Illustrations by Lila Volkas (click on any image to view larger versions and activate slideshow)

Last summer, as my daughter Lila unpacked on her return from another year of college in Canada and a stint WWOOFING on an organic farm, she plucked from her backpack a large Ziplock bag encasing a strange, slimy, dripping pancake and held it up to my face, declaring proudly, “Look at my baby!”

I admit I recoiled with a gasp, as I managed, “What is that thing?”

“Oh, Mom, “ sighed Lila, like it was so obvious, “That’s my Kombucha SCOBY!”

Since I was uninitiated to the delights of the fermented, fizzy drink with a long history and the recent surge in popularity, Lila was eager to share her discovery from the organic farm of how easy (and cheap) it is to make your own kombucha with only water, tea and sugar. As we searched our shelves for a suitable jar and a cotton cloth, she raved about the health benefits (still in dispute) and how drinking some kombucha every day made her feel so good.

After brewing a gallon of tea, adding a cup of sugar and letting it cool completely, I watched Lila pour the sweetened tea into our largest mason jar and gently place the slippery SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast) to float on top of the liquid. She covered the mouth of the jar with a cotton dishcloth and secured with a rubber band. “Now we just have to wait for seven days.” Decanting the bubbling golden brew a week later, I sipped the earthy tang of a zingy, apple cider. Maybe I’m suggestible, but after a small glass, I felt re-energized.

A few weeks later, as Lila was packing for her job as an art instructor at a summer camp in Yosemite, she broke the news, “You’re going to have to take care of my SCOBYs while I’m gone for two months and whatever you do, don’t let them die!” As I surveyed the brood of SCOBYs (which, like rabbits, had multiplied and now occupied all of our glass pitchers) I was suddenly flooded with memories of the traumatic summer when I was nine and volunteered to feed my neighbor’s fish, while they were on vacation. One morning, to my horror, I discovered dead fishies floating atop a tank of black water. I don’t think my neighbors spoke to me again.

Luckily, Lila left me with detailed drawings and instructions and all went well during her absence. Seems my maternal instincts are still intact.

When she returned home, however, I pointed out a few worrisome threads hanging off the bottom of a SCOBY, but Lila reassured me they were a normal part of the yeast and not mold.

Last September, as Lila packed to go back to school, she offered me my own SCOBY, but I declined, because of impending trips away from home. (I know now could have set up a SCOBY hotel)

Meanwhile back at UBC in Vancouver, Lila became active in Sprouts, their volunteer-run, organic café and gave kombucha making workshops to curious Canadians, including lists of do’s and don’ts (e.g., only clean your bottles with hot water, never use soap). She had intentionally expanded her SCOBY family in the intervening months so she could give each of the 30 attendees their own baby SCOBY to take home.

While she was away at school, I missed the bubbly, revitalizing beverage and tried store-bought kombucha but nothing hit the spot like Lila’s brew.

Lila is back for the summer now and our fridge is once more full of her concoctions, this time, flavored with ginger and lemon or blueberries and chia seeds. Soon she’ll be leaving for her summer camp job and I’ll be in charge of the little rascals again. This time, I’m ready. Instead of regarding the jellyfish-like blobs with distaste, I now welcome them as a part of the family who inhabits half our pantry. And I thank my daughter for her willingness to let me mother her “kids.”

SHED exterior facade

What would a locavore’s paradise in wine country look like? For a certain type of well-heeled agrarian, a whole lot like SHED, Healdsburg’s 21st-century grange, grocery, farm store, cafe, bar and event space.

Healdsburg SHED exterior

At first glance, it looks like the prettiest airplane hanger you’ve ever been in, with its huge, boxy shape and garage-style doors, all metal and glass. Grab the handle of that spade doubling as a door handle, step inside, and the enormous space resolves itself into a luxuriously uncrowded farm-to-table playground.

But first, grab a cappuccino from the coffee bar front and center, because everything looks rosier with a foam heart in hand. Admire the spotless white marble counters, the equally pristine bunches of frilly lettuce, the baskets of fresh-from-the-farm eggs, ecru to aqua.

Tall, pale wooden shelves display crayon-bright Japanese coffee pots and Spanish earthenware casseroles. On a wide slab of salvaged sycamore dubbed the “story table,” massive flower arrangements worthy of a Dutch still life spill their blossoms over an educational display of German-made alternative beehives.

Bee Table at SHED

Afternoon sunshine lights up the Dutch and English gardening tools hanging on the walls, glowing across the copper jam pots and hand-carved wooden tortilla presses. It all feels like a Kinfolk magazine spread come to life and tastefully available for purchase. That soft-as-ricotta, brown-as-molasses yarn? Spun from gentle black sheep. The house-fermented cider vinegar? Tap it from the barrel, if you’ve remembered to bring your own bottle. Nothing is made of plastic; nothing has a plug.

Vinegar barrels at SHED

This is not make-do, duct-tape DIY; everything here, from the beakers of fruit shrubs (sweet-tart, vinegar-based drinks, infused with fresh fruit and fizzed with soda water) and bright-magenta beet kvass at the fermentation bar to the galvanized buckets of peonies and the baskets loaded with chocolate-brown loaves of bread the size of watermelons has been curated with an eye for beauty, taste, and usefulness.

Take butter, for example, so necessary with those huge loaves from M.H. Bread and Butter. (Baker Nathan Yanko used to work with bread star Chad Robertson at Tartine in the Mission, so his loaves are as close as the wine country gets to Robertson’s cult-status levains.) Some half-dozen types of butter–cow, goat, sea salted and packed into ceramic crocks–reside in the dairy case. But is that too easy for you? Then pick up a bottle of organic cream, a hand-cranked German butter-making jar, and a couple of wooden butter paddles for shaping the result into decorative pats. What else could you have to do?

Duck into the cleaning nook nearby and you’ll find all the necessaries for fulfilling those downstairs Downton Abbey fantasies: plumy ostrich-feather dusters with 40-inch handles, perfect for polishing chandeliers; crooked hand-carved broomsticks, possibly too witchy to pass muster with Mrs. Hughes but absolutely Quidditch-ready; wooden scrub brushes of which even Mr. Carson would approve, with nary an electric toaster in sight.

SHED co-owner Cindy Daniel

SHED is the vision of owners Doug and Cindy Daniel, who created it as a celebration of Sonoma’s agricultural heritage, as a place where all kinds of crops are grown and products made, not just the wine that puts in on the map. The Daniels provide much of the vegetables, flowers, fruit, and eggs on display from their own 16 acres in the Dry Creek Valley, which they’ve dubbed HomeFarm, where 11 acres are under mixed organic and biodynamic cultivation, and the other 5 as native riparian habitat. They have Rhone-varietal grapes growing for wine, French olive trees for oil, chickens, sheep, bees, heirloom-variety orchards, including curiosities like medlars, jujubes, and pineapple guavas, plus a market garden for vegetables and cut flowers. “It’s a patchwork of things that are all related,” says Cindy, much like the store she and her husband have created.

Mill at SHED

She’s particularly proud of the milling room, where small batches of locally grown, mostly heirloom strains of wheat and other grains are ground into flour every few days. (Most of the flour is sold in the shop; a portion of it goes to M.H. Butter for use in their breads.) The shop is also a pick-up point for grainshare subscribers to the Mendocino Grain Project, a CSA for locally grown grains, including wheat, oats, rye, and barley. Inspired by Native Seeds’ week-long Seed School workshop, Cindy found herself ever more interested in promoting Sonoma’s foodshed and encouraging self-sufficiency in the face of evolving climate change and energy crises. “There used to be a grain mill in Healdsburg,” she notes, glad to be reviving one of the area’s agricultural traditions, even if just on a home cook’s scale.

Larder at SHED

Nearby, the cool larder is “a room that talks about process,” as Cindy says, where customers can peer through the glass wall at wooden shelves filled with pickles and krauts fermenting, and cheeses and cured meats aging.

Hearth at SHED

It could hardly be a true 21st-century kitchen without a live fire burning somewhere, and so, of course, flames flicker in the hearth behind the open kitchen where chef Niki Ford oversees a daily-changing menu of eclectic breakfast and lunch fare. The heavy lifting of the kitchen gets done upstairs, in an additional production space off the main event room. The designer of Boulette’s Larder in the Ferry Building consulted, and it shows: the spacious, pristine kitchen is lavished with All-Clad saucepans hanging from racks above the counters, while tall woven baskets bristle with whisks as long as shinbones and massive stock pots steam on the stove.

Production Kitchen at SHED

In the morning, locals and visitors alike can perch at one of the blond-wood tables in the open cafe area, waiting for bowls of fiber-rich hot porridge slow-cooked overnight to reach a texture described by Ford as “between gruel and chewy grains,” lavished with butter, sea salt, and damson plum jam. Those that haven’t yet foresworn gluten can treat themselves to a “toast service” of thick slabs of Yanko’s bread, toasted with butter, jam by local “jamstress” Elissa Rubin-Mahon, and housemade chocolate-hazelnut spread, or dig into “Doug’s poached eggs” over toast with oregano, sea salt, and a drizzle of HomeFarm balsamic vinegar and olive oil. A Persian breakfast, inspired by the cooking of an Iranian friend of Ford’s, is a mix-and-match assortment of feta cheese, walnuts, sour cherry jam, herbs, and more of that great bread.

Fermentation Bar at SHED

Coming in at the civilized, city-brunch hour of 1pm, we’re sorry to have missed the 11am cutoff for Ford’s heirloom-grain waffles with quince jam and maple syrup. Instead, glasses of blueberry shrub in hand, we plunge straight into the savory side, with a briny bowl of clams bathed in cilantro and cream. A previous menu offered flatbread topped with nettles, cardoons, preserved lemon and local Highway 1 cheese, but today’s offering is as straightforward as any 5 year old could desire: a pizza with tomato sauce and cheese, on a pleasantly puffy-chewy crust. At the fermentation bar–which pours not only both wine and beer on tap but kefir, kombucha, kvass, and cider–we catch up with Ellen Cavalli and Scott Heath of Tilted Shed Ciderworks, who are lunching with their young son. The bar serves their ciders, and also ferments some of it into cider vinegar, using it as a base for the shrubs and offering it in bulk from a barrel on the other side of the store.

Ford, who shares a Chez Panisse pedigree (and friendship) with Suzanne Drexhange of Bartavelle, also shares a fondness for hand-carved boards laid out with savory deliciousness. Around us, many diners are nibbling the ploughman’s lunch, generous slabs of Fiscalini cheddar from Modesto, rye bread, apples, pickled onions, and chutney, or munching their way through the salads on the mezze plate, served with housemade crackers, feta, and olives. Nettle soup is greener than grass, bold as fresh money. “We want to make a lot of room for grains, legumes, vegetables, roots,” says Ford. “There’s a lot of sophistication in making vegetables.” It’s all part of an appreciation for “what we have in our hands, being thoughtful about the ingredients,” an attitude that Ford hopes the cooks will learn to share even during busy moments on the line, all deepened by the relationships they’re building with the farmers and gardeners supplying the kitchen.

The Daniels have plans for frequent events upstairs; already, they’ve hosted Deborah Madison in conversation with local food writer and author Michele Anna Jordan about Madison’s new book, Vegetable Literacy; sponsored a showing of Queen of the Sun, a documentary about the global bee crisis; and hosted a three-course, family-style Sunday Supper featuring the produce and farmers from Bernier Farms. On May 18, bring your knives and brush up on your Knife Skills with Rian Rinn. On May 26, there will be an all-American family-style Sunday Supper out on the patio with live music. And on June 8, butcher Rinn will be hosting Hog It Up, a hog butchery demo & pop-up dinner with chefs Ian Mullen and Jason Smith of Mullen & Smith.

Information:
Healdsburg SHED
Address: Map
25 North St
Healdsburg, CA 95448
Phone: (707) 431-7433
Hours: Mon-Sun 7am-7pm
Facebook: Healdsburg SHED
Twitter: @healdsburgshed

Mom’s Posh Porcini Popcorn stashed behind the cookbooks. Photo: T. Susan Chang for NPR

Post by T. Susan Chang, Kitchen Window, NPR Food

Get recipes for Slow-Roasted Butter Pecans, Matzo Candy With Caramel, Chocolate And Halvah, Rhubarb-Ginger Fool, Posh Porcini Popcorn and Curried Egg Salad Sandwich

My mother didn’t plant a great many spring bulbs. But over by the pachysandra patch, there was a single lovely pink tulip, and I kept my eye on it for two weeks before Mother’s Day. When that Sunday morning arrived, I rushed out, snipped it and ran inside to where she lay sleeping to present it to her. “Did you pick that outside?” she inquired, her expression shifting from sleepy surprise to something more complicated. I nodded proudly. “Oh … thank you, sweetie.”

Today, some 40 years later, I can read that image of my mother’s face like a book — chagrin for the flower-picking (she would rather have enjoyed it in the spot where she’d planted it), affection for her impetuous daughter and perhaps a bit of resignation. For it is traditionally the lot of mothers to receive, on their special day, clumsy, heartfelt versions of the domestic miracles they themselves pull off so adeptly the rest of the year.

Much has changed for mothers in the decades since. So many of us work that a day free of housekeeping chores really seems more like a right than a privilege. And being taken out for brunch is maybe a mixed blessing when what you really want is to sleep in. So I’d like to make a subversive sort of argument — for us moms to take charge, at least in part, of our own Mother’s Day.

Rather than passively waiting around for somebody to think of and give you a treat, why not make one of your favorites for yourself? Something you can snack on all week when no one’s around. Or, better yet, something you don’t have to share. Flowers are nice, perfume is nice, but what really makes me feel special is having a stash of slow-roasted butter pecans that nobody else knows about.

Some of us like it savory; some of us like sweet. Maybe we pack snacks every day for our kids, or we get dinner on the table every night, or we bring a Tupperware to microwave in the office. The point is that we rarely take the time to make a treat for ourselves. Little salty snacks like nuts and popcorn are satisfying, and really not all that bad for you. Custardy individual-sized sweets are irresistible, as are brittle sweets that go crunch. You could make spicy seaweed or chocolate bread or candied orange peel or dumplings or macaroons. Really, there are no rules to what makes a good secret stash food for Mother’s Day, as long as you like it and you have the time and energy to make it.

Where can you hide your treats? Well, the obvious place is at work, if you work outside the home. If you’re at home, seek out the places nobody else seems to know about — like the file cabinet that allows you to produce a months-old receipt from Target when you have to return a nonfunctioning toaster. Or the place where your daughter keeps her chorus folder, or where the button batteries are kept. Store them high (unless your spouse is 6 foot 3) or store them low. The idea is to keep them away from eye level.

Does this seem small-spirited? Somehow calculating? Then I suppose I should admit that deep down, I’m just as sentimental as anybody. When it comes right down to it, the sight of my children growing tall and strong and the sheltering embrace of my husband’s arms are all I really ask for as a mother and a wife. And in then end, I will probably end up sharing my treats anyhow.

But when everyone’s away or asleep and a mom’s left, once again, with her cares and dreams and never-ending lists, it doesn’t hurt to have a little something set aside. It’s a reminder that, even then, when Mom’s the last thing on everybody’s mind, there’s still one other person who cares enough to make you smile: you.

Recipe: Slow-Roasted Butter Pecans

These are a Southern specialty I first learned to make from Damon Lee Fowler’s The Savannah Cookbook (Gibbs Smith, 2008). The long, slow roasting brings out delicate, coffeelike undertones in the pecans. In the unlikely event that there are any left after you’re done snacking, you can mix them into or scatter them atop ice cream.

Slow-Roasted Butter Pecans. Photo: T. Susan Chang for NPR

Makes 6 to 8 servings

Ingredients:
1 pound shelled whole pecans
2 tablespoons unsalted butter

Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Line a 9-by-13 pan with foil and place the pecans in it, shaking to level them. Cut the butter into 8 small chunks and scatter it over the pecans.

Roast the pecans in the center of the oven for 1 hour, tossing them well every 15 minutes (it’s particularly important after the first 15 minutes, when the butter has first melted). The pecans continue to cook after they come out of the oven, so don’t let them get too dark. To test them for doneness, cool a pecan slightly and break it in half. The center should be a delicate but distinct beige.

While the pecans are hot, salt them generously and toss until they are well-coated. Devour them immediately, wait until they’re cool, or store them (cooled) in an airtight container.

Recipe: Matzo Candy With Caramel, Chocolate And Halvah

This is adapted from Susan Feniger’s Street Food (Clarkson Potter, 2012). I like to use lightly salted matzo, which gives you a little bit of that salted-caramel effect. You can get halvah at most Middle Eastern groceries. You can break up the finished candy into very small, decorous pieces if you are concerned about gorging yourself. I have to warn you that it is terribly addictive.

Matzo Candy With Caramel, Chocolate And Halvah. Photo: T. Susan Chang for NPR

Makes 11 matzo candies

Ingredients:
Olive oil for spraying or filming
1 (11-ounce) box matzo crackers (11 crackers)
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/4 cup light corn syrup
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 pound semisweet chocolate, roughly chopped
1/4 pound (1 cup) halvah, crumbled

Instructions:
Set the oven to 300 degrees. Spray 3 baking sheets with olive oil spray, or spread a small quantity of oil over the sheets with a basting brush. (You can line the sheets with foil if you don’t wish to scrub them so much later.) Lay the matzo out in a single layer on the prepared baking sheets.

Put the butter, brown sugar, corn syrup and salt in a small saucepan set over low heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 3 to 4 minutes, until the butter melts. Raise the heat to medium and cook until the mixture is bubbling rapidly, 3 minutes. Add the baking soda, turn off the heat and stir. The caramel mixture will be thick and bubbly.

Spread the caramel over the top of the matzo crackers, covering their entire surface. Put the baking sheets in the oven and bake for 10 to 15 minutes.

Remove the baking sheets from the oven and immediately sprinkle the chopped chocolate over the caramel-covered matzo. Using a rubber spatula or the back of a spoon, spread the chocolate pieces so that they melt and coat the caramel matzo evenly. Work quickly, to take advantage of the hot caramel, which cools rather fast. Then, while the chocolate is still warm, sprinkle with the halvah. Let the matzo cool in the refrigerator for 1 hour or longer.

Break the cooled matzo into smaller pieces, and serve. Store any extras in the refrigerator in an airtight container or plastic bags.

Recipe: Rhubarb-Ginger Fool

Creamy, cool, gently tart, pink and irresistible. The Beekeeper’s Bible (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2011), from which this recipe is liberally adapted, calls for “stem ginger,” “stem ginger syrup” and “acacia honey,” but there is no need to make things difficult. As long as you can find some candied or crystallized ginger, you’re in business. If you care for a more refined texture, you could puree the rhubarb-ginger mixture before folding in the cream.

Rhubarb-Ginger Fool. Photo: T. Susan Chang for NPR

Makes 4 servings

Ingredients:
1 pound rhubarb, trimmed and finely chopped
1 tablespoon water
2 tablespoons finely chopped candied ginger
1/4 cup turbinado sugar (“sugar in the raw”)
3 tablespoons honey
1 1/4 cups heavy cream

Instructions:
Combine the rhubarb, water, ginger, sugar and honey in a small saucepan and simmer over low heat for 10 to 15 minutes, until the rhubarb is soft. Allow the mixture to cool.

Whisk the cream until it achieves soft peaks, then fold in the rhubarb mixture. Spoon the mixture into glasses and chill for 2 hours.

Just before serving, drizzle with a little more honey. If you happen to have any ginger snaps on hand, serve them with the fool.

Recipe: Posh Porcini Popcorn

I wouldn’t try to make this with air-popped popcorn. Although the porcini salt is fine and powdery, it still needs the oil to make it stick. And as for the truffle oil, it is indispensable. Don’t feel bad if you polish this all off in one go — popcorn doesn’t keep anyway.

Makes 4 cups

Ingredients:
1/4 cup dried porcini (hard to measure, but just approximate without crushing the fungi into the measuring cup)
Salt
4 cups hot, freshly oil-popped popcorn
Truffle oil to taste

Instructions:
Grind the porcini in a coffee or spice grinder until it’s finely powdered — be careful lifting the lid, as it will release clouds of porcini dust. Add about a teaspoon of kosher salt (less, if you’re using table salt) and pulse just to combine.

Scatter over hot, freshly popped popcorn and drizzle with a few decadent drops of truffle oil. Take a moment to toss really well before scarfing down by the fistful.

Recipe: Curried Egg Salad Sandwich

As much fun as it is to have hoards of secret snacks on the premises, a mom still has to eat a good lunch sometime, and I don’t mean a pint of store-bought yogurt or a package of overpriced kale chips. Here’s a sandwich that comes together in a moment, but still feels like a special treat. Don’t skip buttering the bread — it makes all the difference.

Curried Egg Salad Sandwich. Photo: T. Susan Chang for NPR

Makes 1 sandwich, piled high

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon cooking oil
1 medium shallot, finely chopped
3/4 teaspoon curry powder
1 scant teaspoon apricot jam
2 hard-boiled eggs
2 tablespoons minced chives
A few cilantro sprigs, to taste
Small handful baby arugula or watercress
Salt, to taste
Multigrain bread
Butter

Instructions:
In a small, heavy saucepan, warm the oil. Over a low flame, sweat the shallot with a pinch of salt until tender and colored a pale gold (take care not to burn on the edges), about 5 minutes. Add the curry and stir in until well blended and fragrant. Add the jam and 2 to 3 tablespoons of water, stirring until a loose slurry is formed. Simmer gently until you have a thick, syrupy sauce that doesn’t run but holds together in the pan, like a chutney or salsa.

Pour the mixture into a shallow bowl to cool for a moment. Pop a couple of slices of multigrain bread in the toaster. If you can keep one side of each slice untoasted by placing the bread face down on a piece of foil or tray, so much the better.

While the bread is toasting, mash the hard-boiled eggs into the curry sauce with a fork, until the egg salad is as crumbly as you like it. Stir in the chopped chives.

When the toast is ready, take it out and butter the untoasted sides (if both sides are toasted, don’t worry — butter them anyway). Place one slice butter side up on your cutting board and pile on as much egg salad as you like, compressing it a bit to help it stay in. Add on the cilantro and arugula or cress. Top with the remaining slice of bread, butter side facing in.

Silence your cellphone. Eat in a warm patch of sunlight while reading a novel.

About The Author
T. Susan Chang regularly reviews cookbooks for The Boston Globe, NPR.org and the cookbook-indexing website Eat Your Books. She’s the author of A Spoonful of Promises: Recipes and Stories From a Well-Tempered Table and has just released the CookShelf cookbook-rating app, which is available on iPhone, iPad and Android devices. For more information, visit her blog, Cookbooks for Dinner.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Home brewing will become legal in all 50 U.S. states, if Alabama’s governor signs a recently passed bill. In March, Mississippi approved a bill that will take effect this summer. Photo: iStockphoto.com

Post by Bill Chappell, The Two-Way at NPR (5/8/13)

The Alabama Legislature has approved a bill making it legal to brew beer at home, a practice that had been forbidden in the state. If Gov. Robert Bentley signs the bill, as is expected, home brewing will soon be legal in all 50 states.

Alabama lawmakers voted on the bill to legalize home brewing months after it was first introduced. And while it met with earlier debate and resistance, the arrival of the legislation — House Bill 9 — for a vote Tuesday night seems to have come to its supporters as a pleasant surprise.

Right To Brew, an advocacy group in Alabama, said that “after all hope seemed long lost, they brought up HB9 unexpectedly, out of the blue, and passed it 18 – 7 – 1 tonight, without a single word of debate. The Alabama Homebrew Bill has passed the Legislature!!!!”

Alabama had been in danger of becoming the only U.S. state in which it was illegal to brew beer at home. As we reported in March, Mississippi recently approved a home-brewing bill; Utah and Oklahoma enacted similar laws in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

If enacted, the new law would mean that Alabamans who make their own beer “will no longer have the fear of arrest hanging over their heads for simply participating in a hobby that is enjoyed by residents of 48 other states,” a representative of Right to Brew said in an email.

Home brewing has been growing in popularity along with the public’s surge in interest in craft brewing. But the hobby had long been either forbidden or in a legal gray area. It wasn’t until 1978 that it became legal under federal law.

The Alabama bill limits how much beer can be produced, and it forbids brewers to sell their beer. It also discourages stockpiling.

“The bill allows 15 gallons to be produced every three months,” says Republican Rep. Mac McCutcheon, who introduced the bill, “and there shall be no more than an aggregate amount 15 gallons of beer, mead, cider and wine stored in the home.”

Brewers must also keep their beers under the 14 percent alcohol by volume mark.

The Alabama legislation’s success was welcomed by the American Homebrewers Association, which has advised state groups of brewers.

“After five years of working with Alabama home brewers to legalize the hobby of home brewing in the state,” says AHA Director Gary Glass, “it is gratifying to see the Alabama Legislature finally pass a home-brew bill.”

Despite being passed by the state Legislature after Mississippi’s bill was approved, Alabama’s home-brewing bill may take effect first — the Mississippi legislation is scheduled to take effect this July.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Clucking all the way to the bank: A hen models a polka-dot diaper from MyPetChicken.com, a multimillion-dollar business that sells everything from chicken caviar treats to day-old birds. Photo: MyPetChicken.com

Post by Michaeleen Doucleff, The Salt at NPR Food (05/01/13)

There’s free range and then there’s free rein — around your house.

When Julie Baker’s backyard birds started spending more time inside, it was tough to keep them clean. So she got innovative.

She sewed up a cloth diaper — chicken-sized, of course — added a few buttons and strapped it onto her little lady.

One thing led to another, and eventually, a business was born.

“A lot of my customers use them as dresses,” Julie Baker, of Claremont, N.H., says about the poultry diapers she sells online. “They want their chickens to look really cute.” Photo: WMUR.com

Now Baker’s Pampered Poultry ships out about 50 to 100 diapers a week to urban farmers around the country. The store also sells saddles.

Wait a minute. Saddles? Who’s riding chickens?

“The roosters,” Baker says. “They’re busy boys.”

“Saddles are almost more useful than the diaper, quite frankly,” she tells The Salt. “A rooster isn’t particularly kind to a hen when they mate. He grabs her by the back and pulls her feathers out.”

“The hen ends up with a completely bare back. It gets raw and bleeds a little bit,” she says.

So Baker started selling saddles to protect the hens’ tail feathers.

And she’s not the only one.

A quick Google search finds several other shops offering custom-sized diapers and leash-ready saddles.

Husband and wife team Derek Sasaki and Traci Torres have even turned the avian accessory business into a multimillion-dollar venture: MyPetChicken.com.

Diapers are a small part of the website’s annual sales, most of which come from selling baby birds, Sasaki says.

Hello, big guy: Hen lingerie like this “saddle” adds a twist to the phrase “safe sex.” Photo: Julie Baker

Much has been made in the past few years about the rising popularity of backyard poultry farming.

About 0.8 percent of households in Denver, Los Angeles, Miami and New York City owned chickens in 2010, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. What’s more, nearly 4 percent of residents in these cities say they plan to pick up a chick in the next few years.

“Chickens are a symbol of urban nirvana,” The New York Times wrote last year, “their coops backyard shrines to a locavore movement that has city dwellers moving ever closer to their food.”

Perhaps the “poultry Pampers” and hen lingerie point to the next phase of the urban chicken trend: home invasion.

Ryan Slabaugh thinks so. He’s the editor of Backyard Poultry magazine, which touts tens of thousands of subscribers.

More people are keeping chickens as pets instead of as farm animals, Slabaugh says. “I bet close to 50 percent of our readers have chickens around for companionship rather than for any real agricultural purposes,” he tells The Salt.

“There are many breeds of chickens that are good to look at but don’t lay very good eggs,” he says — and they’re still popular with urban farmers.

“I got a call the other day from a lady in Idaho because her chicken had a problem with its foot,” he says. “She called it a ‘lap chicken.’ It crawled up in her lap, just like any other pet.”

But Torres of MyPetChicken.com says this might be more the exception than the norm.

There are a few die-hard poultry people who keep the birds in their homes 24/7, she says. They have decked-out chicken condos that can be outlandish.

“But usually what happens is that a bird will get injured and someone might bring it inside to recuperate,” she says. “The diaper makes cleanup much, much easier.”

After the rehabilitation, it can be tough to send the bird back to the yard, Torres says.

And voila — a lap chicken is created.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Why won’t bacon die? Because it tastes so good. Photo: Rachael Myrow

Yes, pundits keep declaring bacon is boring, and therefore, dead. Over. Done, already. But bacon’s greasy grip on the American consciousness lives on.

As food writer Jason Sheehan of the Seattle Weekly put it,

“Bacon has not merely jumped the shark. Bacon has taken all the sharks, stuffed them with cupcakes, ice cream, sausage, lipstick, alarm clocks and mayonnaise, wrapped them in bacon, deep-fried them, then jumped that. Using a ramp made of bacon.”

In a time when people are cultivating their own yoghurt and milling their own flour, it’s a wonder everybody isn’t making their own bacon, the way Pati Palmer does in Cupertino.

It all started a couple of years ago. Driving her two teenagers around one morning, Palmer heard a KQED Forum segment on Do-It-Yourself projects, and the guest Sean Timberlake from Punk Domestics piqued her curiosity. Not long after, she was poking around on the group’s web site. “And I just decided ‘I gotta do bacon.’”

Off she went to Dittmer’s Gourmet Meats & Wurst-Haus in Los Altos for five pounds of pork belly. The family ate what they could, and froze the rest. Although, really, that shouldn’t have been necessary. Palmer guffaws. “A 14 year-old son? Come on! Bacon doesn’t last.”

Tasty as it is, Palmer’s not looking to start a new career in bacon. In case you’re thinking about it, bacon is not one of the approved foods under the new California Homemade Food Act. But…we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The raw material, in this case, at Olivier’s Butchery in San Francisco. Photo: Rachael Myrow

First, you should try making bacon, and that involves buying pork belly. Bi-Rite butcher Zane Clark says some people do pause looking at a full pork belly. Especially if they don’t have ravenous teenagers living at home. Zane suggests sharing the love — and the saturated fat — with others. “You could have a bacon party with it,” he suggests.

Or…if you want to get all competitive about it, you could invite your DIY-inclined friends over for a piggy throw-down. “A bacon swap,” Clark says, “Which would be kind of cool.”

Clark says he’s seen no perceptible bump in pork belly sales specifically for bacon-making. Other Bay Area butchers report bacon stampedes, typically set off by a compelling food blog post, or TV show, or dare I suggest it, public radio segment. Once you’ve got the belly in your hot little hands, the next question is dry rub or brine.

Ian Marks is chef/owner of The Beast and The Hare in San Francisco’s Mission District. Photo: Rachael Myrow

Ian Marks of The Beast and the Hare in San Francisco brines. Downstairs in the restaurant’s basement, buckets of pork belly sit in brining solution for a week before he pulls them out, commenting:

“It’s basically a pickled piece of meat.”

Marks is coy about the actual recipe. Still, it’s fair to say his recipe works. He moves four slabs of bacon a week. The rest he sells to Drewes Brothers and Guerra’s Deli & Meats. In truth, much depends on your personal palate. The ingredients are about as basic as can be: “White sugar, brown sugar, molasses, honey, salt, and a little saltpeter.” That said, he must be doing something right to stand out in a crowded marketplace. San Francisco magazine last year declared his bacon the best in the Bay Area.

Out of the bucket and ready for the smoker. Photo: Rachael Myrow

From there, it’s on to the smoker, strewn liberally with apple wood chips. To meet the exigencies of the weekend brunch rush, he typically finishes cooking the bacon in the oven. After that, there’s yet another aesthetic decision to make – thin slices? Or thick? Marks slices super thick — just eight to ten slices a pound. “Otherwise, the molasses will start burning.”

Some folks are finicky about choosing locally-raised pork, but some of the best heritage breeds come from parts elsewhere. Marks gets his pork from Coleman Farms in Colorado: raised on pasture; no hormones or antibiotics.

“I definitely prefer a red pig, a Duroc pig, over a Berkshire pig,” Marks says. Why? He likes the nuttiness of the Duroc, and the sweetness of the meat. He makes his own charcuterie, too, and that’s also Duroc. That said, there’s something else. “I find Berkshire to be a little more barnyard-y smelling — and because I’ve noticed it, now I notice it every time.” There are a variety of heritage breeds to choose from, and heritage crossbreeds, too. Ask your favorite butcher where she’s sourcing her meat, but it’s worth noting she’ll also special order if you simply must try, for example, a Tamworth pig, instead of what she has in the case.

Where were we? Right, the stove. After Marks fries up a couple slices, we retire to one of the restaurant tables. Journalistic duty requires a taste test, you understand. Sure enough, as Marks promised, the bacon is salty, sweet and nutty. Some say brining makes the bacon taste more hammy, but there’s nothing hammy about this bacon. “Phenomenal,” I exclaim, and he grins with satisfaction.

Want to listen to the radio feature on bacon that aired on KQED? Here you go!

Off You Go To a Butcher Now:

• 4505 Meats, SF.
• Avedano’s, SF.
• Belcampo Meat Co., Larkspur.
• Bi-Rite Market, SF.
• Boccalone, SF.
• Dittmer’s Gourmet Meats & Wurst-Haus, Los Altos.
• Drewes Brothers, SF.
• Fatted Calf, Napa, SF and Berkeley.
• Guerra’s Deli & Meats, SF.
• The Local Butcher Shop, Berkeley.
• Marin Sun Farms, Point Reyes Station.
• Olivier’s Butchery, SF.
• Prime Smoked Meats, Oakland.
• Victorian Farmstead Meat Co., Sebastopol.

Previous Bay Area Bites bacon coverage: Makin’ Bacon in the Headlands

Falling Fruit tells you where you can pick peaches and other foods free for the taking around the world. Photo: istockphoto.com

Post by Kristofor Husted, The Salt at NPR Food (4/23/13)

If you really love your peaches and want to shake a tree, there’s a map to help you find one. That goes for veggies, nuts, berries and hundreds of other edible plant species, too.

Avid foragers Caleb Philips and Ethan Welty launched an interactive map last month that identifies more than a half-million locations across the globe where fruits and veggies are free for the taking. The project, dubbed “Falling Fruit,” pinpoints all sorts of tasty trees in public parks, lining city streets and even hanging over fences from the U.K. to New Zealand.

The map looks like a typical Google map. Foraging locations are pinned with dots. Zoom in and click on one, and up pops a box with a description of what tree or bush you can find there. The description often includes information on the best season to pluck the produce, the quality and yield of the plant, a link to the species profile on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website, and any additional advice on accessing the spot.

A screenshot of the Falling Fruit interactive map

“I’m a data geek,” Welty says. “I feel like there is power in getting everything onto one map. A map is like a very narrow lens on the world, but I think it’s very powerful because of how narrow it is.”

Clearly, with dozens of countries boasting thousands of foraging destinations, it’s practically impossible for Welty and Philips to verify all of the spots. Welty says they have to rely on the honesty of the contributors when it comes to listing trees in potentially off-limits locations, like private properties or fenced-in parks. In many of those cases, the entry contributors tell potential foragers to ask the property owners for permission. The map has more than 6,700 crowdsourced entries so far.

Jeff Wanner stands among the 500 pounds of apples he picked from neighborhood trees in a couple of hours with Falling Fruit co-founder Ethan Welty in Boulder, Colo., last fall. Photo: Ethan Welty/Falling Fruit

“If I can apply my skills to help people realize that there is a fruit tree down the street that they can pick, then that’s just a simple thing I can do to reconnect people with how food works and get them away from the notion that food is only in a grocery store,” he says.

Now, the map doesn’t limit its entries to fruits and veggies. Welty says it also lists beehives, public water wells, and even dumpsters with excess food waste.

“There is someone who posted a squirrel with a recipe for him,” he says. “Gray squirrel is an invasive species. He’s encouraging people to hunt for squirrels, so hey, why not?”

Welty says he hopes the map and its stable of contributors will keep growing — so much so that it ends up influencing cities’ land use and management plans.

“The big goal, in a way,” he says, “is to make people realize that there is potential [for foraging in cities] and deliberately create food forests, like the Beacon Food Forest and others around the country — to rethink what a city should look like.”

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Kale, Broccoli, Artichoke, Blue Flowers

Assess Your Space
How much growing space can you find? How much direct sun (and wind) will you have? San Francisco, in particular, is rife with micro-climates; growing a garden in the Outer Sunset is a very different proposition from planting in the Mission. You can grow lettuces, herbs, and hardy greens, like kale and collards, almost anywhere, but warmth-loving, sunshine-demanding plants like tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers need a reliable 6 to 8 hours of direct sunshine to ripen flavorfully. Making fruit (and seed-filled, fleshy vegetables like tomatoes and peppers count as fruit) takes a lot of effort on the plant’s part, demanding a much higher level of nutrients and food (in the form of sugars produced by photosynthesis) than those needed by leafy greens. So, if your yard is a shady one, don’t break your heart by planting lots of tomatoes that won’t ripen. Stick with cool-loving plants like lettuce, chard, and Asian greens.

Lettuces like cool weather.

Don’t Skimp on the Immediate Gratification
Starting from seed is the cheapest way to get a garden going. But it’s also the slowest, and depending on how slug/snail/bird-mobbed your beds are, it can also be the most dangerous, as just-sprouted tender seedlings are the most vulnerable to pest attacks.

If you need to see some evidence to stay interested, buy some well-established seedlings instead. And fun (and tasty) as tomatoes and potatoes can be, they also take months to produce. So remember to plant some quick-to-harvest treats, like lettuce, spinach, mizuna, Asian greens, arugula and radishes, which go soil-to-table in less than 6 weeks. Beets, too, can be harvested young, when they’re extra-sweet and tender. Sugar-snap peas also grow like Jack’s beanstalk (give them a trellis to crawl up and cling to) and are wildly productive. Plus, they make a great sweet snack right off the plant.

Pea Vines

Know Your Soil
Urban soils, even in residential neighborhoods, can have less-than-pristine histories. That’s why container gardening–or building raised beds and filling them with fresh soil and compost–is usually preferable for edible plantings, rather than digging straight into your backyard topsoil, especially if you’re planting root crops like beets, turnips, carrots, radishes, potatoes. Raised beds or containers can also help discourage critters (like gophers) from digging in from below, while opper strips around the edges can keep snails and slugs at bay. Building your own beds also means you can arrange the height to suit your flexibility; if crouching and bending close to the ground is difficult, plant in barrels or build tall, crate-like beds at a more comfortable level. Sunset magazine’s website offers great step-by-step instructions for
building your own redwood or cedar raised beds.

Get Some Good Books
An invaluable resource–and one that no city grower should be without–is Pam Peirce’s Golden Gate Gardening, now in its 3rd edition. Peirce has been talking to gardeners all across the city for decades, getting their feedback on what grows best where. Her book is straightforward and readable for gardeners at all levels, and explains micro-climates, fog belts, wind patterns, and how to lay out your garden to make the most of both sun and shade, as well as listing all the best varieties of vegetables, flowers, fruits, and herbs for growing around the Bay.

The New Western Garden Book; (9th edition) is another must-have for gardeners throughout the West, especially in California. I can’t think of a gardener I know who doesn’t have a dusty, dirt-smeared copy of Sunset’s gardening bible in her shed or garage–and often a newer, more pristine copy among the inspirational gardening books inside.

If you’re limited to what you can fit in pots on your back steps, pick up a copy of A Little Piece of Earth: How to Grow Your Own Food in Small Spaces, local author Maria Finn‘s book about container gardening. Finn knows firsthand about growing edibles without a backyard–she lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, and does all her gardening in pots on her upper deck.

Feed Your Soil
Before you plant a single seed, you’ve got to get your soil right. Yes, this can seem boring; you can spend a whole afternoon hauling bags of compost or smelly chicken manure, double-digging or spreading mulch, and not have as much a sprig in the ground to show for it. But putting in your plants should be the very last step in building your garden. Skip or skimp on this step, and you’ll be fighting bug infestations, weak growth, and nutrient and mineral deficiencies in your plants the whole rest of the growing season.

Do Some Spring Cleaning
Make room for spring! Pull out any bug-infested or mildewed plants that you planted last fall or winter. Quick tip-offs that your plants have bolted and are ready for composting: Thick, bare, woody stems; heavy infestations of aphids (check undersides of leaves); normally low plants, like lettuce, shooting up and producing long, skinny flower stems; an abundance of yellow flowers on broccoli and other brassica-family plants; anything that looks leggy, overgrown, and just plain tired.

Bolted plants are concentrating their efforts on reproduction, meaning their leaves will be bitter and less flavorful. Pull ‘em out, compost them to feed the earth (anything extremely buggy should be discarded, as home compost probably won’t get hot enough to destroy insects and their eggs), and be sure to beef up your beds with fresh compost and/or organic fertilizer before planting fresh seedlings.

Strawberry Plants

Rotate Your Beds
Don’t plant seedlings from the same plant families in the same place year after year. Every plant family attracts a similar family of predators and disease-causing microbes to it. If you plant your potatoes where you put your tomatoes, you’ll be encouraging the same pests in the soil, since both potatoes and tomatoes are in the Solanum family. Think of it as changing your plants’ passwords every season. Strawberries, in particular, should be rotated around the garden frequently.

Feed Your Pollinators
You know what makes a lot of your seed-bearing edible plants productive? Pollinators! That includes not just honeybees but all kinds of native bees, wasps, and other insects that crawl from flower to flower seeking nectar and, along the way, spreading pollen to make the reproductive fruiting magic happen. Planting compatible, pollinator-pleasing plants alongside your edibles will definitely make a difference in how many zucchini, cucumbers, apricots or apples you’ll get. And they’re pretty, too! Bees are particularly fond of blue and purple flowers, so be sure to include borage (whose dainty star-shaped edible flowers are adorable on cupcakes), bachelor’s buttons (cornflowers), and lavender. Other easy-to-grown pollinator buffets include cosmos, calendula, African blue basil, butterfly bush, coreopsis, dusty miller, sweet allysum, lamb’s ear, scabiosa (pincushion flower), rosemary, and sage.

Borage and Nasturiums

Buy Local
Head up to Novato, where the Indian Valley Organic Farm and Garden, an educational farm that’s part of the College of Marin, will be holding a 2-day Spring Plant Sale, complete with farm tours, live music, sales of plants, seedlings, and produce grown on the farm, bouquet making, and tastings, from 10am-3pm on Sat, April 20 and Sun, April 21. Buying seedlings from a farm often means getting more creative choices and more variety–a great way to try out some healthy new veggies. Purple carrots? Easter-egg radishes? Tokyo turnips? Rainbow chard? Golden raspberries? Why not? And consider investing in some perennials, too, like artichoke or rhubarb crowns, which can be productive for decades once established. Go colorful and get ready for a delicious spring and summer dining in the garden.

In Santa Cruz on May 4 and 5, the apprentices at UCSC Farm and Garden program will be holding their annual Spring Plant Sale, organic plants and seedlings grown on the farm, including both annual and perennial vegetables, medicinal and culinary herbs, flowers, and fruit.

Artichoke Plant

Matt Lee (left) and Ted Lee (right) grew up in Charleston, S.C. After leaving the South as young adults, they founded a mail-order food company, The Lee Bros. Boiled Peanut Catalogue. They have written two previous cookbooks of Southern cuisine. Photo: Squire Fox/Clarkson Potter

Listen to the Story on All Things Considered

Post by NPR Staff, NPR Food (4/18/13)

A new cookbook by the Lee brothers just might inspire daydreams of a food-centric vacation to South Carolina. It’s called The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen, and in it, Matt and Ted Lee feature recipes and stories from the Southern port city they grew up in. The brothers joined NPR’s Melissa Block to talk about Charleston’s distinctive food culture, starting with the dishes that they’d put on a typical Charleston menu.

“I would start with kumquat sparklers, with the flavor of backyard kumquats, which are like tangerines,” Matt says. “Also, classic Charleston cheese biscuits with a single pecan pressed into it, and savory benne wafers — sesame seed wafers.”

For the second course, Ted says, “we’d do a she-crab soup, and then we’d do a shrimp and grits,” he says. “For vegetables, I think this is the perfect time to do chainey briar; it’s growing really well out on Sullivan’s Island. We’d do some Grilled Chainey Briar.”

“Chainey briar is a native weed or vine,” Ted explains. “It’s Smilax botanically. It’s something that grows on fence lines, it grows on sand dunes at the beaches and it has, in the spring right about now, a tender tip, a shoot that is delicious.”

It looks, quite frankly, like a weed, and might be a bit of an acquired taste — but the brothers say it’s worth acquiring. “It’s pretty rangy, and that’s the appeal, in terms of flavor,” Matt says. It tastes like asparagus but with this extra sort of reckless green thing. Sometimes we describe it as tasting like asparagus with olive oil already on it.”

For dessert, the brothers would serve Huguenot Torte, an iconic Charleston dish. “Hugeonot torte has this nice meringue-like crisp top, but then a sludgy caramel and apple and pecan bottom to it,” Matt says. “It’s got flour but tons of leavening — so it just puffs up in the oven, then collapses and creates this very interesting and uniquely Charleston dessert.”

Southern Food With Less Pork And More Loquats

The Lee brothers, who were born in New York but grew up in Charleston, have written two previous cookbooks highlighting Southern cuisine. This is their first to focus just on the city of their youth, and their choice is more than just hometown favoritism: Charleston’s culinary tradition is unusual, with dishes and traditions you won’t find in other parts of the South.

“It’s naturally about the seafood and also about the poultry,” Matt explains. “The much-heralded, like, ‘porkopolis’ of the South doesn’t really exist so much in Charleston, because it was never a place to raise cattle or pigs, being so marshy.”

It’s not just the meat that makes Charleston stand out; there’s also a rich variety of local produce. “I think another thing that visitors to Charleston are surprised by is just how close the farms are — the rural part of Charleston — to the city,” Ted says.

You might not even need to find a farmer to get fresh food. “Even downtown — we grew up downtown in the historic district — we’re surrounded by fruits of all kinds, like kumquats, loquats, mulberries, figs, pomegranates, bananas, citrus,” Ted says. “They all grow downtown, and you grow up sort of knowing where the trees are and which ones taste best.”

Call it “foraging” or call it “stealing,” snagging fruit off someone else’s tree is certainly possible in Charleston. “There are a lot of secrets in back alleys in Charleston that yield great fruits and herbs.” The trick to harvesting that bounty without ruining your neighborly relations? “Be very polite,” Ted says — and, Matt adds, be sure to smile. “That’s awfully disarming,” he says.

Taking Cues From The Past

In addition to highlighting Charleston’s current food culture, Matt and Ted Lee also looked to Charleston’s history to find old recipes that might have been forgotten. Cookbooks from the 19th century were particularly inspiring, Ted says. “They tell a story so diverse and varied about the different types of vegetables that were grown in the low country, some of which are rarely found, like salsify, tania — it’s a root vegetable,” he says. “It’s nice to be able to draw from the past to inform your kitchen in the present.”

One recipe in the new cookbook comes from an even more distant past — a dessert from the 1700s called Syllabub. “Despite the fact that it appears in all the old cookbooks, Matt and I have never been served it — either in a Charleston restaurant or a Charleston home,” Ted says. “So we just tried it ourselves. It’s basically very simple — it’s fortified wine that’s been seasoned with lemon juice and lemon peel, a little bit of sugar, sometimes spices, and whipped with cream until it’s sort of this airy, fluffy, alcoholic whipped cream that goes really well with fruit.”

If you want to follow Matt and Ted and take a stab at Syllabub, a recipe is below, as well as recipes for Huguenot Torte and Grilled Chainey Briar. But be warned: You might need to plan a trip to Charleston to enjoy that chainey briar. You won’t find it in grocery stores or farmers markets, and will have better luck harvesting it yourself. Like fresh kumquats off the tree or oysters from the ocean, it’s a location-bound delicacy. As Matt Lee, who lives in Charleston today, puts it, “it’s just one of those things that you have to live here to really appreciate.”

Recipe: Grilled Chainey Briar

Chainey briar grows wild around Charleston, S.C. Photo: Matt Lee and Ted Lee/Clarkson Potter

Most chainey briar found among the dunes or in metropolitan Charleston are thin, curly tendrils, although our friend Tom, who gentleman-farms on Johns Island, recently introduced us to “bull briar,” the thicker sprouts of mature smilax vines that grow in the forested areas of the sea islands. Bull briar, which truly resembles large asparagus, would seem to represent more vegetable for one’s effort, but it is found so high in the trees that a pole pruner is usually required to harvest it. We’re just as happy to spend the afternoon on a path to the beach, eating every third tendril we pick, until the basket is full.

Chainey briar almost never appears in the farmer’s markets, so you must forage for it yourself (or ingratiate yourself to farmer Sidi Limehouse [see page 94 of The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen], who will occasionally indulge good friends with a basketful). Its flavor is robust enough that it grills well, wilting and charring in places. Dressed with oil and lemon, it makes for an exciting side dish with pre-colonial roots.

1 pound chainey briar
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for the pan
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

1. Thoroughly wash the chainey briar, removing any ants or foreign matter and pinching off the stem ends (which will toughen as they age) so only the tender parts remain. Toss the chainey briar in a large bowl with the olive oil to coat, scatter 1/2 teaspoon salt over the bowl, and toss again.

2. Lightly oil a grill pan, and place it over high heat. When a drop of water sizzles when dropped on the pan, spread the chainey briar in an even layer about 1/2 inch high (you may have to grill multiple batches, depending on the size of your pan). Allow the chainey briar to sizzle and pop for a minute or two, until the tips of some begin to blacken. Use tongs to shuffle the chainey briar on the grill pan and allow them to cook a minute or two more, until almost all the fronds show signs of wilting. Reserve the chainey briar in a large covered bowl as you move on to grill another batch.

3. When all the chainey briar is wilted and charred, dress it with the lemon juice, toss lightly, and season to taste with salt and black pepper. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Recipe: Huguenot Torte

Huguenot torte has gooey caramel beneath a crackly top Photo: Squire Fox/Clarkson Potter

Imagine that a blondie and an apple-pecan pie got into a crusty-gooey, sticky-delicious accident in a baking dish, and you’ll approximate the ultra-decadence of this dessert. Until relatively recently, Charlestonians believed that this confection, as the title might suggest, came to Charleston with the French Huguenots, who settled in the city in the eighteenth century, and that it was a rustic cousin of elegant pâtisseries. But in the 1990s, the culinary historian and Lowcountry native John Martin Taylor tracked down the woman to whom the recipe is attributed in Charleston Receipts, and learned that she’d encountered the dish as “Ozark Pudding” while visiting relatives in Arkansas in the 1940s. She had brought the recipe back to Charleston, and put the dessert on the menu of the Huguenot Tavern, where she was a cook.

The fact that this dessert has become as much an icon of Charleston home cooking as Charleston Okra Soup [see page 74 of The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen] and She-Crab Soup [page 77] seems odd — but it’s all part of “Charleston’s food pattern,” as May A. Pyatt wrote in a 1950 review of Charleston Receipts in the News and Courier. Another interesting note: not many Charleston restaurants these days offer the torte — or even variants upon it — but it is almost always offered on menus at the tea rooms [see page 79] that open in the spring throughout the area. You should master it yourself; it’s easy to make and easy to eat, and nice to have in your repertoire.

When we’re serving this dish for guests, we often temper its sweetness by whipping a small amount of buttermilk or sour cream into the whipped cream garnish.

unsalted butter for greasing the dish
2 large eggs
1 1/3 cups sugar
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 Granny Smith or other tart apple, cored, peeled, and diced (1 cup)
1 cup chopped pecans
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons whole buttermilk or sour cream

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Grease a 2-quart baking dish.

2. In a large bowl, beat the eggs with a whisk until they’re creamy and frothy. Add the sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, apple, pecans, and vanilla, whisking to combine after each addition.

3. Pour the batter into the prepared baking dish and bake for 45 minutes, or until the top of the torte is crusty. Remove the torte from the oven and let cool for about 10 minutes.

4. Whip the cream with the buttermilk until stiff peaks form. Cut into individual portions — they will be lumpen and misshapen, with shards of crust and spoonfuls of ooze, but no matter — and serve with dollops of the whipped cream.

Recipe: Syllabub With Rosemary-Glazed Figs

Syllabub is a traditional dessert featuring sherry, cream and sugar. Photo: Squire Fox/Clarkson Potter

Serves: 4
Time: 1 hour 15 minutes, including chilling

Syllabub

1/2 cup Sercial Madeira or Amontillado sherry
Peel of 1/2 lemon
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
Pinch of kosher salt
1 cup heavy cream, cold

Rosemary-glazed figs

1/2 cup sugar
2 (3-inch) long sprigs rosemary
Pinch of kosher salt
4 ounces fresh figs (about 4 large), stemmed and quartered

1. Make the syllabub: Put all syllabub ingredients except for the cream into a large bowl, and whisk until the sugar has dissolved, about a minute. Let stand in the fridge, about 1 hour.

2. Make the rosemary-glazed figs: Heat the sugar and 1/4 cup of water in a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Add the rosemary and the salt, stir for about 30 seconds to dissolve the salt and bruise the rosemary, and turn off the heat. Cover and let cool to room temperature, about 20 minutes.

3. Put the figs in a small bowl, drizzle 2 to 3 tablespoons of the rosemary syrup over them, and toss gently to coat. (If the figs are less than ripe, let them stand in the syrup for 30 minutes to sweeten.) Reserve the remaining syrup for another use, such as sweetening lemonade.

4. Remove the lemon peel from the wine mixture. Pour the cream into the wine and whisk by hand until the cream is thick and holds its shape, about 2 minutes. Divide the syllabub among four wine glasses or sundae cups and spoon the rosemary-glazed figs over each serving.

Syllabub with Strawberries and Black Pepper

For a springtime variation on Syllabub with Rosemary-Glazed Figs, make Syllabub with Strawberries and Black Pepper. Simply substitute for the rosemary-glazed figs 4 ounces strawberries that have been quartered and tossed a few times with sugar to taste (a teaspoon or two) until the sugar has dissolved. (Add a few drops water, if needed, to dissolve). Spoon the strawberries over each serving of Syllabub, then grind a bit of black pepper over the top of each and serve.

Recipes from The Lee Bros. Charleston Cookbook by Matt Lee and Ted Lee. Copyright 2013 by Matt Lee and Ted Lee. Excerpted by permission of Clarkson Potter, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House.

More on the Lee Bros.
• Classic Southern Food Gets A Makeover (NPR Food)
• Recipes That Passed a Cookbook Critic’s Test (Kitchen Window, NPR Food)

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Many Bay Area home brewers are trying their hands at growing their own hops.

On a sunny day last week, Sam Gilbert dug a hole in the backyard of BrewLab SF‘s headquarters, into which he placed a hops rhizome.

Over the next several months, the rhizome, which looks like a stick with roots poking out of it, will grow vines that will produce a vital component of Gilbert’s home-brewed beer.

“Every brewer to some extent dreams of making a beer with their own hops,” Gilbert says.

Gilbert, co-founder of the home brewers’ collective, joins other dedicated home brewers throughout the Bay Area who have taken their craft to another level by growing their own hops. As home brewing soars in popularity, so does the allure of raising hops, a climbing vine that is inexpensive and easy to grow.

Sam Gilbert holds a Centennial hops rhizome to be planted in his backyard in San Francisco’s southern Mission District. His home serves as the headquarters for BrewLab SF.

“It comes down to passion,” says Ian Dunbar-Hall, who is part of a home brewing group called Euphemia Ales in San Francisco. “One way to extend that passion is to grow your own ingredients. While we don’t have the ability to necessarily grow our grain, we can grow our own hops.”

San Francisco Brewcraft and Oak Barrel Winecraft in Berkeley report normal sales of rhizomes this year, while MoreBeer in Concord has seen companywide rhizome pre-sales increase about 25 percent compared to last year, says store manager Dave Wonder.

“This has been our biggest year by far,” Wonder says.

More than a few members of the Bay Area Mashers home brew club are finally trying their hand at growing hops this year, says president Justin Unverricht.

“I have seen a large increase in people wanting to grow their own hops,” he says. “More people are aware of how to do it and there is now a fairly large wealth of information for people who are interested. If you have the space, it’s a fun distraction.”

Growing your own hops ensures peak freshness compared to the hops home brewers can buy commercially, Gilbert says.

“Everyone kind of prizes having the freshest hops possible in their beer,” Gilbert says. “There is no better way to control that than for it to be your own hops.”

Sam Gilbert plants a Centennial hops rhizome between cilantro and rosemary plants, which will also be used in home-brewed beer.

Chad Gallagher of Berkeley began growing hops because he wanted to be involved in another aspect of the beer-making process. He started four years ago at a time when hops were very expensive because of a hops shortage.

Today, you can find hops rhizomes at home brew stores in the spring for $4-$5, but with hops being a hot commodity, growing your own ensures a steady supply. It can also be difficult to buy fresh hops to make a wet hops beer.

“There are some varieties that are in such demand that many home brew shops and hop distributors ration them out to a few ounces to home brewers at a time,” Unverricht says. “Large breweries often have direct deals with the hop farmers themselves to secure access to certain hops, but competition is pretty fierce.”

Hops rhizomes produce vines that can reach 20 to 30 feet with plenty of sunlight and water. It takes about three years for a hops plant to fully mature and develop its root system. Gallagher, who grows four hops varieties, has been impressed with how quickly they can grow under the right conditions.

“On a hot day,” he says, “they’ll grow two to three inches.”

But hops need regular maintenance and must be cut down to the ground after each harvest, says James Davids, an enologist with San Francisco Brewcraft.

“It’s a pretty crazy plant,” Davids says. “After a year or two, it could take over the entire side of your house.”

The home brewing supply store sells 10 different hops varieties, but not all grow well in some parts of the Bay Area with its varying microclimates.

“Cascade or Centennial tend to do well whether it’s foggy or sunny,” Davids says.

Gilbert is growing six or seven hops varieties, including Cascade, Centennial, Nugget, Goldings and Fuggles. They are a mix of rhizomes and mature plants donated by a BrewLab brewer, all of which he hopes will produce enough hops to brew roughly 15 to 20 gallons of beer.

Gilbert’s freshly-planted rhizomes join mature hops plants donated by a BrewLab brewer.

Like many home brewers who grow their own hops, he’ll make a wet hops beer. Since hops have a very short shelf life once they are harvested, they are usually dried or pelletized. Gilbert will instead add the just-harvested hops to the boil kettle to impart a fresh, grassy flavor.

“It’s more seasonal than any other beer,” says Dunbar-Hall.

Dunbar-Hall grows 32 plants with eight hops varieties on his family’s property north of Napa, which he says would produce more beer than he and his two partners could ever drink. They’ll use some of the hops to make a wet hops double IPA, and will give the rest to other home brewers or possibly team up with a local brewery for a wet hops beer.

On his family’s 85-acre plot of land north of Napa, Dunbar-Hall grows hops on two 16-foot trellis systems.
Photo credit: Ian Dunbar-Hall

Keep an eye out for wet hops beers on tap at local brew pubs around the harvest season from August through late September, he says. Sierra Nevada also makes Northern and Southern Hemisphere Harvest Wet Hop Ales.

With home brewed wet hops beers, there can be a lot of guesswork because unlike commercially-available hops, which are lab-tested, it is harder to determine the bitterness of backyard hops.

“Personally, I’m excited about making a beer completely with my own hops so I think I’ll play that roulette and see what happens,” Gilbert says. “Hopefully I’ll get something that isn’t too bitter to drink or not bitter enough.”