Eat Real Fest 2011 Part 2 – Kraut-a-thon with Happy Girl Kitchen Co and Farmhouse Culture and Cooking with Jam

Uncategorized

phil September 25, 2011

This is Part 2 of a series of photo posts from Oakland’s Eat Real Festival, September 23-25, 2011 at Jack London Square. (Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6).

Farmhouse Culture and the Happy Girl Kitchen Company hosted a Kraut-a-thon at the DIY Make It area. It was another great hands-on event where audience members got to get their hands dirty making a classic sauerkraut using natural microorganisms.

Kraut-a-thon

Extolling the virtues of fermented vegetables. Especially interesting was the fact that the nutritional content of the vegetables can actually improve after fermentation.

Demonstrating her cabbage cutting technique

They had the audience get involved right away. Cutting boards, microplanes, knives, veggies, salt and spices were all provided.

Salt is an important component in making a sauerkraut. The audience was instructed to salt until it tastes just too salty to taste for a salad. Not adding enough salt results in a soggy sauerkraut. Also, using non-iodized salt is a requirement – the iodine inhibits the growth of microorganisms.

Hand mixing the sauerkraut. Farmhouse culture and the Happy girl kitchen company even provided a handwashing station for the audience to use prior to getting in on the action.

Cooking with Jam

Rachel Saunders, Michele Polzine and Fran Loewen led a talk on ways to use jam in normal cooking. They fielded a slew of questions from an interested audience at the Master Craft stage of Eat Real Festival.

Rachel Saunders has been making jam for 13 years and offers a line of preserves (Blue Chair Fruit) that can be found at farmers markets and various Bay-Area restaurants as well as a sold-out cookbook with great photography and delicious recipes. I’ve been picking up her jam since I first started seeing it at the farmers market a number of years ago.

A jam pyramid.

The highlight of the event for the audience was probably the samples – they served a peach leaf ice cream with a plum jam topping. Samples went REALLY quickly.

Blue chair’s Norweigan intern, dutifully scooping..

.. and then applying the plum jam topping.

Eat Real Fest 2011 Part 1 – Blue Bottle Coffee, Ritual Coffee, and Beauty’s Bagel

Uncategorized

phil September 25, 2011

I once again took photos for this year’s Eat Real Festival, held in Oakland’s Jack London Square from September 23-25, 2011. This post is the first of many from the festival. (Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6) The event’s organizers had a fully packed schedule and there were a lot of really interesting things to photograph.

One of the things that I noticed this year was that there were more hands-on activities. There was a DIY Make-it area and a DIY Eat-it area complete with a community oven, sponsored by King Arthur Flour (I am a fan).

Coffee Brewing with Blue Bottle Coffee

One of the first DIY activities was a coffee brewing workshop put on by the fine folks at Blue Bottle coffee, who roast their beans only a few blocks away. 4 of their training staff led a workshop on making coffee with paper filters and their Bonmac ceramic drippers.

Benjamin Brewer started the talk by giving an overview of the process and continued to make key points as each of the other trainers demonstrated their drip-brewing processes.

The coffee grounds were precisely weighed on digital scales to ensure a coffee to water ratio of 1:10 in the cup. “In the cup” is a key phrase, Benjamin explained. The coffee grounds absorb a fair amount of hot water and thus a little extra hot water needs to be added to the filter to achieve a 1:10 ratio in the cup.

Benjamin emphasized freshness – the beans in the demo were only between 1-3 days old. After the beans were weighed, the trainers took turns grinding them and bringing the grounds back to their table.

Hot water was poured in via goose-necked pitchers until the target weight was reached. In the above photo, Brian demonstrated when to pull the dripper away before guiding attendees in brewing their own drip coffee.

I stepped outside after this workshop to make my way to the DIY Eat-it area, where Beauty’s Bagels were putting on a bagel workshop.

Third-wave coffee was well represented at the festival. Ritual Roasters‘ always-photogenic coffee trailer, Sputnik was there once again.

Bagel making with Beauty’s Bagel

Oakland’s Beauty’s Bagel led a DIY workshop where they showed how to make their Montreal-style bagels. They had premade and proofed the dough and workshop attendees floured up their hands and got to rolling their own bagels after watching a quick demo.

Here’s Blake Joffe cutting up the dough for the first demonstration. They used King Arthur’s high gluten flour (14.2% protein content) for maximum chewiness.

Some bagel recipes call for creating balls and poking holes through them to create their distinctive shape, but here Amy Remsen rolls them out and creates a loop.

Completed demo bagels.