Strip trip!

When my Gram was a young girl in Pittsburgh, she spent alot of time around the produce yards of the Strip District. The Merlina family, consisting of seven brothers, my Gram and her sister Marie and their parents, worked and owned alot of the distribution areas, providing restaurants and homes around the city with a vast array of vegetables and fruits. The strips of distribution buildings haven't changed much since then, but what I have known them as since childhood includes merely new distribution companies.

La Prima Coffee Roasters takes up a space on the strip on Smallman street. As a fieldtrip for the class Producing Food, Producing Difference, I had the opportunity to learn more about the production of coffee. The morning began with a coffee tasting- including one lighter, fruitier, more vibrant roast and a much darker, woodier, nuttier roast. Sam, an associate of La Prima who closely works with the engineering of flavors and marketing, explained that coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world next to oil. While Starbucks, Caribou, Seattle's Best and local coffee houses such as Tazza D'oro, Kiva Han and Jitters dominate the university landscape of Pittsburgh, I never imagined it would be the number two international commodity.

Sam also discussed the flavor and body of coffee in terms of wine. While wine is prominently produced and consumed in first world countries (Champagne from France, Chardonnay from California, Reisling from Germany) coffee is produced between the tropics of cancer and capricorn, primarily where alot of the third world countries are located. This is one significant difference because the politics of coffee span from fair trade practices for farmers and laborers whose product eventually makes it to first world countries. Furthermore, the body of the coffee is described in terms of acidity. This is determined by how long the coffee is roasted for. Light roast coffees have more acidity and a brighter flavor because the oils are still in the bean. Dark roast coffees are literally more roasted/burnt beans that can have a charred or woody flavor. La Prima prefers lighter roasts, as Sam claims the dark roast beans have everything roasted out of them, including flavor.

We had the opportunity to watch the beans being roasted in the two "San Franciscan" machines, which turns out to be a rather mesmerizing process. Particularly the beans are poured into the roaster and spin for approximately 13 minutes. Once then are ready, they trickle out into a tray in the front of the machine, constantly spinning in a circle to cool until they are placed in buckets for distribution.

While the La Prima aspect of our Strip trip was really educational and amazingly scented with the roasting coffee beans, we also visited Enrico's biscotti shop. This is yet another one of my favorite places to buy lisanti (soft cherry walnut biscotti) and shell pastries filled with ricotta cheese and orange zest. The next stop included Reyna foods which sells delicious chicken burritos and non-alcoholic sangria. After stopping at Lotus foods to partake in the nostalgia of sharing leechie fruits with my dad and sisters as well as Pocky and Botan rice candy, we lunched at Chicken Latino, a fairly new Peruvian restaurant. The chicken burrito was served with an amazing cilantro sauce, as well as fried plaintains- the perfect sweet salty end to another Strip trip!