Senior Sales Associate

Fresh & Wild would like to introduce our most recent Sales Associate. Mark has been in the order department since the first of the year. After extensive experience in the warehouse becoming familiar with our entire operation he transitioned up to the front office.

Having spent most of his life in the sales field, Mark is no rookie in the customer service department. Being knowledgeable of the products that we carry makes him a strong asset to the Fresh & Wild team.

Mark also has the knack of finding new products to add to our pantry. This allows Fresh & Wild to stay on the cutting edge with items that Chef’s need and want.

For those of you that have him as a representative, you know what I am talking about. And for customers that haven’t had time to speak to Mark, seize the opportunity to do so the next time he picks up the phone. I know that you will enjoy working with him as much as he enjoys dealing with all the Chef’s and purchasing agents that we service.

Sardinian Saba

By Chris DeBarr, chef of The Green Goddess in New Orleans

There are mysterious ingredients available from every category of the Fresh & Wild catalog of gourmet foods.  However, the ingredient that generates the most questions of “What is that?” on our menu has always been the Sardinian saba, which plays such an integral role in the Golden Beet “Ravioli.”  As usual, there’s a story behind our discovery and use of this mysterious saba from the equally mysterious island of Sardinia.  Sometimes I think people get the strange idea that the saba has to do with sardines, but that misconception doesn’t last long in our restaurant!

I had been making the Golden Beet “Ravioli,” for a couple years before The Green Goddess was opened,  and my inspiration behind the dish was being bored with the standard riffs on beets and goat cheese salads, which had come to seem kinda so 1995 to me.  I was curious to see if I could bring back the original daring pleasure of the earthy beet combining with tangy chevre in a new presentation, when my produce guy sends me 10 pounds of very pretty golden beets in the middle of winter.  The notion of a trompe l’oielil where thin discs of roasted golden beets would look like round durum semolina ravioli stuffed with truffled chevre snapped into view.  The visual play of using beets as a pasta sheet captivated me, and I had in my kitchen pantry both pomegranate molasses and saba from Modena’s balsamico region available.   I’ve always believed having great ingredients at hand aids a chef so much in realizing what might otherwise be just a crazy idea.

The saba from young balsamic vinegar is aged up to one year, made from the classic Trebbiano grapes of the Balsamico Consorzio, then slowly cooked down over an open flame in big vats to approximate the famous syrupy true Balsamico at a fraction of the price.  It’s not nearly as complex as genuine Balsamico, nor does saba pretend to be something it’s not, but it’s a terrific way to enjoy good stuff from real Balsamico producers rather than buying caramel-colored, fake,”grocery store quality” balsamic vinegar and letting a cook make an absurd balsamic reduction that bears more resemblance to ink than to the real deal.  Saba from Leonardi, a great Balsamico producer (which Fresh & Wild carries, btw!) is a great value, better tasting, and much closer to the truth in flavor that chefs believe in.  Once you’ve experienced the grades of true Balsamico, the very thought of so-called “balsamic reductions” will forever seem ridiculous and disappointing.

Now when I first developed my Golden Beet “Ravioli,” I had no access to F&W ingredients.  So as I discovered F&W when we were prepping to open The Green Goddess in May 2009, I was immediately struck by two essential ingredients that would immediately improve the dish.  The first was an easy fix, but the preparedness of the F&W website gave me the clue I needed.  I had been using great olive oil to quickly roast my little beet ravioli in the oven so the cheese would melt and activate the black truffle aroma to make the dish sing.  Of course, extra virgin olive oil has a delicate smoke point of around 250 F., thus sometimes when the dish sat in the oven for a moment too long, I began to notice “off notes” of grassiness that competed with the rest of the ingredients.  It wasn’t bad, per se, but when I was reminded that avocado oil has a 500 F. smoke point, and thus its buttery opulent flavor would stay the same when placed in a hot 400 degree oven, I switched over right away.

In the end, avocado oil extends the visual illusion beautifully because to the mind’s eye, the green pool of oil on the Golden Beet “Ravioli” plate is olive oil, but the rich flavor definitely is something else, yet I appreciate that the avocado oil is quiet on the plate, handling the high heat and serving as the green blank canvas for the finishing twin flourishes of pomegranate molasses and saba.

Golden Beet "Ravioli" with Sardinian saba and concentrated pomegranate molasses served at The Green Goddess. PhotoCredit: Jedd Haas, Gallery Tungsten

Sardinian saba is definitely something else, too!  It is a gorgeous red wine syrup made from the Cannonau grape, which is the pride of Sardinian wine patrimony.  You see, Cannonau is the proven DNA ancestor of all Garnacha, or Grenache in the Rhone Valley and rest of the world’s vineyards.  The Sardinians, who bear long lists of grievances about all the invaders to their mountainous island, beginning with the Phoenicians, to the Norse Norman marauders, to the decadent Almodovid rulers of Moorish Spain, who took precious cuttings of Cannonau vines back to the vineyards of southern Spain where it was dubbed Garnacha, and a patrimony was lost & obscured. When I have time to linger with our guests, I get such a kick out of relaying all these historical tidbits about our food, and the story of the historic injustices behind Cannonau and Sardinian saba while delighting in its powerful sweet and sour wine flavor.  The DNA tests indicate that Sardinia has one of the very oldest grape and viticultural heritages in the world, dating back to 2500 BC, so learning to celebrate their saba made from the Cannonau grape is a cool thing to appreciate!

Speaking of the ancient Phoenicians, who lived in what would be Lebanon of modern times, I finish the story by saying, “We are trying to bring peace to the Sardinians by uniting their ancient saba with the  ancient Phoenician pomegranate molasses of Lebanon, and so we called in the Dalai Lama to officiate the peace in the guise of the sprinkled Himalayan pink salt scattered over these little ravioli.”  Such a small bite with such a huge (and I hope hugely entertaining) history.

We usually reserve the Golden Beet “Ravioli” as a late course in The Green Goddess dining experience, which means guests are often relaxed enough to listen to our odd culinary history lesson while savoring the dish, the interplay of the saba and concentrated pomegranate molasses.  Why did I make the switch to the Sardinian saba over the classic Balsamico saba?  For this particular dish, the similarity in color and disparity in flavor of the twin syrups sealed the deal, finishing off my magical beet illusions seamlessly. But the telling of the tale also grew as I did my research into all things Sardinian, and I swear it’s “nothing but the facts, nothing but the facts, sir!”

The fact that this true story was inspired by several ingredients we get from Fresh & Wild makes the telling a little bit better because we love the fact that this little gourmet food business has the brilliant idea to stockpile all these awesome, unusual ingredients.  For me, the F&W catalog is like an “Open Sesame!” chant to make delicious food come alive with the daredevils of the culinary world at my fingertips.   In other words, if you’re a creative cook, you owe it to your tastebuds to keep both kinds of saba in your kitchen pantry right away!

Chef’s Hot line:   800-222-5578

How Corn Smut Changed My Life!

Chef Chris DeBarr of The Green Goddess/New Orleans

By Chef Chris DeBarr of The Green Goddess/New Orleans

There are certain ingredients that are so extravagant and notorious that they work almost as guiding stars in my mind.  It’s my job to coax the maximum flavor from these treasured ingredients, but I also love to consider if I can make a dish that effectively tells a story about the life, culture, and origins of the ingredient and yet make it part of my kitchen sensibility.  These next four tales that will appear on the Fresh & Wild website and blog are the result of my storytelling style of cooking at The Green Goddess, located in New Orleans, a little hideaway “hole-in-the-wall joint” hidden in perfect view inside the famous French Quarter at 307 Exchange Alley.

It was the quest for huitlacoche (pronounced wit-la-coché) , aka “corn smut,” that led me to Fresh & Wild.  F&W were well known to me for their mushrooms, but my produce guys had been adept at getting them for me, so I hadn’t really delved into the myriad offerings of ingredients, pantry items, and fun stuff that F&W sells to their adventurous band of cooks.  Luckily, this persistent idea to use huitlacoche with sautéed mushrooms over folded blue corn crepes led me to the F&W website, where I was especially happy to find beautiful, flash-frozen, tender huitlacoche (not the bulbous, vaguely scary canned kind).   For me, huitlacoche was truly the magical “Open, sesame” moment that launched my kitchen into the many splendored things at Fresh & Wild, so it’s entirely natural that we lead off the series with “corn smut.”

Huitlacoche belongs to the parasitic yet mutually beneficial class of fungi that are able to transform the host ingredient into something almost unimaginably better.  Perhaps the most famous culinary fungus is botrytis, the “holy veil” of late harvest grapes, which covers the vineyards like a wispy shroud, concentrating the sugars and lengthening the flavors so that sensational dessert wines such as Sauternes and Royal Tokaji can be made.  Lobster mushrooms do something similar, which I call the process “the Lobster Eye for the Fungi” because the lobster mushroom is a parasite that takes over a boring, edible, but basically inert mushroom.  When the lobster mushroom is done with its” makeover” it appears that the dull original has been working out a lot in the gym, getting bigger, and discovering the fashion plate notion that the a big flaming orange-red skin looks more attractive for this pumped up new hybrid mushroom, which we all call the “lobster mushroom.”

Huitlacoche is a mutually beneficial parasite fungus, too, but it always seems to draw fear and dread.  The Aztecs gave it a scatological name, which means raven’s poop, even though they may have been the first to cultivate huitlacoche.  North American farmers really hate huitlacoche because the black fungus can “infect” a great deal of corn in the silo, which would make it “useless” to the Multinational Agro-Business Corp; thus the name “corn smut” for huitlacoche became its gringo name.  In most states, it’s illegal to transport across state lines, and US farmers routinely burn ears of corn carrying huitlacoche in the fields.  Only now, as the radar of dedicated gourmet food lovers has begun to find huitlacoche, are North American farmers willing to cultivate a little huitlacoche when it appears, or learn the tricks to bring about this marvelous symbiosis of corn and fungus intentionally.

I have not asked where Fresh & Wild get their stellar supply of huitlacoche.  Sometimes when dealing with a contraband substance, it’s better to ask no questions!  All I know is that we have been using F&W huitlacoche exclusively since we opened The Green Goddess to showcase our dish we call “Spooky” Blue Corn Crepes.

Spooky Crepes served at The Green Goddess restaurant in New Orleans

“Why ‘Spooky?’” you ask.  Well, all the ingredients are blue-black in color; the black corn fungus stains the wild mushrooms (which should also be bought from F&W) with its meaty rich flavor; finally, as the mushroom stock and brandy concentrate the blackness of the huitlacoche as the ragout builds flavor,   we add a lashing of French technique by mounting the sauce with butter and a judicious sprinkling of porcini salt.  Now it’s ready: the dark cascade of mushrooms pours over the folded, dusky blue corn crepes, impenetrable to light and photography, a tangle of dark matter awaiting the curious fork.

The original name I had for the dish played around with mocking the gringo name for huitlacoche, as I was gonna call the dish “Cornography” for all the fear of “corn smut.”  Nowadays, I prefer to just let our guests in on the old title as the punch line, after they’ve enjoyed our “Spooky” Blue Corn Crepes. While the blue corn (I did mention you can get blue cornmeal and porcini salt from F&W, right!) crepes are the anchor for this dish, the unsurpassed stars of the show are the wonderful, ever-shifting, seasonal mushrooms we get each week from Fresh & Wild, harnessed to the black arts of the savory half-corn, half-fungus kernels of history, known as huitlacoche.

It’s an ingredient that we cherish here at The Green Goddess, and it’s thanks to Fresh & Wild that we were able to find it and take the risky choice to feature huitlacoche as a signature, talismanic ingredient for our crazy little New Orleans restaurant right at the very start!  Life would never be the same….

–Chef Chris DeBarr has lived in New Orleans for nearly twenty years, with his better half, writer Poppy Z Brite and their large menagerie of cats.  The Green Goddess opened in May 2009, with several pounds of huitlacoche in the freezer, and many other esoteric marvels from F&W, which shall be discussed in future installments of the Featured Chef blog on the F&W website. PhotoCredit: Jedd Haas, Gallery Tungsten

Huitlacoche can be found through the All Products tab under HISPANIC/SPANISH ingredients on the Fresh & Wild website.

Chef’s Hot line:   800-222-5578

 

 

 

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