Archive for ‘San Francisco Food’

Tis the Season for Good Food Synchronicity

By , 20 December, 2011,

I still marvel at two food-related bizarre coincidences that happened a few years ago. In the spirit of the season I thought I’d share the joy that can come from talking to strangers:

tartine croissant and jam

Story 1: A Mother and Daughter Bakery-Based Reunion

A couple of days ago the lure of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco finally won me over. I stopped in for a croissant the moment they opened, knowing the butter would still be meltingly warm from the oven. The woman helping me asked if I wanted jam. The apricot did not particularly appeal, but after I commented that I wish I could have brought some great jam I had at home, she said by all means go get it.

The flaky abundant croissant fulfilled my food fantasies and I enjoyed every calorie, particularly with this Tayberry jam my sister had brought from Oregon. Immediately after my satisfying breakfast, I emailed my sister to tell her how I’d enjoyed pairing the jam with the croissant.

Yesterday she stopped by the maker of this jam at the farmer’s market in Oregon. While standing there she told her friend how I’d eaten this berry jam with a Tartine croissant. The jam maker’s reply: “My daughter makes the croissants at Tartine.”
Just writing that gives me chills. Here almost 400 miles apart, I had rushed home to get this jam made by the mother of the person who made the croissant I ate it with. If you didn’t believe in some kind of universe before this, maybe you do.

Or perhaps you need to read this next story first.

Story 2: The Sticky Bun Susie Sought Out Comes to Susie

One day I visited my favorite coffee house in San Leandro, CA called Zocolo. All morning I’d thought about the pecan sticky bun I’d had there, made by an artisan bakery. They were out. Crestfallen, I ate a bagel instead.

The next morning I found myself at Peet’s Coffee in San Francisco. After reading each section of the newspaper I handed them to the three young women sitting next to me.

One of them said: “You’re so kind to offer these. What can I give you in return? How about advice? Do you like pastries?”

Our information exchange about the most succulent baked goods flew. She told me about a nearby French bakery known for the most buttery pastries ever. There’s this great cafe in San Leandro, I explained, with the most heavenly pecan sticky buns. It turned out her husband worked nearby and she made a note to send him to the cafe to get her a sample.

“My sister works for a bakery” she said, pointing to the girl next to me. I asked what it was called. “Raison d’Etre” she replied.

This was the bakery that makes the very sticky buns I’d craved the day before.

“I have one in the car I can give you” her sister said. And we walked down the street. She opened a cooler, unwrapped a foil ball, and before me presented the genuine article: the pecan sticky bun of my quest.

As I dove in, we shook our heads in amazement at this bizarre coincidence.

On Being a Connector and Synchronicity

I just read a quote by Wayne Dyer that connectors often experience synchronicity / coincidences and are used to it. While I’m known as a connector I never get used to things as highly improbably as those I described above. Is this The Secret’s proverbial Law of Attraction at work (attracting delicious pastries to me)?

I’d love to hear your wildest synchronicity stories!

What is Artisan Food Anyway? It’s Not…

By , 2 November, 2011,

In recent weeks the Domino’s Artisan Pizza launch (with pizza made by self-proclaimed  “non-artisans”) caused the world to question: What is artisan food? And is the word kaput now that it is being used a substitute for anyone who makes any formerly-known-as-gourmet food? This inquiry, common in the specialty food world, has made its way to the mainstream, featured in Bruce Horovitz’s USA Today article Marketers use artisan label to evoke more sales

For a Halloween feature in the San Francisco Chronicle, my partner in Epicuring Laiko Bahrs and I worked with a number of San Francisco artisan chocolate makers and bakers to create a “treats” crawl of the city. (Here’s the full text.)

Artisans? Yes. They are sole or very small operations who conceived of original recipes and creations they are making themselves, by hand. Meaning, they did not come up with a recipe, standardize it, and distribute it to one of their many locations to say do it exactly like this.

We adore See’s. Honestly, I have a life long obsession with See’s. Yet I’ve never called them artisans; yet, their candy has never lacked without having that description. See’s employs production workers who took Mary See’s (and other more recent) recipes to produce en mass. They use extremely high quality ingredients. I wouldn’t, let’s just say, enjoy so much at a time otherwise.

A later post will continue a discussion (read: rant) with ideas on how to describe a limited production food operation without going overboard. For now, winding through the sweets of San Francisco for a visual definition of “artisan.”

Click the image to enlarge…and see the craft behind the artisans.

How to Make Bean to Bar Chocolate the DIY Way

By , 12 October, 2011,

Visiting Dandelion Chocolate‘s Palo Alto laboratory–cleverly tucked into a suburban garage, for now anyway–felt like a live immersion into Instructables or of course the Maker Faire. Nary had Todd started giving me a tour that I whipped out the old video recorder to capture the charming and clever mechanisms he had built to make a bean to bar chocolate which is quickly gaining a following in the Bay Area and beyond.

See how a few tools, wood, and hardware store parts can come together to make much of the small scale machinery needed to start tinkering with making chocolate. Disclaimer: The DIY part works mostly for prepping the cacao beans, not so much for making the actual chocolate. Although surely there is someone hacking together their own conches and other refining equipment.

Debut at 2 San Francisco Underground Markets

By , 12 May, 2011,

I’m in a major identity crisis – having named my food entrepreneurship project The Nutless Professor and having a blog with the domain Nutty Fig! While I mull over how to reconcile these possibly confusing things..for I do love all that Nutty Fig stands for (two naturally good simple things that magnify in deliciousness when combined much like partnership)…I wanted to tell the world about this exciting moment and hope you come see me:

Read more about The Nutless Professor, how it supports sustainable rice growing initiatives, and what you’ll find at the market. And thanks to so many people for your support as I’ve developed these products! All of my knowledge will be going into a book I’m writing.

2011 Chocolate Salon: Conversations With Chocolatiers

By , 20 April, 2011,

For me, walking through Taste TV’s International Chocolate Salon in San Francisco was culinary carnage and social bliss. First the carnage: As I diligently sampled chocolate after chocolate, I flashed back to a family-owned chocolate shop I called “my after school job” in high school.  The day I started, I asked if I could taste. The owner said, tongue in cheek, it was mandatory. “You’ll get sick of it,” he added.

While others filled cups and napkins with samples, my chocolate chunks and passion fruit-filled bon bons disappeared like a snowman in global warming.

However despite my theobroma high, the bliss came from great conversations with old candy-making friends and interesting new food entrepreneurs I met at the show.

10 Things I Gleaned While Not Eating

  1. The world wants more chocolate! Every year new companies pop up, and the crowd loves them. The thing is, companies go too. It’s exciting to feel the passion, and exhaustion, of a new candy company as I sample a peanut butter cup from Snake and Butterfly (who incidentally makes maple bacon caramels).
  2. When accounting for costs, every minute counts. “It’s easy to calculate the time involved with making my chocolate but where I might lose sense of time – and money – is the packaging. Every ribbon tie, every piece of tape takes a few seconds and thus costs me. When making a large number of packages like for an event, my costs can skyrocket.” So when you rip open your box of chocolates, enjoy the full experience like you will the gooey centers.
  3. Kitchen collaboration rules. I’d heard of at least 3 chocolatiers on the hunt for a large kitchen. It turns out one is working on starting a kitchen and has the line on others who may share. Collaboration is so much better than competition.
  4. If at first a group dies out, start again. The desire to commune among local chocolatiers is strong and wonderful. Peer groups rock – for sharing resources, general support in victory and commiseration, and trading advice. For a couple of years a group of women – “The Sweet Mafia” – would meet periodically. A new chocolatier is reinvigorating the tradition, which led to various business collaborations in cooperatively buying bulk chocolate and production.
  5. Fame can’t hurt. No one knew why William Dean‘s line was so long, about a 15 minute wait. Tasting the chocolates answered three questions: They’re good. He’s famous. Their tasting was a veritable flight with a highly personal touch. OK four: They were selling a lot. Was it his feature on the Home Shopping Network? Do tell.
  6. Inspiration comes from the darndest places. The delightful I-li of Vice Chocolates debuted a chocolate inspired by “The Ring,” decorated with a ring and named after her favorite character.
  7. Twists are fun especially where danger is involved. It’s fun when you can tell a story like Amano Chocolates with their bon bon made with “the most expensive honey in the world” from Yemen. I pictured kids in the middle of nowhere sticking their arms in buzzing hives to enable me to taste that chocolate in San Francisco coupled with the thought that the honey is probably unavailable at this time.
  8. Wine and chocolate go together almost as well as vodka and chocolate. Two different vendors had twists on the ol’ Godiva chocolate liqueur. I had to go with the “local” one – made in Petaluma, despite the Motley umlaut in VÄD.
  9. It’s hard to tell big companies from small. There is much contention in the world as to “artisan” being bandied about. I had no clue (except for a post-chocolate-coma-flashback) that Pure Dark was a Mars company. Yes that Mars. It is now tempting to say “not that there’s anything wrong with it” ala Seinfeld, because I’m an admitted fan of another Mars company, Ethel M. A few months ago the editor of Specialty Food Magazine posed the question of large companies using “artisan.” It’s a toughie.
  10. Toffee and caramel are all the rage. Which is good, with sugar and butter being my two basic food groups. Cristina of Kika’s Treats is making caramels using palm sugar. Toffee Talk, a San Francisco company, uses red walnuts which lend an extra soft crunch to their English style toffee. Nicole Lee, ex-high techie of San Jose, sampled mini chocolate hearts filled with drippy passion fruit caramel as did Anni from Gateau et Ganache in Palo Alto.

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