Chef Peter Berley’s Local, Sustainable Cooking School

“I have been teach­ing on and off for about 25 years in var­i­ous set­tings, mostly in New York City,” Berley told Organic Connections. “I’ve always found that the schools that I teach in are lack­ing in sev­eral things. One is atmos­phere: they tend to be indus­trial, noisy, and have harsh light­ing. So I’ve always wanted a kitchen where I could have peo­ple come to, and equip and design it the way I want, and have it in a place that I like to be.

“The sec­ond thing is that typ­i­cally classes can be any­where from four­teen to eigh­teen peo­ple. To me, that’s just too many; I think it’s much more effec­tive to teach in a smaller group. So I’ve lim­ited my classes to eight, and that seems to be a per­fect num­ber. It’s inti­mate, but there are enough peo­ple to make the class excit­ing, to bring dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties into the room, and so on.”

However, Berley’s third—but not by any means the least important—motivation stemmed from a philo­soph­i­cal belief. “I really didn’t have any con­trol over the qual­ity of ingre­di­ents in the insti­tu­tions that I worked in,” Berley said. “Now I have a lot of flex­i­bil­ity: I can decide to get my pro­duce from what­ever farm I want. I can decide to join a CSA. I can decide to get eggs from my neigh­bor. And, I can really teach seasonally.

“The goal, the ideal, is to be able to get most of our food from our local agri­cul­ture, our local arti­sans, our local pro­duc­ers, because I think, going for­ward, cen­tral­ized ways of pro­duc­ing goods aren’t work­ing. There is a dom­i­nance of the cor­po­rate sec­tor to the great dis­ad­van­tage of the pop­u­lace. I believe one of the pos­si­ble cures for that is devel­op­ing local economies every­where, smaller but many more sources of food.”

Berley chose a loca­tion that was per­fectly suited to a locally sourced oper­a­tion. “I’ve always loved the North Fork of Long Island, which is a his­tor­i­cal farm­ing, agri­cul­ture and fish­ing dis­trict area. I bought a cot­tage on the North Fork in South Jamesport, just about a five-minute walk from the Peconic Bay. The bay is a beau­ti­ful, clean body of water, and there are oys­ters there; there are scal­lops and all kinds of fish. I’m right by the water and I’m by many vine­yards. I’ve got local live­stock, local cheese, milk and pro­duce. It’s just wonderful.”

Into the Kitchen

The cur­ricu­lum Berley is evolv­ing extends from his love of sea­son­ally avail­able local ingre­di­ents. “The phi­los­o­phy is really dri­ven by what I’m pas­sion­ate about,” he explained. “So, num­ber one is that the cook­ing style is sea­sonal and the prod­ucts that we use are sea­son­ally avail­able. There is also learn­ing how to use sus­tain­ably raised seafood, and learn­ing all the tech­niques that go into good cook­ing, such as roast­ing and brais­ing and sautéing.”

The sea­sonal aspect will extend out­side the kitchen too. “I haven’t started my gar­den yet, but it is going to become an inte­gral part of the classes. I have a really nice-size area for gar­den­ing, and in the spring I’m going to plant a four-season gar­den there. I’ll have cold frames so I can pro­duce win­ter crops dur­ing the win­ter as well. Where we’re located we have more sun­light than prac­ti­cally any other area in the United States, because there are three bod­ies of water that the sun­light reflects off of.”

The class­room envi­ron­ment Berley added into his cot­tage was com­pletely suited to his pur­poses. “It’s a beau­ti­ful kitchen,” he said. “It’s skylit, there are win­dows all around, and I built a wood-burning bread oven inside of it. I can teach my bread-baking classes in a wood-fired oven as well as in con­ven­tional home-style gas ovens, because I have two of those as well.”

Bread mak­ing is some­thing Berley dearly loves, and he wants to help his stu­dents tap into the great enjoy­ment avail­able from it. “I feel that bread bak­ing is really essen­tial, not only for sus­te­nance; but I really believe that there is incred­i­ble oppor­tu­nity for con­nec­tiv­ity and spir­i­tual devel­op­ment. When I say bread, I’m talk­ing about nat­u­rally leav­ened arti­sanal bread, using wild yeast that you cul­ti­vate. You learn how to develop that yeast into loaves that are slow ris­ing and stay very fresh for a long time, and are much more nour­ish­ing than breads leav­ened with com­mer­cial yeast.

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“Bread is also rich as an oppor­tu­nity for peo­ple to con­nect. You get into bak­ing more than you need, so you’re going to end up giv­ing bread to peo­ple. That’s just a great gift. Nothing makes me hap­pier than when some­one makes some­thing for me, and bread is a beau­ti­ful craft to learn. It’s some­thing that peo­ple can learn at any age, in any walk of life. It’s inex­pen­sive to do, it’s a great hobby, and it’s a won­der­ful way of con­nect­ing with your friends, neigh­bors and family.”

Another aspect that Berley is pas­sion­ate about is cook­ing with wood—and he is con­vey­ing this to his stu­dents as well. “I love cook­ing with wood,” he con­tin­ued. “I feel the vibra­tion of wood is much dif­fer­ent than gas, and cer­tainly much dif­fer­ent than elec­tric or microwave. I think it pro­duces much deeper, sort of more sta­ble food.

“There are many ways some­one can go about build­ing a wood-fired oven, and such ovens prop­erly insu­lated are incred­i­bly effi­cient and inex­pen­sive to run. The life cycle of the heat is long. In my oven, seven split pieces of hard­wood is plenty for 36 hours of cook­ing time.”

Berley also sees wood as a sus­tain­able alter­na­tive to nat­ural gas. Natural gas is now being extracted through an extremely harm­ful method called hydrofrack­ing, in which poi­so­nous chem­i­cals are forced deep into the ground, cre­at­ing frac­tures through which nat­ural gas escapes and can be cap­tured. “When you light a fire, you are much more con­nected to the food that you cook than when you just turn on the gas flame,” Berley said. “We’re deal­ing with hydrofrack­ing in New York State, and there’s a huge debate going on about it. It’s already occur­ring in Pennsylvania in a big way and other parts of the coun­try. From what I know, this gas that they’re search­ing for is not even ben­e­fit­ing America anyway—it’s being sold to China. So gas doesn’t have a huge future to it.”

The End Product

“The move­ment in local, sus­tain­able food is grow­ing, and I’m sim­ply part of that move­ment,” Berley con­cluded. “This is the way I’ve cho­sen to get involved—just to have a place where peo­ple can come and study cook­ing, using locally sourced ingre­di­ents as much as pos­si­ble, in an inti­mate environment.

“I hope my stu­dents take away inspi­ra­tion, encour­age­ment and energy to go back home and to con­tinue devel­op­ing them­selves as cooks. I hope that they’ll cook for friends and fam­ily and help nour­ish other peo­ple. It will be great if they are inspired to use more local ingre­di­ents instead of rely­ing on big cor­po­rate inter­ests for their food sup­ply. Individuals can make a huge impact on our cul­ture, and one by one I’m just try­ing to influ­ence peo­ple in a more pos­i­tive direc­tion than the way we’re cur­rently going.”

For more infor­ma­tion on Peter Berley’s North Fork Kitchen, visit http://peterberley.com/classes-in-my-north-fork-kitchen.