On our San Francisco Food Tours, we often find that a lot of the way that we use ingredients has to do with how fresh they are here.

On our San Francisco Food Tour of North Beach\Little Italy and Chinatown, it??s always to contrast how different people and neighborhoods treat a particular ingredient. Take for example, artichokes, many recipes for artichokes call for cutting off the leaves and then using the artichoke heart. For myself, that involves losing a great part of the artichoke; the leaves. I like to get the inside of the leaves. I just pull the underside of the leaf between my teeth. It is not only tasting good, it??s kind of fun at the same time. On our San Francisco Food Tours, we often find that a lot of the way that we use ingredients has to do with how fresh they are here. Take for example again, artichokes. They are grown just about an hour south of here, so when get them they are incredibly fresh, while some other places get them a couple of days old, we frequently get artichokes that have been picked that same day. The result is that they don??t need much. They don??t need much sauce. They don??t need much covering up in any way. We can enjoy every part of them. That may have a lot to do with the way that we eat them. When an ingredient is old, it loses a lot of its flavor. The result is that our neighborhood will approach that ingredient from their own cultural point of view, but also from how fresh that it is. The result is interesting, as well being delicious.