Living Local
Lauren KawamIssue date: 7/29/10 Section: News
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Furthermore, eating locally-made sorbet, and an egg frittata made with locally-grown vegetables and eggs from locally-raised chickens is like nothing you've ever tasted, at least according to me.
The locavore movement is slowly creeping into people's lives is many ways. It's not just about buying organic and sustainable products, but taking it one step further: buy the stuff from farmer's markets right down the street, by people who know your name and know what you like to eat.
That's at least how Payton Curry, Jennifer Johnson and Stechnij do it.
Perhaps three of the main players in the locavore restaurant industry in Arizona, Curry, Johnson and Stechnij play their own parts to keep the movement rolling.
Curry is the executive chef at Caffe Boa, a home-grown restaurant with locations in Tempe and Mesa. He's been living as a locavore since he was a kid, working as a dishwasher at 14, envious of the chefs in the kitchen. After work, he'd go to farmer's markets, buy some food, go home and cook things out of Bon Appetit magazine just for fun. Now, as he calls the shots, he buys most of his ingredients from farms down the road, and doesn't think twice about giving informal, often impromptu tours at the farmer's markets, showing others what to cook with and how to cook it.
Johnson is the executive chef at Udder Delights, a dessert shop that's owned by Stechnij. She works day in and day out, creating unusual yet delicious flavors of ice cream and sorbet, and working for months at a time, simply to get the right consistency for home-made yogurt. She also works closely with Curry to put on locavore dinners, and comes in to Caffe Boa frequently to cook with him.
And lastly there's Stechnij. A third-generation dairy farmer and co-owner of Superstition Farm, he's plugged into the locavore movement in a different way.
Instead of being on the buying side of things, as is Curry, Stechnij connects with people and businesses to try to sell his products to them. He works one-on-one with people to try to explain to them how much better tasting, albeit healthier, locally-grown products are.
With all this in mind, College Times shadowed Curry for a day, as he met with Johnson and Stechnij to talk cheese - no pun intended - and observed a day in the lives of those not only working within the locavore movement, but living it as well.
Payton Curry
The Chef
It all started with rugby and his grandmother's pickles.
He would get requests from his rugby team mates to make them all these fancy dinners, so they could in turn bring them home to their girlfriends, and he always complied.
Why? Because Payton Curry loves being a chef. He loves dressing like one, he loves acting like one and he loves shopping like one.
Instead of going to the supermarket miles away to buy his ingredients, even as a 14-year-old, he'd stop by the local farmers markets to talk with the farmers about what was in season and what would make the best combination of flavors.
And this is because of his grandmother's pickles.
"She'd make them for us all the time when we were kids," he says. "Like, she'd take them, and soak them for 70 days, and we'd wait, and then they'd be done. I never thought of making food any other way because that's all I knew."
Fast forward 27 years later, and his grandmother's pickles are still one of the hottest items on the menu at Caffe Boa, the restaurant where Curry carries the title of executive chef.
Now 31, he can pick and choose what goes on the menu, and change it up every night. Earlier in life, Curry was just a dishwasher.
"I was 15, washing dishes, envious of the cooks on the line," he says. "I went to college thinking it was the next logical step, but I always had in the back of my mind this desire to cook. I went back home, got a job in a French restaurant - because my mom loved the crème brule so much I wanted to learn how to make it for her - and it went from there.
"I worked for two years with everyone screaming at me and then finally, started cooking, and just kept working and working until I got this job."
Curry is part of a growing number of chefs riding the locavore wave.
What's a locavore? It takes living environmentally friendly and "green" to another level.
It's not just eating and cooking with organic or sustainably-made products, but products from right down the street, literally.
At Caffe Boa's Mesa location, the dairy farm from which they get their milk, butter, buttermilk, cheese and ice cream is a 10-minute drive away.
And at the Tempe location, near the restaurant is the Tempe Urban Garden, a city-led project aimed at teaching kids and other residents about the value of growing your own vegetables and herbs, and from which Curry gets some of his produce.
"It's the person-to-person connection that we make," Curry says. "All these people put their soul into their work to be able to make that connection … I always say it's no longer going farm to table, it's going farm to family. It's about the family being comfortable with the farmer, and if they're comfortable with the farmer, they're going to be comfortable paying a dollar more a dish."
He says he gets his love of food from his step father and his work ethic from his real dad, and the combination spells success for him as a chef.
"When we were young growing up in Minnesota, my mom and step dad would fly us out to the Drake hotel in Chicago to eat at the restaurant," he says. "Then, we'd go camping the next weekend with my dad, and we'd make hobo meals, where we take a bunch of food, wrap it in tin foil, stick it on the fire, go fishing, and by the time we're done, we have a cooked meal that we can eat right out of the foil. The way I grew up was a little different, but it allowed me the perspective about food I have today."
He also says one of the things he enjoys most is going out in his "civilian clothes," i.e. not his chef jacket, and helping people find foods and put together recipes.
"I do a lot of farmers markets and I'll walk people around and show them what's in season and how to cook with things," he says. "People look at me like I'm crazy. It's like me, mother duck and the little ducklings behind me. For me to be able to show and help them, is gratifying for me as a chef."
Jennifer Johnson
The Dairy/Dessert Maker
She's so dedicated to her craft as a dessert chef - as well as a regular chef - that Jennifer Johnson spent almost two months just perfecting her own yogurt.
She went through a lot of bad yogurt to get to this point, and now that she's here, she says it was all worth it.
"I can't get over how good this tastes," she says. "It took us a while but we finally got here."
Among a whole host of other side jobs, including making delicious flavors of sorbet, including strawberry basil, Johnson is the chef at Udder Delights, a dessert company formed as an off-shoot from Superstition Farm, a locally-owned and operated dairy farm in Mesa.
Johnson makes her own ice cream, sorbet, cheese, butter, milk, buttermilk, and a whole host of other milk-related products. And she starts right from the cows that stand about 50 feet from the kitchen.
While she's passionate about the locavore movement, she understands why some are reluctant to get on board.
"There's such a disconnect with people as to where their food comes from," she says. "There's a lot of apathy in the country as a whole, so why should they care? But also times are tough, and buying fresh and local will be a little more expensive than say, going to Safeway, or a fast food joint, so I can understand."
Even though this may be the case, Johnson holds strong to her point that supporting local farmers and buying locally-grown products means getting the best available.
"When you come to places like Caffe Boa or Udder Delights, or any local place, you're looked at as family," she says. "We all act like it, and you come here so you have become family. We will always treat you that way and that's the main difference between us and some chain. There, they won't even remember your name."
Casey Stechnij
The Farmer
He doesn't think twice about going out in the middle of the night on a Tuesday, after a couple of shared bottles of wine between himself, Johnson and Curry, to round up some rogue cows with the help of his two chef friends. And suffice it to say, he probably did it with a smile on his face.
Casey Stechnij, known at Farmer Casey within the local community, is a third generation dairy farmer, owner of Udder Delights and the co-owner of Superstition Farm.
He's noticed over the past few years that the locavore movement has grown in numbers, and he thinks the reason why is simple: "People want to know where their food comes from.
"It's just about the evolution of food," he says. "Before, we didn't know anything about our food. Now, it's like, okay, we have organic food, but it might be coming from 3,000 miles away, it might be coming from another country. If you can get it from 10 miles down the road now, why not do it?"
On his farm, Stechnij has a petting zoo, a store, the dessert shop for Udder Delight and a classroom for those visitors taking tours.
He says he really enjoys when people come to tour the farm, and he can talk with them about their food, and open up the dialogue about going local.
"Organic, it's a buzz word, and it's easily capsulated, but locavore is a little bit more complex because you have to learn a little bit more about your food sources," he says. "Historically, Arizona has been a huge agriculture market, but not necessarily to the locavore audience. It's been about the five c's: cattle, citrus, copper, climate and cotton for so long. But things change for the better."
And ultimately, Stechnij says it's about people's priorities when it comes to the local movement.
"What's more intimate than what you eat and put inside your body to fuel you," he says. "We all have our cell phones, we all have our fancy cars and we all make choices every day about things. Seven years ago we were spending about 80 percent of the money that we make on food, and now it's reverse, even with the amount of money we spend on fast food, we're still using only 20 percent of our income now on food. That needs to change, and if we're ahead of the game, then we'll be glad to help those who are playing catch-up later on."
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