The Cakebread Cellars American Harvest Cookbook: Celebrating Wine, Food, and Friends in the Napa Valley - Hardcover

Cakebread, Dolores; Cakebread, Jack; Streeter, Brian

 
9781607740131: The Cakebread Cellars American Harvest Cookbook: Celebrating Wine, Food, and Friends in the Napa Valley
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1607740133 ISBN 13: 9781607740131
Verlag: Ten Speed Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Every September during harvest season, the Cakebread family invites five up-and-coming chefs and a host of local farmers to their winery for a weekend of tasting, talking, cooking, and sharing. A whirlwind short course in winemaking, viticulture, and artisan food production, the American Harvest Workshop heats up as the sun goes down. Each evening, the chefs come together to plan and execute two multicourse dinners using a market basket of ingredients from the Cakebreads’ favorite purveyors.

In The Cakebread Cellars American Harvest Cookbook, Jack, Dolores, and culinary director Brian Streeter present 100 recipes and wine pairings developed by workshop chefs and the winery in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of this groundbreaking annual event. These spectacular dishes—from appetizers to entrees and desserts—are adapted for home cooking in this delicious exploration of Napa Valley’s food and wine culture.

Many of the world’s leading chefs have attended the workshop and their recipes are here, including Gary Danko’s Mediterranean Summer Vegetable Gratin, Nancy Oakes’s Warm Chopped Liver Crostini with White Truffle Oil, Hubert Keller’s Provençal Garlic and Saffron Soup, and Alan Wong’s Pan-Seared Sturgeon with Thai Red Curry. For dessert, just try to choose between Charlie Trotter’s Chocolate-Praline Bread Pudding with Cinnamon Cream and Marcel Desaulnier’s Caramel-Banana–Chocolate Chip Ice Cream.

Guidelines for wine and food pairing are presented along with profiles of the winery’s finest purveyors, from Cowgirl Creamery and Hog Island Oyster Company to Liberty Ducks, Broken Arrow Ranch, and Fatted Calf. This unique collection celebrates a quarter century of workshops—and the chefs, winemakers, and farmers who come together each year to cook, eat, and drink from the bounty of Napa’s vibrant wine country.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jack and Dolores Cakebread are the founders of Cakebread Cellars, a renowned winery whose wines are enjoyed in fine restaurants around the world. Along with sons Dennis, Bruce, and Steve, the Cakebreads manage 460 acres of prime vineyards in the Napa and Anderson Valleys, along with a series of popular culinary events. The coauthors of The Cakebread Cellars Napa Valley Cookbook, Jack and Dolores live in California’s Napa Valley.
 
Brian Streeter is the culinary director at Cakebread Cellars, and the coauthor of The Cakebread Cellars Napa Valley Cookbook. He oversees the winery’s successful wine and food program and directs the annual American Harvest Workshop. A graduate of the New England Culinary Institute, Brian and his family live in California’s Napa Valley.
 
Janet Fletcher is the author or coauthor of more than twenty books on food and wine, including Fresh from the Farmers’ Market and The Cheese Course. Janet’s food writing for the San Francisco Chronicle has been honored with three James Beard Awards and the International Association of Culinary Professionals Bert Greene Award. She lives in California’s Napa Valley.

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Introduction

When my wife, Dolores, and I bought the property that became Cakebread Cellars, Napa Valley was not the culinary destination it is today. The year was 1973, and if you wanted to have a nice dinner in a local restaurant then, you had better like steak.

I’m Jack Cakebread, and I’m the one who made the impulsive offer on that Rutherford cow pasture. Dolores and I were active members of the Berkeley Wine and Food Society at the time, and we enjoyed visiting Napa Valley. Besides, we wanted a new challenge. For twenty years, we had been running an auto-repair shop in Oakland—Cakebread’s Garage, a business my father started. The prospect of growing and selling wine grapes and having a place in the country had a lot of appeal. When family friends offered to sell us their twenty-two acres—mostly pasture and walnut trees—Dolores and I made the leap.

The food scene in wine country was limited then, to understate the case. For years after we started Cakebread Cellars, when Dolores wanted to cook for guests, she had to bring many of the ingredients with her from Oakland. The San Francisco Bay Area’s top seafood, meat, and produce purveyors did not send trucks to Napa Valley, a mere fifty miles north, because there wasn’t the population or restaurant traffic to make deliveries worthwhile.

What a change we have witnessed. Today, food lovers from around the world consider Napa Valley a dining mecca. Our farmers’ markets, cheese shops, wine merchants, and well-stocked grocery stores supply almost anything a serious cook could want. The surrounding region nurtures a thriving world of artisan food producers, from cheesemakers to salumi masters to duck farmers. And at Cakebread Cellars, we like to think that our American Harvest Workshop has helped shine a spotlight on these entrepreneurs.

Early Locavores
We were advocates for local eating long before the word “locavore” emerged. In fact, the idea for the American Harvest Workshop—now in its twenty-fifth year—came from my feeling that American food was not getting its due. In the mid 1980s, the French and Italian governments were spending enormous sums to promote their food and wine here. Yet no one was making a similar effort to spread the word about the maturing culinary scene in America.

In 1985, I met a young Dallas hotelier who shared my thinking. Over a glass of wine, Bill Shoaf and I hatched a plan for the American Harvest Workshop, an annual retreat that would bring up-and-coming American chefs together with the best Northern California food artisans. We knew our raw materials were just as good as the products coming here from Europe. We just needed our talented chefs to recognize the quality of what was made in America and to take pride in serving it.

That first Workshop, held at the winery during the harvest of 1986, created a template for a gathering that we have now hosted for a quarter century. We have refined the itinerary over the years to keep it fresh and relevant and to incorporate new purveyors. But the Workshop’s mission and the basic format have remained unchanged.

Each year, we invite five chefs from around the country to be our guests at the winery for four days in mid September to share the excitement of harvest. Call it a summer camp for chefs, if you like. Our son Dennis, who travels widely as the winery’s head of sales and marketing, keeps an eye out for new restaurant talent. When he particularly enjoys a meal on the road, he’ll try to get to know the chef and discern whether he or she has the kind of temperament that fits with the Workshop program.

We learned quickly that the retreat is no place for big egos. The participating chefs need to enjoy collaborating and be able to get along as a group. Over the course of the Workshop, they will plan and execute two multicourse dinners together in our winery kitchen, sharing a market basket of ingredients. We ask them to leave their signature dishes at home, to bring no ingredients with them, and to come prepared to explore and experiment with what our purveyors provide. It’s a reality cooking show without the cameras.

In that way, the Workshop operates like a writers’ or artists’ colony, where like-minded people come to escape everyday pressures and to plant themselves in a new environment, in the hope of stimulating their creative juices. At the Workshop, we strive to provide a comfortable, nonjudgmental venue where chefs can take chances, share techniques, and recharge their batteries.

Initially, the Workshop was just for the trade. Although we have always invited a few journalists to participate, and in the early years we included sommeliers, the program was never open to the public. But gradually we realized that some of our “foodie” customers would enjoy being part of the experience, and in 2003 we began making a few spaces available to them. For those amateur enthusiasts (we call them Cakebread Cooks) who can secure a spot, the Workshop is a dream vacation, assisting the chefs in the kitchen, tasting wines with the company president (our son Bruce), and touring the cellar with the winemaking team.

We welcome all the participants to the winery on a Saturday afternoon with a tour of Dolores’s vegetable garden and a mini farmers’ market in our courtyard. Our partner purveyors are all there with samples of their products—Bellwether Farms with its fresh ricotta and fromage blanc (page 77); Jim Reichardt with his meaty Liberty Ducks (page 147); the Hog Island Oyster folks with a raw-bar selection (page 27); and several others whom you will find profiled in the pages that follow. No transactions take place at the market; it’s strictly show-and-tell and the first exposure the chefs have to the ingredients we expect them to use when the cooking gets under way.

The following three days are a whirlwind short course in winemaking, viticulture, artisan food production, and wine and food pairing. Over the years, participants have enjoyed guided chocolate tastings featuring cocoa nibs from around the world, hiked valley-floor and mountaintop vineyards with Bruce and Dennis, “cupped” coffee (that’s trade talk for evaluating it) with local roasters, thrown clay with Napa Valley potters, and waded into Tomales Bay with an oyster farmer. No one becomes an expert from these experiences, but we hope all the participants gain a deeper appreciation for the effort that goes into fine wine and food.

The group spends time with our viticulturist, Toby Halkovich, learning about techniques we employ in the vineyards, such as the high-tech aerial imaging that helps us make watering decisions. We show them some low-tech methods, too. Professional falconer Rebecca Rosen has demonstrated how she helps us protect our ripening assets in our Carneros vineyards. Birds can do a lot of damage—they know just when the grapes get sweet—so we rely on Rebecca’s falcons to drive them off. We first learned about Rebecca through her work at a nearby air force base, where her falcons help keep the landing strip cleared of birds.

We also take advantage of the free labor to show Workshop participants how a harvest crew works. Early one morning, we take them to one of our vineyards, pass out grape knives, provide a brief safety lesson (those curved knives are vicious), and then divide the group into two teams. The competitive spirit prevails for about forty-five minutes as teams scurry to fill their picking bins. About the time it sinks in that grape picking is hot, sticky, backbreaking work, we call a halt, weigh the bins, and award bragging rights. Until we transitioned almost entirely to night harvesting, the real vineyard crew would pick alongside the...

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Verlag
Ten Speed Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1607740133
ISBN 13 
9781607740131
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
208
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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