PITTS (Georgia), Dec 18 — There may be more improbable culinary trails than the one that leads from a red clay road here in the country’s most prolific peanut-growing state to Beyoncé’s plate at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. But as zero-to-hero food tales go, this is a good one.
The star of the story is cold-pressed green peanut oil, which some of the best cooks in the South have come to think of as their local answer to extra-virgin olive oil.
Buttery, slightly vegetal and hard to find, Southern green peanut oil is a new entry into the growing regional oil game. This is not the peanut oil that slicks countless woks and fills Chick-fil-A fryers, though it is made from the same runner peanuts. (They are the smaller and more uniform cousin of the Virginia peanuts you may find at a baseball game, and different in oil content from the Spanish peanuts in a PayDay candy bar.)
The nuts are pressed at low temperatures in a machine smaller than a golf bag in the back of a building that isn’t much more than a shack, on Clay Oliver’s farm. He lives about 150 miles south of Atlanta, and makes some 400 gallons a year. Chefs turn poetic when they describe it.
“The first time I tasted it, it was as if I was standing in a field pulling the peanuts out of the ground and eating them,” said Sean Brock, the Southern chef whose restaurants in Charleston, South Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, are considered among the nation’s best. “This tastes alive. This tastes vibrant. It tastes like fresh dirt. It’s that moment the plant comes up from the earth and the oxygen hits it for the first time.”
He and other fans say that the oil may be the most exciting new culinary concept to come from the South’s peanut culture since George Washington Carver’s agricultural research a century ago.
Most peanut oil is processed with heat and chemicals to create a cooking medium that is relatively inexpensive, doesn’t taste like much and can stand up to long bouts of high heat. There are some boutique cold-pressed roasted peanut oils, but they have a more distinct peanutty flavor.
Few have tried making cooking oil from fresh green peanuts, which, when first pulled from the ground, can be as perishable as tomatoes. Oliver, 40, pressed his first batch in 2012, and now he has a tiny culinary hit on his hands. He is already so wary of competitors that he won’t let his process be photographed.
The idea came to him out of desperation. His father died in 2008, when the Great Recession hit the hardest. Oliver and his brother, Clint, were left to figure out how to cover the cost of running their century-old family farm.
“I read ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’” Oliver said. “I was like, ‘This is coming true here.’”
He started looking for new ways to make money. One idea was producing biofuel. Another was making cold-pressed canola oil.
An extension agent showed him a jar of peanut oil someone was using for tractor fuel, and the two ideas came together: What if he cold-pressed the nuts and seeds that grew around him? He bought a heavy tabletop press but was such a novice that he had to call the manufacturer to figure out how to turn it on.
He pressed sunflower seeds, then pecans. It was nothing but kitchen-table trial and error. At first, he wasted more oil than he poured into the Mason jars that his wife, Valerie, was labeling by hand.
Then came the big break. Someone from the nonprofit organisation Georgia Organics recognised that the oil might fit the growing interest in both Southern food and handmade farm products. He suggested that Oliver visit chef Steven Satterfield, whose Atlanta restaurant, Miller Union, is a regular on the short list of best Southern restaurants.
Satterfield, who considers himself a student of the goober, was about to go to Charleston to shoot an episode of “The Mind of a Chef,” the PBS show that starred Brock in its second season. Satterfield threw some of the oil into his bag. On the show, Satterfield and Brock went crazy over it.
It was Satterfield who gave what Oliver had simply been calling peanut oil a more marketable name: green peanut oil.
“It has this great green-bean kind of greenness to it,” Satterfield said of the taste.
Soon, Oliver was printing labels and selling his oil at farmers markets in Atlanta and through a website, oliverfarm.com. He could barely keep up. He won accolades from two stalwarts of Southern kitchen culture, the magazines Southern Living and Garden & Gun. Then came a 2016 Good Food Award, bestowed by a group from the San Francisco Bay Area that drills deeply into the flavor and environmental practises behind small-batch foods like chocolate, coffee, cheese and jam.
“He nailed it in his category,” said Sarah Weiner, the director of the awards.
The largest peanut growers in the South (the ones whose crop ends up inside M&Ms and jars of peanut butter) think green peanut oil is good idea, albeit a niche product.
“Those boys are not going to make a dent in 25 tons of green peanuts, but they’re headed down the right road,” said Dan King of Tri-County Ag, a farming operation in Ashburn, Georgia.
Chefs, meanwhile, love the oil. Hugh Acheson uses it to enliven kampachi crudo at Empire State South in Atlanta. Satterfield uses it like the best extra-virgin olive oil, dressing a salad of field peas and boiled peanuts and enhancing roasted squash, which he tops with a Southern version of the Egyptian seed-and-oil condiment called dukkah.
The oil is also a supporting character in a coming book about peanuts that he wrote as part of the Savour the South series from the UNC Press.
“Peanuts are pretty fascinating when you think about them,” he said.
Brock uses green peanut oil liberally at his new, 18-seat revamp of McCrady’s in Charleston. One dish from the restaurant ended up as part of a US$225 (RM1,007) dinner he helped prepare last month as a guest chef at Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant in the Hotel Bel-Air.
Brock mixed the earthy juice of green peanuts with green peanut oil, then spooned it onto a plate with puréed lovage. The effect was a little like celery and peanut butter. Then he slid a piece of poached cobia and some sliced matsutake mushrooms onto the plate, garnishing it all with chopped green peanuts seasoned with green peanut oil and homemade koji black vinegar.
The dish moved Beyoncé to summon him from the kitchen, he said. She’s from the South, so they hung out and talked Southern food. He forgot to mention the green peanut oil. He wishes he had.
“I was so nervous,” he said, “I blacked out.”
Roasted Delicata Squash with Peanut, Sesame and Squash Seed Dukkah
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Total time: 1 hour
2 medium or 3 small delicata squash (about 2 ½ pounds total)
2 teaspoons kosher salt
6 tablespoons green peanut oil
½ cup sesame seeds, toasted
½ cup plain, dry-roasted peanuts
1 tablespoon ground coriander
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Position racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven.
2. Place the squash in a large bowl and rinse well, then rub vigorously with a kitchen towel to remove any traces of dirt in the crevices. Transfer to a cutting board and cut each squash in half crosswise, leaving the skin on. Place each half cut-side down, and carefully slice in half lengthwise. Scrape the seeds and surrounding flesh into a medium bowl and set aside.
3. Cut the squash quarters into ½-inch cubes. In a large bowl, toss the cubes with 1 teaspoon of the salt and 4 tablespoons of the peanut oil. Add the remaining peanut oil to the bowl of squash seeds and toss to coat.
4. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicone mats. Arrange the squash cubes in a single layer on one of the sheets; on the other, arrange the squash seeds and press firmly into a single layer, making sure to mash the pockets of squash flesh as flat as possible. Place the cubed squash on the lower rack of oven, and the seeds on the upper rack. Start checking after about 20 minutes. but it can take up to a half-hour for the squash to become tender, the seeds to turn lightly brown and the surrounding flesh to dry. Remove both pans from oven and let cool.
5. In a food processor, combine the roasted squash seeds, sesame seeds, peanuts, coriander, cumin, black pepper and the remaining teaspoon of salt. Process until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Transfer the dukkah to a small bowl. When ready to serve, reheat the squash until hot all the way through, 7 to 10 minutes. Toss the hot squash with 4 to 6 tablespoons of the dukkah and serve. —The New York Times
