COVER Corn, by Carole Topalian

August - September 2006

When Pat Morford bends over to move the hay feeder in the pen of young goats, three of them rear up to put their front hooves onto her back and shoulders as though they are about to climb atop her. She finishes cutting free the feeder and shakes off the climbers, laughing "Get off of me, you beasties! You're monsters, all of you!" The kids back away for the moment, but it's clear that they're just waiting for her to turn around so they can do it again. They think of her like their mother, Pat explains. "They treat their mothers like trampolines. If she lies down, her kids will start jumping on top of her and sliding down her sides." When Pat climbs into each of the other pens to fix the hay feeders, there's another little gang of goats waiting to play.

Pat has Three Ring Dairy Goat Herd in Logsden and makes River's Edge Chevre. Through long experience, careful attention to husbandry, and lots of patience, she has developed prized breeding lines of bucks that she sells internationally and does that consistently produce excellent milk for cheese. The farm is in a beautiful spot, up against the rolling Coast Range. The house and barn sit side by side just off the winding Logsden Road, and the pasture opens up behind them and then trails off into the wooded hills. Pat's dogs Bobo and Fang race to the driveway to greet visitors and then trot off for a long, lazy game of tug-a-war with someone's sock.

There are about sixty Alpine goats in her herd, including this season's kids, a handful of bucks, and nearly forty does. Each goat is tagged with a number, but Pat calls them all by name: Tutu, Schnoodles, Ariel, Dragonfly, etc. One tiny kid - only a few days old - is called Ice Cream because her light brown coat with dark, chocolaty accents looks a little like Fudge Swirl ice cream. When she opens the gate, the goats head out of the barn into the sunny pasture, many stopping to nibble her and have their head scratched.

Pat has almost always had goats. She got her first one when she was about eight years old: her dad traded some rabbits for a kid when the family was living on Vashon Island. From that time, she's always had at least a couple - except for the few years when she lived on a boat with her fisherman husband George. Once they moved ashore in 1984, the goats returned. They bought the farm in Logsden in 1986, and that winter George bought twenty-seven goats. He had the idea that Pat could make some money by using the goats to raise calves for dairy farmers. It is a fairly common practice for a dairy farmer to contract with a facility to board and raise the calves from when they are five days old until they are young adults; the calves are raised on milk replacer until about 6 - 8 weeks of age then a high protein grain ration to make up for the absence of milk in their diet. This practice leaves all the cows' milk available to the dairy to sell. George's idea was unusual in that the calves would be raised on goats' milk. They tried it for a while, though Pat says it was mostly just shuffling resources in a circle - buy feed for the goats, the goats' milk feeds the calves, the calves bring in money to buy feed for the goats - and there wasn't much money leftover for her family. But now she had a substantial herd of hungry goats, so she started thinking of ways to make them pay for themselves.

She'd been making cheese for her family since the '70s. She laughs when she describes the first cheese she ever made. "I made it with buttermilk and Junket, and it tasted just like sour milk. It was awful!" She kept experimenting with it and got a little better over time, but when Ricki Carroll started the New England Cheese Making Supply Company in the early '80s, it was a revolution for home cheese makers - suddenly one could buy rennet and different starter cultures and molds. With better supplies, Pat's cheese became not just edible, but really good. So when she was looking for a way to support the goats, the idea of making cheese to sell seemed a logical choice. In the mid-'90s, she began collecting equipment and buying any used stainless steel vats she came across. It could easily cost $25,000 just to buy one small new pasteurizer, but by keeping her eye out for used equipment Pat was able to get most everything she needed for about $8,000. A Farm Service Loan last year enabled Pat and George to build the creamery on the ground floor of their house, and Pat started offering her first cheese for sale in September 2005.

The creamery is small and scrupulously clean. The first room is the milking parlor. 'The Girls' are brought in six at a time and climb up onto a low platform; the milking cups are attached to their udders while they munch contentedly on grain and feed. It takes about three hours, twice each day, to milk the herd and then swab out the parlor floor. The milk is collected in the holding tank in the next room, where it is kept until there's enough for making a batch of cheese, and then it's gently pumped into the pasteurizer in the cheese making room. It's important that the milk be gently moved from one container to the next, because if it's treated roughly the milk can start to break down and develop 'goaty' flavors. Then it is slowly warmed to 145 degrees and kept there for thirty minutes to be pasteurized. After that, Pat moves it two gallons at a time into her 56-gallon cheese making vat, adds the starter culture, and a bit later the rennet that causes the curds to form. Once the curds have formed, the cheese begins different journeys depending on the type of chevre it will be.

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Pat makes fresh chevre, several bloomy rind cheeses, an array of chevre torts (basil pesto, sundried tomatoes, olive tapenade, and hazelnut), and a delicately smoked chevre that is wrapped in maple leaves. Her cheeses are distinctively fresh tasting, with the clean taste of good milk leading the way to the delicate tang that marks it as chevre. She'd like to get into making some wheels of harder, aged cheese, but it's hard to find the time. She has some help with the milking and her daughter Astraea helps with the cheese making, but still there aren't enough hours in the day

In addition to milking and feeding, there's a long list of chores to do to keep the herd healthy and content: trimming hooves, summer haircuts, mucking out the barn, tending to any injuries or illnesses, etc. It can be round the clock work, as one night this spring when Pat was up all night helping Schnoodles through a difficult labor. The kid was too big and didn't survive the birth. The next day, Pat tended to the exhausted and bereft nanny, as did Schnoodles' mother who gently rubbed her head against Schnoodles' face and neck. "Goats are very aware of their family groups. They care about each other."

Making sure the goats are eating well is big part of Pat's work. She has a special dairy mix made up that contains several grains plus pumpkin seeds and pulp, and vitamins. Each goat eats about four pounds of the grain and hay each day, which costs about $2.50 per day per goat - or about $150 a day for the herd. It's expensive to feed the goats so well, but Pat believes it's worth it, not only because they're healthy and happy, but also because the pumpkin makes their milk taste great. Whatever goats eat and breathe shows up in their milk: If their barn isn't clean and fresh, their milk will have a stale, barny flavor. If they're eating poor quality food, that shows up too. Recently, Pat had to throw out a whole vat of milk because the goats had gotten into the skunk cabbage. "Now that's terroir for you!" Pat laughs ruefully. If the goats eat a lot of tussock grass in the pasture, it doesn't affect the flavor of the milk, but it does change the composition: there will be less solids (fat and protein) in the milk, rendering less cheese. There are a lot of variables in artisanal cheese making, and staying on top of them keeps Pat busy. Very, very busy.

Out in the pasture, the goats are playing King of the Hill atop a huge boulder. The rock wasn't always there: Pat and George bought it and put it there. "That damn rock cost a fortune, but they like to have something to jump around on," she says, shaking her head as though she can't believe the things she'll do to make sure the goats are content. Bobo the poodle runs great looping circles around the herd, which pulls into a loose group with Pat at the center. She leans over to check on a little kid, and a couple of others try their luck scrambling up her back. Soon more kids are piling on. Surrounded by clamoring kids that want to use her like a jungle gym, she says, "I'm really living the dream here, aren't I?" She's being ironic, but it's clear she also means it.

River's Edge Chevre is available at the following retailers in Oregon and Washington: Bend Newport Avenue Market Edmonds Resident Cheese Monger Newport Nye Beach Gallery Portland Alberta Street Coop   Curds & Whey   Foster & Dobbs Authentic Foods   Market of Choice   New Seasons Seattle Beecher's   Madison Avenue Coop And at the following farmers' markets: Beaverton, Forest Grove, Lake Oswego, Newport, Oregon City, Pearl/Ecotrust To learn more about Three Ring Farm and Pat's goats visit www.threeringfarm.com

"What's in season?" you ask. What's not?! According to my calendar, we're closing in on the lazy, hazy days of summer, and yet we continue to be overwhelmed by fresh, ripe, local choices every time we're in the produce aisle. The riot of color and flavor in our gardens and markets suggests that summer might be endless after all. It's tough to pick a favorite from so many-eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, melons, zucchini, raspberries, figs, nectarines, peaches, plums-but I'm going to do it . . . cast my vote and make an impassioned pitch for corn. Sweet corn.

I know, I know. We've all read Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, or know someone who has. As a result, corn's become the new WMD for conspicuous U.S. consumers. Ardent Pollan supporters can recite the litany of unsettling facts and figures he foists on his readers: Corn is the keystone of our industrial food system, a grain second only to wheat in acres planted and sustenance given worldwide. Our country is blanketed by 80 million acres of corn monoculture, a single crop that's remade our landscape at the expense of animals, people and agricultural diversity. Ninety-nine percent of what most Americans eat, especially if it is industrial food (rather than food produced locally or organically), can be traced back to corn; each of us consumes one ton per year. Oddly enough, of those 10 billion bushels of corn harvested each year, we eat less than one bushel per person as corn-on the cob, as flakes in a cereal bowl, or baked into corn muffins, chips and tortillas.

Of course I'm talking about cheap, over-produced, over-subsidized industrial corn: pop (the original corn, cultivated over 7000 years ago), dent (used for processed corn products), flint (a rare, hearty strain grown for specialty cornmeal) and flour (its kernels are easily ground when dry). The fifth type, sweet corn, is the only one that tastes of the rays of summer sun that nourish it. It is the quintessential food of barbecues and picnics, clambakes, crawfish boils, and summertime family reunions. Sweet corn made me hate the braces I wore until 8th grade even more, since few things are as satisfying as gnawing the nibs of a deforested cob in search of remaining milky sweet kernels.

Corn is curious in that it converts its sugars to starch as it ripens, rather than the other way around. And since its sugar is what makes corn precious (it's called sweet corn, after all) it takes a deft and well-orchestrated human effort to trump vegetable biology by prolonging the sweet moment. The corn we patiently await, only "knee high by the 4th of July,'' falls into one of three categories determined by genetic make-up: sugary, supersweet and sugary enhanced.

'Sugary' describes old-fashioned sweet corn varieties like Golden Bantam, Country Gentleman and Silver Queen. The traditionalists who favor them argue that these old garden stalwarts are chewier, more flavorful. . . cornier, if you will. But a lower sugar content that plummets rapidly once the corn is picked means the window of freshness for sugary corn is measured in minutes rather than hours or days. For this reason, you won't find it available commercially, but it's not in danger of slipping quietly into obscurity either. It's easy to track down the seeds and plant some in your backyard.

'Supersweet' corn converts its sugar to starch more slowly. Devotees of sugary corn say that breeders who tinkered with its genetics went too far; the sugar in an ear of supersweet can overwhelm its depth of flavor, its essential corn-ness. With up to three times the sugar, this hybrid boasts the longest shelf life and is the one you're likely to see in the supermarket. Look for award-winning varieties like How Sweet It Is and Honey 'N Pearl, or Showcase, a large-eared variety with outstanding eating quality. Supersweet corn grows less successfully for home gardeners because it's particularly temperature-sensitive.

The second hybrid, 'sugary enhanced,' has a sucrose content that falls somewhere between the other two. This cultivar offers old-fashioned corn flavor and sweet, tender kernels that retain those qualities 3-4 days after the corn is picked. Sugary enhanced corn is widely available, turning up regularly at local and farmers markets. It's also an excellent choice for a backyard garden. Try Immaculata (unusually sweet, with gorgeous, dark green husks), Lancelot (big-eared and bi-colored) and Sugar Buns (small-ish ears, deep kernels and superior flavor).

Always buy corn in its husk. Husking removes the long stem-end, the place where the ear has been ripped from the stalk. As the sugars in an ear of corn turn starchy, its tip gets brown and dry at roughly the same rate. When it is fresh from the field, the stem-end will be milky white and beaded with moisture, promising truly sweet corn. The husks should be damp, and rich green in color. Listen for squeaking as you strip them away from the ear, a hallmark of just-picked freshness.

Does good corn etiquette permit one to peel back the husk tips, revealing tender young kernels? Presumably the only good reasons for doing so are to confirm that they are pristine and, more importantly, free of earworms. Good reasons to politely refrain from peeking include protecting the corn from unnecessary exposure, which causes it to dry out, and avoiding making the farmer or produce manager cranky. The same determination can be made by running your hands over an ear of corn, feeling for kernels that are firm, plump and tight on the cob. And if you happen to find one, simply flick off the worm and trim away the tip on which he's feasted. Please note: you will never find more than one earworm on an ear of corn. These caterpillars are cannibalistic and, in true Darwinian fashion, the largest, having devoured the rest, remains as the sole survivor.

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The rituals of corn are many and run deep. There isn't a formula that I'm aware of to calculate the minutes of sweetness remaining in a freshly plucked ear of corn. But I do know that the faster the ear gets from the field to the table, the sweeter the reward. If you're lucky enough to have it growing in your backyard, don't snap the ear from the stalk until the coals are hot, or the water in the pot has come to a vigorous boil. If you're choosing from the abundant supply at the market, don't be tempted to buy more than you'll eat in one sitting.

When it comes to cooking corn, your method of choice might have as much to do with upbringing, geographically speaking, as predilection. Midwesterners' close association with it makes them corn purists of a kind; they prefer the simplicity of boiled or steamed corn slathered with butter and sprinkled liberally with salt, maybe pepper. Period. Corn in this part of the country isn't an ingredient so much as a course unto itself. For the best-tasting boiled corn, bring a large pot of water to a lively boil. Don't add salt; it toughens the corn. Add the shucked corn in batches, so that the water continues to boil. Fresh young corn takes about 30 seconds, just long enough for it to heat through. More mature corn needs up to 3 minutes. If you boil it husk-on, double the cooking time. The silk will pull away when you shuck it.

Northeasterners are partial to coal-roasted corn, having perfected this preparation over decades of beachside clambakes on the shores of the Atlantic. In the absence of clams and coals, however, oven-roasted corn is a stellar substitute and the ideal solution for feeding a crowd. Peel the husks back, leaving them attached at the base of the ear. Remove the silk, smear the kernels with softened butter (try adding fresh herbs, chilies or lime zest) and rewrap with the husk. Pile the corn in a large pan and loosely cover it with foil. Roast in a 450 degree oven for 8-10 minutes.

Grilling is a national pastime, but it seems to be especially popular in the west, probably because the BBQ season is longer. Corn grilled in its husk has a greener flavor than grilled, shucked corn, which tastes wonderfully smoky. If you have time, soak the corn in cold water for several hours before you plan to eat it; it will steam as it cooks on the grill. Wait until you have a perfect bed of coals, glowing and covered in ash, before throwing it on the grill, and turn each ear several times while cooking. Shucked corn takes 3-4 minutes, twice as long if you leave it in the husk.

Finally we come to the eating. Huck Finn said, "There ain't nothing in the world so good when it's cooked right." I would add that it must also be eaten correctly. Some fall in the typewriter camp-we'll need another metaphor for post-Smith-Corona generations-left to right, in long straight rows. Others employ the TP technique-my sister and I like to think we came up with this comparison-around and around to the end. I won't acknowledge those who eat in patches, or cut the corn off of the cob, save the braces and denture-wearing among us. Pollan's corn may be malevolent, wreaking havoc on our landscape and our waistlines, but it's not the kind I'm having for dinner tonight. I'll take the sweet corn, please, boiled, salted and enjoyed typewriter-style, the right way. Don't forget you've got a bushel to eat too.

When making a list of the most influential food folk in Portland you'd probably include a slew of executive chefs from our most renowned restaurants, a handful of food business entrepreneurs and maybe a couple of local food writers. Chances are, you wouldn't give a moment's thought to the cooks and chefs populating the kitchens of our numerous colleges and universities, corporate cafes and other large scale dining operations. Well, you should.

Joe McGarry, regional chef for Bon Appétit Management Company, a progressive on-site foodservice company based in California (but in many ways conceived in Portland), has been rocking the Portland food scene for nearly 10 years with his sustainable vision of what large scale foodservice should be.

SALTY CHARACTER

McGarry and I met up a couple of months ago at one of his favorite neighborhood coffee hangouts - Tiny's Coffee at Southeast Twelfth and Hawthorne. At 36, McGarry's style is casual, his personality friendly and laid-back, but his food agenda, as well as his job track, cuts right to the chase.

We chatted about his colorful cooking past and how he first got into foodservice. After working at various restaurants -- first washing dishes at a 1950s style diner, and later dicing and spicing at an esteemed Mexican restaurant - McGarry knew that he wanted a career in cooking. He moved to Portland from the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1990s and took an entry-level position with Bon Appétit at their OHSU on-site restaurant. In less than two years McGarry was Bon Appetit's executive chef at Intel's Jones Farm Campus in Hillsboro.

With the new position came increased responsibility as well as a healthy supply of less conventional challenges. For McGarry, one such recent challenge stood out in particular…

Last summer, Bon Appétit held its first annual Eat Local Challenge, a one-day national event that requires chefs to prepare at least one dish in which every single ingredient - including even the most basic like oils, spices and condiments - has been sourced from within 150 miles. McGarry and his co-workers---ever ready for a challenge - motored out to Pacific City with one thing in mind - salt.

The gung-ho crew gathered equipment - stockpots, firewood, buckets - stocked a cooler full of beer, and made way for the coast. Once at the beach, they got to work collecting and boiling saltwater on a makeshift grill just a few steps from the surf. But after a few hours of watching the pots boil, they were far from shaking salt. What they had was a really strong brine. McGarry said that, as morning turned to night, they realized, "It was going too far, and besides we ran out of beer."

Not to be deterred, once back in Portland, they poured small amounts of the puckery brine on to sheet pans placed in the warmest areas of their kitchens. Within a day and a half, the brine had dried up and crystallized, and they triumphantly filled their shakers with the hard-won, local salt.

McGarry added that much of Bon Appétit's success over the years has been due, in large part, to an empowering company philosophy. "The fundamental basis and philosophy of Bon Appétit is that the chef is pretty darn important and so they have a lot of leeway. For a contracted food service environment it's unheard of to give a chef so much creative freedom."

BON APPETIT

Bon Appétit, which began as a small catering outfit, now rakes in annual sales to the tune of $400 million with 150 corporate, university and specialty accounts throughout the country. Local accounts include adidas America, OMSI, University of Portland, Reed College and Lewis and Clark College - which was their first account in Oregon in 1990. And national clients include Yahoo!, Best Buy, Target Corporation, American University and the Art Institute of Chicago.

CEO Fedele Bauccio began his foodservice career in Portland in 1960 washing dishes for the Saga Corporation while attending the University of Portland. After making his way up the ladder with various foodservice positions he founded Bon Appétit in 1987.

Bon Appétit's major structural shift toward sustainable food policies came about in the late 1990s shortly after McGarry transferred to Intel's Jones Farm Campus.

The change came from the bottom up. Several cooks and chefs at Bon Appétit's Monterey Bay Aquarium restaurant decided that they should only serve seafood approved by the aquarium's "Seafood Watch List." The list encourages sustainable seafood consumption by highlighting seafood that is safe to consume regularly and seafood that should be avoided at all costs.

When CEO Bauccio got news of his employees' forward thinking, he decided to honor the "Seafood Watch List" not only at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, but at every Bon Appétit account across the country. This ethical shift snowballed into countless similar sustainable initiatives for Bon Appétit in the months and years to follow.

Today, Bon Appétit cooks and chefs across the country are schooled in local, sustainable food policy. They don't abide by rigid menu cycles. Their freezers and shelves are not stocked to the gills with out-of-season, frozen and processed foods. Instead, they are encouraged to be creative and resourceful with local, seasonal ingredients.

Company-wide policies favor direct relationships with local farmers, antibiotic free meat, cage-free chicken eggs, free trade coffee and bovine-growth-hormone-free milk. In the large-scale foodservice industry, Bon Appétit stands alone.

FROM THE ROOTS UP

McGarry recalled when he began dealing more often with local farmers and less with corporate purveyors. "The first farmer that I started dealing directly with was Charlie Harris out in Gaston from Flamingo Ridge Organics and, you know, I was just kind of getting my feet wet with it. I said, alright, I've got 300 bucks, you know, bring me what you've got and we'll apply it."

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McGarry was amazed with the quality and the quantity of produce that Harris delivered - countless beautiful and ripe, seedless Oregon Star tomatoes along with a shocking amount of delicious, sweet red peppers and eggplant.

Now, as regional chef for Bon Appétit, McGarry manages 14 chefs and 24 kitchens in seven states. He regularly organizes farmers markets at the Intel campuses, and when the day is over he typically buys back everything that hasn't sold and distributes it amongst his kitchens. Last year McGarry worked with Dave and Amy Dixon of Signature Salmon for an on-site salmon sale. Intel employees placed orders online and at the end of the day, before heading home from work, they picked up local, line-caught sides of salmon that had been out of the water for less than 48 hours.

McGarry keeps busy coordinating farm visits for his cooks and chefs and, in return, his co-workers are inspired to do good work. Bon Appétit executive chef Micah Cavolo has partnered up with Square Peg Farm in Forest Grove to compost Intel's food scraps---nearly a ton a week. And now, after several Intel employees have been consistently using the discarded fry oil from Bon Appetit's kitchens to fuel their cars, McGarry and his staff are gearing up to convert their catering vans to biodiesel.

"That's part of the responsibility we feel we have - to keep things evolving in the movement. You can't stand still and say that the tomatoes coming from Mexico in the wintertime are OK. You've gotta' start thinking, 'How we can change that?'"

COMPUTER CHIPS TO POTATO CHIPS

After our initial coffee rendezvous at Tiny's, McGarry invited me to have lunch at a quintessential Bon Appétit corporate restaurant. I took him up on his offer, and a few weeks later I traveled out to Intel's Jones Farm Campus in Hillsboro.

As we walked around one of the on-site restaurants I noticed a small, framed list on top of the salad bar that detailed the source and status of the food below: cilantro grown in Aurora, red leaf lettuce that's Food Alliance certified, mushrooms from Yamhill, basil from Siri Farms. I also noticed that at the various expo-style café stations, labels next to menu items denoted: vegetarian, vegan, Farm to Fork (dishes that contain ingredients sourced from a local farm or artisan), organic and more.

Information was applied sparingly so that it was easy-to-read, helpful and informative. McGarry noted, "It's great to interact, but in a business environment a customer doesn't want to have to go through twenty questions when they're here for lunch."

Instead, McGarry graciously put up with my twenty questions. Some of his best stories stem from last year's Eat Local Challenge; stories that involve University of Portland chefs shutting down soda machines for the day and making aqua frescas, or a wily chef stalking a wheat combine down a dirt road and returning to his kitchen determined to get his hands on a mill. Or, one of my favorites, revolves around the extremely inventive use a salad spinner - literally.

"Oil was the big one that we really got bummed out on because we thought, oh my gosh, we've got all these great nut growers here," said McGarry. While McGarry and his sous chef prepared for their 100 percent local meal they discovered that although Oregon is home to scores of nut growers, most of the farms ship their nuts--particularly hazelnuts-- to California for processing. Therefore, the nut oils could not be considered completely local.

McGarry and his sous chef did some research and decided to extract the oil they needed themselves. "We started reading up on it and we made this trippy little centrifuge with a big salad spinner."

First they ground up hazelnuts and a bit of water in a food processor and set the slurry aside for a day. In the interim, some of the oil separated and they skimmed that off. They took the remaining hazelnuts, packed them in a pillowcase and tied the pillowcase tightly to the middle part of the salad spinner. By quickly spinning the hazelnuts, a light film of oil was released. Luckily, all they needed was enough oil for a hazelnut vinaigrette.

"It probably wasn't the most food-cost-savvy way, but we applied the nuts into our dessert so, actually, it worked out alright."

McGarry's still planning what he and his chefs will cook up for this year's Eat Local Challenge, scheduled for October 3. Despite his overarching duties and excessive business travel, he's determined to actively participate again.

"I totally make sure that I have ample time in the kitchen. That's a great part of my job. I make sure that I'm always rolling up my sleeves. That's why I got into this in the first place."