Chez Vermont

If you’re a restaurant in Stowe serving fresh, seasonal, localvore cuisine, what do you do in the winter?

Take a look around: The air is still and frigid. Snow and ice blanket the ground. Nothing’s growing.

“It’s tough this time of year,” says Aaron Martin, chef at Plate restaurant. The 31-year-old Hyde Park native cooked in Stowe for more than a decade before taking the helm at the new restaurant Jamie Persky and Mark Rosman opened on Main Street just shy of one year ago.

Persky and Rosman, both Los Angeles transplants, wanted to bring a California sensibility to the table, featuring simple, fresh food prepared well.

To that tune, Martin has twice journeyed to Chez Panisse in Berkley, Calif., the wildly popular farm-to-table haven Alice Waters opened in 1971. The restaurant serves a prix fixe menu that changes daily, based on availability of ingredients and chefs’ whims. Upstairs is a café and bakery; downstairs is a copper-plated, hand-tiled beauty of a kitchen. Two chefs take turns running the kitchen in six-month stretches; joining them are several sous chefs and cooks and a revolving door of invited interns who come, as Martin did, to learn at the temple of California cuisine.

Martin’s first trip was in October 2013; his second was in November 2014. The following includes excerpts from his journals — visit stowetoday.com/blogs to read more and to see photos from Martin’s trip.

Chez Panisse Café: “Top three lunches ever! … Radicchio and farro salad with persimmons and mint … poached eggs and toast, wild mushrooms … chicories and cardoon salad … pizetta with gypsy peppers, rosemary and hot pepper … the ingredients are such just of such high quality and they are respected and handled simply.” — Nov. 13, 2014

Every afternoon, the Chez Panisse kitchen staff holds a meeting to decide what’s going on the menu, picking produce fresh from the garden as needed. There are two dinner seatings per night, and the staff eats a family meal in between —a nicely prepared sit-down dinner, complete with wine and table settings.

“Chef broke out a pig, showed us how he wanted it, and then the two greenhorns helped him finish his while I did the next one alone. It was broken down into porchetta for the upcoming Thursday dinner and book signing. Rear quarters went to the café. The two front legs were boned, ground and turned into sausage with marjoram, salt and fat. Then that will be stuffed into the loin and the belly wrapped around it and spit roasted. The heads were split in half, brined and will be headcheese next week.” —Oct. 4, 2013

It’s hard at times to find local meat to use, said Martin — Plate goes through so much pork every week that it’s difficult to find enough locally.

Martin keeps costs down by using “lesser” cuts of meat in creative ways — hanger steak and braised short ribs instead of filet mignon, for example. There’s a leg curing for prosciutto, but that won’t be ready for a while. It’s from one of two pigs that Martin helped raise last summer in a friend’s backyard; they were named Bacon and Ham, naturally.

“We scored some chain-link fence for free,” Martin said. “We had to put something in it.”

Currently, Plate has a surplus of big, fat rabbits from Vermont Rabbitry in Glover, which are popping up on the menu in several forms — an entrée special featuring a seared leg and loin with silky celery root puree, red cabbage and persimmons with maple, and rabbit liver mousse made with Cold Hollow cider and truffle salt, served on crunchy toast with big chunks of bacon, maitake mushrooms and a fried quail egg.

Extending the season

“Everybody seems to be in a great mood today … We started by picking three different varieties of beans. Cranberry, a white with gold spots and a white. No one seems to know all the different varieties we use … The tree that gives us cover from the sun is a wisteria tree … the pods are hanging everywhere over our heads. And today is the day that they begin to explode one by one at random. It is kind of fun and everyone laughs.” — Oct. 4, 2013

Mike Boomhower, 26, is the sous chef at Plate. He grew up in Enosburg, and spent several years cooking in Oakland and San Francisco. “I ran away like every good kid should, to California,” he joked, and said he was excited to return to his home state to use what he had learned.

“Being from Vermont, we have a lot of pride in what we do. … We have some of the best produce and dairy” in the country, Boomhower said. “We just have a four-month window instead of all year.”

Vermont summer farmers’ markets are somewhat comparable to those in California, on a much smaller scale — rainbows of beans and tomatoes, lush piles of spicy greens. In the summer, Martin said, Plate has great relationships with farmers and a wide variety of produce available. Staff members also forage nearby for native plants such as ramps and mushrooms when the season allows.

In January, pickings are slim, but they’re getting what they can, including arugula and greens, fennel and bean sprouts from Sandiwood Farm in Wolcott, whose greenhouse system keeps the tiny plants safe through the winter. They’re using potatoes they “cellared” from the 2014 harvest, pickled Thai bird chilies from a farm in Greensboro, and Meyer lemons preserved at the peak of ripeness.

“We pick lima beans for the succotash … a few more wisteria pods pop intermittently. … (Chef) has changed the menu again. … He did not like the tomatoes we had and did not like what he saw on the farm this morning. He said he thought it would be the last tomato salad of the year, but when he tasted them said they were done for the year. … Jerome has to go over and OK every menu with Alice. Even while she is in Rome. They argue sometimes.” — Oct. 5, 2013

At Plate, the kitchen crew wants to do more with preserving produce to use in the fallow months. It was a busy summer — and the first year of operation — which didn’t allow for the chance to “put by” much food.

“We have this and that (preserved) downstairs to play with,” Martin said, but it’s hard to resist the temptation to use it all — “we get excited and chew through it in the first month.”

Plus, said Martin, it can be hard from a small-business perspective to allot money for something you’re not going to use yet. This year, they hope to can, freeze and jar as many tomatoes as they can.

California, with its mild-to-hot climate and year-round produce cultivation ability, leads the United States in vegetable production and grows at least half of the nation’s fruit, according to Wikipedia.

While blessed with many amazing natural gifts, and a population and industry at the forefront of the localvore food and drink movement, our small Northeast state is still at the mercy of the elements and all four (or more, if you count mud and stick) seasons, but Vermonters work hard to maintain their homegrown sustenance throughout the year.

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Of the experience at Chez Panisse, Martin said, “It’s challenging, humbling to see new things in the business, because you want to be the best you can.”

“I really just want to be part of that magic again. Even if it’s only one week at a time.” — Oct. 5, 2013