Tag Archives: Sasha Rogelberg

Hosting a ‘Shabbanukkah’ Dinner

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Young Jews find new ways to celebrate old traditions

By Sasha Rogelberg 

In Judaism, welcoming strangers into one’s home is considered a commandment and virtue.  For Shosh Lovett-Graff and Rel Bogom-Shanon, two Jewish food justice activists, it means an opportunity to create the Jewish community they have yet to find as recent college graduates living in Philadelphia.

On a Friday night in early December, the intersection of Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, and the fifth night of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, Lovett-Graff and Bogom-Shanon decide to host a “Shabbanukkah” dinner. Each would invite a few people over who did not already know each other. Everyone would bring something over and break bread together.

Bogom-Shanon expected guests to arrive at “around seven,” which really, to her, meant before 8:00 p.m.  Over the course of an hour, about seven people file into her kitchen. They drop off the side dishes they brought onto the wooden island and pour themselves a mug of cider warmed in a Crock Pot that has seen better days.  Most pour a glug of brown liquor into their mugs too.  It’s cold and rainy out, after all.

Bogom-Shanon is trying her best to make small talk, but mostly she’s incessantly checking her small challah in the oven.

“About an hour ago, I realized it’s Shabbat and we don’t have a challah, so I just decided to make one!” she explains.

She just started watching The Great British Bake-Off, a British baking competition that has gained popularity in the United States, thanks to Netflix, and feels inspired.  Despite her admiration of the show, Bogom-Shanon knows her challah needs some help.  It didn’t have enough time to proof, for the yeast to absorb the sugars and expand the bread into the fluffy and eggy loaf she is familiar with.  She keeps opening the oven door, then closing it, then opening it again.  The challah looks the same every time she checks on it: a small braided log, pale, with a crack running right through it.

Scraps of fried beet, potato, and sweet potato are piled on top of the stove above the oven.  It’s the latke graveyard, the remnants of the fried pancakes cooling on a tray on the kitchen island.  Bogom-Shanon picks at the crispy fried bits every time she checks the bread.

Meanwhile, Lovett-Graff is coolly leaning against the counter by the cider and booze. She’s trying to facilitate conversation, insisting everyone goes around and introduces each other.  It seems likes she’s the only person in the room who knows everyone else. Continue reading →

Please Pass the Pickled Pepper

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On the forefront of fermentation in Philadelphia

 

By Sasha Rogelberg

At Martha, a bar and restaurant in Fishtown, Philadelphia, a pickle is more than just a cucumber wading in a salty brine.

The winner of Philadelphia Magazine’s Best Pickle last year, Martha has lots of fermented fare, including olives marinated in pickled peppers and preserved lemons, local cheese plates and charcuteries, and pickle boats with whatever vegetables are in season, from beans to broccoli to radishes. They even have a sandwich made up of almost entirely fermented foods called the “Vegan Jawn,” which is filled with a carrot terrine, consisting of fermented, pureed, and cooked carrots set with agar that gives it the consistency of a deli meat, fermented radish, and dried, miso-cured eggplant.

Though unique in their ingenuity for the uses of fermentation and pickling, Martha is not the only Philadelphia establishment with a fiending for fermentation.  Local breweries like Fermentary Form, bakeries like Mighty Bread Company, and small distilleries across the city, are all fermenting foods and drinks for the public.

In fact, the process of fermentation — or the growth of healthy bacteria on foods to preserve and give them their funky, sour notes — has grown in popularity all over the country, mostly thanks for the slow food or “locavore” movement putting an emphasis on eating local foods, instead of buying from huge industrial companies.

Mike Landers, who does much of Martha’s fermentation, explained that people ferment and eat fermented foods for reasons ranging from the food being healthier, easier to store, and just as a way of using up food that would have gone to waste.

“Cooking makes things more digestible, but fermenting make food digestible and keeps more nutrients,” he said.

Landers, however, said that food becoming healthier through the pickling process was just a “happy accident.”  He enjoys fermented foods because the process of developing bacteria on the outsides of vegetables and cheeses extracts deep and complex flavors that can’t be created with other cooking techniques.

Despite now being popular and more common in restaurants and small-batch breweries, fermentation is nothing new.  Rather, it’s an activity that’s very old, but one that big corporations have lost interest in, as it takes time and resources that may only be available seasonally.

Ethan Tripp, the founder of Fermentary Form, started his business trying to resurrect an art he believes is now scarce.

The crowd at Fermentary Form

Tripp explained that back in the 1700s before people understood that there were multiple microbes, or the bacteria that is responsible for foods fermenting, or a “microbial world,” people would replicate the food preparation practices that worked for them.

This was how beer and wine were created, and after people realized one could consume spoiled beer and wine in the form of vinegar, this is how vinegar was created and popularized as well. Continue reading →

Where Vegetables Rule

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The couple behind Vedge create a new culinary world – with vegetables

By Sasha Rogelberg

Instead of the carved and notoriously dry turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and soggy green beans that don the tables of many American Thanksgiving tables, chef Rich Landau serves heaps of colorful vegetables—nine-to-12 different dishes-worth—at his holiday dinner.  They range from roasted and sweet purple, white, and orange carrots to shaved Brussel sprouts grilled on a sizzling plancha, or flattop griddle, topped with a smoked mustard dressing.  One year he served a centerpiece roasted Italian squash: plump and stuffed with braised red cabbage.

Landau strives to bring vegetables to the foreground of every meal at his own table. He carries over the same philosophy to Vedge, V Street and Wizkid: the three vegetable restaurants he runs in Philadelphia with his wife and pastry chef Kate Jacoby.

At 3 p.m. on a Thursday, Vedge is closed to the public, but it is anything but empty.  Men layered in khaki and gray shirts are mending the beer line in the front of the “house,” the part of the restaurant where customers eat and sip drinks at the bar.

In the next room, the house bleeds into the kitchen. There, several line cooks are chopping peppers for a romesco, a Spanish red pepper sauce, coating a stout beer, peanut butter and chocolate cake with crumbled pretzels, and blending and seasoning a root vegetable soup-to-be.

Kate Jacoby and Rich Landau

Despite the bustling environment, Landau seems comfortable there.  The line cooks address him as “chef,” but he pointed at the different dishes and talks to his staff without pretension.

He found a quiet table, tucked in a small room next to the bar, to sit down in with me.  He said that the tables in the restaurant were new.  Landau marveled at them when Jacoby joined us briefly and reminded Landau of the upcoming appointment they had right after my interview with him.

But Landau and Jacoby did not always have beveled and stained wood tables in a downtown brownstone Philadelphia restaurant.  Landau began his professional cooking career when he opened up a vegetarian lunch counter in a strip mall in suburban Philadelphia.

Landau became a vegetarian when he was a teenager.  He found the slaughtering of meat barbaric and unethical, despite being “a carnivore at heart.”

He was self-taught cook, and in the 1990s, there wasn’t really much to eat as a vegetarian.  As a lover of bacon cheeseburgers, club sandwiches and chicken nuggets, Landau wasn’t pleased with the few vegetarian options he had at the time: “It was all, like, sunflower seeds, wheat germ, and carob powder, whatever that was.”

The little lunch counter was not intended to be like other health food restaurants at the time. Continue reading →