Jack Kaestner in his kitchen accompanied by locally grown tomatoes and raspberries Kaestner and his herb garden |
Chef Hooked on Locally Produced Food By Susan Bence September 5, 2008 | WUWM | Milwaukee, WI Wisconsin’s First Lady Jessica Doyle is encouraging residents across the state to buy locally-produced food. She’s extended a 10-day challenge, starting today, asking Wisconsinites to spend at least 10 percent of their food budget on items produced within the state. If the campaign takes hold it could infuse billions of dollars into the state’s economy. WUWM’s Susan Bence met one local chef in his who’s already surpassed the goal. I sit down with chef Jack Kaestner in a cozy dining room overlooking Oconomowoc Lake while his staff finishes kitchen clean up. They just finished service a ladies luncheon. “Meatloaf and the apple kuchen which you can actually eat if you want,” Kaestner says. Kaestner’s been preparing food here for 18 years. He started with the usual fare: filets, New York strips, the obligatory Friday fish fry. Gradually he found himself slipping in fresh local food: asparagus in the spring, different kinds of potatoes, mixing up pesto from home-grown herbs. “At first I think the seasonal local food was more kind of an accent point and now it’s becoming more of a focal point,” Kaestner says. Kaestner says there have been a few glitches along the way. “Some lettuce came in you know, and there was a bug on the salad and, oh my god, but you know you’re going to have that once and a while with fresh local food. Because the lettuce wasn’t picked two weeks in California,” Kaestner says. Kaestner has worked the bugs out. He coordinates his kitchen with 40 different farmers. That translates to putting 60 thousand dollars directly into their pockets. Kaestner calls it a fluid system. “One comes in on like a Tuesday, so he drops off to some other people and then he drops off here and that saves him gas. It saves him time. And then there’s some other people that drop off on Thursday and other people will come into the Oconomowoc market on Saturday and then bring in our order and then if they have something left over from the day, sometimes we’ll take it,” Kaestner says. Kaestner buys up to a thousand pounds of asparagus from another farmer, but the farmer doesn’t deliver. “But then I found out my honey producer lives just kitty-corner to him so now the asparagus guy gives it to the honey lady who then brings it to us. So you build up this network of transportation of transportation and distribution,” Kaestner says. Kaestner says the system has become a part of his kitchen rhythm. “We sit down with the farmers like in February or March. Look at how much we bought from them the previous year. See if there’s ways we can increase it. See if there’s ways that we can extend the season. There’s a couple now who have put up hoop houses,” Kaestner says. That’s a sort of green house, made of sturdy plastic. “In the spring we’ve got mixed green and spinach by April, whereas before I never got that stuff until the end of May,” Kaestner says. Kaestner wanted good local potatoes to serve through the winter months. So his potato grower started cultivating a different type of spud that stores well. The farmer increases her income and Kaestner gets his potatoes. When Kaestner isn’t working in his own kitchen, he teaches cooking at a technical college and talks up local food with anyone who will listen. He admits, some of his motivation is selfish. “You know at first you want to kind of guard your farmers because they’re kind of your secret. But then you realize, unless I get other people buying from them, interested in this, I can’t support that many farmers,” Kaestner says. People are getting interested. Kaestner says he catered a wedding recently and the bride and groom wanted to serve locally produce food. So Kaestner put together a feast that was 90 percent home-grown or -raised, including pastured, grass-fed highland beef, red-skinned mashed potatoes and the salad, not a bug in sight, was studded with his farmers apples and blue cheese. “People are starting to see a lot of the chefs around the country using local food. But you know know it doesn’t have to be just high end, white tablecloth type eating. Once you dig into the apple kuchen, you’ll see it’s really food that your grandma probably made. And literally that’s my grandma’s recipe,” Kaestner says. Who wouldn’t succumb? I dig into the apple kuchen and it is out of this world. |