If you live in or near Kingston, come to Unicorn Bar on Saturday! I’ll be debuting my micro-bakery RAY BAKE — there’ll be Sunflower Butter Rye Chocolate Chip Cookies / Spicy Buckwheat Gingersnaps / Toasted Pecan Linzer Cookies with Tart Cherry Jam / Almond Cardamom Biscuits / Sunny Brownies — all vegan, mostly gf, local + whole ingredients. (I will also be debuting my 6-week-old baby, since she will work the stand with me.)
“For some time now ecologists have been documenting the principle that “you can’t do one thing” — which means that in a natural system whatever affects one thing ultimately affects everything.” - Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
I’ve always believed that anything is a way into everything — that if you tug sufficiently on the thread of any discipline, the whole blanket of the universe will unravel. And so it shouldn’t be surprising that a love of cooking would eventually lead into the land.
As I’ve gone deeper into it over the years, I’ve more and more come to respect what I think of as cooking as a collaboration with my ingredients. I think of Alice Waters’ iconic dessert of a simple, unfussed-with peach, by which she seemed to say that sometimes cooking has more to do with all the work leading up to the kitchen. In baking, the flavor of flour can be the main event, but only if you let it shine and only if the flour comes through a particular path of unfussed-with genetics and growing and careful milling. Being inspired by the flavor of an ingredient makes you want to learn about its origin and path to you, and that opens up curiosity about the entire ecosystem that surrounds it.
Moving up to the Hudson Valley has brought me into closer contact with the ingredients I use. I’m applying to be part of the Kingston Farmers Market to sell vegan baked goods, and one of the questions on the application asks you to list all the ingredients not produced in New York State. It’s an interesting exercise that’s making me look more critically at everything I bake with. It’s not really possible to source every ingredient as locally and ethically as I would like and still break even, but I’ve been comparing maple syrups from nearby sugarhouses, and driving out to Wild Hive Farm, a whole grain mill focused on sustainable agriculture.
“Eating is an agricultural act,” Wendell Berry wrote in one of his most famous essays, though in a more recent New Yorker interview he said he was “sorry about that,” adding that “the context—the circumstances, the place, knowing your place—is all-important.” I wonder if his disavowal is because the phrase is overused, or exploited for marketing, or has come to imply that the responsibility for climate change is personal rather than structural. To me, the original point still holds. Your place is important, and the way you eat, or cook, has a lot to do with your relationship with it. There is responsibility involved in any relationship, but there is also the possibility of inspiration and collaboration and mutual growth.
I’ve decided this year to devote the majority of my newsletter to the study of ingredients: particular ingredients that I love to work with and that are grown in my region in a way that is cooperative with the earth. Sorghum will be first, as I was drawn to this idea by Brooke Singer’s Carbon Sponge, an agro-artistic project focused on soil. After that, I want to look at sunflowers, which are indigenous to North America and whose seeds and oil have largely replaced other ingredients in my pantry. I think amaranth may come next, though I’m not sure, and I’m leaving the rest of the year open to new conversations and inspiration from growers and bakers. With each ingredient topic, I’ll include interviews from others who know a lot more than me and recipes that come out of my experiments in the kitchen.
“We can build one system only within another. We can have agriculture only within nature, and culture only within agriculture. At certain critical points these systems have to conform with one another or destroy one another,” is another line I highlighted in The Unsettling of America. The culture around food right now feels particularly unrooted, since everyone is writing on the Internet for readers who could be anywhere. I think there’s something we can do to nudge food culture a little closer in line with agriculture, and that starts with ingredients. I don’t think that my personal choices will yank the steering wheel of the world in a different direction, but I still want to give care to those choices. If sunflower seeds take less water than almonds to grow, why not use them instead? If diverse grains besides standard wheat are more resilient and improve soil health, why not experiment?
In February’s newsletters, we’ll be hearing from Brooke Singer about sorghum’s role in carbon sequestration, Sarah Magid discussing the digestibility of grains and using sorghum in gluten-free baking, and Katie Phelan on grain regionality and sorghum’s unique baking characteristics. I hope you’ll join me on this journey, and share with anyone you think might want to come along!
What I’m Cooking
Sourdough Protein Bars (v, can be gf)
These “protein bars” (I hesitate to call them “granola bars” because there are no oats) have the satisfying crunch of a Nature Valley bar, but are barely sweet and slightly sour from the sourdough starter discard. If a sour nut bar sounds strange to you, consider a bite of granola with yogurt — the honey, olive oil, and salt offset the tanginess for som…