Purveyors

February 24, 2012 – 10:43 am

Sustainable seafood, meats, eggs, local produce

Acme Bread Company
Alexander Valley Pickles
BN Ranch
California Olive Ranch – olive oil
Clover Stornetta Organic Milk and cream
Cannard Farms
Diestel Family Turkey Ranch
Dwelley Farms
Glaum Egg Ranch
Greenleaf produce
Happy Boy Farms
Hodo Soy Beanery
Josephine Farm
Lagunitas Brewing Company
Let’s Be Frank – grass-fed beef hot-dogs
Lhasa Karnak Herb Company
Marin Sun Farms – beef and lamb
Mary’s Chicken
Monterey Fish Market
Mr. Espresso – fair trade, organic, shade grown coffee
Niman Ranch – pastrami and corned beef
Peaberry’s Tea
Riverdog Farm
Sierra Nevada Brewing Company
Speakeasy Ales and Lagers
Straus Family Creamery – ice cream
Straus Barista Milk
Streit’s Matzos – domestically produced
Terra Bella Family Farm
Trumer Pilsner

By selerum | Posted in Purveyors | Comments (0)

Housemade Pastrami: brined, spiced, smoked

September 7, 2011 – 11:45 am

Pastrami

Pastrami on rye with mustard, a simple pleasure, no?

No, not really simple at all.

We used to get pastrami from New York. It arrived in a plastic bag, and we steamed it to order. It traveled three thousand miles. Next we procured local, hormone free and antibiotic free meat but sent it to Los Angeles for curing.  Then, most recently, we started having trouble with supplies of this special arrangement.

Finally, we decided to bring pastrami production under our roof.

Hand-slicing Saul's housemade pastrami

Now many permutations and decisions.

For the rub: Red or black? Definitely coriander, black pepper, paprika. What proportion each? Allspice, clove, garlic?

Peter slices pastrami on the Spice of Life chef stage

What kind of smoke and how much? Pastrami is a smoked meat after all. A whole generation is used to pastrami out of a plastic bag with only a distant hint of smoke.

Cut of meat? Navel or brisket. One is too fatty, the other too dry.  Strictly grass fed or corn finished?  Cow or steer meat?

About the brine: Pump and float or just float or just dry rub? Minimize nitrates and risk the perfect pink color?

We are aiming for a pastrami that is never too dry or fatty (although this is very subjective), peppery, spicy, smoky and essentially on the fatty side. Please remember that in every piece of pastrami, even assuming the most skilled slicing, there will be sublime to less sublime and then sublime again, in one piece. Hopefully you get a perfect combination of slices on a perfect pastrami day. If not let us know.

With so many variables it becomes a rather complicated and changeable process. We hope you will join us in this journey, still very new.  Your feedback is always welcome, especially written form and shared with kindness.

Pastrami spices

By kadleman | Posted in View all posts | Comments (0)

Housemade pickles: brining, fermenting, crunching

September 4, 2011 – 12:30 pm

Pickles

‘The perfection of fermented foods lies in it’s imperfection. If your desire is for perfectly uniform, predictable food, this is the wrong food for you… If you are willing to collaborate with these tiny beings with somewhat capricious habits and vast transformative powers, then eat on.’

Sandor Katz

Pickle plates at Spice of Life Festival with chermoula peppers

We have committed to make our pickles in house. This means when they are good they are really good.

Before when we gave free pickles, we found more than a third would make their way to the garbage can.

So we reduced the price of a sandwich 50c and charge 50c for a pickle. Believe it or not we no longer find pickles in the garbage.

Also non-pickle eaters no longer subsidize pickle eaters. Its a win-win.

Another benefit: before people did not really have an option of half sour vs full sour. You got what came in those pasteurized buckets.

Now both our customers and staff are developing a real knowledge of the difference, the complexities and the joy of fermented foods.

We now ferment sours, half sours, kraut and pickled green tomatoes.

Pickling tomatoes

Every morning a Saul’s ferment nerd, can be found testing brines, skimming yeast by-products, making sure all cucumbers are submerged and starved of oxygen, and generally prodding the ferments along and keeping them safe from taking wrong turns.

Some days the sours are just not yet sour enough for one, yet too sour for another.

Some batches absorb too much salt, some not salty enough. Some cucumbers arrive from the fields too big, sometimes just right.

 

If you are eating pastrami or corned beef we strongly urge you to eat these with our fermented pickles.

It is good nutrition, good digestion and good old yiddishkeit.

These true and tried complimentary flavors, in balance, provide harmony.

Pickle plate with radishes

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Deli Summit: Exploring the Challenges and Thrills of the Modern Deli

June 1, 2011 – 11:31 am

Peter Levitt, Saul’s Restaurant and Deli, Berkeley
Noah Bernamoff, Mile End Deli, Brooklyn
Ken Gordon, Kenny & Zuke’s Deli, Portland
Evan Bloom, Wise Sons Deli SF pop-up

Moderator: Joan Nathan, Author of ten cookbooks including Jewish Cooking in America and Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Food Arts Magazine and Tablet Magazine.

Original billing:

At the:
JCC of the East Bay (just around the corner)
1414 Walnut Street
Berkeley, CA 94709

On the menu from Wise Sons:

House-baked Bialys and Smoked Fish, with chive cream cheese, red onion & capers. Sweet and sour pickles on the side 7 openfaced 10

The beloved institution of Jewish delis continues to disappear.

But a few brave delis are breaking up canons of the dying model. Delis in this NY Times article by Julia Moskin: Can the Jewish Deli Be Reformed?

Saul’s Restaurant and Deli in Berkeley is convening these upstarts for a Deli Summit. Four very different models of renegade.

Saul’s owners Karen Adelman and Peter Levitt believe they and their colleagues will benefit from collaboration on a common language. In a culinary genre defined by rigid expectations (yet varied depending on customer), comparison and critique, these delis trailblazing the deli lexicon can gradually give each other points of reference and authority.

This is a restaurant concept being actively revived. What do these departures from the Deli Institution look like on the menu, the plate, in the dining room? What does it mean to thrive as a deli business?

This is a follow-up to Saul’s Referendum on the Jewish Deli Menu. Now with the other Delis, Saul’s will talk nuts and bolts of their industry.

It’s a behind the scenes, chefs-in-the-trenches conversation open to the public.

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