Warm and Fuzzy
Too sweet, too fragile, too delicate to be shipped to the local Food Giant, California white peaches were for generations packed off to the orient. Very big in Japan, the creamy peaches blushed with hot pink. Low-acid fruit were highly prized there. Or so the story goes. Oh those Americans and their addiction to tough, acidic fruit. Whaddaya gonna do? White stone fruit “went out of popularity in the 50s,” according to Michael Marks, YourProduceMan. “American families were on the go. They need a peach or nectarine that could go on the go with them.” You remember how you used to take your peaches and hula-hoop everywhere. Well, in the last ten years growers have tried new varieties that taste just as good but have a greater shelf life.
Troy at Rozier Farms sells Chef Rich white peaches to grill and serve with his roast duck breast. Because they have less acid, white peaches are sweet while they’re still firm. You can put them on the grill without them turning to pudding. Troy will have a new crop in the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market every two weeks, hauling them all the way from Dinuba, 30 miles southeast of Fresno. “Miserable work, picking peaches,” says Troy. “On a hundred-degree day, the fuzz gets under your skin like fiberglass.” Some varieties have less fuzz, some a bit of acidity, but all are fresh from the orchard with no cold storage. The super sweet Snowbrights arrive this month, but Valerie loves the current crop, poaching a tart white peach for her Peach Melba at Eastbluff, with raspberry sauce, vanilla ice cream and toasted almonds. Kathy at the Coast baked a peach upside down cake with butter pecan ice cream. And Eastbluff bartender Deana mixed fresh peach purée with Stoli Peach vodka, peach schnapps, and a float of sparkling wine for her Bellinitini. More gate-crashing stone fruit swell the dessert menu this month: cherries jubilee with toasted almond panna cotta and a warm pistachio French macaroon (Eastbluff), vanilla custard tarts with warm cherries, balsamic syrup, and honey ice cream (on the Coast), and plum-berry Coast cobbler with crème fraiche ice cream, made from plums from Tammy’s prodigious tree and blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries from Pudwill Farms (Hi Py!).
Roast Duck Breast with Grilled Peaches
Both Locations, Nightly
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English Pig
Cromwell’s Roundheads thought flesh undivine,
Yet they relished this uncloven swine.
Perry’s diplomatic élan
Sent Berkshire hogs to Japan
Now Kansans raise Kurobuta online.
“THE BERKSHIRE PIG IS THE BEST KNOWN AND MOST ESTEEMED of all our English domestic breeds,” wrote Mrs. Beeton in her Book of Household Management (1861), “and so highly is it regarded, that even the varieties of the stock are in as great estimation as the parent breed itself.” Pedigreed pork, besides being easily traceable, has redder, darker, heavily marbled, intensely flavored meat. The way pork tasted years ago, before large-scale producers, hoping to appeal to health-conscious, jazzercising Americans, crossbred their hogs to be 30% leaner. Nearly all the Berkshire hogs were exported to (what, again?) Japan, where they were, like low-acid fruit, highly prized. Doug Metzger, third-generation owner-operator of Metzger Family Farm in Seneca, Kansas, raises the Kurobuta on the Sage menu with no antibiotics or growth hormones, in dirt lots or grass pastures, hoping to create a market for them in America. You can see Doug and his spotted, lop-eared hogs on the Heritage Foods website. Chef Rich bastes his chop with his tangy barbeque sauce, serving it with mashed potatoes, mustard greens and grilled corn salad. For timely tips on pairing wines with barbeque, come to the Second Saturday wine tasting at the Coast, July 8 at 2:30 p.m. on the patio.
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 Pack Your Knives
Entirely flappable Top Chef finalist Dave “Not Your Bitch” Martin will join Chef Rich and Chef Kris for a special dinner at Sage on the Coast, Tuesday, August 8. Executive Chef at XO Wine Bistro in Manhattan Beach and an Honors graduate of Pasadena’s Le Cordon Bleu, Dave became ratings fodder for the Bravo Channel’s 12-week kitchen auto-da-fé. He now makes personal appearances nationwide in addition to running his own catering company, As You Wish, for the Hollywood glitterati. After being flayed alive by media apparatchiks, cooking with Chef Rich will be a smooth sail in a temperate clime.
Dinner with Dave Martin, Sage on the Coast,
Tues. August 8, 6:30 pm,
$80 per person, excluding tax & gratuity.
Reserve early.
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Encore
After years of playing second fiddle to her flashier co-star, the Gorgonzola Salad, (with her crowd-pleasing pecans and crisp granny smith apples), the Sage Salad has a new look, a new network, and—could it be—a new love? Comprised of seasonal vegetables that left her utterly changed six months a year, our eponymous heroine endured slights and setbacks in her long road to stardom. But thanks to her longtime manager, Chef Rich, and a red wine-dijon vinaigrette dressing that stood by her through thick and thin, she’s finally made it to the Features page. Born just a handful of arugula (she won’t say just how many years ago), the Sage Salad was a gawky upstart, hard for the audience to remember. But she was perky and ductile, and that became her strength. In spring and summer, she was warm and full of flavor, with sweet corn and asparagus, maui onions and leeks, cherry tomatoes and sunburst squash. In fall she took on surprising depth, with roast turnips, carrots, onions, fennel and beets. She went on seven nights a week, playing to packed houses, juggling as many as eight freshly roasted vegetables. She was a trouper, but she never headlined. Then came the bitterest pill of all. The studio took beets away from her. In Sage’s first and wildly successful spin-off, the Beet Salad got everything she never had: goat cheese, walnuts, her own vinaigrette. It was a huge blow. For a while, she seemed to drop out of sight. Hope came, as it always does, through personal relationships. Chef Rich found new spring produce at the Farmers’ Market for her to try on. Green garlic, wild ramps, baby squashes in fabulous colors and outrageous shapes. She was back in the spotlight, arresting as ever, and it felt good. Her old fans love her new flavors, and her new fans can’t get enough. What’s ahead? She won’t say, but one thing’s for sure. This salad’s a star.
Sage Salad, Sage in Eastbluff, nightly. Bravissima!
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 Summer Armenian
For Litty the fumes were too much. Drinking straight vodka with dinner, fine in theory. But how to get through those big fat Armenian meals with her dear Melkon’s family with ethanol burning her nostrils? What if they could maintain this cultural practice with something else say, a vodka that worked with the taste-buds? What about a nip of celery-peppercorn vodka between bites of filet mignon? A whiff of candied ginger with your tuna roll? Black truffle vodka with your wild mushroom risotto! Intriguing! Luckily, Melkon Khosrovian was not a man to let a good idea slip by. His Modern Spirits sipping vodkas, handmade in Los Angeles, complement all the varied flavors of fine fusion cuisine, cleansing the palate and whetting the appetite. Rather than using sugar and citric acid as “neutral” blenders in his vodka, or creating a flavor in a beaker (no names!), Melkon infuses his in small batches with fresh grapefruit—only in season—for the grapefruit-honey flavor, or the best Belgian chocolate for his chocolate-orange vodka. Artisanal creativity and entrepreneurial spunk are not lost on Chef Rich, who will dream up matches for Melkon’s vodkas with Chef Kris in a multi-course dinner on the Coast Tuesday, July 18. It will be an absolutely one-of-a-kind dining experience. Share it with your partner and muse!
Modern Spirits Dinner, Sage on the Coast,
Tuesday, July 18, 6:30 pm
$60 per person, excluding tax & gratuity.
Reservations only.
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