Aiki Farms and StoneRidge collaborate with fresh produce
Ledyard — Sitting on a chair in the basement-level sprouting room of Aiki Farms on Shewville Road, Bob Burns grabbed a handful of week-old sprouted garbanzo beans and sampled them.
“They’re borderline,” he said. “These’ll go on the compost pile.”
He pulled out another bag of the sprouted beans, which have an apple-like crispness, harvested the day before.
“It’s cleaner. It’s sharp,” Burns said. “I call them the Macadamia nut of the sprouting world ... when they’re sprouted, the quality and nutrient dynamic is at its height, (and) delivers the sweetest flavor.”
After weighing and labeling the bag, the pound of sprouted garbanzo beans was packed alongside 29 pounds of cucumbers, 26 pounds of green squash, 16 pounds of yellow squash, pea shoots, mung beans and other sprouted produce and delivered to Bob Tripp, the executive chef of the StoneRidge retirement community in Mystic.
Burns and Tripp, who took over the StoneRidge kitchens in the spring, are collaborating to bring fresh local produce to the retirement community.
With around 230 customers that are anywhere from 62 to 102 years old, Tripp said he wants to focus on the health benefits and nutrition of fresh produce.
His goal is to make meals from scratch — no pre-made ingredients.
The retirement community spends $16,000 to $18,000 a week on food, and has been increasing the share of produce it buys from Aiki Farms.
Burns and Tripp have known each
other for more than a decade, from when Tripp was the executive chef at The Flood Tide restaurant in Mystic and would buy produce from Burns “before ‘farm-to-table’” became a slogan, Tripp said.
Earlier in the year, Tripp sat down with Burns and decided what Aiki Farms could grow in the summer to meet StoneRidge’s needs.
“Knowing I had a need for lots of fresh produce for the salad bar, I asked him to plot out certain things — cukes, heirloom tomatoes,” Tripp said. “You can’t get good commercial cukes. They’re large or full of seeds and (coated) in a thin layer of paraffin wax.”
The from-scratch standard has meant a lot of changes in the kitchen, particularly retraining staff to not to take short cuts in meal prep.
The ability to eat food in the evening that was harvested in the morning is something that the residents can discern, Tripp said.
Corn loses “most of its sweetness within 24 hours,” he explained, which leads many places to use hybrid varieties that are artificially sweet.
Aiki Farms was founded in 2001, and grows all of its food using biointensive principles — meaning that it seeks to “get the most product out of the least amount of space,” Burns said.
The farm’s compost uses no animal manure, and it uses a planting system that gives the plants better aeration and exposure to subsoil.
Burns, a 78-year-old Buddhist monk who also teaches Aikido martial arts and meditation, learned how to grow sprouts from a farmer in California before returning to his family farm in Ledyard.
His 1,000-square-foot sprouting room is stacked with trays of pale-green stalks.
Harvesting Tuesday morning, Burns took a chef’s knife and carefully sliced the sprouts from the seeds, which will go back on the compost pile.
Burns said the collaboration has been the “biggest boost” the farm had since it was founded.
In fact, there’s so much demand for Aiki Farms produce that Burns has expanded his crop this year and planted vegetables on another two and a half acres on Sawmill Drive.
“It kind of makes me feel warm inside to know I’m feeding the people I grew up with,” Burns said.
The residents at StoneRidge have been pleased with the changes.
The Food and Beverage Committee, a group of residents who meet on a monthly basis with Tripp and the dining room management and provide input on everything from the quality of meals to the decor in the dining room, has praised the changes.
“These days,” committee Chairwoman Joan Greene said, “it’s more likes than dislikes.”
“Many of the people are very health-conscious ... (and) are very delighted with the addition of locally grown, pesticide-free food,” she said.
When Greene’s family makes an upcoming visit to Connecticut from Los Angeles, she said, she’s going to forgo the restaurant and dine in.