Sprouting with Chef Dean Thomas
Inspired by his father’s passion for gardening, Chef Dean Thomas of the New England Culinary Institute offers students hands-on experience in his herb garden. Sowing and harvesting his own herbs is part of the pride Thomas puts onto each plate.
October/November 1999
By LAURA DAILY
Editor’s note: this is the first in a series on chefs’ herb
gardens.
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Two green thumbs and a passion for food are
essential ingredients in Dean Thomas’s garden. “My father gardened,
and he inspired me to keep my fingers in the ground,” says the
executive sous-chef at the New England Culinary Institute (NECI) in
Essex, Vermont.
Thomas, who has been a chef for twenty-three years, previously
cooked—and grew his own herbs—at Westin Resorts in Tucson,
Arizona, and Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and at Caneel Bay
in the U.S. Virgin Islands. At NECI, an accredited cooking school,
he oversees the food and beverage operations of the on-campus Inn
at Essex and offers 100 student chefs per year firsthand experience
in growing fresh herbs.
When Thomas moved to Vermont with his wife, Nicole, and their
three children four years ago, he discovered that NECI’s kitchen
garden was a small plot of poor soil on the shady side of a
building. He staked out a vegetable and herb garden in an open
field about 100 yards from the kitchen door. “We had to till the
soil and remove all the high field grass and rocks,” Thomas
recalls. He added compost made from kitchen scraps and buried fish
heads to improve the fertility of the site’s clay soil.
This past summer, Thomas added a 20-by-20-foot bed devoted
solely to herbs. Designed to resemble a traditional English herb
garden, the bed is located between two dining areas so guests can
watch as white-hatted students and chefs harvest thyme and
basil.
Chiles and sweet and ‘Dark Opal’ basils line the stone path that
winds through the herb garden from its trellised entrance to a
stone wall at the opposite end. Thyme and rosemary grow toward the
end of the path, and chives are a mass of mauve flowers in early
June. Colorful nasturtiums keep company with tarragon, sage,
thyme, cilantro, parsley, oregano, and chervil, while a few squash
plants add a vertical element against the walls of Butler’s
Restaurant.