On the farm: Barham Family
A SERIES ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FARMERS, RANCHERS AND FOOD PRODUCERS.
THE FARM: Kenny Barham of Barham Family Farm
LOCATION: Kearney, Mo.
FEATURED INGREDIENTS: Black Angus beef, duck, chicken, quail, eggs, pork, lamb, rabbit
A miniature Sebright Bantam rooster with patterned feathers resembling frilly black-and-white lace lets out a cartoonish screech in a vain attempt to get looming barnyard animals to heed his bidding.
Curious goats stand on their hindlegs at the fence, poking their heads in the air, as farmer Kenny Barham of Barham Family Farms calls out to Kirby, a miniature Hereford that responds like a dog and proves gentle enough to pet.
“What’s up, dude?” Fox and Pearl sous chef Arlo Riley says while reaching over the fence to scratch a goat behind the ears.
The goat arches its neck, mischievously nipping at a sleeve cuff.
“No, don’t eat my shirt!”
“They are just petting goats, not eating goats,” Kenny says with a laugh. “This is kind of a petting zoo for people who come to the (farm’s general) store and bring their kids. It gives them something to do.”
The 100-acre farm located in Kearney, Mo., has been in Barham’s wife’s family for more than a century. Despite signs suburbia is encroaching, Kenny chooses to see the neighboring housing developments as positive, bringing more customers to Barham Family Farm Store, which sells meats and other farm products, including cuts of beef, whole chickens, eggs, bacon, pickles, jams, preserves and cheeses.
“We’re not in the middle of nowhere. We’re actually in the City of Kearney,” says Kenny, who wears a cell phone strapped to his hip and a Bluetooth earpiece along with Wrangler jeans secured with a large silver belt buckle and a Barham monogrammed cap.
Chef Vaughn Good of Fox and Pearl relies on the farm for a diverse array of meats, including beef, chicken, quail, duck, pork, lamb and rabbit. And more than the rib eyes, briskets, chicken breasts and sausages, it’s the less familiar meats and offal that are of special interest.
In fact, Chef’s Vaughn’s updated corollary to the popular “Got Milk” advertising campaign of the ‘90s might be “Got a freezer full of beef hearts?”
“A lot of times we’ll just ask Kenny what he has, because he has such a variety of different proteins and different cuts. If he has a lot of excess of something, I’ll say cool, we’ll take it and make a menu off that,” he says.
One of the resulting items: Chef Vaughn’s beef tartare, a popular dish at Fox and Pearl.
Kenny Barham was born in Oklahoma. His dad died when he was 3 years old and the family relocated near his grandparents, who ran a café in Liberty, Mo. Although his family never lived on a farm while he was growing up, Kenny recalls he “always wanted a cow.” During his teens, he joined the Future Farmers of America and started working on a farm in Kearney. That’s when he met his future wife, Annette, who lived on the next-door farm.
A portion of the cow-calf operation is spread out between the Barham farm and nearby acreage they are able to rent. Kenny leads the Fox and Pearl staffers behind the general store and past several black Angus cows to a pasture ripe with brome, fescue, foxtail, dandelion and clover, ideal forage for the cows and ducks.
But when there are not enough nutrients in the pasture, Barham unrolls round hay bales like a carpet on the field, a method that ensures the cattle dung is evenly distributed as the herd grazes, rather than clumped near a trough, which requires shoveling to spread it out.
Mobile poultry pens modeled on those pioneered by farmer Joe Salatin — a pioneer in grass-based farming – also dot one of the pastures. Kenny instructs his guests to stand behind the pens as he hooks a metal chain between the pen and his pickup truck. He throws the engine in reverse pulling the pen and its inhabitants to a fresh patch of grass a few yards away.
“We try to move them twice a day. They’ve kind of got it figured out,” Kenny says as a cloud of 4-week-old ducklings waddle and quack in unison.
Kenny raises Grimaud Hybrid Pekin ducks because it is a fast-growing variety yielding a big, meaty breast. The ducks will be processed at 49 days, before their new feathers come in and make plucking more irksome for the processor. Duck meat is dark, more like beef than chicken. The large eggs have a bigger, richer yolk in addition to protein and enzymes that make them sought after by customers with food allergies.
As the Fox and Pearl group moves up on the Barham home, a gray tabby named Little Bear follows us to a metal building Kenny jokingly refers to as “The Chicken Palace.” He rolls a garage door up to reveal chickens walking up wooden pyramid-shaped coop to lay their eggs. The Red Sex Link chickens are a hybrid which are identifiable as male or female by color at birth; the males have yellow feathers and the females have buff-colored feathers.
“They’re great layers and good foragers,” Kenny says. “While heritage hens lay 150-180 eggs a year, these hens will each lay up to 340 eggs. The thing about heritage breeds, they’re heritage for a reason. They weren’t very productive!”
The staff stops to bottle feed a calf, a twin that was not getting enough milk from its mother, then head to the general store for a bit of lunch – sandwiches made from Barham Family farm deli meats.
Back at his Kansas City Westside restaurant, Chef Vaughn braises Barham beef cheeks bourguignon-style then sears the red wine-soaked meat in a pan over burning coals in the rustic hearth. The beef cheeks are served with a slice of pumpkin stuffed with a mushroom bread pudding and the plate is punctuated by a round bone that yields butter-like marrow.
“I think that we’ve kind of gone to a good point in the menu where most people are pretty accepting of at least trying what we put on it,” Chef Vaughn says. “Foie gras has sold extremely well. Anytime I’ve brought a goat in I’ve been surprised at how fast we’ll sell it.”
There’s also been an awakening in the chef world that whole animal, nose-to-tail cooking inspired by English chef Fergus Henderson is not only the right thing to do to honor the animal’s life, but the practical thing to do to reduce waste.
“Whatever term you want to put on it, it doesn’t matter me. It’s just practical cooking. I mean, it’s an animal. It’s a product. Something you bought, too, so you don’t want to waste anything and throw it away,” he says. “I think some of these cuts are delicious, and they are coming back. Maybe we just forgot them, or they weren’t as prominent on menus. Chefs have just been putting them on the menu and now people are waking back up to something that was already there.”
And, prepared the right way, even the odd cuts can be deeply delicious.
“I think bone marrow maybe doesn’t look appealing to people, if you’re not used to it,” Chef Vaughn says. “But the flavor of bone marrow to me is like that of grandma’s pot roast. You think about a brisket roasted forever with carrots and onions and how that mirepoix of vegetables kind of sits there and roasts in the pan and soaks up the beef fat. That’s what marrow reminds me of.”
“the flavor of bone marrow to me is like that of grandma’s pot roast. You think about a brisket roasted forever with carrots and onions and how that mirepoix of vegetables kind of sits there and roasts in the pan and soaks up the beef fat. That’s what marrow reminds me of.”
The Dish: Red Wine Braised Beef Cheeks, bone marrow, mushroom bread pudding, roasted pumpkin