Online Magazine

& Cooking Club

Home: Table of Contents

Feature Articles

What are Leeks?

Meet a Not-Too-Famous Onion

Discovering What We Don’t Know About Leeks

Alien Encounters:

Drumming Up Inspiration for Strange-Sounding Vegetables

A Week of Leeks:

Get to know Leeks, 7 Easy Ways

In Every Issue

Why We Love It

Partners in Flavor and Season

Leek Season

Vegetable Boosters

Picky Eater Tips

Money Saving Tricks

News from the Farm

Cooking School

Cooking Classes:

White Fish and Leeks en Papillote

Roasted Leeks and Butternut Squash Salad

Buying the Best

Storing for Flavor

Prepping Tricks & Tips

Cooking Basics

Recipes, Recipes, Recipes

13 Easy Recipes: Make

Leeks a Mid-Winter Favorite

Home About Us FAQs Contact Gift Certificate Blog Twitter/Vegetable Queen

Jerry

And

Jackie

Monroe

Visit them at Monroe Organic Farm,

Kersey, Colorado

<<News From the Farm and Beyond

That's why it was so fascinating to visit Monroe Organic Farms on the plains of eastern Colorado. There we discovered the key to surviving winter's long dark days:

Storage vegetables and the know-how to store them.

Organic produce has been raised on Jackie and Jerry Monroe’s family farm since 1936, including all sorts of storage vegetables like beets, celeriac, carrots, potatoes, squash, cabbage and, of course, leeks. But one autumn the Monroe’s faced the kind of weather-induced financial crisis that is never more than two steps from a farmer. So this clever couple decided to go one step beyond growing, to commercially storing and selling their storage crop all winter! The concept worked and they were able to pay the farm's bills.

A Daring Experiment

The Question: Why Do Leeks Get So Dirty?

As explained in the prepping section, dirt doesn't just get on leeks, it gets embedded deep within a leek’s layers. Anyone who has wrestled the dirt from a bunch of leeks has surely wondered how they get so darn dirty.

The Answer Leeks grow layer upon layer, so any dirt surrounding a layer, gets trapped inside as the leek grows outward. It doesn't help when wind blows or rain splashes more dirt inside the layers. Nor does it help if the leeks are blanched, a process described below, where dirt is piled around the leeks.

Harvesting From the Past

In December, just after a sub-zero freezing spell, we had a chance to tour the amazing storage setup Jackie and Jerry have created. There are deep trenches and shallow pits, straw bale structures and cold frames. How did they know which vegetables to store where, how much humidity was optimal, how to keep them from freezing in the plains' sub-zero weather, how deep should trenches be, what kinds of squash stores best, and so on?

Jackie and Jerry reminded us that people survived at least a few millennia without the benefits of California produce shipped to a grocery store down the street. Storage, along with food preservation, were key skills people perfected and utilized to survive. Fortunately, there are still people around who remember life before refrigerated rail cars, like the Monroes' parents, who were a big source of know-how for Jerry and Jackie.

Combining past practices with modern research on vegetable storage, Jackie and Jerry have been able to piece together a patchwork of winter storage methods that are as promising as they are effective. Of all the clever systems they have devised, however, the leek operation is the most interesting.

Making Leeks Last Until March

"Cold Frame Sauna" The leeks’ storage structure looks like a greenhouse but because it's unheated, it is called a "cold frame." Even without heating, however, the temperature inside is almost balmy–and the air is rich with the earthy, humid scent of leeks.

The leeks are grown in outdoor fields until the are harvested in September or October. They are then "re-planted" in the cold frame in trenches about 4" deep. Inside the cold frame, the leeks go into a maintenance stage: they don't grow any more, but neither do they die. They can continue in this "hibernation" state for four to five months, until March. Throughout the winter, the leeks are re-harvested for CSA members.

Labor Intensive

All in all, producing leeks year-round in snow country is a labor intensive process, since they are essentially planted twice and harvested twice. Adding to the labor element, the leeks must be cleaned of any withered leaves before going into the CSA boxes. Many growers will also "blanch" their leeks, another labor intensive process described below.

The article "Who Is This Vegetable and Why Don't We Know It Better?" asked why leeks aren't as common in our country as in Europe. Part of the reason lies in the labor-intensive growing methods they require. Without the potential savings offered by mechanical harvesting and cleaning, industrial growers have little interest in the crop,which limits its availability in conventional stores. Of course leeks are always a favorite at farmers markets and can also be found pretty readily at health foods stores.

Seasonal Eating in the Depths of Winter

Seasonal eating always sounds like a great thing to do--in the summer. Maybe, stretching the imagination, we can envision eating seasonally and locally through autumn. Maybe we could even start in spring. But for anyone north of the 40th Parallel, winter is a time to be thankful for produce from Mexico and California.

That desperate experiment has now, eight years later, grown into a large and successful Winter CSA program that feeds 150 families in the Denver metro area. While it may not feed those families completely, it can provide 40 to 60 percent of a family’s produce needs.

Monroe Farm’s Patchwork Storage System Can you guess where the vegetables are stored?

Low-Tech Ingenuity The Monroe storage operation requires no external energy inputs, only nature's warming, cooling and venting capabilities. Good news in a global warming world!

Ask the Grower

The Question What Is Blanching?

Most of us have heard of blanching in a cooking sense, where a food is briefly cooked in a big pot of boiling water. But there's another kind of blanching that happens in leek fields. Dirt is piled up around the leeks’ stalks so that, robbed of light, they become creamy white.

Why do growers go to all that trouble? Because traditionally, the white part of a leek was the most prized part. As explained in "Separating the Wheat form the Chaff," most recipes call for just the white parts of the leeks. The remaining green parts were either thrown in the stock pot or simply thrown away.

Not all leeks are blanched, however, and some are blanched more than others, which explains why leeks vary in the proportion of white to dark green. Happily, this issue of Vegetable a Month shows how the green parts of leeks can be used in many tasty ways. So no matter what kind of leek you find at the store, you can put it all to good use.

The Monroes don’t bother blanching their leeks. They don’t need to. Look at the size of the white parts on their leeks pictured above. They are the longest I have ever seen!

A Visit with the Vegetable Storage Experts