#100 | I Love the Smell of Anchovies in the Morning
The Bay Area Pepperoni Pizza Index
Hello!
two nights before my 72nd birthday
sitting here on a boiling hot night while drinking a bottle of cabernet sauvignon after winning $232 at the track. there's not much I can tell you except if it weren't for my bad right leg I don't feel much different than I did 30 or 40 years ago (except that now I have more money and should be able to afford a decent burial). also, I drive better automobiles and have stopped carrying a switchblade. I am still looking for a hero, a role model, but can't find one. I am no more tolerant of Humanity than I ever was. I am not bored with myself and find that I am the only one I can turn to in time of crisis. I've been ready to die for decades and I've been practicing, polishing up for that end but it's very hot tonight and I can think of little but this fine cabernet, that's gift enough for me. sometimes I can't believe I've come this far, this has to be some kind of goddamned miracle! just another old guy blinking at the forces, smiling a little, as the cities tremble and the left hand rises, clutching something real.
—Charles Bukowski, from Come On In!
Well, it was boiling hot (San Francisco-wise) for the first couple of weeks of August, but now that Fogust has arrived, we can’t see past the block behind our house.
By the way, I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. If you’re new here, welcome to EAT.DRINK.THINK., a newsletter spotlighting seasonal recipes, the latest SF Bay Area food news, poetry, and more!
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was Andy Baraghani’s recipe for Juicy Tomatoes with Italian Chile Crisp. Have you tried it yet? So simple, so delicious!
Do you know someone who loves Adult Mac & Cheese (with black pep)? Send them this newsletter!
👉 ICYMI #2 John Birdsall’s profile on Soleil Ho, the San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic:
In an extraordinary July 2021 review of Lil Eagle Burger, a roving smashburger popup by Zach Fernandes, the burgers are only the emblem of a deeper humanity. Soleil moves from tasty burger to Fernandes’s chronic depression: his popups—the way he leans his whole body into smashing the patties on the griddle—are his way of publicly gesturing the dis-ease he can’t shake. Soleil doesn’t present a false comforting narrative (by giving us the cliché, for instance, that nurturing others is Fernandes’s cure), but allows the chef to exist suspended in this beautifully human ambivalence. We readers and consumers of Lil Eagle’s burgers become conspirators in the sad, delicious, inspiring, unsatisfying condition of being human. I’ve never read a food review like it.
Continue reading: Soleil Ho Is (Still) Eating Their Feelings. Edible SF
How the Best Anchovies Make It to the Menu: Kenny Belov of TwoXSea delivers fresh anchovies to restaurants in San Francisco two hours after they’re caught. “When I smell the anchovies, I can hear seagulls off in the distance.” —Stuart Brioza, Chef/Owner of State Bird Provisions, and The Anchovy Bar. Eater
Made This Last Night With a Steak: “A hot roast vegetable salad, pleasingly tumbled together with Argentina’s signature chili sauce, that you can eat pretty much anywhere.” Meer Sodha’s vegan recipe for Potato and Lentil Salad with Pistachio Chimichurri. The Guardian
🍕 The Bay Area Pepperoni Pizza Index: Average price for a slice of pepperoni has risen by more than a third since 2016. Not only are food prices going way up, but so is the cost of essential supplies like cardboard pizza boxes; Cindy Hayward of the Pizza Place on Noriega notes that the 20-inch pizza box that cost them 62 cents in January 2021 now costs $1.56 And with most restaurants in need of staff since the pandemic, restauranteurs have raised wages too, which has driven the price of a slice to around $6. SF Chronicle
Vote for Your Favorite Farmers Market! Don’t miss your chance to vote for your favorite farmers market in the 14th annual America’s Farmers Market Celebration in partnership with the American Farmland Trust and the Farmers Market Coalition. Help your market win a piece of the $10,000 prize pool! Cast your vote here!
What’s the Best Way to Store Cucumbers? With a spoon in the bag? 🤔 kitchen
🍦Look Before You Lick: Back in the 1870s, before sanitation practices were widely adopted, it was a game of digestive Russian roulette to eat an ice cream cone. “With semi-regular reports of whole groups of picnickers or fair-goers becoming terribly sick with bowel pain, vomiting, and diarrhea. Some, typically children, died.” JSTOR Daily
🎧. Organic Wine Podcast: Diana Snowden Seysses - Climate Change, Carbon, and Bi-Continental Winemaking. More on carbon capture and reuse in the wine industry and strategies for reducing the massive carbon impact of glass wine bottles.
💖 Pink Sauce Update: To the relief of TikTok’-ers everywhere, the viral bubblegum-hued sauce (watch the original video) that created a tsunami of orders and overwhelmed creator Chef Pī, aka The Flavor Genie, last month will now be sold commercially by Dave’s Gourmet. Bon Appetit
Salt Shakeup: If you’ve flown into SFO, you’ve no doubt passed over the beautifully colored salt ponds in the South Bay (“pigmented microorganisms that thrive in the brine give each pond a unique color—from the lime green of Dunaliella algae in low-salinity pools to the rose-petal reds of salt-loving halobacteria in crystallization ponds”). Salt has been harvested from these ponds for thousands of years; the Ohlone people burned marsh plants to use the salty ash as a seasoning for food. And when the Spanish arrived in the 1700s, the Ohlone were enslaved to produce salt for export to Europe. In the 1950s, the salt ponds were owned by Leslie Salt, which sold them to Cargill in 1976. Cargill harvested and sold one million tonnes of salt per year at its peak; some of it no doubt ended up in boxes of Diamond Kosher Salt (see last week’s newsletter), and some was sold to produce napalm that the US military in the Vietnam war. Cargill has since sold most of its ponds to the State of California, setting the stage for the West Coast’s largest wetlands restoration project. Haiku
Join MoAD’s Chef-in-Residence, Bryant Terry, for a timely two-day summit inspired by his latest book Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora. Sept 9-10. Tickets
This Meme Tho:
Uh huh:
Thirsty? JaNee Nyberg was hired by Mahalo.com for a series of cocktail video tutorials back in 2010 to make 100 drinks in two days. A part-time bartender and actor, she showed up for the shoot, and there were no pour spouts, no jiggers, no glassware, no sinks, one bucket of ice she had to keep reusing, plus a wooden spoon she found in the employee break room to use as a muddler. So she just winged it. Her now-infamous Old-Fashioned tutorial (at this point in the shoot, the bottle of bitters was empty, but she still mimes it) is still getting millions of views across YouTube in various versions, although the original has been removed. Punch
On repeat this week, from the archives: Haim’s ferocious cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Oh Well" live at T in the Park from 2014.
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
–Bruce
Do you follow us yet?
Instagram: 25K+ followers
Twitter: 52K+ followers
Facebook: 6500+ followers
In case you somehow missed that subscribe button:
"Despite its artistic intentions and its many accomplishments, humankind owes its existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." —Anonymous