The Real Foodie

Month: March, 2015

March 20, 2015

A Nourishing Traditions Dinner with Sally Fallon

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Marco Canora and Sally Fallon

I had the honour of sitting next to Sally Fallon, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, over dinner last week at Hearth Restaurant in New York City. Chef Marco Canora, who has become a celebrity with his take out broth window, Brodo, hosted the dinner which was made entirely according to the principles of the Weston A. Price Foundation, as illustrated in Sally Fallon’s cookbook, Nourishing Traditions.

Sally Fallon has a devout following all over the world since she started the Weston A. Price Foundation, a dietary philosophy, based on the teachings of Weston A. Price. Weston Price was a dentist who traveled the world in the 1920s and ’30s, studying the diets of indigenous tribes and found that they had perfect bone structure and no tooth decay or disease. I first read her cookbook Nourishing Traditions eight years ago and I have been on the Weston Price diet ever since. Sally Fallon has changed my life and the life of so many others by improving their health, so this was a very special and rare opportunity to talk to her.

The table was beautifully set on a long table in the private dining room and lit by candles. The dinner was five courses, each accompanied by a different wine. Sally stood at the beginning of each course to make a speech, the theme being reduction sauces, followed by Marco explaining each course. The first course was a tasting of each of Brodo’s bone broths: grass-fed beef with ginger, Pennsylvania Amish organic chicken and Hearth broth; a combination of their chicken, beef and turkey. The second course was a trio of root vegetables, wild salmon eggs, Finger Lakes farm cream, chicories and a beet kvass vinaigrette. The third course was a sprouted grain risotto (lentils, red fife wheat berries, red quinoa) cooked in Hearth broth with wild mushrooms, cabbage and grated Spring Brook Reading raw cow’s milk cheese. The fourth course was a seared calves liver, bone marrow, soft scrambled eggs and alliums cooked in a Bordelaise sauce. Marco pointed out that the liver was from a rare veal from Vermont, fed only mother’s milk and grass instead of powdered milk. The fifth and final course was a selection of three raw milk cow cheeses, served with hazelnuts, sliced pears and honey. The blue and cheddar cheeses were from Sally Fallon and her husband Geoffrey Morell’s own organic bio-dynamic farm, Bowen Farm.

I have been to many great restaurants in my life and I would say this was one of the best, if not the best dinners I have ever had. It was unique in that it was not only cooked to perfection but also using ingredients of the highest quality. This rare combination was what made the dinner so memorable. Once you are on a real food diet and are used to the superior taste of real food ingredients sourced from grass-fed animals and organic farms, there is no comparison to conventional food, even when it is cooked by well known chefs. It is this combination that has made Marco Canora’s Hearth Restaurant such a success.

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March 9, 2015

Brodo, New York City

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My mother used to make broth from chicken bones when I was a child and used it as a base for her many soups and other recipes. She would especially give it to us when we were sick and always had a bowl of it in the freezer. She told me my great-grandmother who was born in Devon, England, in 1870, used to drink a cup of beef tea (broth made from boneless meat) every day. She used to say it was a cure-all and give it to my grandmother when she was sick. I have been making bone broth regularly myself, ever since reading about it in Nourishing Traditions (the cookbook that changed my life) and adopting a real food diet eight years ago. I usually make it from chicken bones but if I have leftover beef, duck, marrow or lamb bones I will add them. Oxtail also makes a very rich, gelatinous broth. Every time I roast a pastured chicken, I freeze the bones and when my freezer is overflowing with various containers of bones, I will boil them in my 16 quart stock pot with filtered water and four tablespoons of vinegar for twenty-four hours, according to the recipe in Nourishing Traditions. Sometimes I will also add fresh uncooked chicken parts to make it more gelatinous and nutritious. Then I sift it and store it in glass mason jars and use it to make soups, lentils, beans, vegetables, meat sauce or I just drink a cup on its own. My freezer is always fully stocked with jars of bone broth.

I was amazed to learn recently that this real food staple has taken off amongst the fashion crowd in New York City. Along with the opening of Brodo–a take out window serving nothing but bone broth–and a number of butchers and home delivery services also selling it, bone broth is being recommended not only by nutritionists and health coaches but also by beauticians and personal trainers for its many health benefits and skin boosting properties.

Brodo (Italian for broth), opened last November as an addition to chef Marco Canora’s East Village restaurant, Hearth, serving bone broth from 100 percent grass-fed beef, organic pastured chicken and organic turkey. Canora says he can’t keep up with the demand. So when I was in New York for my father’s birthday, I had to go and check it out. Sure enough there was a queue of people waiting to buy their cup of broth. They had three different types: beef; chicken and a combination of beef, chicken and turkey. You can also get a healthy add-in such as freshly grated turmeric, beet kvass or bone marrow. I ordered the beef broth which was deliciously rich in colour and taste with a hint of fresh ginger. It certainly warmed me up on such a cold winter’s day and I felt well nourished.

I was impressed with Marco Canora’s brilliant idea of a take out window, popularising a healthy cup of bone broth over of a cup of coffee. As the real food movement grows, I hope we will be seeing more of these broth bars and fewer places like Starbucks.

Sally Fallon, the author of Nourishing Traditions and founder of The Weston A. Price Foundation, has come out with a new book devoted to bone broth: Nourishing Broth.

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