Photo by Marty Bleazard
In season 1 of the cooking and adventure series “From Scratch,” actor and producer David Moscow has met challenges from local chefs and created fish dishes in Finland and Iceland and anchovy pizza in Naples, Italy.
Season 2, which debuts on Oct. 30 on the History Channel, finds Moscow fishing and foraging for ingredients in Utah — including Summit County.
“It is really a Utah-based episode, because it not only takes place in Wanship just outside Park City,” Moscow said. “It also takes place in Escalante Valley and all around Salt Lake City.”
In this episode, Moscow must source fresh trout, acorns, acorn flour, apples, chives, wild hops, wild nettle, fennel, Four Corners potatoes, goats milk and peppers to make trout piscatore, a dish created by Galen Zamarra, executive chef at the Lodge at Blue Sky.
Throughout his adventure in finding Four Corners potatoes, Moscow meets up with two University of Utah professors — Dr. Lisbeth Louderback, assistant professor of anthropology and the Natural History Museum of Utah’s curator of archaeology; Dr. Bruce Pavlik, director of conservation at Red Butte Garden and principal scientist at BMP Ecosciences; and Cynthia Wilson, traditional foods program director at Utah Dine Bikeyah, a nonprofit that strives to preserve the cultural and natural resources of ancestral Native American lands, according to its mission statement.
“The Four Corners potatoes come from the Dine, what the Spanish called the Navajo,” Moscow said. “It’s been known in Arizona and New Mexico, and after a wild cluster was discovered in the Escalante Valley, the professors believe the Dine traveled with these potatoes from the south and into Utah.”
Louderback and Pavlik also believe that these potatoes may be the first domesticated plant in North America.
“They walked the history of the plant back 11,000 years to these grinding stones in Escalante Valley,” he said. “And when I talked with Cynthia, I found that the Dine were reintroducing these potatoes that have been a huge part of their culture so they can grow enough to sell it to restaurants and markets.”
Photo by Marty Bleazard
Learning about the Four Corners potatoes was a “transformational” lesson for Moscow.
“I felt like I was doing something deep and talking about something that was important,” he said with a laugh. “To be able to go beneath the surface and discover a really cool story that is ongoing that is super important is something I live for.”
In addition to learning the history of Four Corners potatoes, Moscow got in touch with his childhood and went trout fishing with Henry Hudson, Blue Sky’s adventure director.
“Most of my mother’s side of the family lived in Salt Lake City, and she used to drop me off at my grandpa’s place in Sandy where I would play with my 20 cousins all summer,” said Moscow, who made his film debut as Tom Hanks’ younger self in the 1988 comedy “Big.” “While my grandpa used to go fly fishing, I never got the chance to. So it was great when Henry took me out fishing in the places my grandpa may have fished. And that was really special for me.”
The fishing segment of the “From Scratch” episode is full of tension, Moscow said.
“One of the things was the ticking clock when I was trying to catch a fish for Chef Galen,” he said. “In this episode Galen says his trout piscatore has three ingredients — trout, trout, trout, and as time went on, it looked more and more like catching a fish was not going to happen.”
On a lighter note, Moscow also meets up with Marvin Birt, who owns Marvin’s Gardens with his brother Nolan.
Marvin’s Gardens is a staple producer at the Park City Farmers Market each summer, and Moscow enjoyed his interactions with Birt while picking apples, berries and peppers.
“Marvin is like 80 years old, and he’s like a character out of a storybook,” he said.
While “From Scratch” does venture off into big agribusinesses like visiting the largest sugar beet factory in Croatia, it also focuses on small family farms, like Marvin’s Gardens, that provide produce for many of the dishes Moscow is tasked with making.
“We always like putting a spotlight on local producers, small farms who are doing a lot of the work by themselves,” he said. “Family farms are shrinking, because it’s more expensive than ever to run a family farm. And we have lost many of them, particularly during COVID. So, I’m here to support them, because they need it.”
Moscow and his crew filmed the Utah episode a year ago over a two-week period.
“It was crazy because I was harvesting in Escalante where it was 100 degrees, but then I got up to Wanship and it was the day after the first frost,” he said with a laugh. “My lips immediately became chapped, and farmers were working to save their produce after the freeze.”
The idea to film in Utah came from a meeting between Moscow and Zamarra at Chef Dance in 2019.
Chef Dance is a food festival that is held during the same time as the Sundance Film Festival.
“We were invited to stay at the Lodge at Blue Sky, and my mind was blown,” Moscow said. “It’s funny, because Galen happened to be a chef at one of my favorite restaurants in New York, Mas Farmhouse, and when I found out he was now at the Lodge, along with things dovetailing with my mother’s family who live in the Salt Lake area, I knew I had to make a show here.”
Credit: Source link
