Trading Post Restaurant’s Aaron Arabian boosts flavor with fermentation

Aaron Arabian, head chef at the Trading Post Restaurant in Cloverdale, is fascinated with fermentation and all manner of preserving, pickling, aging, infusing and marinating to bring out hidden flavors and the coveted umami, the essence of deliciousness.

Arabian started working in kitchens 10 years ago, when his interest in food drew him away from his job at SF Jazz, a nonprofit where he worked in marketing and concert promotion. Once he graduated from culinary school and gained experience in San Francisco restaurants, Arabian moved to Cloverdale to work at Trading Post’s then-emerging bread and pastry take-away counter, where he helped develop the restaurant’s subscription-based Bread Club.

Making pastry and baking is like and making music, he said. Each requires precision yet allows for improvisation and creativity.

“I have been playing music my entire life,” Arabian said. “And that sort of abstract combining notes to make harmony and melody and mixing of flavors to make a complete dish, they come from the same parts of the brain. I love improvised music. That creative drive is the same thing that drew me to food.”

Arabian brings that ethos to his bread baking. “Bread is a living, breathing thing,” Arabian said. “You set your schedule for all the different doughs to rise, and the bread tells you what it needs. You are looking at the size, the smell of the dough, the way it feels — all these different tactile things.”

His culinary inspiration comes from cookbooks, both ancient and modern.

“I read recipe books like novels,” he said. “My walls are lined with shelves of cookbooks. I love food history, old French pastry recipes — and get inspired by unorthodox food combinations.”

And if cookbooks and kitchens are his practice spaces, the Trading Post is his Carnegie Hall.

At the ripe old age of 38, Arabian is in his seventh year at the Cloverdale restaurant. When former head chef Erik Johnson moved to Idaho for other opportunities, Arabian proudly took the reins as head chef.

“Most of what I know now, I learned from Chef Erik as well as my sous chef, Alejandro Diaz, who has a lot of experience. It really helps when you have a team that is on the same page, although the team was just two of us all through the pandemic. Now with four in the kitchen, I’m free to do more projects.”

Fermenting builds flavor

Arabian’s projects took him well beyond bread and pastry as he ventured into fermentation and flavor-building techniques. Even food scraps that normally would be waste can be transformed into fermented ingredients to add flavor, he said.

“The reality is, you throw away products. We do whatever we can to lessen the impact and get something delicious out of it. Utilize what would be a waste product and turn it into a building block. It is about taking the ingredients in front of you and drawing more flavor out of them.”

Fermentation is seeing a renaissance in cooking, perhaps even becoming a new frontier in food. Words like koji (see box), fermentary, ceramic crocks and lacto ferments have found their way into chefs’ everyday conversation and occasionally onto restaurant menus. “Zero waste” is increasingly part of the garden-to-table, sustainably grown food vernacular.

“I love finding the way to push the boundaries while still getting something satisfying on the base level,” Arabian said. “The fermentation process creates tons of umami and draws out complex flavors.”

Often gifted with an overstock of an in-season product, Arabian makes lemonade or cucumber sorbet. He juices the cucumbers, but instead of throwing away the leftover pulp, he cooks up a ferment with shishito peppers and salt to make a spicy kimchi that adds a piquant punch as a side dish or an added ingredient. “We add it to our tzatziki sauce, so all of that flavor will make a much more complex dish,” he said.

With his infused rose oil, Arabian elevates a simple caprese salad to a new level. His secret ingredient? Cecil Brunner rose petal-infused oil.

“The Cecil Brunner rose has a great aroma. They bloom and die off right before tomato season,” Arabian said. “So I gather the petals, infuse them in oil and wait for the tomatoes. The combination of rose, tomato and bright fruits like peaches or nectarines blend so well.”

Tradition of peppers

Since its inception, Trading Post has been aging peppers for their hot sauce. Aging peppers and chiles in barrels is a venerated Latin American tradition to make hot sauces. The process tempers heat and gives a snappy, zesty, tangy sauce with a kick. Any pepper or chile in season will do.

“There is a difference between peppers and chiles,” Arabian said. “Columbus came here looking for black pepper. He didn’t find it because this is not India, but (he) called every spice he found a pepper. Sweet peppers, bell peppers, Jimmy Nardello — anything with zero heat are peppers. Chiles are the spicy ones, but all are from the same capsicum family.”

In early October, the aged peppers are ready to become hot sauce. Arabian said. “We make 5 gallons at a time. This year, we made hot sauce with roasted peaches, brown sugar, vinegar and smoked onions.”

One of Trading Post’s most popular items, the marinated roasted chicken, is to die for. Diaz bestows flavors from his upbringing in Nayarit, Mexico. He brings the roasted chicken to full flavor with achiote paste and a sweet-and-sour pineapple vinegar, made from pineapple peelings and brown sugar, using the tepache fermenting technique.

For Trading Post’s popular Pickle Plate appetizer, Arabian makes ferments a watermelon rind. “I get more excited about the watermelon rind kimchi than the watermelon flesh itself,” he admitted.

He has mastered the art of kimchi, mixing an aromatic paste of onion, garlic, ginger, chile pepper, pear, apple and salt which he massages it into whatever he is kimchi-a-fying. “We serve a sandwich with watermelon rind kimchi, fried chicken (and) spicy aioli. It’s just killer.”

In addition to using all parts of ingredients, Arabian restricts Trading Post’s environmental impact by sourcing from local purveyors. Rebecca Bozzelli of Lantern Farm in Cloverdale is their main farmer. In addition, Preston Farm & Winery in Healdsburg and Tierra Vegetables in Santa Rosa provide Trading Post with fresh fare, allowing the menu to vary with the seasons.

Set in downtown Cloverdale, Trading Post Restaurant, with its blond-wood, open dining space and innovative comfort food, feels both elegant and cozy. Open for dinner 5 to 8 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday, with local favorites such as duck-fat tater tots, roasted chicken in marinade and caprese salad with nectarines. Brunch served 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday. Reservations and take-out available. 102 S. Cloverdale Blvd., Cloverdale, 707-894-6483, thepostcloverdale.com.

The following recipes are from Aaron Arabian of the Trading Post Restaurant in Cloverdale.

“Fried chicken sandwiches make everyone happy,” Arabian said. “Our fried chicken has been on the menu since we opened and has been our biggest seller since. We add spicy watermelon rind kimchi to the sandwich as well as sweet and spicy pickles and aioli to make it as messy and delicious as possible.”

Fried Chicken Sandwich

Makes 6 sandwiches

6 medium boneless, skinless chicken breasts

1 pint buttermilk

1 cup all-purpose flour

Salt and pepper

Canola oil, for frying

6 soft rolls (preferably homemade)

6 servings of sweet pickles (preferably homemade)

6 servings of aioli (preferably homemade) spiked with ketchup, Worcestershire, cognac, crème fraîche and roasted Fresno peppers

6 servings of Watermelon Kimchi (recipe follows)

Marinate chicken breasts in buttermilk for at least 1 hour. Dredge in flour and season with salt and pepper.

Using a heavy skillet or cast-iron pan, heat oil to 350 degrees. Fry chicken until crispy. Serve on rolls with sweet pickles, aioli and Watermelon Kimchi.

Watermelon Kimchi (NO rule line)

1 medium watermelon

2 cucumbers, sliced

1 onion, cut into wedges

1 large knob of peeled ginger

3 cloves of garlic

1 apple

1 bunch scallions

3 - 4 fresh chiles (jalapeños, Fresno or padrons)

Kosher salt (see directions)

Cut the watermelon into wedges and remove the flesh. Reserve it for another use. Using a peeler, remove and discard the green skin, leaving the rind for the kimchi.

Mash the onion, ginger, garlic, apple and scallions into a paste. Weigh the watermelon rinds, cucumbers and paste and calculate 3% of the weight — that is how much salt you will add.

Massage it all together and pack tightly into a jar or into a zip-close bag with the air squeezed out. Let ferment for 1 to 2 weeks at room temperature. It will produce a great deal of bubbles and will smell quite funky. It is ready when it tastes exactly how you want it to.

Keep in the fridge, and it will only get better with time. For your next batch, add a little juice or paste from the previous batch to jump-start the fermentation.

“Obviously, strawberry shortcake is a classic, but we like to highlight peaches here with a little help from its cousin the plum,” Arabian said. “When we have a glut of fruit in the summer, we like to ferment a portion into fruit wine and then turn that into vinegar. ... We also infuse the leaves of the peach tree into the cream for another dimension of this amazing fruit — that green and almond aroma you smell when walking by a peach tree in the middle of summer.

“We sometimes fry our biscuits instead of baking them and toss them in cinnamon sugar after baking,” he added. “Freeze the remaining biscuits — you can bake them straight from the freezer.”

Peach Shortcake with Poached Peaches and Peach Leaf Chantilly

Makes 8 to 10 shortcakes

600 grams flour

30 grams baking powder

5 grams baking soda

Pinch salt

100 grams sugar

Zest of 2 limes

200 grams butter, cold

400 grams buttermilk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugar and lime zest. With a cheese grater, grate the cold butter into the flour, making sure to break up the chunks as you go and distribute them evenly in the flour.

For about 30 seconds, using your fingers, squeeze together the butter and flour mixture. The pieces of butter should be pea-size. Stir in the buttermilk and vanilla.

The dough should be loose and shaggy. Turn out onto a floured surface. Press flat and fold it onto itself like a book. Repeat this twice more (this gives you nice layers when you bake it). Roll it to 1 inch thick and cut to desired shapes for individual shortcakes.

Bake for 15 minutes until golden brown. Serve topped with Peaches Poached in Plum Wine and Peach Leaf Chantilly (recipes follow).

Peaches Poached in Plum Wine

4 - 5 white and yellow peaches, preferably a little firm

1 cup plum wine (can substitute white wine)

1 cup sugar

½ cup water

½ cup plum vinegar (can substitute white wine vinegar)

Cut the peaches in half and remove the pits. You can, if you like, lightly grill the cut side for extra flavor. Mix together the plum wine, sugar, water and plum vinegar. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat to the lowest setting. Add the peaches and barely simmer, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Allow to cool in the poaching liquid.

Spoon poached peaches onto each shortcake and top with a dollop of Peach Leaf Chantilly cream.

Peach Leaf Chantilly

½ quart heavy cream

1 handful of peach leaves “borrowed” from your neighbor’s peach tree

50 grams sugar

Squeeze the peach leaves to release their aroma and submerge them in the cream. Leave in the fridge for a couple of days to infuse. Strain and whip with the sugar to form medium peaks.

“This recipe from Chef Alejandro has quickly become one of our most popular dishes. Achiote is an ingredient out of Yucatan, traditionally used in cochinita pibil (a slow-roasted pork dish),” Arabian said. “We mix it with homemade tepache and serve with mild peppers and potatoes. Our regulars order this every time they come in to eat!”

Trading Post staff brine the chicken overnight to ensure juiciness and seasoning throughout. You can find achiote paste in Latino markets.

Achiote Chicken

Makes 4 servings

1 organic chicken

Achiote Marinade (recipe follows)

2 tablespoons canola oil

3 - 4 shishito and Padron peppers

3 Bodega red potatoes, cooked in water

Sea salt

¼ cup white wine

1 tablespoon butter

¼ cup olives

Lemon vinaigrette

Make the Achiote Marinade and set aside momentarily. Cut out the backbone of the chicken with heavy kitchen shears, and then cut through the breastbone to separate into two halves.

Marinate in Achiote Marinade and leave in the fridge until ready to cook.

Roast the marinated chicken in a 425-degree oven, skin sides up, for 25 to 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat a skillet over high heat, add the oil and toss in the peppers and potatoes with flaky sea salt. Cook the peppers until blistered and the potatoes have browned a little and everything heats through. Stop the cooking by adding the white wine and butter and toss to glaze. Plate the chicken over the vegetables and garnish with olives and lemon vinaigrette.

Achiote Marinade

1 packet of achiote paste

1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

¼ cup tepache (a ferment made with pineapple peelings, unrefined brown sugar and spices, fermented like a kombucha until sweet and acidic)

Salt, pepper and smoked paprika

Mix all ingredients together until homogenous.

“In the summer, we always have a cold soup on our menu,” Arabian said. “Gazpacho is usually made with raw vegetables, but grilling everything brings out the summer flavor of the grill while still making a cooling, refreshing soup. Garnish with a little yogurt or sour cream and fresh basil or olives and reduced balsamic.”

Grilled Gazpacho

Makes 4 servings

2 pounds Jimmy Nardello sweet peppers

2 medium cucumbers, rough chopped

2 medium zucchini, rough chopped

1 pint cherry tomatoes, stemmed

1 onion, cut in wedges

1 pint vegetable stock

½ cup fermented sweet pepper paste fermented with 5% (of weight) salt, a little water and rice koji (see Note)

½ cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon homemade plum vinegar (can substitute white wine vinegar)

1 tablespoon Chinese black vinegar (can substitute white wine vinegar and Worcestershire sauce)

Grill all the vegetables until thoroughly charred and mostly cooked through. Allow to cool. Using a hand blender or stand blender, blend the roasted vegetables with the stock and the fermented pepper paste. Then, leaving the blender running, slowly drizzle in the olive oil to emulsify into a smooth soup. Season with salt and the two vinegars. Serve ice-cold.

Note: Make rice koji at home or buy in dried form at Asian markets. It contains enzymes which break down starches and proteins into sweetness and umami. The paste used here is a variation on the Japanese technique “shio koji,” used as a flavoring or a marinade for meats and veggies.