The People Who Feed Us California Family Farms: The Fruit Bowl, Dewlson Farm & Il Fiorello Olive Oil

Madison's Best in California. This episode, the people who feed us, farming. We're gonna focus on small family farms. We're gonna go to Stockton, to the Fruit Bowl. Incredible stone fruit, I get a peach milkshake. We're gonna head down to Fairfield to the Il Fiorello Olive Oil Company. Incredible family farm there. We're gonna head over to Santa Maria and see the Doulson family farm, coffee and tea, amazing. And then we're gonna head out to India and see a multi-generational date farm. So remember agriculture, small family farms, the people who feed us. Let's get going. I'm Pat Madison and I love California. So we're here in Stockton. I'm with Ralph Fluchetti and we're at the Fruit Bowl. And Ralph, this farm is unbelievable. Thank you so much for bringing us here. Thank you for being here. So tell me the story about the farm. This is a family operation. When did it start? Correct, in 46, actually my parents had a house here that they bought with the ranch. And unfortunately, after a few months, the house caught on fire one night and burned to the ground. There was no fire department or anything. And so they had to look for another place to live. They rented a small piece of property across the street that had some peaches on it. And it was like 4th of July weekend and there was no market for the peaches. They were getting like a dollar a box and a friend of theirs told him, put a table out on the road. And mom sat there and packed the peaches and dad picked them. And that's how it started. And enough people drove by to do it. Right. Now, so you're a second generation. I understand there's a third generation. Correct. Sorry to interrupt. Andrew, come in to join us. Andrew, how did they talk you into this? Well, long, long conversations. Long conversations. You're ready to go off into the world and they went, you gotta stick with the fruit, son. Oh yes. Gotta continue to provide the fruit for the community. This is a potato. A what? Placato? No, this is a- Tomato? Picadum. Oh my gosh. This is incredible. So this is a peach. Apricot. Plum. Whoa. And what's unique about these? I mean, the feel of it, the touch of it, the taste of it? Well, the feel and the taste, they have fuzz like a peach. Oh my God, like a peach. Yeah, but they don't have that in their genetics. So we're here at the farm market at the fruit bowl and this is incredible. And this is Deneen and you are Ralph's wife? Yes. Or is Ralph your husband? I think Ralph's her husband. And Ralph keeps telling me he really does all the work around here. Oh, does he? Yeah. Okay. Is that true? No, I don't think so. I think Andrew's in on it too. So what's going on here? Well, I'm just packing peaches. Okay. Yeah. And do they go to market or are they for here? No, just for here. Okay. So it's all basically all good. And Andrew, what are you doing over there? I'm just sorting through these beans. Beans, okay. So come to the fruit bowl farmer market and bake shop. They bake fruit pies here. We're going to take a look at those. You got to check this place out. And Deneen, pies. Yeah. And you said you don't get to work in here. Why is that? Not too often. It's air conditioned in here, which we love. So tell me about some of your specialties. Well, we do fruit pies mainly. And then we do pastries and we do milkshakes and we do sandwiches. Wait a minute. Milkshakes. What kind? Well, our specialty is peach right now because we do use our fresh peaches. Bing, bing, bing, bing. Peach milkshake. I can't believe it. Right. Well, Deneen Luchetti, thank you. Well, you're welcome. I'm glad you guys stopped by. Peach milkshake. We're going to get one. Yeah. I'm so excited. We're in Fairfield and I'm going to learn everything about olive oil. I'm with an expert, Ann Siebers, co-owner of Il Fiorello. Did I do that right, Ann? Perfect. Oh, wonderful, wonderful. Actually, thank you. And thank you for having us. This is so exciting. I'm delighted to have you here. This is so great. Let me show you my farm. I'm a total neophyte, but olive oil, like wine, has many, many variations. Many variations. We grow 13 varieties of olives here, soon to be 14. I have one coming from Sicily that I'm going to plant soon. We're known internationally for our single varietal oil. So in the world, there are 1,400 varieties of olives. Nobody knows that. 1,400. Right. And each one tastes different. Like, Cabernet tastes different than Merlot. So you're going to do a tasting so you understand the difference. And then we're going to do a food pairing and all the food comes from our organic garden. I'm going to gain so much weight here in Fairfield. I hope so. In terms of people that are coming, they can do a tour. Yep. They can eat. We have a bistro restaurant. Okay. It's a plant-forward restaurant. So what we grow in the garden, we serve in our restaurant. You can do tastings. We can have special events. Oh, wow. I like rehearsal dinners. Okay. Those are perfect. Rehearsal dinners. And then we do cooking classes. This is your brainchild. I didn't want to put in two acres, three acres of wine grapes because I didn't want to compete. Olive oil is an unsaturated fat. It's healthy. It plays well with food and the trees are beautiful. And there's a huge history of oil in the world. You have to find the special climate, the special soil, and then you can plant the trees. Right. So that's what this area was. Yep. Okay. Let's go take a look. Oh my gosh, Anne. Look at all these. So how many varieties of trees? 14 varieties. Wow. 3,000 trees. These are original milling stones from Italy. Wow. There's no such thing anymore as first cold press. That's when we use these stones, but that's a history of how oil has been made for thousands of years. These are beautiful. They're 4,000 pounds each and they tell a history of how we've made oil for a very long time. So Anne, we're at the mill. We're at the mill. This is where the action happens. Tell me a little bit about what goes on here. So if you were an olive, you'd come in picking bins, 1,000 pounds each. The olives get grated. They get weighed. Then they get washed. And then they all go into a crusher. Pits, stems, the whole thing goes through a big crusher. It creates a paste and then it goes inside. These are the malaxation tanks. In Greek, malaxation means to soften. So the paste stays in here for about 30 to 60 minutes and it slowly evolves, kind of like a very slow bread kneading machine. And then from once it's done here, then we send it over to the centrifuge. This big centrifuge, this big girl separates oil from the by-product. The oil goes from here to the centrifuge over to our left. This one clarifies the oil. As of today, we're the most modern mill in North America. So Ann, we're getting to a distilled product. Right. When do I get to taste it? Very soon. Okay. How about you follow me? We'll go to the tasting room. Let's do it. We'll have fun. I love it. You're gonna get to taste single varietal oils. Okay. Very unusual in the world to do this. Okay. As far as I know, we're the only ones doing it. And then we'll pair it with food from our garden. Okay. Wow, how slowly you're adding. Did you just say all of you? Totally, total dad joke. Thank you. So, Ann, I am an olive oil convert. You have converted me. It's not just for cooking. It's to put on gelato. It's just- And popcorn. Popcorn. I am gonna go home. Is this for me? This is for you. Please enjoy. Thank you. Il Fiorello. Did I do that right? Oh my gosh. And you can go online. You can buy. Come here when you're in Fairfield to the Olive Mill. Amazing. I'm so excited. We're in Oceanside. And we're at the Oceanside Welcome Center. And I'm with Lydia Petrov, the manager of the Welcome Center. Lydia, Oceanside. Tell me some of the great things to do. I know you have a very famous pier here, right? That's right. The longest wooden pier on the West Coast. I'd love to mention the California Surf Museum. It was established in 1986. They're looking to expand because it's grown so much. It's such a big collection. I've been to it. Now, outdoors activities. Biking, kayaking, sailing. Stand-up paddleboard. You have boat rentals. Obviously, surfing. You have a major surf event here. We have Supergirl Pro. It is an all-female surfing event. You have the Ironman. It is a qualifying event for a world championship. And Pat, we have skydiving. Skydiving. There's no way in heck to get me into the skydeck. But that's okay. People love to do it here in Oceanside. So you're famous for your food here in Oceanside. I've seen many write-ups. We have a lot to offer. A 333 Pacific, which is across the street from the pier. Okay. Dijamara, which is Michelin-renowned. We have Joe's Crab Shack. Joe's Crab Shack. We have the Oceanside Broiler. Fresh fish again. I'm getting hungry. Free literature. Now, I spotted this one, Snoopy. Yeah. This is about Santa Rosa. That's right. And they have a welcome center. They have a welcome center. So one of the things you can do is plan your trip kind of on the map, going from welcome center to welcome center. We're all about road trips. There we go. Road trips. So Lydia, thank you so much. What a great welcome center. Thank you for coming, Pat. It was nice to show us off. I love it. So next time, we go to South Oceanside, the California welcome centers. We love them. Come check it out. I'm so excited. We're in Santa Maria Valley, and I'm here with Judy Polson and Ron Dewey, and they have this incredible family farm here that you can take a tour of, right? You can do appointment tours. And Ron, tell me how this gets started. Well, after I retired, we bought 20 acres of land just right up over the hill over there. And we planted lemons. That sounded like a good idea, except the first year, they all froze, and we lost 1,000 trees. So we replanted, and then we bought another 20. So let's double up and catch up. Yeah, that was really bad. Let's do it again. Yeah, so now we have 40 acres of lemons. That's our cash crop, allegedly. But that's our cash crop. And then Judy wanted to do something else. Okay. It wasn't good enough just to have 40 acres, 6,000 lemon trees. We gotta expand. And I know you're both retired Navy. And Judy, what happened next? Next is, when we bought this acreage, I wanted a couple spots where we could do something different and went to a couple of small farm conferences and discovered coffee and tea. And I know the big deal here is wine country. I love my coffee. So I'm looking forward to tasting all these different exciting things. Are you ready to give us a tour? Absolutely. Let's go. Let's head out. So Judy, tell me where we're going now. So we're gonna go up, and we're going to take a tour of where we grow coffee, our coffee plantation, and where we grow our tea, our tea plantation. That sounds so cool. Coffee plantation. Well, I know. It's not easy to grow here, but it's fun to grow here. Why is that? Well, because it doesn't like the wind. It doesn't like to be cold. It doesn't want- Everything that happens here. Anything, everything that happens here. But I just love the idea of growing coffee. We have five varieties of coffee. So they're all Arabica, which is the better species of coffee. So they're all Arabica. So I've been saying that wrong all these years. How do you say it? I think I'm saying Arabica. Oh, I don't recognize that. You're saying that wrong. Arabica. That's awesome. Arabica. So the Arabica, tell me about that. So Arabica is the better species in coffee. It's known to be less acidic and a little sweeter. There's not as much production. The other one that people know about is called Robusta. And Robusta is the coffee you see in- No, I always thought that was Robusta. No, I'm kidding. That's like tomato, tomato. I could accept that. I could accept that one. I see Geisha over there. Geisha, yes. What's the connection? So Geisha is spelled like the Japanese Geisha girl. So for the spelling, people get confused as if that was from Japan. And it's really spelled G-E-S-H-A from the Geisha Valley in Indonesia. So that's where it's from. It continues to be the most expensive coffee in the world. So we're pretty proud of this coffee. So tell me about, because I know nothing about growing coffee. So this is a coffee plant. So there's gonna be beans on here somehow, right? Tell me how the beans happen. So this is a good example of the growth pattern and the life cycle of a coffee plant. So you start out with a bud. It becomes a flower that looks like a jasmine. And then a green bean will come, like you see here. And then eventually, this is a red cherry. So this is a fruit. And you know it's ready when you can just twist it and it comes off pretty easy. So a lot like a fruit on a tree. It is a lot like a fruit on a tree. And then you squeeze it. And there are your coffee beans. Oh my gosh, I didn't know that. Yeah, so there's your coffee beans. So can I eat one of those? You can eat the cherry. The cherry is what I- These are too hard. Yes, the cherry. And the Geisha cherries are really good. They're really sweet. And then what I do is I throw the beans down. Oh my gosh. Because every once in a while, I get a volunteer that just starts growing up, comes up. Wow, that's incredible. So, but first we gotta settle one thing. Is it Arabica or is it Arabica? I call- Arabica. I call it Arabica. This is so- One of those. This is so humiliating. Okay, but that's all something else. This is part of the tour? This is what- Yes, yes. So this is- Every tour, we have three tours and one of them is the coffee tasting. So every tour includes a tour of the coffee plantation, how we grow coffee, how we process coffee, the coffee tasting, and they take home fruit. So Judy and Ron. Yes. First of all, I'm highly caffeinated. Well, that's good. That was all right, Tim. That's good, that's good. So the next meal will be very quick. And thank you so much for mainly creating a family environment, having something that people can come to and enjoy farm life. I mean, you've created a little paradise here. Thank you. We think we have. It's our little paradise. Ron and Judy, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Pat. Thank you. Yeah, it was wonderful. Well, Pat, I'm so happy to have you in our Coachella Valley. I'm glad I asked you for a date. A date. Oh my gosh, this is so incredible. We were so excited last month to join you in our first collaboration with Best of California in Riverside. We saw the Cheech Museum, Mission Inn, Tio's Tacos. It was great. And now we have you in our valley for National California Date Month. I'm so happy to be here. And I want to know more about how these dates got here, what they're used for. Can somebody explain all that to me? Well, lucky for us, we have someone in the know inside S.H.I.E.L.D., so let's go. Let's check it out. You look... Well, Mark, we are so excited to be here because, you know, I don't know if you know this or not, but Pat's family has been in California since the 1880s. So did you have any idea in the history of the date? I've always wanted to know how the dates got here, first of all, and then how it came to this region. I mean, this is the date capital of the world, I think, right? Yeah, it is, actually. Well, it's definitely the date capital of the United States. Over 85, 84, 85% of all the dates grown in the U.S. are grown right here in the Coachella Valley. It's a really, really important crop for us as agricultural producers in this region. And we had some really progressive forward thinkers that brought these over from Basra, Iraq, originally. So the trees came from that region. Obviously, the climate is very comparable, right? It's very desert, dry heat. They say that date palms need their feet in the water, and their head under the sun. And out here, we have both of those things. We've got the water for the date palms themselves, and we've got beautiful sunshine all year long. So it was that perfect marriage between this palm tree and this crop and this region. So, Mark, October is National California Date Month. How long has that been going on? These are second years celebrating National California Date Month in October. It coincides with our harvest season, actually. So a lot of us date farmers right now are harvesting the crops we've been growing all year long. And it's one of the reasons why it makes it such a perfect month to celebrate California dates. Wait, everybody's just real tall? So they go up and get, is that how it works? How do you harvest the date? So back in the day, we used to have ladders, primarily, where folks would go up and climb up in the ladders. In the Middle East, there's still a lot of folks that will climb the palm trees. They use almost like a big strap. But here we've become slightly more technologically advanced where we have big reach lifts that lift us up into the palm trees to work them, which is kind of the beginning processes of growing dates because we spend all year growing this one crop and then to harvest them. Well, I don't know about you, Pat. This is so fascinating and it's made my mouth water for a date shake, which you're famous for here. I am looking for a date shake. Whoa, look at this, wow. So where can our viewers get more information, Mark? They can go to californiadates.com and learn a whole ton more about the California dates and the growers and California Date Month, along with recipes, information, sign up for our newsletter. There's all kinds of really, really awesome things on that particular website or follow us on social media at Dates Are Great, at Dates Are Great. I love it. Well, here's to you. Here's to October, the month of fabulous Coachella Valley dates. Cheers. I hope you enjoyed that episode of Pat Pattison's Best of California. And the next time you're in a grocery store, think about the people who feed us, big and small family farms. See you next time. I'm Pat Pattison and I love California. Join us next week for another journey as we explore the natural wonders, food hotspots and hidden gem destinations of our golden state. Don't forget to like our Facebook and YouTube pages and tell us if you're the best and we may come cover you. That's Pat Pattison's Best of California.