BLACK ROCK ORCHARD
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
—Martin Luther
I was born and raised in Asturias, a magical kingdom of apples, where orchards cover the hills like wallpaper and sidra flows freely in the region’s hundreds of cider houses. So when I landed in the Big Apple when I was eighteen, I felt right at home. In the long, cold months of winter we couldn’t find a tomato or a head of lettuce that wasn’t trucked in from California, but we could always find plenty of delicious apples.
Apples have followed me everywhere I’ve gone in my life, all the way to F Street, a block from my restaurants, at the Penn Quarter farmers’ market, where David Hochheimer and Emily Zaas of Black Rock Orchard sell some of the finest fruit to DC cooks and restaurants.
The Black Rock story began with David’s dad, a physicist whose love for the rural life prompted him to buy a ninety-two-acre tract of land along the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. He planted fruit trees as a source of future income, and by the time David hit young adulthood the trees had started to bear fruit. After their marriage in 1985 David’s wife, Emily, joined the team, and Black Rock grew into one of the great small family farms in the mid-Atlantic.
Although they grow seventy-seven varieties of fruit at Black Rock, from figs to gooseberries to Purple Zebra tomatoes, all of it exceptional, what I love most are their apples and pears. They grow the types you’ve heard of—Fujis and Pink Ladies and Boscs, superstars of the farmers’ markets of America; but they also grow all kinds of lesser-known varieties, such as Potomac, Canal Red, and Mutsu.
What makes Black Rock special, beyond the incredible quality of their fruit, is the depth of David and Emily’s knowledge. You’d have a hard time finding anyone who knows more about anything than she knows about apples and pears. She can tell you which apples peak at 37˚F. What part of the flesh of different pears oxidizes first. Which varietal might go best with a Maryland blue cheese or a warm crab espuma at minibar.
Emily doesn’t sell fruit as much as insinuate it onto the dinner plates and restaurant menus of the DC area. She holds court, standing on her apple crate to deliver fruit-based sermons to chefs and home cooks alike. She may be short, but when she stands on top of that soapbox, she towers over all of us. She knows that we tried an apple salsa at Oyamel last fall. She remembers the experiments with slow-dried fruit we had dangling from the ceiling at minibar. She always knows exactly which of her fruits are at their absolute peak, and we make our choices trusting in her completely.
There’s room for all types of farms in the modern food world. I love farms like Up Top Acres that use technical innovations to fight unique food challenges, and like the Chef’s Garden in Ohio that raise the exotic and astonishing produce that you simply won’t find anywhere else. But what really makes Black Rock special is as old as time: deep knowledge and boundless passion. That is what it takes to nourish people.