Menu & Market for Local Foods

The good stuff is piling up faster than I can eat it. Problems like this aren’t so bad. It seems that more and more fine dining establishments in the area are starting to pick up on the trend of highlighting high quality local producers on their menus.

This is great for many reasons. For starters, the conspicuous use of better ingredients helps to justify the prices charged by restaurants. But it’s also good for the customers. A restaurant’s patrons hopefully connect the dots and realize one reason the food is delicious is because of these farm-raised ingredients.

By printing the names of the farms on the menu, diners are provided with a short list of chef-approved producers to seek out next time they venture to a farmer’s market.

Today is the tale of two chefs, one known for fine dining, and the other known as a local-food advocate. That means one of these will require you to dress up and spend a fair bit of money, but the other one is totally free and you can come as you are.

If you live around Albany you will have heard of chef Yono Purnomo of the eponymous Yono’s Restaurant. Well, recently they released their fall menu and I was very impressed to see a handful of local items on their appetizer menu. I do need to get there and sample some of these dishes.

The menu includes eggs from Cornell Farm, pork from Sheldon Farm, cheese from Old Chatham Sheepherding Company, duck products from Hudson Valley Foie Gras, cider from Yonder Farms and applejack from Harvest Spirits.

You can download the menu here, but these appetizers mostly range from $10 to  $12 with the foie gras coming in higher at $19. But that foie gras is like a quadraphonic explosion of local food, which includes an apple cider donut “munchkin” in addition to the local cider, applejack and duck liver.

And I can’t imagine an appetizer portion of squash risotto and a slow poached local egg being a skimpy affair. My hunch is that for $11 one could make a light meal out of this delightful sounding dish that contains a seasonal vegetable, a starch, and a delicious high quality locally sourced protein.

For only a few dollars more than an order of Buffalo wings at a tavern, you could treat yourself to Buffalo-style Marcho Farm veal sweetbreads with celery leaves, heirloom carrots, and “Ewe’s Blue” from Old Chatham Sheepherding Company. It’s $12 and right up my alley. Marcho Farm isn’t a local producer, and it’s not a small producer, but they do make a high quality product that is served in some of the country’s best restaurants.

The rest of Yono’s menu also includes other sustainable meats including farm raised exotic animals, wild King salmon, California spot prawns, and pastured chicken. All of which are great to see from one of the stalwarts of fine dining in Albany.

The second chef of the day is Noah Sheetz.

I got to judge a couple rounds of the All Over Albany Tournament of Pizza with Noah, and he’s a great guy. He even invited me to cook with him at this event on Saturday. But it’s at the Honest Weight Food Co-op and I generally try to keep a low profile over there. 

From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Noah is going to be cooking and sampling local and seasonal dishes.

The two I’m most excited about are the potato cheddar hash made with Palantine cheddar cheese and Staron’s Farm potatoes, and the pork braised winter greens made from Slack Hollow Farm’s veggies and Sweet Tree Farm’s sausage.

Maybe one of you can go on Saturday and tell me what I missed.

Watching professional chefs do their thing can be really informative. If you observe carefully, you might be able to pick up one or two techniques that can improve your own performance behind the stove. And that alone might be reason enough to brave the weekend crowd at the co-op.

While parking at the HWFC may be a zoo for the event, you can always try to park on the street in between the market and All Good Bakers. Because Noah will be giving out tastes of his dishes, but Nick will be in the kitchen offering full sized grilled cheese sandwiches at their bakery/café. He uses locally milled organic flours for the bread, locally produced cheeses for the filling, and locally raised vegetables for the sides. And let me tell you, those things are good.

Okay, I guess that’s three things. But the last one was really just a bonus. Now get out there and eat food.