The Chef Apprentice

Next to his desk in the Oliveto back office, Chef Paul Canales has taped a diagram that captures the restaurant's reverence for pork.

The diagram shows a hog divided into sections, such as the shoulder and the leg. All of these sections are labeled "good," except for the belly. It is labeled "real good."

Pork is a constant at Oliveto. The menu revolves around it.

On any given day, prep chefs can be seen breaking down a hog into various cuts - shoulder, loin, leg - and then processing them into porchetta, pancetta, scallopine, sausage or salumi.

For an uninitiated guest to the kitchen, it can be startling to see a pig's head simmering in a stock pot or a chef hefting a hand saw on one half of a 200-pound carcass.

Yet if you want restaurants to be respectful of the meat they serve, extracting every ounce of flavor and using all parts of the animal, then these scenes shouldn't shock you. Many chefs run far tidier kitchens by relying on industrial meat processors to do their butchery, delivering meat cuts that are shrink-wrapped and ready to cook.

To read the rest of this post, with more photos and a rundown on how Oliveto processes a whole hog, go here.

It's not very often that Sacramento-area farmers, chefs, gardeners and food activists all gather to consider possible collaborations and raise money for some good causes.

Judged on those merits, the Urban Ag Fest that Slow Food Sacramento sponsored Saturday was a sunny success, even with rain clouds threatening the dinner.

Scores of people joined bike tours of gardens and attended movie screenings and workshops on composting and community farming.

More than 100 attended the AgFest dinner at the Fremont Garden, where they got to hear Brahm Ahmadi (right) discuss his work in West Oakland. Ahmadi the founder and executive director of the People's Grocery, a non-profit that is trying to bring fresh food and new gardens to a community where liquor stores outnumber groceries.

Although I don't know the final tally, the dinner, auction and raffle raised several thousand dollars for two charities, The Sacramento Hunger Coalition and the Sacramento Area Community Garden Coalition. A few people people even bid on me, the Chef Apprentice, to purchase and prepare lunch for them on a coming Sunday.

(To my amazement, the bidding started at $300 and climbed to $420 before the winning group claimed their prize. That was nearly twice the amount bid for a round of golf with City Councilman Rob Fong.)

The question now, of course, is whether the momentum of AgFest can be sustained and translated into something larger.

Many neighborhoods of Sacramento lack community gardens and groceries where fresh food is available. Meanwhile, many local farmers would like to sell more of their produce to people in these neighborhoods, but lack outlets for doing so.

AgFest has broadened the network of people interested in closing this loop.

But, as every farmer and gardener knows, it is not just enough to get your plants started. This is a project that will need feeding and attention, week after week, all through the seasons.

Along with local farmers and foodies of all stripes, I spent part of an afternoon Tuesday in a Yolo County walnut grove with Alice Waters, the chef of Chez Panisse.

It was an emotional gathering for Waters and many in the crowd. More than three decades ago, Waters' drive to supply her Berkeley restaurant with fresh, local produce led her to Yolo County and other counties that ring the Bay Area. There she encouraged the growth of organic agriculture and, in turn, farmers influenced the foods that she served.

"She was the wild woman who drove around in her truck, looking for vegetables," recalls Paul Muller of Full Belly Farm, an organic operation in the Capay Valley. "No one knew anything about her."

Now nearly everyone knows about Alice. In her own headstrong and serendipitous way, she's become an icon for the local food movement. Her recent book, Edible Schoolyard, chronicles her efforts to drive out junk food from the public schools of Berkeley, and replace it with fare that is "delicious," as she puts it, and is partly grown and prepared by the students themselves.

On Wednesday, Waters seemed more interested in paying homage to Yolo farmers and young people than in promoting her book or her causes, including a successful effort to bring a vegetable garden to the grounds of the White House.

"I cheerlead anyone who comes out in the heat and works in these fields," Waters said. "They are heroes. I am just so touched by the new population of young people who want to go into farming...They are reinventing farming."

Waters was in our neck of the woods Tuesday for a fundraiser to benefit the Center for Land-Based Learning, a non-profit started by Craig and Julie McNamara that seeks to interest young people with careers in agriculture. The event was held at the Farm at Putah Creek, a walnut grove near Winters that the McNamaras have dedicated to the center's educational activities.

I attended partly to meet farmers like Muller who supply Oliveto, the restaurant where I work as an intern. I also wanted to hear from Waters and meet Craig McNamara, who, as an agriculture leader and son of former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, is an intriguing figure.

To make the best pasta, you must acquire the finest ingredients.

Lately, Oliveto has been re-examining the flours, eggs and other ingredients in its basic pasta dough. In short, the owners and chefs seem to be in maniacal pursuit of primo pasta.

Take a look at these two eggs. The one on the bottom, with the brighter yolk, is from Riverdog Farm in Yolo County. The top one is from a neighboring farm. Which one do you think would produce a superior egg noodle?

It's not just the color that matters. The chefs cooked up both eggs to test their presumption that the Riverdog yolk, with its bright orange color, offered the superior flavor. There was no contest.

The Riverdog yolk was rich and intense - just what you want in a noodle. Apparently, the owners of River Dog let their chickens forage on a variety of leafy greens. That helps produce richer yolk than those produced by chickens that subsist largely on grain.

Not surprisingly, the Riverdog eggs are already getting marquee treatment at Oliveto. The chefs are currently featuring them in "Riverdog pasture-raised hen egg tagliatelle with garden rosemary and Oliveto prosciutto."

Photo by Stuart Leavenworth

Since its founding, Oliveto has cultivated relationships with dozens of farmers, fishmongers and other suppliers. Starting this year, the restaurant has attempted to showcase those food producers through a web site, the Oliveto Community Journal.

This web site is a response to the increasing erudition of restaurant consumers. Many diners don't just want to enjoy good food and wine, they want to know where it came from, and who produced it.

The Oliveto Community Journal includes profiles of farmers, ranchers and other suppliers. There are videos that track the current tomato season and the old-world practices of Mr. Espresso, an Oakland company that uses a wood-fired oven to roast coffee for Oliveto and other businesses.

Check out this Oliveto profile of Fully Belly Farm, a year-round producer of fruits and vegetables in Yolo County. The farm, which hosts an annual Hoe Down Harvest Festival (seen above), has been selling produce directly to Oliveto for 15 years.

One perk of interning at Oliveto is seeing farmers come through the back door with crates of produce or meat. Some clearly enjoy hanging out in the kitchen and deepening their relationship with the chefs that prepare the food.

This is not anything "new." In Europe and elsewhere, the first restaurants and taverns were started by farm families or people who wanted to sell produce or spirits produced by their friends in the community.

Responding to customers who are fed up by mass-produced, faceless plates of food, restaurants are getting back to their roots. 

As this internship and this blog progresses, I plan to spend time with farmers who supply Oliveto with meat and seasonal produce. One of the first farms on my list is Riverdog Farm in Yolo County.

Whoops. As it turns out, Trini Campbell has beaten me to the punch. Trini and her husband, Tim Mueller, own Riverdog, a 300-acre organic farm in the Capay Valley. In Sunday's Forum section of The Bee, she has written a first-person account of their life on the farm.

Spend some time with this story. Trini is a graceful writer and an accomplished farmer. Her story is illustrative of how multitalented people are being drawn to the art and science of producing food, even with the hard work involved.

Over the last week at Oliveto, I've helped to prepare stuffed pasta with Riverdog Farm pork and to wrap pancetta around asparagus recently harvested from Riverdog's fields. The farm's meat and produce is consistently first-rate, thanks to Trini and Tim.

Photo of Trini Campbell by The Bee's Randall Benton.