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Jul 01, 2023

Sahadi’s Gets Into the Wine and Spirits Business

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Pick up rare and lesser-known bottles from the Middle East and Mediterranean, dig into matzo ice cream from Eli Zabar, and more.

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By Florence Fabricant

Sahadi's, a Brooklyn store for Middle Eastern spices, grains, condiments and other products that was established more than 125 years ago, has added wines and spirits to its inventory. Adjacent to its Industry City branch that opened in 2019, the company has installed an airy wine and spirits store with a particularly uncommon focus: the lesser-known products of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. Shelves are crowded with rarities like Armenian Zulal Voskehat, a white wine, and include selections from Georgia, Greece, Lebanon and Turkey, along with spirits like mastiha and Arak. Wines made with grapes from the region are featured. Even some from France, like Maury, a fortified dessert red, tend toward the unusual. The inventory also includes local producers like Fort Hamilton and St. Agrestis for spirits, and Paumanok Vineyards for wines. Prices are moderate; many of the wines are poured at the cafe and bar run by Sahadi's inside the food store.

Sahadi Spirits, 52 35th Street (Third Avenue), Industry City, Brooklyn, 718-878-7108, sahadispirits.com.

Eli Zabar has introduced a Passover-inspired ice cream. Like a cookies-and-cream concoction, it has a vanilla base thickly riddled with pieces of Eli's own chocolate-caramel matzo and toasted almonds for outstanding crunch. The new ice cream is not kosher or kosher for Passover, and is available through April 13 when Passover ends. It is not in Mr. Zabar's Passover catalog, but is sold at his flagship on Third Avenue, the outlet in Grand Central Terminal and Eli's Essentials on the Upper East Side.

Chocolate Covered Caramel Matzoh Ice Cream, $20 a pint, Eli's Market, 1415 Third Avenue (80th Street), elizabar.com.

A whole ham, or even half, for a small group at Easter means endless leftovers. This year, Brooklyn-based Heritage Foods offers a delicious alternative: thick bone-in porterhouse pork chops, 12-to-14 ounces each and enough for two, cured with maple and lightly smoked just like the company's hams. The heritage pork — Berkshire, antibiotic-free and raised on small farms — yields luscious well-marbled meat. The chops come fully cooked and need only to be seared. When you remove two chops from the pan, add a couple of minced shallots and sauté on medium, add the segments of a clementine, a generous dollop of honey mustard and a half cup of tangerine juice; stir, reduce a bit and you have your sauce.

Maple Cured Porterhouse Pork Chops, four for $54, heritagefoods.com.

The history and applications of fermentation will be explored next month in a virtual program by MOFAD, the Museum of Food and Drink. The food historian Julia Skinner, the author of "Our Fermented Lives," which published last year, will discuss the topic and how it has shaped our lives and well-being with Sandor Katz, an expert and writer on the subject whose nickname is Sandorkraut.

"Between Past and Future: Fermentation as a Living Tradition," 7 to 8 p.m., April 5, $10, or $40 including the book, mofad.org.

Until now only members of the limited wine club run by Ridge Vineyards of California could brighten their summers with bottles of the winery's elegant rosé. This year for the first time, as warmer weather tiptoes in, it's being offered in a wider release to the general public. The wine is pale, in the Provençal style; this year it's a blend of mostly Grenache and zinfandel with some cinsault and counoise in the mix, grown organically in Sonoma County. Watermelon and peach come across, balanced by a refreshing touch of bitterness.

Ridge Lytton Estates Rosé 2022, $35 for 750 milliliters, shop.ridgewine.com.

The only way to capitalize on the new cookbook by Homa Dashtaki, the founder of White Moustache Yogurt, is to get into yogurt-making. Thus, you will also produce whey, the liquid byproduct of yogurt and an essential ingredient in many of the recipes. (The company sells its whey in bottles; whey powder is not an appropriate shortcut, Ms. Dashtaki explains.) Instructions for making yogurt and yogurt products like labneh are detailed, and there are recipes for summer soups, Iranian rice dishes, whey-brined and marinated meats, biscuits, pancakes, condiments, preserves, sweets and drinks. Some recipes require very lengthy preparation. The book is full of puns "all the whey" through, if you will, and includes the story of how an Iranian immigrant and lawyer wound up with a successful Brooklyn yogurt company, and the Zoroastrian traditions and philosophy that guide Ms. Dashtaki.

"Yogurt & Whey: Recipes of an Iranian Immigrant Life," by Homa Dashtaki (Norton, $40).

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Florence Fabricant is a food and wine writer. She writes the weekly Front Burner and Off the Menu columns, as well as the Pairings column, which appears alongside the monthly wine reviews. She has also written 12 cookbooks.

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