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Podcast: Sangre Celestial
Episode:

Alvaro Bautista grows his dream dates
Category: Arts
Duration: 00:00:00
Publish Date: 2025-09-12 19:00:00
Description: Dates are a unique crop. "It's a pretty intense process," says Alvaro Bautista of Bautista Family Organic Dates in Mecca, "but at the end, it's so lovely to bring them to the market and see my customers enjoy them like I do." Barhi dates, which can be enjoyed at different stages of ripeness, are ready for sale at the farmers market. Photo by Laryl Garcia/KCRW From when they bloom to when they're harvested, it takes about seven months. "It's almost like a baby. You have to really take care of it — dethorning, pollination, pruning. It takes quite a bit of your time, almost year-round." When dates bloom, they look like little grapes. Palmeros have to climb the tall date trees and put a paper bag around the young dates. They also have to extract date pollen from the males and spray it on the females. All dates have to be hand-pollinated. Farmer Alvaro Bautista stands in front of his date palm trees in Mecca. Photo courtesy of Alvaro Bautista. Once they start getting soft and you can see through the bags, palmeros climb up the trees once more and start harvesting them. "We try to get them as juicy as possible. We don't cut everything at the same time we wait and wait," Alvaro says. At Redbird in Downtown LA, pastry chef Ligia Rossi is using Alvaro's dates in a sticky toffee pudding. For her sticky toffee pudding, Ligia says, "I just put the dates on the processor with sugar and some butter and some flavor, and then I just added the eggs, little by little, and then some of the AP flour or Sonoran flour in the pans, and then just mix all together and bake it." Pastry chef Ligia Rossi's sticky toffee pudding at Redbird. Photo courtesy of Ligia Rossi.
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