Like many people I have talked to lately — including a farmer and numerous home cooks — I’m excited about the Charlemont Forum’s next offering, scheduled for this Thursday, Sept. 18, at 7 p.m. at the Federated Church on Route 2 in Charlemont.
The topic is “Fresh and Local,” and the evening will discuss the future of food production, distribution, and consumption here in New England.
To prepare for the evening, I spoke last week with Martin Philip, one of the panelists. Philip is the brand ambassador of King Arthur Baking in Norwich, Vermont.
I began by asking him what the heck “brand ambassador” meant. He told me that he had started at King Arthur in the production team, baking bread; he is passionate about that craft.
In 2020 when things shut down, he completed a transition on to the editorial team and “was doing everything from fielding lots of interviews to writing recipes to creating video content.” The company created his new title to reflect his new roles.
Philip contributed many recipes and techniques to last fall’s “Big Book of Bread,” a comprehensive bible of bread types and techniques. He also wrote the 2017 book “Breaking Bread: A Baker’s Journey Home in 75 Recipes,” which delightfully combines autobiography and recipes.
His life story is fascinating. He was born the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. He fell in love with music and pursued a singing career in New York. When he and his singer wife started having children, he spent several years in finance.
On weekends he honed his skills and enthusiasm as a baker. In 2006 he and his wife decided to take a chance. They moved their family to Vermont, where he was hired as a beginning baker by King Arthur.
He still plays musical instruments, although he doesn’t sing much any longer. As his recipes attest, he is a perfectionist. Once he stopped rehearsing long hours every day, he decided to give up singing.
I asked Philip how the topic of this week’s Forum — the future of accessible, sustainable food in New England — is handled at King Arthur.
“We have been interested in the livelihoods of farmers and also the environmental impact of farmers for a long time,” he said. “That took a foothold when we became a certified benefit company.”
A certified benefit company is tested every couple of years to evaluate its social and environmental performance, he informed me.
“We have this idea that we want to do better … We want to have a successful business, to keep in mind our employees, the community, and the natural environment. We are constantly striving to improve our sustainability effort.”
King Arthur intends that by 2030 all its flours should come from regenerative farms. According to Philip, the company is working on this goal in cooperation with its partner farmers and with the grain laboratory at Washington State University.
Martin Philip will probably talk about some of these efforts at the Forum. He may also read one of the essays he wrote after a project he did in 2018 called “Biscuits for Strangers.”
He adopted an elderly bicycle, loaded up its basket with biscuit ingredients, and returned to his Arkansas roots to ride around, play his banjo, and make biscuits for people he didn’t know.
In the pictures from the project, he looks like a figure from a Great Depression photograph by Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange, or like Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in the film version of “The Grapes of Wrath.”
He didn’t say this, but I suspect he was trying to disarm people by disguising himself as someone from an earlier American era … and wooing them with a food that represented that era.
He started the project, he told me, in an attempt to learn more about where he came from … but also as a conversation starter. He wanted to talk to people with different views and perhaps gain some understanding of the complicated world in which we live.
Philip’s interest in food is central to his life.
“I’m someone that believes that nutritious food is healthy food,” he explained. “I feel like eating healthily in a way that takes good care of farmers might look different day to day at my house.
“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, how do you eat all that bread?’
“First of all, I eat it as part of a pretty balanced diet. It’s all about turning the dials and combining things in terms of beauty, flavor, nutrition, and technique.”
I told him that I agreed and that I thought food was always personal.
“It’s political, too,” he reminded me.
In honor of Martin Philip and “Biscuits for Strangers,” I made his butter biscuits last week. This simple, homey recipe comes from “Breaking Bread” (Harper, 400 pages, $40) and is used with the author’s permission.
I opted for biscuit squares instead of rounds to I wouldn’t have to re-roll the bits of dough that weren’t used the first time around. My biscuits didn’t rise quite so beautifully as they might have (I think I overhandled the dough a tad), but they were delicious, a little crunchy on the outside and pillowy soft on the inside.
Butter Biscuits
Ingredients:
1/2 cup (113 grams or 1 stick) sweet butter
3 cups (355 grams) flour
1 teaspoon (6 grams) salt
1 teaspoon (4 grams) baking powder
1/4 teaspoon (2 grams) baking soda
1 cup plus 1 1/2 teaspoons (240 grams) buttermilk
Instructions:
Position an oven rack in the top third of the oven. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
Lightly grease a 13-by-18-inch baking sheet or line it with parchment. (I used a silicone mat.)
Cut the butter into 1/8-inch slices. Chill until you are ready to use it.
Weigh or measure the dry ingredients, and chill them as well for a few minutes.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.
Add the cold butter, and toss to coat with the dry ingredients. Then press the butter slices with your thumb and forefinger into small flat pieces or “leaves.”
Add the buttermilk all at once, and mix gently until the mixture is just combined. The dough should be firm and barely cohesive (some dry bits are okay).
Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface, and pat it into a 3/4-inch-thick rectangle. The dry bits will incorporate in the following steps.
Fold the dough in thirds as you would a letter and gently roll or pat it into a rectangle. Repeat this fold and roll process once more if the dough isn’t cohesive.
Lightly flour the top of the dough, and cut the dough into circles with a sharp 2-inch biscuit cutter, or square the sides and edges, and cut into 8 to 10 squares using a chef’s knife.
Place the biscuits on the baking sheet. Bake for 16 to 18 minutes, until the biscuits are golden. Makes 8 to 12 biscuits, depending on how you cut them.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.