The Fishman Cometh: Matt Rubiner’s March to the Sea
During the go-go Reagan years, even dropouts had clearly defined goals and strategies for achieving them. Only 28 when, as an MIT research director and a prospective PhD candidate, Matt Rubiner decided to bail on academia, he took comfort in the knowledge that he was still young enough to retool.
“I asked myself, ‘What else could I approach in this academic way?’ Wine, of course, but I wasn’t really that interested in it.”
Cheese, on the other hand, felt right. So in 1992, Rubiner took a job with Fromage Kitchen in Cambridge, MA. His timing was perfect. While he was learning the business, the nation’s economic boom converged with the Atkins diet and the artisanal food movement to make America safe for luxury cheese. Soon, over cocktails, corporate lawyers were asking Wall Streeters, “Is this farmstead?” and “Was that one made from raw milk?” Matt Rubiner, who, by then, was Mr. Cheese was on his way.
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“It smells like Europe in here,” my friend Dan says as we step inside Rubiners, the luxury cheese and specialty food emporium on Main Street in Great Barrington. When I tell Rubiner this, he is pleased. “My grandfather owned groceries stores. He always taught me, whenever you walk into a food store, close your eyes and breathe in deeply. Do you smell bread baking? Proscuitto being cut? That’s good. Do you smell floor cleaner? That’s not good.”
By May 2004, Matt had hung his shingle, Rubiner’s Cheesemongers & Grocers, on an elegant former bank in Great Barrington. A few months later, he opened a small café in back. “A shop as expensive as ours is bound to be viewed as elitist,” he says. “I wanted to give people another reason to come here. We had to complete the adventure.”
But from the start he knew that a little café like his could never support a highly-trained staff. “The restaurant business is not to be entered lightly,” he says. “Our goal was to have a simple café. We were betting that simple preparation coupled with extreme quality—not just eggs with salt, but eggs that had been laid that morning with fleur de sel—would trump technique. And it worked.” Today Rubi’s café may be the most egalitarian restaurant in the Berkshires—investment bankers and ladies-who-lunch sit next to ratty parking lot kids, all parties pleased to be there and all eating exactly the same stuff.
Ever intent on shortening the distance between the producer and the consumer, Matt Rubiner’s latest mission is his march to the sea. In an introductory e-mail to prospective customers of Rubiner’s Pre-order Fishmongers, he confessed, “I am an incompetent cooker of fish…my grilled tuna tastes like Chicken-of-the-Sea.” Finally, he concludes, “Maybe I’m just not getting good fish.”
In fact, he already had contacted a couple of suppliers in Portland, Maine, one of whom told him, “Fine, but you have to buy like our chef customers,” meaning superstars like Daniel Boulud, Eric Ripert, Charlie Trotter, and Barbara Lynch. In some instances, that meant finding a customer willing to tangle with a whole fish, such as an 18-pound Alaskan king salmon ($25.95 per pound) or a 10-15 pound hake ($7.95 per pound).
The response to his e-mail was encouraging. And so it came to pass that, here, in the mountains of Western Massachusetts, we now can buy Maine periwinkles ($6.50 per pound) and halibut cheeks ($21.95 per pound)—cheeks so fresh that yesterday morning they were still living next door to a swimming halibut’s teeth. Expensive? Not when you compare it to filling up the tank and driving to the Cape.
Place telephone or e-mail orders on Wednesday before 5 pm and pick up on Friday after 12 noon. If that’s too inconvenient, Rubiner can arrange for home delivery, even across county and state lines, for “a nominal fee.” All orders must be secured with a credit card.
264 Main Street, Great Barrington; 413.528.0488
Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/07/08 at 11:30 AM (0) Comments • Permalink
Is this Spa Cuisine? Canyon Ranch’s Secret Sauce
I recently went to have dinner with my mother who was at Canyon Ranch for a few days, and I learned one of the the dirty little secrets of the famous spa in Lenox: You’re allowed to eat as much as you want! I saw the man at the next table have three orders of lamb chops as well as salad and plate of pasta. And then he had a hot fudge sundae for dessert. When I looked around the dining room, I noticed that most people were having hot fudge sundaes. I was beginning to understand that it’s not just the massages and exercise classes that lure my mom to Canyon Ranch, it’s the food. My mom did some research and found out that Canyon Ranch gets its hot fudge from Wax Orchards (which has an online store.) Sweetened with concentrated fruit juice, the chocolate sauce has 45 calories per tablespoon and is one of the reasons why people who go to Canyon Ranch are always smiling.
Tell-a-FriendPosted by Dan Shaw on 04/06/08 at 11:10 AM (1) Comments • Permalink
Grassfed in Ghent: An Extended Two-Family Affair
The first defining moment for Dan Gibson occurred when his daughter Christine finally walked through the door of their house in Katonah, NY on September 13, 2001, still covered with ash from the catastrophe that had destroyed her NYU dormitory on the corner of Water and Wall Streets two days before. A second epiphany came five years later, after he’d already given up his job as Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs at the Starwood Hotels and Resorts and gone into the Registered Black Angus business on an 800-acre former dairy farm in Ghent, NY. This one was precipitated not by a trauma, but by the publication of Michael Pollan’s 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
“I want to be the Joel Salatin of Columbia County,” Gibson says. Salatin, a cantankerous, off-the-grid Virginia farmer whose innovative methods are detailed in Pollan’s book, found that there is a perfect symbiosis between dirt-scratching chickens and grass-fed beef cattle--a symbiosis that rests on crap.
As it happens, chickens like the lush grass that springs up around cow-paddies and the grubs and larvae (future flies) than thrive within it. And cattle like the nitrogen-rich grass that quickly sprouts anywhere chickens have recently been. Once a herd has grazed a pasture off, the chickens move in. During the day, they wander about at will; at night, when they would otherwise fall prey to predators, they enter portable coops called egg-mobiles, modeled on the ones Salatin devised. The result: not a drop of their precious waste is lost.
Farm Intelligence
Steer: a castrated male
Cow: a mother
Heifer: a female who has not yet borne a calf
When grass-fed, all of the above yield equally high-quality meat.
Bull: a male
Natural cover: a bull inseminating a heifer or cow as nature intended
Artificial insemination: When natural cover is impractical, this technique is used to upgrade the prestige hence marketability of the resulting calf.
Farm subsidies: A USDA program benefiting, among other farming sectors, the grain industry. By subsidizing corn used as cattle feed, the cost of industrial meat is kept artificially low and the presence of antibiotics dangerously high. (Corn makes cattle sick; antibiotics fix that.) Ubiquitous corn (corn syrup is present in three components of a McDonald’s burger) is suspected by some to be the root cause of the nation’s obesity epidemic. That and ridiculously cheap food, of course.
Certified Angus Beef: Not necessarily 100% Black Angus; likely crossbred and grain fed.
Registered Black Angus: 100% Black Angus, a breed that has superior intra-muscular marbelling, hence better flavor
Grass-fed Registered Black Angus: 100% Black Angus humanely raised on an optimal diet.
Free range: Legally defined as a chicken that is given access to the outdoors for at least 15 minutes a day.
Pastured poultry: Everything the term “free-range” implies but no longer delivers; largely grass diet, hence higher in Omega-3 fatty acids.
This clearly makes sense for the farmer and also makes for a happier life for his chickens and cattle, who get to do it their way and for twice as long as commercially-raised poultry and beef. What’s in it for the consumer, of course, is what’s in it—and what’s not. Hormone and antibiotic-free grass fed beef, according to a University of California study, has ten-fold the beta-carotene of grain-fed, a minimum of 60% more omega-3 fatty acids (putting it on a par--by this measure, at least--with wild salmon). It also has two or three times the conjugated linoleic acid and three times the Vitamin E (alpha-tocopherol antioxidants). All of which are thought to be factors in the prevention of everything from depression and Alzheimers, to cancer, arteriosclerosis and diabetes and in the promotion of vision, bone health, and weight control. The flavor? “How it was supposed to taste,” according to Gibson; in other words, like non-industrialized beef.
So how did this city slicker, whose expertise heretofore centered on running hotels, suddenly transform himself into an innovative cattleman? First and most crucial, by making the farm managers, Jim and Ilene Stark, who were already in place when he bought the dairy farm, full partners. Then, in time-honored farm tradition, he added his own family to the workforce, turning Grazin’ Angus Acres into a multi-generational enterprise. Dan and Susan Gibson’s son Keith and his wife, Nicole, live and work on the farm. Gibson’s wife, Susan, who was literally the girl next door in Bucks County, PA, when they were growing up, has added collecting eggs each afternoon to a range of pastimes that heretofore centered on gardening and decorating. Grazin’s manpower increases in summer when Dan’s formerly-widowed father, Frank, comes up from Florida with his bride of less than one year, Susan’s formerly-widowed mother, Betty, to lend a hand.
That’s right. In journalism, that’s called burying the lead.
Grazin’ Angus Acres grass-fed beef is served at many local restaurants, including Vico and The Red Dot in Hudson, Local 111 in Philmont, and The Blue Plate in Chatham.
It is also sold frozen at The Berry Farm, Route 203 in Chatham; Hawthorne Valley Store, Route 21 A, Ghent; Random Harvest, Route 23, Craryville; Honest Weight Retail Store, on Central Avenue, Albany, and at the Grazin’ Angus Acres farm store, where chickens and eggs are also available.
Grazin’ Angus Acres, 125 Bartel Road, Ghent; 518.392.3620 Orders may be placed by phone or e-mail (see website) and may be picked up at the Grazin’ Angus Acres farm store.
Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 03/11/08 at 04:34 PM (1) Comments • Permalink
Beyond Organic: Hail the Heritage Breeds
It was a Jane Austen-via-PBS moment: As I pass through a gate into the picket-fenced front yard of picturesque Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY, a dozen or so Karakul spring lambs scamper to greet me, playfully nudging me toward the front door where co-owner Peter Davies awaits. Davies, a Yale-educated sometime English professor and theater director, has become, in recent years, deeply involved in raising heritage livestock. He spends his days ordering piglets of distinguished lineage from the breeding facilities at Mount Vernon and selecting the optimal date to make a former man out of his British White baby bull, a breed believed by some to have been brought to England by the Romans and, others, by the Vikings. Some of the yield of Turkana ends up in Manhattan. They also have a loyal following among Hudson Valley gourmands, a cadre whose ranks recently swelled to include the Governor of New York State.
When Davies, who still finds time to deal in Turkish textiles and kilim rugs, and his partner, attorney Mark Scherzer, bought their 39-acre Germantown spread in 2000, they intended farming to be a weekend avocation. September 11, 2001 changed that plan. With their Wall Street-area loft in shambles, they took refuge in Columbia County. Before long, they were deep into heritage breeds. Now Davies usually spends at least four days a week at the farm. Scherzer, who still practices law full time, joins him on weekends
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“Noah Sheetz, Governor Spitzer’s executive chef recently visited us,” Davies says. Accompanied by a colleague, the young CIA grad has been touring local farms, searching for products to feature on the menus at the Executive Mansion. (George Pataki, a local farm boy himself, is not known to have made any special effort in this regard.) “So far we have gotten a contract for two batches of French meat guinea hens this summer, and an expression of interest in our pork and berries.”
Turkana Farm is not yet self-sustaining, though Davies and Scherzer have faith that break-even is on the horizon. The one-time costs of bringing the physical plant up to par are now nearly behind them. And there are some routine expenses they hope to one day reduce. The closest processing plant for poultry, for example, is two-and-a-half hours away near Oneonta. If demand for products such as theirs continues to increase at the current pace, presumably someone will open a facility closer by. But the real savings will occur only once they’ve cracked the code on breeding.
It appears that animals raised by humans don’t know how to mother their young. “We tried once with turkeys,” Davies says. “Most of the eggs didn’t even hatch, and those that did soon died from neglect.” So, for now, they buy day-old poults, or hatchlings, of heritage breeds such as Bourbon Red, Royal Palm, Black Spanish and Narragansett, for a whopping $9.00 each and rejoice if 85% survive. Add to that the cost of feed—organic grain from Lightning Tree Farm in Millbrook—and one begins to understand why their birds fetch a heady $6.00 a pound.
Fortunately, it’s more than just meat we’re buying. The advantages of organic and locally grown are well known. In addition, there’s the land conservation angle: Davies and Scherzer have wrested land from the grasp of developers and revived a working farm--they deserve our thanks and support. And, as Davies adds, “The only way to preserve these breeds and insure their continuity is to buy one and eat it.” This is not so much a sales pitch as a creed.
Turkana Farm offers limited supplies of fresh heritage turkey, French guinea fowl, pasture-raised chicken, Rouen duck, Toulouse goose, Karakul lamb, Ossabaw pork, grass-fed beef, plus fruit and vegetables seasonally. To join the Turkana Farms Green-E-Mail list, learn more, or place an order, contact: .
Talking Turkey
Here’s what I learned from my first foray into roasting a heritage breed bird:
Heritage turkeys are not broad-breasted, so there’s better balance between dark meat and white. According to my friend and heritage mentor Harriet Shur of Churchtown, one 15-lb. bird handily serves 8 adults and two kids with leftovers one day and soup the next. Spencertown’s Kate Cohen, another old hand with heritage turkeys, reports that she got two meals plus soup for six out of a single 9 pounder. On advice passed along by Davies from another Turkana customer, the chef at Savoy Restaurant in SoHo, I opted for two 8-lb birds instead of one large Tom. What the smaller birds lack in presentation drama, they compensate for in ease of handling—imagine not having to wrestle with a slippery behemoth. Besides, they have an allure all their own. Magnificent in full feather, even on the platter they looked more dignified--call it Jeffersonian--than bulbous-breasted birds. One understands why Benjamin Franklin wanted to make them the national bird.
Turkana supplies instructions for both low- and high-heat roasting. For what it’s worth, here’s how I did mine:
After brining the birds for 24 hours, I piped some flavored butter under the breast skin. On the advice of the chef at Savoy, I didn’t stuff the cavities (vegetables, herbs, garlic, lemon, yes; but bread dressing baked separately for 30 minutes in a gratin dish). Taking advantage of the greater than usual deposits of subcutaneous fat, I started roasting the pair bottom side up at 425 degrees, then flipped them once the exposed skin had turned a crispy mahogany brown, about 45 minutes later. When the breast skin had also darkened (approximately another 45 minutes), and the leg moved easily in its socket, I removed them from the oven to rest. I couldn’t swear there wasn’t a trace of pink in the thigh juices—I hadn’t bothered finding out if it had reached 165 degrees in its thickest part. But, I’m please to report, nobody got sick, and the meat had a silky texture and subtle flavor that even the best free-range, organic birds can’t touch.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 01/24/08 at 07:38 PM (0) Comments • Permalink
