Palisade Peaches

If you live in Colorado, you know Palisade Peaches and likely hunt them down at farmers’ markets and roadside farm stands. These beauties are from the local farm stand run by our friends at Rocky Mountain Garlic. And they taste as gorgeous as they look.

The town of Palisade is on the western slope of Colorado, just east of Grand Junction. That might seem like an unlikely place to grow peaches but the region’s blazing hot summer days and cool nights combined with nutrient-laden soil is a near perfect combination. The other key ingredient for peaches (or nearly anything) is, of course, water. Palisade was originally farmed by settlers at the end of the 19th century (after the Ute were forcibly removed) who were able to grow grains and some vegetables. But their fruit trees could not handle the heat with such intermittent rain. John Harlow, one of the first farmers to the region, worked hard to build irrigation canals diverting water from the Colorado River. Once the water started flowing, the fruit trees and vines started to take off…especially peaches.

In the late 1800s, ‘Peach Days’ was how Palisade celebrated their good fortune. That festival lives on now as the Palisade Peach Festival, with live music (the peach jam…get it?), running races, a car show and peach cuisine of all sorts. And if you like to eat your entire annual peach quota all at once, there’s also a peach eating contest. Palisade is also Colorado’s answer to Napa Valley with numerous wineries and farm-to-table bed and breakfasts. If you like your weather hot and your food fresh, you’d be hard-pressed to beat a visit to Palisade in late summer. 

At the Rocky Mountain Garlic farm stand at the Salida farmers’ markets, we get the same tasty peaches, with weather that’s considerably cooler. A fresh peach on it’s own unadorned is about as good as it gets. A peach pie? Sublime. We’ve decided to give our tried and true berry muffins a summer twist of Palisade, and we must say, they’re not too shabby. Give them a try (we recommend warm from the oven with a piping cup of coffee) and let us know what you think.

PEACH MUFFINS

The yogurt and oil in this recipe make it fairly foolproof and help to keep the muffins tender, not too heavy, with a nice crispy top. We usually go for strawberries or blueberries, but in peach season we can’t really pass up an excuse to get more peaches. This recipe is altitude ready like most of our customers, but if you’re making them lower down go for 2 cups of flour with an extra teaspoon of baking powder.

— INGREDIENTS —

2 ¼ cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
1 cup sugar

½ cup vegetable oil
1 egg
1 cup yogurt
1 ½ cups fresh peaches cut to ½ inch cubes

Vegetable spray for muffin tins

— DIRECTIONS —

Preheat oven to 380 degrees F.

In a large bowl sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt and set aside.

In another large bowl, whisk together the sugar, oil, egg and yogurt. Take 1 tablespoon of the dry ingredients and toss the fruit in it. (Sounds odd, but it helps the peaches retain their moisture.) Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients. Stir mixture about ten times making sure to get all the way to the bottom of the bowl. Add the peaches and stir a few more times — just enough to be sure it’s all incorporated but no more or it will start to activate the gluten and you’ll have bricks instead of muffins. Generously spray a muffin tin and divide evenly.

Place into the oven and bump up the temperature to 400 degrees. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, rotating pan halfway through. Let them cool for a minute or two in the pan, then turn them out onto a cooling rack. 

Seed of Hope Coffee Cupping

These coffees were samples from Seed of Hope Coffee out of Thailand. Ryan Stowell and his crew are helping farmers grow coffee as an alternative crop in a region that was once largely controlled by the opium trade. We really liked the intensity of the dry-process coffee — the fruity flavor may be a bit too much for single origin, but the quality is there. The washed beans we tried were warmer, carameled and incredibly smooth.

Cuppings are the coffee world’s version of wine tastings, and often veer into a realm of snooty self importance. We prefer to keep them pretty low key. Here’s the process: We do a coarse grind of about 8 grams of coffee and add 140ml of 200º water. We use no filter, so that we can be sure we’re getting the whole flavor and feel. It’s essentially cowboy coffee.

We pour the water over the coffee. There’s no stirring per se, but pouring from a gooseneck kettle circulates the grinds and makes sure all the coffee is wetted. After about four minutes, a crust forms on top of the coffee (see main image above where there’s a slight mound in the cup). We break up the crust and carefully remove it, and let the cup sit for another eight minutes.

Then we taste carefully with a spoon (otherwise it’s a mouthful of grinds) and take notes. I like to go back and forth to the bag to smell the beans and see if my initial thoughts hold true.

That’s where most cuppings end, including this one. But it’s essential to also brew any new coffee the way you’re likely to drink it. At Gato, we make French press, espresso and pour-overs with new coffees to see how they taste in the real world. Hopefully we’ll be bringing these to your real world soon. We’ll keep you posted.

Cream, Sugar And Giving Back

It was the autumn of 2012. We were living in California where I’d taken a job with Patagonia. As was the custom, the company would pay all interested employees a full-day’s salary to leave their desks and volunteer with a chosen local group, and today’s activity was to clear out brush and trash from a portion of the Ventura River Bottom, which was a total mess. Unsightly doesn’t start to describe it. We all donned gloves and dragged our trashbags into the weeds and started picking up. 

The reason I tell this story is because by the end of our day trudging around in the riverbed, we had made progress that was sort of remarkable to me. None of us individually had done all that much (picking up trash or moving brush is just not that hard) but collectively, the effects were unmistakable. Maybe it was the first time I’d really seen how much happens when we operate on the law of efficiencies, where each does a little and together we do a lot.

This riverbed moment is part of the philosophy behind Gato’s Buck-a-Bag giving program. It’s hard for just about anyone to support all the worthy causes they’d like, especially in uncertain times of real financial worry. So why not pitch in a little as a group and maximize the effort? Coffee is a commodity. Great coffee is a privilege. We’re under no illusion that even our little company costs the earth – and we know part of doing responsible business on a beleaguered planet is to give something back. So every time you buy coffee from us, we’ll give a buck for every 16-oz bag  (75¢ for every 12-oz bag) to chosen non-profits doing things we believe in (and we’ll change those up a few times a year to spread the love).

We can only think of a few things that can make a great cup of coffee taste even better: cream, sugar — and giving back.

Our sincere thanks for your support.