Brandon Rice, Rich Table, featuring Brooks and Daughters
Saturday, June 30, 2018, 12:00 pm - 12:45 pm
Stop by the CUESA Classroom for a cooking demo featuring the seasonal bounty of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. This demo will highlight a farmer-chef relationship forged and sustained at the farmers market, featuring Brooks and Daughters.
As Chef de Cuisine of Rich Table in San Francisco, Brandon Rice toes the line between local and global. With the former, locality is at the crux of his sourcing, maximizing the best of what’s in season at nearby farmers’ market to fill out his menu. But although the products are local, the flavors have a worldly influence, stretching every continent. For this, Brandon draws inspiration from his international travels with his family while growing up. For him, it’s all about pairing familiar flavors with new ingredients, an ethos at the core of Rice’s cooking, which allows him to continually grow and try new cuisines and flavor profiles. “It keeps my cooks engaged with ingredients they may have never cooked with or paired together before.”
Growing up on the East Coast, the Virginia native used to help his mom cook at home, developing an early fondness for food and knowing from a young age that he loved cooking. In high school, he worked at a local restaurant in Roanoke. It was at this time, when Brandon would go right from school to doing prep work at the restaurant in the afternoon, that he realized he could make a career out of cooking. After earning an associate degree in culinary arts at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY, Rice went on to stage in esteemed kitchens throughout Europe, including Quique Dacosta in Spain and Noma in Copenhagen. He clocked time at Boston’s famed Clio before moving to the Bay Area to work at Coi – his first introduction to Northern Californian cuisine. While working there and experiencing Daniel Patterson’s focus on local, fresh produce, he knew he wanted the Bay Area to be home.
Corie Brooks, who has a background as a food scientist, launched the sprout business in 1996. She named her business Brooks and Daughters in honor of her two young girls. She is proud of the business and sells 80% of the sprouts directly to consumers.
Brooks and Daughters uses only clean water and organic compost on their sprouts. All sprouts are started on specially designed racks under a large shaded structure. As the seeds begin to sprout, they are planted in soil on 17” x 17” open-bottom nursery flats and moved into greenhouses. The sprouts then grow for 1 to 4 weeks in the greenhouses before they are ready for market.
All demos take place in the CUESA Classroom (under the white tents in front of the Ferry Building) and are free to the public, with recipes and samples for all.