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.

This past spring I traveled with fellow KQED QUEST producer Gabriela Quirós to the Sacramento area to film at Sterling Caviar, one of two Californian companies currently producing this delicacy.

This company raises white sturgeon, one of two native species to California (the other is green sturgeon). They originally obtained their stock from the Sacramento River. Once they were able to create their own brood stock for the next generation, they no longer needed to harvest fish from the river.

Learn more about sustainable caviar production in the video, "Green Eggs By The Gram: Sustainable Caviar."

Related Story and Slideshow on QUEST:
Science on the SPOT: Green Eggs By The Gram – Sustainable Caviar

Molly de Vries has a very special Bay Area company, Ambatalia. The name is actually born from a Trinidad song about empowering women and nurturing the earth and Molly couldn't be a better living and breathing representation of the namesake of her company or her mission for the work she does. I first met Molly at the Marin Country Mart Farmers Market. She has a booth right next to my Marge booth and we spend many a Saturday chit-chatting and catching up with each others' lives. But the first time I really began to understand what Molly was aiming to do with Ambatalia was the day she turned down a slice of pie I offered her because it was in a clamshell container. Oh no, I assured her, it's corn-based -- not plastic. That helped. But Molly routinely and deliberately eschews any containers or packaging for a simpler way of carrying and transporting goods -- whether that be a cinnamon roll in the morning or how she brings her goods to the farmers market each morning. She's the real deal. I decided to take some time away from the market to talk to Molly about how she began and what her intentions are for her burgeoning business. I couldn't have been more inspired.

Tell me a little about your business and how/why you decided to start it.
I had closed my downtown Mill Valley fabric shop in 2004 and Tyler Florence approached me to do a kitchen line for his store. I had always created goods in and around the kitchen and the act of shopping but this really pushed me to focus on my passion for useful, sustainable textiles. After being a hairdresser for twenty years, I wanted to do something meaningful and after a year of focusing on what that would look like, when I turned forty, I started to put together clues from my life and Ambatalia was born.

I wanted to do handmade goods with integrity and beauty have a real sense of honor in my work -- the opposite of all the mass-produced plastic stuff floating around. When I walked into Joanne fabrics or other large chains, I'd just see yards and yards of plastic fleece but no wool. This seemed crazy to me. So my goal really became buying fabrics with the most integrity. the closest in distance, and as sustainable as possible.

Your business is decidedly centered around food: the serving of it, the presentation of it, the transportation of it. How did you come around to food?
Well, food and textiles have so much in common, at least in my mind. There's an obvious link in the way in which we honor our food with beautiful cloth on our table and in our kitchen, but more importantly, the people making the cloth have a direct impact on us as individuals and families. The people that are making our clothes across the globe have faces and families. So often these days, we don't take a moment to think about them, we just want a good price. And I walk down the aisles of stores and restaurants and see all of the plastic packaging, especially in the food industry, and puzzle over how so many people don't think about where all of that plastic ends up. So now, as a society, we're finally starting to understand the benefits of buying local, organic food and the importance of knowing our farmers. I believe that it's just as important to buy our textiles in the same way.

Do you think living in the Bay Area allows your business to flourish? If so, how so?
I think so and largely because we’re so cosmopolitan and the whole local food movement is thriving here. People are more receptive to paying a little more to benefit the environment or local producers and artisans. The question always remains though: how do I produce as much as I can using materials that originate as close to home as possible? So it costs more. It does. But there's a trade-off.

What have been the highlights of being a small business owner in the Bay Area thus far?
Well, the highlights are really that I grew up here; I’m native. I’ve always been a small business owner, attracting a community that I love so there has really never been anything else for me. The area itself is a source of creativity and I get the chance to be supported in doing what I love. I love bringing lightness and awareness to something I think is really important. I truly believe in doing the right thing even before making the money. I feel small business can create change where it counts.

What challenges are you facing right now in terms of growth or vision?
My vision is very clear. Honestly, the biggest challenge is about doing everything myself and figuring out a way to grow and balance within that. It's just about learning and asking for help. And right now one of my bigger challenges is the marketing side of the business-- there's only so many hours in the day!

What inspires you, day to day?
Nature, the colors of nature around me. My kids. Also, really humble and simple objects whether it be a tool or just a simple object.
I get really inspired by watching older people and how they do things. There’s something that we’re lacking in our society today. Something that unites us in a deep way...slowing down and creating something, making something useful. That’s inspiring.

What are your goals for the future of Ambatalia?
Immediate goals would be expansion in scope. Right now I do housewares including aprons, furoshiki dish towels, table coverings, and shopping textiles as an alternative to plastic, paper and packaging. I'm looking to broaden my horizons and do linen bath towels, mats, shower curtains. I'm really excited about being a part of our own fibershed project even though it's an ancient way of producing, it is a totally new concept these days. In short, it's where goods are grown and sewn close to home. I will be incorporating plant dying into my products done by Rebecca Burgess and locally produced fiber which would include organic cotton grown here in California by Sally Fox and possibly incorporate some local wool because it is in such abundance here in Marin. In the near future I plan to do a whole collection around the principles of the project. Getting the fibershed stamp of approval would mean the highest level of sustainability to me. That'll really finally bring it completely full-circle.

As a certified green business since 2005, I have sewn all of my products myself and I've just begun training men and woman to sew my products rather then going to a factory in the city. I also want to find weavers here where there is a rich community of weavers. I really believe in connection and relationships. Giving power and support rather than getting what you need or want for the very cheapest price.

We carnivores who live in the Bay Area are a privileged bunch -- on any given day, we can choose to eat Fatted Calf's bacon, Fra Mani's salami, 4505's chicharrones and countless other artisan charcuterie around the city. To that list, I would add Boccalone's pork ragu. It's a lucious ragu that is intensely spiced and just perfect when tossed with pappardelle. Until a couple weeks ago, my main interface with Boccalone was to buy the ragu, or to pick up a sandwich or two for a picnic.

Boccalone is a store that is located in the Ferry Building, and is the brainchild of Incanto chef Chris Cosentino and his business partner Mark Pastore. It has been open less than a year, and attracts great attention in the Ferry Building with its pristine meat slicers and case of hanging meats. In addition to their delectable porcine products, Boccalone also offers sparkling water (like what is offered at Incanto) -- I love filling up my bottle on farmers market days before I battle the crowds.

I've been spending more time at Boccalone these days, however, and it's all the fault of a delicious new product called Nduja. Let's all say it together, class: en-doo-ya. Can't remember how to pronounce it? Ask for the "N-Judah," like I do, and you will get a smile and the lovely Boccalone staff will hand over the $11 salami-shaped package. Nduja is a Calabrian spreadable salami that is spicy and full of flavor. I love bringing it to room temperature and eating it on fresh bread. Once it's at room temperature, it spreads just like butter and is has a great mouthfeel. Nduja roots come from the French andouille sausage and the flavor profile is not unlike the andouille in smokiness and layers of flavor. Friends have been tweeting about mixing a dollop of it in omelettes.

Because this is such a new and unusual product, the folks at Boccalone tend to have some out on sample -- I would suggest that you try it next time you're at the Ferry Building.

Photo Credit: Bunrab.