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Greetings from Fat Gold!

As promised, here’s our holiday gift guide, highlighting some products we really use and sincerely love.

Most of them are available to ship anywhere in the U.S., and some even outside the country. At the end of the guide, we’ll add a few suggestions just for San Francisco Bay Area locals.

Feel free to forward this along to anyone else who might be searching for gift ideas in the weeks to come. You could add a note: “I wouldn’t mind getting something from this list…”

Thanks for your support, year-round!

The warm welcome

We have to start with the Fat Gold gift set, of course.

This combines our Standard (bold and peppery!) with our Blue (fragrant and fruity!) and a limited-edition recipe zine, all of which work together to provide a comprehensive introduction to high-quality extra virgin olive oil.

If you purchase it now, the gift set will ship on December 15.

We offer the gift of an annual subscription, too. A word to the wise: over the years, we have seen many, MANY gift recipients enjoy their subscription so much that, the following year, they turned around and purchased one for the gift giver. So, you might want to play the long game, here…

The hazy celebration

Olio nuovo, or new oil, is a traditional offering of the season: fresh from the mill, bottled while it’s still cloudy with little particles of fruit and micro-droplets of water. This makes for an interesting flavor—it’s almost toothsome, like hazy beer—and also shortens the shelf life. Olio nuovo is for enjoying and using RIGHT NOW. Ideally, you’d glug it all before New Year’s Day.

Fat Gold doesn’t produce an olio nuovo, so let us recommend instead the offering from ENZO Olive Oil Company. Kathryn serves as ENZO’s head miller, so you are still in good hands.

Beyond their olive oil, Enzo’s Table is a cornucopia. While you’re considering the olio nuovo, take a peek at their biscotti, my personal favorite.

The super friends

Our friends at INNA Jam make the best jam in the country; they’ve also been incredible allies and mentors to Fat Gold over the years. If you have enjoyed our olive oil, a share of that enjoyment is owed to the folks at the jam factory.

Their flexible subscription makes a great ongoing gift; not only is the jam sublimely good, but it’s always packaged beautifully. If a subscription is too much of a commitment, consider a jar or three of their black mission fig jam. Ina Garten is on the record saying it’s her favorite!

It’s not all jam over there: INNA Shrub is delicious, particularly as a fun, festive alternative to booze, for non-drinkers and/or young revelers. I was visiting a friend’s house recently, where each kid, ages 4-10, merrily prepared their own drink, first selecting a favorite flavor of shrub, then topping it with a float of sparkling water. “Those are some fancy kids,” I said to myself. Yes—and that’s some tasty shrub.

The chile revolution

Boonville Barn Collective taught us how chiles can, and ought to, taste. Their products are present, in dashes and sprinkles and more, in the majority of meals consumed at Fat Gold HQ.

Kathryn loves their poblano chile powder and smoky Piment d’Ville. I use their whole dried chiles year-round. Those chiles aren’t available until January or February, so sign up for their email list and snag some chile powder while you wait.

Much of the chile-based stuff you find at the grocery store simply isn’t fresh. When you try the chile powders from Boonville Barn Collective, the difference is obvious: they have so much FLAVOR to go with their tingling heat.

This is really one of those situations in which, once you taste the difference, you can’t go back, so: tread carefully.

The salt upgrade

Daybreak Seaweed Company is a tiny, thoughtful team, trying to do something new and different in the world; for years, we have regarded them as fellow travelers.

Their seaweed salt has become a daily staple at Fat Gold HQ. You might think it would be difficult, even impossible, to improve on SALT… but they’ve done it. Something about this blend makes plain salt—even the fancy, flaky kind—seem just a bit pale.

(I put seaweed salt on my toast, along with a generous glug of Fat Gold, every morning. Maybe that’s why we feel this odd closeness to Daybreak… our products spend so much time together.)

The way forward

Diaspora Co. of Oakland is a purveyor of spices with a bracing commitment to equity; they pay their farmers “an average of 6X above the commodity price” for spices that are at least 6X more flavorful than what you’ll find in the grocery store spice section.

Diaspora is an enterprise devoted to decolonization: repairing the world, one step at a time. It’s thrilling and inspiring.

It’s also a bit overwhelming—they have a LOT of offerings—so, if you need a place to start, we recommend their single-origin black pepper. Black pepper is one of those things so ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget that all peppercorns are not made equal. Try these, and the difference will never be in doubt again.

You could also snag the lovely long sleeve T-shirt that Kathryn herself is modeling above!

The clever duo

Proclamation Goods Co. of San Francisco has engineered this set of two interlocking pans, and you might be able to cook just about anything in them.

In fact, while their pan duo is appropriate for anyone who cooks, it might make an extra-special gift for someone just starting out. If it’s not this, it’s going to be the crappy pan set from a big-box store—and they’re better off with this.

It sounds like if you pre-order the pan duo by December 12, it will arrive in time for the holidays. If you’d like something you can get NOW, check out Proclamation’s Big Fat Box, which features a tin of Fat Gold.

Proclamation’s Cassandra Landry recently posted a terrific interview with Kathryn—it truly reads like an X-ray of her brain!

The life-changer

This is the product, more than any other, that gets us through the olive harvest.

There are a lot of other things in this gift guide that we claim are essential, and they are. However, only one fills us with raw panic when it is absent: Serota’s Underarm Balm. (Note the “us”: yep, Kathryn and I both use it. This is a universal balm.)

Is it weird to give natural deodorant as a gift? Maybe… but it might be worth the weirdness, because you could change somebody’s life with this stuff. Just the tiniest dab of herbal-y balm, and you’re set for the day.

(“But Robin,” you protest, “this won’t work for me. I am extremely sweaty.” I hear you, and I understand! I was the extremely sweaty one, until Serota’s changed everything.)

The wild one

Tart Vinegar produces unique vinegars in super-small batches. The vibe is, there might never be another batch like this ever again, and you know we love that!

Our favorite so far, the Ocean Vinegar, is currently sold out. It’s made with kombu, bladderwrack, and Irish sea moss, and we’ve never tasted anything quite like it. Sign up for notifications and keep your eyes peeled.

In the meantime, pick up one of the other great concoctions to get a taste of this undertaking. There’s Celery, there’s Rose, there’s Lavender; there’s Tarragon, there’s Shiso, there’s Sumac!

Sumac!!

As an overall aesthetic project, Tart Vinegar is: bold, wild, singular. As a vinegar, it is simply: delicious.

The city bees

Our friend Jana Kinsman helped out in the old Fat Gold grove a couple of seasons in a row, pruning trees and doing other post-harvest maintenance. She was available to help because it was winter, and her hives in Chicago were slumbering.

Jana’s Bike a Bee is great honey, produced with care in an interesting urban milieu. She combines cappings wax with Fat Gold to craft the Two-Ingredient Lip Balm that you’ll find in our online shop, and in hers, too.

I’m sure you know people who stand out for their capacity for cheerful hard work; their straightforward dedication to making the world always better, never worse, in everything they do. Jana is one of those people. Jana is one of the good ones!

The long goodbye

Loyale was, for many years, a favorite of ours. They’re now going out of business, which is sad—but it’s also an opportunity to get a great deal, and send this little company off in style!

A clutch of linens feels like a gift from another time; it ought to serve as a reminder that these materials really are precious. Of course, they’re practical, too. We use our sturdy and beautiful linens every day.

Thank you, Loyale.

The required reading

We mentioned both of these cookbooks in our summer Field Report, and they’re worth mentioning again, with gift-giving in mind.

Vibrant India, by Chitra Agrawal, is surely our most-used cookbook, its pages water-wrinkled and oil-spattered. We love the dals most of all; we are constantly making Chitra’s Creamy Yellow Lentils, her Lemony Lentil Soup.

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. (A copy of Vibrant India AND a jar of asafoetida powder? Now that would make a cool gift…)

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.

The local scene

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly the East Bay, these are your mandatory holiday stops:

• The Local Butcher Shop in Berkeley, like something out of a storybook: a worker-owned cooperative that’s keeping the dream of a sustainable, equitable local food business not only alive but thriving. As an added bonus, they stock Fat Gold!

• Redfield Cider Bar and Bottle Shop in Rockridge, a perfect setting for a cozy drink, where you can also procure bottles of cider (or wine) for whatever gathering is next. The shelves at Redfield are thoughtfully stocked, with lots of affordable options, and the owners and staff are the friendliest in town. Take a book, get a drink, buy a bottle.

• Vinca Minor in West Berkeley, a new-ish natural winery, and a textbook example of the New California Wine. Their offerings are light and surprising, and they don’t break the bank. On the first and last Friday of each month, Dos Raîcez pulls up to provide food. How so many delicious things come out of such a tiny trailer, we don’t know; go and investigate the mystery for yourself.

• Good To Eat Dumpling in Emeryville, a newly-opened restaurant in the neighborhood of Fat Gold HQ. You won’t find a more welcoming scene anywhere. Stop by on a winter night to warm up with delicious dumplings and the palpable sense of people doing what they love.

That concludes Fat Gold’s 2022 gift guide! It’s a delight to recommend products made by people who sincerely inspire us. When you buy from any of them, you’ll not only be acquiring a lovely gift, but also making a vote, small but meaningful, for a particular kind of economy.

We’ll send a proper Field Report in December. It will be somewhat momentous, because: OUR MILL HAS ARRIVED!

–Robin, Kathryn, and Bryan