Every Ingredient has a Back Story

August 5 - Lyons Farmette w GB Culinary

Seven Ingredients, Thousands of years

Colorado Trout

Greenback Cutthroat Colorado's state fish since 1994 was declared extinct in 1937 after mining pollution and competing species wiped out its native streams. 

Fun fact: in 2012, biologists found the species' only pure, naturally reproducing population in one 3.5-mile stretch of Bear Creek

Mokum Carrots

Amsterdam, the Netherlands This sweet, early-harvest Dutch hybrid is named after “Mokum,” Amsterdam's own nickname — borrowed from Yiddish for “safe haven,” used for centuries by the city's Jewish community. 

Fun fact: cannot be harvest with machines due to the delicate nature of the carrot.

Carolina Gold Rice 

Named for its golden pre-harvest color, this rice built the colonial Lowcountry economy on the rice-growing expertise of enslaved West Africans — and gave rise to Gullah Geechee culture. 

Fun fact: it went commercially extinct in the 1900s and exists today only because growers brought it back. Ark of Taste

Shishito Peppers

Portuguese traders brought Spanish padón peppers to Japan in the 1500s; growers bred them into the shishito — named for a wrinkled tip said to resemble a lion's face (shishi). 

Fun fact: about 1 in 10 packs real heat — a game of chance rooted in plant stress.

Olathe Sweet Corn

Montrose County, Colorado Bred in the early 1980s from a high-sugar cultivar and trademarked by farmer John Harold, this corn revived a town whose economy had collapsed with sugar beets. 

Fun fact: the harvest is hand-picked and packed in ice slush within hours to lock in sweetness before sugar turns to starch.

Shiso

East Asia; since the Jomon period A mint-family herb native to southwest China and the Himalayas, found in a 2,500-year-old Jomon pottery sherd in Japan. Green leaves are eaten fresh; red leaves dye umeboshi plums pink. 

Fun fact: the plastic “grass” in cheap bento boxes exists purely to imitate real shiso.

Ube

Charred remains date ube's use in the Philippines to roughly 8,250–3,050 BCE, predating rice as a staple crop. It appears in the first Tagalog–Spanish dictionary (1613), and its “purple gold” moment is a very new chapter in an 11,000-year-old story. 

Fun fact: ube halaya, now iconic, traces to a 1970s training-center recipe made with carabao milk.

Thank you to GB Culinary and the team at the Lyons Farmette for an amazing event!