Many people are obsessed with food, for better and for worse. Very few are able to take that fetish and diligently channel it to create products that become beloved by the greatest chefs in the country, setting new benchmarks for quality and sustainability. After a hiatus, Robert Rosenthal of Stone Church Farm in Rifton is back in business producing the best-tasting ducks in America, if not the world.
Rosenthal and his wife Noelia moved up from New York City and in 1984 began raising poultry at a lovely 19th-century bluestone church in Rifton that they renovated using salvaged rough-hewn barn beams. By 1986, they had stopped; the birds were noisy and kept getting flattened by the traffic on Route 213 outside their house, and unhappy neighbors complained. Rosenthal leased some land, bought some ducks at auction, and continued production, building a loyal clientele among restaurants, but it was a lot of work. Eventually, he made a deal with Mennonite farmers in Pennsylvania to raise birds according to his system, which left him free to research and market. The only problem was that he was operating under a Pennsylvania State license that forbade transporting animals out of state. Flouting this law ever more brazenly, it got to the point where an inspector urged Rosenthal to turn himself in to authorities to avoid any serious sanctions. “I was an agricultural criminal,” he says of that period. “I was arrogant, and I never said no; there were Fed Ex trucks coming and going all the time.” By 2006, the business was shut down, and Rosenthal began to plot his return to production in a sustainable (and fully legal) fashion.
Rosenthal’s driving motivation has always been to achieve the best possible flavor, and as a result he ended up raising animals in what is essentially their natural habitat. Climbing a steep stairway to a cavernous upstairs room where a pile of thick planks waits to be turned into a dining table, Rosenthal says, “We want to eat what lives where it’s happy; it’s exactly the same as for vegetables. The best food in the world has always been a result of animals raised in an environment of their choosing.” The fact that the best-tasting animals grow in the most humane and bucolic environment is hardly surprising, but it shows how far most of today’s farming has strayed from its origins. “You can’t put an animal in a cage,” he insists.
Rosenthal calls his approach “ecological food” since it begins with the land. Protecting and caring for the land lets the animals thrive: “Happy animals give back to people, both in taste and sustenance.” The public enjoys the superior quality of the food, and the farmer prospers, ensuring that the land remains agricultural. His approach gives the ducks large amounts of open space, including bodies of water, where they can eat grass, herbs, bugs, snails, frogs, and anything else they like. Any fences are to keep the predators out, not the animals in. In the last few weeks of their lives, they are given a custom blend of grain to add fat, and for the last days they come indoors to spacious, dimly lit barns to calm them and relax their muscles.
Currently, he’s working with five farms in the Finger Lakes, and visits regularly to check that all is being done exactly according to his rigorous standards. “I’m unforgiving when it comes to quality control, and I have the customers to prove it,” he says, listing the pantheon of top French chefs in America who all know him on a first-name basis. The law allows for each of his client farms to raise 20,000 of each kind of bird per year, and his sales target is 1,000 birds per week in the coming months. By November—in time for Thanksgiving—Rosenthal plans to be retailing to the public through smaller, high-quality markets around the state.
Rosenthal refers to Stone Church Farm as “first and foremost a research center.” His process begins with talking to chefs, listening to what they want but can’t find. Then he hits the books, scouring his library and the web for any relevant information not already within his capacious memory. Next he begins experimenting with breeding, feed, and different terrain until he gets the result he wants, and codifies the process in a contract with the farmers. “I’m sort of the architect [he studied architecture briefly before dropping out] with a blueprint; I bring the prototype, farmers follow it, and the result is a handmade product but made in quantity.” On average it takes him 18 months to reach a complete plan for a given animal.
Years ago, Rosenthal remembers reading about some ducks in France that were the result of random interbreeding between wild and farm birds. “They combined the best qualities of both types: the fat and mild flavor of non-flying domestics with the rich, gamy flavor of wild animals.” He made it his mission to replicate this hybrid, and began catching wild ducks in Pennsylvania and breeding them with domestic varieties. After trying countless combinations, he developed a bird that had the quality, size, and complex flavor he wanted. Soon after, while looking through a book on French food and culture, he saw a picture of his duck. He contacted the farmer mentioned in the book, sent many pictures, and it turned out that sight unseen he had exactly reproduced the Duclair duck of Normandy. Not only that, but he had done so at the time when the bird had become commercially extinct due to the difficulty of raising it.
To illustrate the uniqueness of his Duclairs, Rosenthal likes to recall a tasting with chefs Alain Ducasse and Daniel Boulud where they were served the meat cooked pink and trimmed into small pieces and they both refused to believe that it was duck. “Somewhere between veal and lamb” is how Rosenthal describes the flavor. An ingredient of this quality needs mindful cooking to do it justice. Rosenthal emphasizes the need to keep the meat pink, always erring on the side of rare, when cooking his ducks. Wes Dier is the chef-owner of The Local, a restaurant that just recently opened in Rhinebeck that serves Rosenthal’s ducks. “The taste is unparalleled. It has a different, meatier nuance—the flesh is almost purple—and you can crisp the skin without overcooking the breast.” Dier serves rare seared breast over confit made from the legs, showcasing the two best ways to eat duck.
Stone Church Farm currently sells Normandy and Duclair ducks as well as small poulard chickens with paper-thin skin and a delicate, refined flavor. During his hiatus, Rosenthal has developed models for growing lamb and foie gras. The lamb will be the famous salt marsh lamb so prized in France, where the animals graze in certain seaside areas and ingest salt along with the flavorful wild herbs of the coast, thus seasoning themselves from the inside. The foie gras will come from geese that do not need to be forcefed. It was a book on oysters that provided him an inspirational spark in both cases; the uniquely fertile properties of estuaries connected the dots between the seemingly unrelated species.
Wild geese feed heavily prior to migration, accumulating fat in their livers; foie gras originated as the result of this normal part of the life cycle of migratory birds. Gavage (force-feeding) is simply an industrial exaggeration of what the birds do naturally. Rosenthal’s point is that by working more closely with the birds—letting them live the way they would in the wild, with minor interventions like giving them lots of grain when they start to naturally fatten themselves—they will taste extraordinary and not require any manhandling. “An animal raised in this particular way can be the greatest food you’ve ever eaten,” he says, citing as proof a Spanish goose farmer who, using this method, recently won a prestigious French award for the best foie gras in the world. Rosenthal has found the sites, knows the breeds, and is ready to go. He has also begun working with a Canadian breeder of rare chickens to develop eggs that he describes as being “so good, it’s like eating an egg for the first time.”
As a result of his stubbornly unorthodox career trajectory, Rosenthal is hitting his stride at an age where most people are retiring. As a result, he is developing a franchising model that will allow farms around the country to raise animals according to his stringent guidelines and then sell them with a Stone Church Farm label. This will allow the business to grow and be sustainable moving forward. When Rosenthal started, he says, local foods had no cachet at all. Now the world has risen to meet him, and his integrated methods and peerless products represent the expert synthesis of green and gourmet. Good duck is one of the most pleasurable of foods to begin with, and when bred and raised to Rosenthal’s near-manic standards, it becomes lavishly luxe. “I have found my place in the world,” he says, smiling: neither farmer nor chef, but a producer who shares the knowledge, standards, and palate of the very best in both fields.
Stone Church Farm poultry is served at many restaurants in the region, including: The Local, Rhinebeck; Beso, New Paltz; the Rhinecliff Hotel; Red Onion, Woodstock; Le Chambord, Hopewell Junction; Red Devon, Bangall; and at the restaurants of the CIA in Hyde Park.
This article appears in October 2010.
