Why There Are at Least 50 People Behind Blue Hill at Stone Barns’s Potato Pizza

“Everyone Who Made This Happen” takes a look at the outsize teams of artists and creative types it often takes to produce a single work.

Number of people involved: At least 50, including the potato breeders at Cornell University and over 20 cheese makers.

Time from conception to being on the menu: Five years.

One evening in July 2018, at the end of a long dinner service at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the influential farm-to-table restaurant in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., less than 30 miles north of New York City, a hungry Dan Barber grabbed a boiled potato off a shelf in the back of the kitchen. This was no mere potato, though, but an experiment: a trial variety named NY162 that he had never tasted before. “I was on the way out to my car when I took a bite, and I stopped dead,” says the 54-year-old chef. It had the sweetness of a plantain and the texture of a yam, and it propelled him back into the kitchen to tell the cooks to try it, too.

American potatoes are generally divided into two categories: processing potatoes, which become chips and fries, and table potatoes, or those found at the grocery store. The former need to be high in starch but low in glucose and fructose so that they don’t turn brown when fried; the latter need to taste and look good. “It’s human nature — if I’m buying produce, I’m looking for the pretty stuff,” says Walter De Jong, the potato breeder at Cornell University who, along with his crew of nine scientists, developed the NY162 and delivered clones of it to various Northeastern potato chip factories. He also sent some to Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Ultimately, the NY162 didn’t pass muster as a so-called chipper, but Barber’s enthusiasm for it revolutionized De Jong’s program — if he thought an ugly potato was delicious, maybe consumers could be convinced — and made a star ingredient out of something that, but for the chef’s intervention, might have gone straight to the compost heap.

Ever since, the Stone Barns farmers have grown potatoes originally intended to be chippers in their vegetable plots. Clones of another trial variety from Cornell called NY173 (similarly dry in texture, and with a richness that makes loads of butter gratuitous) feature prominently in a potato pizza for which they’re prepared two ways: sliced thinly to make a crispy, chiplike base, and blended and whipped with cheese. It’s a dish that has appeared, sometimes with NY173s and sometimes with other varieties, at the restaurant periodically over the past six years, and one that, in its own small way, makes a case for breaking down barriers — especially between breeders and chefs — in what Barber sees as our overly siloed food system. Before service, Camilla Fuller, one of the restaurant’s line cooks, peels some 25 of the NY173 potatoes at a time (enough for about 18 servings). The chef Nick Hukezalie slices and forms the crust using other NY173s fermented by Kylie Millar, the sous-chef, and Fuller makes the purée with Cheddar from Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont and Parmesan from Sartori in Wisconsin, as well as the toppings of Montauk clams and a mash of Sweet Garleek, the garlic-leek hybrid developed by Row 7 Seed Company, another of Barber’s ventures. The dish, like all the others at his restaurants, is meant to emphasize its elements’ origins and the interconnectedness of all things, and this is true even of the sturdy black porcelain plate on which it’s served. Its unglazed surface slowly wears away over time — reminding its maker, the artist Gregg Moore, of the geological cycle in which stone and other matter are broken down into soil.

Digital tech: Stephen McGinn. Photo assistant: Lucy Krebsbach. Prop stylist: Suea