@chefdanbarber

Juliet is 4 months old and on track to become a star milker for Blue Hill Farm. She’s remarkably strong, with enviable genetic history—pure Normandy, a breed that produces delicious milk and cream, and is built for grass and cold climates. (Put the modern American Holstein on an all-grass diet during a New England winter and she’d be burger meat in a week). Juliet’s real magic is that she was conceived by 𝙨𝙚𝙭𝙚𝙙 frozen semen. Call me traditional, but for a long while frozen semen didn't appeal to me. Is it too much to ask that our morning milk is the happy outcome of a bull and a cow? Not really. But until you try negotiating for that arrangement—until you try timing for cycles, or dealing with a stubborn bull—you won’t fully appreciate the beauty of frozen semen. But 𝙨𝙚𝙭𝙚𝙙 frozen semen? It’s relatively new technology, and doesn’t jive with milk’s lily-white bona fides. Through centrifugal force, cell sorting technology separates chromosomes and increases the chance of female offspring up to 95%. Without it, of course, there’s a 50/50 chance of a male bull calf. For most dairies, this means dumping the newborn into the hamburger or cat food chain, or raising it in confinement for veal. So one way to think about sexing semen is that it takes a lot of misery out of the picture. Eliminate males from dairies (and, come to think of it, from our government), and you eliminate a lot of headaches and bad decisions. The best solution—one Blue Hill has championed from the start—is to create a veal-eating culture. This would allow dairy farms to return to what they once were: milk, veal and beef farms. If we have that, the sex of the calf doesn't matter, and we don't need technology to fix what has only recently arisen as a 'problem’. But for now, Blue Hill Farm is in desperate need of milkers. So in Juliet's case, Farmer Sean had to turn to the least romantic choice: sexed semen. @seansfarmwagon @bluehillfarm

The Impossible Egg We didn’t plan for a red pepper egg. Not exactly. It was born from frustration. Many years ago, most people didn't understand that organically-fed hens produce much tastier eggs. Add on the importance of diverse grains and pasturing the hens on grass (the grass that also pastures herbivores like cows), and you end up with a long recipe (but a really important one) for a truly delicious egg. So how do you get people to understand the difference? Over time, we learned that the answer is 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 the difference. Breeder Michael Mazourek suggested integrating peppers into the chicken diet—specifically, the ones he’d bred to contain a high concentration of capsicum that might give the yolks a deep red color. After all, peppers are a natural component of the avian diet. (Their taste receptors are immune to the spiciness, which is probably how the pepper plant spread around the world: bird eats pepper, flies away somewhere, excretes the indigestible seeds, and a new pepper plant is born.) So these aren’t so much “Impossible Eggs” as they are a play on impossibly brilliant ancient avian biology at work. For sure, the chickens thrive on a concentrated pepper feed. And though they produce eggs with a bright red yolk, the flavor isn’t any different from what the hens always produced on organic grain and the rich, diverse pasture of Blue Hill Farm’s Sean Stanton. But that doesn’t matter. People taste the red pepper egg and they flip. “Best egg ever”—we hear that from diners all the time. And we also see a light bulb go off—what we feed our animals is what we feed ourselves. @bluehillfarm @seansfarmwagon

Never has there been a more giving Giving Tree @bluehillfarm

Panther soybeans on the grill. @jackalgiere

Swordfish Sirloin A mind-blowing fat cap on this stunning fish is the result of three things. 1) Catching fish at the perfect moment, which requires enormous skill and years of expertise (thank you Captain Rich Wright.) 2. Atlantic coastal waters (especially up north) are right now teeming with diverse species at peak health and fattiness. It's an exceptional feast for an exceptional apex predator. 3. Gorging at this time of year is baked into swordfish DNA— it's their way of storing fat and energy for the lean winter months. @docktodish

Have you ever thought about how much hay it takes to feed a grass-fed cow for a day? ⠀ ⠀ Blue Hill Farm is an all-grass dairy. But In the Northeast, grass-based is really hay-based, most of the year anyway. Farmer Sean Stanton spends the summer (and spring and fall too) transforming great pasture grass into hay. ⠀ ⠀ So how many cows does a long strip of grass like this—the length of nearly half a football field—feed?⠀ (Swipe)⠀ For 15 cows this is less than one day of feed.

Lining up for Labor Day @bastienguillochon

The picnic marches on. @bluehillfarm @bastienguillochon

“Nothing is more stupid than a cow,” the famed fish chef Gilbert Le Coze once said. “Grazing all day long—there is no spirit to that.” Stand next to a dairy cow at Blue Hill farm—watch them run the bottom of their muzzle over the blades of grass, a rapid reconnaissance of what's available for breakfast—and you realize Le Coze had it wrong. The cows are plenty spirited, and their intelligence is on constant display. Take the hairs right below the jaw. They act as a kind of radar—whisking over the diversity of grasses, translating information in the same way our ears decode sound. What are these ruminants looking for? That depends on many factors, including the weather, the time of year, and even the time of day. Like us, they self-select and balance their diet. Here they're cruising the edges of the fence line, probably looking for calcium by foraging for plants with big tap roots. Though not as wild as a fish evading a hook, their drive gives them another dimension that Le Coze didn’t recognize. To be fair, Le Coze could have been referring to what we’ve managed to do to ruminants over the past several decades. Instead of allowing dairy cows to forage, we do the work of foraging for them. We feed them standard rations—corn, soy and other grains—and generally restrict their urges by narrowing their diets. And their activity: in America, commercial dairies average several hundred per farm, with no access to pasture. We dull them. And so, yes, we do sort of make them stupid. All grass, all the time. @bluehillfarm

Exploring the impact of garlic curing and storage conditions on flavor quality and disease. The bulbs are from a single crop, sorted by size and cured at four different temperature and humidity conditions. (This is the first of a 2 year USDA study led by Chris Callahan of UVM and Crystal Stewart Courtens of Cornell.) Next stop is taste evaluation: what are the flavor differences? What cooking techniques take advantage of which storage conditions? Can’t wait @bluehillfarm @jackalgiere @stonebarns

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Summer’s raw bar