San Francisco Magazine
March 2009
When I first moved to California from the East Coast in the late ’80s, “Going Back to Cali” filled the airwaves and visions of Malibu danced in my head. My expectations were all wrong. I landed several hundred miles north of Hollywood, and instead of sandy beaches and bikinis I found bad poetry readings and fog. But at least the food seemed to live up to the stereotype: In my mind, California was the land of wacky edibles like smoked-salmon pizza, fruit salsa on fish, and, of course, wheatgrass, which sat behind the counter of every juice bar like an offering on an altar. To me, it was the essence of Californian foodways, symbolizing an obsession with health and strange eating habits.
How surprising, then, to discover that wheatgrass was first popularized in my stodgy hometown of Boston. In the 1950s, holistic health advocate Ann Wigmore, having adopted a raw-food diet to combat a range of ailments, cofounded the Hippocrates Health Institute there. The regime that she taught, based on positive thinking and lots of wheatgrass juice, kicked off a wheatgrass craze that eventually migrated west.
Because health food and deliciousness seldom keep company, I avoided wheatgrass juice for the first 15 years I lived here until my wife, a native Californian, presented me with a shot at the farmers’ market. It wasn’t what I expected: It was intensely green and grassy, of course, but with strong anise aromatics and a surprising sweetness. I started drinking it regularly, but it didn’t occur to me until last year that wheatgrass could be used as a cooking ingredient.
My first experiment was at home, for restaurateur friends of a more traditional persuasion. I put a small amount of wheatgrass juice in a simple oyster stew, inspiring a look of consternation in our guests and something like irritation in my wife. But they were wrong. The wheatgrass filled the role often performed by watercress, adding a fresh, penetrating, herbal complexity to the creamy, briny notes. Wheatgrass, it was clear, was a friend of seafood.
At my restaurant, the dish evolved into a mixture of wheatgrass juice and crème fraîche that we served with crab. Its terrific success made me look for other ways to use the ingredient. In a deeper exploration of the raw-food pantry, I used wheatgrass in conjunction with sprouted seeds, beans, and nuts. My favorite iteration involved slivers of deeply flavorful goat, mounded with a salad of various sprouts and served on a wheatgrass-and–raw almond purée.
Though it’s available at countless juicebars and health food stores, the best wheatgrass I’ve found is grown by Jim Brooks on his small farm in Forestville. He and his wife, Corie, started their business, Brooks & Daughters Sprouts, in 1996, and they currently sell wheatgrass juice and a range of sprouts at farmers’ markets in Marin, San Francisco, and Berkeley.
Wheatgrass is just what it sounds like: the young (one to three weeks old) green shoots grown from wheatberries, which are sprouted, then planted in extremely rich soil. Unless you’re a ruminant, the only way to enjoy the flavor and nutrients in wheatgrass is to juice it in a special heavy-duty juicer.
The juice is so strong that, in a culinary context, it’s best when diluted. It should be used the same day that it’s made—adding acid, such as lemon juice or vinegar, will cause it to brown. Wheatgrass juice should never be cooked, although it can be added to a sauce or soup at the last minute, like any fresh herb.
After two decades in California, I have unquestionably gone native. These days, I’m the one offering shots of wheatgrass to friends at the market (to their occasional dismay). And it turned out I was wrong about the food here as well: It has proven to be entirely sensible; maybe even too sensible. Perhaps, along with the mesclun greens and the farm eggs, there’s room for another ingredient that feels distinctly Californian—something novel, slightly offbeat, and entirely delicious.
