Central Oregon farmers and chefs team up for dinners

Published 10:54 am Wednesday, March 15, 2017

White ceramic plates filled with precisely plated Korean barbecue pork, seared miso-glazed kale and fingerling potatoes were delivered to expectant diners inside Bethlyn’s Global Fusion. A few moments later Nicolle Timm stood up in the middle of the room, interrupting dinner guests to introduce Hilary and Greg Smith, the owners of Piggyback Ranch.

Timm is the founder of Central Oregon Locavore, a nonprofit providing a year-round indoor farmers market for locals to sell their products. She, in collaboration with chef Bethlyn Rider, founded the Meet Your Farmer dinner series in 2009 at Common Table in downtown Bend.

While Common Table has since closed, the dinner series lives on with the intention of supporting Central Oregon’s local food economy by connecting farmers to the community.

Meet Your Farmer dinners take place monthly, pairing chefs at local restaurants with rotating Central Oregon farmers or ranchers. Each dinner has four courses and is served family style with seatings of 40 to 70 people.

During the dinner in February, Timm gave a brief introduction, the entrees were served and the local farmers presented themselves and their products.

Timm’s hope with the dinner series is to facilitate a connection between Central Oregon farmers and local chefs, so together they can create a unique menu encompassing products that the farmer grows or raises.

One such attempt was in 2015, when Mediterranean restaurant Joolz was paired with White Diamond Ranch, which raises lambs and goats.

A dinner in 2016 paired a farmer and a food truck that already had a connection — White Diamond Ranch and Indian food truck The Curry Shack.

“Because of the High Desert climate, the grass that grows is really protein rich,” said Timm. “It’s not the ideal place to grow vegetables, but ranching is our strong suit.” For this reason, many wintertime dinners feature local ranchers, and in the summertime, vegetable farmers are featured.

Home again, home again

February’s Meet Your Farmer dinner came full circle with Rider cooking ingredients provided by Piggyback Ranch, which produces pork, eggs and chicken. The dinner consisted of a Chinese pork lettuce wrap appetizer, Taiwanese chicken sliders, a Korean barbecue pork salad, kale and potatoes and, for dessert, red-wine-poached apples with mascarpone and candied hazelnuts.

In addition to showcasing a local farmer’s products, the dinners give chefs a chance to create something different from their usual menu. Rider noted the opportunity to make Chinese pork buns from scratch.

“I might do a little Cajun with southwest or Thai with Italian,” said Rider, who specializes in fusion and combines food cultures in most of her dishes. “I have a hard time explaining it; I will take something and put it in my mouth and then have a vision of it and from there I work with a menu.”

When asked if she would work with Piggyback Ranch in the future, Rider quickly responded, “Oh most definitely, their meat was superior.”

Piggyback Ranch raises Gloucestershire old spots and English large black hogs. The breeds are rare, and the hogs are raised without any antibiotics and well-cared for, making the meat less tough. Even two days after the event, the meat was quite fresh.

The pork is sold as a whole hog, half hog custom butchered, pork roasts, chops, hams and sausage. Prices vary depending on the weight.

A Deschutes dinner

The next Meet Your Farmer dinner is set for 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday at Deschutes Brewery with farm Barley Beef of Bend. Saturday night’s menu includes a beer-braised osso bucco appetizer with polenta and roasted corn, a second course of grilled radicchio and kale salad with Honeycrisp apples; blue cheese, candied pecans and a maple-bacon vinaigrette, a prime rib roast entree with barley risotto, Brussels sprouts and microgreens; and for dessert, a dark-chocolate cake spiced with cinnamon and molasses and topped with a warm whiskey toffee sauce.

Barley Beef’s cows graze on leftover mash from Central Oregon breweries. “If you go to Deschutes Brewery and have a burger and a beer, you’re eating the burger with the beer it was raised with,” said Rob Rastovich, Barley Beef owner.

A traditionally corn-fed animal has a richer flavor, but the animal often lives in a high-production facility. Usually the cows are in feeding lots and being pumped with corn feed. Whereas, a free-range, grass-fed animal lives in a healthy environment, but the meat is much leaner and more gamy.

“With Barley Beef you get the best of both worlds; they’re not feed-lot cows; they’re free-range, which is very healthy for the animal, stress free. But the mash creates the fat and marbley taste,” Rastovich said. “It gives it a much better flavor than the purely grass-fed animal.”

Rastovich is a Meet Your Farmer returnee and worked with Deschutes Brewery at a dinner last year. He’s looking forward to working with chef Nicholas Baroni on Saturday and giving a presentation on Barley Beef.

At the root of it

Before founding Central Oregon Locavore, Timm, who works as a nurse at St. Charles Medical Center, began seeking out healthy locally sourced food options in Bend.

“Most of the time, local food is grown in a way that preserves nutrition instead of in a way that’s for shipping or storage,” Timm said. Food produced locally is fresher and the nutrients are more alive and intact. “Local farmers, they’re not interested in shelf life; they’re interested in taste and nutrition.”

She soon learned that there are food options and farmers in the Bend area, but that people are unaware of them because the farmers lack the means of marketing and distributing.

Many people try to eat more local food, but it’s difficult to know what’s available. Or, they’re afraid that a more locally sourced diet would break the bank.

Central Oregon Locavore and the Meet Your Farmer dinner series gives farmers the means to promote their products and get their names out in the community and diners the opportunity to taste the product and learn the farmers’ stories.

“It’s important to educate the guests that are here how important it is to support local, (and) the pros and cons of doing that,” Rider said. “In a sense, what we need as a community, is to support it no matter what the cost sometimes.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0351, mcrowe@bendbulletin.com

If you go

What: Meet Your Farmer

When: 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday

Where: Deschutes Brewery Mountain Room, 901 SW Simpson Ave., Bend

Cost: $50 per person

Contact: 
centraloregonlocavore.org or 541-633-0674