Earth to Table dinners at WYLD restaurant celebrate the season’s bounty at The Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch

Chef Jasper Schneider feels like a kid in the candy store each week when he gets the list of produce available from Austin Farms and figures out how he is going to incorporate the freshest ingredients into a farm to table dining experience for his guests.  

“I just love getting the list and seeing how much it can change each week, from the variety of tomatoes, corn and peaches, and now with the weather getting rainier and cooler we’re starting to see more apples, and each week it changes,” said Schneider, who is the executive chef at The Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch.

For the past seven summers, Schneider has hosted Earth to Table dinners at WYLD, The Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch’s signature restaurant. The dinner is hosted at a long dining table outdoors if weather permits or indoors if the weather doesn’t cooperate.

“Longer tables are always better. I like the communal dining aspect because it sparks conversation and I always say food comforts people, everything happens around food and a table,” Schneider said. “You converse with your family and friends around a table, and that’s when you get the time to download and express things. And you can even meet some new people at a communal table. It’s a shared experience.”

WYLD’s Earth to Table dinner series is a celebration of seasonal flavors crafted exclusively from the freshest produce grown at Austin Farms. Schneider said they always start the meal out with three vegetables and for the Aug. 27 dinner they served a tomato peach salad with blueberry vinaigrette, zucchini salad with herb vinaigrette and fried green beans.

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“As a child I would eat green beans raw, but why not fry them? That’s a southern thing, right? That went with the theme of this meal, so we fried them in poblano aioli with poblanos from Austin Farms.

The skillet cornbread served with honey butter was very fragrant with the homegrown corn, jalapeno peppers and honey straight from Austin Farms as well.

“For the August 20 Earth to Table dinner, the focus was on tomatoes, for the August 27 meal it was all about the peppers. We played with a barbecue theme with the chili peppers and different items that week. We picked two proteins and built around that. So, I’ve had short ribs in a smoker for hours and we made a rub for the chicken with guajillo peppers and all these different flavors and added a chunky tomatillo salsa to it.”

Schneider loves to get his staff involved and asked one of his chefs from Texas what she’d serve considering the menu they were working with.

“She said, ‘Pickles, pickled jalapenos, pickled carrots, pickled onions,” so that’s why we served basically a pickle jar with those items to the cut the fat of the short rib,” Schneider said.

The main course was rounded out with skillet baked beans with hatch green chili and smoked bacon and mac n’ cheese. Peaches were still in season, so chef made a peach sundae for dessert.  

Schneider has enjoyed developing a relationship with Austin Farms.

“Seven years ago, I met one of the brothers at the Minturn Market. I said, ‘Hey, do you do wholesale?’ and he took my card and we got in touch and it was funny at first because, and the family jokes about it now, but at the time he said, ‘It might take a little bit of time to set you up as a vendor’ and the grandmother said, ‘It’s the Ritz-Carlton. I think we’ll be just fine,’ and we’ve been working with them ever since,” Schneider said.

Austin Farms provides fresh produce for The Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch from late June until mid-December when the hotel receives the last root vegetable delivery two weeks before Christmas.

“We just love working with this family farm in Paonia, in southwestern Colorado, about two-and-a-half hours from here, and farming has been in their blood for many generations,” Schneider said. “Now, we collaborate on a lot of things, we’ll ask if they can grow this or that and they always say ‘we’ll try.'”

The Earth to Table dinner series is a way for Schneider, his culinary crew and diners to honor the farmers, the land and the seasonal flavors.

“This dining experience is a way to pay tribute to not only those who grow it, but also those family, friends and community members who come together and support us every year,” Schneider said.

The chef mentioned that apples, pears and melons might be popping up on that list he gets from Austin Farms in the near future, so look for those items to be creatively woven into the menu. The Earth to Table dinner series is held on Wednesdays and only goes through Sept. 10. Contact RCBGdining@rtizcarlton.com, call 970-343-1066 or go to OpenTable.com to get a reservation.