We invite local, regional and national chefs, restaurateurs, cookbook authors, educators, nutritionists and other notables in the culinary world to demonstrate and sample simple recipes that utilize seasonal and locally available market products.
Since we founded our first market at Dupont Circle in 1997, our Chef at Market program has introduced new recipes and ways to use market foods at home to FRESHFARM customers. It has also exposed many chefs and local businesses to our markets and our farmers in hopes of forging strong community relationships.
In 2019, there were over 60 chef demos across all FRESHFARM markets.
Are you interested in Chef at Market?
Because Chef at Market is an educational program, the first goal is to teach, via cooking demonstration, using seasonal, local ingredients of your choosing. To that end, we ask that all participating chefs:
- Use as close to 100% local, seasonal ingredients as possible. Get inspired with our seasonality calendar.
- Engage with and educate our shoppers about the dish being prepared. We find that preparing the dish on-site is the best way to ensure a high level of engagement with shoppers, thus allowing our chef partners to maximize their time with us at market. But for chefs that prefer to prepare their dish ahead of time, we recommend putting out bowls with some of the ingredients to encourage shoppers to participate and ask questions.
- Provide a recipe for the dish being prepared. We require that chefs send us their recipe, in a format that is easy to follow and scaled for the average home cook, two weeks in advance. We provide copies of the recipe at the demo.
If you are interested in participating using this approach, send an email to chef@freshfarm.org and we will work with you to schedule your demo.
Are you a cookbook (or other food/agriculture-related book) author on a book tour?
We would love to host your book signing at market. We encourage, but do not require, you to accompany your book signing with a cooking demo or samples. If interested, please email communications@freshfarm.org for more information and to schedule.