- [Walter] When you're working at the farm, it's all about, okay, who's making lunch today?

(gentle music) Basically whoever makes lunch walks out to the field, harvests what they need, so it's not gonna be any more fresh than that.

My name's Walter Riesen, and we farm at Star Route Farm in upstate New York.

We really focus on growing produce with a high flavor profile, so that means it's not necessarily always the biggest head of lettuce or the biggest beet.

The challenge is to get people to taste it, and once they taste it, they're usually sold on what we're trying to do here.

A lot of the flavor does come from the soil life, so the more in balance the soil is in terms of minerals that feed the microorganisms that then feed the plant that allows any crop, but especially root crops, to pull up the nutrients and actually use the nutrients that are in the ground.

We farm by using a no till system.

Heavy tillage will burn up the soil carbon, the soil organic matter, all of those things.

Somebody cooks lunch every day at the farm, so a coworker this summer suggested making okonomiyaki, and I had had it before in Japanese restaurants, but hadn't thought of it as a possibility for our farm lunches, which sometimes I struggle to come up with, what am I gonna make today?

A lot of people refer to it as Japanese pizza, but this is a very local version of that recipe.

It's a very easy way to use fresh produce that's right on the farm, and it's fast and filling, and keeps everybody going throughout the rest of the day, so it's become part of the lunch repertoire.

So the pancake is basically traditionally shredded cabbage.

I added radishes today, carrots.

You add flour to the shredded vegetables, and then egg, some water with soy sauce.

This is a simple pancake batter sort of, with vegetables, so it's a savory pancake, more or less.

Then you just put it in your hot oil in a skillet, about three to four minutes, flip it over, and another three to four minutes.

You want to keep the interior custardy, creamy and custardy, so you don't wanna overcook it.

So this is just gonna be a sauce we'll put on top, which is just mayonnaise and miso.

That's the real benefit to eating super fresh food and basically just having a whole farm to choose from in terms of what you wanna use and cook with that day, so it's always a lot of fun to figure that out.

(chattering) (gentle music)