Archive for the ‘Opinion’ Category
Sunday, September 25th, 2011
I’m writing this post with a very heavy heart as tomorrow we leave San Francisco.
The five or so months that we’ve spent here have been so amazing, and the missus and I have totally fallen in love with the city. The hills, the fog, the history, the food, the people, the atmosphere all combine to make San Francisco a totally unique place. Having visited before for a short time as a tourist, I think I was a bit worried about being bored, but far from it. There may not be a huge quantity of ‘must do’ sights, but it has to be one of the best cities in the world for just hanging out and chilling. No wonder the hippies loved it here!
So yeah, we’re basically totally gutted to be leaving, and if things were different with visas etc, I think we would have stayed for a couple of years. But we can’t. C’est la vie. It’s not all doom and gloom though, as we’re heading on an awesome road trip that will take us across country to New York before we head back to London in late October.
So before we bid San Francisco a very fond farewell, I thought I’d give you my top 10 culinary highlights.
1. Mission Chinese Food – I’m pretty sure you’re all sick of me talking about MCF by now, but humour me. I love everything about this place. The food, the venue, the buzz. It’s been wining every time we’ve been there. Wonder if they’d deliver to London.
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Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | 1 Comment »
Friday, September 16th, 2011
I’m sure there’s plenty of cock waving when it comes to which nation produces the greatest chefs in the World. Japan? Spain? The US? England? France? Denmark? To be honest, as long as I’ve got a great plate of food in front of me, I don’t really care. But one thing I’d stake my reputation on (for what it’s worth), is that when it comes to making sandwiches, the Yanks p**s all over the competition.
Us Brits may have invented the humble sarnie, but the Americans have taken it to a whole new level. Here the sandwiches are a proper meal, lots of good stuff slapped between whichever kind of bread you fancy. The fact that burgers sit in the same section on a menu kind of sets the tone. Now I’ve tasted the brave new world, I feel kind of sad when I think about the Prets and Eats I used to visit so often back home, especially as most of the really good ones come out of small independent shops and delis.
Anyway, to prove the point, I thought I’d show you the evidence by showing you a few of our favourites (excluding burgers) from the recent months. GET READY TO DROOOOOOLLLL.
The Delores from Rheas Deli
Smoked peppered turkey, spicy cranberry sauce, muenster, bacon, tomatoes, red onion, pickles, pickles jalapenos, spinach on Dutch crunch bread.
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Tags: Bread, Delores Sandwich, Golden Gate Sandwich, Ike's Place, Korean Steak Sandwich, Mayoose's CA-BLT, Meal, Paul Reubens Sandwich, Rhea's Deli, San Francisco, Sandwiches, Sarnie, Saul's Deli, The Eggbert, Whole Foods
Posted in Lunch, Opinion, Travel | 3 Comments »
Sunday, September 11th, 2011
So that’s it. It’s over. 4 and a half months, 18 weeks, 90 days, 720 hours, 43,200 minutes of hardcore baking action. We graduated from the SFBI Professional Bread & Pastry Programme last Friday, and I’ve go to say it was a bitter sweet occasion.
In the week running up to the graduation, as a group we made over 160 products, and most of them in multiple numbers. We were split into four groups as usual, with two groups concentrating more on bread and the other two predominantly on cakes and pastry. It was a full on week of late nights, early mornings, little sleep and lots of coffee. We all started on pastry, prepping stuff to be frozen and items with good shelf life, and the production schedule steadily ramped up over the week to fever pitch, particularly on Thursday and Friday for us bread people. It was full on, but hugely enjoyable. I have to admit, I felt pretty emotional as I scored the very last loaf that went into the oven.
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Tags: Baking Institute, Bread, Chocolate, Class Of 2011, Diploma, Graduation, Michel Suas, Pastry, Production, Products, San Francisco, SFBI, Viennoiserie
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | 10 Comments »
Friday, September 9th, 2011
Morning / afternoon all.
Apologies for the radio silence. It’s almost been a week since I finished the course at the SFBI, and I’ve been enjoying a few well earned days off. I’ve got a bunch more posts in the bank to write, so if I can pull my finger out, I’ll get to these very soon. AND I’ve also got exciting news about some work experience that I’ve hopefully lined up here for the next couple of weeks.
But back to this week. It was something lurking in my in my in-box on Wednesday that has tempted me back to Wordpress, and that was the launch of the new Big Apple Hot Dogs site. I mentioned it briefly in this post, but I worked with the very talented chaps over at Nation on the site before I left for California.
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Tags: Abiye, Big Apple Hot Dogs, branding, Bun, Butcher, Food, Launch, New York, Old Street, Parallax Scrolling, Sausage, Website
Posted in Opinion, Reviews | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
Last week felt like a pretty quiet one compared to the previous 16. I kind of got the feeling that our tutors were taking it easy on us as next week is graduation when we’ll be making pretty much everything we’ve made on the course. But in one week. That’s right. One frikkin’ week. We’re going to be busier than a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest.
The earlier part of the week, we spent prepping and making ‘baked custards’ of the world. France was repped by the crème brûlée and crème caramel, Italy by the panna cotta, and the good ol’ US of A by a rather tasty baked cheesecake. But where was the British custard tart I ask you? Nowhere. A bloody outrage!
The above was the pre-cursor to the plated deserts section of the course, which we were led through by Frank and Juliette, both of whom have worked as pastry chefs at some pretty fancy places. And it showed.
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Tags: Baked Custards, Cheesecake, Chocolate Mousse, Creme Brulee, Creme Caramel, Deserts, Frangipane, Ice Cream, Pain Perdu, Pancakes, Panna Cotta, Plated Deserts, poached Pears, Sabayon, Sable Breton, Sorbet
Posted in Opinion, Sweet Stuff, Travel | No Comments »
Thursday, August 25th, 2011
A real mixed bag last week at SFBI. Monday & Tuesday were dedicated to making all kinds of Petit Fours, Wednesday & Thursday we were set a two day practical, revisiting the pastry section of the course, and then on Friday we rounded off the week with a tour of the great and the good of the Bay Area’s bakeries. Tell Tale, ACME, La Farine, Semifreddi’s and Firebrand.
So, rewind selectah to the beginning of last week. A big part of Petit Fours is chocolate based, from mendiants and molded chocolates to truffles, you need a lot of the stuff, and being more accustomed to eating it than making it, I wasn’t really aware of one of the key skills of the master chocalatier, tempering. I’ve got to to tell you, it’s a tricky business.
If chocolate isn’t tempered properly it lacks gloss and sheen, and doesn’t set properly, so it’s more prone to melting. For properly tempered chocolate, you need your choc to have a concentration of the right kind of crystals (I’m not going to get into the science, so you’ll just have to trust me), and this is achieved through the combination of time, agitation and temperature. Whilst tabling is a valid method, for us this equated to A LOT of stirring. And don’t I know it. My right arm is still aching, and not from self abuse for once! I think I’ve contracted Tempeperer’s Elbow. But once you’ve got your chocolate right, you can create some pretty tasty morsels, as you can see. But it wasn’t all chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. We also made caramels, more macaroons, a rather unsuccessful peanut brittle, marshmallows, and some mouth-wateringly delicious passion fruit pâtes de fruits. Diabetes alert!
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Tags: ACME, Bakeries, California, Caramel, Chocolate, Firebrand, La Farine, Marchmallow, Molded Chocolates, Peteit Fours, San Francisco, Semifreddi's, SFBI, Sweets, Tell Tale, tempering, Truffles
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Travel | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 12th, 2011
…to me!
I realised yesterday that I missed Hand To Mouth’s second birthday.
Seems crazy to think that two years have passed since I first put finger to keyboard.
Whilst its sometimes tough to muster the energy to write, particularly at the moment when so much other stuff is going on, I’m still enjoying the blogging and living my Hand To Mouth existence.
So a big thanks to all you out there who’ve read and supported what I do here, and to the rest of you, go f**k yourselves (only kidding!).
Here’s to another year.
Cheers
Fergus
Tags: Birthday, Blog, Celebration, Handtomouth, Second
Posted in Opinion | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
Feels a bit odd writing about cake when there’s all this shit going down in London, so to that end I’m going to do what I promised in my last post. Be brief.
So another week, another cake mountain. The cakes last week were definitely more technical than the week before. We compared and contrasted the differences between fat based and egg based sponges, including Génoise and Chiffon, as well as making a bunch of different fillings and icings.
Here are a few highlights:
The Fraisier – a light vanilla sponge sandwiching fresh strawberries and mouselline, all topped off with a marzipan disc. Summer in cake form.
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Tags: Black Forest Gateaux, Cake, Concorde, Egg, Fat, Fraisier, Opera Cake, Sachertorte, San Francisco, SFBI, Sponge, Wedding Cakes
Posted in Opinion, Reviews, Sweet Stuff, Travel | No Comments »
