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It's disconcerting to walk into a giant space, the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and see more than a thousand booths featuring specialty foods, each vying for your eye and palate. Most of the foods at the Fancy Food Show -- which convenes each winter on the West Coast, each spring in Chicago, and each summer in New York -- can make the eyes glaze over (dozens and dozens of artisanal olive oils, chocolate, cookies, salsas, vinegars, BBQ sauces) by sheer repetition, but a few genuinely breakaway food companies stood out.
- Salt gets the spotlight: Iron Chef Ron Siegel, who many people believe to be one of the most talented chefs in SF (he cooks at the Ritz Carlton), if not California, now has a line of artisanal salts out, including an umami salt made from carrot, konbu (seaweed), and shiitake that is just amazing. Ron had a shiso salt, a maccha salt ,and several others. They're not available yet, but will be through a company called Viola Imports. Other notable salts are made by the Artisan Salt Works, who feature a mind-boggling array of salts. Take a look at them here.
- Rice: Lotus Foods sells an over-the-top, green breakaway rice that is made with bamboo extract, and they like to cook it in coconut water. It's insanely delicious. Over-the-top breakaway rice.
- Mints: Green tea mints, beautifully designed to look like a leaf, with a fantastic green tea taste, made by Sencha Naturals.
- Surreally good farmed fish: Kona Kampachi in Hawaii may be the world's best fish farm -- they harvest only to fulfill orders, can tweak fat content, contain no mercury, and represent a truly sustainable form of raising fish. The samples I tried were excellent.
- A breakaway pantry: Nirmala's Kitchen had some great-looking spice blends, among other unique items.
It's somehow heartening to witness this kind of blossoming of creativity. At this rate, maybe we'll all live to see big arrays of breakaway products in supermarkets one day.
Any commercial breakaway products out there that you like?
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