Now’s the time for fresh olallieberries to eat out of hand, to make jam or to bake pies and cobblers.
But there’s another fab way to enjoy the sweet-tangy flavors of these plump berries.
Luis Moro Chocolate of Santa Cruz has a lovely new bonbon made with olallieberries that is out of this world.
With searing temperatures of late, why not reach for some new sorbets to beat the heat?
Especially when they’re made right here in the Bay Area in small batches with locally sourced ingredients and without any dairy.
Garden Creamery, which is made in Marin County, is the brainchild of Bay Area residents, Erin Lang and Natalie Parker. Recently, they reformulated the sorbets to make them even smoother in texture. Additionally, they added two new flavors: French Press Coffee and Thai Iced Tea.
All the sorbets are made with coconut puree to add body and sweetened with organic agave syrup.
Recently, I had a chance to try the new flavors.
From now on, I’m seriously going to have to put blinders on when I stroll past the freezer case at Whole Foods.
That’s because the supermarket chain has just started selling fabulous gelato bars by the Bay Area’s Naia that if left to my own devices, I could eat daily.
Forget those lickable ice cream bars of childhood, which were enjoyed mostly because of their creamy coolness, not their flavor. These gelato bars are made with primo, local ingredients including Oakland’s Blue Bottle Coffee, San Francisco’s TCHO Chocolate, Oakland’s Numi jasmine tea and Alameda’s St. Georges Spirits single malt whiskey.
Yeah, I thought that would get your attention.
Gelateria Naia (pronounced “NIGH-ah”) was founded in Berkeley in 2002 by Chris Tan and Trevor Morris, world travelers who studied with artisan gelato makers in Italy. The two now have two retail scoop shops in Walnut Creek and San Francisco.
It’s a good thing that opposites attract.
We often joke that my husband is the Nasdaq to my “flatline.” His personality tends to be more volatile than mine, which is fairly even-keeled.
And when it comes to cookies, he favors a soft, cakey texture to my fondness for crisp and chewy.
So, when Harvard-educated pastry chef Joanne Chang of Boston’s Flour Bakery & Cafe came out with a recipe last year for chocolate chip cookies that promised to be chewy with the addition of bread flour in the dough, I was intrigued whether it would somehow satisfy both my husband’s likes, as well as my own.
The recipe, “Chocolate Chunk Cookies” is from Chang’s cookbook, “Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston’s Flour Bakery & Cafe” (Chronicle Books), of which I received a review copy. The cookbook includes more than 100 recipes from her bakery, where 1,500 customers come to get their sweet tooth fix every day.
The dough calls for both milk chocolate and semisweet chocolate. I used a sample of Taza Semi-Sweet Baking Squares that I had recently received. Unlike other chocolates, Taza’s products are processed minimally and made from stone-ground beans. The result is chocolate with a much rougher texture, but deep flavor. The baking squares are earthy, with a noticeable acidity and slight bitterness. An 8-ounce container is $10.50.
The dough is a mix of all-purpose and bread flour, along with both granulated and light brown sugars, and plenty of butter. Chang recommends letting the dough firm up in the refrigerator for at least a day before baking the cookies to let the ingredients meld, which is what I did.
If you want to know where the power people dine in Silicon Valley, look no farther than the Village Pub in Woodside.
I don’t think I’ve seen this many men in suits in a South Bay/Peninsula restaurant — ever. It was kind of a nice change of pace, too, from the usual “casual Friday”-look that sadly tends to permeate every day of the week here.
On a recent Friday night, when I was invited to dine as a guest of the restaurant, the elegant dining room with its dark,polished wood and plush burgundy velvet banquettes was hopping, with every seat taken. Quite a few tables were occupied by an all-male party, with at least one displaying an open laptop on the table.
Chef Mark Sullivan of Spruce in San Francisco opened the restaurant 10 years ago. The day-to-day cooking now is overseen by Executive Chef Dmitry Elperin, who has worked at such San Francisco stalwarts as One Market, Campton Place and Aqua.
We had a prime table right in front of the roaring, open hearth that affords a peek into the kitchen. Dark, crusty loaves of bread (from sister establishment Mayfield Bakery & Cafe in Palo Alto) are kept at the foot of the fire to ensure slices arrive at your table warm each and every time.