Meet the Man Who Is Selling Smoke in a Bottle to Chefs
All photos by Ashley Hoffman

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Food

Meet the Man Who Is Selling Smoke in a Bottle to Chefs

One of the most obsessive specialty foods dealers in NYC—a man who has chefs addicted to the unusual—has found a way to bottle smoke.

Cooking doesn't get more elemental than fire, and Behroush Sharifi has bottled it.

Behroush is one of the most obsessive and devoted specialty-ingredient dealers in New York City. Bizarre in his devotion to untapped sources of ingredients, he is a man who inspires chefs with his impressive knowledge of the unusual.

He lived in Tehran, Iran until he was five years old, and then Guildford, Surrey near London until he was 14, when his family had to depart abruptly. While Iran was unraveling during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, his father hadn't been in England long enough to have the correct paper clearance to stay. In 1981, the home office sent his father notice that he had one year left in England before he had to leave. As a result, his family landed in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1983 and later settled in New York, where Sharifi got hooked on food while working at a grocery before taking on the role as enabler of expensive habits to some of New York's best chefs.

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I spent the day with him to see how chefs create dishes with two of his newest offerings: a rare food-grade clear vinegar and a black Kuro powder. Both products are derived from kiln-blasted charcoal.

"I just made a killer fucking smoked black focaccia with this," Raoul Whittaker says about the Kuro powder from behind the prep counter at David Burke Kitchen. "I call Behroush and say, 'I need you down here in 20 minutes with truffles, sometimes a bag of weed, whatever.'" He's joking about the weed. It's the smoky taste he's after.

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All photos by the author.

Whittaker rolls paper-thin slices of venison in the powder and flash-sears it for a carpaccio. In the past, he used vegetable ash, but this, he says, is "about a hundred times more consistent."

"Here's the thing, man. When you look at that, you taste char. It's impossible to get that flavor and keep the color when it's so dry, but the powder lets you," says executive chef Chris Shea.

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"Have some," Behroush says, urging me to inhale some for the first time.

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I take a small bite. It hits you with a pure, stealthy smoke. Leaning over the counter, Behroush suddenly comes alive as he inhales it all—the venison, a heaping platter of lobster and shrimp Kuro powder pasta, and his favorite: oysters glistening with a smoky sauce made with the wood vinegar. In that moment, there is no one in the kitchen more proud than this man in the depths of a char binge.

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His liquid smoke is something new. When you first see Behroush's wood vinegar if you're a chef, you order it without knowing how you'll use it. They all want it for the clean smoke flavor, the tanginess, and the low acidity.

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It's powerful, this wood vinegar—powerful enough to lace their whole tub of hollandaise sauce with just one tablespoon.

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Behroush has dark hair and a long beard, which he says makes him think better. He's sophisticated and tall, but he speaks softly in the accent he inherited growing up in Surrey. His deep voice ascends to a higher tenor when he's excited about his unique products, which happens a lot: "It's like a vase from Ancient Greece that poets wrote about in a salon at London."

Maybe that's what helps him glide confidently among chefs during service. They feed him. They ask him what he's selling, and they drink with him after their shifts. "My personality transcended the purveyor chef divide. Most of the chefs I work with think of me as a friend," he says.

For the next stop, he loads two solid-looking black bags packed with samples onto his bike, a Cannondale M500, which makes sense for this gig. He's attached to his bike, but he'll still ride on cross-country skis or his skateboard late at night if need be. How else can you get the goods to chefs who can't wait?

Behroush says he's drawn to "lost ingredients and lost techniques fallen by the wayside." His vinegar and powder pretty much fit the criteria.

To make the vinegar, Japanese oak is scorched in a kiln for a week. The condensation collected from this process is distilled to become the vinegar. The Kuro powder is the activated Binchotan charcoal ground into a fine powder by Japanese and Korean companies.

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The very existence of the vinegar in food is entirely new, and Behroush might decide to call it "wood tincture." Until now, the char essence has been unknown to the world as something you could eat. For centuries, people in third-world countries in Asia and Africa who are forced to make their own cleaning products have used it as a household cleaning agent. Behroush had the idea to distill it and make it food-grade. Considering that everyone has a hard-on for smoky food, this was one of the more clever moves of his life.

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Once chefs get their hands on these products, they want to push them as far as they can: Béchamel lasagnas, Negronis, bar snacks. I walk into the James Beard Award-winning kitchen at Craft to see the chef de cuisine, Taylor Naples, use the vinegar to make a light tartare with foraged wild chervil, olive oil, and mustard.

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"It's kind of just there, and it hangs with you a little bit," Naples says about the vinegar. "You get everything, but it doesn't overpower anything."

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It doesn't flavor your hands the way the powder does. "Late in the day, I made dough with this and it stained my hands for like two days. I was like, 'Shit! Goddamn you Behroush'!"

Behroush carved out a niche that was distinctly his own by introducing chefs to rare, expensive spices from Iran with his company, Saffron King. But that was before the US trade embargo with Iran, reinstated in 2010 by executive order, killed his business.

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Nowadays, he's riding it out by pimping things like fine truffles and olive oil for other companies as a sales consultant. "I'd give it up in a heartbeat to just do the spices and the botanicals," he says, flashing a wry smile. If the embargo is lifted, he can have his own company again. (The US plans to come to a final agreement with Iran regarding Tehran's nuclear program by the end of this June.)

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After the September 11 attacks, Homeland Security was particularly cautious about bioterrorism in food while he was busy bringing spices in from Iran. A TSA agent once destroyed Behroush's Angelica seed, claiming that an expert had put it under a microscope and discovered it was poisonous hogwart. Behroush insisted that he had pictures of chefs using the stuff for ten years, but the agent said they were saving him a lot of trouble by confiscating it. The TSA arbitrarily destroyed his ingredients a dozen times, he says.

Even at the height of Behroush's popularity, at least 11 chefs told him that they were eager to score his Iranian products, but the restaurant owners refused to let them. "They said it was because they didn't know where the money was going, which was absurd. It's going to the bloody person who grew it," he tells me.

At first, Little Rock wasn't hospitable to him either when he moved there. "Culturally, I felt like the boy who fell from Mars." The kids there kept demanding he "say something" because of how hilarious they found his accent.

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"It was difficult getting into bed with the enemy. It was a massive moment, and I had generally negative feelings toward America," he tells me. But he made friends who loved rock the way he did—bands like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia is still the closest thing to religion for him.

I sit across from him at a table in the empty dining room at restaurant Daniel while he eats King crab that the intense chef de cuisine, Eddie Laroux, made with his vinegar.

"The faint little bit of smoke essence on the tiny mushrooms is pretty extraordinary," he says. "There's really no greater thrill for me than playing some part in this."

And then he gets wistful. We talk about how he yearns to get back to sourcing seasonings from Iran. He has family there, and he's happiest when he's in the big Tehran market, meeting representatives from farming collectives.

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Here people still scream "Osama" at him, he tells me, but he finds solace when he's pedaling on his bike.

"The minute I get on, I feel better. I feel free, like I'm going into the ocean." With that, he rides off to have dinner with his wife and daughter.