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US (ME): Chef grows Asian food in the greenhouse

When some Maine farmers had a bunch of turnips that had accidentally gone to flower, they thought they had screwed up big time. At best, the harvest would go straight into the compost. Chef Cara Stadler decided to intervene; she wanted to use the discarded greens for a culinary experiment.

“We turned it into a fermented green and it was the best flavor,” she says. “It’s the closest thing I could get to the pickled mustard greens from China.”

Stadler, who is half-Chinese, is a reputable chef in the Maine food scene. In the past several years, she has been a semifinalist for a James Beard award for Rising New Chef and received a nod from Food and Wine as Best New Chef. Currently, she is the force behind Tao Yuan in Brunswick and Bao Bao Dumpling House in Portland. Both are Asian fusion concepts that source locally when possible.

Greenhouse
Stadler has an ambitious three-story, closed-loop aquaponic greenhouse next to her New Brunswick restaurant Tao Yuan that will raise fish like trout and grow plants like wasabi root, winged beans, Vietnamese coriander, kaffir limes, and celtuce. She’s especially excited about the wasabi—a plant that takes two to three years to cultivate to maturity.

“I want to put a yuzu tree in, too,” she says.

The greenhouse plans will be open-sourced and unlike the mono-crop operations typical of most aquaponics farms, Stadler and her team are focusing on variety.

“It’s about a 3,000-square-foot greenhouse space and our hope is to grow stuff that aren’t readily available in the United States,” Kate Holcomb, the farm coordinator for the company, says. “The more reliable stuff is bok choy, spicy greens, lettuce mixes, and some herbs.”

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