Professional chefs, just like home cooks, hanker for the freshest produce, the purest protein, the most spectacular fruit.
And boy, do they know what to do with it.
So, now, at the height of the Four Corners’ growing season, you can expect to find tomatoes, corn and peaches – that holy trinity of Western Colorado produce – popping up at your restaurant table.
That amazing caprese salad at Seasons Rotisserie & Grill is made from enormous, locally grown tomatoes, served with purple and green basil and house-made mozzarella with a dash of extra-virgin olive oil and salt.
That savory Mexican snack, elote, is adorning many a plate at Chimayo Stone Fired Oven. Olathe corn (not exactly local, but at 117 miles away, let’s call it regional) is roasted in the oven then sauced with gaujillo aioli, queso fresco, chile powder and lime – a hot dog cart snack, only better.
That trio of peach desserts at Eolus is prepared from famous Palisade peaches (again, regional, not local, but beloved all the same), made into at turns a cheesecake, a sorbet and a fritter. Meet me there now.
While an abundance of local and regionally grown produce is flooding into town these late summer days, it will peter out just as quickly, not to be tasted again for another year.
Restaurant chefs are filling their larders with their personal favorites – earthy eggplant at Linda’s Local Food Café, minerally beets at Fired Up Pizzeria, sweet red onion at the Pie Maker – knowing this moment of plenty is fleeting and fast.
So we foodies better strike while both inspiration and bounty are running high in the kitchens of Durango’s restaurants.
“Ripe tomatoes – there’s nothing better,” said Seasons’ executive chef Dave Stewart. “I love tomatoes because when they’re just right, you just wash them off and put a little salt and pepper on them and that’s it.”
To make the taste last beyond the season, he makes 50-pound batches of tomato paste, freezes it in quart bags and uses it in soups and sauces through the winter.
But those juicy red orbs of summer flavor weren’t always so popular. Americans came late to share the love Europeans lavished on the colorful fruit. Originally cultivated in Peru, early colonists wouldn’t consume a tomato because of their belief that it would turn your blood to acid.
They only came to the party hundreds of years later, when what the French deemed the “apple of love” had been discovered by Spaniards rummaging around in South and Central America, imported to Europe then brought to American shores by Italian immigrants.
But our passion is in full flower now, with tomatoes being the most popular item in any home garden and, these days, on any restaurant plate. Fired Up Pizzeria owner and chef Tad Brown loves his tasty farmers market tomatoes but enjoys them for another reason, too.
“For me, fresh, local and available is super-easy to deal with – you don’t have to walk far to get them. I appreciate that. I’m a lazy guy,” said one of the hardest working chefs in town.
“Also, they taste so good. Our premise is always, ‘Don’t serve anything you wouldn’t put in your own mouth,’” he said.
He’s also enchanted by the robust sweetness of locally grown beets and couldn’t resist creating his own take on the beet-arugula-goat-cheese salad in pizza form, but he goes one better, adding bacon to the mix. You’ve got to love it.
For Linda Illsley, chef and owner of Linda’s Local Food Café, this is the way food is meant to be, fresh from the farm. She actively promotes using produce from local farms and proudly says she hasn’t had a delivery from a commercial supplier in months.
“The eggplant is gorgeous, the basil, the zucchini,” she says, her voice trailing off in reverie. “The lettuces are to die for, everything is to die for. Everything is better, no two ways about it.”
And really, even a Philistine like your brother-in-law can taste the difference between an ear of corn from the Midwest and one from Colorado’s own banana belt, where Olathe sits.
The ears are heavy and thick with neat rows of sunshine-yellow kernels beneath pale silk strands. In the boiling pot or on the grill, they give way to a fresh taste so sweet you can make ice cream out of it, as chef/owner Sean Clark of El Moro Spirits and Tavern, did at the Iron Horse Chef competition.
Chimayo chef and co-owner Michael Lutfy has a way with the indigenous Native American ingredient, using it in a play on every northern Italian’s favorite Sunday dish, risotto. Using the classic technique, he cooks corn kernels and leeks in one ladle at a time of corn stock and white wine, creams some of the mixture and folds it into a coarse, grain polenta, accompanied by grilled corvina and slices of farm-stand tomatoes.
“It comes out like risotto, but it’s made with 100-percent corn,” he said.
But local green vegetables are not be overlooked. Eolus chef and co-owner Chris Crowl can’t get enough of them, whether it’s crisp local bok choy or plump sugar snap peas or hunter’s green kale, the current darling of the vegetable world, full of vitamins A, C and hard-to-get K.
“I love that bok choy, super-packed with nutrients,” he said, fidgeting in the front of the house while dinner prep awaited him in the kitchen. “Carrots are fantastic, too. You just roast them and let the yummy carrot flavor shine through.”
Chefs also sing the praises of locally grown flavoring ingredients like garlic, ramps and onions, which take on a sweeter and more pungent flavor from the Four Corners’ often scorched earth. Even Cortez baker Shani Winer, owner of the Pie Maker, can’t resist. She creates a savory filling for a peach and green chile pie using pine nuts and sweet red onions.
She’s been awash in peaches, and while she loves the golden sweet-tangy fruit (really she does), she can’t wait for late summer’s next big crop – plums.
“We’ve been wanting a fresh fruit tart with pastry cream, and I thought plums would be really beautiful,” she said.
So there you have it – local chefs await local produce just like we do, happy to have their hands on the tastiest tomatoes, the juiciest peaches, the sweetest corn – but here’s the difference: They’re waiting to serve it to you.
phasterok@durangoherald.com
