463 Veggies to Grow…463 Veggies…
If One of Those Veggies Should Happen To Go…
462 Veggies to Grow!
The Exhaustive List of Organic Delights at The Inn at Dos Brisas
It is highly fashionable – nay, expected – these days for a top chef to shop at organic farmers markets for fresh-picked produce to serve his guests that week. Some chefs even have standing orders with local growers to have their restaurant’s vegetables ‘custom grown’; a lucky few even boast their own patches of kitchen garden out the back door.
And then, there’s The Inn at Dos Brisas.
This Relais & Châteaux property deep in the heart of Texas sits on over 300 acres, approximately two of which are dedicated to the intensive farming of nearly all the produce served at the Inn’s award-winning restaurant. It is progressive in all the right ways: sustainable, organic, diverse – and imaginative. The gardens, orchard, and greenhouse are lovingly planned and tended by their own staff, which includes a Horticulturist and an Organic Production Manager. How else could Chef Jason Robinson keep track of the 150 tomato varieties produced on site for his rarified kitchen?
This spring alone, Chef Robinson has 124 varieties in the ground, whose evocative names range from Ivory Egg to Lemon Drop to Aunt Ruby’s German Green to the unlikely Royal Hillbilly and slightly sinister sounding Orange Russian 117….
It’s hard to believe that there’s still room in the allotted garden space for 463 Vegetables to grow! Just starting naming and counting - the asparagus [five varieties, from Purple Passion to Very Wild,] beets [13 varieties, including Bull’s Blood and Tall Top Shiraz,] three different brussels sprouts, and 24 carrots [Japanese Imperial Long, anyone?] But wait – that’s not all: who’d have expected 15 kinds of cauliflower, and 14 kinds of garlic? The 28 squash represented [Eight Ball to Buttercup] are counted separately from the eight different zucchini [Meteor to Cashflow.] Even the kale, kohlrabi, leeks and tomatillos enjoy a diversity of at least two varieties in this garden. Lettuces [18 varieties!] include Mascara and Flashy Trout Back; radishes [also numbering 18] include Easter Egg and Red Meat. The 16 potatoes you might encounter this spring range from All Blue to King Harry to Swedish Peanut; the 13 eggplants include Kermit, Orient Express, and Calliope. There are even six different kinds of melon – not including the ten distinct varieties of watermelon – and five different pumpkins!
Come this fall, there will be new organic delicacies at Dos Brisas for Chef Robinson to choose from, including thirty-one micro bench varieties of specialty greens from the exotic Komatsuna and Garnet Red Amaranth Greens to Russian Red Kale. Chef Robinson is also bringing in mushrooms; planning an apiary to produce his own honey; and still looking for additional varieties of southern regional heirloom vegetables. As he points out, “heirlooms are exactly that: they each have a story, a history, an agricultural anthropology all their own.”
Imagine the tales a chef could spin with this depth of culinary culture right at his fingertips – the reality is only as far as The Inn at Dos Brisas.