Posts Tagged ‘San Francisco’
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
That’s right, Hand To Mouth is back. Despite missing San Francisco like crazy, and Home Sweet Home not really feeling that sweet right now, it is good to be home. Kind of.
We got back to London a week ago, and its been a hectic. Along with flat hunting and catching up with friends & family, I’ve been lining up a bunch of interviews, meetings and trial shifts at bakeries across London. I had my first trial on Monday and have two more lined up this week, along with a couple of meetings. And I’m also meeting up with an old work colleague who wants to get me involved with a food based iPhone / iPad app he’s developing. Exciting times.
I’ve also got a bunch of posts to write when I get the chance, including a round-up of our New York eatathon, a couple of great finds from the city that never sleeps, and a killer rasberry tart recipe, amongst others.
So I promise I’ll pull my finger out and will be back here very soon.
Until then.
Tags: App, Apple, Back, Bakeries, Blogging, Home, iPad, iPhone, New York, Posts, San Francisco, Sweet, Travels
Posted in News, Travel | 1 Comment »
Saturday, September 24th, 2011
Every now and again, you get a really good feeling about a restaurant just by walking past it. In our first week in San Francisco, we walked past The Swan Oyster Depot on our way home after a boozy night out. Even through our alcoholic haze we could tell we were going to like it. It had this really lovely old-school feel to it, so the next day we decided to give it a go. As you can probably conclude from this post, we weren’t disappointed, and we’ve been back a few times since.
But before we get down to the nitty gritty, a short history lesson. The Swan has been around since around 1912, and by the look of the place not much has changed since. The original oyster bar was bought out by a guy called Sal Sancimino and his three cousins (Al, Pat and Frank LaRocca) in 1946, and in turn their kids took it over in the ’70’s, and it not surprisingly has a really friendly, authentic family feel to it.
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Tags: Albacore, Chowder, Clam, Olive Oil, Salmon, San Francisco, Sashimi, Sauvignon Blanc, Scollops, Shellfish, Smoked Salmon, Swan Oyster Depot, Tuna
Posted in Lunch, Reviews, Travel | No Comments »
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 »
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 »
Wednesday, August 17th, 2011
Week 15. More cake. But as the title of this post ‘hilariously’ suggests, we moved away from the predominantly flour based sponges and in to mousse cake territory.
Most of these cakes followed a similar format. Some kind of sponge base, ‘inserts’ made either from more sponge or set crème anglaise based layers flavoured with anything from lemon and raspberry to mint, surrounded with some kind of mousse set with gelatin. These cakes get finished with different techniques. Glazes, cake walls, ‘pate decor’, we even got to get the chocolate spray-gun out.
Here are a few examples (for some reason I didn’t get as many pics as usual):
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Tags: Bavarian, Berries, Cake, Creme Anglaise, Diplomat Cream, Fruit, Glaze, Lemon, Mint, Mousse, Pate Decor, Raspberry, Sable Breton, San Francisco, SFBI, Sponge, Vanilla, White Chocolate
Posted in Reviews, Sweet Stuff, Travel, Uncategorized | 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 »
Monday, July 25th, 2011
This may not make me any friends in San Francisco, but we’ve found eating out here a bit hit and miss. I think it’s great that the food scene is so vibrant and entrepreneurial, but it feels like too often that food takes the back seat over gimmicks, word of mouth and social media buzz (liquid nitrogen cooled ice-cream, anyone?).
If I’m honest, a lot of the places people rave about, we’ve just found a bit ‘meh’, and thus far, there have been very few places that have really blown us away. But Mission Chinese Food is one that we could eat at every week.
The guys who set it up used to go under the name Mission Street Food and (from what the internet tells me) were like high end food truckers, blending classical and modern culinary training with street foods from all over the world. Around a year ago, they decided to set up something a bit more permanent, and like a hermit crab set up in a shell of a former run down Chinese restaurant in The Mission, and Mission Street Food became Mission Chinese Food.
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Tags: Char Siu Pork Belly, Chinese, Danny Bowien, Fish Bumplings, Food, Lung Shan, Mission, Mission Chinese Food, Mongolian Hangar Steak, Restaurant, San Francisco, Xi'an Lamb
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
