Locavore Resources: Southwest

Chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson’s Boulder restaurant, Frasca Food and Wine, gets its espresso beans from this wholesale organic and fair-trade coffee roaster, which also supplies area cafés.

Wyatt Barnes and Amy Tisdale have farmed for only four years but grow more than 100 crops for Boulder’s best chefs, including Mackinnon-Patterson.

Mackinnon-Patterson picks up hand-shaped loaves like cranberry-raisin and filone breads from Denver’s popular bakery, overseen by third-generation Italian baker Maurizio Negrini.

© Jennifer Esperanza

Chef Joseph Wrede of Taos’s Joseph’s Table goes nuts for the stone-ground organic whole wheat flour from this southern Colorado farm. “It bakes a brilliant crumb,” Wrede says.

The Manzanares family sells organic grass-fed lamb from its northern New Mexico ranch to local chefs like Wrede and home cooks; yarn from its sheeps’ wool is sold through nearby Tierra Wools (handweavers.com).

Santa Fe’s Tara Esperanza has won a cult following (including Wrede) for inventive all-natural ice creams like cherry fudge and chocolate tarragon; in June she opened a California outpost in Berkeley.

Monica Pope of Houston’s T’afia says Kendra Scott and Lindsey Schechter are putting Texas cheese on the map, foraging for artisanal finds, like Stuart Veldhuizen’s piquant aged Romano, to sell to chefs and area farmers’ markets.

Jujubes, Asian pears, blackberries and figs are just a few of the fruits available for picking on this 33-acre farm that also supplies Pope’s restaurant.

“Rum made by hand exclusively with Texas ingredients in small batches—wow,” says Pope about this molasses-based spirit that debuted in Austin last year.

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