From artisanal jams to tepary beans to freshly baked pies, here are some farm-fresh treats to savor.
For our October 2021 issue, we set out to find the best mail-order speciality foods the West had to offer. Lucky for us, there's no shortage of farms out West — so the options of farm-fresh delectables were abundant. Don't worry though, we did the hard part of sampling it all and narrowed the options down for you. Happy eating!
Laura Chenel
Sonoma, California
You could call her story For the Love of Goats. Setting: bucolic Sonoma County in Northern California. Time period: 1979. Basic plot: Laura Chenel hasn’t figured out her direction in life. She’s been working and traveling in Europe, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area for a decade and wants to get back to her home turf to live a self-sufficient life off the land. She likes goats and acquires a few. She becomes attached to them, and the herd grows. She doesn’t want to waste the milk. She starts making farmstead goat cheese using techniques she learned in France. Soon, word is out with influential Bay Area chefs like Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, and a new chapter in American cheese is written. Today, Laura Chenel embodies its founding namesake’s pioneering spirit as a leading producer of fresh and aged goat cheeses and goat yogurts crafted with fresh goat’s milk from family farms in the American West.
Fan Favorites: Original Log, Orange Blossom Honey Log, Everything Bagel Chabis, Creamy Brie.
Fun Facts: Laura Chenel Thyme & Rosemary Marinated Goat Cheese is the original marinated flavor developed by Laura herself in the early ’80s. To this day a team member hand-selects and individually places each bay leaf into every tub. The super-versatile marinated-goat-cheese line can be spread on a baguette, top a salad, or garnish a soup. The infused oil can be used as a marinade or dressing, brushed on cut tomatoes before roasting. Dip bread in the Jalapeño Chili oil or drizzle it over salmon. (There are more serving suggestions and pairings on the website.)
To Order/Buy: laurachenel.com and from purveyors of fine cheeses.
Organically Grown
Ela Family Farms has been growing fruit in western Colorado since establishing their first orchards there in 1907, putting all that experience — along with alpine sunshine, snowpack water, and cool mountain night air — into more than 55 varieties of organic tree fruits. Peaches, pears, apples, and plums (they also grow organic grapes and organic heirloom tomatoes) go fresh to farmers markets and ship as farm-made, small-batch artisanal organic jams, fruit butters, and organic applesauce in personalized gift packs. Unseasonably warm temperatures then a hard freeze in October 2020 severely damaged the Ela orchards, resulting in a temporarily short supply of these artisan products for the coming year, until a new crop is harvested in 2022. elafamilyfarms.com
Don’t Worry, Bee Happy
In 2017 the Ioway Tribe of Nebraska and Kansas created the Ioway Bee Farm to share their honey with the world and spread the gospel about the benefits of bees, which they knew firsthand from their own land in Northeast Kansas, Southeast Nebraska, and Northwest Missouri. There, a rich diversity of plant life — sweet clover, wildflowers, and a variety of trees — gives their honey (nanyi: pronounced NAH-nyee) its unique flavor. The tribe sells raw honey, creamed honey, honey sticks, lotion bars, bee pollen, CBD hemp honey, lip balms, and beeswax candles through their Grandview Station convenience store, online, and in stores nationwide. iowaybeefarm.com
Easy As Pie
If you can’t get visions of marionberries, blueberries, boysenberries, blackberries, tayberries, and strawberries to stop dancing in your head, third-generation farmers Ronald and Jamie Lewis can help you with that. They operate the Blue Raeven Farmstand in Amity, Oregon, where they sell the bounty harvested from their 130-acre farm, and they’ll happily send you some of their freshly baked pies made with their very own fruit. Choose from marionberry, apple-blackberry, peach-raspberry, rhubarb, and many more, plus jams, jellies, and syrups. blueraevenfarmstand.com
Cool Beans
An ancient culinary gift from the Akimel O’odham and Tohono O’odham tribes of the Sonoran Desert, tepary beans are some of the world’s healthiest beans but were at risk of extinction due to drought. Luckily, Ramona and husband Terry Button, who were farming her mother’s 10-acre allotment on the Gila River Indian Reservation said yes when elders asked them to grow some bavi, and they’ve been perfecting production ever since. Besides black, brown, and white tepary beans, Ramona Farms’ products include mesquite-parched corn pinole, cornmeal, corn flour, corn grits, corn polenta, black-eyed peas, and garbanzo beans. Snack the traditional way on their wheat pinole, made from stone-milled, mesquite-parched heirloom pima club wheat berries — mixed with water, fruit juices, or blended into smoothies. ramonafarms.com
From the October 2021 issue
Photography: (All images) courtesy vendors