Literal Farm To Table: Here’s The Dirt On Chefs Cooking With Dirt

What’s the next big foodie enthusiasm? Robust flavors, earthy scents and lusty textures from the very soil that nourishes life.

It’s called Veritable Cuisine du Terroir — literally, Food from the Earth Really — and in their copper-clad kitchen in the Marais district of Paris, chefs Solange and Gael Gregoire run one of the hottest bistros in a city long celebrated for its culinary prowess.

Their restaurant, Le Plat Sal — which translates to The Dirty Plate — prepares four-star signature dishes, like Roche Dans la Croute, a rock from Mont Lachat folded into a pastry crust, and Boue Ragout, a stew simmered from the mud of the Seine River, washed down with a surprisingly delicate vintage of Du Vin d’Egout, a smoky gray wine distilled from Paris sewer water.

“The rich earth, so alive with vitamins and minerals,” Chef Solange Gregoire told Scott Simon, host of Weekend Edition Saturday, and “the mud of the earth that caresses our toes, the sand kissed by the sun, and rocks.”

She lifted the top of a copper pot and asked, “It smells good, yes?”

“Very,” Simon had to admit, despite the unconventional ingredients.

This may sound, like foie gras and escargot, to be a distinctly French cuisine. But Ted Allen, who hosts Chopped on the Food Network, believes that dirt, rocks and mud will soon become common in American gourmet cooking, too.

“Let me put it this way,” he asks. “What’s left? People are already eating snout-to-tale, leaves-to-roots, stem-to-stern, hand-to-mouth. Chefs are getting people to eat kale and drink rotted juices. Dirt, rocks and mud just follow.”

And great American chefs are developing their own classic takes. That includes James Beard winner Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef renowned for his Mexican cuisine. Bayless says that the Tzolkin, or Maya Divine Calendar, that was supposed to predict the end of the world in 2012, was off because “bits of the Tzolkin had been chiseled off to toss into a stew, named after Zipacna, the Maya god of the earth’s crust. We make a version in our restaurants, with chunks from Wrigley Field. It’s delicious,” he adds.

And Danny Meyer, the New York restaurateur and author who founded The Shake Shack, is quietly beginning his own new national chain called Rock in Roll.

“We think artisanal rocks, locally sourced and freshly prepared, are the next great American elegant-casual-customized-locavore-hand-made-food enthusiasm,” Meyer told Weekend Edition.

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