Caroline Pam and Tim Wilcox, the husband-and-wife owners of the Kitchen Garden farm in Sunderland, Massachusetts, share an earnest and contagious adoration for growing vegetables and cooking food.

“We try to grow as many different colors of everything that we can find,” says Wilcox. “We have five different kinds of carrots and six different colors of potatoes. We try to bring this sense of color and freshness and beauty, and we want people to just be excited about cooking with the things we’re growing.”

Wilcox and Pam founded the farm 10 years ago on one acre of land and have grown it to 40 acres, selling their vegetables at farmers markets through a market-share program and wholesale to restaurants. Yet it is their take on the tangy, garlicky Sriracha sauce, made from chilis grown on the farm, that has developed a devoted following far beyond the Pioneer Valley.

Photo courtesy of the Kitchen Garden

The couple started with experimental 5-gallon batches three years ago, selling bottles only at Kitchen Garden’s annual Chilifest celebration. They have since scaled up production considerably, processing 1,500 pounds of their chili peppers every week through the harvest from early September to mid-October. They sell the sauce, which comes in standard, habanero, and an already sold-out, extra-spicy, ghost pepper edition, to retailers across the Northeast.

“What we love about chilis is that they’re so essential to so many different cuisines around the world, and the chili pepper itself is like a window into those cultures and those cuisines,” says Pam.

The Sriracha, then, is an extension of this ethos. “Tim studied anthropology and I studied literature and, for us, food is culture,” says Pam. “This is just a really fun way to access that and to connect with other people.”

Photo courtesy of the Kitchen Garden

She and Wilcox also have a diverse culinary and agricultural résumé. Pam attended culinary school and worked in kitchens, as a food critic and writer, and as a market manager. Wilcox, a self-taught cook, studied food anthropology at Hampshire College and did his thesis on Tardivo, an elegant looking, hard-to-find radicchio native to Treviso, Italy, that he grows at Kitchen Garden.

Each day, Pam and Wilcox share an hour-long lunch with their crew, which peaks at 12 members during the height of the season. When the crew included a vegan member one year, Wilcox discovered a passion for cooking Asian food, which led to inspiration to grow more unusual vegetables found in Asian cuisine, such as purple daikon, mustard cabbage, and yu choy.

“A big part of our life on this farm is the farm lunch that we do every day,” says Pam. “We sit down together and eat our vegetables. It’s a chance for people to learn ways to describe what these vegetables are like and ensure that we’re really taking pleasure from the vegetables, even during the [work]day.”

While Kitchen Garden Sriracha sold out last year by February, they scaled up production this year and expect it to stay on the shelves longer. A list of local retailers selling the sauce can be found on their website, and it is also available via Etsy.

Photo courtesy of the Kitchen Garden

Photo courtesy of the Kitchen Garden

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The post Some Like it Hot appeared first on Take Magazine.

The most sparsely populated region of the already lightly populated state of Vermont is its northeast corner. Called the Northeast Kingdom, it comprises three counties dense with forests and farms and is bordered by the Green Mountains to the east, the Connecticut River to the west, and the Canadian border to the north.

The southernmost town of Orleans County is Greensboro, where 17 years ago brothers Andy and Mateo Kehler bought a piece of land last farmed by a man named Jasper Hill. They built a creamery next to a barn and spent the next five years learning how to milk cows and make cheese.

Apparently the Kehlers were quick studies. Jasper Hill Farm cheese is already known far outside the Northeast Kingdom, says Zoe Brickley, who was the cave manager and American buyer at Murray’s Cheese in New York City before coming to Greensboro to work for the Kehlers. Jasper Hill cheese has been served at the White House State Dinner with French President Francois Hollande, named one of the top 50 cheeses to eat right now by New York magazine, and given top honors by the World Cheese Awards, the American Cheese Society annual competition, and more.

Photo by Lark Smotherton

The Kehlers founded Jasper Hill Farm and its cheese-aging facility, called the Cellars at Jasper Hill, in order to sustain a living in the Northeast Kingdom. In turn, they have made it their mission to create artisanal cheeses that reflect the landscape they come from. These include raw-milk cheeses such as the dense and creamy Bayley Hazen Blue, the firm Alpine-style Alpha Tolman, and the complex and nuanced Winnimere, which took home the Best in Show award at the 2013 American Cheese Society Competition.

The brothers’ motto of “a taste of place” is evident in the process, as each cheese comes from the milk of a single herd of cows, is produced at one of Jasper Hill’s two creameries, and is aged in a seven-vault, state-of-the-art cellar where cheese from other producers is also aged. But working underneath it all is the microbiology of the pasture and the animals, which can contribute to “more skilled and nuanced cheese [that’s tied to the terroir],” says Brickley.

Cows are fed dry hay, for example, in order to better cultivate lactic acid bacteria, an important aspect of raw milk that catalyzes the coagulation and contributes to more complex flavors. In order to maintain a consistent local supply year-round, the brothers recently completed construction on a hay-drying facility that allows them to harvest their own hay and dry it in about six hours.

The cellar is also home to a microbiology lab, where the long-term goal, Brickley says, “is to understand and make the connection between the milk microbiology and the flavors and textures that we’re able to achieve, so we’re able to create our own cultures in-house and reduce our dependence on commercial cultures for both pasteurized and raw-milk cheeses.”

Photo by Blake Noyes

High-tech-based efforts like this, and high-quality cheeses to match, have driven Jasper Hill to the forefront of the American artisanal cheese market. Next up, Brickley says, is to perfect and improve their cheeses and to grow their business in the Northeast Kingdom with the addition of new small farms.

Jasper Hill cheeses are available online and at specialty grocery stores, including the new Jasper Hill Farm stall at the Boston Public Market.

Top photo by Bob Montgomery

The post A Taste of Place appeared first on Take Magazine.

When I call Oxbow Brewing head brewer Tim Adams, he’s driving back to Maine from Maryland and Pennsylvania with 210 gallons of peach juice in the back of his truck to blend with a sour beer. It’s a long journey for peach juice, but you get the sense that Adams, whose brewery is based in Newcastle, Maine, is used to going the extra mile for his beer.

Photo courtesy of Oxbow Brewing

I’m calling Adams to talk about Saison dell’Aragosta, a gose-style saison made with Maine sea salt and lobsters, that he brewed in collaboration with Giovanni Campari of Italy’s Birrificio del Ducato. You may have heard of it: After the Associated Press ran a short piece about the beer in July, it went viral, a perfect summer odd-news nugget.

For Oxbow, whose farmhouse ales are more nuanced than gimmicky, getting known for a “lobster beer” was somewhat comical. “We’ve never even used spices in our beer, let alone something crazy like lobster,” Adams says.

The beer’s creation was as organic as any, though. Campari and Adams already had planned to brew a gose-inspired saison (a gose is a slightly sour and salty wheat ale) and over a dinner of lobster rolls at Portland’s Eventide, Campari suggested adding lobsters. The next morning, they picked up a dozen lobsters from the local pound and made the beer at their Newcastle brewery housed in an old barn.

Head Brewer Tim Adams | Photo by Andrew Foster

The lobsters were first boiled in a mesh bag in the sweet blonde wort (unfermented beer) until they were cooked perfectly for eating. They picked out the meat for a mid-brew session snack — the best lobster he’s had in his life, Adams says — and saved the rest for dinner lobster rolls. They added the shells to the second batch and aged the beer for about a year before its release last spring.

The lobster character is subtle but present, says Adams, with a touch of brininess and sweetness from the meat. And while the ingredient itself may be atypical for Oxbow, Saison dell’Aragosta falls in line with the company’s brewing philosophy. It’s low-alcohol, at 4.5% ABV, refreshing, delicate, and balanced — “all things we strive for in our beers,” he says. They also try to brew with local ingredients, such as Maine-grown spelt and strawberries, whenever possible.

“We like to use the things that Maine does best in our beers,” Adams says, “and Maine doesn’t really do anything better than lobster.”

While the beer has been sold out since July, Adams says they do plan to brew it again, hopefully in time for next summer.

Photo by Andrew Foster

The post Did Someone Say Lobstah? appeared first on Take Magazine.