Chef Jacques Pépin demonstrates how to clean and prepare mussels. He is joined by his daughter, Claudine on the set of his TV series Essential Pépin.

Chef Jacques Pépin demonstrates how to crystallize orange skin to make candied orange peels. This video clip is a web-exclusive that was taped during the filming of Jacques' series Essential Pépin.

Chef Jacques Pépin demonstrates how to debone a quail. This video clip is a web-exclusive that was taped during the filming of Jacques' series Essential Pépin.

We’re used to buying cardboard boxloads of factory drone candy canes that are uniform, neatly wrapped, shapely, laden with high fructose corn syrup, and positively soulless. But me -- I’m the gal who likes my candy lumpy. If there were an Island of Misfit Toys for food, these “special” little guys would surely be inhabitants (along with Dingle Berries Candy and Hot Pockets, most likely).

Making candy canes is a lot of fun, and the sweat equity can’t be beat. The flavor is clean and super minty (with a little creaminess to it, thanks to the vanilla extract), and the yield is ample enough to allow me to hand them out generously. And despite the number of words in the recipe below, the whole thing took under an hour. There is a knack to it, however, as pulling hard candy can be a tricky mistress. A couple of things to keep in mind, particularly if you’ve never made candy before:

  
•  A candy thermometer is a very, very, very good idea. No reason not to have one, as they are about $15 and they can be used for frying as well. You can buy a cheaper one made of glass, but they’re pretty breakable. I recommend one like this made of metal, with a sturdy clip, and a protector on the bottom to keep the thermometer off the bottom of the pot.

 

• Heat-retardant gloves. These are great to use as oven mitts as well. But if you’re just dabbling and you don’t wish to invest, you can get by with snug mittens covered by disposable gloves (I always have a couple on-hand for kitchen use and home hair dying stolen from my gynecologist’s office), but you will indeed have to endure a little heat.

    

• Be generous with the oil. A light sheen on the pans and on the bench scraper ain’t gonna cut it. Don’t be shy. Speaking of which...

   

• A bench scraper. This is a small wonder in the kitchen, and an inexpensive and easy-to-store must for baking, candy making, pasta making, etc. Two is better, but you can certainly get by with one.

One other thing: despite the candy appeal, I’m sorry to say that this is not a good project for kids. Scalding fluid and fairly quick work don’t mix well with young’uns.

This recipe took a lot of inspiration from this recipe and this video posted by Slashfood.

Let’s candy cane away!

Homemade Candy Cane Recipe

Time: About one hour

Makes: About 16 3-inch candy canes

Ingredients you will need:

3 cups sugar
1 cup corn syrup (Don’t be scared. It’s not HFCS. Totally different thing.)
1/3 cup water
1/2 tsp. cream of tartar
1/8 tsp. kosher salt
Vegetable oil for pans, tools, and gloves
2 tsp. peppermint oil (ideally not extract, but ok to use if that’s all you have)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Red food coloring -- about 1/3 of one of those tiny bottles (however, next time I make these I will first make my own food coloring. If you get to it before me, let me know how it works!)

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Oil two large baking sheets, a bench scraper, and kitchen shears or a sharp knife. Lay a piece of parchment paper or a Silpat on the counter where the canes can dry. Move one of the baking sheets to the warm oven.
2. Meanwhile, in a straight-sided deep saucepan off heat, combine the sugar, corn syrup, water, cream of tartar, and salt and stir them together well. Clip a candy thermometer to the side of the pot and move it onto medium-high heat. Without stirring, let the syrup come up to 305 degrees. Using a pastry brush or a paint brush dedicated to culinary use, wash down any stray sugar crystals from the side of the pot. Ready the peppermint oil, food coloring, measuring spoons, and vegetable oil. Glove thyself with either heat-retardant gloves or snug mittens covered with disposable gloves.
3. Once the syrup has reached temperature, pour it out onto the room temperature baking sheet. Drizzle the peppermint oil on top, and using the bench scraper, scrape the hot candy up from the bottom and fold it over onto itself to stir it through. Once it has cooled slightly, mix in the vanilla as well. Note that the peppermint scent in the air will be strong.
4. Continuously scrape up and stir the syrup to cool it until it becomes a pliable dough. Cut the dough in half and move one piece to the baking sheet inside the warm oven. (First, we’ll “pull” the white half of the candy cane. Then we’ll color the red half.)
5. Quickly oil your gloved hands, as it’s now time to pull the candy. Scrape up the candy dough into one piece and, working as quickly and as continuously as you can, pull it out into a rope, double it over onto itself, and twist it together. Pull it, double it, and twist it again. Keep on going this way at a quick clip, and you’ll notice that the candy will start to take on a ribbon-y sheen. This is how the candy will turn white, so keep going until the color is pure. Embrace the upper body workout. Note that anytime the candy becomes too stiff, simply warm it up again in the oven to soften.
6. Don’t let the candy get too hard. When it’s reached a nice white color, place it onto its baking sheet and move it to the warm oven. Re-oil your bench scraper. Take out the second tray of candy dough and pour on the red food coloring -- about a third of one of those tiny bottles for a good rich color. Use your scraper fold the candy onto itself to incorporate the color completely. Note that this side of the candy cane does not need to be pulled. Move both candy cane trays to the oven and let them warm through for about 5 minutes until pliant.
7. Once warm and squishy enough to work with, take both pieces of candy from the oven and roll them into logs as long as the baking sheet. Cut each log into four equal pieces. Hang on to one red piece and one white piece, moving the rest of the candy back into the oven to keep warm.
8. On the countertop, line the red and white logs alongside one another and begin to twist from one end, stretching as you go, making the candy canes as thin or as thick as you like. Use your oiled shears or knife to cut the length of each cane. Shape the hook of the cane, and press down on the ends to taper. Set the canes aside to cool. (Know, of course, that you could also cut into sticks, rounds, or individual peppermint sucking candy). Admire the individual quality of your handiwork.
9. Repeat this process with the remaining 3/4 of the candy, one piece of each color at a time.
10. Allow candy to cool until completely hard; about 15 minutes. Wrap each cane in plastic wrap to keep it from sticking. Store in an airtight jar for several months.

Chef Sunhui Chang showcases Fusebox beer + wine license notice. Photo: SunIm Chang

Asian cuisine in the Bay Area has a new crop of intensely passionate leaders with enough talent and culinary chops to lure Martha Stewart to the table. Anthony Myint and Danny Bowien stand behind big, bold Mission Chinese. Sylvan Mishima Brackett of PekoPeko Catering’s insanely articulate and authentic Japanese food will certainly land him on the map of grander things -- one hopes the rumors are true that he’s seeking his own location.  And scheduled to open in January, FuseBox, the West Oakland eatery of Korean-born Sunhui Chang, will add fuel to the Korean food fire with housemade gochuchang, exquisitely crafted pickles, bacon mochi, and well-honed culinary passion.

What’s pucker-worthy about Chang’s cuisine is its pickle-centric nature, many varieties of which he’s been sharing with the pickling community. He’s currently crafting several different varieties of kimchee, using the standard cabbage and daikon, and also rapini and turnip greens. He prides himself on making use of the “offal of vegetables” and thereby using ever part -- including radish greens, and reusing a vinegar pickle brine and the pickled garlic that flavors it. He dunks in the drink your standard vegetables such as cucumbers (see the recipe for Oiji below) and breakfast radish, but also more experimental concepts such as blueberries, summer squash, and fennel.  FuseBox is equipped with some vegetable boxes that will grow some of the produce, and Chang is currently working with the People’s Grocery to have them grow additional vegetables for him. Everything pickled and fermented from Chang’s kitchen will be as closely sourced as possible.

Of course, pickles aren’t the only things on the menu. Bacon-wrapped mochi are satisfyingly stretchy and smoky, and Chang will be grilling ko chu jang pork and chicken yakitori, and caking housemade tofu.

Chang takes regular trips to LA to procure quality, small-batch artisan soy sauce -- he says it’s the closest place to find it outside Korea.  But another of the most impressive aspects of Chang’s cooking is that he makes his own gochuchang, the hot, salty and sweet fermented red pepper paste that is the basis of Korean cooking (akin to what miso is to Japanese cuisine). Few are the Korean chefs who make their own. Most Korean markets offer several different varieties, and if you’ve ever eaten Korean food, you’ve tasted it.  It’s used in stir fries like bi bim bab, as a marinade for bulgogi, to flavor stews, as a condiment for crispy lettuce wraps, as the base for soups, and in many varieties of Korean pickles. I’d never tasted good gochuchang until I’d encountered Chang’s proprietary blend of glutinous rice, soybeans, red chili powder, and sugar. The sauce ferments for about 60-90 days.

“It took a while to learn the gochuchang. I went through so many batches where mold had developed. What I make is not as sweet as the store-bought stuff; more earthy.” Chang reports that in anticipation of the FuseBox opening, he’s experimenting with different varieties of gochuchang, including one for fish stews, and another to be eaten fresh.

Chang has kimchee and other Korean flavors flowing in his blood. As a child born in Korea, family friends gathered to play cards at his house and eat his mother’s well-loved kimchee chi gae. “There’s a Korean expression, ‘She just had her hands in the food,’ and that’s why it was so good. We didn’t have recipes or grow up with cooking books. Cooking was just innate to her.”

Eventually, after Chang’s family moved to Guam, his mother opened her own Korean restaurant when he was 13 years old, and he immediately began helping out by cleaning dishes, sweeping, and mopping. Later he was allowed to slice meat and occasionally pop into the kitchen. “I’m so grateful for everything she taught me, and I wish I’d followed her more. However, at the time, I didn’t think she was really, really cooking. It wasn’t as exciting as watching chefs on the cooking shows!” Growing up with Guam’s tiny and remote culinary culture, Chang laughs as he recalls that the PBS show Great Chefs, Great Cities was a huge influence on his career choice.

Just a few days after his 17th birthday, Chang moved to Berkeley by himself to begin qualifying for in-state tuition at UC Berkeley, where he later studied sociology. To fund his schooling, he worked in a bagel shop, then as a butcher and a fishmonger at a market. He soon became a cook at the now-defunct Hwang Won, a Korean restaurant in Oakland, before launching his own catering business for 14 years.

After two years of effort, FuseBox has secured over $17,000 via Kickstarter (where I invested $25); enough to finish construction and, hopefully, have the inside complete for an opening this January. Expansion plans are already underway to offer outdoor seating and possibly open a market next door selling fresh fish, local artisan goods, and of course Chang’s pickles by the jar.

Oiji—Korean Cucumber Pickle

Recipe by Sunhui Chang of FuseBox Oakland

5 small cucumbers—Either Pickling (Kirby), Persian, or Japanese
2 tablespoons kosher salt
3 cloves garlic
The whites of two green onions, cut into 1’ pieces
4-5 Korean chili pepper threads (available at Korean markets)
3/4 cup unseasoned rice vinegar
1/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup water

Wash cucumbers, leaving them wet.  Sprinkle salt on cucumbers and let them sit in a flat dish for three hours, turning them occasionally.

Wash the salt from the cucumbers and trim the ends so that they’ll fit standing upright in a pint-sized jar.  Add them to the jar, along with the garlic, green onion, and pepper threads.

Meanwhile, make the brine.  In a small saucepan, combine the vinegar, sugar and water.  Bring to boil.  Lower heat and simmer for 1-2 minutes.

Pour warm brine over cucumbers.  Cover, cool, and refrigerate.  Enjoy the pickles after two days, but they will last up to two weeks.

Makes one pint.

Photo of Bacon Mochi by SunIm Chang. Photo of Kimchee and Gochuchang by Sarah K. Khan.

"For Eva and I, life is just better with pickles!"

Saturday mornings at Marin Country Mart Farmers' Market recently got a little brighter with the addition of Emiliana Puyana and partner, Eva Lauderback of JARRED SF brine. JARRED SF brine is a new pickle business based out of the La Cocina kitchen in San Francisco. They specialize in seasonal pickles like pickled yellow wax beans, fennel, incredible shitaki mushrooms and beets (among many other rotating weekly choices). After working as a cook for years, eventually going to the Culinary Institute of America in New York, and moving to San Francisco in 2002, Emiliana started experimenting with pickling on her days off. The rest is history. Emiliana and Eva just began selling their pickles in Marin, but plans are already in place to branch out into other venues around the Bay Area and, someday, perhaps open a little artisan food shop. Chatting with both women, it's clear that a once weekend hobby can, with patience, persistence, and community support, become more of a viable business option. I asked them to tell us more about how they got started, what they're inspired by, and how the feel about the local Bay Area food scene. Here's what Emiliana had to say.

1. Tell me a little about your business, how and why you decided to start it.
For the last year or so of working in restaurants I began to get a little restless. I wanted a little more time for myself, time to spend with Eva, to plan our wedding, to have a "normal" work schedule and to get home at a reasonable hour. I started thinking of ways in which I might be able to make a living without having to be in a restaurant 12-13 hours a day. I was really thinking about starting a business that specialized in making organic pickles using local ingredients when they are in season and pickling every ingredient with its own unique flavor profile. But it was just an idea at the time. Then, came our wedding; we got married in our home and made a ton of different pickles: carrots, baby fennel, green beans, spring garlic, radishes, etc. and we used those as part of our center pieces. It was a massive hit. Everyone loved them (we had my brother design a label for us that was a sketch of our home). For days and weeks after the wedding people were coming up to us saying "You have to sell your pickles they are so good." That was the final push that I needed. Now with the help of La Cocina, Eva and my family we are finally out selling our products.

2. Why pickles?
Because they are delicious and you can use them or put them on everything. Fried pickles, pickled fennel salsa verde, tuna salad with pickled onions, Gibson martini with pickled ramps, Bloody Mary's with pickled yellow wax beans, fried green tomatoes made with sweet pickled green tomatoes, pizza with pickled jalapeños. And so on, and so on.

3. Do you think living in the Bay Area allows your business to flourish?
Without a doubt, living in the Bay Area helps us to flourish. It puts us at such close proximity to our products from the wine vinegars that we use for our brine to the different fruits and veggies that we pickle. We also love the customers here. They are well informed, they know food, they know what they want and they are adventurous with what they eat which is great for us because one of the things that we really want to do is to continue to experiment with what we pickle.

4. What have been the highlights of being a small business owner in the Bay Area thus far?
Being a small business in the Bay Area has proven to be pretty difficult for us so far. A few of the bright stops have been the local resources available to help small business start to operate. The Small Business Administration and La Cocina have been a tremendous help for us.

5. What inspires you, day to day?
I get inspiration from a number of different places: first and foremost from food. Every Wednesday I go pick up my CSA box, open it, and look at what is in it and I get inspired. Last week for instance, we got beautiful fresh Cayenne pepper in our CSA box and now we are working on developing "MARYS MATE" which will be pickle brine that we we'll sell for people to spice up their Bloody Mary's. It will have grated horseradish, fresh Cayenne pepper, and garlic. The idea is that you can put a splash of "MARYS MATE" in a glass, add a little vodka, top it off with your favorite tomato juice and voila BLOODY MARY'S!

Website: JARRED SF brine
Facebook: Jarred SF brine

When you’re making brunch for 25 starving artists, you better have a lot of bacon. In a kitchen like the one at the Headlands Center for the Arts, where I’m currently living and working as a kitchen intern, everything counts in large amounts, and nothing’s more beloved by the artists we’re feeding than the house-made meat products we grind, cure or smoke.

Bacon, pancetta, breakfast sausage, spicy link sausage, salmon gravlax, and more: most of them require only salt, sugar, spices, and time to transform fatty, tough cuts of meat into savory staples that can richly flavor any dish. (The exception is the salmon, of course, caught for us in Alaska by a friend of the chef’s and sent to us in pristine vacuum-packed sides. Still, even this great stuff emerges silkier and more aromatic after a few days’ curing with salt and dill.) It helps, too, that Damon Little, my fellow kitchen intern, spent some months last year working as an apprentice in the stainless-steel surrounds of esteemed salumi-makers Boccalone in Oakland.

Making bacon takes time, it’s true—eight days to cure, a few hours in the smoker, another hour or so in the oven to finish—but very little of it requires our hands or even our presence. It doesn’t take much time to weigh out a handful of salt and spices, rub it into a slab of pork belly, slap the belly onto a baking pan and pop it in the fridge. A turn and rub every other day takes maybe two minutes, tops.

Cured bacon slabs in the smoker.

Then there’s the smoking, a couple of hours, but during almost all of that time, the bacon-to-be is quietly, smokily minding its own business while we go about ours. At the end, well-smoked, the slab goes into the oven to finish cooking. (This last step may not be necessary, depending on how hot your smoker gets; the main thing is getting the pork's internal temperature up to 150 degrees.)

Bacon slabs, just out of the smoker, ready for the oven.

The result, eschewing all modesty, is fantastic. Right out of the oven, the slabs are deep red-brown, lacquered like a Peking duck, with an outrageously appetizing aroma. Because our bacon doesn’t have to last for weeks in a butcher’s case or grocer’s fridge (we freeze it immediately and defrost it chunk by chunk as needed), we can make our cure lighter on both the salt and “pink salt” than most commercial versions. Enough to cure it safely, of course, but light enough that you can taste the flavor of the pork and aromatics as well, without your tongue being clubbed by salt. (What is pink salt, you ask? Also known as curing salt, DC cure, or DQ cure, it is a mixture of 6.25% sodium nitrite and 93.75% sodium chloride, or table salt. The nitrites in the salt mixture help prevent bacterial contamination and also preserve the meat's color during the curing process. It is dyed pink to prevent it from being confused with regular salt.)

This last time we made bacon, we added maple syrup to a simple salt-and-pepper cure, to make something straightforward and breakfast-y out of half the meat. The other half became pancetta, cured without syrup but with more spices and aromatics, including plenty of rosemary. After curing, the meat was rolled and tied but not smoked, to make a savory bacon in the European style, useful as a base for sauces, stews, and ragus.

Damon LIttle tying pancetta.

Any pieces of the bacon or pancetta not immediately fried up for brunch quickly find a home: turned into lardons for salad, sautéed with onions, carrots, and celery to give a backbone to lentils or duck-and-bean soup, or simply cooked up for a kitchen-crew snack on yesterday’s sourdough bread, piled with sliced tomatoes and a smear of leftover garlic mayonnaise or Caesar dressing.

Pancetta

Given that we generally cure and smoke four big slabs of organic Berkshire pork from Idaho’s Snake River Farms at a time, the savings in the kitchen budget are significant. High-quality, organic bacon like this would probably cost us four times what the plain pork belly does. When you’re a non-profit cooking daily for 25 to 30 people, sometimes for twice that, making your own value-added products in house is just good sense.

Good organic jam, free of high-fructose corn syrup and made with more fruit than sugar? Expensive, especially when one brunch can empty 3 or 4 fancy jars. A flat of organic, locally grown plums, a pound or two of organic sugar, a handful of lemons and a couple hours of my time? A much cheaper, and much more delicious, way to fill a pantry shelf. The apples from a staff member’s backyard tree are tasty but misshapen and pocked with holes, useless for out-of-hand eating. But a little time with a paring knife, an afternoon’s slow baking in the oven, and we have three quarts of autumn apple butter ready to be slathered on this Sunday’s waffles.

Waffles served with bacon, naturally. Having come to bacon late in life (my parents’ one nod to traditional Jewish dietary laws was no pork in the house), I’ve never felt confident cooking it, especially since every bacon-lover seems to have a different bacon ideal—rigid or floppy, nearly burnt or just sizzled. Here, I’ve learned a good trick for when you’re making bacon for a crowd, when frying up a single panful just won’t do. We cut our bacon in fairly thick strips, laying them out side by side on parchment-lined sheet trays and popping them into the oven to cook until just crisp. Take the slices off the trays and lay them out on cooling racks to drain; this keeps them from getting soggy with grease and steam while you go about prepping the mimosas and flipping the frittatas. Pour the excess grease off the baking sheets (into an old jar or bowl, not down the sink, since it will thicken and harden into a drain-blocking sludge as it cools). To reheat, slide the bacon, still on its racks, back onto the baking sheets, and return to the oven until crisp and hot. Serve immediately, if you can bear to let any of it leave the kitchen.

Final bacon

Recipe: Smoked Maple Bacon
Summary: The following recipe is adapted by Headlands kitchen intern Damon Little from Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing, by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn.

Prep Time: 60 minutes
Cook Time: 4 hours
Total Time: 5 hours, plus 8 days' curing time
Yield: About 4 lbs

Ingredients:
2 tbsp red pepper flakes, crushed in a mortar
1 tbsp freshly ground black pepper
1.75 oz kosher salt or sea salt (not iodized)
1/4 tsp pink salt (curing salt)
1/4 cup maple sugar or packed dark brown sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup (grade B has the most flavor)
One 5-lb slab pork belly, preferably from a pasture-raised animal

Instructions:

1. Combine the chili flakes, pepper, salt, pink salt, and sugar in a bowl and mix well. Add syrup and stir to combine.
2. Rub cure over both sides of the belly, making sure to work it under any flaps and into any crevices. Seal meat in a 2-gallon resealable plastic bag, or place in a non-reactive (glass, ceramic, stainless steel) container a little bigger than the meat. The salt and sugar will pull liquid out of the meat as it cures; make sure the meat stays bathed in this brine throughout the process.
3. Refrigerate meat, turning and rubbing the belly to redistribute the cure every other day, for 7 days.
4. Remove belly from pan, rinse it thoroughly to remove any remaining cure, and pat dry. Put belly on a rack over a rimmed baking sheet and refrigerate, uncovered, for another 12 to 24 hours.
5. Smoke the belly in a hot smoker for 2 hours. The finished internal temperature of the bacon should be about 150 degrees F.
6. If, after 2 hours, your bacon has not reached this temperature, remove from the smoker. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Place belly on a metal roasting rack over a rimmed baking sheet and bake for 60-90 minutes, until the internal temperature reaches 150 degrees.
7. Remove bacon from oven and let cool. When cool, cut into one-pound pieces, and wrap tightly in plastic. Refrigerate or freeze until ready to use.

Last chance for tomatoes! Now's the time to get your final fill of summer's bounty, time to buy a bagful and stock the pantry for the long days of kale and pumpkin ahead. Mariquita Farms' Ladybug Buying Club will be in residence at Camino on Thursday Oct. 6, from 5-7pm, if you want to split a flat with a pal or two. For canning, the best tomatoes aren't the huge splashy heirlooms but the more modest Romas or Early Girls, short on size but dense with punchy flavor and sweetness.

Having participated in a massive can-a-thon of Roma tomatoes last year, I must say I'd rather spend such kitchen time pumping out a product with a few more frills. (For preserving straight-up peeled tomatoes, a vacuum sealer and plenty of freezer space are much more efficient.) Frills like barbecue sauce, or ketchup, especially this well-spiced, un-corn syruped, oven-roasted version, as good on a steak as a burger, on French fries or scrambled eggs. I put this out at a recent brunch between the home fries and the salmon eggs Benedict, and the bowl came back scraped clean.

Yes, it takes a long time, but the actual hands-on time is short. Some chopping, a little spice-toasting, the occasional stir, and all the rest is simply unattended oven time. A thick puree like this one can scorch and splatter when you try to cook it down, however slowly, on the top of the stove. Here, a slow roast concentrates the tomatoes without carbonizing them, while a final, brief stovetop cooking melds the flavors.

You could up the amount of vinegar, sugar, onions, and heat, add some molasses, and make into something more like barbecue sauce, even replacing the tomatoes with late-season plums. You can start with this spice mixture, then add more or less as your taste commands. A pinch of cardamom, some cayenne pepper for zing, more ginger, whatever you like. You can even put it in a red plastic squirt bottle, just like at your favorite burger joint. In this case, it really is a vegetable.

Want to share what you've put up and getting handy tips from other urban-homesteading enthusiasts? The preserving pros at Happy Girl Kitchen (who make a very tasty ketchup of their own) are hosting an Autumnal Recipe Exchange today, Oct. 2, from 12-5pm in Oakland. Bring samples of what you've been making along with personal recipes to swap.

Recipe: SLOW-ROASTED AUTUMN KETCHUP
Summary: Dress up a meatloaf or a burger with this smooth and saucy ketchup. Slow and steady oven roasting prevents scorching.
Prep Time: 30 minutes
Cook Time: 4 hours
Total Time: 4 hours 30 minutes
Yield: 1 quart

Ingredients:
4 lbs small, dense-fleshed tomatoes, such as Romas or Early Girls
2 hot peppers, seeded and chopped
1 onion, peeled, halved, and sliced
8 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
3 quarter-sized slices of fresh ginger, peeled
2 tbsp olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1 cinnamon stick
4 whole cloves
1/2 tsp coriander seeds
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp smoked paprika (pimenton)
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1/4 tsp oregano
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 balsamic vinegar
1/3 to 1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1 tablespoon maple syrup
2 tablespoons honey
Salt to taste

Instructions:
1. Preheat oven to 325F. In a glass or ceramic 9 x 13 pan, toss tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, and ginger together. Drizzle generously with olive oil and sprinkle lightly with salt and black pepper. Break cinnamon stick in half and tuck both halves, plus cloves, into the tomato mixture. Roast, stirring occasionally, for 2 hours, until tomatoes are cooked down and saucy.

2. Remove cinnamon stick and cloves. Put tomato mixture through a food mill or push through a strainer to remove skins and make into a smooth puree.

3. In a small, heavy frying pan, toast coriander, cumin, and mustard seeds over medium heat for a few minutes, until the mustard seeds begin to pop and the mixture smells toasty. Remove from heat and let cool briefly, then grind to a powder using a mortar and pestle or spice grinder.

4. In a bowl, mix spices, tomato puree, vinegar, sugar. Pour mixture back into 9x13 pan and return to oven. Bake, stirring occasionally, until mixture is thickened and flavors have blended, about 1 hour. Taste and adjust seasoning.

5. To fully meld the flavors, scrape mixture into a heavy saucepan and cook over medium-low heat, stirring frequently, for 10-15 minutes.

6. Pour into sterilized jars and seal. Or, pour into clean glass jars, let cool, then top with lids and store in the refrigerator. The ketchup is ready to eat right away, but gets better after collecting itself for a few weeks.

Eat Real Festival Crowd in Jack London Square, Oakland.
Photos: Wendy Goodfriend

The 3rd Annual Eat Real Festival kicked off their food extravaganza this past weekend, and the eager and hungry masses descended upon Jack London Square in full force once again.

I've attended the event since its inception and have always come away with a full, happy belly and lots of food porn. This dazzling array of culinary delights came about through a "social venture business" whose "mission is to help revitalize regional food systems, build public awareness of and respect for the craft of making good food and to encourage the growth of American food entrepreneurs," according to their website.

And Eat Real goes all out to foster this mission. This year they hosted 60 street food vendors, had 30 beers and wines on tap, an indoor marketplace with 30 craft food vendors, urban farmers leading Q & A sessions about homesteading, DIY workshops and demonstrations about baked goods, cheese and other foodstuffs, live music performances from local bands and DJs, butchery contests and more.

It's easy to get overloaded with this packed schedule -- even with 30 less food vendors than last year -- so I decided to seek out vendors that were new to the festival or that I hadn't checked out in previous years. I met up with BAB's editor and photographer extraordinaire, Wendy Goodfriend, in downtown Oakland on Saturday morning.

After checking in my bicycle at the East Bay Bike Coalition's free bike valet, we were ready to get our grub on. One of the first vendors that caught my eye was Fatface that hails from Davis. I've tried their popsicles before, so I was planning on strolling right on by until I saw the big sign that advertised a "bacon and egg" popsicle. (I think this sign made most people stop in their tracks.) Then I read the description: "Ginger-bacon caramel and vanilla egg custard featuring eggs from Vega Farm and bacon from Blesdoe pork also made with vanilla bean, heavy cream, milk, ginger, filtered water and cane sugar." After reading that list of ingredients and noticing that it was a "limited edition," I couldn't resist the call of the swine. I figured this would be a lovely breakfast (which I had skipped in anticipation of the afternoon of decadence) despite it being dessert. And it didn't disappoint. The frozen egg custard was rich and creamy, with a luscious caramel center of bacony goodness.

Next on the list was the San Rafael-based food truck The Taco Guys. This was their second visit to Eat Real, and Jason Hoffman and Justin Close are two chefs with 20 years of culinary experience under their belts that decided to branch out on their own into the street food scene. My husband Shawn ordered their Maui Fish Taco (panko-battered and fried Pacific rock cod, savoy cabbage slaw, pico de gallo, Sriracha mayo and pickled onions), while I had to try the Burmese Lamb taco (Fallon Hills lamb, Thai cucumber salad, preserved Meyer lemon yogurt, sweet herbs). We bumped into the guys later on as we were wandering through the festival, and they asked us how we liked their food. I let them know that we agreed with their slogan that it was "ridiculously tasty."

Onto the next course; the WOW Truck of San Jose was conveniently parked right near by. Despite being Eat Real first-timers, their popularity preceded them and they had a long line of patient folks queueing up for their fusion Filipino fare. And no wonder; I was willing to wait 15 minutes for a "WOW Silog Taco" with Niman Ranch cage-free egg and beef tapa, garlic fried rice and heirloom tomato on a flour tortilla. And I also had to try the "Silog Sushi Bite" with a fried quail egg on top of garlic fried rice, seaweed, hand-harvested Philippine sea salt (!) and Niman Ranch beef. Shawn went right for the "Turon Turon," a fried saba banana fritter roll. The Sushi Bite was one of my favorites of the day. It had an incredible savory quality that was umami to the hilt. (I'll stop now before I throw in any more pretentious adjectives, so I'll end with the declaration that it was unbelievably delicious.)

We decided to give our stomachs a time-out before diving into the next course. After perusing the goods in the indoor craft food market, we headed over to the DIY Eat It & Oven area. Amy Remsen and Blake Joffe of Beauty's Bagel Shop were just finishing up their bagel making workshop. This was the first appearance at Eat Real for the Oakland-based duo, and they're currently looking for a space to set up a brick-and-mortar bagel shop. In the meantime, Amy and Blake have a wholesale business making Montreal-style bagels that are "hand-rolled, boiled in honey water and baked in a wood-fired oven" for local restaurants Saul's Restaurant & Delicatessen in Berkeley and San Francisco's pop-up deli Wise Sons Delicatessen. They also sell their bagels through a vendor at the Kensington Farmers' Market. I was lucky enough to score a sample of one their freshly baked bagels from a workshop participant, which was still warm from the handmade on-site clay oven.

Moving onwards, we stopped by the latest venture of Eat Real founder Anya Fernald, who is also the CEO of Belcampo Meat Company. They made their debut at the Los Angeles Eat Real Festival in July and were making their first appearance as both a sponsor and vendor in Oakland this year. Based near Mt. Shasta, they're a "multi-species organic start-up farm" that raises grass-fed and pastured animals -- everything from "cattle to quail," according to farmer Kylan Hoover. Kylan, who was helping to serve up their hot dogs with his co-worker Peter Sterling, used to run his own farm in Livermore. He now works with Belcampo in designing and managing the Siskiyou County farm, which has been in the research and development phase for the past 5 years. They plan to open up butcher shops throughout the state along with their own processing facility in Yreka in 2012. I decided to try a cone of their French fries, which were golden and crispy as a result of being fried in grass-fed beef tallow.

Photo: Jenny Oh

There were long, long lines for festival newbie Tikka Bytes, "savory Indian bites" from Milpitas, so alas, I had to pass them up. Lines were also snaking around the plaza for the seasoned festival darlings Chairman Bao Truck, Senor Sisig, and Tru Gourmet Dim Sum.

Wendy grabbed a bite to eat at Vesta Flatbread -- she had been showing great discipline up until now -- and ordered up their vegetarian dish with carrot hazelnut pate, labne, beet salad, and of course, their delicious flatbread made right in their truck.

We said hello to Steven Gdula of Gobba Gobba Hey, who had his new cookbook and cool Indian-inspired Ganesh t-shirt for sale along with his fantastic treats.

We also popped by to chat with Ryan Farr of 4505 Meats, who showed us his fresh-off-the-presses galley copy of his new cookbook that's due out in November. He was slapping cheese on his burgers in rapid fire -- "it's like dealing cards" -- while extolling the virtues of his immensely popular "bacon-studded hot dog on a stick." Ryan serves up these crowd-pleasers at festivals because, "Who doesn't love food on a stick?"

This was Iso Rabins' (ForageSF) third time at Eat Real, but this year he decided to "go for it" and cook this year. Preparing food for "over a thousand people was taking it to the next level" (thus he'd had only 2 hours of sleep the night before), but he was thrilled with selling food made on the spot as opposed to pre-made goods in the craft market. Iso was serving up deep-fried smelt (which he personally deep-fried himself) because he "loved bait fish such as mackerel, sardines and anchovies." A colleague told him that he was taking a risk with selling this unfamiliar fish, but he wanted to take a gamble and "introduce people to new food." Iso flirted with the idea of calling them, "fries with eyes," but thought it might be "off-putting" to the masses. (I think it would have worked like a charm, personally.)

We took another food break and listened to part of the Q & A session with Heidi Kooy of The Itty Bitty Farm in the City. Heidi and her husband have a contracting business, but they're also urban homesteaders in San Francisco who raise chickens, bees and goats -- one of which she was milking onstage as she answered questions from the audience. The other one was gamely allowing adoring fans to pet her.

After all of this gorging, did I have room to eat any more food? Apparently so. I'm a sucker for a good grilled cheese sandwich, so GBD (which stands for Golden Brown Delicious) was my last food order for the day. The Point Reyes Farmers' Market was on the lookout for some prepared food vendors to augment their produce stands, and Osteria Stellina's chef-owner Christian Caiazzo thought grilled cheese sandwiches would be the perfect item. He knew there were plenty of great cheesemakers in Marin to source the main ingredient, such as Pt. Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company and Cowgirl Creamery. The Eat Real edition of GBD grilled cheese sandwiches were made with Estera Gold cheese from Valley Ford Cheese Company and generously brushed with butter from Strauss Family Creamery. Metropolis Bakery of Berkeley provided the delicious sourdough bread (normally Christian bakes his own bread, but he couldn't handle the volume required for the festival). I ordered the "The Bill From Bo," the grilled cheese made with brisket prepared with beef from BN Ranch, Bill Niman's illustrious new company.

Wendy and I were ready to call it a day after over 5 hours of snacking and sampling (Shawn had already reached his crowd saturation point several hours earlier). On my way back to the bike valet, I realized I was a) terribly thirsty and b) passing by the opulent and vaudeville-esque booth belonging to Taylor's Tonics of San Francisco and Santa Cruz. We stopped to talk with the nattily dressed Aaron Dolson, one of the co-founders, while his equally dapper partner Taylor Peck handed out samples and sold bottles of their Chai Cola. This was their first visit to Eat Real -- and it had been quite successful, as they had sold out of everything but their cola. Aaron's background included working with a raw juice co-op based in Eugene, Oregon, while Taylor was an experienced chai barista (read more about his eclectic background here) before they launched their successful enterprise. Aaron's a firm believer in the health benefits of tea and they use only natural ingredients in their drinks. They keep the sugar content low (and no high-fructose corn syrup), add medicinal herbs such as nettle and ginger, and use pasteurization and citric acid to preserve the drinks.

The spicy, sparkling Chai Cola was a refreshing way to end the day, and I was ready to roll home -- literally and figuratively. Tired and sated, we bid farewell to the event until next year, when we'll be ready for another round of the East Bay Eat Real Festival.

Check out BAB's Eat Real Fest slideshow to view more of the festivities.