A Visit to Dino’s Garden

Yesterday, I visited an old friend of mine in San Pedro. He is old-world food purveyor from Sardinia. We talked about Italian food and flavor. We walked through his garden and tasted tiny yellow cherry tomatoes, fava beans, parsley, and Salvia (also known as Bergarten Sage, a velvety gray green leaf picked from a billowing evergreen bush). A member of the mint family, Salvia is a common Mediterranean kitchen herb that is often overlooked here in the American kitchen. Dino’s sage was brought over from Italy, as seed.

Salvia (which means “to save” or “to heal”) has an earthy warm aroma and a slight peppery flavor, which I love to use in so many dishes. The flavor is a mix of rosemary, pine, mint and citrus. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when considering Sage as an element in your menu:

Sage works very well with grilled meats and vegetables

Sage is added to brown butter to garnish pumpkin ravioli or gnocchi

The flavor of sage matches up well to Fontina Cheese

Country Sausage with Gravy - especially turkey - needs sage

Sage can be tastefully added to cheese straws or scones

Try adding to roast potatoes

Sage compliments a saltimbocca of beef or chicken made with Provolone and Prosciutto

Let me point out that Sage is known to be an excellent aid in the digestion of heavy and/or fatty foods. I decide to recreate dish that I used to make during my early days as restaurant chef. I was working at Chianti, an Italian Restaurant in Fort Lauderdale. There, I learned how to make a dish called Chicken Scapariello (which we called “Chicken Scap”). Although my updated version is not the classic preparation with sausage and cherry peppers, this sage-infused version worked beautifully.

Correction from The Vanilla Queen on my Vanilla blog

A couple of details regarding vanilla that weren't accurate. Vanilla is never factory farmed. The largest farms might be 20 - 30 hectares; most are 1 or 2 hectares -- about five acres maximum. Vanilla is not planted from seed. They plant cuttings that are trellised up trees, cement posts, or something else to hold them in place. They must have shade from the sun. Vanilla is a very ecologically sustainable crop.

The reason we're losing pure vanilla is because the corporations are using imitation vanilla or the spent ground vanilla beans from the extraction process and calling the products "pure." Prices are extremely low. As vanilla is the most labor-intensive crop in the world, the farmers can't afford to grow it when they get paid so little.

What happened in 2002 is that many of the farmers had torn up their crops because they couldn't afford to keep growing it. Then there were two hurricanes that took out 30% of the Madagascar crop. Mexico had a major flood and Sumatra had a drought. There wasn't enough vanilla.

Everyone planted, of course, when they saw how much vanilla was selling for. There was a glut on the market and the prices collapsed in late 2004/early 2005. Since then the prices have been rock bottom again.

When the farmers can't make enough for their vanilla, they often overpollinate the flowers (and each is hand pollinated) in an effort to make up in volume what they've lost in price. By doing this it stresses the plants. Do it two years in a row and the fusarium, which is in the soil all the time, attacks the weakened plants and kills them. A plantation can be wiped out in a matter of weeks when this happens and the soil must be rested and not used for several years.

If we go into another crisis, the big corporations feel prepared this time and will simply substitute the newer generation of imitation vanilla; some never went back to the pure after the last crisis. And what concerns me is that the public will grow accustomed to the flavor of imitation and won't care that it isn't pure. If the prices continue to be low for the farmers they'll shift to another crop and eventually few, if any, farmers will grow vanilla.

All this is to say, factory farming had nothing to do with it; it's largely about corporate greed yet again!

A World Without Vanilla

I can’t begin to imagine a world without the scent of vanilla. It would be like Spring without flowers or rain with no hope of eventual sunshine and the smell of fresh grass.

Where would peach pie, cupcakes, pudding and angel cake be without vanilla - that sensual aromatic that lures us into sugar consumption? If you have ever smelled crystallized sugar, you have noticed that by itself, it has very little scent. The alchemy of combined sugar and vanilla emerges via the baking process. Exposed to heat, these two elements exude the seductive scent of carmelization, enveloped in an irresistible floral perfume. Can we really be sure that it was the apple that tempted Adam and Eve?

As I have journeyed through this culinary world, I have noticed that with increased frequency, many of our foods are lacking in flavor. A combination of factors have played a role in this, the most prominent one being factory farming. It saddens me even more to realize that our children may be denied the precious experience of savoring the true flavors of real food. For example, my favorite variety of corn, “Silver Queen,” no longer exists, according to the Slow Food organization. Yet, its distinctive flavor continues to linger in my taste memory. Another of my vivid taste memories is of lobster in Bar Harbor, Maine, picked up amongst the seaweed washed ashore from a broken trap after a winter storm. In contrast to that vivid memory, there is hardly a shadow of such flavor in lifeless lobster that comes to us from a supermarket tank. I search in vain for the flavor and texture of a crisp McIntosh apple pulled right off the branch; or a Kathadan potato roasted in a wood fire. And now I worry about my beloved vanilla, the aromatic pleasure that floats out of a plump oily black Tahitian vanilla bean…ah, so fresh and happy in its perfume. But let me move on, for such talk is causing me to feel depressed.

Occasionally, I will explore local “trendy” bakeshops to taste what the bakers are producing. I often ask what type of vanilla is being used in the baking process. More often than not, I am shocked to learn that the baker has simply gone with the cheapest vanilla available. It saddens me that many bakers put cost ahead of quality.

I always try to obtain the very best ingredients for my baking projects. Regardless of a baker’s skill and talent, the end result will only be as good as the ingredients that are used. And, given the alchemy that takes place when vanilla and sugar merge together, why would anyone want to skimp on the vanilla? I am constantly reminded of the prescient words of Alan Watts, who warned us in his chapter, “Murder in the Kitchen,” that the integrity of our food ingredients was in danger – and that was some forty years ago!

As a private chef, I sometimes have had to struggle with clients, who balk at the cost of certain ingredients. The process of becoming blasé about flavor is an insidious one. Over time, our collective taste buds have become increasingly accustomed to flavorless cardboard that giant food factories manufacture. And when we can no longer appreciate the difference, cost has succeeded in a leverage buy-out of our taste sensation.

I suspect that few people know that vanilla was almost wiped off the face of the earth, due to a blight that was not unlike the phylloxera scare of 19th France, which almost wiped out Bordeaux’s wine grapes. In the case of vanilla, it appears to have been over-production (caused by factory-style farming) that almost caused its demise. The orchid seeds were planted too close together, creating an opportunity for a voracious fungus that destroyed nearly eighty percent of the Vanilla crops in Madagascar.

We can only hope that this blight has been successfully eradicated, because it is hard to imagine a world without vanilla.

To obtain the very highest quality vanilla – from a socially conscious and highly knowledgeable purveyor - visit the website of Patricia Rain (the “Vanilla Queen”): www.vanilla.com. Patricia Rain is THE authority on vanilla. At her website, you will find the finest vanilla available, as well as an excellent repository of trusted information.