Featuring Tournant

Known for their seasonal farm-to-fire cooking, Tournant’s approach celebrates time, place, and purpose. Guided by the seasons and local bounty from the land, we invite you to learn more about them below as we sat down with Mona & Jaret to bring you a bit of Pacific Northwest inspiration.

Mona and Jaret from Tournant Foraging in the Colombia Gorge — *Photo by Eva Kosmas Flores*

Cultivating Moments

You love to create experiences where guests can slow down, connect, and savor the moment. What is the best way to achieve that?

Whenever we can, we like to cook and dine outdoors. Specializing in live-fire cooking means we can create a meal almost anywhere, from meadows to mountaintops, and being outside in nature engages all your senses in such a unique way. We love how a meal sourced, cooked, served and enjoyed with care and intention creates meaningful connections between guests, their surroundings, the food on their plates, and the hands that have grown or prepared it.

Springtime Inspiration

Tournant creates food guided by the seasons. What do you enjoy cooking this time of year?

Spring is such a vibrant season in which to cook. After a long winter of heavy foods and hearty flavors, spring produce is an uplifting balm for the spirit, bursting with freshness, lightness, and hope. We embrace everything verdant and green this time of year, such as slender asparagus, sweet peas, tender shoots and sprouts, green garlic, and emerald fava beans nestled in their velvet pods. It’s also a glorious time for wild and foraged foods like stinging nettles, fiddlehead ferns, ramps and the season’s first morel mushrooms.

Cheers to That

What is your favorite PNW food and wine pairing?

We’d have to go with briny Pacific oysters and a crisp, cool-climate Oregon Chardonnay. The perfect merroir-meets-terroir pairing!

Snappy Spring Salada from Tournant — *Photo by @kylesovadaphotography⁠*

Sneak Peek

Can you share details of a course you will feature at the Earth Day Dinner?

We always like to start our meals with a salad featuring the best of the season’s ingredients. A snappy salad similar to this one from our Spring Farm to Fire cookbook will surely grace the table; discover the recipe here.

Expert Advice

Tournant specializes in open-fire cooking, events and classes. What are your go-to tools for open-fire cooking at home?

Although open-fire cooking can seem intimidating, at its core it is mostly about smoke, fire and time. Many complex-tasting dishes can be made with simple tools. Our essentials would include a heavy cast iron skillet, long-handled tongs—ideally two pairs, one for handling food from the flames and another for moving coals around—and a footed Dutch oven for nestling directly into the coals. Start your fire with dry, well-seasoned hardwood or natural lump charcoal (avoid briquettes loaded with chemicals at all costs!) and for safety, always have on hand a fire extinguisher or 5 gallon bucket of water, a shovel, heavy-duty fire gloves, and a stack of work towels for handling hot items.

Click here to learn more about Tournant’s Farm to Fire cookbooks and favorite fire cooking tools and equipment.

Tastemaker Series