season in Colorado, chances are there was a passionate cook who made it. But not just a cook. Go back to the farm, the butcher and the cellar. Across the state, countless producers are dedicating their days -- and often nights -- to furthering our food system. They're concerned with putting full plates, now and looking forward, on our collective tables.
Welcome to season one of a new Denver Post video series, The Colorado Plate. Through these first episodes, you'll get an up-close glimpse into the work of a farmer and restaurateur, a chef, a cheesemaker and a butcher. We hope their stories will inspire you to dig deeper into our local food chain, just as we have over the last three months spent producing the series.
What is perhaps most impressive about these four makers: Their work doesn't stop at the farm, the restaurant, the factory or the market. Together, they form part of a larger movement pushing Colorado foodways forward.
The Colorado Plate was originally published on The Denver Post.
This past growing season, while farmers were busy harvesting crops across the state and chefs were taking full advantage of their most locally sourced menus of the year, we asked a few talented makers to show us their work. After three months filming on farms, inside kitchens, homes and dining rooms, we are excited now to give you a glimpse inside our local food culture.
For this video series, The Colorado Plate, which you’ll find streaming online starting Oct. 20, we followed a farmer and restaurateur, a chef, a cheesemaker and a butcher as they showed us why and how they contribute to the Colorado food chain. Their work doesn’t stop at the farm, the restaurant or the market, either. These producers connect communities through food, get involved in food legislation and affect the greater food system around them.
Eric Skokan was one of Colorado’s first chefs to attempt real farm-to-table cooking. For over a decade, he has run Black Cat Bistro in Boulder — and now, he farms more than 400 acres while running two restaurants. The second is Bramble & Hare.
“You know, I’ve loved my career as a chef, and I still do,” Skokan said. “And at the same time, as a hobby, I was gardening. Restaurant life is super stressful, so that was kind of the morning solace. … I tasted the stuff I was growing in my garden and then tasted the stuff that I was serving to all the guests in the restaurant, and the difference was so stark.”
To feed diners at his restaurants, Skokan grows 250 varieties of vegetables, grains, legumes and herbs and raises animals at Black Cat Farm outside Boulder.
Cheesemaker Jackie Chang is the force behind multiple medal-winning goat’s milk cheeses at Haystack Mountain Creamery. She was working in her family’s restaurant when she decided to take a pay cut and learn the trade of a local dairy.
Today, Chang makes internationally awarded cheeses like a creamy camembert, tangy-fresh chèvre and aged red cloud, among others.
“If you want to be a cheesemaker, you have to really love from your heart,” she said. “It’s not (just) a job (to) pay your bills, it’s not about that. Sometimes you have to sacrifice yourself, sometimes you have to work seven days. Sometimes (in the) middle of the night, you have to come here and unload the cheese from the mold.”
Kate Kavanaugh runs Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe with her partner Josh Curtiss. Kavanaugh spent much of her life as a vegetarian before deciding to not only eat meat, but also open a butcher shop focused on meat that’s raised and processed responsibly.
“I was a vegetarian for 15 years,” she said. “As a child, I made a very heated decision that I wanted to be a vegetarian. Towards the end of college, I started looking a lot at land management programs … and I decided that the best way to support farmers and ranchers that were utilizing these regenerative agricultural practices was to start eating meat again.”
Meet Duncan Holmes, the chef behind two Denver restaurants, Call and Beckon. The former became part of a national conversation in 2018 when it appeared on Bon Appétit magazine’s top 10 best new restaurants in America, while the latter earned a spot on the magazine’s top 50 list this year.
The only restaurant of its kind in Denver, Beckon’s 18 seats surround a chef’s counter, allowing diners to interact directly with the cooks who serve them prix-fixe dinners.
“I think what drew me to becoming a chef is the hospitality element of it, so really, a real way of connecting with people,” Holmes told The Denver Post. “My day becomes kind of attached to cooking that person’s meal, and you don’t always find that in such a tangible manner.”
There is only one way to roast a chicken so that its skin is crisp.
And is there any more beautiful, aromatic or (let’s use the word) sexy bird to come from the oven than a perfectly roasted chicken, its brown the color of a Capuchin’s robe, its scent of all the perfumes of the hearth?
What luck Charles Pierre Gaston Francois de Levis had. He was “an incompetent and mediocre individual,” wrote the great Larousse near the end of the 19th century. But because Louis XV had eyes for de Levis’ wife, the king made him Duke of Mirepoix and kept him nearby. Mirepoix, for his part, tinkered in the royal kitchens and gave his name to a preparation of seasonings - mostly chopped onion, carrot and celery - that cooks all over the world reflexively use every day. “Mirepoix” (pronounced meer-pwah), or its Spanish sibling “sofrito” or Italian “soffritto,” are what chefs call “aromatics,” the heady base of many warm temperature dishes (certainly most wet dishes such as soups or braises) all over the world.
There's nothing like the flavor of grilled vegetables, you just can't duplicate it in the kitchen. Denver Post food columnist Bill St. John shows us how to grill vegetables two ways on the charcoal grill.
Denver Post food columnist, Bill St. John, shows us how to make the perfect fried egg.
