Colorado culinary stars bolster state’s agricultural diversity, vigor

Colorado lacks a coastline—nobody is hauling salmon out of the high plains. Nor does it support vast acreage of rich, loamy soil in the manner of Iowa. A mild, generous climate? Not a chance. Instead of covering land with things like almond and olive trees, raspberry canes and artichokes, much of Colorado’s agricultural fields support onions, sugar beets, potatoes and hay.

Plenty of farmers, however, do grow grains—including wheat. And a coalition of grain enthusiasts ranging from farmers to CPGs to restaurant, brewery and distillery owners, are turning to regeneratively grown Colorado grains for their ingredients.

The effort is bolstering small farms, and providing culinary professionals, including CPGs, with first-rate ingredients.

Eric Skokan, chef and farmer, Black Cat Organic Farm

Chef Eric Skokan grows produce, grains and more for restaurants

Chef Eric Skokan’s pursuit of growing food for his restaurants began nearly 20 years ago. Annoyed at the price and quality of simple things like edible flower garnishes and English peas, he began planting them in his Boulder backyard.

Nearly 20 years later, those early efforts have ripened into a 500-acre farm. Skokan grows more than 250 varieties of certified vegetables, herbs, grains, legumes and flowers at Black Cat Organic Farm. The operation includes hundreds of heritage sheep and pigs. He farms using biodynamic methods—livestock are central to the farm’s soil vitality, waste mitigation and weed elimination efforts.

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Black Cat Organic Farm supports a downtown Boulder restaurant, Bramble & Hare, which last year won a coveted and rare Michelin Green Star. It supplies a farm store, two Boulder County Farmers Market booths and Community Supported Agriculture programs with a vast diversity of vegetables. And next month, it will also provide most of the ingredients for a new farm dinner space at Skokan’s farmstead north of Boulder.

The farm also offers local, organic ingredients to other restaurants as well as at least two CPGs—a Boulder brand of beet burgers, and a Boulder tempeh brand that relies on Black Cat Organic Farm legumes.

Small farms used to blanket the United States. Most of the time, the farmers were just farmers. They didn’t need to continually find new outlets for their ingredients—demand in the surrounding community was enough. But now, Skokan said, farmers need to engage with a broad spectrum of communities and venues to make things work.

“Small, organic farms cultivate the most delicious and nutrient-dense ingredients on the planet,” he said. “Without them, we’d be stuck with watered-down, bland vegetables grown in lifeless soil by corporate conglomerates. Which as a chef would be cause for immense disappointment. Fortunately, small farms like ours still grow a wilderness of interesting heirloom crops in healthy soil. And during our more than 15 years of farming, we’ve found that for all of this good farming to happen, we need plenty of partners.”

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Skokan, the first president of the Colorado Grain Chain—a consortium of Colorado people and businesses passionate about supporting grains—described local grains cultivated in regeneratively farmed soil as “essential” for the Front Range’s food shed.

The region is not blessed with a temperate climate—with frequent sub-zero temperatures, precipitation parsimony and fierce winds, it’s more like Siberian steppes than a variation on a theme of Santa Monica. The dense, clay, rocky soil poses challenges, too.

Thanks to years of careful cultivation of his patch of steppe, however, Skokan grows literally tons of gorgeous vegetables every year. But grain comes most naturally to the region, all of which was shortgrass prairie until developers started wiping that out.

“The rise of the local grain movement here has bolstered many parts of the culinary equation,” Skokan said. “We’re famous for our beer, for example, and more and more breweries are seeking out local grains. Our distilleries, too, get international recognition for their quality. And the best of them source their grains like wheat and rye from local, regenerative farmers. Bakeries now are leaning into local grains. Food service. Restaurants. CPGs. It’s heartening to see what has happened in a short time.”

Claudia Bouvier and husband, Ted Steen, co-founders of Pastaficio

Pastaficio co-owner Claudia Bouvier works with ROC durum farm

Before Claudia Bouvier into the pasta game six years ago, she spent most of her career as a civil engineer. But a lifelong passion for food—all four of her grandparents emigrated from Italy to Brazil, where Bouvier grew up—eventually pried her away from drafting plans for buildings and into the tactile, aromatic world of crafting rigatoni and fusilli.

From the beginning, she and her husband, Pastaficio co-founder Ted Steen, “didn’t want to create yet another pasta company using conventional wheat,” she said. Instead, they sought ancient, certified organic varieties grown by American small farmers, preferably near their home in Boulder, Colorado.

The couple bootstrapped the business. They invested in pasta-making equipment and starting out with sales at the Boulder County Farmers Market, where they sought feedback from the city’s food-focused and entrepreneurial community. All the wheat came from Colorado.

As Pastaficio experimented with a broad array of different wheat varieties, crafting pastas from single varieties of wheat, they determined that durum varieties were best for pasta. No Coloradans were growing durum, however. So the company began sourcing its grain from farms in Montana, where Pastaficio also began working with a small flour mill that specialized in local grains.

But now Jones Farms Organics, a family farm 160 miles directly south-southwest of Boulder, is growing a large amount of organic durum specifically for Pastaficio.

The effort finds its foundation in the Colorado Grain Chain. Bouvier was one of the founding members of the organization, which started about the same time as she was launching Pastaficio. Jones Farms Organics, which is the first business in Colorado to receive Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC), also was an early member.

Today, Grain Chain members include 16 bakeries, 13 farms, 16 breweries and distilleries, and eight restaurants. As the organization grows—with increasingly more farmers cultivating organic and regenerative grains and food businesses sourcing grains from local farmers—it has become a powerful movement.

“The more we all support the farmers growing these wheats,” Bouvier said, “the more we will have in terms of biodiversity in our food system.”

Turning to organic and regenerative heritage grains aligns with more than Pastaficio’s commitment to the environment: It also speaks to flavor.

“Our pasta doesn’t need to have a heavy sauce or anything, like conventional pasta,” said Bouvier. “The pasta itself has a lot of flavor. Olive oil and vegetables can be enough with this delicious pasta.”

The wheat varieties and Pastaficio’s devotion to whole-grain pasta informs the flavor advantages. But so does the time between wheat harvest and milling. With traditional flour, the process can take months. But with Pastaficio, it’s measured in weeks. The short duration helps preserve volatile oils and other botanicals that drift away over time and adds flavor.

The ancient wheat varieties and attenuated gap between harvest and milling also addresses customers who wrestle with gluten intolerance. Steen suffers from the condition, which served as a spark for starting Pastaficio. As the brand's wheat is all heritage and organic, and as the pastas are all whole grain—meaning the entire wheat berry is used; even whole wheat flour normally removes some of the wheat properties—Pastaficio’s noodles often don’t disrupt the digestive tracts of people who normally steer clear of gluten, Bouvier said.

“Customers come back and say, `This is the only pasta I can eat and feel well,’” she said. “They don’t feel bloated and uncomfortable after eating a bowl of pasta.”

Kelly Whitaker, chef and co-founder, The Wolf’s Tailor, Basta, Bruto

Chef Kelly Whitaker operates commercial grain mill

Chef Kelly Whitaker began his professional culinary career working in Los Angeles, California, kitchens where fish, plucked from the sea not far from where he diced onions and sautéed morels, served as stars.

When he moved to Boulder, Colorado, that particular close connection to a vibrant food ecosystem vanished. So he found a new one: grain. The state might not support scallops and halibut, but plenty of farmers growing everything from wheat to rye, barley and oats call Colorado home.

Now Whitaker, named Outstanding Restaurateur for 2024 by the prestigious James Beard Foundation, runs his own commercial grain mill in Boulder, and works with grain farmers across the state. The toil yields flours and whole grains for his seven restaurants—four of which received different recognitions by the Michelin Guide in 2023.

But the work with farmers and milling also has led to the development of a commercial grain business, through which he sells flours to everything from the Denver Broncos to Denver Public Schools; about 100 commercial customers buy his grains. The grain work, too, addresses consumers; Whitaker sells sacks of his flours through different outlets, including a farmers market and his bakery, Dry Storage Bakehouse.

“It’s going everywhere right now,” he said. “A few people took chances. We made the grains popular, we got some press. And it just grew.”

The devotion to the farming side of Whitaker’s world hinges, in part, on his commitment to local food sheds. But it also fixes on the soil. Just as ocean vitality serves as the foundation of healthy fisheries—and especially delicious seafood—so does fertile, robust soil yield agricultural vigor, gloriously complex biodiversity and sumptuous grains.

“I tell people, if I felt like the ultimate soil builder on the face of the earth was carrots, I’d be growing carrots right now,” Whitaker said. “But I was always chasing grain, chasing pasta. When I came back to Colorado, grain was the immediate thing where I felt I could have the most impact. I didn’t want to get involved with something part way.”

Like Bouvier and Skokan, Whitaker got involved early with the Colorado Grain Chain. From the beginning, he said, he had a “very clear mission.”

“It was to get the farmers to grow it and the chefs to use and buy it,” he said. “I was on the create demand side.”

Soon after he began participating, however, he realized that key elements, such as a mill for small farmers, were missing. Had a mill already been operating, Whitaker said he probably never would have built his own. But the movement needed a mill. So he established one in Boulder.

Now, Whitaker works with five farmers regeneratively cultivating more than 200 acres of land. A restaurant and bakery group in Shanghai, China flew Whitaker to Shanghai to help them figure out how to form similar unions with local farmers.

In the end, it’s taste that drives Whitaker. Stout, lively soil produces grains flooded with nuanced flavors, as well as textures that are advantageous for cooking. When different varieties of flour get milled, they broadcast distinct aromas.

“If I’m milling a variety of white wheat, I might want linguine and clams. If it’s a red wheat, maybe I’ll want a tomato ragu instead. It’s a fireworks moment,” he said. “There’s a learning curve, but you quickly recognize that my restaurant changed over night, that all of the sudden you realize our food is better.”

Catch these three Colorado culinary superstars discussing The Flavors of Regenerative: Culinary All-Stars Share Insights Into the Future of Food Service at 11:45 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 27, on the Regenerate Stage at Newtopia Now, New Hope Network's new trade show.