
Photo by Tara Donne
At Salt Water Farm, lessons include how to shuck oysters, sharpen knives, prepare succotash, and debone mackerel.
By Michael S. Sanders
Oct 28, 2011
From the November/December 2011 issue
Photos by Tara Donne
Along a rugged stretch of Maine’s coastline, a farm has been transformed into a school for culinary arts.
At Salt Water Farm, students return to the land—and the sea—to learn forage, fillet, and feast.
My wife calls me a wannabe farmer, and I’m OK with that. I love food and cooking, and in a righteous world, I would have pigs in a pen and chickens in a coop and an acre of garden. We would invite friends for feasts of house-smoked pork belly with homemade sauerkraut and heirloom squash and tomato ratatouille, accompanied by hard cider and home-brewed beer. The problem is, my current tillable acreage is 40 square feet of questionable dirt in a front yard. My small village in Maine doesn’t allow pigs even as pets. Nor do I have any idea how to smoke pork belly, make hard cider, or ferment cabbage.
Four hours north of Boston, along a stretch of rugged coastline in Lincolnville, Maine, there’s a place for people like me: people who want to rediscover the agrarian rhythms and farmhouse traditions of a simpler time, in a spectacular setting and with just the right teachers. At the end of the driveway sits a cedar-shingled, post-and-beam barn on 17 acres of former sheep pasture overlooking the ocean. The barn has been transformed into a professional demonstration kitchen equipped with a wood-burning brick oven, a Wolf range, sausage and pasta makers, and an open hearth for spit roasting. Its eastern facade is almost all windows and French doors. Outside, a generous, sun-splashed stone patio includes an outdoor kitchen outfitted with a propane grill and a smoker. Beyond the patio are wide terraces planted densely with herbs and vegetables. Beyond that are blueberry and cranberry bushes, and fruit trees. The eye flows from house to gardens, then to the chaos of meadow grown over in milkweed, goldenrod, thistle, and Queen Anne’s lace, leading down to the achingly gorgeous waters of Penobscot Bay.
This is Salt Water Farm, a school for culinary and farm arts founded by chef Annemarie Ahearn with the help of farm manager and sous-chef Ladleah (pronounced LAID-lee) Dunn. I have come here for a three-day workshop promising more than a dozen lessons in such topics as chicken butchery, egg cookery, canning, vertical gardening basics, and a session called “the truth about lobster.” With the exception of a very few ingredients—including olive oil, flour, and lemon—everything we touch during our time here will come from the garden, the hens, and the ocean. The odd slab of bacon or round of goat cheese comes from neighboring producers, none more than 15 miles away.
While you only have to go as far as your nearest chain supermarket these days to see local splashed over entire aisles, there’s something a little different going on at Salt Water Farm. When I arrive, Annemarie recounts that one visitor said her farm experience felt like being in Europe, where “the food tastes so much better.” This is no mystery to Annemarie. “The food here tastes as fresh as it does in Europe simply because we are honoring our place. We’re using local ingredients and really taking advantage of the terroir and living within the means we have in Maine.”
The Salt Water Farm experience attracts more than wannabe-farmer types, though in my class we were heavily represented. Pat, who works on Wall Street and lives in upstate New York, was there with his partner, Tim. From their knowing nods during a bread lesson, I knew they baked. But they also brew beer, make sausage, and have a vegetable garden and an heirloom fruit orchard. What were a couple of accomplished foodies doing there? “It’s a childish pleasure to play with food,” Pat told me. “I’ve never made ice cream or worked with duck eggs or made a salad dressing that was very complicated.”
Also in our group were Maine summer residents, including sisters Jennie from New Jersey, Courtnay from Moscow, and Allison from Dallas, and their mother, Jerrie, from Maine. Jerrie had passed down a love of good food and cooking to her children, and they were thanking her with a Salt Water Farm workshop for her birthday. “We’re all good cooks,” Jennie told me, “but we don’t generally cook together.”
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The bread lesson was a vigorous rebuttal to the idea that bread making, like raising hens, making your own bacon, and growing fresh herbs and vegetables, falls into the category of “just too much trouble.” “No,” Ladleah reminded us, “this is not bread for the meek! It doesn’t happen in a couple of hours, but it only takes a slight effort to bring a beautiful thing into your existence. Become comfortable with the process, and you begin to integrate it into the everyday.”
While many cooking schools offer a watch-and-learn approach, Ladleah and Annemarie encouraged us to get our hands dirty. They acted more as guides, first showing or explaining and then advising from a distance as we attempted to braise chicken thighs or roll pie crust. Annemarie is rail thin and intense in a soft-spoken way; there is little preacher but lots of facilitator in what she does. “We see food,” she told me, “as something that everybody should be able to have an intimate relationship with. It is so hard for us to write down recipes here, because we really do cook with our instincts. Our goal is to get people to do the same and to trust themselves in the kitchen and in the garden. We have had some very well-known chefs come through here. It’s funny, every once in a while, it’s like they’re fighting the place, the gardens, wanting to fly in this ingredient or giving us their purveyor lists. Salt Water Farm is the purveyor list.”
“We’re always telling people, you have the power to change things, especially when it comes to what you feed yourself.”
During one day of classes, Annemarie led a tutorial on knives. Now, I am both a Luddite and a knife fetishist. “If you put my Dad’s knives in the dishwasher,” I once heard my daughter tell a friend casually, “he’ll kill you.” So I was surprised to see Annemarie whip her knives through an electric sharpener before she gave them a final few snick-snicks with the traditional honing steel. She explained that putting a new edge on the knife with an electric sharpener means you won’t have to resharpen as often. I made a note to buy myself a new, 21st-century gadget.
After the knife session, the class crowded in as Annemarie divided a whole chicken into pieces without cutting through a single bone. She then tackled classic French preparations, making a perfect mirepoix (a mix of diced onion, carrot, and celery) and a bouquet garni (a bundle of rosemary, thyme, parsley, and bay leaf), both of which ended up in our chicken stock. “We don’t waste anything,” she told us, “because we’re using the carcasses of the chicken we eat today for tomorrow’s soup, getting all that great flavor.”
During the morning I saw faces smiling over their own diced onions. Later I watched various students sidle up warily to whole chickens. With great proficiency, all members of the group cleanly chopped legs, thighs, and wings, and triumphantly moved the poultry parts to the pile to be marinated and baked. Annemarie trusted us to help each other. Julie taught me, I showed Jennie, Jennie helped Allison, Allison demonstrated for Tim, and so on.
Some people would leave that day determined, in the future, to buy their chicken whole and use its carcass for savory stock. This embodies so much of what Salt Water does—sharing simple ways to approach seemingly daunting endeavors. It also shows how far most of our lives have evolved away from such basic knowledge. “Some may go home,” Ladleah said, “throw on the Carhartts, and till up the front yard. Others will grow a box of fresh herbs on the apartment windowsill. Either one is fine.”
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