Sea Salt

Eastside Road, January 17, 2011—

BACK DOWN TO BERKELEY today to inform a new enthusiasm: roasting our own coffee, at home. Berkeley's Slow Food chapter was giving a seminar on the subject, taught by a barista at the Local 123 coffeehouse on San Pablo Avenue. He explained the differences between Central American, Brazilian, Ethiopian, Yemeni, and Sumatran coffees (and, of more interest, the reasons for those differences; the processes (with water, without water) by which the harvested "cherries" are divested of flesh and reduced to coffee beans; various sources of the green beans (Sweet Maria's emerged as his favorite); and then demonstrated the method of roasting small batches of green coffee beans at home, using an electric popcorn popper.

T. has been doing this for a number of months, and gave me a popper and a few packages of green beans for Christmas; I've been roasting our coffee at home ever since. Not as assiduously as she; I'm not as detail-oriented: that's why I haven't reported on this yet; I haven't been taking notes properly. But I can say the result is delicious; we're as happy with our home roasts as we were previously with Blue Bottle and Extracto, and the green beans are considerably less expensive. I'll try to report further on this soon.

Since the seminar started at seven, we dined locally early at a nearby seafood specialist I've been curious about for some time. There I had as entrée a pan-seared Arctic char, slightly overdone I thought, nicely flavored, with a side dish of long-cooked greens that were complex and delicious but a little sandy (presumably from the recent rains: that can happen, but shouldn't). T. was happy with her sardines and broccoli rabe.

Chardonnay, Cuvaison (Napa Valley), 2009 (half bottle): bright, good varietal, not too much oak

• Sea Salt, 2512 San Pablo Ave. Berkeley; tel. 510-883-1720
• Local 123, 2049 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley; tel. (510) 647-5270