Ever since Oak Park opened eight months ago on Ingersoll Avenue in Des Moines, the staff has been saving its scraps. Maybe it’s carrot peels, tomato cores, cherry pits or not perfect lettuce. No chicken, beef, or pork meat, just seafood, fruits and vegetables. All of it goes into seven-gallon buckets closed with a lid and then stored in the cooler.
Twice a week, Oak Park executive pastry chef Jess Robertson grabs six of these buckets containing 84 gallons of scraps a week and drives them out to Pine Grove Family Farms in Bondurant, where seven piglets at least partially grew up eating the leftovers from the Oak Park kitchen. Some days the Berkshire pigs even ate angel food cake.
The pigs get excited when Robertson walks up with the buckets; they know what they contain.
“It’s been fun seeing them grow. Now they like know when I show up that those buckets contain food. The last time I was out there, they all jumped up and were pushing each other,” she said on a recent trip to the farm.
Some fight over the scraps, even though there’s enough for a bucket per now-full-grown pig. Later after they’ve gorged, some lay on the food to save it for later.
Not a bad last meal.
Now the farm-to-table movement comes full circle at the restaurant; two of the pigs are now at Oak Park, albeit butchered for bourbon-candied bacon, pork ragù with pickled Fresno peppers and ramps, or bacon glazed chops with house bacon cooked in Oak Park bourbon. Some of the cuts of pork will go into staff meals, prepared earlier in the day to feed the cooks, chefs, porters, bartenders, and wait staff before a busy night of serving customers.
Robertson said she got the idea to take scraps and feed animals while working on her business degree with an emphasis on entrepreneurship from Purdue University Global, where she wrote a business plan and researched food waste in restaurants. “I developed this business plan around minimizing the waste,” she said on a recent ride out to the Bondurant farm.
The National Restaurant Association estimates that restaurants waste 11.4 million tons of food every year in the United States alone.
“The No. 1 producer of methane gas, which is the gas that's most harmful to the environment, is probably the food that's wasted in landfills,” she said. “I just felt like this was something that I could do to make a difference.”
Robertson reached out to the Shaymus and Kirsten Smith, who opened Pine Grove Family Farms six years ago, to see if they could bring food scraps to the pigs, who would become part of the menu at Oak Park before the restaurant even opened.
“I was just looking for a farm that would be open to doing this right,” Robertson said.
The Smiths sent the pigs to Mingo Locker to be processed.
“They’re kind of old school,” Kirsten Smith said. “They're smaller compared to a lot of the other ones. … they’re, I would say, more willing to do more custom processing because they're smaller.”
But Oak Park executive chef Ian Robertson did most of the butchering himself to create the specialty cuts he wanted.
More: How Oak Park’s Ian and Jess Robertson plan to wow Des Moines diners with farm-to-table food
How Oak Park sources ingredients from Iowa farms
The pigs are just the beginning of the relationship with the Pine Grove Family Farms. Oak Park already sources eggs, flour, milk and cream from Iowa farms. “We can go back and start re-evaluating getting more and more things,” Jess Robertson said, referring to turkeys and chickens at the farm.
The Smiths have a herd of 50 registered Herefords and 20 registered Simmental, raised on the pasture. The couple and their family have one Berkshire sow that they breed twice a year, as well as 90 hens laying eggs, 150 to 200 broiler chickens, eight beehives, hunting dogs, doves, turkeys, and some farm cats. In previous years, the Smiths sold their products at farmers markets, but this season they have a store on the farm at 9582 N.E. 94th Ave. in Bondurant, open on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to noon.
Where to find Oak Park
Location:3901 Ingersoll Ave., Des Moines
Contact:515-620-2185 oroakparkdsm.com
Hours:Open Tuesday through Saturday from 4:30 to 9:30 p.m.
Reservations:Exploretock.com.
Susan Stapleton is the entertainment editor and dining reporter at The Des Moines Register. Follow her onFacebook,Twitter, orInstagram, or drop her a line atsstapleton@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Oak Park feeds pigs scraps from the kitchen. Expect new pork dishes.
