In the middle of August 2010, on a hot summer afternoon, I pull up to the curb in the Deering neighborhood on Portland’s western outskirts and jump out to check on my trailer. It’s empty except for two apple-picking ladders tied to the wooden framework and angled precariously over the back of my car. I lift the longer of the two over the side, prop it against a nearby tree, and return to the car to fetch picking bags and buckets. Meanwhile my friend Eli Cayer walks quickly over to the nearest house and rings the doorbell. He disappears inside.
After a few minutes, someone reclining on a garden lounge behind the house points me toward the kitchen door. Inside Eli is laughing and talking with the owner, a fortyish woman named Beth. She pours something from an unmarked bottle and hands me the glass. “It’s vodka,” she tells me, “infused with honey and juniper berries.” Which sounds like something closer in spirit to gin, but whatever it is we knock it back and smile. The recipe came from a Polish friend of hers, and it’s delicious. Evidence that Beth’s of a like mind, another foodie, and that we’ve come to the right place.
Eli walks out front to the edge of her yard, where a solitary crab apple tree juts over the sidewalk on a busy road near the high school. He spotted it a few days ago and stopped by to knock on the door. Ordinarily Beth makes a “musky” apple jelly from the fruit, but she’s too busy this year and won’t get around to it, so we’re free to pick all we want. The tree is large, about twenty feet tall, with abundant small red fruits that look for all the world like sweet cherries. Already by late summer dozens of apples have dropped to the sidewalk and the pavement is splattered with crushed fruit. Those remaining on the tree are at their peak of ripeness and flavor, a little too tangy and acidic to eat without puckering my mouth, but also tasting of sugar: sweet and sour.
We raise the ladder, angle it against the crook of one of the branches, and I climb up with my picking bag slung around my neck. It feels strange to do this in such a dense residential area. “Any idea how close we can get to the electric line?” I ask while eyeing the wires running through the foliage a few feet above me. Eli shakes his head and I move carefully, keeping what seems like a good precautionary distance. Enough anyway so we could reasonably tell Karla we’d been prudent if an accident lands me in the ER.
A young couple with a baby stroller walks quickly past us, avoiding my gaze. Eli hands me a pair of scissors, and we start neatly snipping off fruit. Ordinarily I’d grab whatever is within reach and toss the apples by the handful into the bag, but this extra care feels right, ceremonial. It’s our first street tree harvest and the inauguration of Eli’s hard cider winery. Good cider requires a balance of flavors, with acids and tannins as well as sugar, so we’re going to press these crab apples out of curiosity to see what kind of juice they’ll produce for blending. It takes about twenty minutes to pick all the fruit within reach of the ladder. I climb down and empty my bag into the five-gallon bucket Eli has been filling. One bucket of fruit, that’s all we’re going to get. Just enough for a trial run of my new press, and a bit of experimentation with some unusual fruit.
“Let’s set the press right here, on the edge of the dock,” Eli tells me half an hour later. We’ve driven back through town to his newly rented warehouse space. It’s located in Portland’s Bayside neighborhood in a low-slung building with several bays fronted by a covered loading dock. Above us birds roost on steel girders under the eaves, leaving feathers and droppings scattered across the concrete, and below us debris from the parking lot collects against the wall—piles of cigarette butts, waste plastic cups, and scrap paper. At least we’ll be pressing under blue skies in the fresh air—when the wind is blowing from the right direction, that is, away from the wastewater treatment plant over the hill.
Eli connects a hose to the sink, opens the bay door, and starts washing down the pressing area. We’re producing cider only for our own use today, and it won’t touch anything that hasn’t been cleaned and sterilized, but I dislike handling food in a place like this. We wash everything as well as possible, running hot soapy water over the concrete and scrubbing it with a stiff broom. After a few minutes everything seems pretty clean, and certainly more hygienic than cider production of generations past, dependent as it was on horse-driven equipment and wooden presses rigged up inside old barns, or set up directly in the orchard.
We wheel my new equipment to the edge of the dock and set up the grinder beside the bay door. Already I’m in love with this elegant press, a stainless-steel beauty purchased slightly used from Orchard Equipment Supply Company (OESCO) in western Massachusetts. It’s designed for crushing grapes in small-scale wineries, and it operates by water pressure. Connect the internal rubber bladder by garden hose to any ordinary household faucet, crack the valve, and gradually the fruit squeezes against an upright stainless-steel cylinder, running juice through narrow openings in the drum into a collecting tray.
Small enough to fit in the back of a car, this Lancman press is nevertheless large enough to hold four bushels of apples, or roughly the capacity of a large washing machine. It’s far cheaper than most alternatives, can be operated by one person, and it produces about ten gallons of juice per hour. OESCO started importing this equipment from Slovenia a few years ago and experimenting with apples. Whole fruit runs first through a grinder driven by a small electric motor, which breaks it down, and after this the crushed mash goes into the press. Squeezing the juice takes about twenty minutes. The size, price, and portability of this press are perfect for our experiments and limited production for my market stand.
Our first run of apples will be quick, because this five-gallon bucket of street tree crab apples will fill only about a quarter of the drum, yielding less than two gallons of cider. It’s almost not worth the trouble, but we’re anxious to sample the juice and test the equipment. So we fire up the grinder and run the apples into a clean bucket. The stream of finely chopped fruit that comes out is surprisingly dry. It’s hard to imagine these little crab apples releasing much juice, but over the course of the season I’ll come to discover that the appearance of newly crushed fruit can be deceptive. This seemingly dry fruit is in marked contrast with late-fall dessert apples, which often dissolve into a thick slurry and start running juice as soon as they’re loaded into the press. Late-season apples don’t necessarily produce more, however, because the wetter mash is due primarily to the partial breakdown of cell walls. In fact it’s often more difficult to extract juice from softer fruits. By the end of October little pulp bombs sometimes explode without warning from the top of my press as its vents become clogged with macerated fruit. Pressure builds as the juice can’t escape. The timing of this is unpredictable, the dominion of the cider gods. (Two months later a wad of wet mash explodes during a festival at a local pub as I demonstrate my press to the owner, splattering against the back of his friend’s head twenty feet away. Luckily both of them find it funny.) Commercial producers often add rice hulls to a challenging late-season apple mash to improve its texture and pressability.
“Come taste this stuff!” I cry out to Eli. He grabs a glass and fills it from the stream that runs into a gallon-sized bottle, capturing the rose-colored juice and holding it up to the light. (In most of the world, cider refers only to the fermented product; newly pressed juice is just that, juice.) I’m struck by its beautiful color and absolute clarity, and take small sips to evaluate the flavor. This is nothing like the pasteurized product that passes for cider at the supermarket. It’s much lighter and more delicate, at once mildly acidic and sweet, with a pleasing aroma. Eli grabs a refractometer and checks the Brix reading (a measure of its sugar content): fifteen degrees Brix, sweeter than any other apples we’ll test through the rest of the season. These are supposed to be sour crab apples? The juice compares to a naturally sweet cranberry, translucent and clear, refreshing like a light sparkling wine.
That any cider could have such unusual flavor and character surprises me. Having lived most of my life in New England, I should know the nuances of this drink. I’ve tasted fresh juice many times over the years, and while the difference between fresh-pressed and store-bought, heat-pasteurized cider is obvious, much of what we drink comes from a relatively narrow selection of commercial apples. This fresh-pressed juice from a largely neglected Portland street tree is something entirely different. “We need to get out and find more apples,” Eli tells me. Our first experiment suggests a world of possibilities, a range of previously unimagined flavors to explore.
Though this crabapple tastes great right out of the press, our primary interest is to see what will happen once the sugars in the juice ferment to alcohol. Eli fills two bottles, caps them with air locks, and puts them aside in a cool room. He adds nothing at all, no sulfites or yeast, because our goal is to learn as much about this particular fruit as possible, leaving fermentation to its own devices. The simplest hard cider production involves nothing more than pressing high-quality juice and preventing contact with oxygen during fermentation (exposure to air will ultimately produce apple vinegar). Natural yeasts in the air around us can do all the work. Because this is about as far away from commercial production as you can get (typically juice is sterilized with sulfites and fermented with cultured yeasts), the outcome will be somewhat unpredictable.
Eli’s new business is called the Urban Farm Fermentory. His business plan calls for using every inch of available space in his rented three-thousand-square-foot warehouse and its small backyard to produce food. Fish tanks in the entrance will raise tilapia, a side room will grow culinary mushrooms, and the newly constructed hoophouse out back will grow herbs and vegetables. Thus the “urban farm,” and he explains the rest by saying, “We’re going to ferment everything.” He’ll experiment with sauerkraut, hard cider, honey mead, vinegars, and a fermented health tonic called kombucha. Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Eli’s friends collaborate on the project, like designer and gardener Dave Homa, who maintains the greenhouse and pitches in to help with just about everything else. Karla is keeping her two beehives out back. The UFF is a busy place; at any given time it’s impossible to guess what experiments might be happening inside.
Eli’s a born entrepreneur, the kind of guy who knows everyone and starts one venture after another. Just a few months into this new business and not yet selling any products, he’s generated a business following of several hundred Facebook friends and gotten some great press, even a short write-up in The New York Times. A steady stream of curious visitors stops by to visit the gardens and admire the space, which his friends have decorated on every available surface with graffiti art. Eli is always in a hurry, trying to do too much in a short time. To compound this, last week he and his girlfriend Anna had their first baby, Arlo, and the surf has been up. His wetsuit hangs on a railing out back with a puddle of Casco Bay seawater collecting beneath it.
“Strong like moose,” Dave Homa says in a mock Eastern European accent, smiling as he rolls an oak barrel into place. A month has passed since our street tree harvest, and the cider season is in full swing. Dave and Eli are putting the finishing touches on a three-tiered welded steel rack in the cider house (technically licensed as a winery), which will hold two dozen fifty-gallon stainless drums and several used wooden bourbon barrels. In the adjacent testing room ciders of varying hues fill carboys and salvaged one-gallon wine bottles, each topped with a fermentation lock to keep out oxygen and contaminants while allowing carbon dioxide to escape. Some of these juices we’ve pressed from individual trees around town, while others are samples from commercial sources.
Eli and I close up the sliding door on the dock and jump into my car. We’ve loaded it once again for picking, the trailer filled with ladders, buckets, and heavy-duty kraft paper bags. Today we’re headed out of Portland to an orchard located thirty minutes away, near the south end of Sebago Lake. It’s nearly ninety degrees, a late morning in mid-September, and Eli has brought along nothing but an empty coffee cup. “Don’t you need something to eat, or at least a bottle of water?” I ask halfway into our drive, and he says, “Oh yeah,” good idea. I park curbside at a supermarket, engine idling, while he runs in to grab an energy drink and some snacks.
We pull up to a gate marked by an orchard sign and drive through to the barn. Weeds choke the entrance road, the market stand is locked up, tent caterpillars have colonized some of the trees, and the grass has grown knee-high between tree rows. The barn, covered in tar paper, looks derelict, but on closer inspection turns out to be cosmetically challenged but otherwise sound. It looks like no one has been here for months, and a large sign at the entrance confirms that the orchard and its pick-your-own operation is closed. The owner has agreed to let me salvage available fruit, on the condition that I keep things quiet to prevent the rest of the world from showing up in search of free apples. We back around to the first row of trees and start unloading equipment.
Dave Homa rolls in behind us with another friend, a freelance photographer for The New York Times and an enthusiastic home brewer. It’s hot, much too hot. Dave’s used to this; he runs a gardening business and designs permaculture plantings (permaculture being a system of ecological design, focused especially on perennial food plants). Heaving picking bags around under a midday sun is maybe a little new to the others, though. I work in my usual weather-oblivious uniform of Carhartt pants, long-sleeved work shirt, heavy work boots, and a broad-brimmed hat. My philosophy: Keep direct sun off my skin; better to bake than broil.
A member of the family that owns this orchard works for the Department of Environmental Protection with Karla. Until last year one of the largest orchards in the state leased and managed the site and brought equipment down as needed from their base half an hour away. They pulled out, however, unable to make a profit off these apples, which lean heavily toward Macs and Cortlands. The trees are reminiscent of the dated plantings I found in our property search— standard commercial varieties on large rootstocks, hard to prune, spray, and pick. This season the owner hired someone to prune trees on roughly a third of these twenty acres, but otherwise no work has been done. He’s generously letting me salvage apples until he finds someone willing to take over the lease and run the business.
Many orchards here in central Maine lost all their fruit in this 2010 year, including a comparatively large operation located just a couple of miles down the road. A heavy May frost hit at the wrong time and devastated newly emerging apples. Here the Macs have almost no fruit, but somehow every other variety is loaded, thanks to a warm microclimate and a favorable hillside location, which drains away pockets of cold air. Most of the apples are surprisingly free of insect and disease damage despite the trees’ lack of maintenance and the complete absence of insecticides. Pests like codling moths haven’t yet caught on to their good fortune and built up their populations enough to cause visible problems.
Dave and I walk down the hill to the earliest-bearing block. A couple of rows of an apple called Paula Red are ready to pick, running a week or two ahead of nearby Golden Delicious and Empires. It’s too steep to drive my car down the hill, so we’re stuck hauling apples up to the trailer by hand. Eli hoists a bushel onto his shoulder, looking like a tattooed peasant farmer, while Dave talks about the Jamaican guys who work the orchards he used to prune. We work for a couple of hours, after which the others have something urgent going on and need to head out. I stick around awhile longer to finish picking and packing the trailer, then drive back to meet them at the Fermentory, somehow arriving before they do. “We found this sweet little swimming hole on the river,” they explain later.
We’ll press the apples Eli and the others have picked and use their juice as part of a blend for hard cider. For my purposes, however, juice will be bottled for fresh consumption. This year no other vendors are selling their own cider at the Portland Farmers’ Market, largely because of regulatory complications, so it’s been a very popular product. “It tastes like eating an apple!” customers tell me as they throng my stand, as though this is a revelation. Other farmers buy it by the half gallon and drink it on the spot, and mothers offer pint-sized servings to their appreciative children. Customers return each week for more and tell me they’ve never tasted juice this good.
My cider is light and sweet, nearly translucent. In comparison the pasteurized product other vendors buy wholesale from a handful of large operations, including the orchard that once leased the land from which we’re picking, is typically cloudy and dark, kind of a grayish brown. Whether such low quality in the mass-produced drink is due to heat pasteurization (substituting ultraviolet treatment is markedly better), poor fruit selection, or something else about its pressing and handling, customers clearly recognize the difference. After tasting something really good it’s hard to go back.
Even growers at the market who produce their own apples buy wholesale cider to stock their stands, because regulations have effectively shut down small operations. Back in the 1990s a sixteen-month-old girl died from drinking a smoothie containing unpasteurized apple juice produced by Odwalla, and numerous others were sickened by the E. coli strain that infected it. The result was a wave of reformist national regulations that all but destroyed the raw juice industry, forcing producers to purchase expensive pasteurization equipment or stop production. This is pretty disturbing, in my opinion. While it’s true that scary, rapidly evolving bacterial strains have infiltrated our food supply, and ensuring safety is critical, pasteurization doesn’t get at the root of the problem. The real culprits behind unsafe cider are poor worker hygiene, use of rotting fruit, and fecal contamination from dropped apples in orchards grazed by domestic animals. If you start with bad fruit and unclean processing, it’s hard to understand how heat-treating the juice is supposed to make it any more drinkable.
I keep my food safe by using apples picked fresh from the tree, discarding any that are split or damaged, washing them in a three-bay sink in Eli’s commercial kitchen, and pressing them immediately after grinding. Juice collects in a food-grade brewer’s bucket where solids settle out briefly before bottling. From there it goes into a chest freezer running nearby in our market van, where it cools overnight to a temperature in the upper thirties. Anything that doesn’t sell within twenty-four hours finds its way to our basement, where it bubbles away intoxicatingly for months. I know this food, know where it’s been and how it’s been handled, and can speak for its quality and safety.
My cider sells legally at the market due to a regulatory exemption that few other growers can use. A loophole enables those who produce their own raw cider to sell it directly to retail customers. For most growers the resulting sales can’t generate enough volume to support a licensed commercial kitchen and equipment. Thanks to my borrowed space in Eli’s facility, low-cost press, and salvaged apples, however, I’m able to make good use of this exemption. Six days of sales at the market in the fall of 2010 pay off all my expenses and investment in pressing equipment.
This is clearly a promising new direction. As I look back over my first season at the market, sales of distinctly regional products like cider, honey, and nursery plants feel most gratifying. Finding products that expand the market range and fill an as yet unmet (or unrecognized) need is much more satisfying than trying to one-up the competition. Improvements to my display and other marketing tricks can help me compete against other growers, but when customers want something different like raw cider, they seek it out. This is one of the beauties of the market—instant feedback about what’s needed, what works, and what the public desires.
Are there other value-added products based on rare and unusual foods that could find a receptive audience at my stand? Until a few years ago restrictions on sales at the Portland Farmers’ Market imposed by the city prevented most vendors from venturing much beyond vegetables, cut flowers, and spring seedlings for home gardens. (Over the past few seasons Portland has eased restrictions and opened the door to foods like milk, cheese, and meat.) Because of this history the market still leans heavily toward vegetables. It should come as no surprise that it’s difficult for me to sell beets, carrots, or even high-value crops like tomatoes. After a few Saturdays watching produce languish in its display, like beautiful peppers in a rainbow of colors, I come to accept that either someone else is filling that niche, or the demand just isn’t there.
Despite the strength of the competition in this market, gaps remain—there’s very little fruit beyond strawberries, blueberries, and apples, for example, and little or no prepared food, jams and jellies, baked goods, or wine. There are serious challenges involved with any of these products, however. Value-added foods often represent a lot of work with narrow margins (as anyone making home preserves can attest), and they require permitting and licensing. Fresh fruit tends to have low returns and it can be very hard to transport. Even with careful handling, the few pints of raspberries I carried to market as an experiment softened and started running juice all over the coolers after a few hours. After so much work, they sold poorly. Another lesson learned.
And yet some interesting fruits deserve attention. One of the rarest in my collection is a strawberry called Marshall, described by Gary Nabhan in a 2004 publication of the Renewing America’s Food Traditions coalition as one of America’s “top ten endangered foods.” It was also once known as “the finest eating strawberry in America … exceedingly handsome, splendidly flavored, pleasantly sprightly, aromatic and juicy.” The Marshall dates back to 1890 in Marshfield, Massachusetts, where it was a chance seedling found in the fields of farmer Marshall Ewell. According to an excerpt from a 1924 meeting of the Marshfield Historical Society, a workman discovered the original Marshall strawberry plant while digging in a field, and later discarded it in a ditch, where Marshall Ewell’s wife rescued it. From there it went on to win prizes at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. It entered the commercial trade and became a major production fruit for half a century, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.
Today the Marshall is nearly extinct, and the identity of remaining plants is in dispute. The USDA’s germplasm repository in Corvallis, Oregon, maintains one line (the source of my plants), while its counterparts in Beltsville, Maryland, and Bainbridge, Georgia, have others that don’t match up genetically. The only other known potential source as of this writing is the Bainbridge Island Historical Society in Washington State, which maintains a small plot of berries presumed to be Marshalls, acquired from a Japanese farmer who relocated to eastern Washington during the Second World War to avoid internment in West Coast prison camps. No commercial sources or growers remain today for this berry.
It took less than the span of a generation to bring the Marshall from prominence to near extinction. Why would such a widely celebrated, flavorful strawberry with a rich history completely disappear from small gardens as well as commercial farms? Doesn’t everyone dream of the perfect strawberry? Part of the answer lies in the very qualities that make great fruit. Marshalls are juicy and less firm than modern strains, not well adapted for storage and long-haul shipping. The Small Fruits of New York, published in 1925, says they require heavy, rich soil, and don’t perform as well in unfavorable conditions. They’re also susceptible to viruses introduced to the United States in the wake of the Second World War.
In my gardens Marshalls have yet to show disease problems, and they live up to their culinary promise. Whether or not these plants descend directly from their nineteenth-century namesake, they’re quite sweet, but not to the point of overpowering their tangy, rich flavor. This variety wins blind taste tests among strawberries in my fields, although others include several known for their high quality, like Sparkle and Earliglow. To date the Marshall strawberries have been prolific and healthy, and they produce well, if not as abundantly as newer cultivars. Arguably their greatest strength is also their downfall—these berries are soft and juicy, very flavorful but delicate. It’s difficult to bring them to market even for same-day direct sales, because with so much juice they start to break down as soon as they leave the field.
This shortcoming suggests another approach: freezing. The Marshall strawberry holds its flavor and color after processing, so historically it was a mainstay that helped establish the frozen food industry in the Pacific Northwest. Could there be a useful lesson in this history? Freezing could be the answer to my ongoing dilemma about what to do with so many finicky and diverse fruits in my fields. Instead of struggling to develop markets for older varieties that don’t look as pretty as modern strains, and don’t hold up well in handling, but have exceptional flavor, in processing I might develop value-added products. Throw frozen Marshall strawberries in a blender to make fruit smoothies, for example, and it would not only be a winner at the market but also support rare fruit conservation. Perfect, problem solved. No one else sells prepared foods like this at the Portland Farmers’ Market, and on a hot summer day smoothies would fly from the stand.
In January 2011 a friend interested in helping my project suggests making smoothies with a blender rigged up to a stationary bike. This is a fun idea, and it offers a quick and simple setup for the market. In addition to the bike and blender attachment, we might get by with nothing but a cooler and some sort of simple washing station. Someone did this, albeit illegally, for a season or two at another market nearby. Sounds good, but a few phone calls kill the idea. To stay within the law I’ll need a permit from the Department of Agriculture to process fruit, as well as access to a commercial kitchen. The Department of Health licenses vendor sales at the state level, and Portland’s City Clerk and Code Enforcement offices handle local regulatory compliance. Smoothie sales will require a city vendor license and a food cart that meets strict codes. I’ll also have to take a class to become a certified food protection manager. My cart will need running hot water on demand, a three-bay sink for sterilizing equipment, a separate hand-washing sink, and two 20-gallon tanks for potable water and waste. Its surface will have to be steel—no wood—with smooth, easy-to-clean sides without exposed screws or hardware. Sounds like a regulatory nightmare with no end.
Luckily I enjoy this kind of puzzle. I get started right away, knowing that completing the permitting and building my cart could take several months. My plan breaks some new ground, and from the start it’s clear no one at the state or local levels knows exactly how to process my applications. They’re as helpful as they can be, but at least twice over the next three months they tell me a cart at the market definitely won’t be permitted. With my state mobile vendor license in hand, I bounce around from office to office at the city level, searching for approval. The City Clerk’s office tells me it’s fine to sell fruit smoothies with a vendor permit, and that no restriction prevents farmers from doing the same with their own fruits, but it’s impossible to be a farmer and vendor simultaneously because regulations state that pushcarts have to remain at least sixty-five feet away from other food purveyors, including stands at the farmers’ market. “In other words, I have to stay sixty-five feet away from myself,” I say. Essentially, yes, comes the reply. “And what’s the appeal process? Do I need approval from the city council for a variance?” No, they say, start with the city attorney.
This runaround doesn’t bother me, because regulations on the whole make good sense. Everyone is just trying to do their job. That, and the devil in me is more than a little gleeful that these restrictions mean I’ll enjoy a smoothie monopoly for at least the coming year. In the end answers come quickly and easily when I reach the right person on the phone. After getting past the front of the office at last to speak with the city attorney, she tells me, “I don’t see any problem with what you want to do,” and says she’ll stand behind me if further problems arise at the city level. She has the power and authority to push this through, and when it comes time to inspect my cart and commercial kitchen base station (at Eli’s cider house), she’ll vouch for me with code enforcement. “If you run into any more trouble, just give me a call,” she tells me.
As soon as the city gives me the green light in early April, I start building a cart. No prefabricated vendor setup fits my needs—most are designed for hot dogs or tacos, and have to be towed with a hitch. It would be much more desirable to build something small and light enough to wheel through doors for indoor storage, and roll onto my trailer for easy transport. The bike blender idea has gone out the window, too, because commercial models are slow and awkward. Instead my plan is to use handheld Cuisinart immersion blenders, which draw minimal power, only two hundred watts, and work quickly and efficiently. The cart will need a power source anyway to run a water pump from portable storage tanks. There’s no power or water available at the market site in Deering Oaks park, so my cart has to be entirely self-contained.
State codes for vendor carts include minimum and maximum size requirements for all dimensions, including height. For some reason no one can explain to me, regulations require that carts must be at least thirty-two inches wide. Since the door to our basement workshop is thirty-three inches edge-to-edge, the design of my cart can be any width—as long as it falls between thirty-two and thirty-three inches. Height and length restrictions are a little more flexible, but the counter can’t be too tall, and a very long cart would be unwieldy. Over the next two weeks I collect the necessary plumbing and electrical parts by mail and at the local hardware store and marine center—two 20-gallon water tanks, four sinks, two faucets, a twelve-volt pump, an on-demand water heater and vents, a propane tank, water lines and drains, two heavy, deep-cycle marine batteries, a charge controller, and an inverter (to convert power from the batteries’ direct current to 110-volt alternating current). It’s hard to see how everything can possibly fit into the limited space of a hand-wheeled cart.
In the end, somehow, everything works. By the time my strawberries are ready for harvest in late June, the city’s code enforcement officer has inspected and approved my cart. It has a wooden frame with steel sides and a slate-gray countertop made from an environmentally friendly, food-grade composite called PaperStone. I’ve cut the steel with shears, secured the edges with countersunk screws, and covered the seams and screws with aluminum trim. Handles at one end of the cart and two heavy-duty tires set below the frame allow it to roll around, even with a full tank of water, which brings its weight to several hundred pounds. A row of sinks set a few inches below the counter offers good working space. Clean, food-grade surfaces, running hot water on demand, and power to operate small blenders are worth all the trouble. The truth is, this cart is much better than anything I would have dreamed up in the absence of regulations.
We roll the cart out for its test run at the market a few days later, on the Fourth of July holiday weekend. It’s hot, and a line forms quickly. High demand keeps me and three friends working as quickly as we can: one to pull frozen fruit from the coolers and combine it with a light syrup, two to work the hand blenders, and one to handle cash and deal with customers. We advertise only one option, a blend that includes my peaches from last season, heirloom Marshall strawberries, four kinds of mint, maple syrup, and raw sugar. Everything is organic, there’s no dairy, and fruit supplies most of the sweetness. The smoothies taste really good, like sorbet, and at the peak of the market we average three sales per minute, grossing nearly $1,200 in our first four hours. “Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?” comes the refrain from customers. They have no idea. I don’t even try to explain.
Raw cider. Smoothies. This becomes my new direction: collecting rare foods and creating value-added products that depend on their best characteristics and exceptional flavor. Giving new life to plants like the Marshall strawberry, using its natural sweetness to enhance a summertime drink, and thus justifying the time and expense of growing it. When I occasionally have to substitute other commercially purchased frozen strawberries, it’s striking how flavorless they seem in comparison.
So what’s next? For this I turn again to Eli Cayer. The more we press and ferment cider, the more fascinating its variations become. Through the season blends change, flavors evolve, and we learn the personalities of apple varietals. Jonagold produces a sweet, clear juice. Cortland lightens the mix, while astringent fruit from crab apples and a friend’s wild tree creates complexity. Even Red Delicious contributes something of value, because its cider has a nice bouquet. The differences among these foods, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic, add immeasurable richness to our table. The deeper I go, the clearer becomes the French concept of terroir, the idea that a place can impart a particular taste, informed by the realities of ecology and climate as well as culture and tradition. Local food at its best is different from products shipped halfway around the world, not just in quality but also in kind.
In the summer of 2011 my experiences licensing raw cider and fruit smoothies at the farmers’ market embolden me to expand further and bring fermented cider to my farm stand. Cider is true New England terroir, as much a reflection of the taste of this particular place as French Champagne or English Stilton cheese. Growing apples and fermenting their juice is a long-standing tradition here that dates back to earliest colonial days—a rich history that’s all but disappeared. It’s also a fascinating horticultural puzzle, because the taste of fruit varies from place to place and among varieties. To say that we know hard cider after drinking one of the insipidly sweet mass-market brands available today is like equating all wine with Manischewitz. The possibilities for blending hard cider are as myriad as wine.
My trees have yet to begin bearing, and many of the finest cider fruits in my collection are newly grafted, at least five years away from serious production. Most of my fifty Harrison apple trees, for example, the variety I’d first encountered at Ben Watson’s Ark of Taste committee meeting, are no more than two feet tall. Yet it’s never too soon to start clearing regulatory obstacles. Bureaucratic change can at times seem slower than watching trees grow. So one day in early July 2011, I stop one of our Portland neighbors who serves on the city council and ask what it would take for the city to grant me a variance to sell alcohol at the farmers’ market. Would he support me? “Yeah, I’ll bring this up with our Health and Recreation Committee,” he says. He’s one of its three members, and, for reasons that are hard to understand, this is the right place to start. Does alcohol fall under health or recreation? Apparently both, particularly when we’re talking about sales at a farmers’ market in a public park.
Eli gets behind the idea, and within four months we have our hearing. I tell the committee and a handful of local reporters that hard cider is a traditional drink, relatively healthful, with low alcohol, and that it pairs very well with food. Letting us sell at the market will support my efforts to collect and preserve rare trees. Recent regulation at the state level opened the door to wines at farmers’ markets, and the only obstacle in Portland is a regulation prohibiting alcohol sales on city property. At the end of the hearing the three members of the committee unanimously grant their approval, legal counsel lends its support, and we’re on to the full city council for their vote.
This is one of the main lessons I’ve learned over the past few years—don’t wait, jump. Even though it’s unclear when or whether we’ll receive final approval to sell cider at the market, the harvest season is passing and time is short. Eli and I set for ourselves a goal of pressing and fermenting a hundred gallons to test the market, or about five hundred wine bottles. The challenge is to find the right fruit, because typical dessert apples like McIntosh and Cortland don’t make very good cider. They’re fine for fresh juice, but after fermenting not much taste and depth remain. We start scrounging around for more interesting trees and find a few bushels here, a few there, primarily older varieties from abandoned trees like Golden Bellflower and Northern Spy. Toward late fall I come across a windfall of about twenty bushels of Baldwins that puts us over the top, with a total of close to 120 gallons. With the help of friends we press the juice and Eli racks it into barrels, glass carboys, and gallon-sized bottles to ferment. Then in February 2012 the city council votes seven to two in favor of alcohol sales at the farmers’ market. We’re on.
“Do you have any gallon-sized Carlo Rossi bottles?” I call out to the Vietnamese guy working the counter at a local recycling redemption center. It’s November 2011 and I’ve run out of containers to test small batches of fermenting cider at home. The place is noisy with clinking glass and a loader moving shrink-wrapped pallets. He pulls me off to the side in another windowless cinder-block room, and we find four sticky bottles. “How much?” I ask. He tells me they’re mine for 60 cents. Each has the capacity of more than five ordinary wine bottles, which is hard to visualize until you transfer their contents. Carlo Rossi glass jugs are perfect for fermentation, sturdy and clear, with easily gripped handles. And sterilizing bottles from the redemption center is much preferable to drinking this wine myself.
After pressing, Eli adds commercial yeasts to the raw juice we’ve pressed and fits rubber stoppers and air locks to the barrels, bottles, and glass carboys. Within a couple of days the cider starts bubbling vigorously as the yeast goes to work converting sugars to alcohol, expanding into the two inches of headspace in each barrel and sometimes running up into the air locks. The yeast strains he’s testing range from those typically used for English ciders to Trappist ale, wine, champagne, and even sake. Each imparts its own particular flavor to the finished product, a character that depends equally on the choice of apple varieties, temperature, and time. Row upon row of different blends fill Eli’s warehouse, and as fermentation progresses he takes samples, tests for sugar levels and acidity, and records notes about color, clarity, taste, and aroma. Meanwhile in my own basement other experiments bubble away, and last year’s bottles age in a dark corner.
It feels like we’re being carried along by a growing tide. In 2012 as the new season begins my stand includes an ever-increasing range of distinct foods and nursery plants. Apple, peach, and pear trees I grafted two years ago from endangered varieties broaden the range of nursery stock. A freezer filled with fruits like strawberries, serviceberries, red and black raspberries, and peaches sits in the corner of our basement, ready for early-season smoothies. Karla bottles honey for market sales and gifts to friends. Again next fall we’ll find neglected fruit trees to press raw juice. If Eli’s newly fermented cider turns out well enough, it can go to market by midsummer. Other heirloom fruits and vegetables continue to round out my stand at the farmers’ market. To me all of these products, which taste of this place and often trace their roots back to the hands of local people, redefine regional food. This isn’t simply food from a nearby source—it is instead of this land, dependent on the community, and deeply tied to local history and culture. In this sense of place is the meaning of local food.