Every weekend before shelter in place, Alex Hozven and Kevin Farley would lay out chopsticks and ceramics on an enormous table in the middle of their fermentation lab, the Cultured Pickle Shop in Berkeley. The production space became a restaurant, serving a threecourse menu built around a bowl of pickles. Dubbed Rice & Pickles, the meal would begin with a hot cup of dashi, move to a bowl of rice topped with about six fermented products and end with a sweet bite, such as a raw coconut macaroon with apple butter. While the full experience isn’t an option during the coronavirus, Hozven and Farley are still making the rice bowls every weekend for takeout — they’re perfect picnic food. The pickle shop’s
jarred fermented goods are also available to take home, and they’re an easy way to add some produce to your diet when you’re not sure about your next trip to a grocery store.
The Cultured Pickle Shop has been around for about 25 years, but Hozven and Farley didn’t dream up Rice & Pickles until three years ago. For most of the shop’s life span, it functioned primarily as a wholesale operation, supplying sauerkraut to the likes of Whole Foods stores up and down California. But when Amazon bought Whole Foods and the grocer stopped stocking a lot of local products, that major source of income disappeared. Hozven and Farley started wondering: “How do we become a local destination?”
The answer was Rice & Pickles, and it’s evolved quite a bit. When the wifehusband team began, they sold just a dozen bowls a day, mostly using pickles they were already jarring and selling. That ballooned to serving 60 diners a weekend, with each bowl primarily featuring unique ferments created specifically for Rice & Pickles.
Balance is key for Hozven when she thinks about the bowls, which spotlight a variety of fermentation techniques, a colorful mix of topnotch local ingredients and a CaliforniameetsJapan sensibility. While the Western notion of a pickle is merely sour, Rice & Pickles demonstrates the medium’s diversity. Here’s an example of what goes into each bowl.
1 There’s always at least one supersour, lacticacidfermented pickle in the bowl. In this case, it’s made from a French heirloom pumpkin. Cultured mixes it with lemon zest, sliced leeks and salt. The mixture is weighted, then fermented over two or three weeks. The result brings crunch and serious sourness to the bowl.
2 Usually there’s something Hozven calls a “pressed salad.” This one is cabbage packed in umeboshi vinegar and weighted for a day. The vinegar, though, is the result of a sixmonth process — it begins its life as the red shisodyed brine used to make Japanese pickled plums. In the bowl, the cabbage is tangy, with a subtle hint of fruit.
3 Hozven turns nettles into a soft, creamy ball that packs an umami punch. The nettles are blanched, chopped and squeezed and left to marinate in the liquid that accumulates during the yearlong process of making kasuzuke, pickles that use sake lees, a byproduct of sake production. Yes, that’s a byproduct of a byproduct.
4 The tiny bonus pickles on top of the nettle ball are kasuzuke watermelon rind. The lime green jellylike cubes add a fun texture.
5 Wasabina, baby mustard greens, provide a fresh contrast.
6 Sliced avocado provides welcome fat, balancing out the acidic elements.
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Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle
Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle
Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle
Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle
7 Two important ingredients are employed for these mellow, salty yet savory beets: koji and hojicha vinegar. The koji is made by soaking and steaming rice, inoculating it with mold spores and incubating it for two days. The Japanese green teabased vinegar comes from kombucha ferments with low yeast populations. The sliced beets are simmered in tamari, the vinegar and dashi for a few minutes. Koji is added to the cooled mixture, which then sits overnight.
8 A bright, tart, salty blast with a slight bitter finish comes from a dot of yuzu kosho. Cultured removes the Japanese citrus fruit’s peel, blends it with salt and chile, and ferments it for two weeks. Most bowls will have some sort of kosho.
9 For extra seasoning, bowls get a sprinkle of gomashio, a Japanese sesame salt. Cultured makes its gomashio with sesame and a blend of dehydrated pickles — in this case, seaweed sauerkraut.
0 Cultured’s take on the soy eggs in ramen starts with curing boiled, peeled eggs in a mix of sake lees, tamari and hojicha vinegar for two days. The eggs are deliciously salty, with bright orange, jammy yolks.
! Half short grain brown rice and half sweet brown rice offer textural contrast: some grains sticky, some toothsome. The rice is cooked in a doublelidded donabe, a Japanese clay pot.
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Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle
Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle
At the Cultured Pickle Shop in Berkeley before shelter in place, top left, jars of kombucha and pickled items are for sale from a cooler; a cup of bubbly beetlemonparsley kombucha, bottom left, is served; owner Kevin Farley puts together Rice & Pickle bowls; Yoko Kumano (left) and John Waters munch on Rice & Pickles bowls at the shop; pickling vats fill the shop’s storeroom, top right; the amazake pumpkin dessert, right bottom.
Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle