9/28 Chef’s Collaborative – Boulder Creek from St. Julian Hotel

By Chad Pettrone
3 October, 2014
No Comments

What a pleasure to take out a group of Chef’s to my local waters. We started at the St. Julian Hotel and walked across Canyon Blvd to Boulder’s Central Park where we practiced some fly casting as well as fished Boulder Creek.

We split into a couple groups, and with the help of guides Chris Eussen http://ceflyfishing.com/ and Bruning Rangel of Rocky Range Outfitters our Chef’s got right into catching fish.

After fishing for a couple of hours on the catch and release waters of Boulder Creek we walked across Arapahoe Blvd to Boulder’s historic trout hatchery to talk about the differences between farmed and wild fish. Chef’s are used to serving trout on the menu, but it would not be a sustainable item to have WILD trout on the menu. If Boulder was to harvest the trout from it’s creek to serve the needs of the town, we would be out of catchable fish in less than 1 weeks time. In order to maintain trout on the menu, it is necessary to have trout farms. We had some great discussions at the fish nursery as to the importance of knowing your farmer, because the details of water, feed, and waste are important in any farm.

We finished our farmed vs wild field trip with a detailed conversation about saltwater aquaculture and the complexities surrounding this growing industry. Patrick from Open Blue cobia was our guest speaker and he share with us the unique farming techniques of deep-water closed pen saltwater aquaculture. Every type of farming has an environmental impact, and it is important that we are open to new techniques that are working towards minimizing the impacts on our ecosystems.

Chef Dakota of Centro made us an outstanding lunch with starters of chipotle popcorn, avocado salsa and raw cobia over avocado with a fresh pepper aioli main coarse of cobia Veracruz and for dessert sorbet followed by a banana chocolate dish that I didn’t get the name of because I was eating it : )