Category Archives: Great Finds

Dim Sum for the New Year

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Clockwise from top: Sweet potato puff, durian puff, siu mai, har gau, and (center) sweet green tea dumpling -- all from Dynasty Seafood Restaurant in Cupertino.

Dim sum may mean “touch the heart” in Chinese.

But we all know these precious morsels tantalize the tummy, too.

Read the definitive guide to dim sum restaurants in the Bay Area in today’s San Francisco Chronicle Food section, which yours truly contributed to.

While helping to research this story, I picked up some helpful tips along the way:

1) To really judge the quality of your dim sum, refrain from using soy sauce, chile paste, hot mustard and the like. At least with your first bite. Just as we are so often guilty of drowning pristine sushi in soy sauce and wasabi, we unthinkingly do the same with dim sum. When it’s au naturale, though, you can really judge whether a filling has real flavor, and whether a wrapper is well made.

2) Bigger is not always better. As my friend Andrea Nguyen says, there’s a reason they’re made small. Nguyen, whose newest cookbook “Asian Dumplings” comes out in September, notes they should be bite-size. Once they start to get too large, the quality of the wrappers suffer.

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Pampered Japanese Dried Persimmons

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Dried persimmons -- Japanese style.

The Japanese sure give their food a lot of TLC.

Cows get massaged so their flesh transforms into buttery, extraordinarily rich Kobe beef. And even persimmons get the shiatsu treatment.

Maybe I should have been born a Japanese food product because I’d be one happy camper if I got back-rubs on a regular basis. But forgive me, I digress…

I’d never tried the famous hoshigaki before. So when I spied these dried persimmons at Nijiya Market in San Jose last week, I had to buy a package to try.

The traditional method, brought here by Japanese immigrant farmers who settled in Placer County, require that firm persimmons be peeled by hand, and hung by string for several weeks. During that interval — yes indeedie– the persimmons get regular massages.

The rub-downs apparently help break up the flesh and give the dried persimmons a more uniform shape. They also help smooth the exterior to retard mold. After three to six weeks of this, a white powdery bloom appears naturally on the fruit, and they’re ready to be enjoyed.

Hoshigaki (also spelled hoshi gaki) are not easy to find. Because they are so labor intensive to make, there’s little commercial production. In fact, Slow Food has added hoshigaki to its Ark of Taste, a classification given to artisan foods in danger of disappearing. The global food organization is working to revive this fruit tradition.

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Absinthe Makes the Heart Go Thump, Thump, THUMP (Part 1)

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Absinthe Verte

You’ve all heard the commotion about the once illicit spirit, absinthe, not only being legal again, but even being made domestically in the good ol’ Bay Area.

Absinthe had been illegal since 1912 because of supposed health concerns. It was thought that the chemical thujone, which is found in the herb wormwood (used in the making of absinthe), affected the brain. But that view has largely been debunked.

With so many afternoons at the keyboard already leaving me feeling brain dead at times, I thought I’d give it a shot. Admittedly, as someone who is far from fond of black licorice, I was both wary yet curious to try the spirit that the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau made legal again in 2007.

Turns out my first experience with the Green Fairy was all wrong.

Last year, Yankee Pier at Santana Row in San Jose started featuring Absinthe Verte made by Alameda’s own artisan distillery, St. George Spirits. A small sherry-size glass came to the table. The moment it was set down in front of us, I could smell the powerful herbal, anise aroma. The Absinthe Verte was served straight up. After seeing old movies where water is slowly dripped over a sugar cube into the green tea-colored spirit to temper the bitterness of the wormwood, I wondered if I shouldn’t be drinking this somehow diluted. The server assured me this was the correct way.

So I took a small sip, as did my hubby.

The Green Fairy: Diluted with ice (left), and straight (right).

WHOA, BABY!

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It’s a Pancake; It’s a Donut; It’s an Ebelskiver

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Wake up to these warm, filled, Danish pancake-donuts.

Santa brought me a new toy.

OK, really it was my cousin and her husband who did. But you get my drift.

I fairly squealed when I opened the big box to see my very own ebelskiver maker. Uh, what’s that you ask? It’s like a specialty frying pan with seven big dimples in it. You pour batter into each crater to create spherical, filled Danish pancakes known as ebelskivers.

For years, I’d seen the pans featured in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue. I wondered if they were easy to use. And I was curious whether the round donut-hole-shaped pancakes really tasted all that much better than your standard flat ones.

Once you get the hang of making them, they are pretty quick to make. It helps to have your batter, and your fillings at the ready near the stove, because you need to work fast.

And yes, since you need to beat the egg whites separately, and then fold them into the batter, be prepared to dirty more than one bowl.

Adding cherry jam.

Heat the pan over medium heat, with 1/4 teaspoon butter in each well of the pan. Pour in a tablespoon of batter, add a small amount of your favorite filling, then top with a little more batter to seal the filling in. After the bottoms brown (about 3 minutes), use two wooden skewers to flip over each pancake ball to cook the other side.

Serve with maple syrup, a sprinkle of powdered sugar. or a little whipped cream. Eat with a fork, or use your fingers. Enjoy as breakfast, brunch, or dessert.

Unlike flat pancakes, the ebelskivers get a crisper exterior that gives way to a soft interior that holds a surprise inside.

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Finally — Pinkberry Comes to Town

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Pinkberry's new seasonal flavor, pomegranate. (Photo courtesy of Pinkberry)

The wait is over for Northern California’s first Pinkberry.

The Korean-style tart fro-yo that started the whole craze will open Saturday, Jan. 17 at Santana Row in San Jose. You’ll find it in a pavillion in Santana Row that was once the concierge center.

Pinkberry serves two main flavors: Original (tart) and Green Tea. A new seasonal flavor makes its debut, too: Pomegranate.

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