Local Foods Are Religion at Restaurant A Toute Heure

Gourmet chef Andrea Carbine spoke to a 20-member audience at the Cranford Community Center on Monday about the joys and challenges she's experienced as a "locavore" – someone who seeks out local sources of chow.

A graduate of the French Culinary Institute in New York City and now owner of gourmet restaurant A Toute Heure in Cranford, Carbine said she's a stickler for getting her ingredients from nearby farm stands. Having worked for many upscale eateries that hold this local-sourcing philosophy, she is confident that it makes for some very delicious fare. "I was lucky to work in restaurants in which chefs cooks this way," she said. 

In fact, seeking out local food sources is a new and burgeoning national trend, she said. California chef Alice Waters was the first to coin this strategy.

An advocate of locally grown foods, Waters believes mass-shipped foods are often an inferior-tasting product compared to that which you can get at your local farm stand. As a result, she challenged friends and family to eat foods produced within a 250-mile radius only, Carbine said. The challenge soon translated into a national trend.

But after opening  A Toute Heure in 2007, Carbine was set for a learning experience. When it comes to obtaining local produce, the weather is a huge factor, she said.

"It was heavy and savory fare," she said of her menu during the winter, adding that while she coaxed a lot of great dishes out of the ingredients available, which included a lot of root veggies like potatoes and rutabagas, she wanted more options – and local farm stands usually don't offer off-season produce.

So she embarked on another strategy; preserving what produce she could during the summer months for use in the winter. As a result, A Toute Heure cooks are busy right now roasting red peppers and preserving them in olive oil; chilies are being dried and fruit is being canned. 

However Carbine feels having seasonal veggies around in winter months is still important. And she plays them up as much as possible. "We get fancy with potatoes and rutabaga."

Along the same lines, her menu in the summer offers a variety of in-season fruits and vegetables, including eggplants, kale, shards and New Jersey's specialty, the tomato. Berries are also a favorite for dessert concoctions. 

"The pastry chef's in heaven (right now)," Carbine said.

While summer offers mature veggies, the spring menu includes a lot of baby veggies, such as sprouts, she said. In the autumn, the widely available mushroom is a prominent ingredient.

Other than the season changes, shifts in weather patterns have a huge influence on agriculture in general that in turn affect what ingredients are available.

In fact a climate shift pushed Carbine's menu in another direction recently, she said. For the past two weeks the restaurant has been offering cauliflower soup. However the recent hot temperatures halted the fruit production of cauliflower plants. So she found it necessary to switch the soup to gazpacho this week.

"It's very challenging and you have to be willing to change at a moment's notice," she said.

A newcomer from the Seattle, Washington area, Carbine explained that it was fun digging up information about local foods in the New York and New Jersey areas.

"It's great getting to know all those local treasures," she said. "You start finding little gems." She mentioned a type of brown cherry that grows in the northeast. "They were just bizarre, little yellowish almond cherries. And they're a specialty of the New York area."

Carbine gets her food from a variety of sources including Dreyer's Farms  and a Westfield fishmonger who treks to the New York City Fulton fish market every day.

But her most local source is her own backyard. Along with her husband Jim Carbine, she cultivates a 4,000 square foot garden in the back of her house, planting everything from beans to tomatoes. She carries a lot of this produce back to the restaurant.

"I come in there and challenge the chefs to come up with something amazing that day," she said.