Boon Box Zine 1 - 2023/2024

Boon Box

Zine 1 2023-2024

The Boonville Barn Team hello@boonvillebarn.com Follow us: @boonvillebarn Learn more: www.boonvillebarn.com

Welcome to the Boon Box Welcome to the Boon Box from the Boonville Barn Collective. We’re a small farm located in the heart of the Anderson Valley of California, about 100 miles north of San Francisco. We mainly grow chiles, beans, strawberries, and olives.

You may be someone who just found out about our farm from some great piece of press we were in. Or you could be a die hard fan of our farm-to-jar chiles! You might be one of our first friends in Graduate School or you might even be related to us. You might have previously lived here in Anderson Valley or currently live here now or are even fellow volunteers of the Anderson Valley Volunteer Fire Dept. Or you might be dear family friends we’ve known our entire lives.

You may be amazing at creating community around volleyball in Fort Collins, or have traveled from Atlanta for a farm tour and dinner at the hotel. You may be someone we’ve shared many meals with or a plethora of grocery store cake with. Or you might be someone we’ve corresponded with via email many times. This could be the 2nd or 3rd time you’ve signed up for the Boon Box or you just received this as a gift and have never heard of our farm before.

Regardless, we’re so glad you are here!

Krissy, Nacho, Alejandro, and Gideon

What you have in front of you is Box 1 of 3 of our Boon Box Subscription. The following boxes will arrive at your door in March and July. Each box is filled with chile powders, chile flakes, and other goods made with the chiles that we grow on our farm in Boonville.

We also provide recipes for how to use the chiles, stories of the growing season, and other such info about our farm. There’s a few items you will receive that are exclusive to the Boon Box and or first access!! If you need more inspiration on how to use our chiles, head to our website (boonvillebarn.com) and check out the recipe section. There’s a bunch more recipes on there than we can include in the box!

If you absolutely love something - tell us! If you really dislike something or don’t understand how to use it - let us know! We hope that the Boon Box becomes a way for you to give us feedback on what we’re producing. Also! We will send you an email about a week before the next 2 boxes ship to make sure you will be home and that your address is still correct. We’re happy to hold onto the box if you are away and ship it when you get home. If you received this as a gift, we’d love it if you could shoot us an email at hello@boonvillebarn.com so that we have your email to notify you about shipping!

For those of joining us again, you may have noticed that you’re reading this on a computer, and not printed out in the box. It turns out that Krissy and I never got good at planning the content for these ahead, and I could never figure out how to print these correctly via Staples or the local shop in Fort Bragg. Which meant I was often running last minute over the hill or to the coast to get this printed, picked up, and looking somewhat good in time. We’re hoping that by switching to a digital format we can have a bit more fun, not stress as much, and include more pictures of our dog. Let us know what you think!

Thanks for joining us on this adventure, Krissy & Gideon & Nacho & Alejandro The Boonville Barn Team hello@boonvillebarn.com Follow us: @boonvillebarn Learn more: www.boonvillebarn.com As a note - This edition was written by both Krissy AND Gideon. So, ‘I’ statements are sure to be confusing, but hey, two is better than one!

What’s Inside Box 1

Classic

Smoky

Piment d’Ville

Piment d’Ville

Spicy Piment d’Ville

Strawberry &

Boonville Boil

Chile Preserve

Spice Blend

Boonville Barn Collective

Boonville Barn Collective is our woman-owned farm that’s been producing unique chile powders since 2012 in the resource-rich Anderson Valley in Northern California, including our signature Piment d’Ville. This whole thing started when Krissy was a sous chef at The Boonville Hotel and used Piment d’Espelette on everything in the kitchen. It was expensive to import from France and in order to use more of it, growing it here in Boonville seemed like an accessible approach. Between acquiring pepper seeds, having land available to grow on, and an incredibly willing foreman interested in a challenge, we started growing what we call Piment d’Ville, our California version of Piment d’Espelette.

We’re located in the Anderson Valley of Northern California, the perfect place to grow our signature Piment d’Ville chile. The Valley is a 30 mile stretch of rolling hills, productive vineyards, and giant redwoods that lead to the Mendocino coast. Known for hot summer days and cool foggy nights, the climate here is similar to that of the Basque region of France, where Piment d'Espelette is produced, and we think, why our chiles to thrive. Our farm has become the most significant source for this peppery, sweet, mildly spicy chile powder outside of Europe.

We’re one of the few farms in California that produces dried chiles at scale. And by scale, we’re talking about 4 acres of chiles which are all harvested by hand and dried to create chile powders, flakes or whole dried chiles. The supply chain we built is short, free of import tariffs, and is direct from our farm. The entire production process takes place on site: from saving seeds, to planting starts, to harvesting chiles, to drying them, to packing the chiles up, to planning what happens next year. Each order is packed and shipped by our team from our farm office. We take pride in having our hands in the whole process. Aside from chiles, we also grow 3 acres of dry beans, have a patch of strawberries, and also have 500 olive trees that we harvest for olive oil.

In addition to the two of us, we have two full-time employees: our foreman, Nacho, and his right hand, Alejandro. During the bulk of the year, it is really just the 4 of us, but when planting season and harvest/processing season ramps up, we rely on an incredible group of people that live here in Anderson Valley. This includes Nacho’s wife and daughter along with close friends, folks who work in the sprawling vineyards all across the valley, and an assortment of other family members. It’s an incredible team that we are so lucky to have built. Without them, we’d be nothing.

Part of our 2023 harvest crew

Piment d’Ville Piment d’Ville chiles are named for the town of Boonville where we grow our Espelette chiles. Similar to champagne, if Espelette chiles are grown and turned into chile powder outside of France, they cannot be called Piment d’Espelette.

Thus, Piment d’Ville was created.

The three jars of Piment d’Ville in your box are all from the 2023 harvest. The Spicy Piment d’Ville was harvested at the end of September and ground on October 5. The Classic Piment d’Ville was harvested in the first days of October and ground on October 10. The Smoky Piment d’Ville was harvested in early November and was ground on November 24. It truly doesn’t get fresher than this.

Pop open the jars and inhale the aroma of these chile powders. It is a smell I will never tire of.

Use Piment d’Ville everywhere and in everything. It’s a flavor builder. If you add salt to a dish, add Piment d’Ville to it. The general guidelines for when to choose between the 3 varieties is as follows: if you would generally use black pepper or a generic red chile powder, use the Classic. If you want more heat, use Spicy.

If you would reach for smoked paprika, use Smoky instead.

What’s the difference between each jar of Piment d’Ville?

Instead of taking the stickers off of each jar, simply twist the jar open and rip the sticker seal in half. This way you’ll remember how to tell the difference!

Spicy PDV

Classic PDV

Smoky PDV

This chile powder is

This is the chile

The end of season (late

made from the first

powder we’ve been

October/early

harvest of espelette

making the longest. It’s

November) chiles are

chiles. One block of the

our CA grown version

turned into Smoky

farm has fairly poor

of Piment d’Espelette.

Piment. We process

soil and we grow these

The majority of the

them the same as the

chiles there and stress

chiles we harvest in

chiles for Classic

them during the

October are destined

Piment, but add

growing season. This

for Classic Piment. It is

mesquite charcoal to

helps the chiles

rich in flavor and super

the dehydrator when

develop higher heat

tomato-y. It is a little

they are drying. This

levels. We also leave

sweet, a little spicy,

imbues the chiles with

more of the seeds and

and basically the best

a perfectly balanced

veins of the chile in the

flavor builder you can

sweet and smoky

pod when we dry

use on your food. We

flavor.

them, leaving behind a

remove more seeds

chile powder with a

and chile veins for

sharper, stronger heat.

Classic Piment.

How To Use Piment d’Ville The first place to find recipes for using any of our chiles is our website. ●

In Piment d’Ville Chile Cream which can been spooned over roasted potatoes, on a roasted chicken or grilled steak, over pasta, or anything else that you want to be creamy and delicious

●

Rubbed all over a chicken before roasting it along with a few chunks of butter and saltroast at 375 and baste every 15 minutes

●

Add to onions when you sautée them

●

In this Pimenty Party Mix

●

Sprinkled on your morning eggs or avocado toast

●

In this Spiced Holiday Gingerbread Loaf (award winning at the county fair!)

●

On a big bowl of popcorn with salt and a bit of grated pecorino or parmesan

●

As a garnish on a bowl of soup

●

On sheet pan roasted vegetables with a little garlic powder, salt, and oregano

Boonville Boil Blend

I am admittedly not a spice blend person. Many of the blends in our kitchen generally languish in our spice drawer only to be used a handful of times. Maybe it’s my want to be in control of everything (especially in the kitchen) or my vested interest and love of the chiles we grow, but there’s only a few spice blends out there that I get really excited about. That being said, there are many people that love cooking with spice blends and that’s totally fine!

We wanted to make something that would not only work for people who regularly reach for blends in the kitchen, but also people like me that just don’t know how to use them. We reached out to the master spice blenders at Curio Spice Co. in Cambridge, MA to help make this possible.

We work closely with Curio Spice Co throughout the year, growing a mix of chiles specifically for them and getting to share the extra harvests of these special chiles with folks like you. They have an extreme focus on sourcing, working hard to find farms that are growing a variety of spices domestically while also searching worldwide to connect with farmers growing incredible spices elsewhere. Sam Olivari, Curio’s Production Manager, is the blender behind Boonville Boil. Sam spent 2 decades working in restaurants across New England. After starting a family, he realized working nights and weekends wasn’t a great option but didn’t want to lose his connection to food. He’s been bringing his culinary knowledge to the spice blending world at Curio for the past few years. Sam and I found 20 minutes to talk more about the Boonville Boil at the end of November.

Spice blends are made using 2 different approaches at Curio. Owner Claire Cheney blends spices from a perfuming perspective, layering flavors and aromas to create incredibly unique blends. Sam builds spice blends using culinary building blocks from different cultural cuisines and flavor profiles. Then he deviates from the basics, adding interesting and unexpected ingredients. Tasting blends as he makes them is challenging. Sam remarked, “It's not necessarily the end result to eat it as is. We make the blend. We like it. But is it going to cook right? It might not taste perfect to eat as a spice blend, but when you cook it, the flavor levels at a different place.” And there’s even more to it than just flavor.

Curio Spice Owner, Claire Cheney

Finding balance with really potent spices is tricky and finding the right texture/grind size for each spice takes time.

If the grind isn’t right, some ingredients will float to the top while others will sink to the bottom, resulting in something that won’t taste right when it is used. Who knew!

Okay! So Boonville Boil! The impetus for this blend was having some extra stock of Smoky Piment d’Ville and wanting to make something delicious with it. Sam started the blending process by tasting a bit of Smoky Piment and then figuring out what the best background flavors will be. He wanted it to be mostly chile, be a blend, and have supporting notes. “Then I kinda just ate a bunch of it,” Sam said.

Sam was inspired by southern flavors, like low country boils and shrimp boils. He added lemon, bay leaf, and then CA grown dill pollen to add a fun pickley aroma. We tasted it and decided there should be a bit more of a punchy finish, so Sam added a hint of our Comapeño chile powder. And we think it is pretty perfect.

There were two things that guided us in making our first spice blend. First, we didn’t want any salt added to the blend. I get confused by spice blends that have salt because I like salting my food separately and finding the balance of spices to salt isn’t always so easy! Second, we wanted the Gideon at our annual crawfish boil when we lived in Boston. Espelette chiles on the plant.

blend to be coarse so it didn’t just look like a big jar of Piment d’Ville. You can see the other spices in Boonville Boil the moment you open the jar.

As someone who is not a spice blend person, I used up a big jar of Boonville Boil VERY FAST. So far, I think the flavor of the blend really shines with seafood, but don’t let that limit the way you think of this herby chile blend. I’ve enjoyed it on roasted vegetables, chicken thighs, in soup, and am excited to find more ways to use it. Think of Boonville Boil as a much more delicious Old Bay. There is no salt added to the blend, allowing for you to add salt as you want it and be able to add more spice without oversalting. We can’t wait to see what you think of it!

How to Use Boonville Boil We’ve been trying this new blend out in so many different dishes. Here’s a few ideas to get you started. Shoot us a message with the different things you cook with our new blend and we will share them in the next box!

Perfect Shrimp

Roasted Vegetables

Smoky Trout Chowder

One thing I am quite proud

I have recently embraced

I am a huge fan of Julia

of is how perfectly I can

store bought gnocchi. It is

Turshen’s cookbook Simply

cook shrimp. Peel some

our go-to when we really

Julia. It really hits the spot

shrimp, leaving just the tail

want to make whatever is

with simple recipes that are

on. Toss with plenty of

left in our fridge more

budget friendly, don’t have

Boonville Boil and olive oil.

interesting. Here I tossed

too many hard to find

Get a pan hot over medium

sliced delicata squash and

ingredients, and work great

high heat. Add all your

cauliflower with Boonville

with our chiles. I followed

shrimp to the pan, making

Boil and oil and roasted it

her Smoked Trout chowder

sure not to crowd them.

in the oven. I cooked some

recipe (onion, celery,

Let cook for about 2

bacon, then pan seared the

potatoes, clam juice, water,

minutes, until you can see

gnocchi in the same pan.

half and half, and smoked

the opaque cooked color of

When the veg was ready, I

trout) and used Boonville

the shrimp start to curl up

mixed it all together and

Boil instead of Old Bay. SO

the sides. Quickly flip every

topped it with ricotta

GOOD! She also has a recipe

shrimp. By the time you get

cheese.

for Mustard Cracker Fish I

to the last one, the first

haven’t made in awhile that

ones you flipped will be

would be great too with

done. Eat with polenta or

Boonville Boil.

grits and greens!

Cruz in the kitchen at the Apple Farm

Strawberry & Chile Jam- take 2!

Born out of a massive Piment d’Ville harvest in 2019, and followed by, well, 2020, the Strawberry and Chile Jam/Preserve was born out of a way of trying to find a home for our Piment d’Ville that was accessible to folks in a way that wasn’t just straight chile powder.

We found an awesome partner in Merrilee of Preserve Farm Kitchen, down the road in Sonoma.

She welcomed us in to her facility and worked with us not just on the Strawberry Jam, but also our dark horse Tomato and Chile Preserve. Unfortunately for us she retired at the end of 2022 and we were left searching for a smallish sized co-packer to help us make these products. It has been a challenge. We were not able to bring back the

Tomato Preserve in 2023, and it’s been a challenge to find someone who has both the capacity and attention to work with a smaller company. As I write this I’m keeping an eye on my inbox as I think we’ve got the start of a partnership with a co-packer who can help us bring back the Chile Marmalade, the Tomato Preserve and, spoiler alert, we’re working on a Piment d’Ville Mustard as well!

So while I was calling…6 different potential co-packers over the course of the year, we were also chatting with the amazing folks down the road at The Apple Farm. Started in 1994 by Sally Schmitt, the farm is home to 3 generations, growing biodynamic tree fruit, hosting weddings on their beautiful property, and a kitchen where Cruz makes beautiful French style preserves. For the past several years we’ve

sent a large portion of the fresh strawberries we grow down to Cruz to be cut by hand and cooked down in small batches in traditional French confiture pans to make strawberry jam.

After banging out the logistics, it was easy for Cruz to add PdV into their strawberry preserve, and allow us to continue to offer a delicious product.

This years’ Strawberry Preserve (and we hope for many years to come) is made with just 4 ingredients - Strawberries, sugar, lemon juice and Piment d’ville. Enjoy!

How To Enjoy Strawberry & Chile Preserve The great thing about this preserve is that while you can taste the Piment d’Ville distinctly, it isn’t overwhelmingly spicy. It’s pretty all purpose as any strawberry preserve. ●

On a piece of buttered toast

●

In a bowl of yogurt and granola

●

Put the jar on a cheese & charcuterie board and eat it with hard or soft cheeses

●

In a peanut butter and jelly sandwich

●

Spooned into a vanilla layer cake

●

On a buttered biscuit

●

In the middle of a thumbprint cookie

●

Blended into a strawberry milkshake

We’ll let you take it from here.

Looking Back on 2023 A roller coaster? A learning experience. Chaos. I feel like one of the things we do as a business is not necessarily shy away from the hard aspects of running a small business, let alone a farm. It's not to garner pity, nor guilt people into buying our products (we want folks to use what we spend months growing, not have it sit on a shelf), but it’s about sharing the realities of what it takes to bring food to your table. Both of our backgrounds lend themselves to wanting to share this honesty, and I think our goal is to share it in an entertaining/engaging way.

As a complete aside, one of dear friends and mentors recently closed her whole animal butcher shop and has been wrestling with how to share her experience without sounding…preachy/guilting people into feeling bad about themselves, especially around meat consumption. Aside from our complete love of Heather if this sounds up your alley, we recommend subscribing to her newsletter. Anyway - on to our year!

Hearing Nacho say ‘this is my worst nightmare’ is not something I need to ever hear again.

One fateful June evening as I took the dog out to do his business I looked across the valley and saw this strange flashing red light in the back corner of our farm. Suspiciously near where our sump pump collects our leaking ponds water and pushes it back up into the pond.

But. We got to the finish line! We expanded our bean production from ¼ acre to 3.5 acres. With the arrival of our Turkish bean thresher (hooray small farm tech!) we were excited to retire our bicycle powered bean thresher and turn weeks of work into hours.

And aside from the damn dust mites, we would’ve had a fantastic crop of beans.

We settled for a ‘good’ crop of beans, getting what we could to the finish line and upgrading our processes along the way. The bean thresher was clutch. We upgraded the bean packaging so we’re Gideon was so pleased when the thresher arrived

Looking Back Continued…

The next morning we learned that the pump had failed, and our rainfed irrigation pond was currently leaking out to the Pacific Ocean. In the coming weeks we would be calling water delivery companies, considering buying a water truck, wondering if we needed new jobs, and waiting to have our pump replaced. We lost 60-80% of our water for the year in about 3 days. It sucked. It was also about 4

not spending hours stamping bags. And we learned how to better control for mites next year.

As we write this we are almost done. The greenhouse is almost empty - with all the chiles harvested and processed. Our olives went to the mill on November 27th, and we’re in our last push of Q4.

We continue to face challenges. It’s simply been too wet to get our pond lined (the only solution to a leaky pond) which has meant that we’re looking at a less than ideal 2024. The rains will hopefully

days before I was leaving town..

again fill our pond for next year, but will

We were also in the middle of battling

pump on August 15th to ensure it dries

mites that had taken over our strawberries and bean crop and weird summer weather that just wouldn’t warm up.

need to turn off the replaced circulation enough to shape and line. This will leave us in a… key period without reliable irrigation water.

I was listening to one of the local vineyard owners being interviewed on our radio station at one point this summer and they described farming as basically constant crisis management. And in a season filled with challenges I definitely felt that.

But while on one hand this is incredibly stressful, it’s also an important reminder that we’re not in it alone. Either as an individual here on the farm, or as a single farm in the valley. I’m lucky to work with an amazing group of people. Not just Krissy, Nacho, and Alejandro, but everyone who comes and helps harvest and process.

My goodness, the olive harvest would be mind numbingly boring and take FOREVER if we didn’t have a whole slew of people that come help. I didn’t even bother counting this year. Whether it’s Nacho’s wife telling me she’ll help watch our baby, if we decide to have one, and she’ll make sure they learn Spanish or every chef, neighbor, friend, customer who drops a note, likes us on Instagram, or lends support in any of the myriad of ways needed to help us succeed, I’m grateful to those who help us in this small farming endeavor.

Now, if anyone has any suggestions to help Krissy manage some of that stress, let me know, but we’re plotting a vacation for February, and planning for next year, with some of the challenges already known. How lucky is that?

Nacho took this photo and won 2nd place for it at the County Fair!

We hope you have a lovely winter!

Here’s a snap of our dog Reuben on the farm last February when we actually got snow on the valley floor. Have fun cooking with everything in the box from now until early March when the next Boon box is shipped!