Allison Geyer
Culinary corn from UW-Madison plant breeder Bill Tracy is bred for flavor.
Inside the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, Madison chef Tory Miller stands over a tiny bamboo serving boat, concentrating as he pipes a dollop of bearnaise to finish off a bite-sized dish.
“Tomato,” he says, almost reverently, placing the specimen in front of a hungry dinner guest. But it’s not your standard grocery-variety (or even garden-variety) fruit — it’s from a special breeding line developed as part of UW-Madison’s Seed to Kitchen Collaborative. Brilliant yellow-orange in color with a signature “apricot blush,” the flavor is bright, crisp and almost tropical. Miller’s simple dish smartly plays up the exquisite tomato in all its glory, accenting with savory beef tallow and the rich, tangy bearnaise.
Miller was one of eight local chefs who participated in the second annual Farm to Flavor dinner Aug. 24 on the UW-Madison campus. Using produce varieties developed by plant breeders at UW-Madison and other partner organizations and grown by farmers throughout the Midwest, the chefs created a sampling menu of vegetable-centric dishes that doubled down on the simple-yet-revolutionary goal of the groundbreaking collaborative project — making vegetables taste as delicious as possible.
Launched in 2015, the Seed to Kitchen collaborative uses participatory breeding, a process that relies on input from farmers and consumers. Every month from June through January, participating chefs meet at the West Madison Agricultural Research
Station to test produce from Seed to Kitchen trials, evaluating for things like flavor, texture and appearance. Data from the taste tests gets sent back to breeders and growers, who tweak the varieties to create new, optimized cultivars.
“It’s really cool to consider that we, as consumers, can choose who grows what and what kind of plants that farmers grow,” says Solveig Hanson, a Ph.D student conducting beet trials in UW-Madison’s Goldman Lab. “It’s empowering.”
The produce on display at the Farm to Flavor dinner featured some of the highest-rated new varieties of carrots, beets, corn, peppers and tomatoes. Sean Fogarty of Steenbock’s on Orchard and Joe Cloute of Heritage Tavern both created dishes using high-pigment carrots developed in the lab of UW-Madison researcher Phil Simon as part of the multi-institution Carrot Improvement for Organic Agriculture project. Fogarty went
Terri Theisen
Tory Miller helped recruit chefs to the Seed to Kitchen collaborative.
the candied route with his orange and yellow carrots, glazing them with beet caramel and garnishing with an early-ripening habanero bred for flavor without the punishing heat usually associated with the pepper. Served on a stick, they were as sweet as popsicles. Cloute did a carrot version of latkes, a crispy and surprisingly substantial dish with bright orange and purple colors, topped with mild Newburg onion soubise.
Jonny Hunter of Underground Food Collective showcased another exemplary tomato, an indigo-colored variety developed at Oregon State University. It’s rich in anthocyanin, a naturally occurring antioxidant that provides the dark pigment. Hunter paired the star ingredient with puffed grains, egg white miso and a blend of cayenne peppers bred for low levels of capsaicin, the compound that makes peppers spicy. A new series of “culinary corn” from UW-Madison plant breeder Bill Tracy was transformed into an intensely flavored ice cream by Daniel Bonanno of A Pig in a Fur Coat. “It’s just very corny,” Bonanno says when asked what’s so special about the variety. “And it’s not too sweet.” He roasted and charred the grains to extract maximum flavor and sweetened the ice cream with caramel.
Modern, conventional agriculture prioritizes qualities like hardiness, productivity, pest and disease resistance and shelf life when it comes to selectively breeding produce. But in emphasizing and maximizing those traits, other qualities tend to diminish, says Micaela Colley, program director of the Organic Seed Alliance, a partner organization with Seed to Kitchen. “Nobody gets rid of flavor on purpose,” Colley says. “But you can only juggle so many balls as a plant breeder, and if you don’t breed for something, you lose it.”
But Colley is optimistic that Seed to Kitchen will play a major role in reversing that process.
“It’s revolutionary,” she says of the project. “This is the next wave of breeding.”
