A clever 19th century novelist once said lettuce is like conversation.

It must be fresh and crisp.

So sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it.

Now, that bitterness is far less pronounced than it was thousands of years ago, when lettuce was basically an edible weed.

The ancient Egyptians worked to make that edible weed into a tasty plant.

They passed their knowledge onto the Greeks, the Greeks passed their knowledge onto the Romans, and lettuce spread around the world.

Now, we have cultivars for so many different tastes and textures.

I'm Charity Nebee.

On this episode of Iowa Ingredient, urban vegetable growers share their love of lettuce, and some tips on growing this leafy green.

Then Chef Dean Luttrell will help us think beyond salad to discover ways to make lettuce the star of the meal.

All that and more coming up next on Iowa Ingredient.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Funding for Iowa Ingredient is provided by the W.T and Edna M. Dahl Trust.

Chef Lisa LaValle of Trellis cafe in the River Center, and Chef Michael Lavalle of the Des Moines Embassy Club.

For more than 100 years the Des Moines Embassy Club has provided a place to dine, celebrate, and do business located in downtown Des Moines and in West Des Moines.

And Friends-- the Iowa PBS Foundation.

[MUSIC PLAYING] I'm going to just put that on the side.

Just add some more cantaloupe-flavored.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Chef Katie, you've done it again.

[LAUGHING] Thank you so much.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Lettuce is 95% water.

That explains why it doesn't freeze, pickle, or dry very well.

But don't let all that water fool you.

Lettuce still carries with it important vitamins and minerals.

Americans eat about 30 pounds of lettuce each every year.

So with so many varieties, lettuce is not giving up its seat at the American dinner table anytime soon.

[MUSIC PLAYING] So the general nature of lettuce is it likes colder weather.

So in Iowa lettuce is ideal in what I call the shoulder season, so spring and fall.

Here, we try to push the limits and grow lettuce from, I would say March through January.

And we have different techniques that we use.

So for example, we have a high tunnel, we have caterpillar tunnels, so we have plastic that we cover and grow in.

In the summer, it's really tricky to grow lettuce because it doesn't like the heat and it'll bolt real quickly, and that means it goes to seed, and then it'll taste really bitter.

I've learned to kind of love the challenge of growing lettuce almost year round in Iowa.

Jenny Quiner and her family run Dogpatch Urban Gardens, a small scale market garden in Des Moines.

This neighborhood that we're located in is known as the Dogpatch, and there's a ton of pride in this neighborhood.

Jenny sells her produce at the DUG FarmStand alongside other locally made and sourced goods.

And instead of a typical CSA, Dogpatch offers customers a salad subscription.

We don't grow a huge diversity of stuff.

Our main crops our salad greens.

And so, what I did is I adapted the model to fit us.

So weakly, and people will get eight ounces of greens and then two side veggies, or salad dressing, or something like that.

So it's all salad oriented, and it fits our customers' wants and desires quite a bit.

[MUSIC PLAYING] That's our signature spring mix.

And so, when we planted it, we pretty much planted it in a way that when you harvest it, it's already mixed together, and it's just one last step.

So we just planted it in a way that makes harvesting and ready to roll.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Head, leaf, and romaine are the most common types of lettuce you'll find.

Most lettuce is used in salads, and it has been served with vinegar and oil dressing since at least the first century.

A head lettuce, we're growing full size, and we're harvesting it one time and it's done.

And then leaf lettuce, we're cutting above the ground surface with the idea that we'll be able to get multiple cuts off of it.

Generally, leaf lettuce is more popular for like salads, and then a lot of times head lettuce are popular for like wraps or on top of sandwiches.

So they're kind of different functions as well.

[MUSIC PLAYING] But essentially what we do is we put our greens in we call the bubbler.

We fill it up, and it's hooked up to a Jacuzzi motor, and we can turn that on and it helps to bubble and spin the greens.

And then we use these industrial salad spinners to get the moisture off, and then we put them on our dry table and our fans to get them moisture off even more.

Because when it comes to shelf life of greens, if they're wet, they won't last.

There's that fine line of, if it gets too dry they'll wilt, but if they're too wet then you don't have the good shelf life.

So they should have a little crisp, and a little bit of water, but not so much.

Filling the bag.

One thing I think is very eye-opening is the amount of food that we can grow on a small amount of land.

So on our main plot, we're at about a fourth of an acre, and last year we grew roughly 7,000 pounds of food.

And it's pretty astonishing how much food you can really make grow on a small amount of land.

And we grow very intensively.

So if we had acres upon acres, we'd have different growth systems, but because we're so small, like if you look at our plots everything's jam-packed, and we're very specific about what we grow and how we grow it.

We're feeding our customers healthy organically grown food, we're building our land through regenerative and sustainable agriculture, and we're making the community stronger.

Those all inspire me and make me feel proud of what we're doing here.

[MUSIC PLAYING] I'm here in the kitchen with Dean Luttrell of the Iowa Culinary Institute at Des Moines Area Community College.

Hi, how are you.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for being here.

And tell me just a little bit about the Culinary Institute.

Well, the Iowa Culinary Institute started in the 70s actually at the Des Moines Area Community College.

We have grown tremendously over the years to the point that we even have a Baking Institute out in Newton which is part of the Iowa Culinary Institute.

Well, and a lot of people get their start in the restaurant business and don't necessarily go to culinary school.

That's part of your story too, right?

Great, that's what happened to me.

It was back in 1986, I walked into a restaurant and I said I wanted to be a cook or a chef or whatever.

And they said, hey, why don't you start washing dishes first?

And then over the years I've just worked my way up and worked my way up and so, at one point I even own my own restaurant.

But now, I love teaching.

Teaching is what I love to do and at the Iowa Culinary Institute.

So you did go to culinary school later on, what changed for you because of culinary school?

I was trained in restaurants, but I didn't really have the culinary background.

I didn't really know why things happened.

I just knew I need to put this ingredient and this ingredient, I could read recipes, but I didn't know why things happened.

So I went late in life, and got a culinary degree and I was a nontraditional, student and when I graduated I went over to France, and then I did a little training over in France at an internship there, and then I came back and then I started teaching.

This is a life skill, I used to teach someone how to cook.

I always kid with the auto guys, I said, I don't have to work on my own car.

I don't have to build my own house, but I do have to feed my family and know how to cook and not live off fast food.

Right, right.

Well, speaking of cooking, why don't we get started?

All right.

[MUSIC PLAYING] All right.

Now, we're going to make a beautiful salad.

Yes.

Tell me about this.

We're going to make a new spin on a classical salad.

We're going to make a Caesar salad, but we're going to use Romaine hearts, but we're going to trick it up a little bit.

It's not going to be your traditional Caesar salad.

I like to use Romaine hearts for my Caesar salad, it's the center of the Romaine lettuce, it is a little crispy, Romaine in general has a little bit of flavor to it, a little bit of bitterness, and I like that flavor of the wet.

And the dark green tells us we're getting some good nutrition-- Right.

Yes, yes.

We're getting it.

Yes, so what do I need to do?

I need to cut this lettuce into bite-size pieces first.

And there's a way that I do that.

I take my knife, and I find the ridge, and I cut all the way through the ridge.

OK?

One there, and one there.

And then I spin it this way, cut through the ridge there, cut through the ridge there.

And then I'm going to do it one more time just in case it didn't go all the way through.

That way, I get nice one-inch cuts when I cut my lettuce.

And when I eat my salad, I don't have big pieces of lettuce.

Yeah, you just totally revolutionized how I'm going to cut Romaine lettuce.

All right, I'm glad.

So then I go here, here, just about an inch down.

Hmm!

[MUSIC PLAYING] But as you see as we cut down, the color starts to change a little bit, doesn't it?

Yeah.

OK. We're just going to do one more.

And we're going to take this lettuce, and we're going to put it in our bowl and we're going to revisit that later.

All right.

Because we have to make the dressing.

So I'm going to have my assistant Amaya take this out of my way, because I don't need that right now.

Thank you, Amaya.

All right.

So next we're going to make the Caesar dressing.

So Caesar dressing doesn't always come in a bottle No, it doesn't.

Yes.

There's several ingredients that we use.

We have garlic and minced up anchovies here.

We have pasteurized egg yolks, because we are not cooking this.

So these yolks have been pasteurized, so the eggs have been brought up to 140 degrees to kill any salmonella or anything like that.

We have lemon juice, we have some Creole type mustard, we have some olive oil, some vegetable oil, and Parmesan cheese.

So the first thing we're going to do, we mixed up our egg yolk.

So we're going to put those in our bowl, and we have our lemon juice.

And we're going to give that a quick whisk.

[MUSIC PLAYING] To make sure it's incorporated, and then we're going to add our mustard.

[MUSIC PLAYING] So give that a quick whisk, anchovy garlic paste.

You think you can help me?

Sure.

All right.

So we're going to take that olive oil, and we are going to slowly drizzle it here.

All right.

If he goes in too fast, our dressing is going to break.

OK, so tell me when?

Go ahead, and I'll just whisk.

Yeah perfect.

[MUSIC PLAYING] All right.

Now, let's slowly do the salad oil.

All right.

For vegetable oil, salad oil, vegetable oil, are same thing.

OK?

Very slow.

Now we're just going to add the Parmesan cheese.

All right.

Look at that.

We got some crinkly-- Beautiful.

Caesar dressing.

So croutons are next.

Yes, we're going to make our-- Where's the bag?

Oh, there's no bag here.

There's no bag here.

Actually, I made this salato bread.

So you have to make your own bread.

You have to make your own bread, but I guess, if you want to cheat a little bit you can, but wait, we don't do that.

So I have salato bread, I have a mixture of butter and olive oil, and I have some Herbes de Provence.

Nice.

And then we're going to-- I see some rosemary and-- Thyme, yeah.

All that-- Lovely.

Good stuff and we're going to put this in here.

All right.

Just melt it.

Yeah.

I'm just going to melt that around.

This is such a super simple crouton recipe.

[MUSIC PLAYING] So I'll put the Herbes de Provence in there.

[MUSIC PLAYING] All right.

So we got all that mixed in there, and now, we're just going to throw in our bread.

And it doesn't matter these little ones, because on my show you what we're about to do after we put this in here.

And these little ones we can keep those.

OK. OK. Let me do a little toast here.

All right.

So we got all of that mixed together.

Now, we're going to put this on our sheet tray, mix that around, so then we're going to put this in the oven, and crisp them up a little bit for about 10 minutes at 350 degrees.

Perfect.

[MUSIC PLAYING] All right.

While the croutons are baking, we're going to make something else.

It's not enough that you've made your own dressing and your own croutons, you're going to make the dishes too.

Right, yeah.

That's right.

We're going to make the dishes.

We're going to make a Parmesan cheese tuile, or cheese crisp, and we're going to form it into a bowl.

So it we'll actually be-- This is such a good idea.

This will actually be the receptacle for ourselves.

So it's much like, if you've ever had a taco salad, why can't you have Caesar salad?

With an edible bowl.

Love it.

So what we have here is a freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

You have to use first grated cheese.

You cannot use pre-grated cheese in bag, because there's other stuff in there that keeps it from sticking.

OK. And you want this to stick.

And then I've just used some fresh cracked pepper.

And I'll just season this cheese with fresh cracked pepper, and what will be nice is once we cook this bowl, you will be able to see the pepper flakes.

Nice.

In the Parmesan cheese.

So we got that all mixed together.

All righty.

And then we got a hot pan over here, and it's important that we use a non-stick pan for this.

And we're going to just start putting the cheese in the pan.

I usually like to start around the outside.

I make sure that all the gaps are filled, because if I'm pulling this out, and using it as a bowl, and there's a big gap in there-- And the dressing I'll just disappear.

Well, it won't connect and so it'll be two halves or whatever.

It has to-- the cheese has to connect with the other cheese.

It's much like a spiderweb, I guess if you think of it that way.

[MUSIC PLAYING] So I've seen how it's starting to brown up there.

Hmm!

And what I want to do, I want this actually to be the inside.

So when I flip this out, I'm going to flip it over onto this bowl over here.

So the nice brown part-- crispy part is on the outside.

Nice.

[COOKING OIL SIZZLING] [MUSIC PLAYING] OK.

I need to get this out of the pan.

It looks like it's done.

So here, see how that's one sheet now.

Yeah.

OK.

I'm going to take this over to this bowl, and I'm going to just do that.

Awesome.

And that is going to be our bowl for our Caesar salad, and so we need to let that cool.

OK. OK, and while that's cooling, we can work on our croutons.

[MUSIC PLAYING] The croutons are out of the oven, but you are not done.

No, no.

I'm not done.

What I'm going to do is I take those croutons and put them in a food processor, and puree them, and then I mix them in with-- To make them last.

OK. Well, let's put this salad together.

All right.

Let's do this.

So we take that, we take our cheese bowl-- Wonderful.

Look at that.

Look that turned out good.

Yes.

All right.

We take a little bit of dressing-- OK. And I'm going to toss that together.

My croutons.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Then I'm going to add some tomatoes on top.

And we have Parmesan cheese here, but there's also Parmesan cheese in the dressing, so-- We're double-cheesed.

Double-cheese, that's right.

And then I'm going to take some-- fresh herbs, I like this radish on this one.

Just to-- That looks like radish sprouts.

Radish sprouts, yeah.

That is a gorgeous salad, and I have some forks here.

So let's give that a try.

All right.

Let me get rid of this.

It's so beautiful.

All right.

I'm going to break up a little bit of the bowl too, because I want to have that with my bites.

All right.

Get that extra cheesiness.

You betcha.

Hmm, I think I can get a bite.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hmm!

Oh, my goodness.

The cheesy bowl really sets it off, but there is crunch in every bite and it's so tangy, that was delicious.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING] All right.

Now we've got another salad using even more kinds of lettuce.

Yes, we're using three kinds of lettuce here.

We have a butter head lettuce, and this is going to be a little milder type lettuce flavor, we have a Romaine, and then we have our traditional iceberg lettuce.

We're going to do an Asian-style salad, and these are all mild lettuces again.

So we're going to spice it up a little bit with our sauce.

First thing we're going to do, is we're going to cut up some of these lettuce.

[MUSIC PLAYING] I'm going to turn it this way, I'm going to cut it again this way.

So all the lettuce is uniform.

And then I will take my Romaine, OK, and this butter head.

So what I do here, is I kind of do fold like that-- Hmm.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Quick turn, and then I'm going to start again.

OK. And I'm going to mix this all together in the salad.

I want you to work on the dressing.

In our bowl, Korean chili flakes, we have water, OK, we have fish sauce, sesame oil.

little sugar, garlic.

That's it.

Nice.

We're going to mix this together.

All right.

I'm going to take this here, pour a little bit in there.

Coat it with that red and that green together.

OK. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm going to take a little bit of these onions, and we're going mix all them there.

We kind of have a little more color in the salad, right?

Hmm.

I'm going to take out a little of these noodles.

And I'm just going to sprinkle them on that.

Wonderful.

Let's give that a try.

All right.

I can't wait.

Yeah, I'm excited.

It's going to blow my head off with spice.

Now-- Well, let's hope not.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Just the right amount of spice.

That is a little bit of a kick, and totally delicious.

OK. Dean, thank you so much.

Thank you.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Despite the popularity of farmers markets, CSAs, and farm to table businesses, getting access to local foods can still be a challenge for some consumers.

Growing vegetables and making that a sustainable business model might be equally challenging for individual farmers.

So that's where something like a food hub comes into play-- a central location for farmers to aggregate, store, market, and distribute their vegetables directly to people who want locally grown foods.

The idea of a food hub is not a new thing.

Iowa has several, including North Iowa Fresh.

In North Iowa there's just not very many CSAs, and I think people were really looking for a way to get products from the farms.

So North Iowa Fresh is a group of producers that work together to aggregate their products so that they can sell it to individuals through our Bounty Box Program, and then have it delivered to sites across North Iowa.

So we serve about seven different communities across North Iowa.

We delivered to Mason City, Clear Lake, Garner, Fall City, Belmont, Clarion and Sheffield.

These ones are really nice.

Yeah.

It's really nice for farmers to be able to really grow the crops if they're good at growing, and that they like to grow.

Chard is so amazing.

It's so, so tough.

It handles all this heat, and it stays so beautiful.

And not have to grow the whole suite of everything that might go into a CSA during a year.

So for us to work together, each farm brings in the items that they're good at growing, that their soils are well suited for, and they can really get the best from each farm into an aggregated box.

So I think usually then we pass it down the line, right?

Is that how you do here?

Yeah.

My ground is suited for the root crops.

And I don't have to be raising multitudes of different.

I love it that I can be the carrot supplier, and the cabbage supplier, parsnip, and potatoes, onions, that kind of thing.

We all work in our own farms with our own systems and never try to figure out how to do it together.

Oh, sorry.

All right.

So note how it crushed.

I never loose track of how many producers.

I think we have about 8 to 10-fold producers.

Oh!

The large.

You probably have a bag of each.

They're involved in the annual planning and production commitment.

So it's been fun to see that expand and try to grow a platform that is providing more products for the full plate, bit by bit.

But you know-- So there's a couple of really great things about working together, with helping the producers sell more and get more products to the customers that, like to people who are looking to find local food.

We have yellow beans currently, green beans are about two weeks out as well.

And then-- I think giving an option for people that can't make it the Farmers Market.

I can see on this stuff here I finally got on the website Good.

and made my own order.

Good.

So having another option for producers to get their products to the customer I think is really rewarding.

I think we have just enough right, Ron?

Well, I actually think that's true.

OK. Kind of been a really great fit for everyone, I think.

[MUSIC PLAYING] That's it for this week's show.

I'm Charity Nebee.

Thank you for spending some time with us as we explore Iowa's culture through food.

See you next time for another episode of Iowa Ingredient.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Keep in mind that circumstances are always changing.

So please take a moment to check ahead if you're planning to visit a restaurant, farm, or event featured on the show.

[Captioning provided by:] [Karasch] [800-621-5689 www.karasch.com] Funding for Iowa Ingredient is provided by the W.T and Edna M. Dahl Trust.

Chef Lisa LaValle of Trellis cafe in the River Center, and Chef Michael Lavalle of the Des Moines Embassy Club.

For more than 100 years the Des Moines Embassy Club has provided a place to dine, celebrate, and do business located in downtown Des Moines, and in West Des Moines.

And Friends-- the Iowa PBS Foundation.

Generations of family and friends who feel passionate about the programs they watch on Iowa PBS.