Searching for that NYC hunger fix? Look no further than the streets of Brooklyn to get ripped…on food.

Located on the cement roof of a lively Parkdale restaurant unexpectedly lays an assortment of luscious vegetation. Lemon balm, mojito mint and stinging nettle just to name a few, breed vivaciously out of plastic bins, which supply the restaurant below. It’s an excellent type of sustainable urban agriculture that the creators hope will soon be more commonplace than novelty.

The Container System

A Conversation with Katie Mathieu & Victoria Taylor
Interview By Abby Ainsworth
Photography by Antonio Fernandez
Video by Abby Ainsworth

Tell us a little about yourselves and your relation to the garden.

VICTORIA: Ok, my name is Victoria Taylor and I’m a landscape architect working in Toronto. I’m interested in green roofs and growing food and restaurants and eating food. So when I bought this building in 2009 with some partners, I was very interested in getting something going on the roof and I was looking for the right person to do it with. Then I met Katie and she had all this interesting experience with growing food.
KATIE: My name is Katie Mathieu. I’m a chef, permaculture designer and a farmer. About five years ago I went to a farm school on Cortes Island in British Columbia called Linnaea Farms and studied organic agriculture and permaculture. Then I had the good fortune to work for Michael Stadtländer for seven months and now I’m interested in studying container systems – the urban systems that are smaller and more complicated.

How did you two meet?

KATIE: Parts and Labour was doing a cattle call for bartenders and a friend of mine was going to it. We were hanging out in the morning and I just kind of went along, as a joke. I got an interview and I totally blew it but was kind of curious about the space so I came back and met [chef] Matty at the back door of the restaurant. Matty and I got along right away and we started talking about animal slaughtering and planting and he suggested that we start a couple buckets up top, just as a casual thing and then all of a sudden I was meeting you [Victoria] – we had coffee at the Drake. Yeah we had a blind date! [laughs] And all of sudden it just kind of blew up.

When you first started the garden what were you growing and how has it evolved?

KATIE: Peas and radishes and carrots and greens – stuff that I knew were small and could survive. Then we got really excited about tomatoes last year. We thought that because it was hot up here it would be easy to grow heat-loving plants but when we got 25 tomato plants when they were babies it was too hot for them. There was too much wind, it was too exposed and they suffered for it. And so that was something that we did a couple this year because we really like them and they did produce a lot of tomatoes but not as much as you would expect. We did a lot of chives and a lot of herbs for the kitchen downstairs. They were really excited about having those on rotation and being able to come up and get them. We have a big container of Cuban mojito mint for the bar this year. We started growing different kinds of mint last year but we got the mojito this year and Rob, our bar manager really likes it.

What’s the difference between Cuban mojito mint and the mint that we’re used to?

KATIE: It’s still a mint. The family is called lamiaceae. It’s still a common mint but it’s a specific variety that has a rounder leaf and less of – you know how spearmint has a finishing note that kind of tastes like toothpaste? Mojito mint has a rounder, chubbier finish that doesn’t compete with the high notes in booze and it’s Hemmingway’s mojito mint of choice.

Was this the first time you were ever growing it?

KATIE: Yeah. Everything else is pretty familiar; everything else was stuff that I’d worked with before so I’ve got comparisons for all of them.

And are the comparisons from Stadtländer’s farm?

KATIE: …and Linnaea Farms. Big time.

What are some of the less common items grown in the garden?

KATIE: Lemongrass, Stinging nettle, purple sage, okra chickweed, and red plantain.

Who would be able to get your herbs and who would you sell them to other than just the restaurant?

KATIE: Private clients that are interested in establishing bins and friends and family.
VICTORIA: We have brought people up here and they’ve said, “Can you help us start a small roof garden on our garage at home?” We made small, little models like that. What we would really love to do is massive roofs like this, figure out what it would be like to be on a commercial rooftop that has a structure and make it like a real farm. We’re interested in both forms.
KATIE: I’m interested in irrigation right now too. We have buckets underneath the hood fans in the kitchen. There’s condensation that comes off of them and when it’s really, really hot you can get four eighteen liter buckets on a really busy night. So things like that, like figuring out how all these machines and systems around us can accumulate and bring in water.

You were saying you want to expand– what would be your ultimate garden? Would it just be for restaurants or would it also be a communal garden?

KATIE: Community access would be amazing. Not just because you need the expert hands but also because I think it’s the only way to really get the model to expand and grow and the only way to teach people effectively, to get people involved from start to finish. I think that’s the only way you really get what works and doesn’t work in the system. You have to watch it all the way through. That’s what the farm schools are about.
VICTORIA: And have it so that the public can come up here safely, have proper railings, have something other than just a ladder at the back. Have it so that people of all ages can come up and have a time to work on their garden up here, bring school groups. It would be great to have a place like that.

Is there a particular plant you’d want to introduce or take away?

KATIE: I like perennials. They like the bins.
VICTORIA: Yes, they do really well.
KATIE: I want to do more of them. They’re super effective, they produce really well. I really like the lemon balm too. It’s good for cold and flu and anxiety and I think it’s kind of funny to have that growing in a city, you know? I think it’s appropriate.

Victoria – How often do you come up here?

VICTORIA: Well, whenever I can. In the evenings and in the summer I come up here and hang out and do what I can and then on the weekends sometimes we have little work sessions. I’m here a lot at the beginning when we’re setting up for the season and then breaking it down, bringing everything inside. But Katie is really hands-on all week because I have another -
KATIE: You have another job!
VICTORIA: Another full-time job.

Since your background is landscape architecture, did you design the layout here?

VICTORIA: Yeah, we worked on that together with an engineer. We had to try and figure out structurally where we could have the weight and where the weight bearing walls are from underneath. There’s not really that much to design, but just figuring out what containers we were going to use and the soil mix too, talking to different soil suppliers. We wanted something that was really light but high in nutrients. So just doing some of that background research.

How often do you guys replenish your soil?

KATIE: It depends on what crop it is. Like a lettuce or things that are heavy feeders, they need to be replenished more often.

Can you talk a bit about your bin system?

KATIE: The bottom third is a water reservoir. It’s basically a recycling bin, a few pieces of election sign material and PVC pipe. Rooftop Garden Projects in Quebec made the prototype out of garbage and now they produce it and distribute it to people. So the water goes into the PVC filling pipe from the surface of the bin and goes down into the reservoir and then there are three areas of soil that extend into the water reservoir and act as candle wicks and they’ll pull the moisture up into the base of the soil and allow the roots to self regulate how much water they draw. I don’t think the plants would have survived up here without it because a heavy plant needs a lot of water. The big plants in two days with a heat wave would be bone dry. If I fill the reservoir up and soak the soil in a heat wave I would come back two days later and it would be cracking bone dry.
VICTORIA: Yeah it gets hot up here.

What’s the perfect weather for everything up here?

KATIE: How it was last week – 28, 25, 26 degrees (Celsius). Hot enough for everything to fruit and flower but not so hot that everybody gets all stressed out. Right now all the beets and carrots and peas and radishes and lettuce are super excited about this! They’re really into it!

Tell us about the hops that you’re growing.

KATIE: I’m growing three varieties for my cousin opening Bellwoods Brewery on Ossington and he’s starting a city-wide hops project and we were just studying to see how they do in bins and they’re only supposed to grow eight to ten feet in the first year and not produce hop cones and they grew 20 feet and produced cones.
VICTORIA: Oh, I didn’t know that.
KATIE: Yeah, hops love bins. It’s crazy, they did so well and they’re so attractive. And everyone likes beer, so it got a lot of people excited about roof gardens. The interest is always touch and go with urban agriculture but everyone got stoked about beer and it got a lot of attention.

Where do you see this type of system in five years?

KATIE: Hopefully just a casual thing that’s running all over the city and is not a big deal anymore, where everybody kind of knows what to do and the information isn’t precious or new and it’s just normal and everybody’s got their infrastructure going.

What would you say to someone who hasn’t grown anything out of a box or on their roof? What’s the easiest thing to start growing?

KATIE: Lettuce is pretty gratifying. With regard to seed sowing, it’s recommended that you just scatter it on top of the dirt and then rough it in, which is pretty easy for anybody to do. Then they come up pretty quick and they’re tasty, they’re super familiar and their lifespan is pretty short so it’s not, you know, it’s not a lot of time for tears. [laughs]

What would you like people to understand with the knowledge of what you two have started?

VICTORIA: Well, just that it’s possible. Even if there’s not access now, all you need is to put up a ladder, be safe about it and then get it going. Soil and water can get heavy, so checking with an engineer or architect before putting up something this size (or any size) is really important.
KATIE: I just really like studying it. It’s really nice instead of just thinking about it and talking about it. It’s really nice to be doing it – and doing it wrong and figuring out what’s killing things. [laughs] It’s been great to learn.

Meet Chad Robertson, San Francisco’s very own baker extraordinaire.

SIMPLY OBSESSED

Words by ABBY AINSWORTH
Photography by ABBY AINSWORTH

Some would say Chad Robertson is simply obsessed. As owner and baker of
Tartine Bakery in San Francisco, he is meticulous about finding the perfect
ratios between water to flour, and time to temperature. He pours ingredients
into measuring cups with the precise eye of a chemist; it always has to be
perfect. If it weren’t for his fixation on his product, which borders on
fetishization, it would not be the best.

It is five in the afternoon. The smell of freshly baked bread lingers in the air. There is a line that spans blocks outside 600 Guerrero Street. Customers contentedly wait to buy a taste of Chad’s precision. The loaf itself is a generous size, replicating the dimensions of a flattened rugby ball. It is a sumptuous deep brown with a glossy sheen. There are long linear cracks along the top, which are created from the delicate scores Chad makes before the dough goes into the oven. Once tarred, the bread rips apart with ease and you are left feasting your eyes on a beautifully elastic and sponge-like dough. The taste? Heavenly addictive. Its well-developed yeast/wheat flavour is where you can understand the craftsmanship behind the product.

When Robertson and his wife Elisabeth opened Tartine Bakery and Cafe in 2002, they didn’t anticipate how popular it would become. All they knew was that they wanted to put out a top-notch product. Both had formal training at The Culinary Institute of America in New York City. After school, Chad had the opportunity to apprentice for Richard Bourdon, the very well known baker and owner of Berkshire Mountain Bakery. Chad says it was during this time that his love for baking was ignited. In his book Tartine Bread, Robertson says that despite the long hours, he would rather work a twelve-hour shift baking than at a busy restaurant.

Now with two cookbooks, praise from The New York Times and Food & Wine, and a James Beard Award, the couple are still as passionate about their product as ever—always expanding their knowledge of bread to make sure it’s the best it can be. Chad is constantly traveling the globe to absorb knowledge from top bakers. Even after all these years, baking still remains a solitary passion for Chad. “Making bread has become a mostly silent meditation for me and I like it that way,” he says.

ACQ: Can you tell me when your love for baking began? When did it turn into your own business?

CHAD: I didn’t really have any plans to become a baker when I visited Richard Bourdon’s bakery. There were a lot of factors that influenced my rather quick decision to shift my focus from cooking to learning to make bread.  For starters, I was young and impressionable, and Bourdon was unlike anyone I had ever met. He was, and still is, a bread-making savant. His approach to baking and fermentation in general is very intuitive and elemental.

After working with Richard for a couple of years, I went to France to work for the bakers that had inspired him many years before. The bakers there used natural leaven and specialized in stone-milled organic grains. When we returned to the US, there were very few bakers working in the traditional ways that I wanted to, so we decided right away to start our own place. Point Reyes California is a tiny town with only a few hundred permanent residents, so we had to take our bread to markets in nearby larger cities to sell enough to make a living.

The Berkeley Farmers Market was a great place for us to take our bread and pastries. The city had long supported organic artisan food producers; restaurants such as Chez Panisse have been supporting family farmers and producers for almost 40 years.

ACQ: Even though you are obviously driven and very fastidious, you seem to be pretty laid back. You mention in Tartine Bread that you love to surf and find baking relaxing. Do you think San Francisco complements your nature, and do you think the location has added to the success of the restaurant?

CHAD: San Francisco is an amazing city. The produce we use from our local farmers is exceptional; it informs and inspires what we make at the bakery. The size and situation of San Francisco definitely informs my working lifestyle, with its ocean beach where I surf and run for three miles along the western edge of the city. Compared to New York City for example, San

Francisco—with its mountains, ocean, and redwood forests nearby—is quite a small city; yet, we have one of the most diverse food cultures in the country.

ACQ: You have been written up in Elle Magazine, and nominated for a James Beard Award in 2006 and 2007 for Outstanding Pastry Chef and Baker. The New York Times was here [at Tartine Bakery and Cafe] a day before me, and everyone advocates Tartine as a must-see dining experience in San Francisco. Did you ever expect to receive this success and such wide reception?

CHAD: No, I didn’t expect the success we have had. For the hard and dedicated work of our entire staff over the years, it’s a welcome, hard-earned, and much-appreciated success. And every day we strive to maintain it.

ACQ: Who do you look to for inspiration? You said you went to Paris recently. What were you doing there?

CHAD: I mostly look to artisans and artists outside of the baking world to inspire indirectly what I am doing. Also, to chefs who are making interesting food. I went to Paris and Brittany recently to work with two bakers. Both of them were making very different bread from each other, and from what I do at Tartine. While I didn’t come home wanting to replicate any of the breads I worked with in France, I was very inspired by the new friends I had made and the effect that a week in Paris has on the soul.

Most recently, I traveled to Copenhagen and Hungary to work with bakers making breads very different from those in France. Again, the friends I made and the two cities gave the inspiration I brought back with me. In Copenhagen, I enjoyed one of the best meals of my life at a restaurant called Relae—a perfect neighborhood restaurant serving exceptional and interesting food and wine. It is incredibly inspiring.

ACQ: When you travel to Europe and come back to America, do you notice a big difference in the techniques? Do you think North America is behind in techniques as compared with France or in Europe in general?

CHAD: There is not much difference between the skill-level of techniques from the good bakeries in the US compared with the same in France. Some of the techniques are necessarily different though, due to the different qualities of the flour. I couldn’t generalize too much here. There are bakers taking a lot of shortcuts and making bad bread in both places. Just as there are dedicated artisans making great bread in both.

ACQ: What is it about France or Paris specifically that differentiates their baking skills? Are we trying to catch up to their standards or is this a misconception?

CHAD: I don’t really think about catching up with Paris. It’s not easy to even find a bakery that makes croissants from scratch in Paris. The baker I worked with there informed me that over 80% of bakeries in Paris use pre-made frozen dough. Christophe Vasseur of Du Pain et Des Idees is making excellent and distinctive breads and pastries using organic stone-ground flour. He is one of the best in France and was named best bakery in Paris a couple of years ago. He strives not only to achieve the highest quality, but also to offer something different from his peers.

I’ve also found that it’s much easier to find good, distinctive bread in the countryside in France than in Paris. Regarding French bakers borrowing from us, this would be unlikely not because we don’t have the innovation they might like to adopt; rather, because the French are very set in their ways with centuries of tradition informing their techniques.

Some of the ways that I work with bread in San Francisco would be considered impossible in France only because the method is completely outside of the French tradition. And in general, French bakers have little to no interest in learning new techniques outside of their own tradition.

ACQ: I have read that your baking philosophy is to keep things simple. Do you think this is why people like Tartine bread so much? Is it because you have gone back to the basics?

CHAD: We are just obsessively dedicated to sweating the details every day on the quality and freshness of the food we make. That’s the simple thing.

ACQ: You explain in your book about using a natural leavening agent instead of the commercial straight-yeast version. Can you explain what the difference is between the two? Why is one better than the other?

CHAD: There is nothing wrong with using commercial yeast; in fact, it’s quite convenient. But the maximum flavor that can be developed through fermentation using commercial yeast is considerably less than what can be achieved using a natural leaven. So, one is not better than the other. But if you are looking to develop maximum flavor, natural leaven is the way to go. We use a blend of locally milled organic wheat flours. The flours are stone-ground weekly for us. The freshness and type of milling gives us the foundation of flavours that we build on using multiple long fermentation stages.

ACQ: I know you are constantly questioned for using a gas oven rather than a wood fire. Do you think people place more importance on wood fire ovens for baking as opposed to gas?

CHAD: It’s a total misconception. No matter how much I try to clear it up, it will never go away. Working with wood is a great pleasure and I enjoyed it for many years. But unless you are grilling directly over a wood fire with food coming in contact with smoke, you are not infusing the food with the flavor of the fire.

ACQ: What do you want people to get out of the experience of eating Tartine bread?

CHAD: A new flavor. I want our bread to taste distinct from other breads out there so that we are adding to the diversity of our bread culture. And ideally, a singularly delicious experience that creates a lasting memory.

ACQ: Do you think that bread has become too commercial and that the art of baking fresh loaves is somewhat lost?

CHAD: True artisan bread is becoming more varied and available across the country. At the same time, artisan ‘style’ bread is becoming more commercial. In my experience, there are a lot of people making great bread these days at home.

ACQ: What makes the perfect loaf of bread in your eyes?

CHAD: There are a few different perfect loaves for me: some made of wheat, rye, spelt, or kamut (or combinations of these grains). They all have a strong contrast between the crust and crumb. The crumb must be exceptionally flavorful and moist; the character formed through a lengthy fermentation—subtle acid balanced by a sweet lactic nature. The flavour of freshly stone ground flour must be there. This is difficult to describe but it is sublime. I prefer the crust to be burnished with the complex flavours and colours of caramelization, to be firm but with a slight cracking give.

ACQ: Do you have any tips for someone who might be hesitant to make their own bread?

CHAD: It’s much easier than you think. Just start the process and you’ll see.

Yes… I. AM. CANADIAN. BUT that doesn’t mean I will ever get used to our cold and gloomy winters. To get me to go anywhere these days I have to know that wherever I am going, I will eat amazing food. Dramatic? Yes. Snobby? Maybe. But the only reason I would ever trek in the heavy snow is if the end result is extremely pleasing and delicious. Try and get me to go to Ottawa in -30 degree weather!? There better be food prepared by Canadian culinary masters. Lucky for me this was precisely the reason for my endeavor to the nation’s capital, The Canadian Celebrity Chefs Event. Suddenly the country’s winter didn’t seem so terrible and bleak but instead turned into a culinary winter wonderland.

When it comes to Offal cuisine nobody knows it better that Chris Cosentino. We recently got the chance to sit down with him and talk about the progression of this type of cooking and the barriers he has encountered thus far.

Nobody goes for ice cream in the fall right? Wrong.  Humphry Slocombe is San Francisco’s go-to ice cream parlor, regardless of the season.