Who's Hungry?

IT'S SUMMERTIME, THE SEASON OF GRILLING,

GARDENING, DRINKING, EATING. AND WHILE

WE MAY PLAN OUR DAYS AROUND FOOD,

MANY MIDD ALUMS HAVE PLANNED

THEIR CAREERS AROUND IT.

Perhaps it's the creative bent inherent in a liberal arts education, or maybe it's spending four years in a place surrounded by a landscape rich in nature's bounty. Perhaps it's a combination of the two. Whatever the reason, we've found that a number of you have dedicated your life to raising, growing, selling, pressing, and aging
the food we enjoy so much.

So in the spirit of the season, we've chosen to highlight several Middlebury foodies in the features below, and point out some others in "More for Your Plate." And as an added bonus, we've designed the perfect summer picnic—using all-Middlebury products.

| More for Your Plate | Two Middlebury-crafted Picnics |

Liquid Gold [By Joanne Eglash]

An olive orchard during the growing season resembles a rolling ocean—if the ocean were on fire. At the Willow Creek Olive Ranch in the Adelaida region of California, trees blanket more than 40 acres, stretching to the horizon, and on a windy day, a sea of vibrant-green and flame-yellow leaves shimmers. There’s no prettier sight on Earth, a bearded olive miller declares. Well, he adds, that and a half-ton bin overflowing with freshly picked olives.

Since his family first planted olive trees at Willow Creek a decade ago, Josh Yaguda ’90 has milled and pressed olives culled from the ranch’s 9,000 trees; what began as a hobby has evolved into a bustling operation that produces what Food & Wine magazine calls “one of California’s best olive oils.”

There’s a certain mystique about the best brands of olive oil. Quality olive oil has an exquisite flavor that can transform an ordinary salad or poultry, fish, or meat dish from mundane to magical—some chefs refer to this ingredient as “liquid gold.” Extracting the oil from the humble olive and then transforming the liquid into the golden essence that is bottled and sold requires a good deal of alchemy. But Yaguda makes it sound, well, simple.

“Pick an olive when it’s fresh, and squeeze the oil from it,” he says matter-of-factly. “The way we do it now is almost the same as it’s been done for centuries, except now we use stainless steel equipment instead of an ox, and we use a centrifuge instead of a traditional mat press.”

The olives are washed and then ground into a paste that resembles “gravelly oatmeal,” because the pit is ground up, as well. Once the paste is mixed, it’s spun in a centrifuge, which separates the oil from the rest of the olive, including the pit and the skin and water. In order to create extra-virgin olive oil, the olives must be picked and pressed within 48 hours. At Willow Creek, the process is done within two to four hours.

In addition to the Food & Wine laurel, Pasolivo has been selected as California’s Best New Oil by the Los Angeles Times and received many medals at the annual Olive Oils of the World assembly, including a gold medal for orange-flavored olive oils.

The most challenging aspect of his job, Yaguda says, is changing the public’s views of acceptable olive oil. “What generally passes for olive oil in this country is viewed as lamp oil anywhere else,” he claims. So, part of his goal is to educate and enlighten the nation on just what good olive oil should taste like.To experience the oil, Yaguda recommends involving all your senses by following these steps:

Pour a sample of the olive oil in a small wine glass, cover the top with one hand, and hold the glass in the other hand to warm up the oil.

After a few moments, take a deep sniff from the glass. The pungent, somewhat herblike aroma is “what our whole mill smells like from November 15 to January 15,” he says.

Time to indulge your taste buds. You will experience that pungent, herbish odor as a rich, strong, intense flavor. Yaguda claims that when he samples his olive oil, he can taste the soil and grass of the orchard. “In the early morning when the ground is wet, and the trees are dripping with dew, as soon as the sun hits the ground, the earth throws up this amazing aroma. That’s what our oil tastes like.”

“Once you live on a working piece of land, it’s almost impossible to imagine being anywhere else,” says Yaguda, who has kept his day job as a financial planner, but trades in his blue suits and wing tips for overalls and boots at the start of each winter harvest.

“Sharing this feeling with my family, friends, and customers is what I live for.”

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What Ales Him [By James Meyer ’91]

In a nondescript warehouse on the outskirts of Portland, Maine, Rob Tod ’91 is busy redefining the concept of beer. His microbrewery, Allagash Brewing Company, already produces some of the country’s best Belgian-style beers, a fact backed up by gold medal wins at the Great American Beer Festival in 1998, 2002, and 2005. But according to Tod, the future of Allagash lies inside oak barrels that once contained Jim Beam bourbon and Napa Valley Merlot.

In the world of high-end brewing, barrel-aged beer is the next big thing. After initial fermentation in stainless-steel tanks, the beer is aged in oak casks for anywhere from two months to two years. The oak imparts a vanilla essence, while the barrels’ former liquids seep out to create unique and complex flavors. With a 9 to 11 percent alcohol content, the result is an adult sipping beverage that’s a far cry from keg swill.

Innovation has been part of the company’s mantra since the brewery opened in 1995. By using cork tops on large (25 oz.) bottles, Tod extended the shelf life of his beers. Now, his Allagash White and Tripel Reserve labels can be found in high-end liquor stores and specialty markets nationwide. Allagash beers are brewed in the Belgian style, using unmalted grains, like wheat, instead of barley, fermenting with wild yeasts, and incorporating various spices, like coriander and orange peel. In this niche, Tod discovered a recipe for success. Sales exploded from a mere 120 barrels in 1995 to nearly 5,000 barrels last year. Several of the barrel-aged offerings are back-ordered, and the brewery is profitable.

After graduating from Middlebury in 1991, Tod planned to parlay his geology degree into graduate school, then maybe a college professorship. He spent a couple years in Colorado procrastinating—working at carpentry and skiing—before heading back East in 1993, when he returned to Middlebury and checked into a friend’s lead about a job washing out kegs at Otter Creek Brewing. Otter Creek was growing quickly at the time, and most of the expansion work was handled in-house. “It was everything I wanted to do under one roof. Carpentry, plumbing, electrical, welding, art, and science. I loved that it had the feel of working in a trade.”

After only two days on the job, Tod knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life—to run a brewery of his own. He read every brewing book he could find and enrolled in a two-week lab course before launching his own label in Maine. “I couldn’t wait to finish the brewery, write the recipe, and pour myself that first pint of beer,” Tod recalls. “I thought then I’d be happy and could relax a little. So, I drank the first pint . . . and immediately went back to work.” He regularly logs 12-hour days at the brewery but is never too tired to jump in his truck late at night to deliver kegs to a bartender in need.

During construction of the brewery, Tod installed most of the plumbing and then followed the electrician around until he could do that work himself. Tight budgets inspire creativity, so Tod salvaged Allagash’s hot water tanks from a local dairy farm. He fought the urge to spend extra to purchase a turnkey operation with ready-made recipes and preconstructed equipment. “Plenty of great breweries started out like that, but I saved a lot of money and got uniqueness. You can’t buy that.”

One Allagash fan who applauds Tod’s handcrafted approach is Ted Davidson, sommelier at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston. Allagash is one of the few beers served at the hotel’s five-star restaurant, the Aujourd’hui. “There are a couple of great breweries in the country doing Belgian-style beer well. Allagash is definitely one of them,” Davidson says. He plans to host a tasting dinner pairing Allagash beers with delicacies from the Aujourd’hui menu. Unfortunately, it’s been a slow process getting management approval since Tod and Davidson first cooked up the idea over a year ago.

“I don’t care if it takes three years to happen,” answers Tod with a smile. He’s not going anywhere soon. “I can’t imagine doing anything else in life. I don’t have an exit strategy because I don’t want to exit.”

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What’s in a Name? [by Melissa Pasanen]

A blizzard of delicate paper snowflake cutouts were still hanging from the ceiling of Susan Gallagher Borg’s farmhouse in Lincoln, Vermont, the week before Easter, as she and a friend transplanted herbs.

The pair worked patiently, gently moving young plants that had been nurtured under lights into larger pots to go out into the farm’s solar-powered greenhouse. There they would join rows of orange-juice cartons overflowing with kale and parsley and foil roasting pans bushy with chickweed—experiments, Borg ’68 explained, in feeding the farm’s chickens with fresh greens throughout the winter.

Like making the snowflakes, which Borg constructed during the long winter, transplanting is slow and delicate work. “I wish I could get my speed up,” commented her friend. “Care is more important to me than speed, paying attention to the plants,” Borg reassured her. “Take the time. That makes a difference in the world.”

It was paying attention to the plants that brought Borg and her partner, Dick Nessen, to the ramshackle former dairy hill farm in 1998 when they were looking for a place to expand her work growing culinary and medicinal herbs. Even for Vermont, the spot has an exceptionally short growing season, but when Borg walked around the property, she found bountiful wild herbs—mint, motherwort, angelica and wild ginger. The Weed Farm was born.

Borg has developed a brisk business selling organic seeds and plants by mail order and over the Internet, and she and Nessen also grow vegetables and raise chickens. But Borg is particularly fond of what others dismiss as annoying weeds. A weed is just “a plant out of place,” she said. “All herbs are weeds somewhere.” She teaches workshops on herbal remedies, teas, and oils, and nothing goes to waste on the Weed Farm. Borg and Nessen eat chickweed and comfrey in salads; drink ground ivy, blessed thistle, and yarrow in medicinal teas; steam nettles and burdock leaves into tender greens; and feed evening primrose to the chickens. “Anything gets counted as an herb if it has a use,” she often says.

Borg originally came to Vermont from Wisconsin as a summer camper. At Middlebury, she studied music, but gave up an opera career when she found it to be “a pretty cutthroat business”—clearly not her style. Back in Vermont, she became involved with a preschool and started a school garden “so the kids would know something about where their food came from.” She continues to teach music and direct a local chorus, but farming has slowly evolved to become a key piece of her life.

“I love making good food for me and for anyone else who wants me to make it for them,” Borg concluded, as she gently pressed soil over microscopic seeds in her kitchen. “Growing medicinal herbs and growing good food is all part of being healthy. It’s important for me to be doing work that doesn’t just make a living, but is a way of life.”

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Mmmm, Cheese [by Melissa Pasanen]

It’s the romantic dream of many corporate high achievers: jump off the treadmill and find a pastoral corner of the world in which to become a farmer, a carpenter, a natural baby-food maker.

For John Putnam ’79, who spent close to two decades as a commercial litigator in Boston and New Hampshire, that dream became a reality in 2002, when he and his wife Janine turned a former dairy farm in southern Vermont back into a working agricultural enterprise and created an award-winning farmstead cheese.



While Putnam is thrilled to have shifted gears, he’s the first to say that the demands of the barn and the cheese house are as consuming in many ways as the courtroom. When cows need to be milked, you must milk them. When the milk is ready to be made into cheese, it won’t wait. “That’s the schedule. No time off. No vacation,” he says. “I missed my 20th College reunion,” he adds ruefully, “because I had to milk.”

Farmstead cheese is special, he explained recently on ABC television’s Money Matters : “Everything to do with the cheese is ours. It’s our feed, our cows, our milk. The milk travels all of about 50 feet from the barn to the cheese house. We do it all right on the farm.”

All those pieces make for a lot of work, but the Putnams clearly love what they do—and they are very good at it. In less than five years, their Tarentaise cheese has accrued many accolades, including best farmstead cow’s-milk cheese at the prestigious American Cheese Society annual awards; praise in the New York Times , Food Arts , and the Boston Globe ; and a spot on Saveur ’s list of 50 best American cheeses. In his latest book, Cheese: A Connoisseur’s Guide to the World’s Best, Max McCalman of Artisanal in New York City describes Tarentaise as “a dense, complex cheese, smooth . . . with a subtle nutty flavor that establishes a large, lingering presence on the palate.”

Putnam credits his professional training with helping on the cheese-making road to success: “I approached it like a lawyer—with lots of research,” he says. The couple analyzed the weather and the landscape of their small North Pomfret hill farm and compared them with regions in the Alps. With a cheese book as their guide and four kids in tow, the family traveled to Europe looking for their cheese destiny. They found it in the Savoie, where Tarentaise cows graze on Alpine grass and flowers to produce milk for aged, raw-milk cheeses called Beaufort and Abondance, similar in style to Gruyère.

Back in Vermont, with detailed notes gathered from that and subsequent trips (they spent more than 50 days meeting with Alpine cheese-makers and buying equipment) along with the exceptionally rich milk of their 20 organically raised Jersey milkers, and a custom-built copper vat from Switzerland, the Putnams started making cheese. “You gather all the little pieces, like putting on a trial. You’ve done the work,” Putnam says with satisfaction as he heaves an eight-month-old, caramel-golden round of cheese onto a cutting board and slices off a hunk. One delicious bite is all the evidence he needs to present.

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Where the Buffalo Roam [By Melissa Pasanen]

George Phinney ’68 admits he didn’t know much about farming when he bought a farm in Shoreham three years ago. Phinney had recently sold a small chain of paint and home decorating stores when he had the opportunity to buy the 360-acre property nestled between the Pinnacle thrust and Delano Hill. “I knew nothing about farming then,” he says with a smile, “and I know just a little bit more now.”

What Phinney did know was that if he didn’t buy the property, it was at risk for development. Its varied topography also reminded him a little of Montana, where he and his wife, Jane Belcher Phinney ’71, a school principal, spent a number of summers. After buying the property and naming it Apple Ridge Farms, Phinney and a team of workers set about renovating the historic barn and saving the orchard. Then they considered what to raise on the farm’s rolling green pastures.

“It was not really a conscious decision,” Phinney reflected as he sat in the second-floor office above the barn, which houses four Clydesdales along with some other horses. “I had seen lots of buffalo in Montana, and I thought they would look cool here. And I also knew about the health benefits of eating buffalo meat and thought that was something we could get into.”

Starting with a dozen North American buffalo, Phinney ventured into bison ranching. “They’re real easy to take care of,” the non-farmer says. “You just leave them alone.” He now has more than 200 bison, and these impressive icons of the American frontier, with their regal, shaggy profiles and curved horns, grace the Vermont landscape like they’ve always been there.

“Apparently, the grass here is better for them than Montana grass, and there’s more of it,” notes Phinney. “You hear how the buffalo roam, but that’s because they were searching for food. Here they don’t have to.”

Raising buffalo has also proven to be a savvy marketing move. Nationally, the meat has grown in popularity thanks to its relatively low-fat and high-protein nutritional profile, and vocal supporters like media mogul Ted Turner. Apple Ridge can barely keep up with demand from local specialty markets and restaurants.

Phinney hopes that Apple Ridge can become a case study in how low-impact agriculture can work in Vermont. In addition to growing apples and raising buffalo, he would like to make the picture-perfect spot available for events like the graduation bash he hosted for his youngest son, Brian ’05, and his hockey teammates last year. There are snowshoe and hiking trails to explore, Clydesdale-pulled sleigh or wagon rides, and plenty of ingredients for a healthy barbecue.

From a log cabin perched above the orchard with a spectacular view of the landscape and buffalo below, he adds, “I really like coming out here and seeing how nice this land looks and how we helped preserve it and keep it a working farm. We think others might enjoy it too.”

Kitchen Staff: