Rockfish-Scallop Ceviche with Crispy Skin and Sea Lettuce Chicarrons

Rockfi sh-Scallop Ceviche with Crispy Skin and Sea Lettuce Chicharrons

Courtesy Colin Moody, The Club at Pasadera

1 to 2 fresh local rockfi sh (after spearing preferred) 2 cups rockfi sh meat, cut into ¼-inch pieces (reserve skin for frying, bones, head and rest can be used for stock) ½ cup local or fresh diver scallops, cut into ¼-inch pieces ¾ cup lime juice (cut limes in half and grill 2 minutes to fl avor and release more juice) Sea salt to cure and season ¼ cup red onion, diced fi nely ¼ cup ripe tomato, diced fi nely 2 tablespoons jalapeño or serrano pepper, seeded and diced fi nely 2 ripe avocados, diced ¼ inch ¼ cup cilantro, sliced thinly 2 tablespoons garlic aioli White pepper, to taste Generously sprinkle the rockfi sh and scallop pieces with sea salt. Toss in bowl and set in the refrigerator while slicing and dicing rest of the ingredients (15–20 minutes).

Pour grilled lime juice into the fi sh-scallop mixture and mix well. Place plastic wrap right onto and over the surface and put back in the refrigerator for 30–40 minutes or until mixture fi rms up. Drain lime juice and reserve. Mix all remaining ingredients, careful not to mash the avocado or seafood too much. Add back half the lime juice. Check seasoning and adjust if needed. Fry the fi sh skin in oil until crisp and serve both with sea lettuce chicharrons. Serves 4.

For Sea Lettuce Chicharrons recipe please see ediblemontereybay.com

EDIBLE COMMUNITY Taste of Home

While the pandemic keeps us physically distant, a boom of cottage bakeries and residential restaurants brings new faces and new cuisines into the local food community

BY RAÚL NAVA PHOTOGRAPHY BY COLINE LECONTE AND MARGAUX GIBBONS ILLUSTRATION BY JASMINE SENAVERATNA

When the coronavirus pandemic hit last spring, Michelle Lee found herself working from home—but her setup looked considerably different than the typical telecommuter’s.

Lee doesn’t spend her workday plopped in front of Zoom, troubleshooting glitchy Wi-Fi. Instead, she labors over a mixer and worries about the precision of her oven temperature. She’s one of many homebased chefs here in the Monterey Bay area selling food directly from their kitchens to customers.

She started cooking from her home out of necessity. For the past five years, she worked as sous chef and pastry chef at the InterContinental The Clement Monterey hotel on Cannery Row until, like many restaurant workers, she lost her job during the pandemic.

“After I was furloughed back in April, the first thing I felt like doing was making a pie,” Lee recalls. She resolved to be as productive as possible while out of work and had fun geeking out on making the perfect pie and the consummate croissant—but then her furlough became permanent. “I decided I was baking so much at home, I’d try to make money from it.” She launched Michelle Kneads Dough, which offers flash sales for baked “QuaranTreats” like caramel pumpkin pie, Cheez-It toffee and sweet Mexican conchas.

Lee isn’t alone. The pandemic has seen a boom of pop-up businesses offering foods cooked in home kitchens.

A scroll through Instagram reveals an astonishing array: vibrant quesabirria tacos with crimson consomé for dipping, artfully executed mochi doughnuts, towering sandwiches of crisp Nashville hot chicken, bite-sized Vietnamese shrimp pancakes—the list goes on and on.

The chefs and bakers behind these foods come from varied backgrounds. Some are steeped in the hospitality industry—out-of-work chefs and servers looking to compensate for lost income, retired hospitality veterans getting back into the business, ambitious cooks selling from home as market research for new concepts—but many are simply amateur home cooks with a passion for food and service.

A mom selling doughnuts to jumpstart college savings for her young kids, a Latinx couple sharing their passion for vegan Mexican cuisine, a high school student keeping busy over her summer vacation with weekend meal deliveries—these home operations have brought greater equity to food service, making an industry notoriously centered on white men more inclusive for women, people of color and young people.

Eager entrepreneurs face fewer barriers operating out of their homes—most notably skipping the expensive investment in buying or renting commercial property. And the commute is appealing.

BUDDING ENTREPRENEURS

After the birth of their fourth daughter in 2018, Isaiah and Jacquelyn Nickerson naturally wanted to maximize baby bonding time. “We were looking for a way to make the income I’d lose being home [on maternity leave] six to eight weeks or longer,” recalls Jacquelyn. She turned to baking, perfecting her recipe for French macarons and soon Mac City Macarons was born.

Like many cottage food operators, Jacquelyn appreciates the flexibility of baking from home. “I like being able to work directly from home while still being around my family.”

This year, she and Isaiah formally secured a cottage food license to sell their colorful and creative cookie combinations for pickup, pop-ups and at local farmers’ markets, finding a fervent following Isaiah calls their “Mac Family.”

Home-based food businesses have emerged as hubs of community and connection in a time when we’re starved for contact and company.

“Customers appreciate knowing they’re supporting family businesses. The community is right there with you helping you succeed,” says Sandra Ortega, who owns Azúcar Con T with her sister Celeste. The sisters sell homemade, vegan conchitas (mini Mexican sweet breads) frozen to bake in your own oven. “Now more than ever, people are trying to keep their money within the community.”

Otto Kramm, founder of Otto’s Bread Co. in San Benancio, agrees. “The pandemic is a tragedy, absolutely, but it’s brought about a sense of appreciation for everything local. Because of shelter-in-place orders, because of isolation, it’s brought a longing for a sense of community.”

Five years ago, he took up baking as a weekend hobby, supplying friends and coworkers with loaves of sourdough. While working from home during the pandemic in his job in banking, Kramm realized finance didn’t suit him. This January, he took a leap of faith to become a full-time home baker. “It’s inspiring to see others like myself pursue their dreams, especially when those dreams help bring people together.”

While the pandemic has elevated the prominence of home-based food operations, these businesses aren’t entirely new.

Since 2012, cooks and bakers have leveraged California’s cottage food law to sell shelf-stable baked goods, jams and such that they make at home. But perishable foods—namely hot meals like you’d enjoy in a restaurant—were excluded until AB626 was signed into law in 2018.

Also known as the Homemade Food Act, this legislation allows for sales of a wider menu of foods by establishing microenterprise home kitchen operations (MEHKOs), essentially residential restaurants. The legislation was intended to democratize food service, which has a notoriously high barrier to entry, while creating a system for inspections and permits—similar to those for cottage food operations—to allay consumers’ concerns about health and safety.

Critically, however, these home-based restaurants are only allowed if approved by the county. To date, Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties have not passed ordinances to begin permitting microenterprise home kitchen operations. (See sidebar page 40) Here on the Central Coast, sales of perishable foods require the use of a commercial kitchen. In truth, many of those tantalizing tastes teased all over Instagram aren’t exactly legal—but that hasn’t seemed

to slow diners’ appetites. All rack up like after like from followers who wait in eager anticipation of pop-up sales that often sell out in a snap. Locals love the feel-good notion of supporting their neighbors, especially when it means enjoying fresh foods and flavors that aren’t common in local restaurants. Home pop-ups foster not only a greater diversity of purveyors, but product too. Some showcase dishes that aren’t in demand enough to justify a dedicated brick-and-mortar establishment, some cater to niche diets with vegan, gluten-free and keto selections, others ride on trending tastes with unproven market potential.

INTERNATIONAL FLAVORS

The signature rabokki from Rabokki Wednesdays combines ramen noodles and tteokbokki rice cakes in sweetened, umami-rich gochujang sauce. The dish is popular in Korea’s street food stalls, but largely absent from menus at local Korean restaurants. “Eighty percent of our customers have never tried it before, but then they turn into repeat customers,” explains one of Rabokki Wednesdays’ owners, who requested to remain anonymous since her home kitchen business is unlicensed. After losing her weekend job due to the pandemic, the stay-at-home mother of a special needs child enlisted her own mother—a retired restaurateur—to help cook and sell hearty Korean street food to earn extra income. But the duo found richer rewards in showcasing their Korean heritage. “I’m excited sharing my mom’s food, and it’s such a great thing seeing her light up at customers’ compliments.” The murky mess of regulations has created an underground market for homemade foods that’s left operators wary of inviting attention. There are now dozens of MEHKOs in business throughout the Monterey Bay area, but few would go on record to share their experience for fear of attracting scrutiny.Home cooks clockwise from top right: Michelle Lee; Tuty And they’re right to worry. and Alfian Sani; Otto Kramm; Media coverage and nosy neighbors put home pop-ups at risk of beand Jacquelyn Nickerson of ing outed to local health departments and shut down for operating withMac City Macarons. out proper permitting. In the San Francisco Bay Area, authorities have

ordered several viral home pop-ups to close.

That’s an experience the Sani family is painfully familiar with.

Tuty and Alfian Sani launched Tante Tuty’s Kitchen in September. Tuty ran a homebased daycare, which remains shuttered indefinitely to protect a vulnerable family member in the multi-generational Marina home. Looking to recoup lost income, she and her husband leveraged her passion for food and his experience cooking in restaurants to offer locals a taste of traditional Indonesian cuisine.

“I’ve loved to cook since I was little. My happy time is in the kitchen,” Tuty says. The couple’s daughter Ariyanti helped with operations and the family found growing demand for a cuisine absent from Monterey County’s restaurant scene. “For a lot of people, it was their first exposure to Indonesian cuisine,” explains Ariyanti. “Access to a different cuisine was exciting for our customers.”

Customers’ rave reviews earned Tante Tuty’s Kitchen a feature in a local newspaper last October. But a week after a story celebrating their success as a pandemic pivot, the Monterey County Health Department ordered them to move to a commercial kitchen or shut down operations. “I didn’t know the Monterey County Health Department frequented Instagram, but I guess they do?” quips Ariyanti.

“We were shocked, but not really shocked,” she recalls, alluding to the gray area microenterprise home kitchen operations occupy. She and her parents were disappointed, but motivated to lobby county supervisors to recognize MEHKOs with the goal of fostering greater equity and inclusion in the local food industry.

“It would open doors for a lot of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] folks who want to share their food, who want to cook and who want to help keep their families afloat,” says Ariyanti. “People who are a little less affluent, like people of color who don’t have the generational wealth, they have to start somewhere. They have the passion to create a business, but face a lot of roadblocks.”

Raúl Nava (he/him/él) is a freelance writer covering dining and restaurants across the Central Coast. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter: @offthemenu831.

The Homemade Food Act

Signed in 2018 by Governor Jerry Brown, the Homemade Food Act (AB626) is the fi rst law in the nation that sets out a process to permit the sale of fresh home-cooked dishes to the public.

It paves the way for people to start their own microenterprise home kitchen operation (MEHKO), but implementation is required on a county-by-county basis and so far just three counties have started issuing permits: Riverside, Imperial and Lake. Santa Barbara County is looking at starting this spring.

“My big focus is on the local food economy,” says Peter Ruddock, who is spearheading the implementation eff ort through the Oakland-based nonprofi t COOK Alliance. “I support cooks, farmers, CSAs and farmers’ markets. I want us all to get so much more of our food from our neighbors. It is more socially, economically and environmentally responsible.”

Ruddock says there are basically two types of cooks who have signed up to start MEHKOs in the places where it is already allowed. Many are professional chefs interested in starting their own restaurants, who use it as a legal incubator to test their concept. Others are people who need the fl exibility off ered by MEHKOs, perhaps because they have children or an elderly relative they care for at home. To get a county permit, it costs on average $1,000 for a health inspection and for certifi cation as a food safety manager. All food must be prepared the same day it is sold and there is an annual cap of $50,000 in sales, although eff orts are underway to raise that.

In our area, Penny Ellis—cofounder of the Corralitos Open Farm Tours—is the point person for implementation in Santa Cruz County. Monterey and San Benito counties are not as far along.

“I see this as a catalyst for job creation and creating a sustainable local food system starting from the grassroots level,” says Ellis.

Chef Linda Braz, a resident of Aptos, is looking forward to the day she can prepare and sell meals out of her home kitchen. She used to be co-owner of Encuentro Café & Wine Bar, a vegetarian restaurant in Oakland, and still remembers a write-up by the former San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic. “The most memorable part of the review for me was having Michael Bauer say that my marinara sauce tasted as though it came directly from a kitchen in Italy,” she recalls.

Once AB626 is implemented locally, we may have a chance to try that marinara and Braz says, Why not? “There’s no reason home cooks shouldn’t be able to sell food, if they have the proper guidance and follow all sanitary procedures. I often feel they do a better job than some restaurants. It’s not about being fancy, it’s about feeding people and showing love.” —Amber Turpin

Homemade marinara sauce by Linda Braz over ricotta gnocchi with a baked chicken meatball.

IN THE ORCHARD

OLIVE OIL SYNERGIES

Networking and mentorship make a difference for small producers, from grove adopters to a former governor

BY CHERYL ANGELINA KOEHLER

Kim Null and Jamie de Sieyes rest for a minute as they check the quality of their justharvested olives, which are headed straight to the mill. (Photo courtesy of Wild Poppies)

It’s a cool December day in 2017, not long after Olga Orlova’s Santa Rosa home burned down in the Tubbs Fire. The young Capay Valley olive oil producer is preparing for a long day of milling when her phone rings. A voice on the other end says, “This is the governor of California, Jerry Brown.”

“I thought it’s a joke,” says Orlova.

After a polite “Hello, Governor of California Jerry Brown, how can I help you?” she learns that Brown’s 140 olive trees, recently transplanted to his Mountain House ranch in Colusa County, have ripe olives. Olga Orlova, as he’s been told, is the person who can help him.

To fully appreciate the irony of a powerful national leader calling a young, recent immigrant for advice, let’s jump back a decade as Orlova is enjoying her first career developing recipes for a milk company in her native Russia. She longs to travel, and by 2010, she’s in San Francisco exploring logistics for becoming a mushroom farmer or perhaps a brewer. On an evening in 2013, she’s in Santa Rosa barbecuing for friends and waxing eloquent on how a good grilled steak needs only salt, pepper and olive oil, when someone mentions that olive oil is becoming a big thing in California.

“Like, big thing in California, what do you mean?”

“They make olive oil here, and right now the market has started growing in the U.S.”

“But isn’t it a Mediterranean product?”

“Yeah, everywhere wine grows, olives can grow.”

While the group tucks into their unctuous olive oil-slathered steaks, Orlova further queries her California ag-savvy friends enough to determine that coaxing the delicious oil from this Biblical tree fruit and marketing it might be her true calling. Within two weeks she’s leapt over a chasm of innocence and charmed her way into the orchards and mills of esteemed local olive oil producers, plus labs and offices of sundry top-level researchers, testers and administrators, and is well along in her launch of Olica, a boutique olive oil company.

Fast forward four years, and this budding entrepreneur has racked up awards for her olive oils and simultaneously established a strong reputation for helping other small growers mill their fruit into high-quality oil (or acquire equipment and know-how to mill their own). That’s when the governor calls.

“Honestly, we don’t know what we’re doing here,” she recalls Brown saying.

“I go to his place. We need to harvest now,” says the miller, who knows that oil of superior quality, such as the governor expects, can only be achieved when the olives are at a perfect, subtly pre-ripe moment and are milled immediately upon harvest before any deterioration sets in.

“What time do we start?”

Brown is just heading out to give the President an aerial tour of the fire devastation, but four cheerful, young, casually clad people hanging around Mountain House—who turn out to be the governor’s security contingent—help Orlova harvest the olives. Back at Olica central, she mills the olives and bottles up the oil, affixing the governor’s Mountain House label.

While the miller helps Brown learn about taking the product from tree to table, the two strike up a friendship. And when Orlova learns that he has it in mind to sell the bottles at Whole Foods, she has to break the sad news that being the governor of California paves no golden-green path toward getting this very limited supply of Mountain House olive oil out to the people of the Golden State via that particular venue.

Given the enduring resilience of this very long-lived, drought-tolerant tree and its long cultural role as a nurturer of humankind, it makes sense that an environmentalist governor might like to steward an olive orchard and pursue olive oil production in retirement. In fact, each person interviewed here was similarly attracted to the tree’s ecological story as well as to the long history of olive oil as a shared community enterprise.

And, of course, there’s always the matter of olive oil’s great taste.

THE DRAMA AND THE MYSTERY

In 2011, Kathryn Tomajan, cofounder and producer of the Oaklandbased Fat Gold olive oil company, was a 20-something graduate student studying food culture and communications at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy, when she got tricked by a master Tuscan olive oil producer into tasting a rancid olive oil. She thought, “It’s good—it tastes like olive oil,” a misconception all too common among consumers inured to the off flavors of inexpensive, outdated and possibly ersatz supermarket olive oils. Tomajan quickly learned the difference.

“I was really taken aback by the quality and adulteration scandals that are occurring globally in the olive oil trade,” she says. “That really was my hook into olive oil; the drama and mystery around it.”

Influenced in her thesis research by Tom Mueller’s then newly published exposé, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, Tomajan also delved into emerging reports from the UC Davis Olive Center by researcher Selina Wang, who as a young and recent immigrant from Taiwan had driven all over California collecting supermarket samples of oils marked extra-virgin for the center’s lab to analyze. The findings? “Reports said that many of our extra-virgin olive oils did not meet the extra-virgin grade standards,” says Wang. From her current seat as the Center’s research director, Wang has now turned her attention to analyzing similar standards that can assist across California’s food landscape in a time of change.

Tomajan’s quest to understand how the fraud problem could be addressed took her to Australia, a major world olive oil producer, which, as she describes, was then “several years ahead of California in establishing mandatory, industry-wide quality standards.” She went back again to apprentice with a small Australian milling operation staffed entirely by women. “I don’t think it’s normal anywhere in the world to have women actually running the mills and doing the difficult work of managing production,” she says.

To school her palate, Tomajan participated in the (now defunct) UC Davis Sensory Panel and then moved on to join the California Olive Oil Council (COOC) Taste Panel, where she continues to participate in its evaluations for producers seeking extra-virgin certification for its oils via rigorous lab and sensory testing. Three videos starring the convivial Tomajan on the COOC website are examples of her fast-developing role as a spokesperson for California olive oil.

In a discussion regarding Tomajan’s role in encouraging her peers, Orlova mentioned the series of personal and professional growth events Tomajan ran with three collaborators from 2011 to 2018 in locations around the country. Called Eat Retreat, the project encouraged participants working

Women olive oil producers clockwise from top left: In the milling room, Kathryn Tomajan constantly puts her olive oil through a series of lab and sensory tests to determine mill settings for the best outcome. (Photo courtesy of Fat Gold); Olga Orlova checks olive ripeness in her Capay Valley orchard. (Photo by Cheryl Angelina Koehler); Susan Ellsworth visits her Flatlands olive trees during the winter harvest season. (Photo courtesy of Flatlands Oil & Mill); Wild Poppies oil drips like gold in the packing shed. (Photo by Will Duncan)

in many facets of food and agriculture to experience themselves as part of a community dedicated to strengthening the food system as a whole.

Olive oil presents many challenges for a small producer, among them how to afford land for an orchard, how to harvest and mill quickly and cleanly enough to win extra-virgin certification, where to mill if you can’t afford to buy your own equipment, how to market and also how to convince consumers reaching for that cheap commodity supermarket oil that a small local producer’s product is worth the higher $20–$40 price tag. Sharing knowledge and resources is crucial to the endeavor.

SYNERGIES IN ADOPTED ORCHARDS

In 2017, Tomajan was making olive oil alongside one of her Eat Retreat collaborators at Enzo Olive Oil Co. in Fresno when the inspiration to start her own olive oil company came along. A landowner in the Alameda County community of Sunol had a mature olive grove going untended and offered to let Tomajan take over harvesting the fruit in trade for maintaining the orchard. While Fat Gold now sources olives from growers in diverse locations (much the way urban winemakers buy their grapes), during that first year in Sunol, Tomajan started learning firsthand about orchard management, harvesting, milling, packaging and marketing, all of which require a small producer to develop many relationships with others in this labor-intensive business for it to be affordable. (Note: Now in year four, Fat Gold is finally paying small salaries to Tomajan and partner Robin Sloan.)

The notion of adopting a field or an orchard was lionized by veteran organic farmer, writer and olive oil producer Mike Madison in “The Beginning Farmer’s Plight,” his Fall 2015 article for Edible East Bay. The story outlines how and why a landowning farmer heading toward retirement could (and should) bring young aspiring partners into the enterprise for the sake of imparting knowledge and keeping fertile land in its valuable agricultural usage. Young farmers Susan Ellsworth and Colin Dixon were his test case, and the couple now steward some of Madison’s mature, organically farmed olive trees to make their Flatlands olive oil. They share Madison’s 100% organic facility, including the mill and a certified organic kitchen, where Madison’s wife Dianne makes olive oil cosmetics.

SOWING WILD POPPIES

In a lovely hollow of the Santa Cruz Mountains, sisters-in-law Jamie de Sieyes and Kim Null landed a grove adoption opportunity similar to Tomajan’s along with a mentorship like Ellsworth’s.

In 2016, de Sieyes was tiptoeing from early motherhood back into her marketing career just as her sister-in-law, Null, also a young mother, was developing a passion for agriculture that would later blossom into EatLocal.Farm, a virtual sales model she spearheaded for the local grower community. The sisters-in-law had always wanted to grow a business together when an opportunity appeared as if to fulfill their wishes.

“Just around the corner, a neighbor of ours has a beautiful olive orchard,” says de Sieyes, speaking of Chris Banthien, producer of the award-winning Olio del Le Colline di Santa Cruz, who planted her

Chris Banthien (center) helps Jamie de Sieyes and Kim Null learn how to harvest in their newly adopted olive orchard. (Photo courtesy of Wild Poppies)

grove in 1996. “Having Chris be our mentor, that was the biggest piece of Wild Poppies coming into existence. It enabled us to work together and work near our homes, to work in our community and to have an existing agricultural piece that was well nurtured and well cared for.”

Banthien trained the duo in orchard management and showed them how to harvest using large electric shaking rakes. They learned about milling and bottling by working alongside their miller, Greg Traynor of 43 Ranch in San Ardo, in southern Monterey County. But of equal importance has been the way Wild Poppies was nurtured by the local farmers’ market in Aptos.

“[They] welcomed us as we transitioned from Chris’ brand to ours, and that was a key part of our business thriving that first few months,” says de Sieyes. The sisters-in-law have cultivated deep relationships with their customers, which include local tastemakers like Michelin-star chef David Kinch, who uses Wild Poppies Extra Virgin Olive Oil exclusively at his newest venture, Mentone in Aptos.

In this season when olive harvests have been light throughout most of California, the small supply of Wild Poppies oils has been claimed almost entirely by Null’s EatLocal.Farm customers. “They kept us going this year after the restaurants closed down. My husband built a little mini barn next to the big barn where we can let customers come and pick up their olive oil and pick up their produce.”

FLAVOR IS THE HOOK

If a bottle or can of extra-virgin olive oil from one of these small specialty producers might seem too dear for daily cooking, a cook interested in flavor (as well as health values) might consider what they could be missing.

“Most mid- to large-scale producers are trying to make a consistent, relatively neutraltasting, all-purpose olive oil to appeal to the masses,” says Tomajan. Conversely, her work at Fat Gold, like that of all the producers in this story, is about “honoring the diverse olive varieties planted here in California and milling them in a way that brings out the best of each cultivar.” She’s talking about bringing out maximum flavor, which is more expensive to produce.

What is a cultivar? De Sieyes says the four young Wild Poppies children can pronounce the names of all the cultivars in their orchard…Ascolano, taggiasca, frantoio, Canino, leccino, maurino. The names reveal the cultivars’ Mediterranean origins, and each has been developed over many centuries to highlight distinct flavors. Part of the differing profiles comes from the mix and levels of polyphenols, the organic compounds found abundantly in plants, which, according to a 2018 National Institutes of Health abstract, “have become an emerging field of interest in nutrition in recent decades. A growing body of research indicates that polyphenol consumption may play a vital role in health through the regulation of metabolism, weight, chronic disease, and cell proliferation.”

On the table, an olive oil with high polyphenols is likely to provide a distinctly exciting pungency, which tickles the throat and can even make you cough. Try drinking some “neat,” as credentialed sensory testers do, or just drizzle enough onto a dish to see how a well-made oil adds layers of gorgeous flavor.

Olga Orlova describes her Olica Picual as having a “tomato herbaceousness.” Her Chiquitita offers a “stone fruit nose like apricot and cherry and herbs.” Her Coratina, with its high 460 polyphenol level, gives that robust pungency along with a vivid grassy flavor that stays in the imagination for hours or even years after the meal.

When you purchase extra-virgin olive oil: • Always check the harvest date, since olive oil is a fresh product that does not keep well for more than a few months, depending on how it’s stored. • Keep it capped so it doesn’t oxidize. • Store it away from heat. • Protect it from light. • Purchase only oil that’s packaged in an opaque container.

And a most important last piece of advice: Explore the treasures from your local extravirgin olive oil producers to discover all there is to enjoy and support.

Cheryl Angelina Koehler is the editor and publisher of Edible East Bay.