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  • From: Aozotorp AT aol.com
  • To: market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Ohio farm plants and plucks the best for star chefs
  • Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2000 20:43:44 EDT


http://www.bouldernews.com/food/stories/30fprod.html

Ohio farm plants and plucks the best for star chefs
By Jane Snow
Knight Ridder Newspapers


The top chefs in the country beat a path to Lee Jones' battered old door.

The Erie County, Ohio, farmer ushers the highfalutin fellows along a rutted
gravel driveway and around back, where rows of greenhouses and a few acres of
fields hold the jewels that will show up on the nation's most precious
plates.

For about 12 years, Jones has produced teensy lettuces, heirloom tomatoes,
unusual pinkie-size potatoes and a host of other gourmet fruits and
vegetables for a veritable who's who of the food world.

Julia Child calls and places orders. Alain Ducasse, the French three-star
chef who just opened Manhattan's most buzzed-about restaurant, visits and
tramps through the fields. So do chefs from Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, the
Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., Cafe Boulud in Manhattan and
Norman's in Coral Gables, Fla.

While chefs in Boulder and other cities buy gourmet produce from local
farmers, Farmer Jones Farm near Sandusky, Ohio, is almost unique in the food
world. Most gourmet farmers concentrate on a relatively small number of
produce varieties or herbs. Some artisanal cheeses such as Haystack Mountain
Goat Dairy in Niwot develop clients outside their immediate regions.

But Jones is a veritable supermarket of high-end produce with 600 items, and
everything is cutting-edge.

Have you ever heard of herbal mesclun mixes? Filament-like ginger roots? You
soon will, thanks to Jones.

"We'd like to say we saw this coming," Jones says. "We were just in the right
place at the right time, and we're extremely blessed."

Tragedy got the Jones family into the gourmet produce business. In 1980,
Jones' parents lost the family farm to a hailstorm. The crops were ruined,
bank loans were called in and the land and equipment were sold at auction.

Jones was 20 at the time. His brother, Bob, was 16. The boys pitched in to
help their parents start over with leased fields. They planted a truck garden
and sold their produce at farmers' markets, including West Side Market in
Cleveland.

At the market, the family met Cleveland chefs who were interested in fancier
stuff than field tomatoes and eggplants. Jones began growing some items for
Sammy's restaurant in Cleveland. Then Players restaurant began ordering
produce, and other restaurants followed.

"We had a family vote . . . and decided we were going to go strictly with the
restaurant business," Jones recalls.

The restaurants initially were all in Ohio, but now most are elsewhere. Jones
says few area restaurateurs want and are willing to pay for the top-quality
items he grows. The produce is shipped overnight with ice packs to keep it
fresh.

"Our goal is to have the product on the plate in 18 hours from harvest,"
Jones says.

This commitment to quality is why chefs such as Thomas Keller of the French
Laundry in Napa Valley, Calif., buy from Jones rather than farmers nearby.

Lettuces and herbs are harvested by hand with scissors. Produce is picked
only after an order is placed, and it is picked to the specifications of the
chef. On one day last week, three workers walked through a field of bright
yellow Swiss chard, stooping here and there to pick a single leaf by hand.

"We'll go out with a ruler or a tape measure and if they want them 3 inches,
that's what we'll pick," Jones says.

The produce is washed by hand, too, and packed in containers that prevent it
from being crushed. One or two orders are opened at the end of each day to
double-check for quality and content.

Employees receive bonuses for getting it right. Last year, 39 percent of the
farm's profits were returned to employees as bonuses.

"We're really shooting for perfection," Jones says.

Jones won't divulge what his fruits and vegetables cost. He doesn't even tell
the chefs initially. They get a weekly newsletter without prices.

In the shipping shed, he holds up a small package of threadlike garlic roots.
The 2-ounce package sells for $20.

"We target chefs who understand the level of quality we're trying to do and
who are able to market that," Jones says.

The chefs are drawn to Jones by the double whammy of flavor and whimsy.

The whimsy is found in unusual products, such as cucumber blossoms; the
garlic roots, which are fried and sprinkled over entrees; and the hops
threads, popcorn shoots and ginger shoots he is experimenting with now.

Jones doesn't grow mesclun lettuce mixes anymore — the baby lettuces served
as salad in many fancy restaurants — because they're passe, he says. He now
grows the even tinier micro-greens, which he helped pioneer with chef
Trotter.

Jones was invited to dine last year at the trendy Tru's restaurant in
Chicago, which also is a customer. His wife, Mary, ordered soup. It came in a
bowl placed inside a larger bowl in which a live tiger shark was swimming.
The little fish circled around and around his wife's soup. Jones says his
unusual products are intended to have a similar impact.

"Everyone wants to taste something new and more exciting," Jones says.

At the restaurants Jones caters to, they also want to taste something very
good. So Jones grows vegetables and fruits for flavor, not for how easily
they can be shipped.

Each winter, Jones' wife and brother comb the Internet for heirloom seeds.
They grow 56 varieties of peppers, including Jingle Bells — bell peppers the
size of golf balls in rainbow hues. Eggplants come in 16 varieties, from
2-inch-long lavender globes to pure white Thai.

Jones' father, also Bob, flew to Iowa one summer to taste 100 kinds of
heirloom tomatoes at an old-fashioned farm. He winnowed the choices to the 65
kinds of tomatoes they grow now.

Everything is picked young, at the peak of flavor.

"Once (produce) reaches full maturity, the flavor changes. And it's all about
flavor," Jones says.

Growing such flavorful produce is not easy. Jones has 70 acres and 65
full-time employees, compared with a nearby farm of 3,500 acres that employs
just two.

The antique varieties of vegetables that Jones grows bruise easily, so they
cannot be cultivated with high-tech machines. Also, Jones uses no pesticides.

Workers cultivate the land with 50-year-old equipment, including a rusty John
Deere tractor and a two-pronged cultivator that travels at walking speed up
and down the rows.

Tiny, tender potatoes are dug with a 100-year-old potato digger that gently
lifts the potatoes to the top of the soil. A museum curator once saw the
potato digger in the field, knocked on the door and asked to buy it for the
museum's agricultural collection.

"I told her, 'Ma'am, we're still using that,'" Jones says, laughing.

The result, though, is potatoes that burst with flavor, and tomatoes that
taste like concentrated sunshine.

Jones is proud of what he does, and says he wouldn't go back to growing
truck-garden produce for a bundle of money — which he could use, judging from
the condition of his sagging, ramshackle farmhouse.

No, despite what Jones charges for the produce, he isn't getting rich.

"Have you ever run into a farmer yet who's making money?" Jones asks. "I'd
hate to be the first farmer to break that trend.

"But it's rewarding in different ways. It's not all for the money."



August 30, 2000





  • Ohio farm plants and plucks the best for star chefs, Aozotorp, 08/30/2000

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