Steve Selin gathering wild apples to make cider. (Photo credit: South Hill Cider)

“Wild apples have a character that is impossible to simulate,” Selin said. “Like the difference between picking wild mushrooms and growing cultivated mushrooms. And the trees grow in the wild; they are generally very slow-growing and quite old. These two characteristics are known in the wine world to create more concentrated wine. I also find that is the case with apples.”

You probably wouldn’t want to bite into one of the apples Selin finds. They’re tart, sour, and often bitter. But their intense flavor was made for fermenting and turning into cider. Quite literally.

Centuries ago, cider was the alcoholic beverage of choice, with many landowning Americans growing apples to ferment into hard cider. When prohibition went into effect, apple growers began to focus on producing the fruit as a snack instead of a beverage, and orchardists began breeding and propagating sweeter apple varieties instead. As a result, many cider apple trees were abandoned, left to grow on their own—and most people have never tasted cider made from their apples.

Selin, who has been bottling cider since 2003, now finds himself in the midst of a cider renaissance in the U.S. And with the beverage making a comeback, growing 10 times in retail sales from 2008 to 2018, some cider makers aren’t just foraging for wild apples, they’re also grafting older, wild apple varieties in their orchards.

While some of these apple trees are wild in the sense that they grew from seed to tree, others likely came from cultivated varieties planted decades ago and since forgotten. In addition to ensuring a steady supply of the most optimal cider apples, cultivating these varieties also enables cider makers to grow the fruit to withstand the looming threats of global warming and the range of diseases and pests that climate change will bring to their regions.

Selin is grafting and planting some of the wild seedlings he has collected. “We have about 100 of them in the orchard that  will be bearing fruit in the next couple of years,” he said. “We grafted another 100 this year and are increasingly going in that direction. I believe that these will be the next generation’s cider apples in our region.”

Breeding Climate-Resistant Apples

While apples grow in all 50 states, most cider apples are grown in the Northeast, Northwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest. They need well-drained, slightly acidic soil and cold temperatures, but milder winters, late frosts, rain, and drought can all lead to large crop losses, such as the frost-and-hail combination that wiped out some crops throughout the Northeast last May. The climate crisis will also bring changes in pathogens, pests, and an increase in bacterial diseases such as fireblight, which affects fruit trees such as apples and pears and can destroy entire orchards.

“[Climate change] doesn’t necessarily mean more pest and disease pressure, but it does mean changes,” said Cameron P. Peace, a professor of horticulture at Washington State University. “You can breed apples to be resistant to fireblight, [but] something new may come along, or the strain of fireblight changes and overcomes the current resistance.”

Some of South Hill Cider’s apple harvest. (Photo credit: South Hill Cider)

Peace oversees the school’s student-run Palouse Wild Cider Breeding Program, which, for the past six years has worked to breed cider apples that are fireblight resistant and bred to grow in the local region and flower quickly, allowing the students to see the outcome of their crosses. They started with more than 20 wild apple seedlings species, along with heirloom and modern seedlings from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Geneva, New York collection.

“The students are making crosses that have never been made before, and it’s amazing the things that are coming out of it in terms of the fruit’s shape and color—and underlining that is genetic diversity, which provides an opportunity for adaptation for various climate changes,” said Peace.

While his students are focused on developing apple varieties for Northwest, Peace hopes that by focusing on wild apples they help develop tools to encourage more breeders to use more diversity.

A wild pear harvest. (Photo credit: South Hill Cider)

“I think breeding should be regional,” he said. “People shouldn’t be trying to think of breeding for the whole world. We are planning for the future decades ahead, and while you might want to do your trials in a warmer climate, in general where there is a viable crop, there should be a local breeder working on those varieties. If they happen to do well somewhere else, good for them.”

One of the tools Peace has helped to develop outside of the student-run breeding program is DNA diagnostic tools of apples and cherries, which will allow botanists to more accurately predict how the trees and their crosses will perform.

Finger Lakes Cider Makers at Work in the Orchard

Selin isn’t alone in planting wild apple varieties; other Finger Lakes cider makers, including Autumn Stosheck of Eve’s Cidery and Eric Shatt of Redbyrd Orchard Cider, are also grafting foraged apple varieties in hopes of growing more resilient trees.

Shatt and his wife and business partner Deva Mass started cider orchards in Burdett and Trumansburg, New York, in 2003, relying in part on wild trees they found in abandoned orchards. They have been making cider for the public under the Redbyrd label since 2010.

“It’s always been a quest in farming for me to grow in a way that requires the least amount of inputs,” Shatt said. “In discovering wild trees, it was kind of obvious that because they establish themselves and have continued to survive and produce crops of apples without any inputs, that there was a good potential to cultivate them,” he added.

Wild pears. (Photo credit: South Hill Cider)

Over the course of their work, Shatt and Mass have grafted about 30 different wild apples into their orchards, although there are only about five or six that Shatt said he continues to be excited about.

“Once you graft them in, sometimes they don’t perform the way they did in the wild. They’re overly vigorous, or they don’t produce enough,” Shatt said. He now gives what’s known as scion wood—a shoot from an established tree used to start a graft—to others who want to grow the varieties he’s cultivated.

“I’m on this quest to grow food in a low-impact way. In searching for and discovering naturally resilient cultivators and bringing them into the orchard, we’re promoting sustainable food systems,” Shatt said.

While foraging is endemic to the local culture in Ithaca, and many Finger Lakes cideries market their products that way, Mass and Stoscheck are keenly aware it’s happening on land that once belonged to the local Indigenous population.

“We hope that through featuring wild fruit in ciders that tell a story about a place, we can begin a dialogue around land rematriation and reparations in a state where less than 2 percent of farmers are BIPOC. We’re trying to organize around paying it back,” Stoscheck said, adding that she is working on a holiday pack and virtual tasting with Redbyrd Orchards Cider with proceeds going to Quarter Acre For The People, a land access project.

“This is not the final thing on reparations; it’s more like a starting point in a conversation around what businesses can do,” she said.

Stoscheck started Eve’s Cidery nearly 20 years ago. She and her business partners forage mainly for wild pears, specifically looking for fireblight-resistant trees. They’ve grafted and are trialing wild pear specimens that other cidermakers in the Finger Lakes have found, as well as apples.

Checking on rootstock. (Photo by Bridget Shirvell)

Her big focus, though, is growing rootstock on to which she can graft the apples. Most rootstock is dwarfing rootstock, which comes from the West and produces the smallest type of apple trees. Since the 1950s, rootstock has been bred to be smaller and more productive, for a focus on ever-higher planting density, ever-earlier yields, and ever-higher yields per acre.

“It is considered not commercially viable to plant an orchard on anything but dwarfing rootstocks,” Stosheck said. “However, the price you pay for all that productivity is a tree that really couldn’t survive in any natural setting.”

She’s started planting a cold hardy rootstock that she believes is also less susceptible to mouse girdling than many other rootstocks, helping make for a large, healthy, vigorous tree that will be more resilient to a low-input organic management system.

Stoscheck is excited by the developments she and other cider makers are bringing about, related to both cultivation and taste, in their work with wild varieties. “If universities and corporations are breeding apples for shelf life and yield, what are you as an eater missing out on in terms of flavor?” she asked. “Cider made from wild and heirloom apples offer a whole delightful universe of flavor and aroma that you’ve been deprived of and never knew existed.”

Still, it’s a long-term project, she emphasized. “We’re at the beginning—it’s a project that’s realistically multi-generational. We’re working on it; we’re figuring it out. I have ideas, [but] check back in 30 years.”

Top photo courtesy of South Hill Cider.

The post Cider Makers Are Betting on Foraged Apples for Climate Resilience appeared first on Civil Eats.

The cans sitting outside homes on a Tuesday morning in Ridgefield, Connecticut appear to be trash bins, but instead of rubbish, they’re packed with food scraps. By the end of the morning, the scraps will be picked up by Curbside Compost, a company that serves parts of Fairfield and Westchester counties, in the metro New York City area.

“Households are filling their pails more because everyone is home,” said Nick Skeadas, who co-founded the company in 2016.

As the coronavirus pandemic keeps people at home, many people who are cooking more than ever are also paying more attention to food waste. What they’re doing about that food waste varies greatly.

While some home gardeners compost their own food scraps, most Americans don’t have that option. And just 326 towns and cities (less than 2 percent of American communities) offer curbside food waste collection. New York City only began its voluntary organics pickup program in 2017, as part of the city’s plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, and barely a year later halted expansion of the program.

Although the program, which is available to roughly 3.5 million New Yorkers remained in operation in March and April, the New York City Department of Sanitation recently announced it would suspend the service through May as the result of the pandemic.

But it’s no secret that food waste was a huge issue long before the pandemic. Food waste is responsible for 6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Now, images of farmers forced to dump milk, smash eggs, and destroy produce are all over the news. According to Politico, it took the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) more than a month to begin buying large amounts of surplus produce. Yet, even before the pandemic, an estimated 33.4 percent of edible produce went unharvested in fields and disked under. Those numbers get worse off the farm. Households are believed to be responsible for the biggest portion of food waste. And it’s not clear how things have changed now that more people are cooking at home.

Civil Eats spoke with food waste expert Dana Gunders, the executive director of ReFED, which just announced a grant program aimed at preventing 10 million pounds of food waste over the next 90 days, about the current state of food waste, what strategies home cooks can employ, and what’s giving her hope for the future.

Are we wasting more food since the pandemic began? Less? Or are we just wasting it differently?

Photo courtesy of ReFED.

Overall, more food is going to waste than usual right now. With almost the entire restaurant and foodservice sector closed, entire supply chains have found themselves without a market. This is leading to millions of pounds of produce being tilled into the ground, many thousands of gallons of milk poured into lagoons, and huge amounts of seafood being thrown out. Because grocery sales are up, there is likely less food going to waste in that sector for the time being, but it’s not enough to make up for all that’s going to waste on the foodservice side. In homes, we don’t know for sure, but my guess is that all the hoarding and change in habits has led people to waste slightly more food than normal.

What are the challenges of reducing food waste during the pandemic?

At first, the challenge was so many restaurants and campuses were closing abruptly, and they had to do something with all the food they had on hand. Now that has passed, and the main challenge is that supply chains that typically serve the foodservice channel have no market for their food. Some sales have been able to migrate over to the grocery sector, but that doesn’t always work. For instance, a 20-pound bag of shredded cheese can’t simply be sold in a grocery store, and people buy a lot less broccolini and high-end fish than restaurants do. So for many products, the sales just don’t line up. There is a huge amount of food going to donation, but that doesn’t always work out due to added costs of harvest or transport, or lack of storage by the donation partner.

What strategies do you recommend for those that want to reduce their food waste at home?

I usually give people four tips. First, plan your meals. Rotate through “meal sets” of two or three meals that utilize ingredients you tend to have in excess (e.g., cilantro or celery). Acknowledge that lazy nights of frozen pizza or takeout happen and plan them in. Include “Eat Down” nights, when you empty out the fridge to make use of anything that still needs using up. And remember, the moment you buy food, you’ve committed to it.

Freeze. Almost anything can be frozen—milk, cheese (best if shredded), bread (best if sliced), pasta sauce, pasta, leftovers, and more. At my home, we’ve been doing a lot of lasagna-type meals and getting sick of them after a day or two, so we just freeze the rest and are glad to have dinner already made a week later.

Store food properly. It buys you more time to use it. Fresh herbs and asparagus do great in a jar of water in the door of your fridge. Avocados last much longer if refrigerated once ripe. And fruit does best in a crisper drawer of its own set to “low” or slightly cracked open. You can find many more details on how to store different foods at savethefood.com.

Revive older food. Soak wilting veggies in ice water to re-crisp them. Un-stale bread, crackers, or tortilla chips by toasting them for 1-2 minutes.

What about “best by” and other label dates? How important are they?

Don’t fear dates. Contrary to popular belief, “best by” and “sell by” dates are actually just manufacturer suggestions for when the food is at its peak quality—they don’t indicate that the food is automatically bad on that date. Most food—including dairy—can safely be eaten after those dates. As a rule of thumb, foods that pregnant women are told to avoid are ones to be careful with, along with bagged salad greens.

Is now a good time to start a compost pile if you’ve never had one at home before?

Sure! Most of us don’t have access to a municipal compost service, so home composting is the best option for recycling nutrients and reducing greenhouse gases with our food scraps. Make sure to read up on how to balance your pile with “brown” matter and how to turn it to get the best results.

What’s giving you hope?

People are learning or re-learning to cook, and that could be game-changing in reducing the amount of food that is wasted in homes in the long term. The more comfortable people are cooking, the more they’re able to throw together a meal with what’s in the fridge or know how to use something that’s about to go bad. I also think many people are planning meals more as they’re keen to shop less, which is another healthy muscle to build in terms of reducing waste.

The post How the Pandemic is Affecting Home Food Waste appeared first on Civil Eats.

“It’s easy for us to sell the New York Strips, filet mignons, and ribeyes, but you’ve got also rumps and shanks and neck and fat and bone and oxtail and liver,” says co-owner Dan Meiser. “Not only do we not want to be wasteful, but we’re also paying for all of it, and to make the model work, you have to sell every pound.”

Instead of simply selling meat, Meiser and his business partner, James Wayman (pictured above), opened a butcher shop with a restaurant inside. The two-year-old eatery serves not only as a place to pick up hamburgers or learn  how to cook a new cut of meat, but also as a place to get a meal. All the while, the owners and staff are working tirelessly to reconnect area residents to their local meat producers.

“We’re really lucky in this part of the world,” says Wayman. “We have a very strong and historic farming tradition, with lots of families farming for generations.”

At one time, butcher shops were a staple of most communities. But in the 1970s, “boxed beef” cuts which butchers could then cut into smaller cuts, became more popular. As a result, there was less of a demand for whole-animal butchery, and today, many supermarkets sell everything pre-packaged.

While traditional, whole-animal butcher shops have largely disappeared, a new type of business has popped up across the U.S. in recent years: the butcher shop/restaurant hybrid. In addition to Grass & Bone in Connecticut, similar establishments and others have launched or added restaurants to make themselves more financially viable and draw in clientele who might not otherwise seek them out. Some of these include Foothills Meats near Asheville, North Carolina; Kau in Greensboro, North Carolina; Revival Meats in Houston; Laurelhurst Market in Portland, Oregon; Clove & Hoof in Oakland; and Belcampo Meat Co. in multiple locations.

In addition to serving fresh and local meat and supporting nearby farmers, these establishments also hope to make whole-animal butchery affordable and cut down on food waste.

Photo courtesy of Grass & Bone.

“You know when you’re buying from a local butcher who lives in the community that they’re vested in the area, and the money is going back into the community,” said Danny Johnson, vice president of The Butcher’s Guild and owner of the California market and butcher shop Taylor’s Market.

Johnson says the return of the neighborhood butcher shop is one of many side benefits of the farm-to-table movement and the fact that more people want to understand the origins of their food.

More than a decade ago, Wayman and Meiser helped to start the farm-to-table scene in southeastern Connecticut, when they opened Oyster Club, the establishment that eventually paved the way for them to run a whole-animal butcher shop. At the time, it was a trailblazing move to feature the names of farms on a menu that changed daily, depending on what the chefs could procure.

Oyster Club led to a resurgence in local food in the Mystic area and the overall strengthening of the local-food economy. And it also created a demand in the community for access to the type of meat that Oyster Club, with its on-site butchery team, was dishing out.

“I’ve been butchering for almost 15 years, and when we opened Oyster Club, we did [whole animal butchery] right away,” Wayman said. “I think it’s important for our cooks to know how, and it’s an important part of our local food chain.”

Several years after opening Oyster Club, Meiser and Wayman launched a second restaurant in town. The Engine Room, with a focus on burgers that the team butchered and ground in-house, created an additional need for a butcher shop. The two knew if they wanted to do whole-animal butchery and source the animals locally, they would need to find a way to make it work economically. The result is Grass & Bone.

Near Asheville, North Carolina, Casey McKissick started a small family farm that raised cattle, hogs, and chickens back in 2002. In 2013, he opened Foothills Meats—and eventually turned the establishment into a butcher-and-restaurant concept, with a separate food truck.

The exterior of Foothills Meats. (Photo courtesy of Foothills)

“The business model has been an exercise in stubbornness in trying to figure out how to create a sustainable business centered around whole-animal butchery and utilization,” McKissick said. “By taking responsibility for the ‘whole beast,’ we are preserving the craft of butchery and helping farmers continue to farm.”

Foothills Meats’ two Butcher Bar restaurant models feature a fully stocked and serviced retail butcher case in restaurants that offer simple, approachable food menus. They also host a high-end private Butcher’s Table Dinner series.

“Over the years, we’ve been very intentional about creating menus and marketing the respective dishes, so as to maximize yield and value from the butcher shop,” McKissick said. “Our burgers and our hotdogs are the biggest sellers, and there are good reasons why from a whole-animal standpoint. Steaks and charcuterie items are also very popular but comprise a sustainable [enough] percentage of overall sales that we’re not forced to go out and buy boxed and/or commodity beef to meet demand. It all works quite well together.”

Like McKissick, Wayman and Meiser focus exclusively on local meat. Everything they bring in comes from New England farms—some of it organic, some grass finished, but all of it local. “They’re all from farms where the people farming are doing it in a manner that we’re happy with and proud of,” Wayman said.

For many small farmers, the butcher shop/restaurant hybrid model also provides a unique sales channel.

“Whole animal butcher shops, especially the ones with restaurants, allow small producers to showcase the quality and nuance of their operations through their product and get paid a fair price,” said David Zarling, Director of Butchery at Belcampo Meat Co. The company, which sells cuts of meat direct-to-consumers online, has butcher shops restaurants in California and New York City and raises its own animals on a ranch in Northern California.

“We’ve hung our hat on transparency, and as far as I’m concerned, raising your own animals is the most thorough way to ensure quality and total traceability through your supply chain,” Zarling said.

In Greensboro, North Carolina, Kayne Fisher takes a different approach to sourcing the meat that comes into his butcher shop restaurant, Kau. While the pork and poultry is sourced from farmers in the area, the majority of the beef comes from Braveheart Farms in Iowa City. “They checked every box I was looking for—prime, humane, antibiotic free, no feedlots,” said Fisher, who opened Kau—an idea that had been in the making since he was five years old—in 2018.

Kayne Fisher. (Photo courtesy of Kau)

“I spent summers in Detroit with my grandparents, and I would go with my grandfather to this local corner store, where we’d get that night’s dinner. They’d be cutting chicken, beef, and pork, and you could get cuts to order. I was so intrigued by it; I started thinking that one day I would open a restaurant that had a butchery market,” Fisher said.

The butchery component inevitably influences Kau’s menu. “We use every component of everything we cut down,” Fisher said.

Still, the model is a challenging one.

“It’s antithetical to our fast-paced, ready-to-eat-while-driving culture that seems to be all the rage right now,” said Belcampo’s Zarling. “Butcher shop restaurants harken back to a different time, a different pace, where skilled trades were held in high regard and folks would break bread together at the end of a day of satisfying work.”

But places like Belcampo, Kau, Foothills and Grass & Bone are proving that whole-animal butchery with minimal waste and lots of consumer engagement is completely possible.

“We have a team of butchers and chefs who can say, ‘Hey, why don’t you try this?’ If we can show you how to take this amazing cut of meat and turn it into something flavorful and delicious, there’s a real joy and sense of accomplishment on our end—and for our guests—when they can pull it off,” Meiser said.

The post The Growing Trend of Dining at Your Neighborhood Butcher Shops appeared first on Civil Eats.