Category Archives: Pizza

Sneak Peek: Mayfield Bakery & Cafe

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Flaky, buttery croissants at the new Mayfield Bakery & Cafe.

When restaurateur Tim Stannard was just a kid and his father a professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, he remembers riding his bike through the campus and across El Camino Real to buy candy bars at the drugstore that once stood on this spot.

Now, Stannard and his Bacchus Management Group have transformed that icon of his childhood into his newest restaurant venture, Mayfield Bakery & Cafe.

It opens for dinner on Monday, Feb. 9, and will add lunch, breakfast, and brunch service in the weeks to come. I got a sneak peek on Saturday night of the newest restaurant to open in the Palo Alto Town & Country Village, which will serve up wood-fired American cuisine.

Mini versions of the restaurant's Niman Ranch chuck burgers with fried onions and remoulade were served at Saturday's invitation-only, opening party.

On the opening menu, find burrata bruschetta ($12); griddled artic char with cracked wheat, herbs, olive oil and dates ($22.50); braised lamb cheeks with gremolata and parsley paparadelle ($19.75); and spit-roasted Fulton Ranch chicken with rosemary polenta and green olive-melted tomato sauce ($19).

Diners also will get a choice of sparkling or still filtered water served in carafes gratis — a nice, and environmentally-sound touch. All the coffee served will be organic, fair-trade, and roasted by Bacchus’ ROAST coffee company in Oakland. The beans will be ground and brewed to order.

The bakery.

The bakery, overseen by Pastry Chef Nancy Pitta, formerly of San Francisco’s Boulevard restaurant, will supply fresh-baked bread twice a day to all Bacchus Management restaurants, including the Village Pub in Woodside, and Spruce in San Francisco.

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Charlie Ayers’ Calafia Cafe Opens

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Inside Calafia Cafe & Market A Go Go. (Photo courtesy of Ben Mayorga)

The long-awaited debut restaurant by the former executive chef of Google has opened for business at Palo Alto’s Town & Country Village.

Calafia Cafe & Market A Go Go is the brainchild of Charlie Ayers, one-time private chef to the Grateful Dead. Although the cafe is open, the market  — with its planned salad bar, rotisserie chicken, and pre-cooked meals to reheat at home — won’t open its doors until February.

The eclectic, global menu of the casual eatery emphasizes fresh, healthy, local, and sustainable. You’ll find everything from brown rice sushi ($9) to Crouching Chicken Pizza (Five-spice chicken, tiger sauce, mushrooms, white sesame seeds, and greens; $9), Chinese Chicken Salad ($7.50), Lacquered Beef Short Ribs ($16), and Vegan Sticky Buns with Maple Syrup ($7).

Carafes of house-filtered still or carbonated water are set on the tables. Lumber from a 1910 Pennsylvania barn was reclaimed for the ceiling. A chandelier of 66 recycled milk bottles graces the front dining area. Other custom table lamps are constructed from a found gas can and dairy can; and counters are made from recycled paper put under immense pressure to create a hard, dense surface.

Pizza -- Charlie Ayers' way. (Photo courtesy of Chris Schmauch)

The cafe and bar are open daily, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Happy Hour, 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. daily, will feature select wines, beers, and appetizers at a discount.

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Her Majesty’s Secret Flour

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Italian doppio zero flour

That’s ”00” to you.

And yes, you can shake it or stir it, but you might get very messy in the process.

Sorry about the James Bond 007 pun, but I couldn’t resist. Doppio zero flour is also known as “OO” flour. The numbers refer to the grade of flour. The “00” is the finest milled available.

I was induced to hunt it down after making the pizza dough recipe in the “A16 Food+ Wine” (Ten Speed Press) cookbook by Nate Appleman and Shelley Lindgren. The first time I made it, I used all-purpose flour. It turned out incredible. But of course, wondering if a good thing could be made even better, I was curious if “00” would produce an even more spectacular dough, since A16 restaurant uses that regularly for its pasta and pizza doughs

While in Wine Country recently, I happened to find bags of Italian doppio zero at Sunshine Foods Market in St. Helena. I loaded up on it.

The “00” flour is very light and powdery to the touch. Following the A16 recipe, I mixed the “00” flour with a smidgen of yeast dissolved in water, olive oil, and salt. I covered the bowl and put it in the fridge for two days to ferment and slowly rise.

A16 pizza dough made with doppio zero.

When I pulled out the dough, I noticed it was stickier than the one I had made with all-purpose flour. It might be that the “00” is so fine, you need more of it. But because the recipe gives the flour measurement only in cups, not in grams, it’s hard to tell.

This dough also was more elastic. Indeed, it was easy to stretch the dough very thinly so that the pizza baked up with a very crisp center.

Before putting the pizza on a baking stone in the oven, I layered on my own combination of paper-thin slivers of garlic, truffle cheese, and fresh basil leaves. When it emerged blistered and golden from the oven, I draped prosciutto over it.

Pizza topped with garlic, basil, truffle cheese, and prosciutto.

It was one mighty fine pizza. I can’t say that the “00” flour imparted any more taste necessarily to the pizza. But it made the dough a pleasure to work with, and perhaps even crispier.

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Chef Nate Appleman On His Superb Pizza Dough Recipe

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Last weekend, I had the opportunity to talk to Nate Appleman, executive chef-owner of A16 in San Francisco, about his wondrous three-day pizza dough recipe. You might remember my original post, touting it.

I cornered him after he did a cooking demo at the “Worlds of Flavor International Conference” at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone campus in St. Helena.

I told him how much I LOVED his pizza dough recipe because it was so easy to make, and it resulted in such a soft, elastic dough. It’s featured in his new cookbook, “A16 Food +Wine” (Ten Speed Press), which was co-written by the restaurant’s wine director, Shelley Lindgren.

I mentioned, though, that I was more than a little skeptical at the start that the dough would actually rise, given it only had a quarter teaspoon of yeast in it to 4 cups of flour.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one.

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The Pizza Dough That Takes Three Days to Make

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Pizza Bianco, pre-baking

Don’t let that scare you off.

It does take about three days to make this pizza dough. But most of that time, the dough is just hanging out in the fridge, doing its own thing.

Pizza Bianco, post-baking

This recipe comes from the new “A16: Food + Wine” (Ten Speed Press) cookbook by Nate Appleman, Shelley Lindgren, and Kate Leahy. Yes, it’s the new cookbook from one of my favorite San Francisco restaurants, A16, where I have swooned over many a thin-crust, Neapolitan-style pizza.

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