Linda Falkenstein
Jason Kierce continues to refine his pilot hydroponic system for growing greens.
At this year’s culminating “street food” event for Chef Week, it wasn’t any of the dishes from the hot name kitchens that stole my heart. For sheer audacity of flavor, it was the sabich sandwich from Adamah Neighborhood Table — the cafe in the UW-Madison Hillel.
The sabich, an Israeli favorite, is filled with fried eggplant and hard-boiled egg and jazzed up with hot schug sauce and amba (a tart-sweet mango sauce). This one was the work of Jason Kierce, executive chef at Adamah since July 2015.
Kierce was behind my favorite dish from last year’s Chef Week potluck, too, a rich meatloaf made with additions of short rib meat and bacon, from Johnny Delmonico’s — Kierce’s kitchen at the time.
Yes, you heard right, bacon. Kierce, who’s not Jewish, had never cooked kosher before moving from stints at Johnny Delmonico’s and Cento to take over the kitchen at Adamah last year. The cafe was then under the auspices of Blue Plate Catering, but as of Jan. 1, 2016, it’s been operating on its own as a nonprofit restaurant owned by Hillel. It’s open to the public 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Sunday-Thursday and 10 a.m.-3 p.m. on Fridays.
Linda Falkenstein
Herbs are growing in perlite in the new hydroponic system for growing greens at Hillel/Adamah Neighborhood Table.
Adamah is Madison’s only kosher kitchen and the only certified kosher restaurant in Wisconsin approved to serve both meat and dairy. It welcomes not just students but members of the community, tourists and other visitors who need a kosher meal. The kitchen even delivers kosher meals to UW Hospital and Clinics for families of patients.
Kierce works in concert with Hillel educator Shlomo Geller, also the kitchen’s kosher supervisor. Geller, for instance, turns on the stove any time it’s needed (due to an element of kosher law that requires a Jew must take some part in the cooking process if a non-Jew is cooking). Once every two months the kitchen is inspected by a rabbi from Milwaukee.
When Kierce started at Adamah, he looked at the cafe menu and wanted to do “food that was traditional but with my spin on it.” So he came up with, in one instance, a tomatillo and poblano version of shakshuka, the Israeli/North African dish that’s more conventionally eggs poached in tomato sauce. “People liked it, but they were longing for the traditional version,” says Kierce. “I always hear, ‘I want the stuff that Bubbe makes.’”
He has obliged, and the menu includes homemade malawach, a “laborsome” fried bread that consists of layers of dough that are carefully cut, wrapped, pressed and then fried.
The kitchen also makes its own harissa, the hot chili blend found in its sweet potato hash and its chicken schnitzel sandwich. There’s also an American/Jewish deli side to the menu, with a pastrami sandwich, Rueben, matzoh ball soup, noodle kugel and potato pancakes. Kierce wants to introduce more seasonality into the menu, and is also toying with doing housemade brisket and a kosher sausage.
For Passover, which starts this year on April 22, the entire kitchen must be cleaned and re-koshered. All-new food, even new spices, must be brought in, to make sure no flour has touched anything. “In Chicago, most restaurants just shut down,” Kierce says, because re-koshering the kitchen is so much work. But here Hillel will be extremely busy, with five seders scheduled and an abbreviated Passover menu in the cafe, complete with gefilte fish, and matzoh or latkes on the side of other dishes (like the now-traditional shakshuka).
Kierce has been working on creating a state-of-the-art hydroponic growing system for fresh greens on site. His pilot setup in a small room upstairs from the kitchen is filled with nasturtiums and parsley. He’s still tinkering with a more elaborate system that’s been established in a sky-lit storeroom in the top floor of the building — adjusting fertilizer, water and light levels.
Growing greens on-site is not just a nod toward trendy hyper-local. The laws of kashrut include a rule forbidding the eating of insects, and so all greens that the kitchen purchases must be rewashed and re-inspected. Growing greens indoors hydroponically means no insects.
“The gardening is actually quite fun,” says Kierce. Currently he’s producing microgreens, edible flowers and “every herb you can think of.” He’s even planted squash, to use the plant’s blossoms.
Kierce says that ultimately, Adamah provides “nourishment on more than one level. What we do is really specialized, but we put out really good food.”
Editor's clarification: Hydroponics consultant Benjamin Amann built and maintains the hydroponic growing system.
