Video from Slow Food Nation: We Love Jam
What's Up with Blenheim Apricots
While at Slow Food Nation, I came face to face with the endangered foods described in the Ark of Taste.
What is the Ark of Taste you ask? It's a Slow Food project aiming to rediscover, catalog, describe and publicize rare foods around the globe that are threatened by industrial standardization, the regulations of large-scale distribution and environmental damage. Preserving these foods also preserves the unique economic, social, cultural, and culinary heritage of the people who produce them. Many of the breeds of animal listed under the Ark of Taste, for example, have been farmed for centuries by people who have built up their own cultures around the animals they raise.
Some interesting stats: According to Slow Food International, Europe has lost 75% of its crop diversity since 1900, and the United States has lost 93%. Thirty plants feed the majority of the global population.
The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity believes that the best way to save rare foods is to eat them, creating a market for artisanally produced or unusual foods. Ark products rage from a type of fava bean grown only on Santorini, Greece to dairy products from the Irish Kerry cattle...and, more locally, to the Blenheim apricot and Charbono grape.
Eric Haeberli of the We Love Jam company in the video above* makes a jam with Blenheim apricots. He and his partner produces the jam from one of the last remaining Blenheim orchards in the Santa Clara Valley here in northern California. Eric became famous when Food + Wine magazine described his jam as "simply the best jam we have ever tasted." Since then they have developed a cult following, receiving orders from every corner of the world.
I can attest that Blenheims are a truly magnificent apricot. I grew up eating them. No other apricot is quite like them; everything else tastes watery and bland.
BTW, Eric sells other other products like an incredibly delicious bbq sauce, biscotti, bread and butter pickles, plum jams, kumquat marmalade and massaged persimmons. (Yes, massaged persimmons. See the next video for an explanation.)
* If you are reading this in the daily digest email (*URP) and can't see the video player with the arrow button in the middle, click on the title of this post to take you to the blog itself.
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