Preserved Moves to Rockridge
By Rachel Trachten
Elizabeth Vecchiarelli is bringing an impressive variety of cookware and supplies into her new space. (Photo by Zach Pine)
It’s quite a 10th anniversary gift for Preserved owner Elizabeth Vecchiarelli: a new location for her popular culinary shop focused on food preservation and fermentation. As this magazine was heading for press, Preserved was on the verge of opening its new site, a coveted storefront at 5540 College Avenue in Rockridge. It will provide the added space Vecchiarelli has been longing for.
“A perfect opportunity presented itself,” she says. “We are essentially taking over two storefronts that are side by side. One will be our dedicated workshop space and the other will be our retail store.”
Although she’ll certainly miss the Temescal neighborhood where the shop has thrived, Vecchiarelli was simply out of space for all the culinary items she wants to offer and her large slate of popular preservation workshops. The added space will allow for wider workshop hours than were possible in the former location.
Elizabeth Vecchiarelli started Preserved in 2015 in a small cedar shed she built with some friends. A year later, she moved the business to a retail store in Temescal, where it quickly became a neighborhood favorite. (Photo courtesy of Preserved)
When Elizabeth Vecchiarelli opened her shop on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, it quickly became a popular stop for food crafting supplies and products by local food artisans. (Photo courtesy of Preserved)
Preserved got started in 2015 when Vecchiarelli and a few friends constructed a shed in the backyard of the Piedmont Avenue shop Good Neighbor. There, she sold supplies for canning, pickling, brewing kombucha, and making sourdough. Hands-on workshops for DIY enthusiasts were held at two picnic tables beside the tiny shed.
A year later, Vecchiarelli took the plunge and opened a retail spot in Temescal, stocking it with items like canning jars, proofing baskets, fermentation crocks, and pickle weights (to name just a few). She expanded her skills-building workshops from canning, pickling, and jam-making into a wider range of traditional foods like miso, cheese, sourdough, marmalade, tortillas, dumplings, chocolate, tofu, and Japanese pickles. A recent addition has been mocktail mixology. Vecchiarelli herself is a highly knowledgeable and enthusiastic teacher, but she increasingly began bringing in local chefs and makers as teachers, turning the shop into a hotbed of creativity.
Berkeley resident Nola Burger has taken multiple in-person classes and learned to make sourdough during the pandemic thanks to Vecchiarelli’s Zoom classes.
“It’s like you become an advanced beginner or even an intermediate right away just because she gives you so much information to succeed,” says Burger. She adds that Vecchiarelli is not only generous in sharing her knowledge, but also highly organized in the way she presents the different stages of each fermentation process.
The larger space in Rockridge will allow Vecchiarelli to offer more cookware, filling a void left after several of the East Bay’s independent kitchen supply shops closed down during the pandemic. “We’re excited to bring our same discerning curation to a broader array of culinary tools and supplies and bring in new brands that we love,” says Vecchiarelli. For example, she plans to have Made In Cookware’s line of ceramic bakeware, enamelware, stainless steel All-Clad, and carbon steel cookware on the shelves, and she’ll be adding a selection of knives from San Francisco’s Bernal Cutlery along with classes in knife skills and knife sharpening. The new space will also enable Preserved to host inexpensive or free events like cooking demos and cookbook author events.
“We’ve got lots of ideas, and it will surely evolve,” says Vecchiarelli, who is also planning to increase the size of her small team. “I’m excited to expand our staffing so that we get even more creative energy and take this business to exciting new levels in our next decade.” ♦
Preserved | 5540 College Ave, Oakland | preservedgoods.com
