"Smokin'" June 27, 2005

June 27, 2005

Smokin'

Greetings Friends of the Farm,

 Lately, someone has to awaken at 4 AM, and by the light of a declining moon, walk the path from the Gause farm shack to the smoke houses. On such a peaceful, tranquil passage, one hopes simply, and fervently, not to foul the mood by encountering a poisonous copperhead -- snakes that lose themselves in the dead leaves -- along the way. This is typically Larry's job. Don Lupe is the keeper of the two small fires in the smoke houses during the day, but it's Larry's task late at night and pre-dawn.

  At 4 AM, at the farm in Gause, the night is lit with the stars we old folks remember from our childhoods. There are no competing lights -- no malls, no cities -- nothing to diminish the glorious show. Larry appreciates them, and the almost full moon, which in the last week, has been golden around this hour, but his mind is occupied mostly with the tomatoes.

 I ask him how many pounds of tomatoes will fill the bays of the smoke houses. He ponders this and says it is difficult to say, because the houses are being loaded and unloaded and re-loaded constantly throughout each day. Apparently no one has thought to calculate this number.

 The first day, only one house is partially filled, and by the time enough tomatoes have ripened to fill it, some tomatoes are coming off. To complicate the math, the original smoke house has been deemed best at smoking, and the second one, equal in all respects, seems to do better at finish-drying. So after a few days of absorbing smoke and drying, the tomatoes are transferred to the second house to complete the drying -- freeing up the first one to accept the next batch. Larry thinks it's the geography of the two houses. They are about 20 feet apart, and perhaps location is everything.

 At any rate, it takes a lot of pounds of tomatoes to make a pound of Smoke-dried Tomatoes. About ten to one, we think. And both houses are loaded now, every day.

 The harvest continues daily as the tomatoes ripen constantly. Once harvested, the red fruit is washed and cut in halves and lined up on trays that slide into the tracks in the smoke houses. Post oak wood is chopped small enough to fit into the short clay sewer pipe sitting upright in one end of each smoker. It's a diminutive fire, a cool one, and a box fan situated in the middle of the smoker distributes the resulting smoke through the metal enclosure. The men, and Pamela, are infused with this same smoke as they load and unload. It's in their clothes, bonded to their skin, woven into their hair. They need not eat the tomatoes; they breathe them.

  We remember the first year: 1994. Our tomatoes were staked in the back field of the farm in Austin. 1200 plants, in twelve rows, marching along in hedges from the south end of the field to the north end. A lot of tomatoes for those early years, but we knew even then, that if a Texas farm doesn't have tomatoes, it has nothing. At least in Larry's opinion. He was born to tomatoes. As a kid, he picked green ones in the fields in Gause, 25 cents the bushel. He thinks that was arduous work in the hot sun for so little. I told him that at the same time, in San Antonio, I was baby sitting a neighbor's four little kids, in a hot house, for 25 cents the hour, and if a tomato job had come up, I'd have switched in a minute. He agreed suddenly that picking tomatoes wasn't quite as hard as he'd recalled.

 While he was still young, but big enough to drive a tractor, during the 1950's, his parents were tomato farmers. The second year, they ordered a load of transplants from the Rio Grande Valley, and planted them on forty acres near our current farm. Larry drove the tractor at a steady slow pace; his mama sat behind him on a platform and dropped the transplants into a hole. His daddy walked along, squirted a bit of water at them, and heeled them in. Forty acres. It took a while.

 In this agricultural heyday, Gause had a tomato shed alongside the railroad tracks and there everyone brought their green tomatoes. The sorters tossed back to the farmer the too-littles and the too-bigs, as the resulting perfectly-sized "Homestead" tomatoes were destined to go into narrow, rectangular, white pasteboard boxes, wrapped in cellophane. They'd be gassed to redness later. The farmers took the rejected tomatoes home to the hogs and cattle.

 The Butlers' tomatoes grew well in the sandy soil that second year. Then they fruited, and sadly, they turned out to be Romas. Well, too bad, as the mistake meant no market. So the farmers bought some cows and put them on the forty acres, and the cows ate the Romas. After that, the farmers were "ranchers."

 Now fifty years later, there is demand for Romas, for sauces especially, and of course for Larry's Smoke-dried Tomatoes. When our 1200 tomato plants, bearing round tomatoes for market, began ripening in 1994, we were anticipating a great harvest. But one night, we got a violent rain/wind storm, and those rows of tomatoes, staked every six feet or so, keeled over, the stakes snapping like toothpicks, the hedges toppling like rows of dominoes. The next morning, the sun shone brilliantly and blasted every red tomato with a circular scald mark.

 After a day or so of examining our lives and our desire to farm, Larry came up with the idea of smoke-drying the tomatoes. It's too humid in Central Texas to sun-dry them, so that wasn't an option. He built a little smokehouse in the "woods" on the other side of the Hen House, and made wooden-lath trays. We cut the blisters off the tomatoes, loaded the fruit onto the trays, and slid them into the smoker. A "funnel" of tin extended from the shed, and at the end of that, he built a tiny fire. Five days later, after going out every star-less night to tend the fire, he proclaimed the tomatoes "smoke-dried."

 A lot of folks loved the Smoke-dried Tomatoes (they saved the farm that year). But one year, Larry decided not to do them. It was a mistake and it was pointed out to him, over and over. After that, he grew them and smoked them every year. Last year, Nature decided that there would be none (the flood), but in a turn-around, this year Nature has decreed that it's a "Tomato Year," and equaling the bumper crops of round tomatoes is our good crop of Romas.

 Thank goodness, as Food Network continues to air (nine times so far) the "Food Finds" segment first filmed in 2002. Soon we will be shipping them out all over the USA. A lot of folks' mailboxes will be anointed with the unmistakable aroma of these smokey tomatoes. After they extract the box of tomatoes, they might do well to leave the mailbox door open for a while. Pamela and the men, in tune with that aroma, say a good head-washing every night helps too.

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 For market at the farm, Wednesday and Saturday, 9-2:

 Smoke-dried Tomatoes (in the bag, plain; and in the jar, marinated with olive oil); Roma Tomatoes; Round Tomatoes; Sun Gold Cherry Tomatoes; Butternut Squash (shredded smokes are great with these); Delicata Squash (ditto); Eggplant (yes!); Onions (ditto); Potatoes (ditto); Hen House Eggs (ditto); Long Beans (ditto); Native Greens (ditto); French Sorrel (humm); Arugula (yes); Okra (absolutely!); Figs (why not?); Heirloom Garlic & Elephant Garlic: you know they do! Tomato Tonic and Gause Yaupon Honey....

 Pure Luck Dairy's award-winning Feta and Chevre; Wateroak Farms' Kids' Favorite Ice Cream (in the Chronicle this week!), Yogurt, and Ricotta; Rain Water; Miles of Chocolate; and Fresh Breads from Wild Wood (Wed) and Sweetish Hill (Sat).

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 That's it.

 Carol Ann

Copyright 2005 Carol Ann Sayle