Welcome to Dirty Work, our new series of dispatches from the MUNCHIES Garden. We’re inviting chefs, bartenders, and personalities in the world of food and drink to explore our edible playground and make whatever the hell inspires them with our rooftop produce. The results: MUNCHIES Garden recipes for you, dear reader.
“Sometimes the most delicious thing that we can create is always right in front of us,” says Jake Nemmers, chef de cuisine at Estela in downtown Manhattan. Having combed through the half-dozen tomato varieties growing in our garden one sunny day, he’s geeking out over the aroma of vines.
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Estela, known for it’s Mediterranean-inspired plates, is the brain child of chef Ignacio Mattos. It is here that you can find ricotta dumplings, mussels escabèche, and homemade burrata with charred bread alongside one another to make you experience geographical vertigo: are we in Bilbao or south of Houston street?
“There’s not anything else in the world like the smell of a tomato vine. Even when you’re picking tomatoes, they don’t smell like tomatoes—they smell like the vine,” Nemmers says. “I think that everyone subconsciously knows that smell, but it isn’t until you put it in their face that they realize what that scent is, which is almost musky, and really peppery.”
On his visit to the garden, Jake gathered up handfuls of the vines that a typical home cook would toss in the compost bin. “So I made tomato vinegar,” he says. “It just made sense to me.”
Bronze fennel in full bloom. All of these amazing photos are by Sydney Kramer.
But he hardly stopped there. Jake went on to make pickled carrots (“ideally eaten as-is,” he notes) and lemon verbena syrup (“use it with something sweet, not savory”).
Jake harvests fresh lemon verbena from the MUNCHIES herb garden.
He also infused a batch of honey with hyssop, an ancient medicinal and culinary herb that relieves coughs and helps give Chartreuse its signature flavor. “You can use the hyssop honey for something savory, or if you’re drinking tea. Or drizzle it over fruit, like blueberries,” Jake says.
Harvesting radishes from the vegetable garden.
Fresh heirloom tomatoes growing in the MUNCHIES Garden.
And as for the tomato vinegar, he says that it goes best with cooked greens, but can be used on anything that needs a little acidic bite. It’s slightly spicy and has a deep flavor. I mixed it into white distilled vinegar with absolutely nothing. It just takes time to come together—it tastes great after a month of sitting there.”
Jake discovered a patch of tomato vines in a trough below the tomato patch.
Jake harvesting carrots from the MUNCHIES garden.
But then, something especially delicious happened when Jake used some of our carrots to prepare one of Estela’s current dishes.
“I personally love cooked carrots—not super-crunchy or super-soft, but right in the middle—and we currently have a dish on our menu right now that involves charred leeks with chicken, so together, the carrots are slightly sweet and the leeks and softer, but both are charred,” he says. “It made sense that they would go together for the mouthfeel with the pork shoulder, which has a lot of interesting texture. You can taste different parts of the shoulder in each piece. I added farro to the bottom because I love pork with grains. It would be equally amazing with chicken.
The final result is your itinerary for dinner tonight, no garden required.
