Rio Vista farm grows chicory perfect for winter salads, appetizers
Back in the days of “going back to the land,” better known as the 1970s, many of us did try to fulfill the three pillars of eating well: Eat what’s in season, make sure it’s grown organically, and find a local source for it.
Well, you can’t get more local than if you grow it yourself. At the time, I was living in Pennsylvania, so there wasn’t much food in season in February in a place where the ground is frozen solid. We mostly ate what we canned, froze, dried, or stored in a cold room of the house. We made cheese from our goat’s milk, bread from grain we ground in a hand-cranked mill, winter squash and onions stored in the cold room, frozen black raspberries and wineberries from the abandoned meadows around us and sliced peaches from a local orchard, bacon and butter from a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, and vegetables we grew and froze or canned.
And, in February, while the snow was flying and the car’s starter motor wouldn’t turn over, we had fresh salads of our own, home-grown Belgian endive. Wait, what? How was that possible in February?
Simple. We grew these big Belgian endive plants - a kind of chicory - over the hot, muggy summer, harvested the fat tap roots in October, trimmed off their tops, buried them two feet deep in a straw-lined hole in the garden, then filled the hole with straw and covered it with bales of hay to insulate it from the frost.
Then in late January, I opened the hole and retrieved the roots, put them upright in a tub of sand in the cool basement, watered them, and turned out the lights. In a few weeks, the roots sent up the familiar chicons, or endive heads shaped like spear points - beautifully tight, white and yellow, crisp, fresh, icy-bitter, and a super treat in the dead of winter.
Now here in California, almost all Belgian endive - also known as Witloof Chicory - is still grown in fields during the summer, but forced to produce chicons in large, climate-controlled facilities.
The only endive farm in the country is California Endive Farms in Rio Vista, founded in 1983 by Rich Collins. Before that, they were mostly grown in Europe and brought here in cold storage - or you had to grow them yourself, as I did.
Most of our locally-sold Belgian endive now comes from the Rio Vista facility.
A few years ago, Collins retired and sold the company to the Planasa of Spain, the largest endive grower in Europe, which was developed by Alexandre Darbonne, the grandson of one of Collins’ original partners from France.
“It made sense, because you have the support network with people who understand endive, a very unusual crop,” said Mike Reed, director of sales for California Endive Farms.
“It’s a very hard crop, and it takes a long time … from planting a seed to getting a finished product could be 13 or 14 months.”
The company grows three chicory roots - red, yellow and a new chicory variety called Coraline - at three different elevations from Southern Oregon to Susanville and Turlock, which provide the “chill hours” required for the plant to send the energy into the roots.
At the Rio Vista farm, the roots are held in cold storage - at 28 degrees - which allows the roots to continue to hold their energy for up to a year. “We’re basically tricking the root to think it’s winter,” he said.
The roots are awakened, a little bit at a time, by placing them in spring conditions, provided by a completely dark hydroponic facility warmed up to 55 degrees. It takes three weeks for the root to sprout a tulip-like endive head.
Not surprisingly, this strange but interesting crop was discovered by accident back in 1830 by a Belgian farmer who had grown chicory roots, probably to flavor his coffee.
“He went down to his root cellar and notices that this root is starting to grow,” Reed said. “It was a lettuce that he was able to have in the winter, so that became very popular.”
California Endive Farms, which produces 4.5 million finished pounds of endive a year, is also the largest organic endive farm in the world, Reed said. Product trends include an uptick in interest in pre-packed endive, which allows the endive to stay its true color and last longer.
With the rise of Paleo and gluten-free diets, the pretty, red and yellow endive spears have also become popular as cracker substitutes in appetizers. Americans like to throw them into salads or on the grill, with some oil and salt and pepper.
Though located off the beaten track, the Rio Vista facility offers tours on weekdays to groups of 10 or more, often to chefs and culinary students curious about how this niche crop is grown. (To reserve, call 707-374-2111.)
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