Preserved

Elizabeth Vecchiarelli, owner and founder, began her journey over 10 years ago working in high-end food service with a special focus on local, sustainable and handmade food. She has classical training in serving wine, cheese and beer. Partway through her career, she began to desire a more intimate connection with the food and beverages she loved.  She learned about sustainable farming through the work-travel organization World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF). She began to grow her own food making the most out of her urban garden space. Preserving the harvest was inherently the next step as she endeavoured further into urban homesteading. Soon she was creating her own alchemy of ferments and preserves, taking quickly to Sandor Katz's book, Wild Fermentation.

Elizabeth interned with Teutonic Wine Company in Oregon, learning how to make wine naturally with only ambient yeasts. She learned to make yogurt and fresh cheese at home; and aged, unpasteurized cheese with Garden Variety Cheese Company in Watsonville, CA. She preferred the flavors and health benefits of these wild ferments and continued to explore these lesser-known, ancient methods of preserving. She studied Holistic Nutrition at Bauman College driven by the effort to understand how and why such methods nourish our bodies so thoroughly. Through her studies she was introduced to herbal medicine as yet another form of preserving. She apprenticed with the SF Herbalist assisting with their product line of Herban Elixirs.
 
She continues to be driven by the desire to learn, create and share. The culmination of this journey brought forth a culture in itself of food and drink with an unmistakeble connection. PRESERVED is a way to introduce this culture and share it's heritage. Not only are we preserving foodstuffs, we are preserving tradition.