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Greetings from Fat Gold!
Here in the dog days of summer, as we shuttle between Fresno (108 degrees) and Oakland (66), and the harvest season comes into focus—it’s going to be a wild one—we thought we might send a relaxed Field Report, recommending a few books that are important and interesting to us.
We’ll begin with an honor, then tell you about a couple of cookbooks used weekly at Fat Gold HQ, and finally add a couple more, from different genres, to the pile.
For any small-batch food producer, it’s a milestone: your first cookbook mention.
Lukas Volger has an outsized influence at Fat Gold HQ; as the muse of savory oatmeal, he has inspired many of Kathryn’s favorite breakfasts. His new cookbook, Snacks for Dinner, is a gem: practical, inviting, inspiring.
Naturally, Kathryn purchased the cookbook… and what a surprise, in the section on building your pantry, to read this:
!!!
Just in case it’s too small on your screen:
I belong to a wonderful “olive oil subscription” called Fat Gold, where four times a year I get a little tin of fresh, small-batch olive oil made from California olive groves, which is such a treat.
We love Lukas’s writing and thinking, so it is a distinct honor to be included in this way.
The following two cookbooks don’t mention Fat Gold… but they are so great that we’ll forgive it.
Vibrant India, by Chitra Agrawal, is surely our most-used cookbook. Its pages are water-wrinkled and oil-spattered. This is how a beloved cookbook looks:
We love the dals most of all; we are constantly making Chitra’s Creamy Yellow Lentils, her Lemony Lentil Soup. ALWAYS DOUBLE THE RECIPE!
Also, it was Vibrant India that clued us in to asafoetida powder, the magic dust that lifted our home-made Indian dishes up to a new level. We purchased our asafoetida from Oaktown Spice Shop.
Next up:
Maureen Abood is multifarious: besides operating Maureen Abood Market, an online cornucopia of hard-to-find items (skinless chickpeas!), she is the author of Rose Water and Orange Blossoms, our other household staple.
We return again and again to Maureen’s recipes for lamb skewers, kibbeh, tabbouleh, and more. Rose Water and Orange Blossoms is the perfect example of a cookbook that actually wants to be USED. Its recipes are totally practical: concise and clear without being simplistic, and certainly never dumbed-down. It’s an impressive balance.
Start cooking from either of those books, or both, and you’ll basically be eating the same things we do at Fat Gold HQ.
We’ll move beyond cookbooks now.
Here’s a book for the DEEP olive oil nerds only. But, this is the Fat Gold Field Report… so we know you’re out there.
Behold:
SuperOlio charts the emergence of a new philosophy around olive oil that started in Italy and has now spread around the world. This book describes Fat Gold’s lineage: the values and methods described in its pages are the values and methods we believe in, too.
Also, the star of the book, in many ways, is Mori-Tem: the Italian manufacturer of our new mill!
SuperOlio is rarified territory, not for everyone. But… if you want to understand the absolute latest thinking in olive oil—and the limits of what is possible—this is the book for you.
That’s pretty intense. What if you prefer, dare we suggest it, a BEACH READ?
Some of you receiving this newsletter might not know that Fat Gold’s co-founder Robin is a New York Times Best Selling author. His second novel, Sourdough, is about the mysteries and opportunities of food. It tells the story of a young computer programmer who finds herself gifted with a sourdough starter that exhibits strange behaviors. This leads her into the weird, wonderful world of Bay Area food—and into places even deeper.
Sourdough is a quick, fun read: perfect for these dog days of summer.
What if you don’t feel like buying a book, or going to the library?
No problem: The Fat Gold Guide to Extra Virgin Olive Oil is always just a link away. We hope it exemplifies some of the virtues we’ve praised above: nerdy, practical, inviting. The same goes for our Recipe Stockpile.
Thanks for reading! We have plenty of oil ready for you in the online shop, perfect for pouring over Chitra’s lemony lentils, glugging into Maureen’s tabbouleh, or drizzling onto your sourdough… while reading Sourdough.
–Robin, Kathryn, and Bryan