We love the concept of roof gardens going commercial above the store that sells their produce. It’ll be interesting to see how well this does.
Check out BrightFarms on GOOD and Edible Manhattan.
photo courtesy of BrightFarms
Because Patrick Rue wanted them there – that’s why.
Rue and his cohorts at The Bruery have been brewing beers with very unconventional ingredients with some great success, and getting a lot of attention for their innovation and craftsmanship. Luckily for San Diego beer dorks, Mr. Rue will be speaking today at the first ever BEER-CON, a new conference for the brewing industry and its fans taking place at the Handlery Hotel.
Mother Sponge says, you’re a home brewer or local bar-hand looking to bolster your chops, you best head down to soak up the knowledge while partaking in the “Tap Heaven” beer garden.
Check out some more cool photos of The Bruery’s Autumn Maple beer (the one with the yams).
One of our favorite local artisan food producers, Knight Salumi, had to close its doors earlier this year. Was it because their product was lackluster, their competition too difficult to overcome, their market uninterested? Nope, nah, and finally… not a chance. The culprit was a broken drain and a clerical error in paperwork.
As reported by Edible San Diego, Knight found itself haulting all pre-holiday season production at it’s Kearny Mesa facility to fix a broken drain pipe as required by the USDA. Without knowing the details, let’s give the benefit of the doubt to the USDA on that one – facilities should be in tip-top shape to ensure healthy conditions.
Knight was able to utilize a client’s facility in Illinois to help fill in during the drain repair, and production commenced. But just when they thought they’d dodged a bullet, the USDA confiscated a 6,000 pound order, all because of a missing signature. Even after Knight had the product tested for safety, the USDA would not release it. The loss of that order was too much financial burden to bear, causing Knight to close.
Again, the USDA has protocol for a reason, and of course that HACCP form should have been filled out correctly. But the real question here is, can’t there be room for a human to determine when a clerical error can be remedied in order to avoid the potential closing of an otherwise thriving small business?
Knight Salumi is not alone in facing sometimes questionably strict food health regulations. It’s apparently become extremely difficult for restaurants to operate legitimate charcuterie programs – in New York City of all places!
While we’re sad to see Knight Salumi go, we have hope for great things from charcuterie producers across America. Perhaps these challenges will only propel this renaissance into a fervor!
Photo by IndirectHeat
If the About page wasn’t enough, and you wanted more depth about our name, here it goes.
A mother sponge is an active symbiotic relationship of wild yeast and bacteria that lives in a mixture of flour and water, and must be fed regularly to continue living and helping bakers make bread. The bacteria produces lactic acid, which gives sourdough its tangy taste. By our estimation – MOTHER since it produces bacterial offspring, and SPONGE because it gets bubbly & looks like a sponge.
Besides making bread taste awesome, we think it’s pretty amazing that a mother sponge can hypothetically live forever! Boudin in San Francisco claims to use the same sourdough starter they used 150 years ago during the Gold Rush era. As the story goes, they rescued their starter in a bucket during the Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake before fire enveloped their bakery and most of the city. So, as a mother sponge can live forever, we always aspire to create timeless work.
We believe it’s an authentic miracle that dough rises naturally through the living symbiotic relationship between wild yeast and bacteria. With that in mind, we love working collaboratively with you clients out there. You know your business and your customers best, so the work will always be better if you are engaged in the design process.
More sourdough lore to come…
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