223: Abra Berens

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1:00If you plant a kale plant, you can harvest from that same plant throughout the entire season for mature kale. But baby kale is grown often in trays and it's a single harvest. And so instead of having one seed grow kale for an entire season, you have one leaf coming out of one seed. You're listening to The Taste Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.

1:28Michigan chef and cookbook author Abra Behrens returns to the studio to talk about her third book in a trilogy on Midwestern farming and cooking. Starting first with vegetables, followed by grains and legumes, her new book Pulp tackles fruit. Yes, fruit of the Midwest. It is such a great topic. In this episode, we get personal in praising Michigan for its superior apples, incredible blueberries, and possibly overrated cherries. Yes, I did just say that. We also talk about Abra's restaurant at Greener Farm, which is one of my favorite restaurants in the state. I hope you enjoy this episode with Abra Barron's.

2:13Abra Barron's, welcome back to the Taste Podcast. Oh my gosh, this is like the reason I keep trying to write books is just so you'll have me back. Oh, geez. Well, I think the last two times I saw you, it was on the farm. It was on Greener Farm where you have a restaurant and you are part of the farming community there. We'll get to that. It's just so great to see you. Likewise. Yeah, it's nice to be back in New York and to see you in person and in, you know, in your neck of the woods. In your context. Well, I grew up not far from your farm and I have such a connection to Southwest Michigan and we talk about a bit on the show.

2:49So it's a theme. But roughage to grist, now pulp, it's been this journey. It's been this absolute journey covering Midwestern products in situ, on location. What has it been like, this trilogy that you've written? And it's funny, it's a little bit, do you remember that short story in like middle school that we all read called Flowers for Algernon? Oh, yeah, definitely. Of course. There's a little bit of that. Public school here. Yeah, looking at them on the shelf, it still feels so magical that books come together in this way. So many people work on them. And I'm like endlessly grateful to Chronicle and Sarah Billingsley for, you know, understanding these books and wanting to make them.

3:29And then to everybody who contributes to them. But yeah, I mean, the focus that started with roughage was vegetables and then looking at other ingredients and really trying to create tools to help people internalize sort of truly how to cook with something as opposed to memorizing a recipe. And so it was a natural progression for me to go vegetables, grains and legumes, which are a big part of our farm at Grainer. And then, I mean, Michigan, you know, better than most is full of fruit. Yeah, I'm biased. I think there's the best apples in the country, and we'll talk about that soon. I have a question very much.

4:04But yeah, full of fruit, but also full of legumes. And I remember walking through your fields of wheat. You were growing wheat like a few years ago on the farm. Yeah, our grain program. So Grainer Farm is in southwest Michigan. And so we're definitely a part of the fruit belt that's on the western side of the state. And we started as a vegetable farm. Rob and Liz, the owners of the farm, started in 2006. vegetables. And then the grain program sort of came shortly thereafter and is on, we rent just shy of 400 acres for those crops. So let's zoom out a little bit and just talk about farming in West Michigan.

4:44I guess for our listeners, I'll ramble on about Michigan all the time, but from you, a farmer and a chef working there, what is the region like and what don't we actually realize about Southwest or West Michigan agriculture? I mean, I think it's diversity. People are always really surprised to learn that Michigan is the second most agriculturally diverse state in the nation, second to California. We have a shorter growing season, but we have a lot of diversity in the peninsula. And so, you know, I referenced the Fruit Belt. That's the Western side of the state. And I think what people don't know about Western Michigan, a lot of folks are familiar with Michigan and Detroit and Annabert, and there's a ton of agriculture there too.

5:22There's, you know, I think between just over 1 ,600 urban farms in Detroit. Vertical, small plots. There's all sorts of different styles there in Detroit. Yeah, it's incredible. And a lot of folks who are really leveraging that ag for really important reasons. And then, but the west side is, you know, we're right on Lake Michigan. I think a lot of folks don't realize, you know, you can't see across Lake Michigan. It's a giant body of water. It looks like the ocean. and just what that coastline feels like. And then once you get inland a little bit, the land is, you know, very hilly from the glacial coveratures and the cool breezes that come off the lake and the extra snow in the winter.

6:06It's a really, I really love, I mean, obviously, you know, I love Michigan. I mean, we're talking about grapes. We're talking about apples. We're talking about cherries. We're talking about blueberries. The fruit belt, it's real. And your third book in a series, Rough-Edged Gristin' Now, pulp focuses on fruit. And you make this statement in the intro, and I love it because it's just a sound statement. And I want to know, why is fruit simultaneously simple and frustrating? It's very unpredictable, you know. And so when I was, you know, kind of puzzling out this book, I was asking folks, like, what would you want out of a fruit cookbook?

6:47And it was truly 50-50 that people were responding either, oh, why would you need a cookbook about fruit? You just eat it, simple. And then frustrating is I don't buy fruit because it goes bad before I eat it. Sometimes the strawberries don't taste great and you can't tell by looking at them and things like that. So that was sort of the idea behind it. And then for me, the real driving motivation for pulp is that I use fruit a lot in savory cooking. Very cool point. Right. And the recipes in the book are a lot of savory. Yeah. So much savory. 50%. 50%, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the idea. I mean, with roughage, it was, here's this like bounty of produce.

7:28Here's a lot of different ways to prepare it the same way and just dress it up with different flavors. Grist was all about like these pantry staples, grains, legumes, and then different ways to sort of gussy them up throughout the year. and with fruit the variations are um one savory recipe and one sweet recipe per fruit and preparation technique so similar organization to the previous books yeah you really stuck with it too and like that's that's just the work that you're going to get in this book it really is full of application oh thanks shouts respect it okay let's talk about apples i've i've tasted apples in uh in west michigan we'll get to that but also japan upstate new york washington state California all through the east coast really there are no better apples than west Michigan I mean back me up here please I mean yeah I love apples and it's a good thing too because apple season you know is about what six seven months out of the year it's a long period of time because it will pop up around August I mean those early first picks are tremendous they are yeah and um I think that we also have a pretty good range of different types of apples.

8:36So, you know, eating apples, baking apples, you know, ton of crab apples and those wild ones. There was a place up in North Port called Kilcharmins that had like something like 200 different varieties of apples. I think that they have since sold their orchard. But yeah, just, you know, the apples have a tremendous lineage. And so it's nice to get to see some of those trees. Let's get into apples. Is it, is old growth, does that matter in orchards? And I guess also, is it this lake climate? Why is West Michigan have such a great apple reputation, at least in our minds, but also just the yield is so tremendous?

9:14Yeah, my understanding of it is that I don't know if the old growth changes the same way people think about that for vines, for grapes. You might know better than I do, but - I don't know. Probably not true. It probably has nothing to do with it. But they're old trees. You know, so Gene Garthy is a legacy tree fruit grower that I interview in the book. And, you know, some of the apple trees in his farm he planted with his grandfather. So, you know, that's getting on in time. And so I think that that's part of it. The reason the West Side of the state has so much fruit, again, is the lake and the topography is really suitable for it.

9:55It also means that it's not as well suited to other types of agriculture. So, you know, it's hard to grow row crops like corn and soy on particularly hilly areas that don't get as warm because of the, you know, the way that the weather comes over the lake. So it's really well suited for that. And then once you put that investment in, I mean, he really articulates in some of the other interviews do too, the overhead associated with, because these are all perennial crops, you know, whereas in roughage, they're all annual. So we plant them each season. Same for greens and legumes mostly. But there is nothing in this book that is a single season.

10:34We talk about lineage crops. When were these planted? Do you have an idea of when these apple in the state of Michigan is? Do you go back? That I don't know. I should actually look it up about when sort of the apple industry really took hold. Yeah, I don't know that. But it's definitely been a part of, let's see, when did Gene's family settle? I mean, it was his great-great-grandfather who immigrated and bought land. So, I mean, certainly their house was built in the late 1800s. So before that. Yeah. So, Abra, what makes a gray apple? For me, it's the tartness. You know, however I'm applying it, I tend towards tart fruits.

11:20And so that nice bit of tang that can pair well with things like pork or, you know, is perfect in a pie, that like cheddar cheese, apple together, you know, all of that. It's such an amazing apple, cheddar cheese and apple pie. That is a Midwestern thing, I feel. Is it? I always wondered because I remember the first time I read through the Fannie Farmer cookbook, which is, I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with that. Definitely. Super old school. And I was looking, I was like, you know, probably ate and wanted to make a pie or something like that. And yeah, it was like serve apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese.

11:56And I was like, what is this? That sounds terrible. And now I'm like, oh yeah, that makes total sense. Yeah, maybe it goes back further than the Midwest. Listeners are right in. I'd like to hear. Okay, we're going to segue to another great fruit in the Fruit Belt of West Michigan, which is the blueberry. And I would like to ask you about the blueberry muffin. The blueberry has been removed from most blueberry muffins that we eat. So what is your recipe doing right here with a blueberry muffin? So blueberries grow really well near where I grew up, which is near Holland. Really, they do well in sandy soil, things like that.

12:27And so it was one of the first baked goods I ever made was a blueberry muffin. And so I have a soft spot in my heart for them. And I also think most blueberry muffins are pretty terrible. That's what I'm saying. They've been removed. There usually is no blueberries in the blueberry muffins. Yeah, or they look like a Skittle, like a blueberry Skittle is in there or something, like the airport version of a blueberry muffin. So this is probably a good representation of the culmination of all three books because it's a spelt flower, which I really like for muffins because it's a softer flower. so it doesn't you know doesn't tend to get overworked it has a nice nuttiness to it and then it's just a really simple batter I'm pretty sure the batter is adapted from you know the joy of cooking at some point and I and then yeah just load it up with fruit and bake it and I just love a blueberry muffin just butter on top and it's just such a great thing to have for breakfast or for whatever but I love their book is organized with batters and bases in the beginning and you can kind of start with those and then you move into all the different fruits the categories you're covering, right?

13:28Yeah. So in the other two books, there was either like the strong pantry in roughage or the condiment section in grist. And this is sort of the keeping to that model. But I'm not a particularly natural baker. And so I've learned a lot from the bakers that I've worked with over the years. And this is really, you know, diving into my own. I have like a notebook and then also a file on my computer that's like all of the baking recipes that I've absorbed over the years. And so this is a lot of them. And the idea is that most of the desserts that I make for the dinner series that we do at Grainer and before at Bare Knuckle were all fruit-based desserts.

14:06So it's like these are the things that showcase fruit. So they're a pretty set repertoire. And so this is the batter. And you can make it – I mean – and the idea was sort of similar again to the other books. Like if you have blueberry muffins, you could also put cranberries in there. You could put raspberries. You know, it's like it's interchangeable. Our blueberry season in West Michigan is so short, too. It's true. It's so short. It's like six weeks and then you're done. Yeah. All right. I'm going to quote you. Being a native Michigander, I'm legally required to love cherries. Okay. I love this.

14:37I agree with it. Cherries are important. But I have to say I've never had a good cherry experience in Michigan. Is that bad? No. I mean, that's, I mean, it's, again, the frustrating side of fruit. Yeah, I feel tied to the cherry industry because I lived in Northport for so long that so much of Leelanau County and Grand Traverse County is cherry production. But it occurred to me, and this is actually one of the parts of the book, I wanted to talk about, you know, the scale of farming. And it occurred to me one day as I was driving up there, I don't know if people know that these cherries are not going to like a farmer's market.

15:15But, you know, and that kind of articulated like there are lots of different cherry industries, you know, that you're – and so Abby Schilling, who owns Mick Klug Farm, closer to where we are, kind of summed it up. And she said there's basically three different markets for fruit. There's fresh fruit direct to consumer, which is what she does. You know, they harvest their fruit. They pack it up in a truck. They take it to a farmer's market. That's what they do. Or mire. Well, that's the second – Oh, sorry. No, no. Or to restaurants. She has a large, like, wholesale thing. But then the second sort of market is fresh fruit to a broker.

15:52Got it. That then puts it into Meijer or, you know, Kroger, all of those sorts of places. But then there's also the fruit to the commodities market. And so, and it's a little different than the commodities market for something like, you know, pork belly or soybeans. But it goes to a processor. And that's what Gene does. So Gene does not store any fresh fruit. It's all of his tart cherries go into tart cherry concentrate or cherry pie filling. And then even today, I was running around doing some stuff before coming in here and stopped in. I had to get some cherries for something later on tonight.

16:31And the frozen, pitted, dark sweet cherries in the Whole Foods are from Michigan. And that's what it's going to. So that's kind of the other outlet for it. And that's commodity. That's like bought and sold on a market, right? So there's really not a lot of quality. They're not like thinking about organic. They're not thinking about like the actual growing of it. It's truly dipped by weight, right? Yes. The organic is a separate category. Separate category. Commodity. Correct. But yeah, they're looking at it's a volumes game. I just love those Washington State Bing cherries. I just I grew up I feel eating those even though we were in West Michigan.

17:07I feel like or maybe later on in the East Coast. I just love those. I don't know why. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. And that's why food is such a beautiful thing that everybody has those experiences with it. And, you know, it's what resonates for you. And that's great. I love that. You're diplomatic. Okay. So grilled cheese. But we can agree tart cherries for a cherry pie, right? Okay. Thank you. You've made that. You've drawn that line. Yes. Tart cherries from Michigan in cherry pie. The cherry hut up in Beulah. You've been there, I imagine. I have, yeah. Very, very cool little place if you're ever up there in the summertime eating cherry pie.

17:42So grilled cheese with cherry chutney. That's your recipe in that section. Wow. It looks so good. Thanks. Yeah, so I really love fruit and cheese together. And this was a, I don't know why I felt the need to make a grilled cheese even more decadent. But it's basically like a grilled cheese that is combined with a fried mozzarella stick. And so you like dredge it, pan fry it, and then it has this ground cherry chutney in the center that is just so good. That sounds amazing. Wow. And so this chutney you make during the season have in your pantry? Yeah. So ground cherries are similar family to tomatillos.

18:23So they're husk cherries, also what they're known as, or cape gooseberry. And they are not sweet like a traditional gooseberry. They are, I'm sorry, they're not tart like a traditional gooseberry. They're very sweet. They have like a pineapple-y sort of flavor. And I had never had them before being at Grainer Farm. And then we grow them there. And I just really love them because they usually come due kind of towards the tail end of summer. So right as you're starting to want more of those like fall flavors. And they freeze really well. Oh, cool. I didn't know. Yeah. And you can freeze them in their husk, which I know from experience because they take a long time to husk.

19:01And so we don't usually have time. So we just load them all up into Ziploc bags and then come January when we have time, you can dehusk them frozen. And then – and the berries like are great after they've been frozen too. Speaking of time, do you ever get time off in the winter months now that you – like you're – do you – there's a thought that like there's a season. Obviously your restaurant is not open year-round and your farm is not open year-round. Open meaning you're not selling in your farm store. But do you get like an actual downtime in the season? Yeah, you know, it's interesting that you say that because that has been one of the biggest changes at Greener is that when I started, the farm store was only open from Memorial Day weekend until the weekend before Thanksgiving.

19:40And now we're open 11 months out of the year and really trying to provide that option for folks. We also, and you've been to dinner now at Greener. Definitely. And that greenhouse that the meals take place in, it's this big glass greenhouse where we have the kitchen and the dining room. there's grow space on either end and that additional greenhouse space gives us the opportunity to grow greens in the greenhouse in the winter so that's how we can have the farm store open and then we came we actually did not break for dinners so we uh oh yeah you're around there yeah we took a couple of weeks off at the like winter holidays and then came back for new year's eve and have been doing it so ever since now i'm going to link to in the show notes but you can book a dinner at the farm and we'll get into some of the guest dinners you're having.

20:29But you're close to Chicago. I think that's the one thing. If you fly in Chicago, how do you get to your greener farm? Just 94 all the way around. And it's about, let's see, I drove, because I flew out of O 'Hare to get here to New York. And I think it's like an hour and a half drive. Yeah, it's really fast. And it's a beautiful drive. And all four seasons, it's nice to just get out in the country and get to you. But your dinners, you're booking them. You're running them every week, basically. And you have some guest dinners coming up too. Yeah. So we mostly do dinners on Friday and Saturday nights in the greenhouse.

21:00And then the farm store is also open on Friday and Saturday. And the way that our dinners work is it's, yeah, it's pre-ticketed. So we're not really a restaurant. It's what we call experiential dining. You buy a ticket in advance. And then through most of the season, you'll do a walking tour of the farm and then land in the greenhouse and have dinner. It's usually seven courses. we don't release the menus in advance because we're often it's dependent on what we're harvesting. And so they change a little bit. And the idea is that they are dinners that are meant to sort of express the moment in time that we are in this personal, like this specific piece of land, but also to hopefully get people thinking about how to use these ingredients that we grow.

21:41So it's a night out, but it's not super fussy. I mean, it's like way chill and cooler, like version of Blue Hill, I think. Oh, that's nice. It reminds me of been to Blue Hill and just the way that you lead the tour and talk about when we walk the field. I mean, it's beautiful to still walk the field and then have your seven courses that you're busy. I mean, you're busy. Those are busy nights. Yeah, they're really fun. I can't remember. I think, were you at one where Lark had to come on the tour, my son? I never met your son, but I did meet some feisty folks from Chicago. They were great. I sat next to them.

22:19Yeah, it's definitely, you know, we're a family farm. It's, you know, a family that owns it. And then there were a couple where Lark, Eric, my husband, was gone. And so he came and did the tour. And all of a sudden I was like, there's a lot more people taking videos on this tour than normal. And it's me just like shoving peanut butter puffs into his mouth. It's so cute. Oh, my gosh. So is he getting his hands dirty in the farm? Yeah, he's not really helping, but he's definitely around. He knows those spaces and comes through and, yeah, gets real excited. I love this. Now, I know a few summers ago we sat in a round deck chair and had a great interview, and I'll link to that.

22:55I love that interview. You should definitely read it. But one point we talked about was kale and how kale had been overplanted and overseeded and had really basically the reason was is that kale became a meme. It was on T-shirts and it was what people wanted to eat. And you made a really great case of how this is actually not the best thing when you overplant based on theme. Now, is that still the case with kale? And I guess the second part is, is are we verging it as our territory where there might be another crop that is getting a little bit over planted and maybe we should be aware of it as a consumer?

23:31Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I mean, I certainly am never going to say that it's a bad thing to have people excited about something like kale or another vegetable. But what was happening was that all of a sudden baby kale was the like hot thing. And so which, you know, as we probably talked about on the tour, if you plant a kale plant, you can harvest from that same plant throughout the entire season for mature kale, for like big leaved kale. But baby kale is grown often in trays and it's a single harvest. And so instead of having one seed grow kale for the entire season, you have one serving come out of one seed or like one leaf coming out of one seed.

24:12So there was a shortage of kale seeds. I think that that has pretty much been corrected. And there's also been sort of a decline in the like hype around kale. Yeah, it's kind of like chilled out a little bit, which has probably helped like even out agriculture and the demand a little bit. Yeah. And I mean, I think it's moved from that excitement to into the mainstream. I think you can still find kale salads on things, which is great. You know, and that's the best case scenario. The most recent one that I've heard about with this is cauliflower. That cauliflower has become like quite the it vegetable.

24:41The ricing of cauliflower, you know, and as a green alternative, it's part of that, I would imagine. Yeah, it's a big, I think it is a response to some of the gluten-free stuff. And then also, I mean, Hedy McKinnon has a beautiful cauliflower steak recipe. And I think that that idea, and again, I support people moving towards a plant-based diet. I still eat animal products, but I also think about meals that don't have them. And I mean, a good solid. And there's a recipe in pulp for roasting a whole head of cauliflower that has a ground cherry like glaze to it. So you like roast it as the whole thing with a little bit of water in the bottom of the pan.

25:21It kind of steams the inside and outside. It's all crusty. And then you put the ground cherries in and they burst and reduce down into kind of like a sticky syrup. So you spoon that over. Oh, cool. And then cashews and serving it with Tum, which is that like garlicky Middle Eastern condiment, which I just, oh, I love it so much. Yeah, Toom. Did you pick that up when you were working at Zingerman's? I feel like that was probably maybe something on the shelf. I think I remembered Toom. I don't remember where I first heard it. I think probably the Middle Eastern food in Dearborn and Hamtramck. Yeah, that makes more sense.

25:50But then there was a place up in northern Michigan called Rose and Fern, which has now moved locations. It's called Rough Pony. And they had Toom on a sandwich. And I was like, oh, yeah, this is so good. Which I feel like is how, at least for me, how recipes are developed. It's like these little things that like stick in your mind. And I was thinking about this because there's a recipe in the apricot chapter for shattering cheese, which is the Finnish bread cheese wrapped in phyllo dough. And the idea for that with like an apricot and herb salad. And that idea for that came from going out to dinner with my friends Carl and Nikki at Kiki's down in Chinatown here in New York.