‘Cooking a Summer Bounty’ online class with chef Janos Wilder


August 3, 2021
By Matt Sterner

"After a month of life-giving rains, the desert is offering up its bountiful gifts."

Summer is in full swing so let your cooking skills thrive, too.

Chef Janos Wilder is teaming up with the San Xavier Coop Farm for the “Cooking a Summer Bounty” online class from 10 a.m. – noon on Saturday, August 14.

Executive chef Janos Wilder at Downtown Kitchen + Cocktails (Credit: Jackie Tran)
(Credit: Jackie Tran)

It’s the fourth class in the “Summer Monsoon: Desert Senses Awake” series of workshops presented by the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill. Don’t worry if you’ve missed any of the past classes because there’s still time to dust off your skills and join the upcoming lesson.

In this particular class, chef Wilder will be demonstrating how to create some modern dishes consisting of wild and ancient ingredients, as well as the “bounty of Tucson’s summer gardens.”

In other words, you’ll learn about the diversity of cacti fruits including cholla buds, juice of the prickly pear, and bahidaj sitol — the rare syrup that’s made from saguaro fruit.

The dishes will also be based on flour that’s ground from mesquite beans and verdolagas that grow wild in Tucson washes once monsoon rains barrel through.

Prickly Pears
Prickly Pears (Credit: Jackie Tran)

Tickets are $45 per person and that includes six months of access to the recording and other resources from the workshop.

During the online class, Wilder will be joined by Maryia Miles of San Xavier Coop Farms for a discussion about the cultural importance of desert food plants. To top it all off, you’ll also be able to join the live question and answer session along with a virtual tour of the farm fields of San Xavier Coop Farm and the Mission Gardens.

For more information, visit eventbrite.com. 

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