Two sales in the market ~ August 15

Visit the market next Saturday for two special sales!

• Bella Viva Orchards will be selling flats of their peaches for $10 — or half off the normal $20 price.
• Mountain Ranch Organically Grown will be offering their chickens at a $1 off per pound (limited to one per customer). The Gunsells generally sell their chickens frozen, but they'll also have a new batch of fresh (non-frozen) birds tomorrow.

Almonds and Olives Farm Tour ~ September 11

Take a tour with CUESA to learn about two distinctly Californian tree crops: almonds and olives. Our first stop will be G.L. Alfieri Farms in Ripon, where Gary Alfieri will show us around his almond orchard and diverse table grape vineyard, and take us to the shelling plant that processes his almonds. Our next stop will be Sciabica and Sons in Modesto, where we'll meet with two generations dedicated to bringing extra virgin olive oil to market and visit the orchard where the olives are ripening on the trees. The bus tour goes from 8:30 am to 6:30 pm and costs $25, including lunch. Sign up here >

Two summer cocktail events

Artisanal cocktail class ~ August 14
Join Scott Beattie, author of Artisanal Cocktails, and Lou Bustamante of St. George Spirits for CUESA's next exciting hands-on class. Beattie will talk about seasonal cocktails and teach the group how to make two summertime drinks from his book, the Blackberry Lick and the Westside Bellini. Instruction will include side recipes, garnish how-tos, foams, and rim sugars and salts. Drinks will feature St. George/Hangar One spirits and fresh, seasonal fruit from the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Buy tickets>

Summer Farmers' Market Cocktail Night ~ August 12
Celebrate summer's bounty by sipping handcrafted cocktails made by some of the city's best bartenders! For $30, guests will enjoy 2 full-sized signature cocktails made with Square One Botanical, the new spirit that pairs floral and fruit flavors, along with 12 other sample-sized drinks that will bring together botanicals with summer produce (think berries, peaches and tomatoes). Featuring mixologists from Elixir, Beretta, Rye, Bourbon and Branch and more. Buy tickets >

Jam Making Class with Urban Kitchen and Happy Girl Kitchen ~ August 28

As part of our 2009 Preservation Celebration, Happy Girl founder and preservation wizard Jordan Champagne will share her meticulously developed techniques in a hands-on class. Participants will use produce from the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market to make strawberry Meyer lemon jam and mixed berry jubilee, learning the fundamentals of jam making along the way. Everyone will take home two delectable jars of their newly jammed goods and instructions for making jam at home! Learn more or buy tickets >

Intro to City Beekeeping at Graze the Roof ~ August 8th

Are you interested in learning the basics of beekeeping in the city?  What about on rooftops? Graze the Roof invites you to join us for a presentation and discussion given by Susan Prentice and Paul Koski of the San Francisco Beekeepers Association. They will discuss the cost of equipment, where to put a hive and how to maintain it, and how to extract honey. Reserve a spot >

Jonah Raskin at Book Passage in the Ferry Building ~ August 12

Raskin will talk about Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating & Drinking Wine in California. Part memoir, part vivid reportage, this work chronicles the renaissance in farming organically and eating locally that is unfolding in Northern California. Raskin tells of the year he spent visiting farms, working the fields, selling produce at farmers’ markets, and following it to restaurants. Several FPFM farmers appear in the book, including Star Route's Warren Weber and Wayne James from Tierra Vegetables. Details >

Saturday, August 8 ~ Market to Table

11:00 am - Seasonal cooking demonstration
Joanne Weir, author of Wine Country Cooking and Tequila

Tuesday, August 4 ~ Food Wise Booth

12:00 - 1:00 pm - CUESA's market chef Sarah Henkin will be giving out recipe cards and samples of a simple meal made with market ingredients.

Saturday, August 15 ~ Fig Festival

10:00 am - Fig-Focused Cooking Demonstration
Linda Carucci, The International Cooking School at the Art Institute of San Francisco and author of Cooking School Secrets for Real World Cooks

11:00 am - Fig-Focused Cooking Demonstration
Marie Simmons, author of Fig Heaven

10am - 1 pm - Visit the fig education booth, where you’ll learn about the history of fig cultivation and the many nutritional benefits to eating this delicious fruit. Then pick up a fig bar made by hand with Ferry Plaza Farmers Market ingredients ($1 donation). 

10 am - 1 pm - Urban gardeners will have the chance to meet garden designer Maria Finn, who will discuss how to grow and care for fig trees in the many Bay Area micro-climates.  Maria will bring fig trees for display. 

Unless noted, all programs take place in CUESA's Dacor teaching kitchen, in front of the Ferry Building on the north side.

This article was written by volunteer Jessica Zdeb.

At Scream Sorbet, the raw ingredient always comes first. Whether it’s a fruit, nut, vegetable or herb, the process starts at the farmers’ market. “We buy it first and figure out how to make sorbet out of it later,” says Scream’s owner and founder Nate Kurz.

Some ingredients are obvious choices for sorbet, others are the product of constant experimentation and fine-tuned attention to what’s in season. “Sometimes we just know something tastes good, so we figure there must be a way to make delicious sorbet out of it,” says Nate. This philosophy can mean Nate and his team test as many as ten different recipes per ingredient, but the effort has paid off. Letting the ingredients speak for themselves has led to some unexpected flavors like citrus fennel and almond saffron.

Nate founded Scream in 2008 after tossing around ideas for farmers’ market-based businesses, a brand new field for this former software engineer who recently relocated from New Mexico. The idea was simple: buy the best produce from local farmers, turn it into sorbet, and sell it solely at farmers’ markets. With the help of chef Stephanie Lau, formerly of Café Fanny and Google, self-described “frozen dessert freak Noah Goldner (pictured below),” and eight other part-time production and sales helpers, the idea came to life.
 
Today, six fresh flavors of Scream sorbet are scooped up every week at over 20 markets. Since fruit and vegetable flavors are based on market produce, they change constantly: nectarine, pluot and sweet corn sorbets are available now; pear, persimmon and grape will appear the fall; citrus, kabocha squash and beet in the winter.

Raw produce comes in from farms like Hamada Farms, Brokaw Nursery, and Twin Girls Farm. Each ingredient is hand-processed, whether that means halving and juicing Murcot tangerines, peeling, chopping and juicing beets, or blanching and peeling almonds. Scream’s nut flavors are a particular source of pride. They consist simply of water, ground nuts, sugar and sea salt. “If people tell me they don’t like pistachio ice cream, I make sure they try the sorbet," says Noah.

Scream sorbet is made with a high percentage of whole fruit — sometimes much as two-thirds, depending on how sweet it is. The level of sugar, or brix, of the fruit is vital to the process — and it's kept constant for all the flavors. They add just enough sugar to make the sorbet scoopable, without making it too sweet. That means the fruit can't be too sweet to begin with; they missed out on early-season tart blueberries this year, for example, so there was no blueberry sorbet.

It’s not just the recipes that set Scream apart. They blend their sorbets (the night before each market) in 1-quart batches with a Pacojet, a high-end blender with blades that shave the frozen mix into razor-thin layers for a velvety final product. From a sustainability perspective, it also means less waste because it blends the skins of things like plums effortlessly. It also adds only three percent air to the volume, unlike other small-batch freezers that add 25 percent.

Plans for pre-packed pints and an online ordering system for market pick-up are in the works. For now, though, Nate says they’ll continue pursuing the freshest market produce and experimenting with it. Partner Noah Goldner agrees. “We may have a product that changes how people think about sorbet,” he says.

You can find Scream at the Thursday market and keep up with their weekly flavors on Twitter.

This is the most up-to-date information about which sellers will be attending the market as of Friday. If there are no changes to a seller's status, they will not be listed. You'll find a list of which farmers regularly attend each market here. Please understand that there are often last-minute changes—it's the nature of farming!

Saturday, August 8

In/returning: Apple Farm
Out: Payne Farms (for the season)

Tuesday, August 11

In: La Tercera (returning after a long absence!)

Thursday, August 3

no changes

Returning and plentiful this month (weather willing):
Grapes, tomatillos, cucumbers, apples, summer squash, Valencia oranges, nectarines, peaches, pluots, radishes, basil, sunflowers, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, Asian pears, grapes, zinnias, duck, pullet eggs, cucumbers, eggplant, mint, nopales, peppers, pears, squash blossoms, smoked fish, wheat, baby corn, onions, lettuces, okra, figs, grass-fed beef, plums, tomatoes, melons, dahlias, new potatoes, peanuts, wax beans, shelling beans and Romano beans

Winding down/limited supply:
Mulberries, fresh lavender, peas, fresh garbanzo beans

Value Added and Vendor items not to be missed:
Chicken stock from Mountain Ranch Organically Grown, fresh salsa from Happy Girl Kitchen, tayberry conserve from June Taylor, sauerkraut from Farmhouse Culture

Featured Recipes for August:

Shaved Cucumber, Radish & Bottarga Salad with Zinfandel Vinaigrette from Chris Consentino, Incanto

Fire Roasted Eggplant Soup from Sondra Bernstein, the girl and the fig

Stewed Okra, Corn & Tomatoes from Sharon L. Anderson, Purple Plum Restaurant

Summer Fruit Crostata from CUESA's Market Chef, Sarah Henkin

Cocktail ~ Midsummer Dream from Erick Castro