‘It helps me feel better’
In times of crisis, chef learned to forage and preserve food
Moments after walking into a verdant forest in San Francisco’s East Bay, chef Hanif Sadr nibbled on the vegetation he found there — canary yellow mustard flowers, then spicy wild radish flowers, streaked with white and purple. He tasted potently cool chocolate mint and sniffed leaves from an intensely aromatic California bay laurel.
He grabbed a stalk of wild wheat and threaded foraged blackberries onto it like a skewer, a trick he learned as a child in the
’80s in Northern Iran. “I’d have stalks as tall as me, full of berries,” he said.
Back then, Sadr would wander the forest surrounding his family’s walnut and hazelnut farm in the Alborz mountain range, occasionally picking the blackberries for his grandmother’s jam or wild herbs for her tea.
Sadr, the chef and majority owner of Komaaj, a pop-up restaurant and catering company in Berkeley, California, first discovered these treasures in the summer of 2013, a little more than a year after arriving in the United States. He has been foraging there ever since. (There is a robust foraging community in the Bay Area, despite the practice being banned on public and private land.)
That summer, he worked as a camp counselor for a Persian language-immersion and nature school in El Cerrito, leading children on hikes throughout the East Bay. There, he found many of the same plants he foraged in Iran, like Persian hogweed (golpar in Farsi), which his grandmother would brew into painrelieving tea when he was sick.
“Finding Persian hogweed was a turning point for me,” he said. “It helped me feel more at home here.”
A former material engineer in Tehran, Sadr came to California for a graduate program in sustainable energy. When the program was canceled, he stayed on at the Persian school as a cook, even though he had no prior kitchen experience.
Sadr is ethnically Gilaki, one of three major ethnicities in Northern Iran, and he cooks Gilaki food, which he learned to do in 2015 when his family’s longtime cook in Iran came to visit California. Gilaki food is more rice-focused than the country’s other regional cuisines, with more riceflour breads and pastries, and it uses more herbs and smoked foods. He opened
Komaaj in June 2015 with five partners.
To keep Komaaj afloat during the pandemic, he began making a weekly family-style meal in his catering kitchen.
Sadr, who grew up in Tehran and in a rural part of Ramsar County while the country was at war with Iraq in the 1980s, said his experience of the scarcity of wartime has deeply informed his cooking during the pandemic. “We spent days and nights without water, no electricity,” he recalled.
He said that in a time of
crisis, it’s common in Iran to gather and preserve as much food as possible.
Sadr’s sour plum molasses keeps for a year, allowing him to create meals for Komaaj like a chicken-andplum stew made with prunes and apricots. The molasses also goes into his bieh, an herb and nut sauce he puts on roasted Italian eggplant halves for his take on bademjan kebab.
“Focusing on nature, touching the ingredients,” he said. “It helps me feel better, in the moment and not thinking about the future.”