Grain of Truth by Stephen Yafa

Author:Stephen Yafa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

Super-Tasters

If future generations of Americans embrace whole wheat with anything like genuine enthusiasm, that will most likely come about as a melding of early exposure in and out of school with a broadening retail distribution of tastier, more enticing, and more nutritious versions produced by local artisan bakers.

Suppliers like Finnerty and Tony Van Rees, Finnerty’s partner and Fat Cat’s executive chef, seem primed to play an important role. I met with them at their Fat Cat plant on the same day I visited Del Paso Elementary. By then I’d done a personal sampling of the four items the students rated. They were sweet but not cloying, filled with soft fruit chunks, thicker and less dense than energy bars, with a soft, cake-like texture. I didn’t pick up pronounced flavor differences among them. Above all, they left a fresh taste behind, with no lingering off notes.

“Kids are super-tasters,” Erik told me. “They have way more tongue receptors than we do, which is why we dump hot sauce on eggs and they don’t. So you have to deliver food they want to eat. And hope you get support from their parents at home, otherwise Doritos win and whole grains lose. People may be scared of whole wheat, but then they have a visceral bread moment at an artisan bakery. They taste the crunchy crust and tell you, Wow, this is so amazing—and that filters down to their children.”

“And how do the school districts you sell to make their decisions?”

“It’s a moving target, because Congress is always changing the USDA requirements, and we have to be compliant to compete. But sooner or later it comes down to money. The school district’s goal is to increase average daily participation to get a higher rate of reimbursement from the feds. And there’s now a supper program as well in lower-income areas. So for us to do well, we have to be one of the reasons they get their participation up for every meal.”

Fat Cat, Finnerty continues, buys all of its California whole-wheat flour from Joe Vanderliet’s Certified Foods, about twenty miles away. “It’s mild, it’s mellow, with a good mouthfeel and texture; the kids like it—we tested fifteen or more flours before we made our choice. Most of our products are 60 to 100 percent whole grain.”

Selling to local hotel restaurants, Finnerty and Van Rees started out as wholesale baking partners while still students at UC Santa Barbara. Now in their late thirties, they haven’t entirely abandoned the spirit of those laid-back college days. Finnerty’s vanity license plate reads SCONER, a clever play on stoner that also happens to identify his vocation. Until recently his ride was a bright orange boxy Honda Element that looked more at home on the beach than the boulevard. Trained as a pastry chef, Van Rees after graduation came up with a formula for frozen scones made in the softer European style; working out of Erik’s garage, they launched Fat Cat. Their edge in competing with Pillsbury and other “big boys,” says Van Rees, is that their school cookies and bars don’t taste like cardboard.

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