Secret sauce: How some of Anchorage’s most authentic meal ingredients get here

Greek olive oil from ancient trees, imported by air freight. Ethiopian spices driven more than 2,000 miles. Mexican banana leaves shipped in from a friend in California. Alaska wild berries crowdsourced from across the state.

In Anchorage, where school district students’ combined 112 languages is often cited as a metric of diversity, the city’s various identities are also reflected through culturally specific foods.

Some restaurant and business owners put in extra effort to bring authentic ingredients from the source, in spite of far distances.

Hand-picked ingredients

Inside the Midtown Queen of Sheba Ethiopian Restaurant, a blooming smell of spices looms in the air. It smells just like Ethiopia, said employee Nile Monfe, who was born in the country before immigrating to the States as a child.

That’s because chef and restaurant owner Dawit Ogbamichael cooks with the real deal: imported Ethiopian ingredients, backed by the cultural knowledge of how to prepare them.

“Everything we make is from scratch,” said Ogbamichael, who moved to Anchorage two decades ago. “But every ingredient we use, there aren’t any major retailers here that (carry) our ingredients. That’s the problem.”

The solution: an Ethiopian commercial wholesale warehouse located more than 2,000 miles south of Anchorage, in Seattle. Each fall, Ogbamichael makes a pilgrimage in his Toyota Sienna van with the back seats taken out to hand-pick ingredients — including baby okra, cardamom, and teff flour to make injera — that supply his restaurant all year, he said. He spends the night at a Canadian hotel at the border, while border patrol agents match each food item with its receipt, he said.

Part of the reason he chooses imported ingredients over American-sourced is because of availability — American wholesalers don’t supply many Ethiopian spices — but also because of an inherent trust in Ethiopian farmers.

“What we have in Ethiopia is hand-picked by our family,” Ogbamichael said. “They pick the best and the freshest there is.”

And besides, since he shops at the warehouse in person, he lets his nose be the judge of freshness:

“The eyes can be deceived, but the nose, it will not.”

1,500-year-old olive trees

For Bambino’s Baby Food’s Zoi Maroudas, quality is a similarly motivating force behind olive oil imports from her family’s grove in Greece. Quality, and health.

In the center of Bambino’s Baby Food store are two crates, each carrying a 100-liter aluminum jug of olive oil. To the left, tables are topped with Greek chocolates, coffee, soaps and individual glass bottles of olive oil. Behind them, in the freezer, is baby food, and some homemade pasta sauces.

“This is real medicine,” said Maroudas, ladling out the neon-green product she and her family have been harvesting annually in Greece for generations on their farm. Some of their trees are more than 1,500 years old, she said. The oil is the key ingredient in her baby food, which is otherwise 100% sourced from Alaska farmers. It’s also the central building block of the Mediterranean diet, which is tied to increased life expectancy.

But not all olive oils boast the same health benefits. Production methods — including high-temperature processing to get a greater quantity, and blending with lower-quality oils — are common practices that eliminate or diminish natural health benefits, said Maroudas, who studied food science at Baylor University.

Maroudas and her family still travel to Greece every year to harvest and press their olives for the oil, and prepare it for shipment. The family imports roughly a dozen 100-liter jugs a year, she said.

“With all the work, the biggest gratification is nurturing our community,” she said. In a recent shipment, the air courier carrying the Maroudas Olive Oil jugs traveled from Greece, to France, to Cincinnati, Ohio, before it arrived by plane to Anchorage, Maroudas said. “That’s how far, and deep, our passion goes.”

Food as memory

Some business owners rely on friends and family to send personal mail with bulk supplies of traditional ingredients.

Inside Salsa Oaxaqueña, a new Spenard restaurant run by an Indigenous Triqui family from Mexico’s state of Oaxaca, a group of diners sit rapt in front of plates of food, listening to Spanish radio.

The restaurant is run by sibling team Rosi and Abraham Martinez Marthel, and Abraham’s wife Selena Vazquez-Lopez. It relies on certain ingredients indigenous to their homelands to recreate their traditional foods. That includes: tamales cooked in banana leaves, pasilla chilies characterized by their smoky flavor to make mole, and even chapulines — small, fried and seasoned grasshoppers, a Oaxacan delicacy, which they offer in plastic to-go containers.

The owners rely on packages sent every few months from a Oaxacan friend who lives in California but often travels back to Mexico, said Abraham Martinez Marthel. They rely on personal mail because it’s more efficient, and gets them fresh ingredients they say they can’t otherwise find in Anchorage.

“The tamales taste more delicious when the banana leaves are fresh,” said Martinez Marthel. While their eatery attracts locals of all different backgrounds, he added that one man recently ate a dish he said reminded him of his childhood in Mexico.

“I’m very proud of where I was born and grew up, and I will never forget the teachings of my parents” Martinez Marthel said. “Now we are here to share (it) with all of you.”

Native network

Not all delicacies offered in Anchorage eateries must cross international borders to reach local palates. Others are closer to home, but take a village to collect.

At Blackbull Native Store, owner Daphne Nicholai uses what she calls her “Native network” to source some Alaska ingredients to make into products she then sells in store. Specifically akutaq, or Eskimo ice cream.

In her Anchorage store, Nicholai offers goods targeted to Alaska Natives who grew up in the village, as she did. Her shelves are stocked with everything from salmon strips to tobacco products, to the hard candies villagers associate with the Russian Christmas of their childhoods. In the back, there’s a whole freezer dedicated to different types of akutaq.

Some are made with salmonberries, others tundra, and others are marked in Nicholai’s handwriting as “store blacks” or “store blues.”

“People like a variety,” she said. “They don’t all like the same kind.”

Although Nicholai also forages for berries herself, she couldn’t possibly pick enough to keep up with the demand for akutaq, she said. So, she taps her Native network on Facebook.

“I post, ‘hey, I need this kind of berry, if you’re coming into town for a medical appointment and need cash,’” she said. It works. Her selection hails from all over the state as a result.

The diversity — not just of where the local food comes from, but also the customers who buy it — is displayed on two classroom-size whiteboards near Blackbull’s front door. In different colored markers, visitors from all over the state and the world write the name of their hometown, or country. Visitors are from Greenland, and Shishmaref. China and South Carolina.

“They come from everywhere,” Nicholai said.