Category Archives: Chefs

Food Fun For Your Next Party

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Tacos and more tacos -- all at your doorstep. (Photo courtesy of Michele Mandell)

Why do all the cooking for your next soiree when you can have this baby parked in front of your house or office instead?

Sancho’s Taqueria, famous for its killer fish tacos, has debuted a new catering truck that will roll on over to your venue of choice to prepare all-you-can-eat tacos. Yes, that includes tacos filled with fish, al pastor, carne asada, choriza, pollo asado, and the like. Chips and salsa are included; drinks are extra. You need a minimum of 30 people to have the truck for 90 minutes. The cost for this feeding frenzy? $600.

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Martini Madness

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Martinis galore at last year's cocktail celebration. (Photo courtesy of Douglas Thompson)

If you’re feeling a little hung over from all that revelry on New Year’s Eve, martinis might not be exactly what you want to see right now.

But just think: You have eight days to recover before the Martini Madness Challenge 2009 rolls around at the Saddles Steakhouse at MacArthur Place Inn & Spa in Sonoma.

The Jan. 9 event (5 p.m. to 7 p.m.), part of the Sonona Valley Olive Festival, will feature 10 bartenders from various Sonoma Valley restaurants and bars presenting their top martini for judging.

Enjoy the fruits of their labor (shaken or stirred?), along with appetizers and live music. Tickets are $40 per person ($45 at the door). There’s also an $85 option that includes entry to the Martini Madness festivities, plus a three-course dinner at Saddles.

Purchase tickets here.

For more fun Sonoma Valley Olive Festival events, head to Ramekins Culinary School’s Vineyard Room in Sonoma on Jan. 24 to partake in the annual Feast of the Olive Dinner. A host of chefs will prepare a five-course feast inspired by olives, with matching wine pairings. The chefs will work in teams of two to prepare each course using local, artisan olives and olive oils.

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Playing It Sweet and Safe

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In these uncertain times, we long for stability. We crave comfort. We want reassurance.

What we need, dang it, is pudding.

Bradley Ogden’s butterscotch pudding, to be precise.

It’s a taste of nostalgia, of a better era, of more flush times. It’s a sweet, creamy spoonful that goes down ever so easily, unlike each morning’s painful headlines. And it’s got a touch of real booze in it. How many of us couldn’t use a bit of a buzz these days to calm our anxieties, right?

This classic dessert, that’s thick as all get out, and a real mouthful of butterscotch flavor, can be found on the dessert menus of the various Lark Creek Restaurant Group establishments, of which Ogden is a founder.

In the original recipe by Ogden’s mom, the pudding is baked in individual ramekins in a water bath. The restaurants make their pudding in one large pan in a water bath, then strain the baked pudding through a chinoise, before serving it in tulip glasses. By straining the pudding, you get rid of the thin, darker skin that forms on the pudding after baking. It also results in a pudding that’s a little less dense in texture.

Since the skin doesn’t bother me, and because I like the pudding at its very thickest, I cook mine with the individual ramekin method sans sieving post-baking. It’s the way Ogden’s mom made it, and the way he prefers it, too.

Make a batch of this awesome butterscotch pudding, and welcome 2009 with a sure thing.

The pudding needs to be made a day ahead of serving, as it needs time to chill and set up in the refrigerator. Covered with foil, the pudding will keep in the refrigerator for about 3 days.

Butterscotch Pudding

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A Show-Stopping Dessert with A Spicy Taste of Winter

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Gingerbread cake that's mmm, mmm good.

This is one of the desserts that award-winning San Francisco Pastry Chef Emily Luchetti says she makes most often.

It’s easy to understand why.

It’s a classic gingerbread cake with an air of elegance and sophistication because of its accouterments — a compote of warm, tender apples, and a rich, creamy sabayon with the added complex kick of Calvados (apple brandy).

Luchetti says she used to slice the cake and build little gingerbread houses out of them. Now, she takes the simpler approach and just cuts the cake into squares. “Tastes just as good,” she says with a smile.

“Gingerbread with Warm Apples and Cider Sabayon” is from Luchetti’s lastest book, “Classic Stars Desserts” (Chronicle Books).

The dark, moist cake looks almost like it’s made of chocolate because of the molasses in the batter. Warm spices including ground ginger, cinnamon, and cloves give it a comforting taste of winter.

The cider sabayon is made by whisking egg yolks, sugar, apple juice and Calvados in a double-boiler until thick and smooth. Then, whipped cream is gently folded into the cooled sabayon for even more luxuriousness. I could happily eat this by the spoonful all on its own. But that would be wrong, wouldn’t it?

You can make the cake, warm apples (I used a mix of Galas and Granny Smiths), and sabayon a day ahead of time. Just reheat the apples before serving.

I made this dessert for my in-laws’ Christmas gathering. Even my husband’s 20-something nephews went wild for it.

The recipe says it serves 6, but that would mean some seriously large slabs of cake. I found that it makes more like 8 servings, even for me, who can’t get enough of this knockout dessert.

Gingerbread with Warm Apples and Cider Sabayon

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Take Five with Pastry Chef Extraordinaire Emily Luchetti, On Leaving the Savory Side for the Sweet One

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San Francisco Pastry Chef Emily Luchetti. (Photo courtesy of Jeff Gleason)

The name, Emily Luchetti, is synonymous with desserts so luscious you want to seriously lick the plate even after swallowing the last forkful. Civility, be damned!

That’s not surprising given her reputation. The 51-year-old Luchetti is executive pastry chef of Nick’s Cove in Marshall; and Farallon, Waterbar, and Epic Roadhouse, all in San Francisco. A veteran cookbook author, she also was named James Beard Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2004.

Recently, I talked with her about why she made the switch from line cook to pastry chef, the one baked good she’s been unable to master, how she stays trim around all that butter, and the incredibly sweet tale of how she met her husband, Peter.

Q: You were working as a cook in the private dining room of Goldman Sachs in New York and Peter was a trader. You dated, and then decided to head to France without him for a year to study cooking. And at the end of the year, he picked you up at the airport, and you two have been together since? That is way too romantic.

A: (laughs) But he didn’t tell you that the first time he asked me out, I said ‘no’!

I had just broken up with a guy. I needed a break. It was nothing personal. But the second time that Peter asked me out, I thought he might not ask a third time, so I said ‘yes.’

Q: So did you court him with your cooking?

A: I was doing savory food then. I was at Goldman’s because I needed a job to pay the rent. Cooking was something I always loved to do, but I didn’t consider it as a career. This was in 1979, back when cooking wasn’t as popular as it is now. But the more I did of it, the more I fell in love with it.

Maybe I did keep Peter interested because I fed him. Plus, I think he liked my enthusiasm.

Q: When did you start doing pastry professionally?

A: I was at Stars in San Francisco then (in the mid-1980s). I knew I wanted to do desserts. The woman who was doing pastries there was pregnant and wasn’t going to come back. I didn’t have pastry training, but I figured I had nine months to convince my boss to give me the job.

Q: What was it about pastry making that you enjoyed?

A: Peeling shrimp or cooking a bunch of salmon fillets didn’t excite me. I didn’t like cooking on the line, not knowing what was going to happen each evening. So much of my destiny seemed out of my control. When you do desserts, you plate them to order, but a large part is done ahead of time.

I’m a day person, too, not a late-night person. Plus, I married a guy who was a trader, and he was getting up really early, too. You can’t have opposite shifts all the time in a relationship or you’d be like two ships passing in the night.

Q: Were you one of those kids who baked all the time?

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