The Harvest Kitchen: Creating New Opportunities for RI Farmers and Youth

ApplesEven though RI grows a lot of tomatoes, how many farms at your farmers market sell tomato sauce? True enough, practically no one cooks their RI tomatoes into a sauce to sell. That’s despite the fields of tomatoes that all turn ripe at the same moment, often creating an overharvest that overwhelms even those who think there’s no such thing as too many tomatoes. So, producing more local tomato sauce is win-win: it’s simple and healthy and widely eaten. It’s a product that can be sold year-round, enhance farmers’ income and make use of the overharvest. But there are so few local processors that work with farmers and so few kitchens available to rent.

So for the past few years we’ve been working on increasing processing infrastructure (i.e. commercial kitchens) for locally grown foods. The broad initiative is our Open Kitchen Project, and it identifies and matches underutilized certified kitchens with farmers and new food entrepreneurs. Yet sometimes a farmer doesn’t have time to do the processing themselves. They would love to work with others who will do the cooking for them, co-pack their raw ingredients into a finished products. That got the wheels in our head turning and are pretty thrilled to announce our next big step…

Next week Farm Fresh RI will launch the Harvest Kitchen in partnership with the Department of Children, Youth, and Families. The Harvest Kitchen is a 15 week culinary training program that will create a line of high-quality preserved foods using ingredients from local farms and prepared by youth within the Division of Juvenile Corrections at a certified kitchen in Providence. These products will be sold at local stores, farmers markets, and to area schools, hospitals and similar institutions.

The Harvest Kitchen’s first product will be applesauce. (Local apples are available year-round!)
From Hill Orchards to a culinary class in Providence to your table.

The benefits of the Harvest Kitchen will be:

  • Practical, hands-on job training for at-risk girls and boys (ages 16-19)
  • Increased sales for local farmers
  • Affordable, healthy option for consumers, restaurants and institutional food service buyers
  • Sustaining income for the RI Harvest Kitchen through food sales

Chef Jennifer Stott will run the culinary skills training program. Contact Christie for more information.