More spice!
Always, more spice.
That was the way Manuel Berber’s mom, Ofelia Berber, liked to cook. It was her love of spice and big, bold flavors that helped turn Mi Rancho, once a mom-and-pop Hispanic grocery store in Oakland, into a worldwide distributor of tortillas.
“We’d say, ‘let’s go out to eat at a Mexican place,’ and my dad would say, ‘no, nobody is going to top my mom’s cooking,’” said Manuel, now the president and owner of Mi Rancho.
For nearly five decades, family members remember lines of as many as 100 people wrapped around the corner from Mi Rancho’s little store on Seventh Street and Broadway, hoping for a bite of whatever creations “Mama Ofi” was cooking that day.
But when “Mama Ofi” passed away in 2008, Manuel feared some of his mom’s recipes were lost forever.
Then he remembered Josefina Samaniego.
Samaniego was just a teenager when she moved from Mexico to Oakland with her family in the 1970s. She barely spoke English. And she needed a job.
Mi Rancho hired her to wash dishes. But “Mama Ofi” noticed that Samaniego loved being on the other side of the kitchen. She loved to cook.
“Once she saw I loved doing that, she started showing me all the recipes,” Samaniego said through a translator. “The salsas, the ground beef burritos, the chile verde burritos, all the food that was there. Once I showed a lot of interest and knew how to do it, I picked up on it fairly quickly.”
Samaniego now gets emotional when she thinks about the way Mama Ofi took her under her wing.
Ofelia was 49 at the time; Samaniego was 19. But Ofelia saw something in the teen. She pushed her hard, demanding perfection in the kitchen, and Samaniego responded to it.
“She watched everything I did,” Samaniego.
Manuel, who was 21 at the time, remembers what would happen if his mom walked into the kitchen and tasted something she didn’t like.
“She had Josefina by the ear,” Berber said. “My mom would come in and yell, ‘There’s too much salt, the tomatoes aren’t right!’ She knew exactly what was wrong. The recipes were simple, but had tremendous flavors. She was adamant about the taste of everything.”
Ofelia only used tiny tomatillos, the green ones; no big, red, watery tomatoes, Berber said. And a lot of spice.
“We had Mexican chiles, spices, things you couldn’t typically find back then,” he said.
Samaniego excelled in the kitchen, and soon, many of her family members also found work at Mi Rancho.
“She was actually a part of the family,” Berber said. “She still is.”
Over time, the company changed. Mi Rancho narrowed its focus and expanded tortilla production. The family closed the grocery store to move into a bigger factory in Oakland in 1997.
“That broke my dad’s heart,” Berber said.
In 2008, when Ofelia got sick, Samaniego began taking care of her two days a week.
“It felt really good to help her and be with her,” she said.
Opehlia passed away later that year.
In 2021, the company moved production to Elk Grove. What started as a 3,000-square-foot storefront in the 1930s is now a 155,000-square-foot factory producing between 8 and 10 million tortillas a day.
“The sad part is when the company moved (to Elk Grove),” said Samaniego, who stayed employed with the company until the move. “I have my family and kids and grandchildren and couldn’t come. It killed me. It was a big change. I was very sad because of that.”
That’s when Berber had an idea: Could Samaniego rejoin the company for a while, just to help reinvent Mama Ofi’s lost recipes?
“Josefina remembered everything,” Berber said.
It didn’t take long for Samaniego to resurrect the famous red salsa Ofelia was spreading over her famous tamales. There was only one problem.
“We did the taste testing, and people said, ‘It’s way too hot!’” Berber said.
Just the way Mama Ofi liked it.
Berber tweaked the recipe to make it less spicy but otherwise stayed true to the original, and the company released three versions: salsa roja, salsa chipotle and salsa verde.
“I think that’s why I married you — the green sauce,” said Carol Berber, a former employee at the old grocery store who later married Manuel Berber. “The best chili verde I ever had.”
The salsas are now sold at grocery stores all over the world.
Samaniego now lives with her sons and her 93-year-old mother in Oakland. She cooks for them often. Sometimes she picks up a catering job and recreates Mama Ofi’s recipes.
“I almost felt like a piece of Ofelia was back with me to have these recipes,” she said. “And feel like she’s a part of them. I feel so appreciated.”
