Turnip the beets
Learn how to make the most of your vegetables from chef and former farmer Abra Berens
Plump tomatoes, slender green beans and creamy zucchini: When summer’s fresh produce starts rolling in, it can be tempting to fall back on tried-and-true methods. But sometimes, on those rare occasions, a nudge in a new direction can be a revelation. In Ruffage (Chronicle Books, 2019), chef and former farmer Abra Berens brings an abundance of such catalysts.
The Galien, Mich.- based author drew on her deep knowledge of vegetables for her debut cookbook. The result is inviting and inventive, practical and original: An exploration of 30 different types, arranged alphabetically and accompanied by essays, tips and recipes presented according to preparation technique (grilled, puréed, raw, etc.) with plenty of variations.
Berens trained at the celebrated Ballymaloe Cookery School in Co. Cork, Ireland, which centres on an organic farm and gardens. Just a year and a half later, in 2009, she co-founded Bare Knuckle Farm in Northport, Mich. “I grew up on a farm so I had a sense of what farming could look like,” she says. “It wasn’t until after Ballymaloe that I decided I really wanted my food to be of a place, and to be evocative of what’s happening in a certain region. That felt really exciting.”
After eight years of farming, Berens returned to her career as a full-time chef and now helms the kitchen at Granor Farm in Three Oaks, Mich. Vegetables are the “chosen cornerstone” of her diet and in Ruffage, she takes a generous approach to sharing her style of cooking. Early on in her farming career, she learned “that ingredients can be repetitive, but meals need not be”; in Berens’s hands, there are seemingly endless possibilities for produce. ( The book features more than 100 recipes and upwards of 230 variations.)
“The most important thing for me is this idea of inverting the way a lot of people, myself included, make their meals sometimes, which is getting inspiration from a finished dish and then going out and getting the ingredients for it,” she says. “I’ve always benefited from looking at the ingredients that I’m most excited about and then weaving those into a meal as opposed to the other way around.”
Take the humble cabbage, which is unequivocally Berens’s favourite vegetable: “Sweet and mild,” equally suitable as “the star or the support.” Raw and shaved, she tosses the brassica with chili oil and cilantro, and tops it with charred melon in a salad. Other iterations include apples, ham and mustard vinaigrette, or lemon vinaigrette, parsley, dukkah and ricotta. In one of the following recipes, after sizzling ribbons in duck fat, she dresses the cabbage in a brown sugar-vinegar sauce and pairs it with roasted potatoes in a bright herb salad served alongside seared duck breast. Variations such as sausages, apples, mustard and cheddar, or sunflower seeds and salsa verde transform the dish entirely.
“I wanted the recipes to be very different in their texture and in their flavour combinations,” says Berens. “And then the variations to give a glimpse into the million different ways that these dishes can permutate to make new things.”
From the book’s outset, she conveys a sense of empowerment: “You’re in charge.” Cultivating your own sense of salt and acid is key to cooking, and Berens provides an experiment (“Adventures in Seasoning”) that will help you get there. Naturally, her background as a farmer has coloured her career as a chef. She expresses the hope that in sharing her experiences, readers will develop a greater understanding of vegetables – when they’re at their best, the strengths their flavours and textures bring to a dish – that will change the way they cook as well.
“I have a little bit of a loosey- goosey style of cooking, so the recipes reflect that. But that loosey- gooseyness comes from feeling confident in what I’m doing and I wanted to share that confidence with people,” she says. “None of this is inherently complicated but it is a craft – or practical art – where the more you do it, the more comfortable you’ll become with cooking. I call it reading the landscape of food, where you get a sense of how something looks or how it’s going to taste, or what cooking technique or preparation technique is going to be the best for that food. I wanted to shortcut that for people a little bit.”