Results tagged: Blue Hill

Meet Leo Mondragon, mushroom farmer. Leo supplies Blue Hill and other top restaurants in New York City and Boston with shitake, oyster and 20 other types of mushrooms. If you've ever wondered how mushrooms are cultivated you should find this video interesting.

[Watch this video on YouTube]

Learn more about Forest Harvest on their website.

This video is a part of a series produced for Blue Hill by Savory Cities. View our previous Meet Your Purveyors posts:

• Mountain Sweet Berry Farm
• Cherry Lane Farms
• Herondale Farm

Or view the entire serious on the Blue Hill website.

If you've ever visited the Union Square Greenmarket in search of ramps, chances are you've ended up at Rick Bishop's Mountain Sweet Berry Farm stand at one time or another. Rick's the guy with the sign board featuring assorted ramp recipes and the names of his more well known restaurant customers.

In small letters off to one side is the name Blue Hill, home to chef and co-owner Dan Barber, who is not only one of Rick's best customers, he's also one of his biggest supporters. Barber, who took home this year's James Beard Foundation Outstanding Chef award, wrote about Bishop and his science-oriented farming practices in the July 2007 issue of Food&Wine magazine. In the article Barber made note of Bishop's use of a refractometer, a tool used to measure the sugar content of fruits and vegetables, to gauge the optimal time to harvest his crop for the best possible taste. 

It's long been in fashion to name farmers and other purveyors on menus, but we've usually found this to be more of a conceit rather than any sort of effort to educate diners or help suppliers in a meaningful way.

One of the few chefs we've encountered who does take the time to educate the public and and directly help farmers is Dan Barber of Blue Hill in NYC and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico, NY. For the past several years Dan and his brother and business partner, David, have been outspoken champions of locally-sourced and sustainably-raised animals and produce.

So when Blue Hill approached us last year about producing a series of short videos to showcase the farmers that supply the restaurant, we leapt at the chance. Not only did we love the idea, but it also gave us an opportunity to learn about some of the people we'd been buying tomatoes, potatoes and chickens from at the Union Square Greenmarket.

The complete set of videos are on the new Blue Hill web site, but we thought you might enjoy seeing them here so each week we'll be posting a new video to showcase a local farmer. The first video is of Cherry Lane Farms, a second generation family farm in New Jersey. If you're headed to the Union Square Greenmarket anytime soon, stop by and say hi to Susie and her crew.