Babbling Blueberry

I went to Pagolac (Yelp, Menupages) in the Tenderloin last night with a fun crew of dinner eaters.  We were in San Francisco, but throughout the whole dining experience, I kept having all these flashbacks to being in Vietnam.  It was an unusually warm night for San Francisco, so that helped.  The rest of the effect is probably from the comfortable, unpretentious atmosphere inside and from the great food.  One result of all this good Vietnam food and the Vietnamness was that I had this flash of worry when one dessert came with ice: “Oh no, we forgot to ask for no ice!  We can’t eat this.” While this is a common thought when traveling in places like SE Asia, I don’t usually have that instinctive reaction in the U.S.  (I should note that this reaction wasn’t because the place looked unsanitary… I think it was because I felt like I was away from home.)  Also, when passing through the tiny, cramped kitchen in the back, because it was extra hot back there, I felt like I was a kitchen in Taiwan or Vietnam or another hot Asian country.

More about the food:  pretty much everything was great.  I especially liked the imperial rolls (with taro inside!).  There was also a really interesting noodle (fat rice noodles) dish with dried shredded pork, coconut milk, and other toppings.  Anything wrapped up in rice paper with noodles, herbs and greens, and fish sauce (assembled ourselves) was great.  The imperial rolls were really yummy eaten this way as was a shrimp ball wrapped around sugar cane.  Such a symbiotic relationship with the sugar cane and the shrimp - both components come out way tastier when cooked together.  (You’re supposed to chew the sugar cane to get the juice out rather than chew to swallow.  But if you’d like a little bit more fiber in your life, it can be eaten, as we all witnessed last night.  Mark, thanks for the demo!)  The best dessert we had was this rice pudding and taro dessert - it also had coconut milk.  It was so warm and pleasant and comforting and yummy!

I’d recommend staying away from the ice cream because while it was flavorful, the texture wasn’t great.  There are way more yummy things to eat at Pagolac so there’s no need to order the ice cream, in my opinion.

I haven’t reviewed the dishes and pottery of a restaurant in a while, probably because I haven’t seen anything memorable.  But Pagolac had some great pieces.  They had this one black bowl with pale yellow flowers carved to look like they were scattered on the inside of the bowl - really pretty.  And they had this four-sided teapot with an amazing glaze job - a tenmoku-like (black/copper/red) top, a narrow yellow band, and most of the base was blue.  The different glazes all flowed together and it was very fiery and organic at the same time.

Happy travels!

LaMancha the Localvore, Ben, and I visited Redwood Hill Farm and Creamery for a tour (free) of their goat farm and yogurt and cheese operation. LaMancha and Ben have been visiting a lot of farms around the Bay Area and in Northern California so they’re experts on this whole agriculture business. But for me, it was new and interesting. I figured I could share some of what I learned and provide some reviews of Redwood Hill Farm’s various products. I’ll put some photos in this blog entry, but if you want to see more photos, you can see the full album.

First, let’s talk about the yogurt to get it out of the way. The tour wasn’t very interesting and the yogurt wasn’t so good. Because it’s a liquid product, California requires that their whole process be automated in this huge system of pipes and vats and tanks. So it isn’t that interesting to see. Plus, I’ve already learned a bit about how to make yogurt from various people who make their own yogurt (Jen at SEP, Da - she makes DaDannon yogurt!, and Karin) and the larger scale process is pretty much the same. Plus, this tour leader, while knowledgeable, didn’t answer my questions as fully as I would have liked, and I didn’t want to be a pain for the rest of the tour group, so I let things go. For example, he said that goat milk comes out of the goat homogenized while cow’s milk is not and will separate if left standing. When I asked him why that was the case, he basically just defined what homogenization meant rather than really explain why. We decided amongst ourselves that it must be because the goats are more active than cows, jiggling and jumping all over the place to homogenize the milk in their udders. If it were any other reason, this tour guy would have said so, right?

Other than learning that goats homogenize their milk, the only other interesting thing that I learned on the yogurt tour was that they package the milk and cultures into the little cups, and then let the bacteria grow within each individual cup! It’s not going to change my life, but it’s interesting, to me, at least.

We had to wear hairnets and booties over our shoes to help them keep things sanitized, but I suspect that it was all a sham or an excuse to point out the long shelf-life of their yogurts. They weren’t making any yogurt that day and all the yogurt was enclosed within steel pipes and tanks. So what were the booties and hairnets protecting? They weren’t really making cheese that day either, but that portion of the tour was much better because of their head cheese maker doing a good job talking about cheese and answering questions. That’s head (cheese maker) not (head cheese) maker.

Before I get to the cheese, a quick review of the yogurt. They add tapioca and pectin to thicken the yogurt. Boo. The flavor is pretty good, but I didn’t enjoy the texture and I wish they wouldn’t put tapioca and pectin in it.

The cheese maker was the exact opposite of the yogurt guy in how much information she provided and it was great. It would have been slightly improved if she had described the different types of cheese and how the final product looks and tastes before she described how each kind is made, but I think I put together the pieces eventually. It looks like a really fun job. She tweaks various parameters relating to proteins (casein in the milk and rennet - from baby cow stomaches! - that’s added), fat, squeezing the whey, shaping, different aging conditions. And she takes plays with various microorganisms - bacteria that produce lactic acid, yeast, mold. She says that she has a number of small experiments running to tweak and optimize the cheeses that they produce, and to develop new ones. Seems like a really fun job. In case anyone is wondering what it takes to get a fun job like this, she did her undergraduate work at Davis in animal science and dairy something or other, and then she did a masters degree in microbiology. And then she studied with some cheese makers in Europe, maybe France. Plus, I’m sure she has a ton of other qualities that help, but those are the basics.

So on to what I think of their cheeses! I won’t really cover the information that’s already on their website, so go there if you want more information. I’ll just share what I think is the most interesting and/or relevant.

Gravenstein Gold - This would have been LaMancha’s nickname had I not decided to use the breed of goat with the funny ears. Based on what I’ve seen online, this is a type of cheese that was developed at Redwood HIlls Creamery and there’s way more information at this other blog. To summarize, they wash the cheese with cider from Gravenstein apples and that’s what makes it yellow. This cheese is aged so it’s firm and got a good stink. But only mildly stinky. And, it really is a good stink. I don’t have a good vocabulary to describe the stink of cheese, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that it’s enjoyable and try some yourself.

Camellia - This one is a soft one, very much like Camembert in texture and flavor and visually. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s probably made with the same process as camembert but with goat milk instead of cow milk. CAMEmbert? CAMEllia? They say this cheese is named after one of their favorite does, but it sounds like it’s also named after camembert.

Bucheret - This cheese has a texture is halfway between Camembert and feta, but flavor is more like Camembert.

Crottin - This one was quite similar to Bucheret and I can’t really do a good job describing the difference in their textures and flavors without both in front of me. I recall the difference in how they were made being that in one, the salt is mixed into the curd mixture before it’s added to the mold (to shape it, not mold like what grows on the cheese) and with the other, the salt is sprinkled on to the ends of the mold and it’s allowed to dissolve into the cheese. I think the former is Crottin and the latter is Bucheret.

They also have feta and chevre. These are pretty good, but there’s nothing interesting to say about them.

We wound up buying some chevre, Bucheret, and some of the Gravenstein Gold. I had a good dinner with some sour dough bread, these three cheeses, and some Rainier cherries! I would have liked to buy goat milk directly, probably to make ice cream, but maybe another time and another creamery.

Here’s one last bit of interesting information that I learned from the whole goat tour: Goats are seasonal and produce milk with highest fat and protein content in spring, and fall’s a close second. So goat cheese is best during those times.

We also stopped by Screamin’ Mimi’s in Sebastopol for ice cream. I was a little concerned when we walked in and it looked and smelled very much like a Ben and Jerry’s store. And I was a little disappointed in their flavors (I’ve been spoiled by Bi-Rite Creamery), but they still had a good selection and things were very tasty. LaMancha and Ben got lemon poppy and ginger, and I got black walnut and cassis sorbet. The lemon poppy was nice and bright, maybe a little too sweet and not tangy enough. The ginger good, but I would have preferred it to be more sharp and spicy Black walnut was good but not spectacular. The cassis sorbet was really nice with a full and bright flavor. The texture for everything was pretty good but I would have preferred it to be a little bit more custardy and chewy (which would be a direct result of custardiness). The best part of this place is that they sell you the ice cream by weight so you can get what you want to eat and what you want to pay for. My guess is that the bump up the price a little in exchange for the customization, but that’s okay, I think. It was a fun place to stop if you’re in Sebastopol, but there’s no need to go out of your way to come here. Bi-Rite kicks Screamin’ Mimi’s butt! And it’s much closer to where I live.

We had a few other stops up north, but this post is long enough and I’ve already covered the parts that are most worth writing about. See, I’m using these awkward phrases. That means it’s time to end now.

Last night, I went to a Pakistani/Indian restaurant in the Tenderloin that blew me away in how delicious it was - I haven’t been blown away by Indian/Pakistani food in a long time - there are many good places in San Francisco, but no one stood out from the rest of the pack.  It’s my new and clear favorite Indian/Pakistani restaurant!

The best dish was an eggplant curry dish. Eggplant by itself is magic, but in this dish, it was elevated beyond magical - to godliness and divinity. There’s also this hard to find (according to our C Facilitator, which, in this case, stands for curry facilitator) fish dish that looks like it’s cooked in the tandoor oven. (Is saying “tandoor oven” like saying “The El Camino”?) Others in the group thought this was the best dish, and it is quite good, but it was not even at the same level as the eggplant dish. Some of my companions think that Shalimar, a neighbor to this place, has better naan, but I respectfully disagree. The flavor of the dough was much better, almost sweeter. And the texture was better - chewy but very light at the same time. And there was a good balance of thin crusty parts and thicker, but not too thick parts. And they were very generous with the butter/ghee.

I haven’t revealed the name yet because that’s the best part. No, the eggplant was the best part. This is maybe second place. Lahore, pronounced “La whore.” Full name is actually Lahore Karahi. This extends the fun beyond dinner, both before an after… “I have a craving for Lahore.” After sitting in the fragrant atmosphere of the restaurant during your leisurely meal… “I smell like Lahore.” And so on.

They gave us some kulfi to end our meal. I’m not sure if they do this for everyone or if it was because of our C Facilitator, but it was a nice touch.

If I’ve ever recommended an Indian and/or Pakistani place to you in the past, scratch that. Just go to Lahore.

I went to the SF Chocolate Salon yesterday. There were lots of chocolate makers and confectioners and there were lots of chocolate to sample, but that wasn’t the highlight of my day. I’ll get to the highlights of the day later.

A ceramics buddy of mine who is a Guittard of the Guittard Chocolate Company had given us a tasting tutorial one night at the studio, so it was nice to have that preparation when sampling more of their offerings and other companies’ chocolates as well. Guittard had the widest variety and I enjoyed their flavors the most. My head and mouth and nose were all very stimulated and each variety was very different from the next (anything from berries to bananas to anise and more) and also very good. I really liked the Sur del Lago from Venezuela. Scharffen Berger’s chocolates are good, but they don’t have a lot of variety and there’s only really one bar (70%) that I really enjoy. The 60% bar is kinda dull and not as bright as the 70%. Amano might have more bars that they make, but they didn’t have many for us to taste. While they were interesting, many of the bars had weird plastic or gasoline flavors and that overwhelmed the chocolateness.

A photo of some of what Guittard had to offer at their table.

Most of the tables had chocolate treats. They were pretty tasty, but there were no confectioners that really distinguished themselves and their products in my mind. Christopher Elbow’s chocolates might have been the best, but still nothing blew me away. I got tired of eating these and I kept wishing that there were more chocolate bars for me to taste and compare. A big problem was that everything was so sweet! I think that the confections would have been tastier and more interesting if the sweetness didn’t overwhelm the other flavors. If I ever get into the business of making chocolate confections, I would make things much less sweet!

Christopher Elbow’s chocolates, for display only. They showed us all these varieties but they were only letting people sample three kinds.

They also had chocolate-inspired hair style demonstrations from a salon that specialized in multi-cultural hair. I think the multi-cultural thing is supposed to be the connection to chocolate. While we were waiting to get a table at Greens Restaurant (hold on, hold on, I’ll get to that part soon!), we sat through a chocolate body frosting demo. They had chocolate, paint brushes, and stencils and I guess it’s supposed to be romantic and fun, but the final result looked like moles.

We also tasted some wine with chocolate, but the wine wasn’t very good. And the wine was causing some weird reaction in my mouth when it was mixed with chocolate and it was not enjoyable at all. I’ll just drink wine (good wine) and eat chocolate separately from now on.

We were quite exhausted after eating all that chocolate. Many of us were in chocolate comas:

But one of us couldn’t get enough chocolate and needed a take out box:

The real story is that he couldn’t finish the samples that he was getting and needed a place to hold the chocolate overflow.

Okay, on to Greens! I’ve been wanting to try brunch at Greens and since the chocolate affair was at Fort Mason, we decided to hit Greens. So did a lot of other people. We wound up waiting 2 hours, but it was worth it. It gave us a chance to rest after eating so much chocolate. And the food was really good. Since Christina was complaining about some people having nicknames on the blog while she didn’t, I’ll start referring to people with nicknames. Bourbon Red and Poblano had a Mexican-flavored scramble with the fluffiest tastiest eggs that I have ever tasted. Big Ben had fettuccine with asparagus. And I had a butternut squash gratin with the squash and other vegetables (including poblanos) topped with a fromage blanc custard (I guess that’s the gratin part). There were also cipollini onions and polenta cakes on the side. It was amazing. Unfortunately, there are no photos partly because Poblano was making fun of me for taking so many pictures of food. So I kept the camera in my bag and just enjoyed my food. Number Seven and his Wifey decided to leave before we could get seated at Greens, but hopefully they’ll have an opportunity to go back and have brunch at Greens sometime! With a reservation made in advance!

My Greens Day didn’t stop there. One of Deborah Madison’s (original chef at Greens) recipes from her Local Flavors cookbook was included in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. And it was perfect for this time of year. Asparagus and Morel Bread Pudding. Yes, a savory bread pudding! Brilliant! I couldn’t find morels (I’m so jealous that Bourbon Red got to go morel hunting when he was in middle school. That sounds like fun!) so I used enoki and what I think were oyster mushrooms instead. I made some modifications (soy milk instead of cow milk, two extra eggs because four didn’t seem like enough). The bread was dark so that’s why it looks so dark in the photo.

The resulting bread pudding was delicious and I will be able to enjoy delicious leftovers for a while:

Next time, instead of soaking the bread in the milk and then adding the eggs later, I will try mixing the eggs into the milk first before soaking. I think that will make the bread more custardy. There were walnuts in the bread that made it extra tasty, so next time, if I use bread with no walnuts, I might add some on my own.

I often have to wait a long time at some of my favorite restaurants. But I have also been recommending my favorite restaurants in pretty public ways, like on this blog. Should I stop publishing my recommendations for my favorite restaurants because that will lead to longer wait times for me? Or maybe I should continue making these recommendations to help keep these restaurants in business and available to me. Or maybe I should monitor how long I have to wait at a restaurant and use that to decide whether I publish a review.

Of course, this assumes that my reviews are being read and actually have a significant impact on how many people go to restaurants.

Then again, just yesterday, some people (a friend of mine has passed along my reviews to them; I had never met them before) said that they “worship the ground that I walk on” because they ate at a place that I had suggested. But then again, they were from DC, so maybe it’s not that hard to recommend SF restaurants that will please them?  It just has to be better than restaurants in DC?

???

I went to Aziza for the first time last night. It was recommended by a number of people. I may be getting too used to the high quality of food in San Francisco because while the food was very well done, Aziza didn’t wow me enough to be very memorable among San Francisco restaurants. We had a goat cheese, tomato jam appetizer (they gave us a huge chunk of goat cheese, more than I buy for myself at once, but Mark amazingly did a good job polishing it off), I had a scallop dish with lemon saffron rice and pea shoots and chanterelles (the scallops had an inappropriately fishy taste, but other than that, it was very tasty), and Mark had a couscous with an assortment of root vegetables (sophisticated and deep flavors). All very nice, in general, but nothing knocked me over… until the dessert.

I must be feeling a need to try anything with pears, maybe because of the lost pear, bacon, and cheddar sandwich. They have a pear frangipane tart on their menu. It came with bitter almond ice cream and huckleberries. That part was okay. But the tart seriously blew me away with how creative and perfect it was. The pears were thinly sliced and caramelized on top and created a creme brulee-like top but with the added texture and flavor of pear. The frangipane part was so delicate and soft and light, with just the right amount of almond flavor. It was almost cakey, but it had the more dense and chewy texture of almond paste. I don’t know how such a combination of textures can be achieved. The bottom was a well-executed perfect short-dough crust. So brilliantly simple and brilliantly mind-blowing all at the same time.

The waitress was also lovely enough to give us a pot of mint tea that was orphaned. Thanks! I hope the tea was as grateful to be adopted as we were in adopting it. I often find that mint teas are sweetened too much, but this was just mint. Plus, the teapot had the most perfect spout ever. I haven’t figured out how to make a spout that pours well and doesn’t drip. I enjoyed the spout on this teapot so much that I kept pouring the tea over and over again. I imagined that other people watching me thought that I was drugged up, but it really was so fascinating. Not a single drop dripped.

And they also had really nicely shaped bowl and plates. Very deep and round. Beautiful for presenting food, but kinda hard to eat out of because you had to angle your knife in order to cut anything at the bottom of the bowls’ large basins.

Ha ha, my restaurant reviews have turned into reviews of the food and of the dinnerware! Maybe that can be my schtick.

Arlequin (a cafe in Hayes Valley) had these amazing grilled sandwiches with pear, bacon, and cheddar. I would often stop by before going to see a performance at the symphony or the opera or the ballet. This great combination of ingredients, flavors, and textures was an enjoyable surprise each time I had it. But recently, I haven’t been able to go. I’ve been in the neighborhood a number of times recently, but I thought that I couldn’t afford that extra bit of time to stop in for a sandwich. I finally went there a week ago with only one goal - to get this sandwich. They had done some lovely remodeling and reworking of the space. But my favorite sandwich was no longer on their menu. I was so heartbroken.

Enjoy those “pear, bacon, and cheddar grilled sandwiches” while they’re on the menu. Don’t put it off until another day because they may not be around. My sadness was probably exacerbated by my bittersweet feelings about graduating and leaving my beloved city. I have a list of new restaurants and old favorites that I want to make sure to hit before I move and I had budgeted a year to do that. But maybe a year’s not enough if they take these delicious items off of the menu!

I probably should have gone and ordered the sandwich as often as possible. If they thought they had more customers for the sandwich (even if it was me over and over again), maybe they would have left it on the menu! I could have both saved the sandwich and eaten it multiple times! What a tragedy!

Actually, don’t feel so bad for me. It’s such a simple sandwich, I can easily make it myself. In fact, there’s a recipe online. I’m not sure that one needs a recipe to make this sandwich, but Elise at Simply Recipes has interesting stuff to say about this sandwich.