ANNOUNCER: Funding for "Lucky Chow" has been provided by... From the kitchen to the grill, Soy Vay sauces and marinades add an Asian twist to your favorite dishes.

[ Bell dings ] Recipes and more are available at soyvay.com.

MAN: The way of Thai -- our way of unique happiness, and it begins with the people.

ANNOUNCER: And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

CHANG: Today's journey of "Lucky Chow" takes us to the San Francisco Bay Area, which for generations has led the nation's sustainable and local food movements, but now it's also known as the high-tech capital of the world.

We are about to explore how these two worlds converge by taking a special look from Google's trending food culture...

It's vertically just really responsible all the way from beginning to end.

CHANG: To a microgreen and produce farm of the future... SPENCER: We will grow about 15 acres worth of greens in a 3,000-square-foot space.

CHANG: And to Hodo Soy Beanery, taking ancient tofu making to a whole new level, all inspired by generations of Asian food culture, right here in the Bay Area.

I went to high school in Palo Alto, right down the street from where Facebook, Apple, and Google were founded.

Much of my family still lives here, so this is still home to me, and even though this land of innovation is best known today for its high-tech culture, farming and good food is still at its heart.

I've been invited by Google to their Mountain View headquarters to gain further insights into how food is a means through which to build community.

Google.

We all know it and use it as an invaluable resource in our lives every day, but what you may not know is how Google feeds their 30,000 worldwide employees quality, fresh food each and every day.

Their food program gets to the heart of the company's ethos -- building community and corporate responsibility.

WU: Hi, Olivia.

Hi.

Welcome.

So great to see you.

Glad to have you in the garden.

Here's some Thai basil and some little chilies, maybe the beginning of a Thai-inspired dish.

CHANG: That sounds amazing.

So, do you -- is this actually a working garden?

It's a community garden, one of many, on our Mountain View campus, and we've planted basil and lemongrass and corn among the flowers because we want Googlers to know the beginning and the origins of food.

-Right.

-And so we have all these community gardens, and in some gardens, the Googlers participate in planting and harvesting.

-That's wonderful.

-It's really wonderful.

So we don't have enough food here to put in a café, but we teach that lesson, we want to have that reminder, and we, in the cafés, as you'll experience later, what we want is to fuel moon shots.

We're a company of moon shots.

We want them to have healthy food so they're at peak performance, and so the culture of innovation and of collaboration is kept alive in our eating spaces and by the food that we cook for them.

And tell me about the types of food offerings that you have on campus.

I understand there are several Asian restaurants.

That we're very proud of, but we do, really, a global cuisine.

We're a global company.

And we want them to feel at home, so we offer this home cooked version, not restaurant version, this healthy, home-cooked version of all of these regional cuisines, so, Mediterranean, we have Mexican, we have Chinese, Japanese, we have Indian, and I made an arrangement for you to eat at Chef Irfan's Baadal later.

So, we feed everybody.

Right, so tell me more about that.

I mean, you're introducing global cuisine, but you're sourcing from local, sustainable purveyors, and that, I understand, is part of your ethos.

Very proud of that.

We've, for instance, found small startups like Hodo Soy and then very innovative farming practices like Ecopia, which is a vertical indoor farming venture, and we work with them, we really want to support them, and then the main thing is what they produce is so delicious, so delicious is a standard that we go by first and foremost.

It's all to create the space and the opportunity for casual collisions.

You know, Gmail -- I like that term, "casual collisions."

Casual collisions is part of our culture, and Gmail happened in a café as people were standing in line.

And so we create it.

We create the tables for community among Googlers, and that builds the kind of ethos where you go back into your cubicles and your teams, and that kind of collaboration is already set from the café.

As I was walking in, I noticed that there's so many different food experiences here on campus.

We offer them all.

So you can get food from a cart, you can get a tea tray.

You can have a café where you go through a buffeteria line.

You can have a sit-down, family-style meal, as we're going to have, at Baadal, which is our first family-style restaurant.

Well, I can't wait to check it out.

Let's head that way and have lunch.

Danielle.

Welcome to Biryani Day.

Thanks so much, Chef!

I'm so happy to be here.

Very happy to have you with us.

What are you making today?

It smells amazing in here.

Today we are making biryani.

Biryani is India's favorite dish and it is a celebratory dish.

It is seen at banquets, at weddings, and it is something that no big event is complete without.

So it's not an everyday meal, then, it's a special occasion meal?

No, it isn't.

It's a special occasion meal, and we do it here on Friday, and we feed almost 2,000 people.

At Baadal what we want is the kind of food that your old grandma would cook and it's what you would get at home.

We try to get that comfort food.

Baadal is Google's first sit-down restaurant.

It was created, as most great ideas happen, over food.

Baadal takes it one step further in communal eating, because we serve our food family style.

Well, this definitely is not your average corporate cafeteria.

I know Baadal is one of the top-rated Indian restaurants in the Bay Area, so I can't wait to get to lunch.

That's right.

Let's get done with this and let's get on with it.

All right.

You're gonna do this.

That looks like a blessing.

Welcome, everybody.

Welcome to this special table at Google.

We all eat at tables every day, but this is a special one for you, Danielle.

I know you've been on a quest to look for unique and authentic Asian food experiences, and we have one here.

Nice to have you here.

CHANG: Thank you so much.

It's Biryani Friday at Baadal, and I'm going to let chef of Baadal explain this to us.

The star of the show today is chicken biryani.

CHANG: Ahh.

DAMA: It's chicken cooked with myriad spices -- coriander, turmeric, cumin, garam masala powder, red chili, and paprika.

We cook that down.

Follow that with tomato puree and cook that with yogurt, cream, and we heat up oil.

We perfume it with whole spices.

That flavors the oil and everything else that goes in it.

Garlic, green chili, cilantro, mint, and kasoori methi, which is dried fenugreek leaves.

The flavors come together with the chicken and it's layered with rice, so all the flavors stay entrapped, and it is what brings everyone here.

It's why we feed 2,000 people on Friday.

I'm gonna pass that.

WOMAN: I think what connects me to Baadal is the home-style Indian cooking and home-style food.

I feel like I'm back in India in my mom's kitchen or my grandma's kitchen and it just makes my day.

This is the best part of my day.

It does remind me of making me a feeling of eating with my family and of my mom's good food, so it's an amazing experience.

He is from Gujarat, and the state is primarily vegetarian, so I'm always happy to see him here on Tuesday or whenever, because I know he's gonna be well fed.

[Laughter] MAN: Baadal actually makes me slow down a little bit.

For myself and my team, we're always rushing, and a lot of times, unfortunately, eating at our desks, but when we come to Baadal, we carve out that 45 minutes or an hour to sit together, to eat together, to catch up over the family style food, and it's just a really nice experience for me, and it also helps me learn about real Indian food, the stuff you get outside of the restaurants.

WOMAN: I think Google in general has been sort of an entree into a lot of different types of cuisines, being able to sort of appreciate different types of fish or meat or vegetarian foods both for me and my husband, who's a fellow Googler.

Google got him hooked on Indian food as well, which makes me very happy because we can enjoy it together.

The experience when we're eating here is always delicious, thanks to you and your wonderful team, but it's also different from any other experience in other cafés, because you're really having that moment outside of work, outside of your day-to-day where you can pause and exchange ideas and great stuff comes from that I think.

Thank you.

CHANG: Thank you guys so much for this enlightening experience.

Chef, now I know what to prepare next time I have 2,000 people over dinner.

Don't try it at home.

Just don't try it at home.

CHANG: Thanks for letting me take a glimpse into your culture.

WU: Cheers.

ALL: Cheers.

WU: Thank you, chef.

Thank you so much.

WU: Happy travels, happy feasting.

ALL: Cheers.

CHANG: Olivia sparked my curiosity to investigate further.

First I heard to Ecopia Farms, run by two Asian-American gentlemen working to change the face of farming.

SPENCER: This farm will use 3% of the water a normal farm would use and we use 4% of the area.

CHANG: I knew this wasn't a typical farm, but now I'm beginning to understand.

It just might be farming of the future.

SPENCER: We're able to have fresh-cut lettuces every day of the year, 'cause to us, seasons don't matter.

NISHIMURA: We can get it from the farm to the table in four or five hours.

MAN: And we're able to use space extremely well, so what you'll see is highly compact growing environments.

CHANG: You two seem like best friends.

How did you meet?

Well, I applied at Lockheed, and lo and behold, Sam hired me.

And that's how we started.

He was a first-line supervisor, and I went on to graduate from San Jose State with a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree, and I worked with Sam for about three, four years, then this is where we parted.

He went on to aerospace and I went into the computer industry at IBM.

And after we retired, we looked at a project farming in the Middle East, and when that project fell through, we still thought this was a very good project we could do in California.

What is your vision for this farm?

What we would like to do locally here is to complement the local farmers.

So our job is to grow produce that they can't produce at the time of the year that they can't produce it.

I see.

And this way we can basically satisfy the customers in a way that no other farmer can satisfy.

So, Sam, what has your professional path been like?

I started at San Jose State and my father wanted me to go to Stanford.

My father as an immigrant came to this country and started as a gardener in a large estate.

He wanted me to take some agricultural classes because he says, "I want you to become a smart farmer."

So I says, "If I'm gonna go to college, I want to get away from a farm as far as possible."

-Right.

-So I went into space.

Uh-huh.

Well, guess what now?

He's up in heaven and I'm on the ground.

I'm back on the farm again.

[Laughter] That is a fascinating story.

When you grew up in Silicon Valley, it wasn't even known as Silicon Valley.

It was just a valley of farmland and peach orchards.

Now we're in the home of Apple computers.

ARAKI: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

It's an interesting story, especially in the Silicon Valley, because as you know, the Japanese made Silicon Valley flourish as an agricultural center, then it went away and it gave way to the technology people, and yet we feel like we're coming back.

It's the second coming of farming of the Silicon Valley.

CHANG: So what are you growing here?

I see shiso, mustard greens, cilantro, so many Asian ingredients as well.

I think I even saw a wasabi stem?

Is that correct?

ARAKI: So our goal is to grow every variety of produce and bring out the natural taste and also go back to a lot of the heirloom seeds that are hard to grow now in an open farm.

[Whirring] This is an automatic seeding machine.

These are our red romaine seeds.

We're gonna be planting a couple trays, about 578 seeds in each tray.

About 578?

-About 578.

-[Laughter] We get pretty exact here.

Where do you get your seeds from?

We get them from a lot of the organic seed suppliers around the country.

The unique thing about our seeds may be that they're all heirloom seeds.

We're going back to the original seeds that existed that a lot of farmers outdoors no longer use.

What you see here is these are picking up the individual seeds for that type of leafy green or lettuce, and the first thing it's gonna do is it's gonna punch a small hole cavity into the pod and they drop them through those little holes right there, and it's important that the seed's at the right depth in the soil and in the right position for the lights.

So, Ko, how did your professional career at IBM prepare you for this?

There's a lot of similarities between that and this.

Both of these are industrial processes, so we use all the same techniques in linear programming, operational research techniques, and transportation, distribution, and the queuing problems, which is the forecast variation.

We could handle all of those.

The only thing that's different is the growing process.

But what about farming?

How did you learn how to farm?

Well, first of all, my family has very deep family background in my DNA, even though I thought I didn't.

Basically, what we call this is a cube.

You can see that it's modular and you could build vertically, you could build horizontally.

One of these rows is a growing unit.

So what happens to the seeds after they leave the machine?

So then they're gonna go under grow lights and they'll be under these lights for anywhere up to about 28 days.

It'll either be harvested for consumption at that point or it's gonna be transferred over into a larger grow tray for the last 14 to 17 days before it's ready to be cut.

So the next step is to take these seedlings and transplant them into the larger grow trays.

It comes out, the roots are all ready, and it's ready to just be transplanted right over into there.

In this soil, we'll have a lot different biology working, as well as a different nutrient level, 'cause now we're ready to let it grow from a small seedling to a larger head of lettuce that will be ready to go.

-Can I try?

-Yep.

Grab one.

Is this the same lettuce that we saw in the seed machine?

SPENCER: No, it's not, actually.

This is a red oak lettuce that we grow.

We grow upwards of 10 or 15 different types of lettuces at any given time.

CHANG: What is covering the soil?

SPENCER: There's a white reflection that helps us give more light to the product, and it also prevents some of the things that could happen to the soil, right?

So we're trying to keep the soil as healthy as possible, and sometimes when water and light come together, there can be stuff that will grow on the soil that we just don't want to happen.

And we'll water it and we'll begin to put it up into the large grow system.

CHANG: It's a pretty labor-intensive process.

SPENCER: It is.

You know, we want to make sure that we've got this process exactly right and that we treat the seedlings with utter care.

CHANG: That's pretty impressive how little water it uses.

So this layer helps to absorb and maintain the moisture.

SPENCER: Helps maintain the moisture, helps preventing evaporation, and, you know, as I said, it has good light refraction capability.

So what's the next step?

So the next step is it's gonna go up into the system based on the product and when it's supposed to be harvested.

Where do you see the future of farming and Ecopia's role in it?

It's pretty simple.

We're starting at the high end, and we'd like to build about four or five platforms.

What we'd like to see is entire world population enjoy this kind of food that tastes good, that's fresh, that's local.

Minimal use of land, minimal use of a natural resource like water.

And to be able to locate the farm at the source of consumption in the cities, and this way you are eliminating long-distance transportation.

What we have to do is make it so it's affordable to all economic sectors of the population.

That's what our end game is.

We think we can get it there.

CHANG: It's exciting to me that Sam and Ko have returned to their farming heritage.

I'm so impressed that they're now taking their decades of experience in high tech and applying it to a new way of farming, the industry that once paved the way for their families' success in America.

Farming isn't the only sector of the food world that has been transformed by technology.

Hodo Soy Beanery, an artisanal tofu factory, has 21st-century vision.

TSAI: My name is Minh Tsai.

I'm the founder of Hodo Soy Beanery in Oakland, California.

We're an artisanal tofu company making the best tofu in America.

We make thousands of pounds of tofu a day.

We have the ability to make 20,000, 30,000 pounds of tofu easily per day.

How did you get into making tofu?

I got into making tofu because I love food, and I grew up eating amazing tofu in Vietnam, but I also was a former banker and an economist, so I've seen way too many recessions, and I was tired of the recessions, so I decided to get into a business that's a little bit more recession proof than being an investment banker.

That's true.

Everybody has to eat.

So I believe traditional tofu is typically made by hand, but you've got a very high-tech factory here.

What is the difference in the process?

TSAI: For us, what we're trying to do here is to have the artisanal approach to making tofu, but to remove some of the heavy lifting and talk more precision.

Tofu traditionally has been taught sort of from masters to apprentice, and a lot of science is not really explained in that process, you know?

So I would ask questions like, "Well, how thick is that soy milk?"

And he'd just say, "Well, you taste it, and if it tastes thick, then it's thick."

And what I'm trying to do with this machinery is not to take away the artisanal approach, but to make it more precise.

Essentially tofu was discovered like a lot of food, which is accidentally.

Right.

Where was it discovered and when?

It was discovered in China more than 4,000 years ago.

It's essentially somebody is cooking a pot of beans just like everywhere else in the world, and there's excess water in that pot, and he or she drinks it and then decided to add salt to it to enhance the taste, and then eventually adds vinegar.

And it's the vinegar, the acidity of the vinegar, that gets the soy milk to curdle.

-I see.

-So if you want to coagulate tofu, you can use any type of acidity.

So tell me about the process.

How is tofu made?

Well, we make tofu here in a very artisanal way.

We have a lot of custom-made machineries here, but essentially the process is exactly the same as it's been made for thousands of years.

So we start with high quality organic soy beans that we source in the U.S. We soak them overnight.

Once they're hydrated, then we basically start grinding the beans, and the way we do it here, it's with a stone grinder.

Again, a very traditional process.

So we grind the bean into a slurry and then we cook it, and this is where we have some technology here.

We cook it with direct steam injections, kind of like a pressure cooker of soy milk with steam.

Is that a pasteurization process as well?

It is.

That's a great question.

That's basically the process where the milk gets to a certain temperature that kills all the germs and whatnot, so it's a clean soy milk.

The soy milk is then pumped to our coagulation machine.

The coagulant is again a traditional coagulant, calcium sulfate.

So calcium sulfate does not mask the flavor of tofu, but I can make tofu with lemon juice or vinegar and it would still become tofu, except it's sour.

What we do is basically we allow the curd to form and get solidified for a certain amount of time, and then we break that curd.

So once you basically break the curd, it's similar to cheese making.

You basically form it into a shape, and then depending on what texture you want, you press it.

-Okay.

-So here what we do is we make a lot of firm tofu, so when we basically do the press, we press more liquid out to get firm tofu.

Is that really the difference between firm and soft tofu, the amount of liquid that's extracted?

Exactly.

In the sort of tofu artistry world, we say the hardest tofu to make is the softest tofu, so silken tofu is really difficult to make and also is very hard to transport, so we don't sell silken tofu.

We teach chefs how to make it with our soy milk, 'cause we can't transport the traditional silken tofu.

CHANG: I see.

TSAI: So once it's pressed and cut, we package it and we ship it out.

CHANG: So it's actually quite a complicated process for something so simple, made with, really, how many ingredients?

-Three.

-Three.

CHANG: Despite its ancient origins, tofu is now so popular across America that Hodo's top customer is Chipotle, who includes their tofu on its menu offerings.

You know, my favorite tofu product is actually the tofu skin.

-Right.

-Do you guys make that here?

We make yuba here, and I'll show you how to make it.

Yuba is essentially the cream of soy milk, so as long as you have a really good soy milk, the sheet will form by itself.

You ready to harvest some yuba?

-I sure am.

-All right.

Let me show you how it's done, okay?

So first we have to separate the edges.

So once I basically separate it, I want to make sure it does not stick to the sides, and then I'm pinching it in the middle and I'm lifting it up like that.

CHANG: Ooh, it's so pretty.

TSAI: There you go.

A sheet of yuba.

CHANG: Let me try it.

Wow.

TSAI: When you cut, you can cut super fast.

There you go.

CHANG: It looks really delicate, but it's not as fragile as it looks, right?

TSAI: I think you made a very good point.

It's actually a very pliable and strong sheet, so you don't have to treat it with too much delicacy at all.

Want to do another one?

CHANG: Yeah.

That was fun.

TSAI: There you go.

Yours is a little prettier than mine.

TSAI: It's okay.

Years of practice.

[Laugh] Okay.

And then you fold it like that and then like that.

CHANG: Minh Tsai is a first-generation Vietnamese-American.

He left banking to pursue a career that was more personally meaningful, to introduce tofu to a wider public.

I am always amazed by the power of food and its ability to bring people together, and through new technologies with the transformation of corporate culture, the power of sharing a meal together definitely creates exciting new paths for the future.

WU: Cheers.

-Cheers.

-Thank you, Chef.

Thank you so much.

WU: Happy travels, happy feasting.

ANNOUNCER: To learn more about "Lucky Chow," please visit luckyrice.com.

Funding for "Lucky Chow" has been provided by... From the kitchen to the grill, Soy Vay sauces and marinades add an Asian twist to your favorite dishes.

[ Bell dings ] Recipes and more are available at soyvay.com.

MAN: The way of Thai -- our way of unique happiness, and it begins with the people.

ANNOUNCER: And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.