Eden: A Guided Tour | Back to Nature in Hawaii
A culinary explorer on Hawaii's Big Island signs up for three agri-tourism adventures and bites into her first jaboticaba. By Kate Sekules
"If you go hungry out here, it's because you're not paying attention," declares Kristi Clay of Wailea Agricultural Group, as she pilots her battered yellow Gator truck past stands of palms and of huge heliconias laden with waxy scarlet blooms. Clay wears several hats at the farm; today she's playing tour guide. "Here!" she hollers, tossing a small tree into my lap. "Have some lychees!" Well, call me deprived, but I've never eaten an entire branch of my favorite prohibitively expensive fruit before. Nor, for that matter, have I bitten into a freshly shucked heart of palm, tasted an a'a banana or picked a Sexy Pink, but all this and more I am about to experience in a sampling of three wildly contrasting versions of the fiftieth state's next big thing: agri-tourism

Here on the Big Island (which its residents invariably refer to as Paradise), agri-tourism does not mean shoveling manure at dawn or throwing your back out with a hoe. No, it's about getting a privileged glimpse of Hawaii's agricultural revolution, and then cooking with—or simply feasting on—its products. And, in every sense, the Big Island's products are growing.

Case in point: Kristi Clay located the lychees in Wailea's mixed-fruit orchards. Not mixed peach and apple and pear; mixed longan, lemon, lime and durian, as well as the spiny vermilion egg-like thing that Clay next hands me. (And I thought by now I'd seen every fruit.) It's a pulasan—a softer, juicier, tarter, bigger lychee—and it's absolutely delicious. Much of the produce here, Clay says, including pulasans, goes wholesale to local distributors because it's too difficult to market on the mainland, where it would fetch a higher price. But Wailea has found a mainland market for fresh hearts of palm, its most novel product. Wailea has sold them very successfully ever since owners Michael Crowell and Lesley Hill first harvested them from the peach palms they'd grown from seeds that they'd brought back from Latin America. "We still have to get seeds from abroad," Clay explains, piloting the Gator through next year's crop, "because we don't have the pollinator here on the Big Island. Nobody knows what it is!"

Peach palms are not a fraction as flashy as Wailea's other big crop: cut flowers, including spectacular yellow caribaeas, torch ginger, tea leaf and the drooping, foot-long Sexy Pinks. But they're still a fascinating food. After hand harvesting, workers strip off the fronds (leaving them in the fields for mulch), revealing the stalk, from which they remove the lily white sheath (it looks exactly like plastic pipe from Home Depot), then peel off a few more layers, like lemongrass—and there's the heart. It feels silky, like sandblasted glass, has an intricate cross section, like marrowbone, and is crunchy, sweet and infinitely delicate.

"In our culinary classes," says Michele Gamble, "we cook the base like bamboo shoot, or skillet-fry the heart with breakfast sausage, or grill it in the sheath, which steams it." Michele and her husband, John, own the Palms Cliff House, a year-old deluxe inn on the island's Hamakua (east) Coast; it's one of Michele's culinary farm-tour weekends, offered once a month, that I'm sampling today. (Wailea is a site her tour guests get to know well—it's not otherwise open to the public.) The Palms Cliff's cooking classes, taught by three local women—a Cuban, a Californian and a Kona native (they all emphasize Pacific Rim dishes, but they're willing to branch out on request)—are one of their weekends' best features. These lessons are so informal that they resemble the kind of parties where everyone congregates in the kitchen—and it's some kitchen. The Gambles fell in love-at-first-sight with the house only two years ago, as vacationing Denver-ites. A rambling white Hawaiian-plantation-style Victorian, it seems to float on the cliff edge, giving the large lanai, or veranda, where most meals are served, a trillion-dollar view of Pohakumano Bay—especially in whale season. "Some days you hear rumbling," Michele says, "and it's whales rubbing along the rocks. They birth here too. A female will lie there in the water and flap her tail, and then out flops a baby."

The Gambles have a mini farm of their own in gardens rampant with orchids, citrus, starfruit, Haden mangoes ("like footballs," Michele says), three types of avocado and several of banana, including the a'a, an albino variety once reserved for Hawaiian royalty. The inn's eight suites are easily as luxurious as those in the fanciest of the famous resorts on the opposite, Kohala (west), coast: DVD players, giant showers, fireplaces, private lanais with hot tubs, custom-made lace sheets from a 300-year-old family business near Venice and, in one room, a teak opium bed with a black-and-red silk-brocade cover that Michele made herself. Her multiple skills have fashioned a rare, inviting home, without froufrou, a richly peaceful embodiment of elusive Old Hawaii—the opposite of a resort.

 

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John Kaniukumakekai Gamble & Michele Kealaokapualokomaika'i Gamble celebrate 9 years of sharing their aloha with guests.

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