Tom Urell

On a crisp morning a couple weeks ago, I went to Marblehead to meet Tim and Bronwyn Wiechmann at the house where they keep a root cellar for their restaurant, TW Food, in Huron Village, Cambridge. As the growing season winds down, Tim and Bronwyn are busy loading hundreds of pounds of vegetables into the cellar to use through the coming months.

Kept in large bins and covered with sand, the produce will keep long after the farmers’ markets are closed for the season and the ground has frozen. In keeping with his ‘keep it local’ ethos, this home-grown source of produce will allow Chef Tim to serve locally-grown vegetables from now through the winter, minimizing his need to order produce that has to be shipped in from California or beyond.

The vegetables will stay fresh until Tim gets tired of preparing (and customers no longer want to eat!) winter vegetables, which usually comes around the end of March. Then, around April, there is what farmers call “the hungry gap,” the period between when the cellar supply is wearing thin and the greenhouses and fields are just beginning to offer up the first shoots of spring.

For the home cook, Tim recommends setting up a small bin of beets, carrots and other hearty root vegetables and covering them with dirt, sand or sawdust. The bin should be kept in a cool, dark and dry place–i.e., ambient temperatures of 32-50°F and 60-70% humidity. Potatoes, onions, cabbage, garlic and thick-skinned squash (butternut, acorn and delicata) can all keep for months, too, when placed in baskets in the same conditions. If you check periodically for spoilage, the vegetables should keep until you are ready to cook with them.

After experimenting on his own for the first season, Tim’s current guide to the cellaring process is Root Cellaring by Mike and Nancy Bubel. It goes into great detail about preserving all types of produce and setting up a cellar under almost any conditions.

For Tim, the cellaring process is more than just an expression of the local food ethic that drives TW Food: it makes business sense. Buying vegetables now, as area farmers finish their harvest, is less expensive than ordering them a few weeks or months down the road, in part because Tim does the shipping and storage himself. Once the vegetables are laid down in the cellar, the challenge then becomes using it all. The bill’s been paid!

What about you? Do you store vegetables in a cellar of sorts or go out of your way to find local produce that has been stored during the winter? Share your cellaring stories.