San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Chez Panisse and secrets of the fruit bowl
Stars align in constellation of biochemistry and timing
At Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant where Alice Waters once mined large chunks of the bedrock that supports modern American fine dining, cochefs Amy Dencler and Jennifer Sherman prepare multicourse tasting menus in the downstairs dining room, while Nathan Alderson and Beth Wells serve dinner a la carte in the upstairs cafe. Pastry chefs Mary Joe Thorenson and Carrie Lewis supply both levels with desserts.
For nearly half a century, generations of talented Chez Panisse chefs have stoked the international renown of the legendary restaurant while following a culinary strategy that defies the rhythms of conventional restaurant criticism. The kitchen orbits around a concrete core of classical techniques, without avantgarde flourishes for food critics to dissect. And the menu changes every day to sync with seasonal ingredient flux, so it’s difficult to nitpick details or make recommendations to future diners.
In the absence of concrete menu landmarks or groundbreaking technical milestones, the national conversation surrounding Chez Panisse tends toward a watery slurry of restaurant industry cliches, including debate over the value (both financial and creative) of “simple” or“ingredient forward” food. Within the coliseum of debate about whether Chez Panisse merits the price of entry, the restaurant’s penchant for serving fresh fruit is a perpetual headliner.
Chez Panisse is a restaurant where real strawberries can taste as loud as Jolly Ranchers, and foraged chanterelles can carry sufficient savory payload to compete with Doritos. Despite what Chez Panisse’s critics and fans alike may claim, such perfect produce doesn’t just fall out of a well-tended garden and onto your plate.
Channeling Chez Panisse’s brand of electric, tonguethumping flavor from aesthetically simple food requires the precise manipulation of some of the most complex biochemistry in the edible world. Here’s how they do it with fruit.
Growth and harvest
Despite the classical aesthetic, cooking “farm to table” food at the highest level is no less chemically complex or difficult to execute than the right-angle precision presented by more modern-leaning restaurants. Where some contemporary restaurants invest time and resources on new dish R&D, Chez Panisse devotes hundreds of hours to a Templarlevel quest for the perfect citrus, persimmons, avocados, pomegranates, figs, apples, tomatoes, pears, stone fruit, table and wine grapes, melons and berries.
Ingredient prep begins months, or years, before your 8 p.m. reservation and takes place in a tiny kitchen buried in dirt. Bob Cannard, one of the many farmers with whom Chez Panisse collaborates, knows that supreme fruit depends on an umbilical cocktail of elemental staples like nitrogen, potassium and calcium. To set the mood for ripening, Cannard seasons his soil with fava beans, crushed volcanic rock, oyster shells and compost. Favas and other fast-growing cover crops turn air into fertilizer by recruiting bacteria to nestle against their roots and snare nitrogen from the atmosphere. The crushed rocks and shells are crystalline caches stocked with dozens of different minerals. The compost donates billions of microbes to an already flourishing subterranean community that uses natural acids as mining tools to dissolve these mineral storehouses into a nutritious, geochemical kimchi.
Sommeliers love to wax poetic about oyster shells and ancient seabeds in certain vineyards. Plants put soil through a digestive meat grinder to strip out basic nutrients, so you can’t actually taste ancient mollusks in ripe fruit or even in the most expensive Chablis. These prenatal fruit vitamins contain a functional road map to help plants navigate the convoluted labyrinth of pathways toward the most delicious fruit. Minute deficiencies in a single mineral can prevent a tomato from manufacturing umami-rich glutamate or stunt a peach from surpassing the size of an almond, so Cannard makes sure to keep his soil pantry well stocked.
Harvest severs the plantsoil lifeline, leaving fruit alone in uncharted waters with only what it has stored for survival. Chez Panisse asks its farmers to allow each piece of fruit maximum time to pack its bags of deliciousness before departure to the restaurant, which, like cutting things close at the airport, rubs against the chance of complete catastrophe. Chez Panisse chefs coordinate with their pomegranate growers to push their fruit past acceptable ripeness for market-bound product, often allowing the jeweled red orbs to split open on the tree. With their delicate cargo exposed to the elements, emergency harvests often occur hours before an impending afternoon shower brings waves of blooming mold.
Along with color and flavor changes, peak ripeness triggers the release of a platoon of cellular executioners that cut the cords of pectin and cellulose that tie fruit to plant. Chez Panisse chefs inspect all incoming melons at the juncture where the stem was once attached; a perfectly circular, empty stem scar indicates that the melon released itself naturally after storing as much sweetness as it could hold, whereas quarter- or half-moons of vestigial stem indicate that flavorful stockpiling was cut short by a premature harvest. Immature fruit clings to the vine, so the best figs, stone fruit and berries seem to jump into the warmth of an outstretched hand if picked at their peak.
In addition to the sentimental beauty of this agricultural kismet, minimizing aggressive tugging and twisting decreases the chance of injuring the fruit during harvest. A scratch offers passage to hordes of invading microbes. A bruise crushes internal cell blocks open, allowing dangerous enzyme inmates to run amok and cause uneven rot-ripening from within. The plump drupelets on a ripe mulberry contain fragile purses of acid that can spill open to trigger color and flavor degradation with the vibrational stress of riding in a truck bed. The Chez Panisse chefs don’t source fruit locally to win sustainability kudos; they know that the physics of deliciousness can depend on traffic patterns and the age of a truck’s shock absorbers.
Chez Panisse’s sourcing endeavors extend to all possible interpretations of the word “farm.” The magnetic pull of the restaurant’s prestige draws a steady flow of neighbors and local admirers offering fruit grown in backyards, urban gardens and even untended empty lots. As busy as it is, Chez Panisse takes these offers seriously, greeting every offer with the same discerning eye.
Aging
Even if you are lucky enough to live within driving distance of these farmers, you’ll be hard pressed to eat fruit as good as what Chez Panisse serves, because of what happens next. When a case of presumably perfect peaches, handpicked by one of the country’s most sought-after farmers, arrives at the door, only six or so will immediately be deemed ready for the spotlight. The rest get put through a gauntlet of rigorous sorting and curating protocols under the guidance of some of the most discerning fruit affineurs in the industry.
Fruit is an instrument of botanical seduction, a meticulously crafted thirst-trap designed to lure us into a mutually beneficial barter system: flavor and nutrition in exchange for spreading the seeds of a new plant generation.
Picked fruit remains alive, and some fruits — including figs, peaches, plums, apples, pears, avocados, persimmons and bananas — have the ability to continue ripening for days and weeks after harvest. The shock of detachment from their stems causes these fruits to release an odorless perfume of plant hormones. These hormones announce a biological last call to signal the fruit’s final chance at luring in an animal suitor, kicking millions of microscopic enzyme factories online to full production, making the fruit as delicious as possible.
Ripening fruits drop their protective physical coatings of tough fibers and dampen chemical deterrents like astringent tannins and abrasive acids. Deep 401(k)s of starch are liquidated to fast cash in the form of sugar, and cell walls crumble to allow easier access to the sweetened nectar when bitten. Scraps of the disintegrating structures rocket upward to explode enchanting perfume into the air, and tasteful, utilitarian, green chlorophyll cedes the floor to garish pigments of every other color, a botanical “Everything Must Go” banner hung high.
In the industrial fruit supply chain, these ripening changes are shepherded under the watchful eye of color, texture and aroma quantifying instruments, each costing tens of thousands of dollars. Chez Panisse trains its chefs to replace those analytical labs with their senses.
At the restaurant, deliveries of fast-ripening fruit are immediately sorted and laid out onto single-layer trays that are tagged and retagged with information tracking their progress across the waves of cooks who roll in and out of the restaurant between shifts. By logging the stem-end firmness of a pear, the character and intensity of a plum’s perfume, or the characteristic wrinkling pattern of a black mission fig, these notes act like nautical star charts to indicate whether a specific piece of fruit will be perfect in two days, that evening, or between 1 and 3 hours from last touch.
Most home cooks are familiar with the paper bag trick — putting underripe fruit into a paper bag for quick ripening. The paper works by trapping and con--