Kalettes: Stump the Chef

We do farm tours at The Chef's Garden all through the winter because even in the middle of a chilly December day, there are fascinating things to be discovered growing in the fields. Maybe it's the cold temperatures that get to me when I'm giving a winter tour but I always like to have a little fun by playing something I like to call, "Stump the chef."

I play this guessing game when we get to our kalettes, which grow on stalks as tall and thick as a Brussels sprout but have tiny bunches of ruffled leaves growing in the places where the sprouts should be.

So the chef is thinking sprouts but then their eye travels up the stalk and reaches these little bunches of mauve and purple leaves that are super crunchy and intricately textured and the brain goes a bit haywire because it's never seen anything like it before.

This is our kalette and I'm not only proud of how unique it is, I'm proud of our team who harvests it each winter. We are a hearty bunch here on the farm and the harvest of the kalette is the best example of how strong and determined our amazing growers are, patient too.

The kalette takes a full eleven months to grow and they're not ready to be picked until the temperatures have dipped to freezing. The cold temperatures allow the kalette sugars to increase which makes these super-tender winter gems incredibly sweet and flavorful.

So if you visit us on the farm in December, don't be surprised to see a wagon driving through the fields, harvesting our kalettes. It's a process that numbs the fingers but we all think it's worth it because the result is one of the most interesting winter vegetables we grow here on the farm.

And don't worry about our team who brave the frigid temperatures to harvest kalettes for our chefs. After we've piled about three hundred stalks that are as thick as a grown man's wrist on a wagon, we retreat to the barn where it's nice and warm to remove the beautiful kalette from its stalk.

Once we're warmed up, it's always fun to gather around a pile of stalks, hunkering down with our razor-sharp sheers on a cold December day to complete our harvest, the unforgiving winter wind blustering outside while we are warm and toasty inside our barn, kalettes piling up all around us.

These little beauties are ready to grace your winter table and bring a smile to your guest who isn't expecting much more than a root vegetable in the heart of winter. Boy, won't they be surprised when they catch sight of our lovely little kalette.