Fox and Pearl On The Farm: Barham Family Farm (Kearney, Mo.)
The 100-acre Barham Family 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 the farm's general 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.
“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.
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.”
DISH: Red Wine Braised Beef Cheeks, bone marrow, mushroom bread pudding, roasted pumpkin
ABOUT FOX AND PEARL | Chef/owner Vaughn Good co-owns a Midwestern bistro in the historic Westside neighborhood in downtown Kansas City where he butchers, cures and pickles to create high-quality food with integrity using traditional preservation techniques and live-fire hearth cooking. All food served at the restaurant begins with the freshest seasonal ingredients, and menus change monthly, sometimes even weekly.
FOX AND PEARL ON THE FARM | A multi-media series highlighting the restaurant's and the chef's grass roots connection to local farmers and food artisans in Kansas and Missouri.
CREDITS
Barham Family Farm https://barhamfamilyfarm.com/
Video produced by Pilsen Photo Coop / @pilsenphotocoop861
To see a photo gallery for this story: https://www.foxandpearlkc.com/eat
Story interviews and words by Jill Wendholt Silva, editing by Kimberly Stern of Silva + Stern
To read more: https://www.foxandpearlkc.com/farmers
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