North Carolina or Bust! Pt. 2

After a couple of amazing days visiting the Chapel Hill area and working on Four Leaf Farm, we guest taught a cooking class with our friend, Michelle, who is the fabulous mastermind behind Farmbelly Cooking School.

As chefs teaching cooking classes on a small farm in Steamboat Springs, we thought it would be an amazing opportunity to travel to North Carolina to collaborate on a class with Michelle.

We based our class on the ideas in the book “Salt Fat Acid Heat” by Samin Nostrat.

If you haven’t already, it is a must get and must read for anyone interested in food or cooking!

As a chef, I love looking at cookbooks and reading recipes for inspiration, but rarely do I actually follow one.

Cooking, for me, is all about taste.

Tasting as you go, adjusting for taste, and understanding how the different tastes work to create the flavors you want in a dish.

Her book highlights, just that and goes on to describe how the basic concepts of

salt, fat, acid, heat

are the building blocks of knowing how to cook anything!

For our class, we decided to use these concepts as the outline for our meal. Each section of the class centered on one of the four concepts as we put together our meal, and what better meal to create than a Banh Mi sandwich bar!

Our Banh Mi Sandwiches included:

Fresh, local baguette

Pickled carrots and daikon (salt and acid)

Chicken liver pate (fat)

Nuoc Cham dipping sauce (acid)

Charred, marinated pork(heat)

To prep for the class, we harvested daikon, carrots, lettuce, and bundles of fresh herbs from the farm. We were also able to get some delicious local pork shoulder from the neighborhood market along with chicken livers and local bacon. Teaching cooking classes in conjunction with working on a farm is the most rewarding way to bring our treatment of food full circle. It is so satisfying to help plant, care for, and harvest the vegetables that we will then teach how to cook and eat with our students. Our students were engaging and curious, and the class flew by! Then, it was our turn to sit back and relax with a glass of wine, banh mi sandwiches, and great conversation :)

Our trip to North Carolina was so much fun! Experiencing other farms and teaching in a new space was so refreshing and energizing! I’m excited for our season in Steamboat to get started and can’t wait to see what this summer holds for my work on Elkstone Farm and my own private chef business!

Happy Eating!

Chereen