, growing corn organically and grinding it fresh to preserve some of the elements in the kernel that were lost in other processing methods, so we tried it, and we liked it immediately.

Corn is stable as long as it’s in the kernel. It doesn’t degrade. What Lakeview Organics does differently is, they grow it organically, and they mill it or grind it fresh, so the corn grain we get from them is actually a fresh product. It may have been harvested months ago, but it’s not ground for us until we need it, so this whole range of flavors and materials in the corn kernel are preserved, and I think that really impacts the quality of our whiskey. It’s just a much higher quality of corn than what we had been using.

It really had a noticeable difference in the whiskey. When we were using the conventionally grown and processed corn, our whiskey had a thinner, narrower, sweeter flavor. Now we have a much broader, earthier, richer kind of flavor profile.

When you’re tasting a white, unaged spirit, like our moonshine, you can definitely taste the difference between a spirit distilled with a high quality corn like the one we use and one distilled with a lower quality corn. With an aged spirit like the bourbon, it’s harder, because so much flavor is infused from the charred oak barrels as the whiskey ages. The flavor of the corn might not be so pronounced, but the quality of the corn imparts a certain quality in the whiskey that gives it richer flavor and a fuller body. It makes a noticeable difference.

Can you tell us a little about how you actually make your whiskey?

It’s not terrifically technical, to distill a whiskey. Here, all of our distilling is done in very small batches. We don’t have nearly the capacity of the larger commercial Kentucky distilleries. So we have a much, much smaller yield. The bigger commercial distilleries have gotten very good at aging their whiskies. They don’t place as much emphasis on the actual distilling of the spirit as they do on the aging of it, because during the aging process, a lot of flaws in the distilling of the spirit can be masked in one way or another.

So one thing we do differently here is we pay a lot of very careful attention to how we distill the spirit. We put a lot of care into using very high quality ingredients, and into distilling the highest possible quality white spirit that we can. That allows us to produce a very nice unaged whiskey – the moonshine, and it allows us to age our bourbon in smaller barrels for shorter periods of time. Because we’re starting with a very high quality spirit and we age it in much smaller barrels than the bigger commercial distilleries, it doesn’t need to age as long in order mature.

In addition to their moonshine and bourbon, the distillery produces limited runs of a chocolate-infused whiskey, made with cacao bean husks from Mast Brothers Chocolate.

The process begins with distilling the spirit. To begin, we mix fifty gallons of water and fifty pounds of corn, and bring that to a boil. The mixture becomes fairly starchy very quickly, as it would if you were making grits. The water breaks down the corn and disperses its starches. The liquid turns yellow, and we let it begin to cool.

The reason we use malted barley as well as corn in the spirit is because there are enzymes in the barley that are really good at breaking down the starches from the corn into the sugar that the yeast will later transform into alcohol. Those enzymes in the barley are at their most active at a hundred and fifty eight degrees. So when the corn and water mixture cools to that temperature, we add the barley and stir it around and let it sit for about thirty minutes.

Another way in which we differ from a lot of distillers is that we do not use synthetic enzymes to break down the starches into sugar. We only use the natural enzymes in the malted barley, and that’s pretty uncommon. That’s something that also impacts our yield. If we used synthetic enzymes, we could produce more, but we believe that our process results in a really nice whiskey in the end, and that’s what we’re most interested in.

Barley is stirred into the mash.

As soon as you add the barley, the mixture – which we call the mash – starts to taste sweet, as if you’d added sugar even though you have not. It’s the enzymes from the barley breaking the starches from the corn down into sugar. It starts to happen immediately.

We let the mash cool to room temperature, and then we begin the fermentation by adding our yeast. We mix it into the mash and let it ferment for four and a half days. The yeast consumes the sugar and dissolved oxygen and transforms it into alcohol. After about four and a half days, the yeast will have done just about all of the work they can. They’ll have consumed all the sugar and oxygen available and made that into alcohol, so then it’s time to distill.

First, we strain out all the leftover solids from the corn and the barley. They go to the pig farmer for feed. The strained liquid goes into the still.

Yeast is added to begin fermentation.

We use these fairly old, traditional pot stills, and we distill our spirit twice. On the first run, we basically reduce about fifty gallons of liquid to about ten, by boiling off a lot of the water content. Alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so we start with a mash that’s about eight percent alcohol, and distill it to separate and condense the alcohol. At this stage, we call what comes off the still the ‘low wines.’ The low wines still have a lot of impurities, a lot of undesirable oils. It’s still quite crude.

The second distillation is where we really focus in on what we’re doing, on producing a really well-balanced, smooth white spirit. When you’re distilling your spirit you’re basically slowly heating your liquid to a high temperature, to separate the desirable alcohols and flavors from everything else. The second distillation takes you through a few distinct stages, which we call the heads, hearts and tails.

One thing that a lot of people don’t necessarily understand is that there are a whole variety of different types of alcohols. It’s not a single, pure thing. There’s methyl alcohol, or methanol, which is very toxic. There’s ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, which is the type of alcohol we drink in beers, wines and spirits. And there are a whole bunch of other alcohols that occur in nature through fermentation. Ethanol is the one we’re after in the distilling and brewing process.

The stills.

What happens in distillation is that alcohol boils at a hundred and seventy three degrees – well before the two hundred and twelve degrees at which water boils. As the temperature of the still increases, the alcohols start to boil off before the water. As the temperature rises higher, water and other oils in the mash start to boil off too. In the first stage of distillation, called the heads, you have a lot of nasty, harsh alcohols and compounds that boil off at the lowest temperature. The heads are about eighty two percent alcohol – the highest concentration that you can get with our stills. They smell like toxic solvents, and they are. At that stage, you have a lot of methanol and acetone in your distillate. This is stuff that can kill you. We completely remove those from the whiskey. We actually keep it and use it to clean the equipment.

The next stage is called the hearts. After the nasty heads have boiled off and been removed, you get into the hearts. In this stage, as the temperature is rising, the vapor coming off the still is dropping to about eighty percent alcohol, as more water and oils and compounds are boiling off with the much cleaner ethyl alcohol. This is the good stuff – very clean, with that immediately familiar whiskey flavor and smell. This is where you’re getting the highest levels of ethanol, which is what you really want. The hearts last from about where you’re at about eighty percent alcohol all the way through to when you have about sixty seven percent alcohol coming off the still. Remember – as the temperature increases, the percentage of alcohol in your distillate decreases because more water is evaporating and coming off the still with the alcohol.

The last stage is called the tails. As the temperature of the still continues to rise and your distillate drops below sixty seven percent alcohol, you’re into the tails. At this stage, you start getting something called fusel oils. The purity starts to drop, and you start getting some funky flavors coming through. The fusel alcohols are what cause hangovers. We cut those off as well.

About four hundred barrels of bourbon age on the distillery's second floor.

So the art in craft distilling comes in deciding where to make your cuts – when to start pulling your spirit off the still, and when stop, to get just the right quality and balance of flavor. It really is an art, and we take great care in this stage of the game to ensure that we have a really smooth, pure, balanced spirit coming off the still.

Like I said, larger producers don’t worry so much about the distillation, because a lot of impurities can be removed in the aging process. But we believe in putting a lot of care into the distillation. We think it gives us a really nice quality white spirit, which is what we call the unaged alcohol coming off the still.

So after we pull the white spirit off the still it’s still very strong. We dilute it with distilled water to bring us to the proper proof. And that, basically is our moonshine. For the moonshine, we’re diluting it and blending several different batches to ensure a nice consistency in flavor, then we bottle it and that’s it.

Kings County ages its bourbon for about one year.

For the bourbon, the spirit is diluted to a hundred and twenty five proof, or sixty two and a half percent alcohol, and put straight into charred oak barrels to age. The charred wood is essentially a charcoal filter. The whiskey absorbs a lot of the flavor of the sap of the wood, and the charcoal lining of the barrel acts as a filter to remove any impurities left in the white spirit that comes off the still. So you get a lot of flavor developing during aging, through both addition and subtraction. To my mind about eighty five percent of the flavor in a bourbon comes from an infusion of flavor from the barrel itself, and another fifteen percent comes from mellowing – the removal of some of the volatile compounds through the natural charcoal filtering that happens in the barrel.

We age our bourbon for a year. The bigger distilleries generally age for much longer. That’s for a couple of reasons. Like I said, we put a lot of effort and care into distilling a very balanced white spirit to begin with. A lot of the bigger distilleries don’t worry so much about distillation because they can just age it longer to filter out the impurities. We put a lot of emphasis on starting with a very strong, smooth spirit, with a very, very minimal level of impurities that need to be filtered or mellowed. We also age our whiskies in much smaller barrels. We only produce five gallons of spirit a day, so we age our whiskey in five gallon barrels. The big distillers are using fifty three gallon barrels. In aging, it’s all about surface area. Our barrels are much smaller, so the whiskey doesn’t have to age as long.

There is often a misconception out there that the longer a bourbon is aged, the better it is. That’s not true. A bourbon is ready when it has matured. It’s ready when it’s ready. If a bourbon ages too long, it will start to taste overly woody. It’ll lose its balance. Generally, it needs to age for at least a year, because you want it to go through the full cycle of seasons in the barrel. When it’s warmer, the bourbon expands in the barrel. It’s literally pushed into the oak. When it’s cold it contracts, and is extracted back out. That cycle allows the flavors of the charred oak to really steep into the whiskey. So for that reason bourbon makers generally don’t want temperature controls in their aging rooms. We don’t have any heat or air-conditioning in here. The more temperature fluctuation you have over the course of the year, and the smaller the barrels you’re using, the faster the whiskey will mature.

Head distiller Nicole Austin tests a barrel.

We taste every barrel as the whiskey ages, and we know when it’s ready. When it is ready, we blend whiskies from several barrels to ensure we’re getting that consistency in flavor from batch to batch, and then we dilute it to the proper proof – our bourbon is forty five percent alcohol – and into the bottle it goes.

The big difference between our whiskey and the whiskies being made by the big Kentucky distillers is in the process. The big distillers are buying trainloads of corn on the open commodities market. They’re not focusing on the quality of the corn – they’re looking for the cheapest starch you can buy. They’re doing a different type of distillation too, in which they’re not focusing on making those precise cuts in the distilling run to capture that really rich, balanced band of flavors in the white spirit as it’s coming fresh off the still.

To their credit, many of those bigger distillers have gotten very, very good at aging their whiskies. They do it so well that they’re able to filter out any imperfections in the distilling process. So I think you have the bigger Kentucky distillers who don’t put much emphasis on the distillation, and age their whiskey really well, and you have smaller craft distillers who put a lot of emphasis on distillation so that they don’t have to age their whiskies so long in order to get a really nice bourbon of comparable quality to the big Kentucky brands. For the smaller guys like us, the focus tends to be more on flavor at every step rather than yield.

So Colin, how did you end up distilling here?

Well, the deep beginning of it probably lies back when I was growing up in a dry county in Kentucky. When we were in high school and we wanted liquor, we’d go to a local bootlegger. Bootleggers aren’t necessarily someone who just sells moonshine anymore, in modern times a bootlegger is more likely someone who drove to Virginia and filled up his trunk with Zima and then sells it out the back door at home in a dry county. [laughter.] That’s modern day bootlegging for you.

So bootleggers and moonshine and bourbon were a real part of the culture down there growing up and I kind of became fascinated with all that. I moved to New York about eleven years ago. I went home one time and brought back some moonshine, and just had fun sharing it with people at parties and that kind of thing. As I started to run out of it, I started trying to figure out whether I could maybe make some myself, right here in Brooklyn.

I ended up going online to do some research and to look at some stills. As it turned out, it’s not too hard to learn how to make moonshine. I decided to do it. I got a crude still and decided upon my recipe and started making moonshine on the roof of my apartment in Williamsburg. It was just for fun. There was no plan to turn it into a business.

But as we started making it and tasting it with our friends, we started getting really interested in refining it. We wanted to make something that just wasn’t a really high proof – we wanted to distill a very high quality, well balanced moonshine. Moonshine isn’t something most people associate with quality, but we started to see where we could go with it. Once we realized that we could do it, and that no one else was doing it in New York City, we decided to try to become the first licensed distillery in New York City since prohibition.

We got a tiny little production space in Williamsburg right after we got our license in 2010. We started selling our moonshine as soon as we started producing it, and we started aging our bourbon right away. People really liked it. We couldn’t come close to keeping up with the demand.

We ended up finding out about this space in the old Paymaster’s building in the Navy Yard. We loved the building and we could see that it would really let us grow. So here we are today. We’re distilling downstairs and aging about four hundred five gallon oak barrels of bourbon upstairs. We’ll be moving to some larger stills and barrels soon, so things will change, but we feel like we’ve really got a good process, a good approach, and we’re producing some really nice whiskey. That won’t change.

Kings County Distillery is based in the Paymaster’s Building of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Their moonshine and bourbon is available throughout the borough.

Photography by Valery Rizzo. All rights reserved.

Wintercress, a cousin of arugula, can be found throughout Brooklyn right now.

A Brooklyn winter may have you thinking more of diving into your pantry (or the nearest pub) rather than foraging for fresh fare, but there are still a few plants out there that are not only edible, but tasty. Wintercress, a cousin of arugula, is one of them.

Imagine arugula leaves, with their smaller lobes near the base and larger single lobe at the end of each leaf. Now imagine them slightly less tender than that cultivated crop, and waiting for you to find them anytime they are not buried under snow (which has been most of winter for the past couple of years).

Barbarea vulgaris a.k.a. wintercress leaves grow alternately on the branching stems and have no, or very few hairs. The upper leaves are small and stalkless where they attach to the stems, although you aren’t likely to see these at this time of year when the plants are ground-hugging rosettes.

The flowers, which appear in April and May in Brooklyn, have the four yellow petals that are a hallmark of plants in the Brassicaceae (mustard family).

Wintercress seeds form in slender, 2-chambered dry pods called siliques, with many seeds in each pod.

Where to Find Wintercress

In BK, a better question might be where not to find it. Wintercress grows in full sun and is especially fond of disturbed soils, in other words places near humans such as parks, abandoned lots, roadsides, and gardens.

Wintercress leaves becomes unpleasantly bitter once it flowers in the spring, so harvest them now during the colder months. Once the plants do flower, skip the leaves but harvest the edible flowers for salads.

How to Eat It

If you like arugula then you’ll be a fan of wintercress. I like it best combined with lettuce or other milder leafy greens in salads. Baby beet leaves are a good match for wintercress. Include some balsamic vinegar or a dollop of local honey in the dressing – a hint of sweetness turns the pungency of wintercress into something playfully light and pleasing.

You can also stir-fry wintercress with a little garlic and butter or oil until the greens are barely wilted. If straight up sauteed wintercress is too strongly flavored for you, try incorporating it into an omelet. Or mix it up with roasted root vegetables (again sweetness is a good balancer for wintercress, so sweet potatoes and parsnips are good matches).

Barbarea vulgaris is a non-native species that is considered an invasive weed. You don’t have to worry about endangering this species when you harvest it.

Wintercress Salad with Warm Beets and Honey-Balsamic Dressing
Serves 2-3

• 1 pound beets, washed and trimmed
• 1 quart wintercress leaves, washed
• 1 teaspoon local honey
• 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
• 1 teaspoon cider vinegar
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon ground mustard powder or 3/4 teaspoon prepared mustard (a.k.a. the wet stuff that comes in a jar)
• Salt and pepper to taste

1. Place the beets in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat and simmer until beets are fork-tender (15 – 30 minutes depending on the size of the beets).
2. Meanwhile wash the wintercress leaves and dry in a salad spinner or by rolling them up in a dishtowel. Tear into bite-size pieces.
3. Whisk together the honey, balsamic and cider vinegars, and the mustard. Once those ingredients are fully blended, whisk in the oil, salt and pepper.
4. Once the beets are cooked, peel them as soon as they are cooled enough to handle. Cut into slices or dice.
5. Toss the beets with the dressing. Arrange the wintercress on plates. Pile the beet salad on top. Serve while the beets are still warm, or at room temperature.

Leda Meredith is the author of The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget. She is the Gardening Program Coordinator for Adult Education at the New York Botanical Garden and an instructor specializing in edible and medicinal plants at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Info on her many upcoming classes and events can be found on her blog at www.ledameredith.com

Monday, February 11 from 7 to 8:30pm (location disclosed with enrollmemt). $35.

Mardi Gras at Mable’s Smokehouse
Brooklyn may be miles away from the Fat Tuesday festivities down south, but Mable’s is here to make sure we don’t miss out on the fun. They’ll be dishing out Cajun specialties like crawfish etoufee, seafood gumbo and andouille sausage, and once you’ve had your fill, dance the night away to live tunes from Catahoula Cajun Band. RSVP here.

Tuesday, February 12 from 7 to 11pm at Mable’s Smokehouse, 44 Berry St at 11th St (Williamsburg)

Mezcal Tasting
It may be cold outside, but you’ll have no trouble warming up at Sycamore, with help from tequila’s smoky cousin. Chat with John Henry of El Buho Mezcal and Arik Torren of Fidencio Mezcal while sampling different varieties of the spirit and noshing on complimentary snacks. Snag a ticket here.

Tuesday, February 12 at 8pm at Sycamore, 1118 Cortelyou Rd between Stratford and Westminster Rds (Ditmas Park). $25.

How to…Prepare a Mexican Feast
Edible and the Brooklyn Brewery team up once again for the latest in their how-to series, a tutorial on south-of-the-border eats. You’ll learn to make corn and flour tortillas from the folks of Lonestar Taco, fiery salsa from the Brooklyn Salsa Company and refreshing paletas from La Newyorkina. As always, tickets are just $5, and Brooklyn Brewery beers will be flowing for $5 a pop.

Wednesday, February 13 from 7:30 to 10pm at Brooklyn Brewery, 79 N 11th St between Berry St and Wythe Ave (Williamsburg). $5.

Milk Bar’s Bake the Book Series: Cereal Milk & Crack Pie
Instead of bingeing on boxed sweets on Valentine’s Day, join Christina Tosi of Milk Bar and learn to make her addictive, one-of-a-kind confections. The first class covers two cult favorites: cereal milk and crack pie. After learning the process step by step, you’ll get to take home the finished product. To reserve a spot, sign up, and stay tuned for future classes: “The Crunch” on February 20, “The Crumb” on February 26, and a cereal milk and crack pie encore on March 5.

Thursday, February 14 from 7 to 9pm at 382 Metropolitan Ave between Havemeyer St and Marcy Ave (Williamsburg). $50.

Cocktail Lab 101
Find your inner mixologist at this tutorial hosted by the Jakewalk. Bar manager Timothy Miner and bartender Bryan Teoh will walk you through the basics of drink-making, including proper shaking and stirring techniques and a few classic recipes. And of course, everyone will get to knock back a few drinks (you know, for educational purposes). Sign up here.

Saturday, February 16 from 1 to 3pm at the Jakewalk, 282 Smith St at Sackett St (Carroll Gardens). $65.

The Secrets of Making Good Sausage
Brooklyn Cured founder Scott Bridi leads this hands-on workshop at 61 Local. He’ll discuss the tips and tricks of sausage-making at home, from what cuts of meat to use to types of equipment you might need. You’ll get to sample the recipes you make paired with craft beers, and get to take some sausages home at the end of the class. Get tickets. 
Tuesday, February 19 at 61 Local, 61 Bergen St between Court and Smith Sts (Cobble Hill). $55.

NYC Beer Week Opening Night
The annual blowout of the New York City Brewers Guild is almost upon us, kicking off with an all-star bash featuring some of the country’s best craft beer. The $45 ticket includes unlimited tastes from over 20 breweries, including Sixpoint, Rockaway Brewing Co., Smuttynose, Goose Island and many more—nab one now before they sell out.

Friday, February 22 from 7 to 10pm at Galapagos Art Space, 16 Main St at Water St (DUMBO). $45.

by Heather Phelps-Lipton

1. It’s mad scientist season at Ample Hills

Winter means more time to experiment at Ample Hills of Prospect Heights.  Behold:

candy cane        maple bacon

eggnog               munchies*

*pretzel-infused ice cream with crackers, pretzels, potato chips and mini M&M’s.  Whu-hut???

Photography by Heather Phelps-Lipton. All rights reserved.

Chef Kyle McClelland, of Prospect in Fort Greene.

At Prospect in Fort Greene, chef Kyle McClelland likes taking classic, familiar dishes and infusing them with a little fun, an element of surprise, by giving them his own modernist twist. We stopped by to chat with Kyle and try one of his favorites – a butternut squash soup poured over charred espresso marshmallows and root beer cream with toasted hazelnuts.

So Kyle, what should we try today?

One of the dishes that I think really captures the kind of food we like to do here is our butternut squash soup with espresso marshmallows, toasted hazelnuts, and root beer cream. It’s just an appetizer, but I think it’ll give you a pretty good sense of what we’re all about – the kind of food we like to do.

Tell us about it.

Our kitchen crew here, we’ve all worked in fine dining restaurants. What we all wanted to do at Prospect was to use the cooking techniques that we’ve been trained in working in that world, but to have some fun with it and do it in a little bit more of a laid back way.

This soup is a good example. We start with the root beer whipped cream, espresso marshmallows and toasted hazelnuts. We melt and char them in the broiler, and then we pour the butternut soup over the top. It sounds like it’s going to be very sweet, but that charred, caramelized flavor you get from the roasted marshmallow and root beer cream balances the sweetness in the dish in a pretty interesting way. It gives it a lot of complexity.

To make it, we start with our butternut velouté. We start it with a white vegetable stock – just onions, leeks, and celery, simmered in water and reduced until you have a nice base of flavor. We sauté the butternut squash with a little garlic. Some carrot too. Then we pour the stock into the pot over butternut squash and carrots. We add some fresh herbs – thyme and bay leaf – and let them steep in the soup for a while. Then we take the herbs out and blend it. It’s very simple. It’s earthy and savory and sweet at the same time, and the fresh herbs brighten it up.

For the root beer cream, we pour root beer into a pot and heat it to reduce it. Those ginger, sasparilla, anise and warm spice flavors in the root beer get really concentrated and as the sugar cooks, it takes on that brown, caramel flavor. When it’s really cooked down, we add some cream and we foam it, so it’s basically a root beer flavored whipped cream.

Our pastry chef Annika makes the espresso marshmallows. She starts with ground espresso beans, sugar, water and corn syrup. You mix those together and bring them up to a boil. She uses agar agar, which is made with seaweed, instead of gelatin. You mix the agar agar with water and let it sit for a few minutes until it thickens. You pour the hot espresso and sugar syrup into the agar agar and aerate it by whipping it and it just puffs up into a light, pillowy marshmallow. Once it’s cooled, we coat them with some powdered sugar and more espresso. So we start with espresso and finish with espresso. The bitterness of the espresso balances out the sweetness of the marshmallow.

Kyle and his kitchen team all come from fine dining backgrounds. At Prospect, their goal is to inject serious food and classic dishes with a little fun.

For the hazelnuts, we toast them and candy them. We make a simple syrup with sugar and water, and we toss the toasted nuts in the syrup, bake them, then crush them up.

Then we put the root beer cream and the hazelnuts in a pan with the marshmallows on top, and we put them under a really hot broiler for just a minute. The marshmallows melt and caramelize and burn a little, like they do when you roast them over a campfire for s’mores. You might expect the whipped root beer cream to just fall and melt in the heat, but since there’s so much sugar in it from the root beer, it actually does the opposite. It browns really nicely as the sugar caramelizes, and it actually sizzles and bubbles. And the hazelnuts take on even more of a crunch.

Those all go into a bowl and the butternut veloute goes over the top. So it’s not just a butternut squash soup. It’s got a lot of different flavors and textures going on, and when it comes together it’s something a little surprising and really fun to eat.

That roasted, slightly burnt, slightly charred flavor from the marshmallow is a really interesting flavor. It’s uncommon, you don’t encounter it a lot, but it’s something you recognize instantly if you’ve ever roasted a marshmallow over a campfire. It adds a lot of depth to the sweetness. The espresso in the marshmallows gets toasted a little too, and that toasted bitterness of the ground coffee beans adds a whole other angle to the dish too. The root beer cream caramelizes and foams and brings those concentrated, earthy, roasted, herbal anise flavors into play. The hazelnuts bring crunch and a toasty, nutty, slightly bitter flavor. The butternut soup itself is really velvety and smooth, with those savory, and sweet and earthy flavors that work so well together.

There are a lot of sugars in the dish, but the overall effect isn’t a blast of overwhelming sweetness at all. By caramelizing and charring the root beer cream and the espresso marshmallow, you create some very kind of deep and complex layers of flavor that can really surprise people when they encounter them in a soup, but are still familiar.

This dish for me is all about being a kid. When I was thinking of things we could do to make a butternut squash soup a little more interesting, I kept thinking of things I liked as a kid, like root beer floats and making s’mores around a campfire. I don’t know why, but that’s just where it wanted to go, so we went with it, and we’re really happy about it. It’s a dish that seems really simple, but it’s not. This is what we like to do here – have some fun with classic dishes that are usually familiar and simple, and add our own modern twist.

Kyle's butternut squash soup with charred espresso marshmallows, caramelized root beer whipped cream, and toasted hazelnuts.

And what about you Kyle? How did you end up here, doing this?

I grew up on Cape Cod. Both my parents really loved to cook. They were both really interested in art and sculpture and things like that, so that rubbed off on me a little bit. I took a lot of art classes and really loved it, but when I realized how hard it is to make a living as an artist I thought I’d like to cook.

My family moved to New Hampshire, and I went to high school there. I got my first job in a kitchen when I was fifteen years old, at a really nice place called the Bedford Village Inn. I worked as a prep cook there throughout high school and I really loved it. I knew that was what I wanted to do for a living.

So after high school I came to New York to go to culinary school at the French Culinary Institute. Now it’s called the International Culinary Institute. I wasn’t interested in going to one of the bigger culinary schools and spending years in school and getting a bachelor’s degree in culinary science and all that. I just wanted to be in restaurant kitchens as much as I could. That’s where you learn the most, the fastest, and if that’s what you’re after, New York is the place to be.

I really liked that program. They had a lot of old school French chefs teaching, and they were really hard on you, and that was the whole point. They yelled at us a lot and embedded things in our brains and made us understand them. I remember on the day we learned to make French omelettes, I made like eighty omelettes back to back to back until I got it right, getting yelled at the whole time. I feel like that’s the way I like to learn. Just keep doing it until you get it right and move on to the next thing.

The great thing about being in school in New York, is I got to stage at all these great restaurants. I worked for a week in one kitchen, another week in another, and that’s just a great way to learn.

After I graduated I went back to Boston. It was close to home and I love Boston. It’s a great city. I ended up working at some great places there. I liked to keep moving. I’d stay at each place for a year and learn everything I could and then move on to the next place to learn more from someone else.

One New Year’s Eve I went to a place called Ten Tables to eat. It’s gone on to be a real success, but this was right when they opened. It was literally ten tables around an open kitchen. The chef brought the dishes out to each table himself. I thought right away, “I like this – this is so cool. This is what I want.” A little while later, I was browsing through some job listings and I saw that Ten Tables was looking for an executive chef, and I applied and actually got the job. It was awesome.

A little while later, a chef I had worked for at another place called The Federalist got a job as executive chef at a place called The Wauwinet on Nantucket. It’s a Relais and Chateaux hotel and restaurant all the way out at the northeast end of the island, next to a big nature reserve called Great Point. It was spectacular. Absolutely beautiful. Like paradise. He asked me to join him there as his sous chef. I didn’t want to leave Ten Tables, but I was like, “How can I not do this?”

I was there for four years. I just couldn’t leave. It was such a great lifestyle and experience. While I was there, I met Steven, one of my partners here at Prospect, and Vinny, who’s now my chef de cuisine. We all lived together and became really good friends. We always talked about opening our own place together some day.

After four years there it was just time to move on. We all parted ways. I ended up getting a job as executive chef at a place called Caviar Russe in midtown Manhattan, and I brought Vinny in as my sous chef. We were there for a couple of years, and then it felt like it was time to try to put together our own thing. We put together a plan, and talked to a bunch of people, and it kind of just came into place, really.

It’s been great. We’re all friends here. We all live in the neighborhood. We’ve all worked hard for a lot of years, and it’s really awesome to finally have a chance to make our own food our way, and to have some fun doing it. That’s why we call it Prospect. People always ask if the name has something to do with Prospect Park. It doesn’t. It’s about having our own place for the first time and the possibility that comes with that. It’s our chance to do our own thing our way.

Prospect is located at 773 Fulton Street, between South Portland and South Oxford, in Fort Greene.

Photography by Morgan Ione Yeager. All rights reserved.