Category Archives: New Products

Ineeka Puts Innovation Into Tea

A new type of tea bag from Ineeka.

It opens up like a miniature grocery bag with handles to sit squarely in your mug of hot water.

Inside of it, organic tea leaves swell and swirl, steeping an exquisitely fresh tasting brew that’s smooth, satisfying and noticeably less tannic.

Take a taste of Ineeka teas, founded by a husband and wife team in Chicago whose families have been in the tea business for generations.

Shashank and Sumita Goel tout their company as the only completely vertically-integrated tea brand in North America. That means they grow their tea on family farms along 15,000 acres in the Himalayas north of India and package the teas, themselves.

Ineeka (“little Earth” in Sanskrit”) grows their tea organically and biodynamically in self-contained systems. For instance, the animals on the farms eat the food grown on the farms. In turn, their manure fertilizes the soil. The company employs 25,000 people who also live on the farms. As Fair Trade certified, the company pays higher than wages than the industry norm, too.

But of course, the proof is in the taste.

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A Gourmet Scooping Ketchup To Ladle On Thickly

Sir Kensington's Classic Gourmet Scooping Ketchup.

If your ketchup MO is to reach for the usual squeeze bottle, Sir Kensington’s may have you reaching for their glass jars to scoop out the stuff instead.

Sir Kensington’s mascot may be totally mustache in cheek — a top hat-crowned, monocle-wearing British dandy who supposedly created the tomato-based condiment 300 years ago for Catherine the Great to top her steaks with.

But truth be told, like so many wonderful artisan products these days, Sir Kensington’s actually originated in Chelsea, NY. With Mark Ramadan and Scott Norton, former business and finance consultants, to be exact. They thought there ought to be an alternative to Heinz that was more hand-crafted.

While most mass-produced ketchup relies on tomato concentrate and corn syrup, Sir Kensington’s does not. In fact, they’re made with vine-ripened pear tomatoes, real onions (as opposed to powdered or dehydrated), cane sugar, honey, agave, apple cider vinegar, coriander, lime juice and allspice.

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The New Edible Silicon Valley

Don't miss my profile of Jesse Cool in the new Edible Silicon Valley magazine.

Haven’t you scratched your head over the fact that there was an Edible San Francisco, Edible Marin, Edible Monterey Bay and so many others — yet no Edible Silicon Valley magazine?

Wonder no more.

Now, there is one.

Edible Silicon Valley debuted its first issue this month.

Yours truly is proud to be a regular writer for the new publication. Enjoy my first story for the magazine, a profile of Jesse Cool, the Peninsula chef-restaurateur who’s been a long-time champion of sustainable, organic and local foods.

An experimental crop of organic wheat that Cool grew in her backyard.

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World’s Youngest Master Sommelier

Roland Micu, the youngest certified Master Sommelier in the world. (Photo courtesy of the International Culinary Center in Campbell)

Last year at age 28, Roland Micu passed the last of four rigorous exams to become the youngest certified Master Sommelier in the world.

To get a sense of the weight of that accomplishment, consider that since the Court of Master Sommeliers was established in 1969 that only 197 people around the globe have attained that certification.

For most candidates, it takes multiple tries to pass the daunting Level IV exam, in which six wines must be tasted blind in 25 minutes to identify the varietal, country of origin, district and appellation, as well as vintage precisely.

Micu did it on his first attempt.

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