Making the most of a farmers market forage
We call ourselves Marketplace, so part of our job is exploring how marketplaces work, in all their forms. David Brancaccio and the “Marketplace Morning Report” team set out to visit five markets, all in the near-orbit of this program’s world headquarters in Los Angeles. None are financial markets in a formal sense, but all markets are financial markets in a way, right? The goal is to learn the right and the wrong moves with an expert.
Today, a tricks of the trade harvest at the Santa Monica farmers market.
Our first stop at the farmers market, just blocks from Santa Monica Beach, is the stand of Munak Ranch. Here you’ll find tomato variety after tomato variety, shipped in about 3½ hours from Paso Robles to the north.
“There’s green zebra, red Brandywine, black Brandywine, persimmon,” says Karen Beverlin, our guide to the farmers market. “This is a pineapple. Isn’t that glorious? The interior is, like, so marbled with the yellow, orange and red.”
Beverlin knows all the moves in this market. Trick of the trade No. 1: Buy one and bite in. Or, if you have the kind of relationship Beverlin has with vendors here, they just let her taste.
“At most stands, you can sample the product. Step aside, taste it. And if you love it, then buy more, enough for the house,” she says.
Seventy-five growers have set up here on this Wednesday — public policy and their hard work in action. By the 1970s, smaller farmers couldn’t make a buck competing with Big Farm and Big Grocery. The state of California responded with a law allowing growers to kick in a percentage of sales to fund inspections that would hopefully certify the safety and source of the produce. They also were exempted from labeling and packaging rules. Farmers markets in California flourished.
Here at the market, there are crates upon crates of peaches, nectarines, eggplants and heads of green so intricate they look like undersea coral.
“The texture is so savoy, right?” Beverlin says. “They’re firm. They’re like the Thomas’ English muffins of lettuce.”
The lettuce is the work of farmer Ky Takikawa, who calls his business The Garden Of. He has a reputation for getting up every hour of the night to keep things watered just right. (We’ll get back to the importance of names of sellers in a market in a moment.)
“So if you want to keep your food dollars in your area, then a farmers market is the best way to do that,” Beverlin says.
She’s a pro shopper. Beverlin is vice president of local and specialty produce for FreshPoint Southern California and is paid to forage for restaurants and highlight unexpected fruit and vegetable treasures. She works with people like Nick Picciotto, chef de cuisine at an upscale Taiwanese restaurant in downtown LA called Kato.
“I get here at 7, 6:45 every Wednesday,” Picciotto says. “And if there’s anything on a table that I haven’t seen yet or is new coming into season, I usually go over to it, taste and buy as much as I can before everyone else gets here.”
He might not even have a recipe in mind yet, but he’s spotted something. “This is going to taste good. I want to use it. We’ll figure it out,” he says.
Next trick: Get to know your own tastebuds. Beverlin has a kind of test for this.
“If you prefer a Fuji apple to a pink lady, you like low-acid fruit,” she says. “So when you go to a peach farmer, you should say, ‘What are your low-acid varieties?’ If you love pink ladies like I love pink ladies, then when you walk up to a peach farmer or an apple farmer, ‘Where are your high-acid varieties?'”
She’s got what’s called a refractometer, a battery-powered gizmo for a numerical readout on this. But you never leave home without an acidity sensor — it’s called your tongue. And some farmers here make choosing especially easy.
Like Michael Cirone, out of See Canyon, south of San Luis Obispo.
“Either they like sweet apples or they like tart,” he says. “So here’s my tip: We line our table up from sweet to tart. So we just point and say, ‘Go that way. If you want tart, come this way.’”
There are lots of tools in Beverlin’s market cart: a folding knife for slicing off bits of produce for tasting, paper towels for the schmutz. But the big tool at all the markets we’ve visited is building relationships. Beverlin is on a first-name basis with practically every vendor, it seems. Stands here aren’t just stands — they’re businesses run by farmers who you can start to get to know. Then, over time, you forge a relationship and you’ve got your in.
“Every farm stand here, they are so welcoming to anyone walking up,” Beverlin says.
More farmers market tips from Karen Beverlin
Beverlin is working on a book about navigating farmers markets, due out in 2026. For now, though, we’ve got more of her tricks to share:
- “The way you want to store peaches on your counter is stem-side down. … It’s physics. There are multiple areas of contact points. So the weight of the peach is distributed on a wider area.” Otherwise, the peach might bruise.
- “What you want to do is, you take them home, you want to use them before they get soft. They get soft, you miss the sugar and you miss a lot of the acid because they’re both going down. Like from the minute they’re harvested, those things are going down. So you want to catch them while they’re still high enough to get the best flavor.”
- “We find that the blossom end is the sweetest end of any fruit by several degrees.” (That’s the little green bit.) “Except in watermelon, and then, of course, it’s the center.”
- “One of the important things about the farmers market for the home cook is it teaches us about seasonality. Because at the grocery store, we’re so used to seeing asparagus year-round or great tomatoes year-round. And when you come to the farmers market, you see what true seasonality is. And it’s best for our bodies and for our planet to eat in season and for our pocketbooks. When you have to have asparagus, and it’s, you know, July … or in August, you’re going to pay more than you would in the spring, when it’s actually asparagus season. So if we eat seasonally and cook seasonally, so many things fall into place.”
- “When you go to a melon stand, find someone who knows how to pick the best melons. So watermelon, you want to listen to a dull, rich, resonant thump. Not a harsh, high, sharp thump.”
- “Summer squash, look for, like, a medium size. The small size, they haven’t developed enough sugars. And the large ones can be kind of mealy, or not a great texture.”
- “There’s two things you look for with green beans. You look for it to be a little bit fuzzy. You don’t want it to be shiny. Shiny is over-mature, so the texture should be a little bit fuzzy. And … it should be straight — you shouldn’t be able to see the outline of the bean. In general, when you get that look like that, then they’re going to be not very sweet.”