Category Archives: Going Green and Sustainable

A Better, Safer Canned Tuna From A Sausalito Company

Posted on by One comment
A canned tuna you can feel good about eating.

A canned tuna you can feel good about eating.

 

Our love affair with canned tuna has ebbed and flowed over the years.

Beset by worries about mercury levels and unintended bycatch deaths of dolphins, Americans have cut back on their consumption recently. Still, it’s a good bet that there’s still a tin or two in our cupboards on a fairly regular basis because it’s hard to beat the convenience and versatility of the product.

Sausalito’s Safe Catch Elite Tuna, though, makes it easier for us to enjoy canned tuna with fewer worries.

Every tuna (albacore and skipjack) used by the company is tested for mercury, ensuring a limit of 0.1 parts per million which it touts is 10 times stricter than the FDA action limit. The tuna are wild, sustainably-caught, and additive-free. The fish are packed in BPA-free cans without any added water, oil or preservatives. In fact, the ingredients label on the can is as short as can be — just tuna and salt. You don’t even need to drain the can when you open it because there’s very little liquid in it.

Read more

Little Gem Is A Gem

Posted on by One comment
Pork shoulder at Little Gem.

Pork shoulder at Little Gem.

 

Imagine a restaurant, in which all the food is gluten-free. And dairy-free. And sans refined sugar.

No doubt, you’re probably fearing it also will be flavor-free and dismally low in satisfaction.

Not so. Not when it’s Little Gem in San Francisco, which opened in December.

After all, when the head chef is Dave Cruz, formerly of Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc in Yountville, you’re guaranteed to be in good hands with the food, as I found out when I was invited in as a guest of the restaurant last week. Little Gem’s other partners are Eric Lilavois, former chief operating officer of the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, and John DiFazio, an investment banker, who has such an appreciation of good food that he did an apprenticeship at Dan Barber’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York.

Chef Dave Cruz, formerly of Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc.

Chef Dave Cruz, formerly of Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc.

The compact kitchen.

The compact kitchen.

This is clean eating the way it should be — with bold flavors, freshness, finesse but not fussiness, and great ingredients from purveyors such as Marin Sun Farms, Five Dot Ranch and Rancho Gordo.

Read more

A Chocolate Bar With An Unusual Ingredient

Posted on by 2 comments
A new chocolate bar that uses Coffee Flour. And yes, that's a mound of Coffee Flour on the plate.

A new chocolate bar that uses Coffee Flour. And yes, that’s a mound of Coffee Flour on the plate.

 

Jcoco’s newest chocolate bar tastes of cherries.

Yet there are no actual cherries in it.

Instead, its fruity taste comes from discarded coffee waste, otherwise known as the pulp leftover when a coffee bean is extracted from its fruit.

Canadian company Coffee Flour, which has offices in Redwood City, started working with coffee farmers five years ago to turn coffee waste into a type of gluten-free flour. Now, food manufacturers are starting to use coffee waste in new products like this chocolate bar.

Coffee flour has more iron per gram than spinach, more fiber than whole wheat flour, more protein than kale, and more potassium than a banana.

Read more

Don’t Just Drink Beer — Eat It, Too

Posted on by One comment
The predominant ingredient in these bars? Spent grain from brewing beer.

The predominant ingredient in these bars? Spent grain from brewing beer.

 

It’s a good bet that when you’re downing that frosty mug of beer, you’re not thinking about the spent grain that went into brewing it.

But there’s a lot of it. A whole lot.

Indeed, when beer is made, about 85 percent of its ingredients ends up as waste that is usually composted or sold off to feed livestock.

Now, Dan Kurzrock and Jordan Schwartz have come up with a novel — and delicious — way to reuse that discarded grain.

The hobbyist brewers created ReGrained, granola-like bars made from spent grain donated by three Bay Area craft breweries: Magnolia Brewing, 21st Amendment Brewery, and Triple Voodoo.

Read more

Florida Expands Into the Caviar Game

Posted on by 2 comments
A luxurious little potato crowned with creme fraiche and Black Opal caviar.

A luxurious little potato crowned with creme fraiche and Black Opal caviar.

 

California may can lay claim to being the first producer of farmed caviar way back in 1993 with Sacramento County’s successful Sterling Caviar.

But now, the other side of the country is expanding its reach into the game, most notably Healthy Earth Inc.’s Black Opal caviar from Sarasota, FL.

It, too, is farm-raised, from Siberian black sturgeon fed a vegetarian diet. The company has worked with Sarasota’s Mote Marine Laboratory to grow the sturgeon for both meat and caviar.

Read more

« Older Entries Recent Entries »