Charity Robey

On the North Fork, a Model for Repurposing Food Waste Emerges

Published in Edible Long Island and Edible East End Innovation issue, June 5, 2019

 

When 2,000 pounds of carrot pulp came to Treiber Farms in Southold from Matchbook Distillery, six miles east, Peter Treiber fed some of the largesse to his chickens, and shared some with fellow poultry farmer Abra Morawiec of Feisty Acres. The remainder of this stupendous load of food waste he put on his compost pile, destined to fertilize the berries he will raise and sell.

All mutually beneficial relationships.

The 59-acre farm that Treiber works with his sister and a few summertime farmhands was established by his father in 2014 and stands as an example of distiller-to-farmer-to-table cooperation. “It’s a community effort,” says Treiber.  

Fourteen acres are in fruit trees and berries grown with the compost made on the farm from vegetable scraps donated by local brewers and restaurants, including Greenport Harbor Brewing in Peconic and Green Hill Kitchen in Greenport. Fifteen cattle graze on another 42 of the Treiber Farm’s acres, a partnership with Acabonac Farms, a company that leases farmland on the North and South Fork to sustainably raise grassfed cattle for meat.

On a cool damp spring morning, a few days after the avalanche of carrot pulp, Treiber was only halfway through gathering eggs when he saw he was going to need a bigger basket. The hens were ramping up production. The entire chicken operation—rolling coops, waterers, even some of the birds—were recycled through a sort of yardbird-sale; bought off a Cutchogue farmer getting out of the chicken business.

Garbage is an expensive, intractable problem on Long Island, and the imperative for East End producers to recycle as much as they can is good business. In 2018, Greenport Harbor Brewing used 596,686.87 pounds of grain to make beer, according to founder John Liegey. “Spent grain is definitely the majority of the waste that we produce,” he says. The first time Liegey saw spent grain from their brewing process being offered to North Fork farm animals, it made an impression. “It was an interesting sight to see all the buffalo (at North Quarter Farm) charging toward the truck,” says Liegey.  

Greenport Harbor Brewing currently shares spent grain with several farms near their main brewing facility in Peconic, including McCall’s, Hallockville, Treiber Farms and North Fork Egg Farmer.

Tom Hart, who runs Deep Roots, a diversified farm less than three miles east of the brewery, is happy to come pick up a load from the hugecontainer of warm, wet spent grains that Greenport produces every day they brew. “The chickens love it fermented, and the pigs are okay with it if they get it the same day. When you add whey from a dairy farm, and mix it with the spent grain it’s just about the perfect pig feed.”

“All the pulp [from juice scraps from the juice bar at the Giving Room] stays in,” says Hart. “The chickens just love it.”

Hart also gives pulpy juice scraps from the juice bar of Giving Room in Southold to his poultry. “All the pulp stays in,” he says. “The chickens just love it.” This year Hart is looking to increase the use of food scraps by setting up a booth in front of the farm for customers to drop off compost, coffee grounds and animal scraps to supplement the diet of their pigs and chickens. Through a friend working at Wickham’s Fruit Farm in Cutchogue, Hart was able to score squeezed pulp from the apple cider processing last fall.

Reusing something from one farm to help grow something on another only happens in a communicating community, and the small to medium farms and agriculturally dependent businesses between Aquebogue and Greenport are increasingly partners with each other in reducing food waste and improving food quality.

Even farmers who can’t accept gleanings from non-organic farms because of their organic certification, or spent grains because they can affect the taste of the milk in dairy animals, follow best practices of composting and reducing food waste within their own operation by reusing and sharing with other farms.

 

The award-winning cheeses of Catapano Dairy Farm in Peconic depend on the quality and consistency of the goat and sheep’s milk, so Karen Catapano says she does not feed her animals any spent grain or botanicals from the distilling process lest it affect the taste of the milk. Instead, the goat bedding, manure and sheep manure that is the farm’s primary waste goes into the compost pile to be digested by microbes and used on the farm, and any excess whey from cheesemaking goes to the pigs of Catapano Farm in Southold and 8 Hands Farm in Cutchogue.

The web of connection and cooperation between East End farmers, producers and food suppliers is symbiotic. “It definitely takes effort, and timing,” says Lucy Senesac, post-harvest manager at Sang Lee, an 80-acre certified organic farm in Southold. Her job is to examine and sort what they grow and to figure out what should be done with it.

“Half of my job is managing waste,” says Senesac. “Farms that sell to grocery stores are under pressure to have everything be exactly the same size, but for us, it’s being in touch with our consumers, and being able to communicate to them, ‘It’s not bad, it’s just different’ from what they see wrapped in plastic in the grocery store.”

An educated consumer is the first step, but when tender tomatoes start to liquify in the heat of summer, no amount of education can save them. “We have a compost pile to dump stuff that went rotten in the cooler,” she says. “Nothing goes to waste in terms of food.”

“We have a compost pile to dump stuff that went rotten in the cooler,” says Lucy Senesac, of Sang Lee Farms. “Nothing goes to waste in terms of food.”

When it comes to post-harvest food waste, Sang Lee Farm is a universal donor, since any farmer is delighted to feed their animals or enrich their compost with certified organic vegetables.  

A few miles east of Sang Lee, Abra Morawiec collects food scraps such as asparagus ends and stale bread from Wednesday’s Table in Southold to nourish her game birds. Morawiec, who is as effective at scavenging food as the turkeys, ducks, quail and partridge she and her partner, Chris Pinto, raise for meat and eggs, asked Senesac last year if Sang Lee had any food scraps for the birds.

The answer was yes, and it led to a regular Thursday pickup of farm scraps. Senesac said one day last fall, a pile of watermelons that “got thuddy” went to the Feisty Acres turkeys, and later Morawiec presented her with one of those birds, completing the recycle of growing, giving and gratitude. “We cooked it for Thanksgiving,” says Senesac. “It was delicious.”

North Fork fruit farmers elevate the art of cidermaking.

 

The scent of cider conjures up an East End tradition.

When I crossed the threshold of the century-old barn, I stepped into a fragrant past, with sweet, rosy notes of crushed apple in the air. The hulking, two-story 120-year-old cider press at Wickham’s Fruit Farm in Cutchogue noisily turned bushels of apples into juice, its cypress rails creaking, wheels turning against ancient cogs, and a wooden conveyor belt delivering fruit to the grinder. My hair smelled like a Honeycrisp for the rest of the day.

It’s a scent that conjures up an East End tradition. Take a bushel of apples that are too ugly to eat out of hand, squeeze out the juice, put it in a jug, and you’ve got cider. Enjoy it now, or if you prefer hard cider, wait a week.

The Wickham’s farm in Cutchogue has been in cultivation for over 300 years.

The first European settler on Shelter Island, Nathanael Sylvester, had apple trees, a cider mill and cider press on his plantation, and his son Giles continued the practice of making cider and cider-water, a less expensive and less alcoholic beverage made from rehydrating and mashing the first pressing of apples. A Native American plantation worker called Harry made the cider that was sold for cash, or bartered for goods and labor with the Manhansets.

The Wickham’s farm in Cutchogue has been in cultivation for over 300 years, and the family began growing apples and making cider after World War II. Tom Wickham speaks from a half-century of cidermaking experience, “The most important thing is the mix of apples. You want some that are sweet and some that are tart and stand up to the flavor. It’s that balance that all of us look for.”

At Briermere Farms, Clark McCombe blends varieties of his farm’s apples using a modern press. His family has been making cider since the early ’60s, but they stopped using a wooden press in the ’80s, he said, because although it gave a pleasant flavor to the cider, it’s hard to sterilize a wood press. Like most East End cidermakers, McCombe uses an ultraviolet sterilizing system, because the other option is pasteurization, which requires heating the juice and losing flavor.

Before refrigeration, most cider was hard cider, and the amount of alcohol depended on how sweet the apples were. Today sweet cider is the beverage of choice for apple-picking school groups, and artisanal cidermakers like Woodside Orchards are creating a Champagne-quality beverage, with 6.8 percent alcohol; dry and elegant.

Cider on the East End was once so common there was hardly a landowner without an apple tree.

Six years ago, Bob Gammon got the idea to make hard cider at Woodside Orchards, the Jamesport apple orchard established by his father and brother 30 years ago. Bob Gammon Sr. planted the 40-acre orchard in the ’80s and sold apples out of a jury-rigged irrigation trailer until the local raccoons got wind of it. He moved a cabin from a defunct children’s camp on Laurel Lake to his Manor Road orchard, replaced the trailer with the repurposed cabin and has sold apples and cider from it ever since.

Bob Gammon enlisted the aid of a local winemaker, a University of California, Davis-trained scientist who took him on as an apprentice. She showed him how to apply the same tools she used to ferment grapes on apples; manipulating sugar, alcohol levels and pH to make fine cider.

An enthusiastic beginner, while Gammon was waiting for the license to sell his hard cider, he fermented 15 batches at the same time, intuitively blending various combinations of apples and yeast, and invited friends over for a tasting party.

Letters between William Adams and Thomas Dering of Shelter Island in 1768 show that both men understood the necessity of tasting a barrel of cider before buying it, to make sure it was good.

It did not go well. “One had an aroma of roses but tasted so bad you had to spit it out. Another smelled like a swamp, but on the palate, it was great,” Gammon said. “We had 15 barrels of junk.”

It was a stark lesson in the way apples and yeast generate a wild variety of flavors, not all of which you want to drink.

Cider on the East End was once so common there was hardly a landowner without an apple tree, and the scabby, pock-marked fruit they bore in the days before pesticides were good for cider. Fermented and stored in barrels, it lasted through the winter. Letters between William Adams and Thomas Dering of Shelter Island in 1768 show that both men understood the necessity of tasting a barrel of cider before buying it, to make sure it was good.

That is one way in which cidermaking today is different than cidermaking 300 years ago. No longer an intuitive process, making hard cider now involves applying the principles of winemaking science to create a Champagne-like beverage refined enough for a holiday dinner.

A Local's Guide to Shelter Island |Edible Long Island

http://www.ediblelongisland.com/2017/08/14/a-locals-guide-to-shelter-island/

What is a Farm? Changes in Suffolk County’s Farmland Program Force the Question | Edible East End

Tom Wickham, whose family has farmed three hundred acres in Cutchogue since the 17th century, would like to put fencing around some of his fruit trees this spring to protect them from the predations of local deer. The problem? Although his land is protected from development, he can’t be sure that he is allowed to protect it from ravenous deer now that the permitting process for farm structures has ended.

via www.edibleeastend.com

On the East End, the Humble Blowfish Mounts a Comeback-Edible East End

Published in Edible East End on March 9, 2017

Chet Kent shows off a fully inflated blowfish. • Photo by Tara Israel

A just-caught blowfish looks like a medieval weapon. Only after it is cleaned and dressed does its gustatory charm come through. A frightened blowfish will inflate itself to comical proportions, turning into a rotund, spiny orb, but when it’s cooked the meat is the size and shape of a drumstick, the flesh firm and sweet. Generations of Long Islanders have been taught to grasp a fried blowfish by the tail, and nibble the delectable thing like a chicken leg.

Also known as northern puffers, for a decade or more they were scarce, but in recent years they have been making a comeback, and are available in restaurants and fish markets from early spring through the fall.

“I think of blowfish as Long Island frog legs,” says Stephan Bogardus, chef at North Fork Table & Inn. “It’s fantastic to see the resurgence of blowfish, to see their numbers increase.”

He includes a blowfish fricassee in his tasting menu. He pan-roasts the fish, and serves it with horseradish and a sauté of spring vegetables; radish, asparagus, spring onion.

Septuagenarian Long Islanders remember catching them by the bushel when they were kids. One Shelter Island old-timer says he and his friends used to sell them for 5 cents each to Claudio’s in Greenport. Whatever he didn’t sell, his mom would sauté in butter in a cast-iron skillet.

Blowfish was known as “sea squab” in the 1940s, and the reference to poultry stuck; even today people refer to blowfish as “chicken of the sea.” Found in shallow water, they swim with a paddling motion, and although spiny when inflated, you’d have to work at it to be injured by a blowfish (stay away from the four teeth in its beak-like mouth.)

Cleaned blowfish, ready to cook. • Photo by Charity Robey

Kids who grew up on the East End of Long Island used to have plenty of marine life for company when they went for a swim, including blowfish. Tim Purtell recalled childhood summers on Shelter Island in the 60s and 70s. “In June,” he says, “the blowfish would nibble my toes; there were crabs, skate, horseshoe crabs, sand sharks. In the fall the scallops would scratch my legs and wash up on the shore, there would be so many.”

Blowfish are such lousy swimmers a child can catch one with bare hands, but Nanette Lawrenson, Executive Director of the Shelter Island Historical Society, said she and her siblings caught them at Crescent Beach with a seine net. “They were everywhere. When we tickled their stomachs, they blew up. I learned how to clean a blowfish when I was seven years old; cut off the head, pull the skin off and all the meat is right around the tail.”

Donnamarie Barnes, the archivist at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island, recalls catching blowfish in shallow water when she was a child. Barnes grew up spending summers in Ninevah, a beach community near Sag Harbor, where she learned to love blowfish with a fervor reserved for those who gather their own dinner. While the fathers worked in the city, their families stayed at the beach. “When the money ran out,” Barnes recalls, “the mothers would send us into the water saying, ‘Time to go fishing.’”

“You could kick them around like a football,” says Jean Ely, remembering blowfish on the South Fork beaches in the 70s. “They were big and spiny–and so delicious.” Jean Ely remembers blowfish being so plentiful and cheap they were considered “trash fish.” No matter. Everyone still loved to eat them.

Charlie Poliwoda, a fishmonger at Southold Fish Market, prefers a rod and reel with a bobber to catch blowfish from a boat. “They don’t fight, and they don’t puff up unless they feel threatened.”

A plate of fried blowfish. • Photo by Charity Robey

In the summertime, John Tehan runs a fishing charter out of the Island Boatyard on Shelter Island, taking clients out on day trips to prime local fishing spots to catch porgies, fluke, and bluefish, which he scales and cleans for them to take home at the end of the day. Blowfish are not included in the deal. For years, John brought any blowfish caught on his boat home to his mother.  Now that she has passed, he eats them himself. “I had to explain to a seven-year-old girl that there is a blowfish tax on my boat. Her family got a whole cooler full of fish, but I keep the blowfish.”

Local chefs who cook blowfish like to serve them as appetizers because of their drumstick shape and single central band of cartilage down the middle, a cocktail toothpick thoughtfully provided by nature.

Keith Bavaro, owner of SALT, a restaurant on Shelter Island, remembers a legendary blowfish preparation that Anthony Rando, former chef at Sweet Tomatoes, an Italian restaurant on the Island made: Blowfish Puttanesca. “It always sold out halfway through dinner service. Locals would order two right when they arrived because they didn’t know when it would be back on the menu.”  Nowadays Bavaro buys blowfish for his restaurant whenever he can get it. SALT Chef Darren Boyle likes to fry blowfish like chicken wings and serve them with a classic remoulade.

The Japanese variety of blowfish called fugu is a delicacy notorious for containing potent neurotoxins in several of its organs. Fugu can only be safely cleaned by specially trained and certified fish cutters. The northern puffers caught in the mid-Atlantic coastal waters of the United States are safe, since they do not eat the things that create poisons in Japanese blowfish. The toxic blowfish are 6739 miles from here—the best argument I’ve ever heard for eating local fish.