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The Market:
Berkeley
Farmers Market
Center Street at
Martin Luther King Jr. Way
Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., year round, rain or shine
(510) 548-3333
Marketgoer:
Victoria Slind-Flor
Berkeley
’s 20-year-old farmers market is a project of the Ecology
Center, which also operates the City of
Berkeley’s recycling program and sponsors the Berkeley Community Gardening
Cooperative, the Plastics Task Force, the Indigenous Permaculture
Project and the Berkeley Biodiesel Cooperative.
The market is one block from the Berkeley BART (Bay Area Rapid
Transit Station), and is adjacent to the
Berkeley
Civic
Center
Park—a great place for a post-marketing picnic—Berkeley
City Hall
and
Berkeley
High School.
In the summer and
autumn, the market attracts between 50 and 60 vendors, who must meet
the
Ecology
Center’s stringent guidelines. All must sign a pledge not to sell
genetically engineered food. Approximately 80 percent of the vendors
are certified organic farmers. Shoppers are encouraged to bring
their own containers.
Saturday was a warm autumn day after the first
rains of the season in northern
California. I was surprised to
find several vendors selling late sweet corn, and an abundance of
many kinds of tomatoes and peppers, which will disappear after the
rainy season begins in earnest. Many of the farm offerings were distinctly Italianate.
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Stridoli and Wild Arugula
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La Tercera of Bolinas, which is a certified
organic farm, brought in three varieties of radicchio and broccoli raab at $4
a pound, and
baskets of flat beans at $3 a pound, including
flageolet, coco nero, borlotti and cannellini. La Tercera also
offered stridoli (or, as it’s sometimes known, “strigoli”)
for $6 a pound. Stridoli is Silene vulgaris, also known as
“bladder campion” or "cowbells." Stridoli is an
old-world leafy vegetable often used with pancetta in pasta
dishes from
Italy
’s
Tuscany
and
Romagna, or as a sharp-tasting
salad accent. |
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Happy Boy Farm of Freedom,
California
had one pound bags of baby mixed salad greens and edible flower petals
for $4, Sicilian melon for $3 a pound, and chestnuts for $4 a
pint.
Alicia Sapienza of
Sebastopol,
California’s certified organic Gabriel Farms, sang the praises of her
farm’s six different varieties of Asian pears (Pyrus
pyrifolia). Asian
pears, which are native to
China,
Korea
and
Japan, have been cultivated for centuries. They are less
fragile, and better keepers than European pears.
Sapienza cut up all six varieties for tasting: hosui,
shinseiki, niitaka, chojuro, shinko and Olympic
| The shojuro was the sweetest, the shinko
the juiciest, and the Olympic variety had spicy overtones.
Sapienza suggested making a sweet/savory pizza by
thin-slicing shinko pears, placing the slices on a prepared
crust, adding Canadian bacon and blue cheese and baking. |
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Alicia Sapienza
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Brokaw Avocados
was selling fat Gwen avocados grown in
Soledad,
California
that are every bit as fat and flavorful as the more common
black-skinned Haas. Most
California
avocados are grown in
San Diego
County
, so it was a surprise to see these from further north.
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