Chef Balo Orozco started Sunset Cultures, a kombucha-and-condiments business, helping local farmers — and the environment — along the way.
Balo Orozco’s freezer is full of nectarines. Well, one of them is. The other is full of plums. At his commercial kitchen in South L.A., the chef is fermenting 100 pounds of chiles in orange juice. He’s lightly simmering berries to make kombucha. He’s scooping up excess unsold or “ugly” fruits and vegetables from local farms and reimagining them into some of L.A.
This early winter morning Orozco is picking up boxes of persimmons and fistfuls of avocado leaves in Fallbrook from Dominguez, who operates Rick’s Produce outposts in Virgil Village and the Original Farmers Market. The avocado leaves will be used for cooking savory dishes, while neighboring farm Rancho la Paz de Mi Corazón’s late-season fig leaves, which give off an almost coconut-like scent, will be used in a future kombucha with surplus cherries from Murray Family Farms.
He had been cheffing at a restaurant in Tulum when he developed a close work relationship with one of the farmers. The source of his kitchen’s pork and many of its vegetables asked if Orozco might help slaughter some of his turkeys, and that farmwork led Orozco into a new way of cooking: butchery, making sausage with every bit of meat.
Orozco moved to San Francisco to work with Gabriela Cámara at her now-closed Cala, which led to his role as executive chef of Onda in Santa Monica, which he opened with Cámara and Sqirl chef-owner Jessica Koslow in 2019. During that restaurant’s five-month tenure, Orozco ran a kitchen that tried to use scraps and focused on fermenting hot sauces and other jarred and bottled products.
Orozco and Harning hatched a plan: They could process the tomatoes into bottled sauces, thereby extending the window for Dominguez to sell them, and hopefully make back some of his investment. Thanks to the jarred-sauce sales, he was able to recoup his initial investment. The long-running Cuban bakery in Silver Lake served as the occasional base for the operation until the couple landed their own commercial kitchen space in late 2020. It also served as the first customers for their kombucha in the early days of Sunset Cultures, a home operation that was then brewing only five gallons at a time.
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