“Kill the Mexicans!” my friend hollered as we watched a movie. Some of my housemates groaned. Others chuckled. I stayed quiet even though I’m Mexican American. We all continued watching the movie; it’s easy to shrug off discrimination when it’s not directly targeted at you.

Where I used to live, choosing not to challenge racist remarks was one of the compromises I made to fit in. I was a resident of a student housing cooperative where most of my housemates were white. And to be honest, not speaking up about racism wasn’t a compromise as much as it was a requirement. For instance, my housemates wanted to throw a “White Trash” party. In high school my friends called each other white trash, but I never thought I could, because I wasn’t white and didn’t live in a trailer park, as they did. Thinking about my high school friends, I opposed the party. Because of my position, I was booed. My housemates complained about not having the party until I moved out.

Racist remarks were also commonplace at my former co-op. During lunch, one of my friends, a humanities student with a 4.0, talked about interning with “dumb” blacks. Another housemate, a popular guy, posted a flier on his door depicting black graduate students laughing. It read: “Excellence Through Despite Diversity.” My housemates tolerated and ignored racist remarks such as this. Like minorities with strong cultural differences, individuals who were racists were seen as “transitioning” into a cooperative environment. The problem here is that minorities were the victims while racist individuals were the opposite. In putting up with these racist remarks, we effectively tolerated racism.

Some of my well-meaning housemates claimed that we live in a post-racial America and that thus, racism doesn’t exist. Yet students of color still face racist prejudice, meaning we can’t overcompensate for our progress toward racial equality by claiming racism doesn’t exist. Rather than condemning discrimination, other housemates told me to develop a “thicker” skin. Students of color are told this all the time. This may be well-intended advice, because we, like everyone else in the world, should learn how to deal with adversity maturely. It’s unfair, however, to say students of color need to be bullied into maturity. Certain students have the privilege of using discrimination to one-up others. They discriminate to make others feel bad. They also discriminate “jokingly,” as when my housemate hollered, “Kill the Mexicans!”

While it’s easy to show that remarks such as this are prejudiced, it’s much more difficult to prove that the actions of an institution are prejudiced. In the words of professor Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, individuals have the privilege “to be prejudiced without having to admit to themselves or others that race plays any part.” The pervasiveness of this privilege fuels the ambiguity and anxiety surrounding institutional racism. For instance, two years ago, the Berkeley College Republicans staged an “Increase Diversity Bake Sale.” They believed this could start a “debate” on campus. Mocking policies that give admissions preference to underprivileged communities under the guise of “starting a debate” is no less racist and equally problematic.

One way our university shows our enduring commitment to diversity is hanging up banners of nonwhite students on campus. Yet over the past few years, state funding for public education has been drastically reduced. As a result, UC Berkeley has more and more out-of-state students as well as reduced access to spaces intended for students of color. In other words, UC Berkeley had to choose between having nice things or nonrich Californians of color. As the banners demonstrate, underprivileged students are considered part of the university’s “nice things”; something it gets to parade around without having to answer for the consequences of what ensuring diversity actually means.

The problem here is not that the university doesn’t want to enroll more underprivileged students. It’s that in a time of economic hardship, our university was able to forgo its mission to educate Californians of different economic and racial backgrounds. It’s that, despite the university’s best efforts, budget cuts were not distributed equally. It’s unclear now whether an undergraduate education will be as affordable or accessible as it once was or whether international and out-of-state students will be pitted against Californians for enrollment.

Public institutions should operate on the same principles their constituents do. Their actions should be evaluated not only on the intent behind them but also on the impact they have on the communities they serve. And as I experienced, racist attitudes are still present and can go unchallenged throughout the community — whether it’s in a Berkeley housing co-op or at an event organized by college Republicans. Like most American cities, our campus struggles to integrate the student body racially even though diversity increases overall. It’s time we paid attention to what this means.

Josh Escobar writes the Monday column on the intersection of student and urban life. You can contact him at jescobar@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @urbananimale.

The post Racism in Berkeley never left appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Josh Escobar/Senior Staff

1. It’s the evening before a midterm, and you need to get through the last episodes of “Breaking Bad” before you can focus and really study. So you go down the street and order a cup of coffee.

2. It’s a grand sunny morning in Tuscany. After brushing your teeth you sit down at the kitchen table with your home-stay family. Breakfast is a croissant stuffed with orange jelly. On the stove, in an upright metal pot boils the espresso, enough for everybody.

3. It’s late afternoon and you’re done with classes. You’re half-tired, half-awake, which is good because you have so much work due tomorrow. “I always have work, yet I always get so much done,” you think while sipping a mocha cappuccino.

4. Iced coffee – better than chocolate milk, anytime, any day.

5. It’s still too cool and dusky outside until you have that first full drink of coffee before class at 8 AM. Then it’s a brisk, resplendent morning on October.

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One cannot undermine the power of nature to restore itself. The morning after it rains in Berkeley, everything outside looks so fresh. The wood shingles and turquoise tile of Cloyne Court and Soda Hall are clean and vibrant. The sidewalks are damp. Streets glisten. From Northside, I amble downhill over puddles and gutters toward the Berkeley Marina. In Downtown, I catch the 51B, which takes me over train tracks and Interstate 80, then drops me off at the waterfront. The smell of wet earth is heavy in the outdoor air.

It’s been seven years since former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency” when 58,000 gallons of Cosco-Busan oil spilled into the San Francisco Bay. Now, things are more or less OK at the marina. The birds and their mudflats are no longer tarred. The shellfish are, arguably, safe to eat again. The extension of the Bay Trail, partially funded by Cosco-Busan oil-spill reparations, is open to bikers and pedestrians. Soon, the do-it-yourself trash cleanup stations, which are fully funded by reparations, will be installed along the shoreline.

Although the Cosco-Busan oil spill was, according to Shorebird Park naturalist coordinator Patty Donald, “horrible and massive,” the truth is the marina itself was founded on enormous loads of trash. Trains ran along the beaches of the East Bay until Berkeley began pouring landfill into the bay. While activism has diverted landfill away from the bay, we still haven’t stopped what Donald calls “an ongoing onslaught.” She’s referring to the shoreline pollution caused not by oil spills but by rain.

“When it rains,” Donald says, “everything comes off the streets.”

On the shoreline, any day of the year you’ll find cigarette butts, food wrappers and bead-sized plastic pellets — along with leaves, pine cones and the exoskeletons of little crabs. What you won’t find with the naked eye, however, are the pesticides, molecules of plastic, car emissions or industrial chemicals that have been spilled “accidentally.” Although California has passed some environmental reform, we still have not challenged pollution that comes from our consumer culture and overuse of automobiles.

Oftentimes, wildlife has to cope with such man-made pollution.  At the marina, I saw an airborne crow hurl an oyster at the asphalt in order to crack its shell. Later, during low tide on the mudflats, I saw a murder of crows feeding on the shellfish inside a big rig tire pitted in the sand. Although birds are resourceful, trash poses a danger to them. The Laysan albatross, for example, will eat lethal man-made waste instead of food. Researchers find their carcasses in the sand; rib cages stuffed with plastic goods and feathers. Birds and fish will digest plastic pellets, which — according to the Algalita Research Foundation — may contain up to 1 million times the amount of pesticides as their ambient water. Meanwhile, sandpipers and snowy egrets forage near the mouth of Strawberry Creek, which, like our other creeks, has been turned into tunnels and gutters.

In spite of our dilapidated system of environmental governance, California has passed some powerful legislation. Proposition 84 is funding the development of metrics, machines and a public database for small-scale trash interception. Cities statewide are required to develop Climate Action Plans, which specifically lay out how they will resist and adapt to climate change. Yet this is only the beginning of what we need to do to help restore the environment.

The same body of internationally inspired empirical research on the shortcomings of American health care and economic systems ought to also be levied against regressive urban development. In Tokyo, every tree has a “doctor.” In France, according to planner Lucie Laurian, the right to live in a “balanced environment” with due respect for health is a constitutional right on par with the human rights of 1789 and the welfare rights of 1946. In Copenhagen, planners are collaborating to make their city carbon-neutral by 2025. With similar focus and energy, we as a state need to pioneer environmental development and restoration.

We need to rework water rights and chemically intensive farming. We need to rethink the use of plastics in general (not just for lattes and grocery bags). We need to reroute the way hundreds of thousands of us travel to the same places in the same region, daily and separately.

Modernization has altered our natural landscape in Berkeley. Instead of flowing from a corridor of willows, Strawberry Creek flows from a sewer into the mudflats, where birds feed during low tide. Strawberry Creek, and all our other creeks, should run in daylight as far as possible from the hills to the bay. For now, it doesn’t. It won’t. As long as we let each city live up to its own weak set of environmental standards, the birds will have to keep out of the rain.

Contact Josh Escobar at jescobar@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter: @urbananimale.

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Blackberries, oranges, grapes and walnuts are all in season. Check out these scrumptious treats that you can have for breakfast or during a study break. All of them cost less than $5 and can be found a block from campus!

Mixed berry scone at Babette. Photo by Josh Escobar.

Mixed berry scones at Babette

These gluten-free scones, available on Thursdays at Babette in the Berkeley Art Museum, are rugged and dry on the outside but soft like a cupcake on the inside. Break it in half and you’ll see blotches of strawberries and blackberries that look like confetti.

Cranberry crumb bar at the Berkeley Student Food Collective. Photo by Josh Escobar.

Cranberry crumb bars at the Berkeley Student Food Collective

While pastries by Nabolom Bakery are delivered every morning to the Berkeley Student Food Collective, this treat is made on-site by student volunteers. It goes great with coffee or as a mate for breakfast!

Al Mare gelato. Image courtesy of Simone Arpaio.

Honey and walnut gelato at Al Mare

This cold treat tastes just like it sounds and has the added creaminess of gelato made fresh. Look out for the orange, chocolate and spice gelato and pumpkin flavors next month!

Grape oolong tea at Asha Tea House. Photo by Josh Escobar.

Grape oolong tea at Asha Tea House

Asha Tea House makes this tea with fresh fruits. The bitterness of California red grape peels and oolong tea is balanced with the sweetness of crushed grapes at the bottom of the drink. It’s perfect iced!

The post 4 autumn treats around campus appeared first on The Daily Californian.

You have love on your jacket,” said a man next to me.

I nod and keep staring out the window. He is a foot taller than me. The canvas coat he wears is stained with grease, and he smells like a gutter. Moments earlier, he said he had served in the Army. I’m scared.

We were both riding the 1 back to Berkeley on a sunny afternoon. Earlier that day, I had gone to Oakland to read and wander around alone because no one was back from winter break. For a few bucks in Downtown Oakland, I could get a Banh mi sandwich and artisan coffee. I went there every day for a few weeks, even though I’ve had friends tell me they’ve been robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight a block from the 19th Street BART station. I’ve read about local shootings with blood-spattered graphics in the local paper. I’ve seen police with masks, shields and clubs barricading the streets during protests.

Although Oakland is famous for its routine violence, I would live there if given the chance.

A guy no older than 18 who looks really faded slinks over to the Army man and mutters, “Why are you in my spot? Do you think you’re tough?” Then he pushes him. The standoff begins. Passengers clutch their grocery bags. The people sitting in front try not to look. High school students speculate about who is going to win. While others relocate, I can’t because the combatants are standing between me and the door.

After a little back and forth between the two contenders, they calm down. Oddly enough, I was mildly comforted by the excitement of the high school students. Their excitement made me remember that in high school my friends and I got riled up by fights like this. After my sophomore year, however, I transferred to Chaffey High School, where my chances of going to college were significantly better. The school was unreachable by public transit, so every week day my parents drove my twin brother and I across town until we graduated.

I have a similar privilege now. I live in Berkeley a block away from campus and can bike, bus or BART to Oakland whenever I want. The livelihood of Oaklanders, rich and poor, isn’t a concern for me — the cross-town hipster, the tourist.

Although I hella love Oakland, I am wary of this attitude, common among us affluent college students and ex-San Franciscans. Will we affluent people embrace what we love about Oakland by barricading it off from what we don’t? Will all of us continue commuting long distances by car so that a major portion of our public space remains in the form of roads? To what extent will the city’s growth and prosperity bypass those who were born and raised there?

These questions are concerning, because cities in the East Bay can fund projects such as downtown revitalization that cater to tourists and professionals and not residents of low income. This model of economic development will empower constituencies that don’t value an integrated public transportation network but instead favor semiprivate one we have now.

While generation after generation of kids, such as the high schoolers on the bus, is recruited by gangs, Oakland still has yet to initiate an adequate poverty-alleviating program. Instead, city funds continue to primarily serve middle- and upper-income residents. The new wave of college students and young professionals — the “nouveau riche” — into Oakland will intensify the city’s inequality if services such as affordable and public housing are not secured via public policy.

I am fortunate enough that when I encounter violence, it’s shocking. For the high school students on the bus, such incidents occur so frequently that they seem more like a game. Unfortunately, in a gentrified town, these incidents are used to stigmatize poor people as inherently violent. But both rich and poor wish to avoid such violence.

When the Army guy pacified the fight by commenting on the graffiti’s shadow that spelled out love, I looked into his eyes and saw he was more scared than I was. Clearly, the Army man wanted to get off the bus just as much as I did.

A moment later, one of them suggests he has a weapon. At the next stop, I leap from my seat out the door. Walking away, one of them said, “Man, that nigga’s going to get it,” and he took playful swings at no one in particular.

I was shaken up but glad. Glad that super-faded kid targeted the man in the Army instead of me. And glad that, unlike the other passengers, I had no groceries or job to commute to. That winter, I took my time reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s whirlwind of a novel “The Autumn of the Patriarch” for a class next semester.

I can get off the bus whenever I want.

The post ‘Love’ in a bus appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Josh Escobar/Senior Staff

Erin Wade, co-chef of Oakland’s beloved mac ‘n’ cheese restaurant Homeroom, gave a reading from “The Mac + Cheese Cookbook” ($16.99, Ten Speed Press) at the bookstore Mrs. Dalloway’s last Wednesday.

The book begins with a few blurbs about Homeroom and the co-chefs/owners/authors Wade and Allison Arevalo. It offers many recipes for mac and cheese — from Trailer Mac, with potato chips and hot dogs, to Patatas Bravas Mac, with potatoes and paprika. There are two sections on sides and desserts, convenient conversion charts in the back and, for those who have never made mac and cheese, the book offers a step-by-step lesson on how to make Mac Sauce, a basic cheese sauce that goes with most of the recipes.

“We’ve kept the recipes simple,” Wade explained, “since mac and cheese is a comfort food that everyone should be able to make.”

While the cookbook maintains the simplicity Wade mentions, it is also delightfully crafty. For example, to give a throwback to recess and grade school euphoria, it includes doodles of paper airplanes, goats, lemons and more. It also has a troubleshooting section to help you ace the “spoon test,” which determines whether you’ve properly made the Mac Sauce or messed it up.

After talking about the book, Wade told the unconventional story of how she became a chef.

“I started off as a food reviewer for The Princetonian when I was an undergraduate,” she said. “Afterwards, I became a pastry chef in New York, then a lawyer in San Francisco. Then the firm fired me — which ended up being a blessing.”

Homeroom began when she “randomly met Allison at Bittersweet Cafe on College.” The pair realized later that they should go into business together. Lots of friends told her she was crazy. Both Arevalo and Wade committed their life savings to a one-food specialty restaurant in a neighborhood where street traffic averages four people per hour.

“If Homeroom didn’t work out,” Wade admitted, “I would probably be living out of my car right now.”

But that wasn’t the case. Three years after stumbling across 400 40th St. while hunting for a storefront, Arevalo and Wade own it. Soon they’ll be opening a mac and cheese takeout shop across the street with picnic tables and soft-serve ice cream.

“The advice I would give young people is to not think linearly,” Wade said during Q&A. “Our parents teach us to go to school, get a job and to work hard, but fulfillment isn’t guaranteed in the end. … If you want something, you have to give it to yourself.”

“The Mac + Cheese Cookbook” represents Wade’s fresh approach to an American classic, which was reflected in her excitement and creativity during the reading.

Contact Josh Escobar at jescobar@dailycal.org.

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One night last spring, I went hiking with a housemate whom I disliked but who had brought whiskey along. On the way to the Big C, I told him I was living off of coffee, sleeping in class and wearing dirty clothes. For both of us, at some point the days ceased to be different from one another. Every day, we felt like we were struggling to keep up with schoolwork and maintain a healthy social life. From the Berkeley Hills, the view of the Bay with all its city lights reminded me of an Arcade Fire lyric: “Like a river, the city always shines.”

That said, no matter how bad things get, I’ll always know I have a good life compared to my friends who never made it out of Southern California. Life in the suburbs of the Inland Empire is grand until you realize there is nothing to do, which usually happens around age 15. The neighborhoods where you were allowed to run free as a kid darkens and idles every day after 8 p.m. Visiting areas with wildlife usually requires some form of trespassing. You have to drive everywhere.

On the same track, Arcade Fire also sings: “I wonder if we weren’t so small that we could ever get away from the sprawl.” The interlocking, slate gray cities of the Inland Empire become repetitive and exhausted once you grow up. As evidence of this condition, most of my friends who moved away for college have decided not to return to the Inland Empire after graduation. Portland, Santa Barbara, Providence: these cities have so much more to offer than the suburbs where most of the jobs available pay minimum wage and the nightlife consists of going to the mall or hanging out at a fast-food restaurant.

In spite of how lame it is to spend your Friday night at a Jack-in-the-Box, you can’t really complain about living in America. So in order to get the American public interested in urban challenges, planners usually present startling figures, such as 50 percent of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050. The reason fear tactics are so effective is that they engage society abstractly. They suggest we need to accommodate the future masses, or we’ll face utter chaos. While this tactic is useful at times (the Interstate Highway System was built as an evacuation network in the event of a nuclear strike), it should not be the sole approach to urban planning.

Planners also need to be visionary.

For those not working in the field, it may be surprising that urbanism can be both visionary and deeply personal. One way city life has been portrayed recently is through testimony.

One example is the work of novelist Vikram Chandra. Drawing on his interviews with a mob boss to create the main character of his epic tale set in Mumbai, “Sacred Games” (which AMC is making into a miniseries), Chandra turns the city itself into the protagonist, weaving individual stories and traumas into a single narrative fabric. Personal testimony calls for the portrayal of the sacrifices, double motives, institutional frameworks and moral challenges that individuals face in cities in the 21st century.

My column, Urban Animal, will approach city life through personal experience and relevant research. I will focus on Berkeley and Oakland while occasionally drawing upon other cities, such as Copenhagen and Siena, where I studied abroad. Some weeks I’ll scope out where free stuff can be found, and others I’ll explore why the creeks of the East Bay are buried underground. I plan to address urban renewal and gentrification, as well as the thornier aspects of what it means to live in a city.

The target of every column, though, is to get at the variety of pleasures and challenges of urban living.

Urban life is relevant to all of us at UC Berkeley because many of us live in the city. But it is also relevant in that many academic disciplines — from philosophy to physics — affect our locality on geopolitical and socioeconomic levels. Whether actively or passively, we build a city continually and together. Being in a community means we must recognize one another’s needs.

For more permanent residents, it provides the intimacy and spaciousness of a suburb, as well as the public transportation network and downtown of a big city. For students, however, rent and tuition are almost beyond our reach. Most of us will barely be able to afford housing once we graduate, even if we work 40 hours a week.

Thankfully, our campus is endowed with certain unique qualities. For instance, nature is a walk away. A quick getaway in the night allows us collect our thoughts and to visualize ourselves as part of the city rather than as caught in the midst of it. And whether it’s a panoramic view from the Big C or catching BART, thinking about the pressures of where we are and where we’re going shouldn’t be something we shy away from. It’s how we find common ground.

Josh Escobar writes the Monday column on the intersection of student and urban life. You can contact him at jescobar@dailycal.org.

The post Looking beyond the buildings appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Josh Escobar/Staff

A brief history of soba

Like pasta, soba originally developed from gruel and polenta. Unlike pasta, these precursors of soba were eaten by “ninja and ascetics who spent extended periods of time training or traveling in remote mountain areas” (James Udesky, “The Book of Soba”).

Modern science has demonstrated the health value of buckwheat since the year 722, when Empress Gensho called upon farmers to grow more buckwheat to subdue famine. Buckwheat grows in a remarkable 75 days. It flourishes in barren soil but remains full of usable proteins and essential amino acids (Udesky).

According to buckwheat historian Shigeru Niijima, soba noodles were developed sometime between 1596 and 1614. Around that time, the provincial, urban-based royalty was losing political power to the samurai in the countryside, who prized soba over exotic delicacies. Soba noodles amassed widespread fame with the construction of Edo around the mid-17th century because soba was affordable, quick to serve and very filling. A preindustrial city, Edo attracted many construction workers, who in turn crafted the basic wood tools to make soba by hand. Nowadays, you can find a soba shop in or around the corner from every train station in Tokyo.

Soba in Berkeley

Master soba chef Koichi Ishii has been working at Ippuku for a year and a half. After studying small-business management at Glendale Community College and Phoenix College, he went to Yamagata, Japan, where he honed his craft over the course of three years.

At 8 a.m. on a Friday, while other chefs clean and prep, he begins making the first batch of soba. Because soba dries fast, Ishii must work quickly to form noodles from flour and water. At 9 a.m., the noodle is completed and ready for lunch service, which runs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

Ishii sifts the buckwheat flour into a large bowl and gradually adds water to the flour while stirring with his hands.

The soba clumps, but Ishii stirs and adds water until he can amass it into one solid brick.

Ishii kneads the dough while using its own weight to compress it.

The soba dough has all the water necessary. Ishii sculpts the brick of dough into a disk.

The disk is rolled out into a scroll.

Each sheet is put in place, and little adjustments are made.

The final cut.

Homemade soba ready for lunch.

The Ten Zaru Soba at Ippuku is served cold on a bamboo mat with nori, fresh green onion, grated daikon, wasabi and a dipping sauce. To eat it, you dip the noodles in the sauce. Each soba chef makes his own sauce and keep the ingredients a secret, but according to Ishii, when it comes to pairing homemade soba, “the simpler the sauce is, the better.” At the end of the meal, you drink the rest of your dipping sauce with soba-yu, the water that was used for boiling the fresh soba. It is nutritious, subtly sweet and soothing. Eating soba at Ippuku makes you realize how chefs such as Ishii can create astonishing flavors with just a few masterful strokes.

All photos were taken by Josh Escobar. Contact Josh Escobar at jescobar@dailycal.org.

The post Soba noodles at Ippuku appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Josh Escobar/Staff

Various delicious restaurants in Downtown Berkeley say the pasta or soba they serve is “homemade.” This distinction, though well received, made the writers at the Daily Cal wonder: What value do homemade noodles have besides their novelty?

To address this question, we took to the kitchens of Ippuku, Trattoria Corso and Belli Osteria.

But before heading to the kitchen, it’s important to understand what pasta and soba are. Soba is a Japanese noodle made from buckwheat flour, wheat flour and water. Italian pasta is made with wheat flour, water and eggs. For some pastas, such as tagliatelle, the water in the egg yolk is enough to bind them together. Other pastas, such as spaghetti, require only wheat flour and water. The ease of combining these basic ingredients allows the pasta to be manufactured on a large scale at a low cost.

Unlike manufactured varieties, however, the noodles at these restaurants are made by hand in small batches. By doing so, the chefs can decide how the noodles pair with the other ingredients in a dish.

“Each pasta shape has its own advantages depending on the sauce,” said Scott Eastman, co-chef of Trattoria Corso. “A handmade shape like strascinati goes perfectly with sausage and peppers. Tagliatelle, which is flattened by an extruder, pairs well with duck ragu because the noodles can sweep up chunks of meat. Pastas like penne or rigatoni are ridged and tubular, so they require hand tools like a chitarra. … The shape determines how the pasta picks up the sauce.”

Another desirable quality of homemade noodles is that they can be served fresh. In the case of soba, homemade noodles tend to be more nutritious than those made in factories for two reasons. First, buckwheat loses its nutritional value as it dries. Second, soba chefs can make soba with a higher proportion of buckwheat than machines can.

“For soba made by a machine, the proportions (of flour to water) are always the same,” said Koichi Ishii, the master soba chef at Ippuku. “Yet, every batch of buckwheat flour is never the same. The amount of moisture it has and water you add are always different. They are affected by humidity, heat and even the seasons.”

The more buckwheat a serving of soba has, the more nutritious it is. This is because buckwheat, which helps lower blood pressure and break down alcohol, is full of water-soluble proteins and essential amino acids. In fact, buckwheat is so nutritious that it’s customary to drink the last of your dipping sauce with soba-yu, the boiling water, which is full of water-soluble proteins.

While making noodles by hand allows a chef to craft traditional, preindustrial forms, it also allows that chef to customize and experiment.

“I can make a more decadent pasta by adding high-grade saffron or using eggs from my back yard,” Eastman said. “Sometimes we torch the flour for orecchiette al grano arso. That method came from the way flour was harvested: After the rich farmers burnt the fields in Puglia for cultivation, the poor were allowed to take leftover grain.”

When asked whether he liked making pasta by hand, Eastman replied: “It may seem like it isn’t fun, but after a while, you find a rhythm to the labor of love.”

At Belli Osteria, the chefs are always playing with the color, the composition and the textures of pasta. There may, for example, be as many as four different kinds of flour in a single ravioli.
“We take a lot of pride in making fresh pasta,” said Paul Oprescu, head chef and co-owner of Belli Osteria. “But it’s very time-consuming.”

Again, we put the question to Oprescu: Why is fresh, homemade pasta so desirable?

“Fresh pasta just tastes better than dried (pasta),” Oprescu said with his usual pizzazz. “There’s even a difference between pasta that we make with an extruder than that which we roll by hand. Hand-rolled dough is nicer because it is softer, more elastic, has more of a bite. … I would think that any self-respecting chef would do all that they can to make everything in-house.”

Indeed, many chefs are going back to basics. Although noodles made by hand cost more than the manufactured alternative, for about the price of a movie ticket and a bag of popcorn, you can get a great dinner at a locally owned restaurant, where “quality” is not a dodgy term that accounts only for some ingredients instead of all of them and the food doesn’t come from a bag but is made to order. Restaurants such as Ippuku, Trattoria Corso and Belli Osteria offer fresh noodles, professional service and a stylish setting in which to enjoy them. And it’s not just about making money. It’s about being passionate, because doing so is part of what it means to be homemade in Berkeley.

Contact Josh Escobar at jescobar@dailycal.org.

The post Return to the tradition of handmade noodles appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Josh Escobar/Staff

Warm nights, yellow leaves and cloudy days mark the beginning of fall in the Bay Area — a time of windy nights, midterms and football games. What better way to wind down in the evening than with a cup of Eating Berkeley’s very own concoction?

Autumn Spike is a brew of cinnamon, anise and rooibos tea with a brilliant amber color. It’s easy to make, affordable, nearly caffeine-free, and its sweet, warm scent fills your kitchen as it brews. Regardless of whether you’re making it for a large gathering or just for yourself, it’s a soothing experience.

Ingredients

• 4 cups of water
• 3 sticks of cinnamon
• 3 stars of anise
• 4 tablespoons of rooibos tea, loose leaf
• 1 shot of Jagermeister (optional)

Directions

• Combine water, cinnamon, anise and rooibos tea in a medium-sized pot.
• Set the flame to high and maintain a lightly rolling simmer for 6 to 10 minutes with varying heat or time depending on how strong you want it.
• Serve.

Autumn Spike can be enjoyed just as tea or with a shot of Jagermeister for a smooth black-licorice finish.

Tips
Now that you have the basic formula for Autumn Spike, we encourage you to play around with the proportions and cooking time until you find what works best for you.

Enjoy.

Contact Josh Escobar at jescobar@dailycal.org.

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