Barbecue Bus Moonshining Feast for the Fourth Heirlooms

PALATE THE LOCAL

FOOD CULTURE OF THE SOUTH

Melon Infusion

Raspberry Lime

Coconut Lemongrass

STAY COOL! TASTY WAYS TO BEAT SOUTHERN HEAT

Mango Habernero

Pomegranite Margarita

DISPLAY UNTIL AUGUST 28, 2012

JULY/AUGUST 2012

THELOCALPALATE.COM

GARDEN-RIPE, FRESHLY PICKED HEIRLOOMS COME IN ALL SHAPES AND COLORS, OFFERING FAR MORE TASTE AND NUTRITION THAN MASSMARKET HYBRIDS.

LARGE-SCALE COMMERCIAL FARMING HAS BRED THE TASTE RIGHT OUT OF OUR FAVORITE SUMMERTIME FRUIT, BUT HERE ARE SOME SOUTHERN GROWERS DETERMINED TO CHANGE THAT.

SOMETHING IN THE TO

HEAR BETSEY ELLIOTT TELL IT, GROWING A FEW DELICIOUS VINE-RIPE TOMATOES IS

CHILD’S PLAY. WE’RE TALKING THE KIND OF FRUIT THAT YOUR GRANDMOTHER PAMPERED IN HER BACKYARD GARDEN, THE KIND YOU CAN’T HOPE TO FIND IN A REGULAR GROCERY STORE OR EVEN AT ONE OF THE UBIQUITOUS ROADSIDE STANDS THAT DOT

BY JEFF ALLEN PHOTOS BY TIM HUSSEY

THE SOUTH, SELLING TRUCKLOADS FROM FLORIDA BEFORE THE FIRST FLOWERS EVEN SET FRUIT FARTHER NORTH. BETSEY GROWS REAL TOMATOES.

HEIR

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: GREG JOHNSMAN; GEECHIE BOY MARKET & MILL; TOMATO FIELDS IN EARLY SUMMER. OPPOSITE: A COLLECTION OF TINY TOTS SUCH AS YELLOW CHERRY, CHOCOLATE, SUNGOLD, AND YELLOW PEAR.

That is, when she’s not serving customers at the acclaimed Crook’s Corner Café in Chapel Hill or adorning the restaurant’s walls with collages of tomato seed packets. In between evening shifts a few days a week, she tends a small acre patch behind her nearby Chatham County home, growing everything from lettuce to cucumbers, but like many Southern gardeners, the tomatoes are always her favorite harvest. After forty years of putting in an annual crop of over a hundred plants, she should know. She often fields questions from interested diners and stresses one common refrain—that heirloom varietals are superior to commercial plants. Betsey’s not alone. Farmers markets these days abound with

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oddly shaped forms of the fruit in every conceivable size and color with a diversity of flavors to match. So when I began looking for tomatoes to grow on my small farm south of Charleston, South Carolina, it was to people like Betsey that I turned for advice because the complex world of tomatoes can be mindboggling. Just down the road from my farm, Greg Johnsman grows over fifty-three varieties at his Geechie Boy Market & Mill. He’s new to the tomato game, and farming in general, but his father-in-law, Adair McKoy, has been in the commercial tomato business for over forty years. He knows all of the tricks of the trade. But Greg said that old-timers like his father-in-law can be hard to persuade. “He told me I was crazy,” Greg informed me, “especially when we started having problems with the plants.” These were problems that farmers like McKoy had spent years working to eradicate. The yields were low,

THELOCALPALATE.COM / JULY.AUGUST ISSUE

MORTGAGE LIFTER

PURPLE CHEROKEE

Originating from central Appalachia, this varietal is characteristically pink, and brought in a good revenue for the cultivator, hence helping with house payments.

BRANDYWINE

One of the more popular beef-steak shaped heirlooms, this pink tomato is noted by its potato-shaped leaves, which are oval and smooth.

Named from the Cherokees who had the original seed, its distinctive deep reddish purple coloring with green across the top makes it stand out.

STRIPED GERMAN

A favorite varietal of the Mennonites from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia in the mid-1800’s.

* TO BE CONSIDERED AN HEIRLOOM, THE SEEDS MUST BE AT LEAST SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

FLAVOR PROFILES RED TOMATOES: Higher in acid with a sharper bite YELLOWS: Highest in sugar making them taste the sweetest PINKS: Blends the acid from the red and sweetness from the yellow PURPLE: Sweet with an earthy flavor GREEN: Firm, dry, and sour in taste

the fruit hard to pick and process for sale, but the prices were three times what a “normal” tomato could bring and the flavor was incomparable. “That’s what really got him,” said Greg. “He tasted the difference in flavor and realized that what we were on to was special.” Since 1940, the prospect for heirloom tomatoes has been mostly dim. Commercial growers won’t touch them. Like Greg Johnsman’s father-in-law, they’ve spent lifetimes developing a tomato culture that can produce large volumes of fruit impervious to disease, easy to pick, and able to survive a long journey to the supermarket shelf. Anyone who’s eaten an insipid slice placed between the buns of a fast-food sandwich can attest to less than spectacular culinary results. No one is going to mistake a commercial tomato for one of Grandpa’s juicy orbs, nor serve this tasteless variety the way my grandmother taught me: on toasted bread slathered with a half inch of mayo and lots of salt and black pepper eaten over the kitchen sink (lest the juice running down your arms reach the floor). And to make matters worse, as Barry Estabrook’s 2011 exposé Tomatoland pointed out, if you’ve eaten a few of those fast-food models during your life, some were likely picked by modern-day slaves, an indication of the horrid conditions routinely faced by Florida’s migrant laborers. According to Estabrook’s award-winning investigation, Florida tomato fields are “ground zero for modern-day slavery,” though some Florida attorneys are working hard to eradicate this injustice. Florida fields are also where some of the most noxious agricultural chemicals in use are routinely sprayed on thousands of acres of tomato plants and often on the workers as well, leading to a steady flow of lawsuits since 2004. For all of the human cost, a tomato produced this way contains around “30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than it did in the 1960s.” But these industrial tomatoes don’t suffer early blight or wilt or septoria leaf spot or blossom end rot that can destroy entire crops. Heirlooms do, especially when not doused in harsh anti-fungal agents. But growers try to select varieties that do well in their particular climate and often achieve independence from the chemical contaminants that a commercial plant sees by the bucketful. For people like Bill Best, a legendary seed-saver and renowned tomato gardener in Berea, Kentucky, heirlooms are worth their weight in gold. As Best points out, in the industrial

THELOCALPALATE.COM / JULY.AUGUST ISSUE

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: SIDI LIMEHOUSE TAKES A BITE; HEIRLOOMS IN A WOVEN LOWCOUNTRY SWEETGRASS BASKET, THE WELCOMING SIGN AT ROSEBANK FARMS; A FLOWERING TOMATO VINE

tomato world “most tomato production is picked green and gassed after storage to turn it red, and that just creates a lycopenefree, vitamin-free tomato. And the flavor turns off the children.” Best is a tomato sage of sorts, carrying the torch for his favorite varieties like the Vinson Watts. These varieties develop over many years of successive backyard selection. In the case of the Vinson Watts, its namesake creator selected open-pollinated seed for fifty-two years until he passed away in 2008. Some people consider a tomato like that to be new, and not heirloom (over seventy-five to a hundred years old), but for the flavor aficionados, that’s a minor quibbling point. Best points out that heirlooms come in thousands of varieties and all sorts of shapes and sizes. Each one has its own unique flavor as well. As a rule, red varieties tend towards higher acid with a sharp bite. Yellows are highest in sugar, sweet and even syrupy at times. Pink tomatoes, such as the famous Brandywine types, balance the acid of the red with the sweetness of a yellow and are among the most popular to grow. But then there are

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heirloom tomato recipes Yellow Germans (yellow with red streaks)—some stay green and slightly tart, even when ripe—and the elusive black and purple ones, many relative newcomers from the former Soviet Union only known to the United States since the fall of the Iron Curtain. The people who grow these and trade their seeds have found an effective ally in the internet. On the website message board tomatoville.com, people from all over the world come together to discuss varieties, ways of growing them, and even to invent the “new” heirlooms. One such tomato expert is Raleigh resident Craig LeHoullier. LeHoullier is a chemist by training but a certified tomato nut by avocation. He’s so serious about heirloom tomatoes that he’s helping lead an effort to invent new ones. His varieties, as he explains it, will become heirlooms once they’ve been stabilized through successive selection for around a hundred years. He would know. He named and popularized perhaps the most famous heirloom to hit the seed catalogs since Brandywine: a purple/ brown variety with deep, smoky flavor he named the Cherokee Purple. Now they’re everywhere, but just a few years ago, Craig was the only one who had them, except for the J.D. Green family, who claimed to have received them from Cherokee Indians in the late nineteenth century. The variety achieved wide acclaim and can now be found growing across the country, but the great flavor of such old-time varieties got LeHoullier and his friends at tomatoville.com discussing how to make them even better. For a decade now, the Dwarf Tomato Project (dwarftomatoproject. net) has been utilizing the members of tomatoville.com to cross and improve flavorful heirlooms with nineteenth-century dwarf varieties that Craig and others discovered locked away in USDA germplasm banks. Their efforts have produced a plethora of new genetics, and they’ve released over a dozen new varieties through seed exchanges. These plants, designed for containers, grow large-sized fruit on stocky, thick-stemmed bushes, making heirloom production accessible even to city apartment dwellers. These “new heirlooms” promise to bring the flavor and satisfaction of that traditional tomato sandwich to locales where the wild, often erratic growth of traditional vines would overwhelm the gardener or where the climate means that tomatoes need to be kept partially under glass to protect them from the cold. If LeHoullier’s other solanaceous endeavor, Tomatopalooza, an annual “tomato tasting” gathering of friends and tomato growers is any indication of potential interest, then there should be many more varieties to come. After all, the proof is in the flavor. Just northwest of Columbia, South Carolina, in the small hamlet of Little Mountain, Rodger Winn runs his own annual tasting where three to four hundred people and a bluegrass band turn out to sample the eighty-eight varieties of tomato that he grows in his acre patch. Winn is an old-timer on the seedsaving circuit, and his three hundred plants are interspersed with heirloom beans, cucumbers, and melons. He grows several pounds of certified organic seed for the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange every year and is willing to share his knowledge as well as sell his plants to eager gardeners. His favorites are the black tomatoes, which are hard for him to grow but have an intriguing flavor. So he selects the good ones every year and attempts to create a better strain more locally adapted to his climate and disease conditions. Because he grows organically, his plants must be able to stand up to quite a few

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attacks on several biological fronts. But where commercial growers concentrate on yield and financial return, Winn focuses on flavor. Like Betsey Elliott up in Chapel Hill, his journey began with the notion that good eating required a return to what had worked for generations of cottage gardeners. I plan to visit Rodger for his tomato tasting this summer and trade some seeds. I’ll surely gather some advice and make a few new friends. By fall, I’ll have some of Bill Best’s Vinson Watt tomatoes planted out at Rebellion Farm, and we’ll probably experiment with some new dwarf varieties as well. We used to scour the commercial seed catalogs, looking for funny symbols that indicated an indestructible, disease resistant hybrid— the “perfect” tomato, if you will. But that’s not a strategy that gardeners need employ. There are a thousand reasons to instead source heirloom and open-pollinated varieties and a thousand colors and shapes waiting to be your “perfect” tomato. Just remember to keep your elbows over the sink, lest the juice dribble down onto the floor.

SOUTHERN ‘MATER FESTIVALS Tomato tastings and festivals launch in June in the Deep South, but there’s still plenty of time this summer to sample and revere this tasty fruit. Tastings, celebrity chef demos, recipe sharing, seed swapping, growing tips, salsa competitions, classic tomato sandwiches, even tomato throwing (modeled after the Spanish festival in Valencia)—there’s something for everyone. Grab a napkin and go! July 5: Bama Loves Tomatoes Festival, Tuscaloosa, AL July 6−7: Lauderdale County Tomato Festival, Ripley, TN July 14: Hanover Tomato Festival, Mechanicsville, VA July 15: Palmetto Tasty Tomato Festival, Columbia, SC July 21: SPLATT South Carolina Piedmont Lycopersicum

CORN, TOMATO, AND BASIL SALAD WITH SHALLOT-THYME VINAIGRETTE By Chef Hugh Acheson, chef and owner of Five & Ten in Athens, Georgia from his cookbook A New Turn in the South. 2 large ripe heirloom tomatoes ½ teaspoon kosher salt 2 cups freshly cut white corn kernels 2 tablespoons Shallot-Thyme Vinaigrette (recipe below) 1 tablespoon cider vinegar ¼ cup fresh farmer’s cheese or feta 2 tablespoons chopped flat leaf parsley 12 fresh basil leaves, torn by hand into small pieces Core the tomatoes and cut them into a large dice, about 1×1-inch. Place the tomatoes in a large bowl, season with salt, and let them sit for 30 minutes at room temperature. The tomatoes will exude a fair bit of liquid and that is good stuff. Add the corn, vinaigrette, cider vinegar, cheese, parsley, and basil to the tomatoes. Gently mix with a spoon and serve immediately. SHALLOT-THYME VINAIGRETTE 3 shallots, finely minced 6 stems (about ½ ounce) of fresh thyme 1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice 2/3 cup champagne vinegar 3 cups extra virgin olive oil ½ teaspoon mustard powder ½ teaspoon kosher salt

Annual Tomato Tasting, Little Mountain, SC July 22: Attack of the Killer Tomato Festival, Atlanta, GA July 27−29: Grainger County Tomato Festival, Rutledge, TN July 28: Tomatopalooza, Raleigh, NC July 29: Heirloom Tomato Festival, Clarkesville, GA August 4: Tomato Tasting at Monticello, Charlottesville, VA August 6: Thomas Jefferson’s Tomatoe Faire, Lynchburg, VA August 10: Tomato Tasting at Western NC Farmers Market, Asheville, NC August 11: Tomato Art Festival, Nashville, TN August 12: Tomato Festival at The Arboretum, Lexington, KY Tomato Tasting, Fairmont, WV

1. Using the blunt side of a large, heavy kitchen knife, bruise the thyme by pounding it about ten times to extract its essential oils. 2. Place the shallots, thyme, lemon juice, champagne vinegar, olive oil, mustard powder, and salt in a quart-sized mason jar. Close tightly and store in the refrigerator for 24 hours. 3. Remove the vinaigrette from the fridge, bring to room temperature, and pass through a conical strainer, pressing the solids vigorously with a small ladle to extract the thyme and shallot flavors. Discard the solids and place the vinaigrette back into the quart jar and seal tightly. Shake well before using. Yield: 4 servings

August 18: MAGTAG Mid-Atlantic Growers Tomato Appreciation Group, Baltimore, MD August 18: EastMont Tomato Festival, Shawsville, VA August 22: Big White Barn Produce Heirloom Tomato Festival, Buckeystown, MD August 29: Tomatina Festival at Ripple, Washington, DC

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Note: Conical strainers, commonly used in traditional French cooking to make smoother vinaigrettes and sauces, can withstand repeated pressure better than a round strainer. You could also use a food mill as an alternative.

CLASSIC TOMATO PIE

CHERRY TOMATO PRESERVE

By The Local Palate

By Executive Chef Edward Russell of PARISH Foods & Goods in Atlanta and co-founder of the Four Coursemen Supper Club.

1 9-inch pastry shell, unbaked 2 large fresh tomatoes, thinly sliced 1 medium Vidalia onion, thinly sliced 1 cup whole fresh basil leaves Sea salt Cracked pepper ¾ cup Duke’s mayonnaise 1/3 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese 1/3 cup shredded Gruyère 1/3 cup shredded Asiago 1. Bake pie shell for 10 min at 375 degrees. Remove from oven and let cool. 2. Make a spread with mayo and cheese. Place tomato slices on a few paper towels and sprinkle them with salt to drain excess moisture. Place a layer of tomatoes in cooled pie shell and then a layer of the onions in the pie shell. Spread a layer of the cheese spread. 3. Dot each layer with basil leaves then salt and pepper each layer. Spread the final layer with the cheese spread. Add a basil chiffonade (sprinkling of thin strips of basil). 4. Bake the pie at 350 degrees for approximately 30−45 minutes until it is browned and crispy. Cool slightly and serve. Yield: 6−8 servings

2 pounds of any heirloom cherry tomato, use a few varietals—color is magic 1 lemon, zest and juice reserved ½ cup brown sugar ¾ cup granulated sugar ½ cup water Pinch of good sea salt 2 turns fresh ground pepper 1. Combine all ingredients except zest in a stainless steel saucepan and simmer on low heat for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally until tomatoes have “popped.” 2. Raise to high heat, stirring constantly, and reduce the mixture to a thick consistency, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat, stir in zest, and cool completely. 3. Store in a container with a tight-fitting lid for 2 weeks in the refrigerator. Put it on everything! Yield: 2 cups