Evolving Farmers Markets - How Local Is Local?

Farmers market or food court?

Correction to This Article
This article about "value-added" products at winter farmers markets incorrectly suggested that pasta from Smith Meadows Farm may not be produced with local ingredients. Nancy Polo, manager of Smith Meadows Kitchen, said the pasta is prepared with the Berryville, Va., farm's own eggs and with flour from Pennsylvania.

By Tim Carman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 12, 2011;

The minute Fred Jackson steps away from our interview to serve a customer at his barbecue stand at the Smart Market in Gainesville, another vendor approaches me, her face tight and unhappy. She wants a moment of my time on this Sunday in January. When I finally make my way to her, she's almost popping at the seams with frustration.

She thinks I'm spending way too much time with Jackson, who sells some tasty smoked meats under the banner of Uncle Fred's BBQ Smoke Shack. And with Abbie and Ron Pence, a pair of semi-retirees who deal bags of kettle corn from their country kitchen on wheels. And with Tommy Venable, a former graphic designer with a stylish goatee who has found a second career hawking homemade salsas under the brand TommyV's.

As she talks, the vendor and I are standing in the middle of a circle of temporary tents pitched on this damp, wickedly cold patch of concrete in the Virginia Gateway shopping center parking lot. She admits that today is the first day she realized how few farmers are at the market: The kitchen dwellers - the barbecue man, the corn poppers and salsa pusher among them - have the land dwellers outnumbered by more than 2 to 1. She finds it appalling that a farmers market such as this can have so few of them. "You're looking at a food court here," says the vendor, a farmer, who requests anonymity lest she lose her spot at the market.

Whether she knows it or not, this vendor has hit upon one of the hot-button issues of winter farmers markets: How far are they willing to stretch beyond the farm to include "value-added" products? That question, of course, immediately raises two more: What exactly are "value-added" products, and who's reaping the benefits of all this added value?

The first question is slightly easier to answer.

As commonly defined, they are products created from raw agricultural ingredients that then have a higher market value. That definition is broad enough to cover both goat cheese and garlic pickles and even goods that have nothing to do with eating, such as soap and wool and tanned sheepskins. Then again, one market manager told me that, to her mind, a value-added product is simply one prepared in a kitchen, which would exclude soap and the like but would include Jackson's wood-perfumed 'cue, the Pences' salty-sweet kettle corn and Venable's line of gourmet salsas.

Definition aside, who benefits from added value? Some managers and vendors will tell you that everyone does. The farmers make more money by turning surplus summer inventory into entirely new items for the winter. In turn, the winter markets, those once-barren outposts yielding a skeleton selection of greens and cold-storage apples, now bulge with pastas, sauces, jams, jellies, breads, pies, soups, stews and other prepared foods. The public then has more reasons to venture into the icy streets for sustenance.

"Some people get real tired of seeing the kale and the winter squash and big greens and sweet potatoes," notes Bernadine Prince, co-director of the nonprofit FreshFarm Markets, which operates two year-round markets, one at Dupont Circle and another in Silver Spring. "If you only have one or two things down there [at winter markets], people are not going to come. You need to have that density of product."

The issue is, as the squawky vendor noted on that drizzly cold Sunday in Gainesville, when does a director begin to alter the very concept of a farmers market by including vendors with no connection to local animals or the region's soil? When does a "producers-only" market, a trendy term managers toss around to guarantee that no wholesale produce creeps onto stands, begin to expand its definition to include non-farmers? Some market directors, sensitive to that conundrum, have developed rules to make sure value-added vendors don't wander too far afield.

"We try to encourage anybody who's doing a value-added product, whether it be a farmer or someone like Chris Hoge [from Chris' Marketplace] who's making crab cakes and empanadas, that they be sourcing from local farmers and that they actually let us know who those farmers are," says FreshFarm's Prince.

Prince realizes that some products, such as the breads from Atwater's Bakery or the pasta from Smith Meadows Farm, probably will never meet that standard, so there is flexibility built into the guidelines. All value-added goods, she notes, must be made from scratch and prepared with "locally sourced ingredients when reasonable and possible within season."

Other directors waive the local-ingredient requirement in favor of other goals. "We are not nearly so strict as, say, FreshFarm," says Jean Janssen, founder and director of Smart Markets Inc., which runs two year-round markets. "We do not require them to use only locally grown ingredients or products, because then they would be out of business in the winter, too. . . . And part of our mission is to be an incubator for small food producers."

What these varying rules have created, then, is a kind of hierarchy of value-added vendors. At the top of the social order is someone like Mark Toigo, the owner of Toigo Orchards in Shippensburg, Pa. His family farm has been transforming raw ingredients into ciders and jams and butters since the early 1970s. Toigo still remembers when he'd walk into the house as a child and see his mom surrounded by "hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pints of strawberry jam."

"I thought that was kind of normal growing up," he says, laughing at his own memory.

These days, Toigo is a value-added behemoth, with at least a dozen products for sale, from bourbon peaches to bloody mary mixes to basic pasta sauces, some of which are sold both at farmers markets and at retailers such as Whole Foods Market. "We're not burning down doors with our product at the farmers market," Toigo says. "It just helps; every little thing we do helps enough to keep us out there."

Because of his high sales volume, Toigo doesn't prepare his foods on the farm. It'd be too costly and too labor-intensive. Instead, he ships his raw ingredients to a small regional processor who handles everything. Jim Huyett, on the other hand, has built a commercial kitchen on his 245-acre Sunnyside Farm and Orchard in Charles Town, W.Va., to get his own slice of the value-added market.

"Think about it," Huyett tells me on one bone-cold Sunday at the Dupont market. "Before we started [the value-added items], you had to make enough money during the summer to support yourself year-round. That's difficult."

Huyett no longer has to rely on his limited palette of muted-colored vegetables to get him through the winter. His kitchen now turns out an array of soups, stews, dips, sauces, cookies and even mac 'n' cheese to sell at farmers markets. He figures half of his winter income is generated by his value-added products, all of which include local ingredients. "Either I'm growing it myself," he says about his ingredients, "or I'm purchasing it from another local grower."

Even operations as small as Terrapin Station Herb Farm can thrive in the value-added market. The seven-plus-acre farm in York Springs, Pa., cranks out dozens of products, from catnip and zucchini cupcakes to jams and cranberry ketchup. "If it doesn't sell at market the first time around, it gets frozen or turned into a jam or jelly or some other value-added product. Then we'll have it for the winter and after the growing season," says general manager Carl Purvenas-Smith, who sells at the Clarendon Farmers Market and the USDA Winter Farmers Market, both on Wednesdays.

The value-added market has become so lucrative for Terrapin Station that Purvenas-Smith figures 60 to 70 percent of its products are now prepared items vs. freshly harvested ones. "We find that we make a lot more money on the value-added than we do on the just the regular [product]," he says.

The next tier down in the value-added hierarchy includes chefs like Nathan Anda of Red Apron Butchery and Stefano Frigerio of the Copper Pot Food Co., who are not farmers but who have developed relationships with farmers. The chefs use local ingredients to produce charcuterie (Anda) or pastas and jams and sauces (Frigerio) to sell at local markets.

Then there's someone like Venable, the man behind TommyV's Salsa. He's not exactly a farmer and he's not exactly a chef, but his business incorporates elements of both professions. He grows his peppers indoors with an aquaponics system, an unusual combination of aquaculture and hydroponics. He then uses his chili peppers to concoct custom-made salsas, including the guilty-pleasure Fugosa, a blend of tomatoes, jalapenos and liquid smoke, and his tart, pureelike Cran Slam'n, a cranberry salsa with jalapenos, evaporated cane juice, mango and orange juice.

In season, Venable says, he might buy tomatoes from local farmers, but obviously some of his ingredients can arrive only from locales far away.

It's not clear where Abbie and Ron Pence get their kernels for popping. It's a trade secret and a secret to their success. They've been popping kettle corn for 12 years, ever since they both retired from their previous jobs to produce these plastic bags of popped corn, which are absolutely addictive. The Haymarket couple recently moved into local farmers markets after many grueling years of working state fairs.

Then there's Fred Jackson, the smoke expert. Whenever he appears at the Smart Market, Jackson buys mostly from Angelic Beef, the Fauquier County operation that produces naturally raised, hormone-free beef from Piedmontese cattle. When pressed, though, Jackson admits that he turns to giant food-service providers to supply meat for his catering events, which is perhaps why some at the farmers market think he uses Sysco-brand beef and pork in Gainesville, too. But on this Sunday, the first one of 2011, it seems that Jackson is generating an even bigger controversy than the source of his proteins. He has rattled a neighbor at the Virginia Gateway shopping center.

"The [shopping center] property manager got a call from Ruby Tuesday, and they were not happy that we were there with Uncle Fred," Smart Market director Janssen says a few days later. "They considered that competition."

So the value-added barbecue vendor has, on this day at least, become a liability. The Smart Market will be forced to relocate to another spot in the shopping center, down near Target, where the vendor tents are not so well protected from the winter winds.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/12/AR2011011200232.html

Winter Street Food In DC

I saw the Red Hook truck a few days ago - I still can't see standing in line in any weather to pay that much for a sandwich.


Food trucks fight a cold economy

By Tim Carman
Wednesday, December 22, 2010; E03

Back before our weather became a blunt instrument, battering us with its remorseless chill, the Red Hook Lobster Pound truck enjoyed a customer demand that had the depth and urgency of a Depression-era bread line. This month, however, the hungry masses that once huddled around this Maine seafood shack on wheels evaporated when a cold front dropped temperatures into a range better suited for antarctic mammals, not patrons of Washington street food.

Still, Red Hook's sales in December have not declined dramatically compared with sales in the warmer months, says Leland Morris, president of Red Hook's D.C. operations. He has a theory about that. "What I've noticed is strategy," Morris says. "The line comes in waves now. . . . People watch from their offices, and when they see the line shorten, they'll move down."

Morris offers the explanation with such nonchalance that it has the ring of truth. Two days later, as snow starts to blanket the District's streets for the first time this season, several customers outside the TaKorean taco truck on L Street NW confirm Morris's theory.

"I work right up there," says Daniel Mandell, pointing to an office building in the 2000 block of L Street. "I can see how long the line is. I waited until it was more reasonable."

It would appear the District's emerging food-truck market could use more persistent patrons like Mandell. If you discount Morris's happy accounting - and even the Red Hook president will admit, when pressed, that the cold has had a "slight impact" on sales - many of the mobile vendors are hurting this month. Operators of four trucks say their sales have dropped by 40 to 50 percent from peak numbers. "My guess is most of these trucks are going to be losing money in winter," says Justin Vitarello, founder of the Fojol Bros., whose own rolling empire is earning about 60 percent of its summer sales.

So why do these chuck wagons continue to roll during winter? Simple: They have bills to pay, such as commissary and vehicle storage fees, and people to keep employed. "The reason is to make a living," says Mike Lenard, owner of TaKorean, "and for the people who work for us to make a living."

It might not be clear from the streets, but mobile vendors such as Vitarello and Lenard serve a different kind of seasonal cuisine, the kind whose revenues fluctuate dramatically with the seasons. The businesses that occupy this unusual category typically have been ice cream parlors, frozen yogurt shops and the like, but with more four-wheel eateries roaming the streets, the group now includes food trucks, no matter what they serve. What's more, their seasonal economic disorder is complicated by something that often gets romanticized by the media: Many food truck operators have no experience in the hospitality business.

The D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs has long known that. One DCRA official, in fact, told me last week that, historically, almost nine of every 10 new street vendors have no business experience. They just have an idea - and ambition. That can be a problem when it comes to budgeting for, and surviving through, the lean seasons, when revenues shrink but expenses don't. Starting early next year, though, the DCRA will launch its Small Business Resource Center, a private-public partnership that will bring together local nonprofit and economic development groups to help new entrepreneurs map out their future and perhaps even get them through tough times.

Coming to grips with the limitations of mobile vending is enough to make the average food truck owner issue a small, bitter laugh. Why not? As the hired guns for bricks-and-mortar restaurants continue lobbying the D.C. Council for ways to neutralize what they say are the food trucks' "unfair advantages," these street operators continue to contend with elements that few restaurateurs ever face. Such as workplaces where the temperature is only a few degrees warmer than the air outside. Or customers who don't want to feel their faces turn numb just for the opportunity to buy lunch.

One of the recurring issues for truck operators during winter - aside from updating their menus with soups, chowders and other warming dishes - is the status of their ordering windows. Should they remain open, which allows the frigid air to whoosh into the vehicle, or should they be shut when no one's in line? It would seem like a no-brainer, right? Shut that sucker tight and stay warm. But operators say it's not that simple.

"If the window is closed, the message you're sending is that you're closed for business," says Kristi Whitfield, co-owner of Curbside Cupcakes. Only the most seasoned food truck customer or someone seriously hankering for a cupcake will dare approach a closed window, she says, a fact that can affect the bottom line.

For that reason, most truck workers keep the window ajar, which forces them to find other ways to seek and retain heat. Most operators adopt Whitfield's approach of dressing in layers. On a particularly frigid Saturday this month, Whitfield swears she sported six layers of clothing under her apron (although she admits her wardrobe was largely dictated by the fact that she also had to work the downtown outdoor holiday market). Those extra garments can have their drawbacks. Ask Fojol's Vitarello, who had to affix his trademark fake mustache over a ski mask.

Others, such as Stephan Boillon, the owner and chef of El Floridano, rely on the heat generated by griddles and steam tables to keep warm. Boillon's case might be the most extreme. Because he installed solar panels to run his kitchen, allowing him to turn off the truck's engine and save fuel costs, Boillon cannot rely on the vehicle's in-dash heater to provide extra comfort. It can get cold fast in his truck, but the owner has devised a solution: He shuts off the kitchen's exhaust fan for a couple of minutes. "It heats right up," he says.

Such improvisations could help these curbside restaurateurs survive the coming months. They might even help them thrive, if you consider Vitarello's story. Last winter, during Snowmageddon, the Fojol Bros. truck found a way to navigate the clogged streets between its Hyattsville commissary and Dupont Circle, where it was one of the few operations selling food to the snowbound. Vitarello hawked 120 meals during one lunch. "The winter can play to your advantage," he says.

Of course, what should not be lost in this discussion of food truck operators braving the cold is the fact that they are not the first street vendors to suffer through Washington's winter. They're just the ones who attract the attention of media-savvy foodies. Vendors such as Ethiopia Asreshegn were huddling against the elements long before the gourmet food trucks stormed into town. Asreshegn has been squatting at the corner of 12th and L streets NW for a dozen years now. She operates a hot dog cart, that clunky symbol of street food's past.

Inside her cart, Asreshegn has sealed herself off from the cold, her window shut tight. No one, I'd venture to guess, thinks she's closed for business. I ask her how much she has made today while sitting inside her frigid tin can, her skin buried underneath three sweaters, three pairs of pants and a puffy parka.

"$50," Asreshegn says. So why do you do it? Why not just stay home and stay warm? Her answer mirrors those of her motorized peers. "I don't have a choice," she says. "I have a family."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/17/AR2010121706633.html


http://takorean.com/

Indian Veg On K Street

I never tried Nirvana but wish I had.



Dosas to order at Nirvana Express in International Square

By Tom Sietsema
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 21, 2010; 12:16 PM

Vegetarians, and others of us who like to eat lower on the food chain on occasion, felt abandoned when the family-run Nirvana went dark on K Street NW this past summer. Where would we go for our dosa fix?

Not far, as it turns out. Four months before the Indian establishment closed, husband-and-wife owners Jawahar and Doler Shah quietly opened Nirvana Express, a small counter in the International Square food court serving lunch Mondays through Fridays.

There are no seats. Orders can be eaten at one of the dozens of nearby tables in the basement setting near the Farragut West Metro.

The abbreviations at Express continue with the selections. Unlike Nirvana, this kitchen doesn't serve anything as elaborate as banana peppers stuffed with a paste of coconut, coriander and mint. But the Express peddles those crepelike dosas, which you can watch being made to order on the griddle behind the counter. Spinach dotted with cubes of house-made cottage cheese is one of several agreeable ways to fill a floppy, hubcap-size envelope of cooked-till-crisp batter made from rice and bean flours. (You can get a dosa stuffed with falafel, but I find that the fritters taste flat.)

Two bucks buys you a samosa the size of a baseball; beneath its crisp shell is a comforting core of potatoes and peas. For $7, you can get a combination plate: your choice of a curry with basmati rice, the flatbread known as chapati and the yogurt dip raita. The last part of the deal tames the heat you might pick up in the zesty pumpkin and eggplant curries, two of the entrees I look forward to seeing on the rotating menu at this Indian outpost.

Carl Domingo, the former manager of Nirvana who holds the same job here, says that "we were doing well" at the now-closed restaurant.

But the Shahs were not, at least physically. Both are in India for a break, he says.

They plan to return to Washington next month, after which they hope to begin serving breakfast at their carryout and (yes!) open something bigger than Express but smaller than Nirvana, in either Dupont Circle or Capitol Hill.

1825 I St. NW. 202-223-0123. dcnirvana.com. Lunch combinations and dosa wraps, $5.50 to $8.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/21/AR2010122102787.html

Hannukah Donuts!!!!!

Another miracle of Hanukkah: Fried jelly doughnuts
Customers rush and gush over Md. kosher bakery's holiday treat

By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 11, 2009

In sitcom Boston, barflys have their Cheers. In Kemp Mill, the heart of the region's Orthodox Jewish community, the observant have the Kosher Pastry Oven.

A place where headgear is a baseball cap with "Nationals" in Hebrew lettering or a yarmulke knitted with American flags. Where there's a spare prayer book on the counter if you forget every word to a particular meal-related blessing. Where everyone knows your name.

And where, during the holiday of Hanukkah, which begins at sundown Friday, your sunny little strip mall cafe transforms into a mob scene. That's because the Kosher Pastry Oven has some of the region's best-known sufganiyot, a fried jelly doughnut that has migrated from Israel to America as a standard treat for the eight-day holiday.

Starting in a trickle earlier this week and building to a gush Friday, Jewish people have been coming to the Pastry Oven, where the subject of holiday food triggered debate about linguistics, religion and family.

"The story behind the sufganiyot is a military one," stockbroker Lew Sosnowik said Thursday morning to Joel Davis, his daily synagogue-and-breakfast partner, of Hanukkah's historic meaning.

"But the victory was a spiritual one!" insisted Davis, an accountant.

"Every story is dependent on the raconteur," Sosnowik added while a woman told a clerk that she was about to drive her order to her children in New York City. It's not unusual for sufganiyot from the Pastry Oven to be taken aboard planes bound for California or Florida.

In the back, order slips were being added to the dozens already taped to the fridge: for 100 sufganiyot, three dozen, 18 (a lucky number in the Jewish faith), 36 (double that), in Hebrew, English and Spanish for the different staff. Up front, at the counter, trays full of sufganiyot kept replacing empty ones. Discussion among customers bounced from the etymology of the word (biblical Hebrew?) to the Hanukkah food best-known to Americans: the latke, or potato pancake.

Both are not coincidentally dependent on oil, which is central to the miracle at the center of the Hanukkah story: a lamp used to rededicate the Temple in the 2nd century B.C. had only enough oil to burn for one day, yet it burned for eight.

As President Obama appeared on a television in the background, giving his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, customers debated: Can latkes be made in butter, instead of oil? Or does that change their meaning? ("It's not a latke," tsked Davis.) And what about the sufganiyot fillings: Are the caramel and cream varieties you can get easily in Israel or New York better than the classic jelly?

At the helm of the scene is owner Arie Eloul, a Moroccan Israeli pastry chef with an impish smile and knowledge of kashrut, or Jewish dietary law, so deep even those in the most Orthodox garb ask guidance from a guy who drives on the Sabbath (which you're not supposed to do) to synagogue (when he goes).

Eloul expects to sell 10,000 sufganiyot (at $1.25 apiece), and places including Shalom Kosher Market in Wheaton and KosherMart in Rockville are also doing brisk business.

Meanwhile, regulars popped in and out of the kitchen to say hello to Eloul and his wife, Shula. Despite a dinner menu that features $24 sea bass and homemade tiramisu, the vibe at the Pastry Oven is informal. Although the posted opening is 8 a.m., by 7:30 tables are already populated by regulars including Sosnowik and Davis, as well as writer Marla Fogelman of Silver Spring, the New York-bound woman who meets a group of other female writers there each week.

Holidays -- and holiday food -- of course mark the passage of time, and customers talked Thursday about rituals changed with spouses passed on, children scattered. Hanukkah celebrations that might once have been at home with family are now at synagogue dinners with friends.

For Jerry Sandberg the Pastry Oven's jelly sufganiyot are a fine, if limited, alternative to the variety he gets in Brooklyn, where he grew up and where his relatives still live. That said, he knows everyone at Eloul's and comes every other day during Hanukkah.

"The only down side here," he said Thursday, "is you've got to make sure you get here before they run out."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/10/AR2009121004167.html