Chefs Collaborative

We are pleased to announce that on Thursday, January 31st, our Network Manager, Rob Booz, will be joining the local culinary talents of Season To Taste for an all locally sourced five-course dinner.

Season To Taste is not your average catering company. Owner Robert Harris, a CIA alum and Boston-area restaurant veteran, had taken off a few years off to be a parent when he decided to come back to the culinary world in earnest. He knew he wanted to do something different.

Season to Taste focuses on using the freshest, most locally produced ingredients available in a flawless French-inspired execution. Besides their catering gigs, Robert and his team also produce intimate ten seat events in their storefront kitchen space. We are honored to be featured at one of these “At the Table With…” events.

Rob recently ventured up to their Somerville location to help suss out the menu with Robert. A completely locally-sourced menu in the middle of January, in New England, can seem a daunting task to say the least. But we think they’ve picked out some of the best that the season has to offer.

We hope that you will join Rob, Robert, and the staff of Season to Taste for:

• Taylor Bay and New Bedford Scallop. Beet Puree. Sunchokes. Ver Jus Vinaigrette. Taza Cocoa Nibs.

• Tagliatelle. Rabbit Sausage. Fiddlehead Tomme. Herb Pistou. Parsnip.

• Blue Fish. Creamy Leeks. Carrot Caramel. Pickled Green Tomato.

• Lamb. Cider Reduction. White Bean Cake. Cipollini Onion. Upland Cress.

• Taza Chocolate Cake. Beet Ice Cream. Sage Anglaise.

Tickets are available here. Remember, there are only ten seats!

Chefs Collaborative is thrilled to announce its first-ever Trash Fish Dinner going down in Cambridge, MA on March 10, 2013:

 What makes this event so special is that it was conceived of – and is being driven by – eight amazing local chefs. They are:

Rich Garcia – 606 Congress in Boston, MA	Larry Leibowitz, Guckenheimer
Michael Leviton, Lumiere and Area Four	Evan Mallett, Black Trumpet Bistro
Mary Reilly, Enzo Restaurant & Bar – Newburyport, MA	Jake Rojas, Tallulah on Thames – RI
Michael Scelfo, Russell House Tavern	Derek Wagner, Nick’s on Broadway

During the multi-course family-style dinner, these chefs will serve you Atlantic fish that fly under the radar – paired with delicious wine and/or beer. Plus, there will be a special talk from Barton Seaver - Sustainability Fellow in Residence at the New England Aquarium and National Geographic Society Fellow.

We’ll be releasing the menu in early February. In the meantime, we do expect to sell out so hurry over to our events page to buy your tickets! www.chefscollaborative.org/events

We hope to see you there!

One of the things I already love about working at Chefs Collaborative is the opportunity to engage with our Locals – groups of chefs in geographic regions of the US who are working together to cultivate community-based networks of food professionals and share best practices for running sustainable kitchens.

Who knew that within my first week on the job I’d get to go to a knife factory, a farm, and a local restaurant with a group of amazing New England chefs?! #Ilovemyjob. On December 11, I got a chance to travel to three different spots in MA and NH with our Portsmouth Locals and Rob, our Network Manager. We were also lucky enough to have Board Member Seth Caswell, based in Seattle, join us for the day.

Group photo – the Locals plus R Murphy Knives owners Mimi and Mark (Far Right and Far Left, respectively)

Our first stop was R Murphy Knives in Ayer, MA – a company that I admittedly hadn’t heard of. But by the time I left, I felt like I knew the owners Mimi and Mark well. The company has been in business since 1850 and has had just four owners in its entire history.

R Murphy still makes its knives right here in the USA, of American materials, with humans and machines working together (what a sharp idea – zing). In fact, they are one of only four or five remaining US manufacturers of knives. Mimi and Mark took us on a tour of the whole factory, and chefs got to see their over 40 different kinds of knives, as well as see the processes by which they manufacture the knives – most of them hand-stamped.

Watching the knife-making process up close; this rockstar employee has been there for more than 25 years.

They nickname themselves “a factory lost in time,” but it turns out the methods they use are often proven to be the best out there – working more consistently than fancy lasers and automated machines to provide super-sharp edges and perfectly straight lines on their high-carbon blades. While they are a seemingly small company, they do big business – they make over 800,000 knives each year. Mimi was interested in getting chefs’ input on the kinds of knives they need, and what they look for when purchasing restaurant goods.

From there, we bounced over to Heron Pond Farm’s new construction site in Kensington, NH. There, Andre Cantelmo and team are working together to create a food hub; a community space where farmers, restaurants, and consumers can come together to share in the yearly harvest and learn from each other. They have a pretty amazing spot in development; they are building out a public marketplace, as well as a kitchen where local chefs can hold dinners and classes, an additional room for cooking, a basement for temperature-controlled storage and house-curing foods, and a raw space they can transform at a moment’s notice. They also have a gorgeous outdoor area, and I could already imagine folks lingering at picnic tables overlooking the fields during long summer days. We discussed how much work it is setting up an operation like this, their goals, and learned that they plan to open in May of next year.

After Heron Pond Farm, we landed at the Ale House in Amesbury, MA and got to know one another. There, the fearless outgoing Local leader – and Board Member – Evan Mallett of Black Trumpet (NH) introduced Rob Martin (The Oaks Country Club) and Mark Segal (The One Hundred Club), two outstanding chefs who will be taking the reins as the new co-leaders of the Seacoast Local. This means that Rob and Mark will be working together in the year to come to facilitate Local meetings and field trips like this one.

For someone entering the food world, it was incredibly inspiring to see a group of chefs taking time during their precious hours outside of the kitchen to meet other chefs, visit local businesses, and discuss what inspires them. I know this Local has already accomplished great things thanks to their local leadership and consistent involvement, and I’m very excited to see what they have in store in 2013.

By Rob Booz of Chefs Collaborative. Crossposted from Tech Connect. 

As the chefs in the Chefs Collaborative network constantly remind us, the first step to being a sustainable restaurant is being a profitable restaurant. If you can’t stay open, what’s the point?

Chef Derek Wagner of Nick’s On Broadway goes whole hog

So for chefs out there looking to make more sustainable choices, it’s critical that they can also maximize their resources and do more than stay afloat. We at Chefs Collaborative are noticing that chefs are increasingly using mobile technologies and apps to manage their time and resources more effectively.

Where does this come into the discussion of “hacking” meat? All over the country, and in increasing numbers, chefs are turning to whole animal butchery as a source of sustainable meat.While chefs tend to enjoy both the challenge of using whole animals and the high level of quality associated with working with farm-direct animals, the use of whole animals creates its own set of challenges.

Any chef using whole animals will tell you this commitment takes more time, more highly skilled labor  and more oversight. If you can’t find ways to save on time and labor costs, then the nominally lower prices you pay for a whole animal are all for naught.

Therefore, making the choice to perform whole animal butchery demands a high level of efficiency both in processing and inventory control to stay profitable. Technology really provides an opportunity for more and more chefs to streamline their kitchens and improve their profit margins to let sustainability in.

In a professional kitchen, multitasking is a must. Thanks to the high portability of tablets and smart phones, chefs can optimize their ability to edit menus and control inventory in real-time from the line, monitor many stations in the kitchen from one easy to read screen, and the possibilities go on and on. All of this in an easily located and constantly updated format that is scalable to even the largest of commercial kitchens.

How does your restaurant use technology? Share your thoughts in the comments below, on Twitter using #hackmeat, or on Facebook.

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Hacking Meat is an online conversation exploring how can information and technology be used to hack (or reimagine) a more sustainable, profitable and healthy future of meat. Join the conversation and share your ideas or product requests in the comments, on Twitter using #hackmeat, and on Facebook.

This post comes to us care of Chefs Collaborative board member Evan Mallett, chef and owner of Black Trumpet Bistro. The post was originally published on his own blog. 

During the last three years of my career as a chef and restaurant owner, I have undertaken a Melvillian quest to find an answer to an unanswerable question. This blog tracks the pursuit of that question, which is this:  Should I buy fish from our local boats, or should I buy fish that is most plentiful and sustainable?  The goal of this pursuit is that my children’s children will never have to ask the question posed in this blog’s title.

In May of 2009, three fishing boats from Ogunquit and Wells, Maine landed some beautiful bluefin tuna.  That afternoon, the fishermen—none of whom had a license to sell tuna–brought their catch directly to several restaurants in town, whose chefs each purchased a portion of the fish to serve in their restaurants.  Shortly thereafter, a local fisheries officer from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) slapped a fine on each fisherman and chef involved in the  bootlegged tuna transaction.  The fines levied on fishers and restaurants totaled over $100,000.

Pretty much every chef I knew at that point, myself included, pooped his pants a little when word got out, not because any of us had done anything worthy of a fine, but just that it could happen at all.

According to an article on Seacoast Online, at least one of the fined Ogunquit chefs said he was unaware of the permit laws.  The article reports that “He said he didn’t understand why federal agents targeted businesses in town, adding he thought he was doing a ‘nice local service’ for patrons by offering local, fresh fish from Perkins Cove.”

Fast forward a few months to a similar, albeit more innocuous, conundrum in my restaurant.  While I was away on a trip, my sous chef purchased locally landed bluefin tuna from a legitimate fishmonger and ran it as a special on a Saturday night.  The special was posted on a then-nascent Facebook, as we have been doing since the marketing meteor of social media first crashed on our doorstep.  Within twenty-four hours, one person’s post on our Facebook page expressing outrage about our choice to offer “endangered” bluefin tuna led to a barrage of defensive responses from our loyal fan-base.  Chef Evan and Black Trumpet are as conscientious as they come! the defenders cried.  But my heart was filled with doubt.

A week later, I found myself at a Chefs Collaborative sustainable seafood initiative at a highly regarded restaurant in Cambridge.  I pleaded my case to a roomful of chefs about the conundrum we chefs face trying to do the right thing for our local economy but also for our greater ecology.  My confession met with nods and grimaces from some of today’s most respected chefs in the Greater Boston area.  Since then I have attended sustainable seafood symposia from Italy to Seattle, including many right here in our fragile Seacoast foodshed.  In Italy, at Slow Food’s Terra Madre conference, I was particularly moved by a fisherman from a small island nation in Oceania who could not afford to eat the fish he caught, which fetched top dollar in Japan and Europe, so when he fed his family fish, it was usually inexpensive, cellophane-wrapped farmed salmon from Europe.  More stark images of a fractured food supply chain to come.  Stay tuned…

I still don’t know the right thing to do, but I feel like I’ve been inching toward a sound philosophy ever since the bluefin debacle.

There is a statistic that gets bandied about whenever I find myself around sustainable seafood cognoscenti that at once depresses and motivates me.  In New Hampshire, the state with by far the smallest shoreline, over ninety percent of all fish consumed comes from overseas.  Meanwhile, our few New Hampshire fishing vessels, who are struggling to meet ever-changing regulations while facing severely depleted wild stocks,  are shipping over ninety percent of their catch outside of New Hampshire.  And our distribution system, unfortunately, is hardly exceptional in today’s world.

In fact, the more I look into our global seafood distribution system, the more I am shocked by my findings. Read on!

Here’s the booklet. Inside, you’ll see an overview of the entire schedule, thank you’s to volunteers, food and beverage donors, and chefs who are cooking, as well as headshots of all of our presenters and a few words from our sponsors. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Ann Marie Bouthillette, the de facto matron saint of Blackbird Farm, in Smithfield, RI and her family run a tight ship. One wholly focused on the welfare of the animals and the quality of their product. The Chefs Collaborative staff found this out last Wednesday, August 1st, when we (Melissa, Leigh, Jen, and myself) took a break from our daily routine to go see what was going on down the farm.

While certainly not the biggest farm you’ll ever see, especially considering it turns out beef, pork, turkey, and eggs for a number of local restaurants and a small farm stand, it might well qualify as one of the most picturesque. Even if you can claim you’ve seen prettier farms, Jen here will probably think your eyes might as well fall out of your head if you don’t agree that the scurrying Berkshire piglets on the farm are some of the cutest darn piglets you ever did see.

While I’m probably not as given to the cuteness of piglets as Jen, as much as I am their tasty looking little hams—they are pretty impressive; then again, so is the rest of the farm.

Ann Marie comes from a farming family. Her pedigree shows, and her comfort on the land proved self-evident as she led us around the barn, with the scurrying piglets, into the grassy pastures, dotted with Angus cattle, out to the spacious hen houses with their movable runs, and my personal favorite, up to the half-acre plots of woodlands set aside for the rooting and wallowing pigs.

The whole family spends a good bit of time talking about the high quality of the farm’s products, not so much in a sales pitch way as an obsessive, fixated way—like the way Thomas Keller might talk about the importance of knife cuts—and area chefs agree that Blackbird produces really, really top tier products in taste and substance (something we got a small taste of thanks to a lunch prepared by David Dadekian). No doubt this superior product comes from the attention that the family pays to the quality of life of their animals, giving them ample room to do what they do best but also encouraging the animals to be the best that they can be.

Finding ways to maximize the taste and quality of the product is a definite focus of the farm; take, for example, their beef. Unlike many other small, sustainable New England farms, Blackbird farm is not 100% grass-fed, but their grain-fed system is far from what one might expect. For the last 120 days of their lives Blackbird Angus goes in a pasture, no more than six head at a time, where they have access to grass, to round bale, and twice a day, to grain, which they flock to as if on cue. Here too, the choice is calculated.  According to Ann Marie, the feed is carefully mixed and measured to optimize the ruminants’ stomachs without harming them, a carful blend of corn meal, cracked corn, and whole kernel corn. This controlled feeding and mixed diet means that the animal finishes with what the Bouthillette’s consider superior taste and marbling but avoids the problems of overeating and antibiotic use found in the great majority of grain feeding operations, problems that the farmers have seen first hand when they used to travel on the livestock show circuit, and are extremely wary of. It also avoids the distinctly pungent flavor of commodity beef once described to me by an industry leader as “corn fart.”

Now can farms like Blackbird feed the world with such modes of production? Probably not, but they are providing real alternatives to centralized beef production.  It’s becoming self evident, what with an increasing amount of food related illnesses and surging prices of grain, CAFO’s probably can’t feed the world either. Things aren’t so black and white, with one type of meat production being the only way.  Blackbird Farm is just a piece of the puzzle, it’s a negotiation, and the best answers come much like the best dishes out of a kitchen, with careful and deliberate thought, a huge helping of passion, and execution approaching flawless. Every once in a while it’s important we get out of our kitchens, our offices, and our homes, to remind ourselves of this.

Welcome to Chef v. Chef!

This is a new way for our members to share their techniques and see what others are doing, too.

Every couple months, a couple of chefs will challenge readers to raise the stakes on the sustainability-minded practices in their kitchens. Chefs Collaborative then wants you document and share your work: in a comment and on Twitter and Facebook. We even have a Twitter hashtag: #chefsskills.

So: August’s challenge: Pick one fish on your menu and bring it in whole.

When it comes to the fish he buys for his restaurant, 606 Congress, Chef Rich Garcia goes whole. He writes:

Chef Rich Garcia, 606 Congress

It amazes me that more and more chefs and restaurants with the capacity to process fish in house are deciding against it.From an economic standpoint, I find that the ability to use the whole animal is much more profitable despite the extra labor involved. And for me this is why I cook. I love to create and develop new dishes with what is made available to me. I take the time to research what I can do with the heads, bones, scales, tongues and gills. How he does it:

At 606 Congress, a striped bass is broken down into 3 separate groups:

Striped bass “head cheese” served in its spinal cord.

1) Fillets- 6oz portions for dinner service and any smaller pieces and trim go to lunch features, including fish cakes, fish sandwiches or tasting portions for VIP and amuse.
2) We then scrape all the remaining meat off the bones and use it for raw dinner features like striped bass tartare, ceviche or even a mousse for our charcuterie board.
3) Last pile consists of head and bones. We either make a flavorful fish fumet or my favorite thing we have done is make fish head cheese. We take the bones, split the head and place them in the CVAP oven with a standard mirepoix , fennel and white wine, and let it all cook for a couple of hours at a very low, controlled temperature. The result is a super flavorful, gelatinous meat that can be picked off the bones and head and transferred into a terrine mold to form into an amazing feature for the charcuterie board for the night. We’ve even taken the spines of larger striped bass and split them along the vertebrate to use as the serving dish for tartar or head cheese.

So try bringing in some of your fish whole, says Garcia. “You’ll be amazed at how your culinary team will immediately be more motivated and will want to educate themselves, especially if they have never had the chance to butcher whole fish. Your service team will be proud to go to a table and talk about the whole fish they saw you fabricating so carefully earlier in the day and then describe to the table the amazing features you have created.”

Chef Tenney Flynn, GW Fins

Likewise, New Orleans chef Tenney Flynn of GW Fins, a seafood restaurant in the French Quarter, brings almost all of his fish in whole, he says. “A recent list of whole local fish would include American red snapper, Mangrove snapper, gag grouper, pompano, tripletail, triggerfish, cobia, redfish, drum, sheepshead, yellowfin tuna, swordfish, triggerfish and escolar. I’m sure I’m missing a few,” says Flynn. How he does it:

1) We make a lot of fish stocks, primarily for gumbo, so lean fish like snapper and grouper carcasses end up there.

Potstickers with fish mousselline.

2) Trimmings go into mousseline for lobster dumplings and crab potstickers. We always remove the cheeks for special orders or tasting menus.

3) The oddest thing we’ve done lately was hot smoking the rib bones from a 100-pound local swordfish. I gave them away at the bar.

It’s relatively easy for Flynn to work with so much fresh whole fish, he says. “Restaurants talk about flying their fish in daily—we get to drive ours in because we are so close to the docks.”

Chef Nico Romo, Fish, Charleston

At Fish in Charleston, chef Nico Romo gets most of his fish fresh from the boat of local fisherman Mark Marhefka—and brings it all in whole, to be butchered in a special walk-in reserved for that purpose. Among the fish he works with: red grouper,  scamp grouper, hog  grouper, triggerfish, red porgy, vermillion snapper, tilefish, amberjack, wahoo, and pompano. How he does it:

1) The beauty of fish this fresh is we don’t have to do anything to it. Just salt, pepper, and right onto the plancha, then served.

Steamed fish potstickers w/ kaffir lime consomme

2) With the trimmings, we make brandade and steamed and fried dumpling. We also sometimes make fish burgers.

3) The best dish we’ve made with trim has been fish and kaffir lime consomme with spicy steamed dumpling and brunoise mirepoix. And all the bones always go to stock.

So, chefs—you’ve seen how Rich, Tenney, and Nico handle whole fish in their restaurants. What about you? What’s your technique?