Vanessa Barrington. Photo Credit: Cynthia Wheeler

FOOD SHOPPING

“East Bay Farmers’ Markets: I base all of my food shopping around the farmers’ markets and supplement from there. I love The Grand Lake Farmers’ Market for its urban Oakland feeling and the mix of vendors. Also the Temescal Market. It’s close to my house, it’s on Sunday. and it’s fun to watch all the kids. Love Tomatero Farm, Catalan Farm, Blossom Bluff, Scream Sorbet, and Massa Organics for brown rice. In the summer I tend toward the Berkeley Saturday market. First stops are always River Dog Farm, La Tercera Farm, and Morrell’s Bread.”

“Market Hall in Rockridge —it’s less crowded than some of the more popular grocery stores, a short bike ride from my house, and I can get everything I need there. The produce store has local organic selections, for when I don’t make it to the farmers’ market, and a nice selection of heirloom beans.

The new Marin Sun Farms butchers rock my world. They are real pros (and they know where the meat is from). I wasn’t eating much meat at all until they opened because I’m kind of a stickler about local, small-scale, humane meat. Now I’m often in there picking up some goat chops, or a pork shoulder for braising. Favorite things are the duck crépinettes and the porchetta sandwich that they make on weekends. It has thinly sliced fennel, spicy arugula and they build the sandwich so almost every bite has a crispy bit of pork skin. At The Pasta Shop, I like to check the top of the pasta counter for day-old ravioli. It’s the best deal in town. And their new cheese counter is great.”

“Rainbow Grocery is one thing I miss about living in SF. They have the best bulk section on the planet for dried heirloom beans (including Rancho Gordo) and grains, as well as teas, olive oil, maple syrup, etc. Gordon, their cheesemonger, has turned the cheese counter into one of the best anywhere, and the produce buyers go to great lengths to offer as much local and organic produce as possible, while still maintaining a good selection.”

“For Asian groceries, the New May Wah store on Clement is wonderful. They have everything you need for Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Korean cooking adventures.”

EATING AND DRINKING

Barrington said that, “This changes all the time, depending on my mood and who I’m dining/drinking with.

Currently I like CommonWealth on Telegraph. You can go in at night and get a really nice beer and some Shepherd’s Pie or a pressed sandwich. During the day, you can order coffee and an excellent scone with Devonshire cream and jam. It’s comfortable and friendly. Just a great place to hang out.

Saul’s is great because they serve wonderful deli food but they source local and humanely raised meats, introduce seasonality into the mix (especially in their specials) and they even make their own sodas!”

MOM AND POP SPOTS, WITH A LATIN AMERICAN BENT

“I haven’t found my favorite mom and pop restaurant in Oakland yet. Still looking. And all of these are Latin American, but they are all I can think of.

I like El Trebol on 24th in The Mission because it literally is mom and pop and their kitchen is a literal hole in the wall and they are sweet and have been there for years. It’s really cheap and good—especially the pupusas, refried beans, plantains, and crema.

I love Pastores on Mission—the food there is special and the owner, Irma, is a graduate of La Cocina. The last time I was there, she was in the kitchen cooking everything to order—I haven’t been in forever though, so I’m not sure if it’s still the same. I remember the chilaquiles and the chicken enchiladas with tomatilla salsa fondly. To my knowledge, there’s no pop, just mom.

La Borinquena —family owned Mex-icatessen in Oakland on 7th Street. I go there for tortillas, tamales, and Mexican groceries. Family owned since 1944.“

DATE NIGHT

“Hibiscus: Great atmosphere. Comfortable but romantic. Hand-blown glass chandeliers. Order the spicy crab and grits or the fried chicken. Great cocktails.

Camino: Another restaurant that just feels really good, comfortable, and spacious. Love their brunch, especially the baked eggs, sausage and roasted duck fat potatoes, the crab prix fixe on Monday nights during Dungeness season can’t be beat. Their menu is small but everything on it is always perfect. It’s great for double dates because you can order almost everything on the menu and share. Also delicious cocktails!”

GUILTIEST PLEASURE

“Kozy Shack chocolate and tapioca puddings. Yep, even the staunchest advocate of home cooking buys store-bought pudding. Sometimes you just need pudding and you don’t want to make it. There’s no fake stuff in here and it doesn’t taste like chemicals so it passes muster with me.”

Hungry for more? Try Barrington’s recipes for grainy prepared mustard and a mustard-bourbon glazed pork roast. Find out what it’s like to D.I.Y., Vanessa Barrington style.

Vanessa Barrington’s Mustard and Bourbon–Glazed Pork Roast
Recipe credit: Vanessa Barrington, D.I.Y. Delicious, Chronicle Books, 2010

Here’s an uncomplicated, crowd-pleasing way to cook an inexpensive cut of meat. This recipe utilizes your Grainy Prepared Mustard and pairs well with a variety of different side dishes. It also yields versatile leftovers that you can use for Pulled Pork Canapés with Fig-Rosemary Jam in sandwiches, on pizza, or stuffed into Corn Tortillas with Simple Tomato Salsa or Avocado-Tomatillo Salsa.

Time Required: about 25 minutes active; 3 hours passive (excluding mustard preparation)
Yield: 6-8 Servings

One 4-pound boneless pork shoulder roast (ask your butcher to roll and tie it)
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup lightly packed brown sugar
1/4 cup bourbon
3 tablespoons any version Grainy Prepared Mustard (see recipe below)

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees F. Season the roast all over with salt and pepper.

In a heavy, dry cast-iron skillet over medium-high to high heat, brown the roast all over. Start with the fat side down, and turn with tongs until the roast is a deep caramel brown all over, 10 to 15 minutes. The fat from the roast should render, providing plenty of oil to brown the roast. (If the roast is very lean and you feel you need oil, use a tablespoon or so of refined vegetable oil suitable for high-heat cooking.)

Remove the roast to a plate and let the pan cool slightly. Pour off the excess fat and wipe out any burned bits. While the pan cools, in a small bowl, whisk together the sugar, bourbon, and mustard.

Return the roast to the pan and pour half of the glaze over it, turning the roast to coat it completely and using your hands to distribute the glaze evenly. Cover the pan with aluminum foil and roast for 2 hours, turning and basting every half hour with the remaining glaze.

Remove the foil and increase the oven temperature to 350 degrees. Continue to roast uncovered, until the glaze reduces and the pork is glossy brown and thickly coated with glaze, 45 minutes to 1 hour. Let the roast rest for 10 minutes before slicing and serving.

Vanessa Barrington’s Grainy Prepared Mustard
Recipe credit: Vanessa Barrington, D.I.Y. Delicious, Chronicle Books, 2010

Homemade mustard has so much more flavor than store-bought and has many uses in the kitchen. Whisk it with bourbon to make a glaze for pork or with maple syrup to caramelize root vegetables, stir it into vinaigrette, or simply spread it on sandwiches.

Mustard is simple to make, economical, and easy to vary to your taste. A word of warning: Your homemade mustard will always be quite a bit spicier than store-bought. You can control this somewhat by varying the ratio of brown to yellow seeds (brown are more pungent). You can also add sugar, honey, maple sugar, or other sweeteners to temper the spice. You won’t need to use much in a recipe or on a sandwich to get a big mustard flavor and the mustard will mellow with time in the refrigerator.

Time Required: about 10 minutes active; 24 hours passive
Yield: Makes 1 cup

3/4 cup liquid (mixture of vinegar and wine, beer, or some other alcohol; see Note)
1/2 cup mustard seeds (brown or yellow)
About 1 tablespoon finely chopped aromatics like onions, garlic, or shallots
About 1 tablespoon chopped fresh herbs (optional)
About 1 tablespoon (sugar, honey, or maple syrup; optional)
Salt

Put the liquids, mustard seeds, aromatics, herbs, and sweeteners in a nonreactive (ceramic or pottery) bowl and soak overnight in the refrigerator.

In a blender or food processor, blend the mustard to the desired consistency. Depending on your equipment and inclination, this can take up to 5 minutes. Don’t expect your mustard to be as smooth as factory-made mustard. Add salt to taste as you blend. Transfer to jars and seal. Will keep, refrigerated, up to 3 months.

Note: If you don’t wish to use alcohol, replace the alcohol portion of the liquid with water. Mustards made solely with vinegar can be overwhelmingly vinegary.

Who guards the culinary heritage of a culture? Where does authenticity reside, and who decides what it is? Can traditional foods change with the times, and if they do, are they still traditional? Can handmade salami made from grass-fed beef still call up memories of Grandma's Saturday-morning scrambled eggs and salami? In this age of massive multinational conglomerates, does brand loyalty mean anything anymore?

What's better-- the Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray tonic in the bottle you remember Grandpa drinking, now with high-fructose corn syrup included, or homemade celery soda infused with real celery seed, with less sugar and no packaging? How much do we pay-- in food miles, in feedlots, in calories-- for nostalgia?

All these questions, and more, were in the air at the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay in early February, as an overflow crowd squeezed into the main auditorium for a panel discussion on "Referendum on The Deli Menu" (Can the Jewish Deli be sustainable?) sponsored by Saul's. Saul's, for those of you born without cravings for matzoh ball soup, is Berkeley's big, busy, much-loved Jewish deli. But ever since Karen Adelman and her husband Peter Levitt bought the deli in 1995, they've had what they call "a stealthy, secret mission" operating alongside their dedication to borscht and blintzes, corned beef and chicken in a pot. Their secret? A desire to pull the deli in line with contemporary attitudes about food and consumption, rather than letting it ossify like gefilte fish left too long in the fridge.

To this end, towering sandwiches were slimmed down, no longer stacked with jaw-defying stacks of meat. Meats became sustainably ranched, grass-fed when possible. Vegetables started to come from local farms. Corn-syruped drinks were out; housemade sodas were in. Most recently, salami was dropped from the menu; Hebrew National, the only widely available brand of all-beef salami, is now owned by giant Con Agra.

This being Berkeley, you'd think pasture-raised chicken soup would earn nothing but mazel tovs. But not everyone, it seemed, wanted consciousness-raising alongside their blintzes and brisket. There was pushback from some customers, and an overall question: How much could a deli change and still be a deli?

Hence the referendum, featuring Karen and Paul in conversation with Saul's regular and local superstar Michael Pollan; green-business maven Gil Friend, City Slickers Farms founder (and self-described "pastrami addict" Willow Rosenthal, the whole moderated by Evan Kleinman, host of KRCW's Good Food.

Having heard the phrase "2 Jews, 3 opinions" tossed around by my opinionated, argue-for-the-sake-of-it relatives all my life, I was ready for some Talmudic-level conflict, some heated words exchanged in the interest of radical change vs. How Bubbe Did It.

Alas, though, everyone on the panel agreed on nearly everything. Nostalgia is no excuse for a lack of conscience; if you care about eating locally, organically, sustainably and/or humanely at home, why should a Jewish deli give you a free pass to wallow in feedlot beef or syrupy soda?

Said Peter, "We started with not wanting to sell meat we wouldn't eat. We want to drag the deli out of the museum, let it breathe with the seasons for a change." Right now, his challenge is corned beef: the grass-fed beef from local Marin Sun Farms, delicious as it is, isn't holding up to the 2- to 3-week brining process. It's been coming out dry and crumbly, probably due to being more muscled and less fatty that typical feedlot beef.

And then there's the menu problem: Saul's, like most delis, has a huge menu. There's the everyday menu, an equally long, but more international, seasonally-inspired specials menu, and then the "secret" menu of the more hard-core, Old World items--flanken, kishkes, things made with schmaltz and braised in gravy. Peter would like to see the menu shortened and made more manageable (and cost-effective); if that means no cold beet borscht in winter, so be it.

Says Karen, "I think we should be leading, not just reacting. We're hungry for meaning and community, along with comfort food. We need to connect with our future as well as our past. I promise, no one will leave hungry!"

Of course, even in Berkeley, there's room to toe more than one party line. If this were New York City, or Los Angeles, where deli culture, while battered, is still alive, one deli's decision to nix the salami would hardly generate SRO crowds at the 92nd St Y. But delis are few in the Bay Area, and so Saul's clientele takes any changes personally . But if there are Hebrew National fans and lox diehards out there, they're keeping quiet; the crowd claps and nods along with just about everything Pollan, Rosenthal, and Friend present, even recoiling a little in genteel horror at brightly colored slides of jaw-defying pastrami sandwiches teetering higher than Lady Gaga's heels. Those massive sandwiches, long the symbol of post-war abundance, a meaty slap in the face to immigrant privation, are no longer sustainable; as Peter points out, there's no way to provide that much meat, particularly if it's good, humanely raised meat, at a price regular customers can bear. "Those huge sandwiches are killing the deli. You can't make money selling 12 oz of meat for $10 or $15. At a steakhouse, you'd pay $30 or $40 for that much meat, and you'd buy a bottle of wine." Instead, Karen and Peter want to offer their customers alternatives that taste good, with a little patient explanation to help it along. Already, the menu emphasizes smoked trout (farmed) over overfished salmon, and more and more Mediterranean inspired salads and vegetable dishes to go along with the potato pancakes and cheesecake.

Pollan, for one, sees the democratization of the food movement as a very good thing. "Getting sustainable food into delis, taquerias, cheaper places, that's great because it makes it more accessible to everyone." Agrees Friend, "We vote with our dollars every day."

If the deli is our secular synagogue, as Pollan muses, clearly this one is reform, maybe even reconstructionist. So fizz up an egg cream or raise a glass of borscht, and toast the new deli.

VIDEO CLIP OF EVENT:

Photos provided by Saul's

Related Posts:
Saul's got SOLE: The Jewish deli in Berkeley evolves
by Marc R. aka Mental Masala at The Ethicurean

Referendum on the Deli Menu at Saul's Restaurant and Delicatessen: What is Tradition?
by Vanessa Barrington at Civil Eats

For years, locavores and vegetarians, calorie-counting suburbanites and couscous-loving Sephardim and even heeb-hopping hipsters have been bringing their own favorite dishes to the Jewish table. You might not know this upon stepping into a deli, where piles of salty, fatty meat and schmaltz in the chopped liver and never-ending free pickles every day of the year define good eating. It's supposed to be a carefree zone where all the generations and sects can enjoy some chicken soup in relative peace.

Leave it to Karen Adelman and Peter Levitt in Berkeley to begin shaking up this world a bit. As the owners and hands-on managers of Saul's, these two widely read, passionately opinionated individuals are working hard to keep Jewish delis vibrant, relevant and delicious far into the 21st century. From adding Mediterranean mezzes to offering locally grown, locally made pickles, they're crafting a new sensibility for an old institution.

A multicultural, sustainable deli might seem like a quixotic pursuit, as many would argue that we should leave well enough alone. Any real and authentic Jewish deli doesn't need to concern itself with all this modern fancifying. But if you're a deli owner and you see your customers coming into your dining room less and less often -– how many pastrami sandwiches does one person eat these days? -- you realize that things need to change to keep going.

Of course, ideals do have a way of bumping up against reality. Let's take the last thing on the menu, that list of drinks at the end of the page. Such a minor thing, no?

Well, as it turns out, simple it most definitely is not.

For diners, drinks are usually just an afterthought. For green-minded business owners, though, the environmental costs of transporting flavored water, the impact of corn syrup and artificial sweeteners in our communities, and the waste of thousands upon thousands of empty cans and glass cannot be ignored. If you're somewhat concerned, you might just put out a recycling bin and offer a few cents off on coffee poured into insulated mugs. If you're a little more committed, you might try sourcing local sodas.

But if you're Karen and Peter, you have a much, much longer road to travel. You begin by studying the history of sodas and the science of bubbles. Along the way, you learn about the monopolistic technologies of multinational food corporations. You connect the dots between individual soda jerks, creative spirit and community values. You daydream down a short detour, one that takes you past designs for a working seltzer tap at each and every booth. You decide to compromise, backtracking to install a central seltzer dispenser. You call up a beer tap specialist to design a brand-new beverage system for you. You track down stronger fittings that can hold up to the pressure of C02. You convince colleagues that going back in time 60 years to revive obsolete tastes and technology will be a good thing for the business. You train special "seltzer baristas" to use the finicky machine with its nonstandard formulations. You develop recipe after recipe from scratch. (Cream Soda #8, you think, seems especially promising.) Then, years later, you launch your own house-made seltzers and, in a moment of unrestrained ambition, you decide to stop selling bottled, commercial sodas entirely. Even Dr. Brown's. Yes, even the Black Cherry and Cel-Ray.

And it's still not done. Now, you smile politely at your customers' dismay when they can no longer grab a can of soda with their take-out lunch and nod synpathetically at those most earnest of drinkers, the Diet Coke loyalists. You accept losing thousands of dollars in beverage sales. At the same time, you account for higher food costs because your drink bases, made from real fruit, are good for only four hours. You create and hope that your customers will enjoy the special syrups that taste slightly different day to day in flavors that come and go with the seasons.

You stand back and imagine a dining room full of people sipping sodas made by friends and neighbors from fresh fruit and whole spices.

You win some -- these sodas are phenomenal and you're proud and ecstatic, if a bit exhausted. They more than make up for past battles lost. There's still that ongoing campaign to source enough briskets from grass-fed cattle to feed your hungry customers. And let's not forget the recent Pickle Squirmish, when you tried charging for kosher dills -- in a deli! -- and took a fatal stab at explaining the seasonality of cucumbers.

Yes, one step at a time, one step at a time.

For now, you're happy to offer a taste of history: the sweet satisfaction and elusive effervescence of real seltzer flavored with homemade syrups.

Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of the Jewish Delicatessen
By David Sax (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)
Sax's campaign to save the deli, as one mom-and-pop sandwich shop after another closes, brings him to the Bay Area this week. Stop by and meet him at Saul's this Saturday afternoon or at Book Passage on Monday at the Ferry Building. Listen to him read from his new book and then ask him for yourself: which city makes the best pastrami and why do we have to drink egg creams so fast and, yes, that most important question, what is the future of the Jewish delicatessen?

Saturday, October 24, 2009
4:00 pm
Saul's Restaurant and Deli
1475 Shattuck Ave Berkeley, CA 94709
(510) 848-3354
Map

Monday, October 26, 2009
6:00 pm
Book Passage
1 Ferry Building, #42
San Francisco, CA 94111
(415) 835-1020
Map