These days I visited a vegetable garden worked for futures chefs who are preparing for the new challenges of giving eatmanage a restauranta food company or throw entrepreneurship that change the future. It amazed me because among the variety of it, there was Mexico in it cornthe quelites…Quelites?, I asked Leire Etxaide, the person in charge of the project. She naturally replied: “Yes, we have herbs like purslane. Wanna epazote, papaloquelite, pipicha. In addition, we grow flowers with yellow petals, edible, which are used in altars…” “Cempasuchil”I replied. The word queliteI explained, is from the Nahuatl quilitl, used to designate edible, medicinal and ornamental herbs, which sprout in the cornfield…Milpa? Another of the guests asked, I said that’s what they call the ancestral polyculture of Mexicogoverned mainly by corn, bean and pumpkinthe famous Mesoamerican food triad seasoned by the chili and enriched by animal protein: insects, fish, deer, armadillo…
Etxaide commented that four years ago the project of the vegetable garden from the Basque Culinary Center, the pioneering university in gastronomy, but the pandemic went through. “It is not a typical garden,” he added. Its particularity is that it adapts to the school year from September to May. “It was a great challenge. Now the students are cleaning it and preparing it for the next course.”
He explained that the one-hectare design, outlined with Íñigo Segurola, a landscaper with a program on the Basque television schedule, has different plots, two with regenerative and conventional agriculture, in organic, so that the students, in the first and second year of the degree Gastronomy and Culinary Arts, see the difference and learn various techniques. They work on temporalities, they learn basic concepts in situ. “Later, the theory will come,” he said. The innovation team also has its space to develop new products. There is a greenhouse, seedbeds. Likewise, the classroom students get involved to value what is produced and convey it to the diner, telling the story.
At my side was Segurola, whom I asked about the varieties of corn grown in the region and he referred me to Jakoba Errekondo, who was also part of the invited delegation. “He has been with a garden program on the radio for more than thirty-five years and he is, surely, the one who knows the most,” he highlighted.
“The Basque Country owes a lot to Mexico and corn, that upon arrival, the village emerges as a unit of agricultural subsistence. As a young man he considered himself genuinely Basque but that was not the case. It was a brutal learning experience.”
I mentioned that there are hundreds of recipes with grass. At that moment the skies, unknown in this region, came to my mind. I explained that they are tender corn kernels, toasted or fried in butter, oil or lard, scented with epazote. To make them brothy, I recommended adding meat or vegetable broth. We season with mayonnaise, cream, grated fresh cheese, lemon and chili powder. I promised to prepare them as soon as they have them.
I will cook at university! I hope that the use of fresh corn spreads like wildfire and in some years it will be part of the traditional Basque recipe book, to which tomatoes and beans will also be added. In Mexico the same thing happened with mango, papaya, pineapple, banana, cilantro, orange…
After the bucolic walk, one kilometer from the BCC building, we visited the kitchen where the garden is the owner and mistress. “We organized ourselves around it,” said Ruen A. Kazandzhiev, the cook responsible for the student team. The feast offered was what was harvested that morning: garlic, carrots, Brussels sprouts, beets, oh, and fresh purslane. I imagined it in salads, stews… Without a doubt, if it pleases and seduces, in the coming years it will be native.
@irmaa.aguilar
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