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Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
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Farmer’s Markets have, of course, grown more common in St. Louis than masseurs at a John Travolta arraignment. They’re all over town. A really good one’s at Tower Grove Park.
The TG Farmers' Market is in part fun because, from sustainable doggie treats to free-range, handmade soap to biodegradable batik couture (hormone free!), all is uniform, doctrinaire Progressively Orthodox here and there is always amusement whenever so many Prog Oxen herd together.
You could probably get a master’s degree in environmental studies just reading the signs over the trash cans explaining which should receive your soiled Kleenex and why. Displays evangelize the gospel of recycling, organic cotton produce reliquary bags are for sale to the faithful, and there’s a yoga revival session being conducted off on the lawn. (Note that, probably because of strict anti-sanctimony statues in the City of St. Louis, the TGP market is open only on Saturday mornings.)
We passed a fellow who had erected a show-and-tell display of the threats to engendered species. We hesitated to ask if, in this neighborhood, endangered species might include republicans.
The coexist bumper sticker vibe of the place aside, there are real farmers at this market; the quality and variety of fresh produce is enough to satisfy all comers, from those who just want some decent tomatoes for their BLTs to the high priests of the Locavore cult. This time of the season is like high tide for vegetables. The stalls at TGP’s market are loaded. Dark green mounds of thick cucumbers. Tomatoes—the real thing, with all those weird shapes and colors—that really taste like tomatoes. Fluffy field greens, fat striped watermelons, cantaloupe, berries. Plump snap peas. This is the kind of place where, if you’re unsure of what to have for dinner, you can be damned sure you’ll find the answer in the bountiful display.
There are some big names in local food manning stalls at the TGP market. Baetje Farms produces world-class goat cheese. Salume Beddu proffers their incredible sausages, salami, pancetta, and the city’s best guanciale. We knew what “Missouri Grass Fed Beef” was selling. Their steaks have that rich, mineral tang you’d expect from such animals. Centennial Farms has honey that tastes like every flower in a June meadow is blooming on your tongue.
The TGP is worthwhile too, because of the high incidence of samples. Now, it is not true that admonitory photos of us are posted at some local farmer’s markets, warning about what we call our “strolling sampling lunches.” But we have been known to nosh liberally. We did just that with some wonderful, juicy, crunchy seedless watermelon from Yoder’s Produce. And a nibble of fresh bread from Companion Bakery. Normally, we’d have spent the morning cruising through the stalls leaving none of them unsampled.
But we were there for popsicles.
“Popsicles?” you ask. “You left a carbon footprint bigger than a Humvee road rally in the Amazon rainforest by driving all the way down to Tower Grove Park for popsicles? When you could just as easily have waited for bell-jangling Kaptain Kreepy’s frozen treats truck to come around your neighborhood, White Bread Estates, and gotten your bomb pop fix?”
Well, yes, we did. But, in our defense, these popsicles are not your average sugary sweet tongue stainers. These popsicles are genius.
The place that sells them is called Farm Fresh Cupcakes, a business that will soon open a brick and mortar store, Whisk, on Cherokee Street. Farm Fresh is the inspiration of Kaylen Wissinger, who had an idea about commercially producing cupcakes. She worked with St. Patrick’s Center’s “New Venture Center,” which rented kitchen space to her—the rent she and other start-up food companies pay goes back to St. Patrick’s in their efforts at assisting the homeless locally. Ms. Wissinger sells her cupcakes at the market. But she apparently reasoned that while cupcakes might tempt on steamy summer St. Louis mornings, icy popsicles could be a moneymaker. She also reasoned, apparently, that while cherry, banana, and grape flavors were already saturating the popsicle aisles, there might be an opening for say, blueberry-lemon flavored popsicles. Or avocado. Or peach-basil.
So while Farm Fresh cupcakes might be great, since on the morning of our visit it was slightly hotter than the surface of Venus, we scanned instead, the day’s flavoring options of their popsicles:
Sweet corn. Plum ginger. Watermelon. Vietnamese coffee. Mexican hot chocolate. We tried the peach-jalapeno. It has a spicy kick; the jalapeno here is asserting itself right under the smooth, sweet peach. It’s weird in a popsicle, yes. But it’s refreshing, satisfying. We owed it to ourselves to go for another; we settled on a cucumber and lime popsicle. Which we liked even better.
Full disclosure here: we were skeptical of a place like this selling popsicles. First, because we’re very narrow-minded and provincial and we had much trouble trying to imagine how something like a sweet corn popsicle could possibly be all that great. And second, because we know, just as well as you do, that homemade popsicles do not taste as good at the kind you get off the trucks, or even the kind you buy at the store. And we know why.
It’s science. When a liquid is frozen, it doesn’t turn into a solid all at once. Ice crystals form, deep inside the liquid, and gradually work their way out. The water crystals also, as they freeze, squeeze out any other ingredients, manhandling them to the surface.
So when you poured your grape Kool-Aid into those Tupperware popsicle molds your mother had, and stuck them in the freezer overnight, the flavoring and the sugar were both shoved to the outer part of the slowly forming popsicle.
So when you sucked on it the following day, yes, it tasted like a lovely icicle of grape Kool-Aid for the first four or five good sucks or licks—and then it tasted like frozen water.
And you complained and said it didn’t taste like the real stuff and your mother called you an ingrate and reminded you that over in China right about then there were kids who would have appreciated those popsicles and you suggested packing ‘em up and sending ‘em over and there was a grounding in your immediate future.
The reason real popsicles keep their taste all the way through is that they are frozen very, very quickly, usually surrounded by a brine broth that supercools the liquid so fast the ice crystals don’t have time to bully the flavor and the sugar to the outside.
We don’t know what process Farm Fresh Cupcakes uses to make their extraordinary popsicles. But it must be a pretty fast one. Because by the time we got down to the part of the ‘sicle right around the stick, we could still taste every bit of the cucumber and the lime. Delicious.
We wanted to ask them how they did it. We figured it’s a small company, though, just trying to establish themselves and we didn’t want to put them on the spot. And secondly, we were left with that empty stick in our hands and the line was pretty long over by the recycling cans and we had a lot of reading to do to know where exactly we should put it.
