Edible Notables

Edible Honors And the winner is…

Edible Monterey Bay readers choose their 2013 Local Heroes

By Deborah Luhrman

Our most sincere congratulations go out to the passionate and visionary winners of our 2013 Local Hero Awards. In online voting, readers of Edible Monterey Bay selected six businesses and two nonprofit organizations as the very best examples of our vibrant local food movement here on the Central Coast.

“I’m honored and a bit surprised,” says Kendra Baker, the chef behind the popular Penny Ice Creamery and the beachfront Picnic Basket café. “The Penny encompasses more than just ice cream; it’s very chef-oriented, thoughtful, hand-crafted food,” she adds.

Baker is a classically trained chef who got her start at Gabriella Café and has worked as a pastry chef at Manresa in Los Gatos. The businesses, co-owned with business partner Zachary Davis, are run like fine dining restaurants. Seasonal produce for ice cream and salads is sourced directly from local farms, and The Picnic Basket features ingredients from other Santa Cruz food artisans—like Companion Bakeshop bread, meats from el Salchichero and Verve coffee. Runners up were: Brendan Jones of Lokal in Carmel Valley and Jason Giles of Jack’s at the Portola Hotel in Monterey.

In the category of best farm/farmer, Tom Broz and Live Earth Farm tied for top honors with Jamie Collins and her Serendipity Farms—the second year in a row that Collins was selected as a Local Hero.

“It’s nice to be recognized as a significant part of this growing movement,” says Broz, “but heroes are only made by their network of supporters. Then there is the land and the workers.” He started the Watsonville-based CSA 18 years ago, and Live Earth now includes an important educational component that hosts 1,400 children on the farm each year. “I think farms can be a vector or a catalyst in connecting people to the issues we all face together,” he says.

Collins—who together with Broz formed a coalition of farmers supporting GMO labeling—shared the award. “I feel really loved by the readers and grateful that people appreciate the farm,” says Collins, who also writes the What’s in Season column for Edible Monterey Bay.

She started her Monterey farm 12 years ago and has a well-established CSA in the Monterey/Salinas area. This season she plans to add U-Pick sessions every Saturday beginning with strawberries on May 4 and moving through raspberries, tomatoes and pumpkins. Runners up were: Jeff Larkey of Route 1 Farms and Joe Schirmer of Dirty Girl Produce, both in Santa Cruz.

When it comes to shopping for great local foods, New Leaf Community Markets came out on top in our Local Hero polling. “I’m quite flattered that Edible Monterey Bay readers selected us,” says owner Scott Roseman. “I think readers care that New Leaf Community Markets is a value-driven business that’s true to its mission to nourish and sustain our community.” In addition to selling many foods that originate locally, New Leaf continues to honor the commitment Roseman made when starting the business 27 years ago to give 10% of the profits back to the community. New Leaf currently has seven stores in our area, with an eighth store set to open in Pleasanton in May. (Read about the evolution of New Leaf on page 42.) Runners up were: Staff of Life in Santa Cruz and Whole Foods, with locations in Santa Cruz, Capitola and Monterey.

Tabitha Stroup of Friend In Cheeses Jam Co. was voted best food artisan.

“I’m super honored, tripped out and blown away,” says the creative jam and condiment maker. “I think the attraction for the public is that I am guided by Mother Nature and believe in representing, protecting and supporting what comes from this region.”

Stroup has been a professional chef for 22 years, including a stint at the now-closed Theo’s in Soquel—a garden restaurant that was ahead of its time. She started her Santa Cruz-based company just two years ago and has gained a loyal following for amazing flavors that include Forbidden Fruit Marmalade spiced up with a hint of ghost chile and Salted Watermelon. Runners up were: Kendra Baker of The Penny Ice Creamery and Kristen and Lynette Cederquist of Serendipity Saucy Spreads.

In the beverage category, newcomer Sante Adairius Rustic Ales was selected top artisan. Brewer Tim Clifford had been making beer

2013 Edible Monterey Bay Local Heroes

Best Farm/Farmer: (tie) Jamie Collins Serendipity Farms, Monterey

Best Beverage Artisan:

Tim Clifford and Adair Paterno

Sante Adairius Rustic Ales, Capitola Best Chef/Restaurant:

Kendra Baker

The Penny Ice Creamery and The Picnic Basket, Santa Cruz

Best Farm/Farmer: (tie) Tom Broz Live Earth Farm, Watsonville

Best Food Retailer: Scott Roseman New Leaf Community Markets, Santa Cruz, Capitola, Boulder Creek and Felton

Best Nonprofit: (tie)

Darrie Ganzhorn

Homeless Garden Project, Santa Cruz Best Food Artisan:

Tabitha Stroup

Friend In Cheeses Jam Co., Capitola

Best Nonprofit: (tie) Willy Elliott-McCrea Second Harvest Food Bank, Watsonville

at home, but opened Sante Adairius in a small Capitola warehouse just nine months ago. “We strive to give an experience that is all about the beer first. We’re totally obsessed,” he says.

His wife and co-owner Adair Paterno says, “I think we fill a niche in the Monterey Bay Area for experimental, barrel-aged, Belgian-style ales and Tim is so passionate. I think that comes across to our customers.” Although the “tasting room” is hard to find and open just four nights a week, it’s always thronged with the local beer cognoscenti. And it doesn’t hurt that the brewery’s “Love’s Amour” ale took home first prize in the West Coast Barrel-Aged Beer Festival last November. Runners up were: Kate Appel of 3 of a Kind in Pacific Grove and Kevin Clark of Peter B’s Brewpub at the Portola Hotel in Monterey.

Santa Cruz’ Homeless Garden Project and Second Harvest Food Bank tied in voting for best nonprofit. “Our success depends on the community, so we are really grateful for the love and support,” says Darrie Ganzhorn, executive director of the Homeless Garden Project. She has been with the project for 22 years and sees it as a good way of combining vocational training for those who need it with a sustainable urban food system. “There’s so much going on here, I’m just hooked!” she says.

Second Harvest CEO Willy Elliot-McCrea says the organization is emphasizing fruits and vegetables like never before. “Cheap food and lack of access to fresh produce is what’s driving hunger and obesity here on the Central Coast,” he says, adding that 62.3% of all the food distributed last year was fresh produce—the highest percentage in the nation! Additionally, Second Harvest has created a group of 250 peer-to-peer nutrition ambassadors to teach cooking and help people understand the links between good eating and good health. “If we want to have a healthy and vibrant community,” he says, “we have to have healthy food.” Runners up were: Live Earth Farm Discovery Program and MEarth in Carmel.

Local Hero Awards are presented by Edible magazines across the country as a way to recognize local food producers and purveyors for their exceptional contributions to their communities. The winners are determined by readers through an online vote.

Edible Notables Bantam

A chef comes home to roost

By Amber Turpin

Santa Cruz is an urban city with a small town mentality. That means neighborhood friendliness and loyal local support—but also a generally casual dining scene. So it used to be the case that most chefs with big ambitions would just take the short trip up to San Francisco and explore more sophisticated opportunities. But now, the opposite is true; trained chefs from the city are choosing to move back down the coast and set up shop here in our little beach town. Lucky us! The newest delicious example is Bantam Restaurant.

Owners Sarah and Ben Sims have struck upon a perfect formula, creating a space on Santa Cruz’s Westside that with its lofty exposed steel beams, glossy polished cement floors and Mugnaini woodfired oven is sleek and industrial, yet warm and inviting. Most importantly, they are crafting food that people want to eat over and over again.

The couple met eight years ago at Ristorante Avanti, a Santa Cruz institution for seasonal, Cal-Ital offerings. Ben was the chef, blending his Chez Panisse training into the Avanti kitchen while Sarah worked the front of the house. (Ben attended cooking school in San Francisco and in addition to cooking at Chez Panisse and Avanti, worked in restaurants in London and Tuscany, as well as San Francisco’s Michelin-starred Acquerello. Sarah most recently ran the front of the house at La Posta.) They married and eventually started tinkering with the idea of opening something of their own.

After more than two years of wending their way through financing, location-scouting, city approvals and construction, the Westside restaurant finally opened in November and quickly became packed every night.

While it was always more of Ben’s personal dream to have his own restaurant, both owners say they love working together and find their shared aesthetic and propensity to excel at different things create an ideal business partnership.

Ben is also quick to give props to his mighty kitchen staff. “I am continually blown away at the food our chef Melissa Reitz is creating. She and Troy (Wilcox) decided to move down here [from San Francisco], and we really couldn’t do it without them.” It is no small thing to land such talent, as both chefs having a long list of cooking experience at some of the Bay Area’s highest caliber locations. Chef Reitz has worked at Michelin-starred Quince, as well as Pizzaiolo and Zuni Café; most recently, she was sous chef at Oakland’s Camino. Wilcox, the restaurant’s pizzaiolo, or pizza-maker, previously practiced his craft at Boot and Shoe Service and Pizzaiolo in Oakland and Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco.

But back to the food, which is presented as a changing daily menu utilizing the area’s pristine local bounty. The pizza is astounding, although Ben humbly calls it “pretty standard Neapolitan.” The perfect chew and yeasty complexity of the charred crust is credited to the prefermented Biga starter that Bantam has been feeding since the very beginning. The in-house sensibility continues with canning projects, evident with a simple glance at their pantry shelf, so you can expect to sample some of Reitz’s exciting fermented concoctions soon. Just remember to go early—while you can get a table.

Ben and Sarah Sims and their stinging nettle soup and pizza.

Amber Turpin is a baker, homesteader and food writer based in Ben Lomond.

Bantam • 1010 Fair Ave. • 831.420.0101 www.bantam1010.com

Edible notables COOK. REAL FOOD. FROM SCRATCH.

In his forthcoming book, Michael Pollan celebrates cooking and why it matters

Review by Kristina Sepetys

Michael Pollan’s work has profoundly changed the way we think about our industrial food system, the behemoth that produces the foods found in conventional grocery stores and restaurants. But Pollan is not just a critic. To help people find more healthful and sustainable alternatives, he’s offered the ordinary eater useful tips to help fix the situation or at least avoid the bad stuff. Recall his advice from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Or from Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual: “If it came from a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don’t.” In his latest book, Pollan offers more simple, corrective advice: Cook. Real food. From scratch. “Not every day, not every meal, but more often than we do, whenever we can.”

In Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Pollan turns his journalist’s sensibility and straightforward, thoughtful analysis to how we transform plants and animals into meals and why cooking matters. He maintains that recovering cooking from the industrial factories may be the single most important step anyone can take to help rebuild a healthier, more sustainable American food system. If, as he’s argued in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and elsewhere, the industrial food system obscures important relationships with the ecological and natural world, then cooking is the way to restore them.

The book is organized around the four elements: fire, water, air, and earth, which correspond to four basic ways to transform raw materials into nutritious, tasty things to eat. Fire is linked to grilling and barbecuing, water to cooking with liquid and braising, air to baking bread and earth to fermenting, cheesemaking and brewing. Pollan joins barbecue pit masters at the spit in North Carolina and New York, kneads with bread makers at Tartine in San Francisco, learns to put up sauerkraut with fermenter extraordinaire Sandor Katz, and observes the Cheese Nun (and microbiologist) Mother Noëlla Marcellino as she creates a raw milk, fungal-ripened cheese using techniques practiced in the Auvergne region of France since the 17th century. The experiences teach him the basic skills to transform meat, grains, fruits, vegetables and liquids into healthful, nutritious meals.

His explorations in cooking take him all over the world, but there’s no place like home, particularly when your home is in Berkeley. Northern California residents will recognize many of the specialists Pollan works with, like Chad Robertson of Tartine Bakery, Joe

Vanderliet, the proprietor of Certified Foods and the miller for Community Grains and Alex Hozven of Berkeley’s Cultured Pickle Shop.

Cooked is a personal story, a love letter to cooking and shared meals in Pollan’s own life, and an inspiration to reconsider its place in our own. Using a wealth of historical detail, literary examples, artisan profiles, scientific study, personal anecdote and references ranging from Homer to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pollan explains how cooking knits us in a web of social and ecological relationships. He’s funny, too, like when he describes his family’s experiment with a “Microwave Night,” which turns out to be a surprisingly expensive and not particularly efficient or enjoyable every-man-for-himself foray down the aisles of the local Safeway.

For all the waxing enthusiastic about long hours in the kitchen chopping, preparing and putting up, he’s also realistic. Pollan recognizes that in many homes it’s difficult, if not impossible, to work this sort of cooking into the rhythms of daily life, in large measure because “time is the missing ingredient in our recipes—and in our lives.” Either the demands of life are such that we just don’t have time or even interest in cooking, or we consider our opportunity costs and find we’re financially better off to work and earn a wage and avail ourselves of inexpensive prepared food than to spend the time cooking ourselves using fresh, whole ingredients.

His advice? A return to the communal cooking of generations ago, when families, friends or groups of women would gather together to share the labor, and the fruits, of food preparation. Indeed, one of the greatest pleasures of cooking, Pollan claims, is getting to be a part of the spontaneous communities that spring up and gather around these special interests, creating intimacy and connection.

If you’re inspired by Pollan’s experiments and tempted to try some of your own, he includes four basic recipes, each illustrating one of the elements he profiles: pork shoulder BBQ (fire); pasta with meat sauce (water); whole-wheat country loaf bread (air); and sauerkraut (earth).

Cooking converts plants and animals into edible, appetizing meals. The process, Pollan claims, changes us, too, from consumers into producers. Regularly exercising the simple skills described in the book to produce some of the most basic necessities of life— bread, fermented foods, braised meats—can increase self-reliance and freedom, reduce dependence on large corporations to cook for us and build community, creating the possibility for living a more healthy, happy and nourishing life.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation By Michael Pollan The Penguin Press, April 2013

Kristina Sepetys has written on food, farming, economics, and environmental policy issues for many publications, including several Edible magazines. She lives in Berkeley.

Edible Notables Mustard Power

A Watsonville company discovers a supercharged soil amendment—and fuel for the tractors, too

By Deborah Luhrman

It started as a conversation between local organic pioneers, Ken Kimes of New Natives in Corralitos and Larry Jacob of Del Cabo and Jacobs Farm. They dreamed of finding a way to use fallow fields along the coast north of Santa Cruz for growing biofuel to run their farm vehicles. But the farmers soon discovered that the green power of their raw material of choice—the humble mustard seed—went far beyond powering the equipment.

With the help of an expert in alternative energy from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and advice from the University of Idaho, they found out that mustard seed met their criteria of being a nonirrigated and seawater-tolerant crop. They already knew that a compound in mustard seed called glucosinolate—which makes it spicy hot—has the added bonus of being an effective organic fertilizer. So Watsonville-based Farm Fuel Inc. was born, with Jim Cochran of Swanton Berry Farm and biodiesel mechanic Henry Smith also on board.

Since biblical times, the tiny mustard seed has been a symbol of how something very small can grow and blossom into a flourishing enterprise. But the path hasn’t been easy for Farm Fuel since its inception in 2007.

“The fuel market went up and down, and the person we were selling to stopped refining biodiesel locally,” explains biologist Stefanie Bourcier, who manages Farm Fuel Inc. on a day-to-day basis with five other employees. While partner Henry Smith has converted his pick-up truck to run on mustard oil, there aren’t any other fuel customers right now.

Eventually, the focus shifted from making fuel to producing mustard meal, which is the byproduct left over when the oil is pressed. It comes out of the press looking like big flakes of breakfast cereal and is then compacted into pellets of potent organic fertilizer.

Farm Fuel brought in a bumper crop of mustard seed on 45 acres in Pescadero last summer. It was a spectacular yellow field in spring, and then, to maximize its glucosinolate, Kimes and Smith allowed the towering seven-foot plants to toast to a crisp before cutting in August. Using a 1960s vintage Massey Ferguson combine, Farm Fuel harvested a ton and a half of mustard seed—enough to produce 3,000 gallons of biofuel and 60,000 pounds of soil amendment.

The fertilizer, marketed as Pescadero Gold and available for purchase from the company’s website, is a double-action product—it both kills off harmful soil diseases and encourages the growth of beneficial organisms.

“When you put it in the soil and add water, there is a reaction just like you get in your mouth when you bite into a spicy mustard seed,” says Bourcier. “Then, depending on the type of mustard seed, it will either give off gas or pass through the soil, killing pathogens like nematodes.” Mustard meal also contains nutrients that allow the beneficial predatory fungi trichoderma to flourish, helping keep the bad guys at bay throughout the growing season.

Swanton Berry Farm and High Ground Organics in Watsonville are among the local growers that will be using mustard meal this spring on strawberry crops in place of the ozone-depleting fumigant, methyl bromide—which is not organic and is being phased out under terms of an international treaty. Mustard meal has also been used success-

fully on basil, carrots, raspberries, tomatoes, apples and grapes, and Swanton and High Ground have had good success with it.

“Mustard has been planted as a cover crop in vineyards and orchards for hundreds of years. We’re just taking that same chemistry and making it a little more efficient and easy to apply,” Bourcier says. In fact, Farm Fuel found in research trials that application of mustard seed meal boosted strawberry production by as much as 50%.

Experience using mustard meal in strawberry fields has led Farm Fuel to an even more lucrative type of business that may finally allow it to post its first profit this year. It’s a service that prepares strawberry fields for planting using ASD or Anaerobic Soil Disinfestation—an organic process that uses only rice bran, mustard seed meal, molasses, black plastic and water. Last fall Farm Fuel treated 150 acres in the Pajaro Valley using ASD, up from just 6 acres in 2011, and business is booming.

“We’re seeing ASD work as well as the [methyl bromide] fumigant, and it’s easy and no more expensive than fumigation,” says Bourcier. “More and more doors are opening, and it’s amazing because our clients are farmers and they’re the best people.” So the company—founded on tiny mustard seeds—is blossoming at last in a dramatic, if unexpected, way.

Farm Fuel Inc. • 831.763.3950 • www.farmfuelinc.com

Edible Notables A Fork in the Road

Along with Monterey County’s recognition as a Top 10 worldwide wine destination, new dining and lodging options are coming to the Santa Lucia Highlands

By Laura Ness

We may finally be reaching a fork in the road: River Road, that is. Home to 14 wineries and tasting rooms, and two of Monterey County’s American Viticultural Areas (Santa Lucia Highlands and Arroyo Seco), it’s among the best-loved “wine trails” in Monterey wine country. Yet, unlike the county’s Carmel Valley AVA, dining and lodging of the caliber of the wines have been few. That’s slowly changing, and just in time, given the recent naming of Monterey County as a Top 10 wine country destination by Wine Enthusiast magazine (February 2013). The county was one of just three regions in the United States that made the list, and the only one in California.

Talbott Vineyards winemaker Dan Karlsen says wine tastes better on its home turf. Hanging out with the vines, seeing their view and feeling their weather help you grok wine at a deeper level.

So Talbott is retrofitting a century-old farmhouse at its Sleepy Hollow Vineyard in Gonzales, transforming it into a culinary demonstration center. Something of a sustainable Garden of Eden will surround it, providing guest chefs with a bounty of produce to use for food- and wine-pairing sessions and evening meals. The intent is that ensconced in this charming retreat, visitors will enjoy the wonder of the Highlands in a way that usually only those who live there can.

But for now, if you plan to stay in the area, the historic Mesa Del Sol Estate Retreat & Winery, just off River Road on Arroyo Seco, offers its stunning guest cottages within its own eco-paradise for week-long periods during the summer season and weekends the rest of the year. (See EMB Fall 2012, p. 53.) The Inn at the Pinnacles, close to Chalone Vineyards, provides bed and breakfast on weekends, and the Arroyo Seco Recreational Area offers camping.

Few vineyard properties on River Road have such dead-on views of the entire Salinas Valley and the stunning Pinnacles National Monument as Hahn Estates, which has long planned a culinary center for the site.

In something of a first phase, Brian Overhauser, the estate’s resident chef, last summer launched a popular “Wine Country Tapas” program—an opportunity for guests to enjoy three small plates of seasonal, garden-fresh food, paired with three Hahn estate wines. There are two seatings, by reservation only, on Saturdays at noon and 1:30pm, from April through October. The cost is $25 per person. A recent menu included 2010 Hahn Estate SLH Chardonnay paired with a lobster and mango salad, velvety 2011 Hahn Estate SLH Pinot Noir paired with a rich croque-madame topped with quail egg and a muscular, smoky 2010 Hahn Estate SLH Syrah beautifully synced with Wagyu short rib, black truffles and cauliflower purée. New in 2013 is Hahn’s “Alchemy of Flavors” program. “While Wine Country Tapas gives you three different dishes to pair with three wines, Alchemy of Flavors provides three unique creations to pair with a single wine,” says Overhauser, so guests can experience the nuances in the wine brought out by different dishes.

These monthly stand-up social mingling experiences are $15 per person.

Overhauser also plans to offer an internship program for the at-risk youth who attend nearby Rancho Cielo’s Drummond Culinary Academy, which could lead to further expansion of Hahn’s dining program.

Meantime, no matter which area winery you head to, one of the best ways to enjoy the Santa Lucia Highlands and its wines—especially as the spring sun warms the vineyards—is to pack a picnic.

For provisions, the River Road area boasts five farmers’ markets where artisanal foods and fresh local produce may be purchased. (See King City, Salinas and Soledad entries in Spring Farmers’ Markets, p. 56.) And if your visit doesn’t fall on a farmers’ market day, The Bakery Station in Salinas provides not just delicious artisanal breads and pastries made on the premises, but also sumptuous sandwiches full of organic and local ingredients. And for sheer selection of local artisanal products and produce, Salinas’ Star Market fits the bill— and also provides an array of prepared foods.

The area’s many wineries, of course, will be more than happy to supply the wine.