{"id":1603,"date":"2018-07-30T17:29:14","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T09:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.agrinoon.com\/agriculture\/?p=1603"},"modified":"2018-07-30T17:29:14","modified_gmt":"2018-07-30T09:29:14","slug":"squash-mediocre-vegetable-doesnt-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.agrinoon.com\/agriculture\/2018\/07\/30\/squash-mediocre-vegetable-doesnt-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Squash is a mediocre vegetable. It doesn\u2019t have to be that way."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

We\u2019re often told to eat our vegetables, and for good reason. But face it: They often kind of suck. Our supermarkets teem with towers of flawless looking squashes and tomatoes\u2014but where\u2019s the flavor?<\/p>\n

For generations, plant breeders have largely been taking their orders from the food industry, in pursuit of varieties that are high-yielding and that can withstand long-haul travel. Flavor isn\u2019t a priority\u2014flavor comes from adding lots of salt, sugar, and fat in the factory, or from a restaurant chef\u2019s bag of tricks. But at an event I attended in 2013, Dan Barber, chef of the acclaimed Blue Hill restaurants in New York, assembled a team of agriculture professors and rolled out a new idea: What if seed breeders started taking their cues from chefs instead of big food companies when they\u2019re tweaking varieties of the fruits, vegetables, and wheat we eat?<\/p>\n

Nearly five years later, the fruit, so to speak, of Barber\u2019s collaboration with seed breeders has ripened into a new project called Row 7, which calls itself a seed company \u201cbuilt by chefs and breeders striving to make ingredients taste better before they ever hit a plate.\u201d On the latest episode of Bite podcast, Barber and I chatted about why a chef who runs two restaurants is barging into an industry dominated by three multinational behemoths who use seeds as a marketing tool for selling pesticides.<\/p>\n

Barber said the idea germinated about a decade ago, when Michael Mazourek, a Cornell University vegetable seed breeder, visited Barber\u2019s restaurant for dinner. The two ended up chatting afterward in the kitchen, where a cook was preparing butternut squash for the next day\u2019s service. Barber reports: \u201cJust off the cuff and kind of flippantly, I said, \u2018You\u2019re a squash breeder\u2014why don\u2019t you create a butternut squash that actually tastes good?’\u201d<\/p>\n

Barber then went on to complain to Mazourek about \u201call the heroics\u201d chefs go through to \u201ceke out any deliciousness\u201d from butternut squash: careful roasting and caramelizing, goosing it with maple syrup and brown sugar, etc. Mazourek replied that \u201cin all my years of breeding, no one has ever asked me to select for flavor before,\u201d Barber reports. And that\u2019s when the lightbulb went on.<\/p>\n

His conversations with Mazourek taught him that breeders are a little bit like chefs: They \u201ccombine genetics in a kind of recipe format\u201d to create traits. Modern butternut squash, for example, is \u201cbred to be picked green,\u201d he said\u2014that is, to be harvested before it\u2019s ripe, and then stored for months and ripened at the convenience of the food industry. A winter squash that\u2019s bred to be picked ripe, with flavor as its main goal\u2014rather than storeability\u2014would be a much more delicious thing, he said.<\/p>\n

When US chefs began to rebel against bland ingredients in the 1970s (listen to my interview with Alice Waters to dig into that history), they began an enduring alliance between farmers and chefs that became the farm-to-table movement. But in seed terms, the focus of that relationship was on heirloom vegetable varieties\u2014highly flavorful old strains that are adapted to very particular microclimates, don\u2019t tend to produce very high yields, and aren\u2019t suited to resist various fungal pathogens.<\/p>\n

What Row 7 is trying to do, Barber said, is bridge the gap between the flavor of heirlooms and the yield potential of modern industrial varieties. The company has set up a nationwide network of 70 chefs working with seed breeders to create flavor-forward vegetable varieties. And the goal is to create products that appeal not just to rarefied foodies. \u201cThe north star is to get into Walmart, not to keep [the new varieties] in the cathedral of our white-tablecloth restaurants,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Barber\u2019s original challenge to Mazourek ultimately resulted in a winter squash variety called honeynut, which Barber says is now available at supermarkets nationwide. I haven\u2019t tried a honeynut squash; here\u2019s how Bon Appetit describes it: \u201cThe flavor is much more concentrated because their flavor isn\u2019t diluted from water weight\u2026an intense natural sweetness that becomes rich, caramel-y, and almost malt-like when roasted at high heat, they don\u2019t have to be peeled because they have thin skin (similar to a delicata), and they have three times the amount of beta-carotene packed in.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company already has seven seed varieties on the market, including a sweet pepper that has all the fruit flavors of an habe\u00f1ero but none of that incendiary chile\u2019s heat. There\u2019s also a beet variety called \u201cthe badger flame.\u201d If you hate those root vegetables, hear out Barber on this podcast. Tweaked by seed breeders following orders from chefs, this variety has \u201call the vegetal sweetness of the beet, without the polarizing earthiness,\u201d Barber says.<\/p>\n

\n

Source<\/strong>: Mother Jones<\/a><\/span><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n
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We\u2019re often told to eat our vegetables, and for good reason. But face it: They often kind of suck. Our supermarkets teem with towers of flawless looking squashes and tomatoes\u2014but where\u2019s the flavor? For generations, plant breeders have largely been taking their orders from the food industry, in pursuit of varieties that are high-yielding and… Continue reading Squash is a mediocre vegetable. It doesn\u2019t have to be that way.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry-news","entry"],"yoast_head":"\nSquash is a mediocre vegetable. 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