Caramels with A Goaty Tang

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Soft, pillowy caramels made with goat milk and goat butter.

Gooey soft, sticky, sweet and with a unique chevre-like finish.

That’s the remarkable taste of Happy Goat Caramels, made in small batches by hand in San Francisco.

The candies are made with Grade A Kosher-certified goat’s milk and goat butter from small, free-range farms. For friends who are lactose-intolerant, these might be the perfect treats as goat’s milk is naturally sweeter but lower in lactose than cow’s milk. Goat’s milk also has more Vitamin A and Vitamin B than cow’s milk.

Happy Goat Caramels made in San Francisco.

I recently had a chance to try samples of the all-natural caramels ($6.99 for a package of 7; and $9.99 for a package of 14), which are available at Sur La Table and select Whole Foods stores.

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Ramen Rama

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Tender pork rib ramen at Ajisen in Fremont.

San Francisco boasts some of the best eats in the Bay Area. And deservedly so.

But when it comes to bountiful bowls of authentic Japanese ramen, the South Bay and East Bay may just one-up the City by the Bay with its three noodle joints with bonafide roots in Japan.

Ringer Hut, which originated in Nagasaki in 1963, may operate more than 550 noodle restaurants in Japan, but it has only one outpost in the United States -– in San Jose. The restaurant, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary, is the champon champion. Champon means “blend’’ in Japanese, and that’s exactly what you get when you order the specialty “Nagasaki Champon’’ ($7 to $9.70, depending upon the size). Dig through the huge bowl of milky white broth with a subtle peppery kick to find cabbage, shrimp, fish cake and pork, as well as a mound of springy noodles slightly thicker than ramen ones.

The famous Nagasaki Champon at Ringer Hut.

Gomoku ramen (soy-based with seafood, cabbage, green onions) at Ringer Hut.

Both the champon and ramen noodles are exceptionally fresh, as they are made daily here from flour milled in Japan.

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Hazelnut Heaven

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Crumbly scones with a swirl of hazelnut spread.

That’s exactly what these scones are.

Aren’t you just getting giddy looking at how thoroughly packed with crunchy hazelnuts they are?

One of my favorite baking books from 2008 was “Baked: New Frontiers in Baking” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang) by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, who own the Baked bakery in Brooklyn, NY. So I was thrilled to hear that the duo just brought out a sequel to that book. “Baked Explorations” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), which offers 75 more recipes for irresistible homespun baked goods that are equally straightforward to make and yield exceptionally spot-on flavors.

The recipe for “Nutella Scones” caught my eye immediately after I received a review copy of the new book. Made with Nutella, toasted hazelnuts and cocoa powder, these beauties bake up as dark as a pan of brownies.

They look like they’d be too rich and heavy to enjoy for breakfast or brunch. But trust me, looks are deceiving. The crumb is actually quite light, crisp and crumbly. And the cocoa powder adds a hint of chocolate without hitting you over the head senseless with it.

Hazelnut spread with the consistency of natural peanut butter.In fact, I purposely played up the hazelnut factor by substituting hazelnut spread for the Nutella, since I happened to have a sample can of Love ‘n’ Bake’s Hazelnut Praline in my pantry. Like Nutella, it is made from roasted hazelnuts and sugar, but the one difference is there is no cocoa in it. Instead, it’s a pure nut spread with the thickness and consistency of natural peanut butter.

With any scone dough, be sure not to over-mix or else you’ll end up with leaden, tough baked goods. Never a good thing.

A generous amount of toasted, chopped hazelnuts gets stirred into the dough, before it is gently patted into a rectangle. A bit of Nutella or hazelnut praline paste is spread on top of the dough, before it is rolled up jelly roll-style. Then, you stand the roll of dough up on one end and gently flatten it down until you have a thick disk. Cut out wedges and bake.

When the scones come out of the oven, heat a little more Nutella or hazelnut praline paste in the microwave until the texture is more pourable, then drizzle over the top of each scone like glaze on cake.

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Five Heavy-Hitting Cookbook Authors to Visit the Bay Area

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Maybe those of you in the South Bay haven’t had a chance to eat the fried chicken and popovers at Wayfare Tavern in San Francisco yet. But you can still meet its chef-owner up close and personal.

Tyler Florence will be in San Jose at 5 p.m. Oct. 19 at Sur La Table in Santana Row for a Q&A session and a book signing of his latest cookbook, “Tyler Florence Family Meal” (Rodale Books).

The new cookbook is a collection of recipes he makes for family, including his wife and kids, as well as restaurant colleagues.

Attendees are encourage to pre-purchase the cookbook, available beginning on Oct. 12.

His fellow Food Network darling, Rachael Ray, also will be stopping by Sur La Table in Santana Row in San Jose at 3 p.m. Dec. 11.

Ray will be signing copies of her new cookbook, “Rachael Ray’s Look + Cook” (Clarkson Potter), filled with 100 recipes, each with step-by-step, full-color photos that illustrate how to create the dish.

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A Visit to Saison 2.0

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Perhaps no restaurant epitomizes today’s necessitated bent toward creative entrepreneurship better than San Francisco’s Saison.

Last summer, much like so many budding tech impresarios of yesteryear,  Chef-Owner Joshua Skenes and sommelier whiz Mark Bright, cloistered themselves away to improvise on what would become a makeshift once-a-week restaurant. Their location wasn’t a garage, but what was once a historic stable that is now the Stable Cafe, which leased its kitchen and rear dining room to the dynamic duo.

From the spacious but far from state-of-the-art kitchen, Skenes turned out elegant, four-star, fine-dining fare served on the best china to jeans-clad diners who sat at bistro-style, slat chairs before cramped, bare wood tables.

It wasn’t long before word spread, important restaurant critics came calling, top food magazines started taking notice, and investors wanted, well, to invest.

The result this summer is version two of Saison — with a lot more waitstaff, a fancy Molteni stove in the kitchen, a large hearth on the redone patio for open-fire cooking, and actual upholstered, cushy banquettes in the dining room the shade of washed denim.

The restaurant has gone from pop-up to permanent. It now serves dinner five nights a week.

It’s a fitting stage for this young chef and young sommelier to show off their talents. Skenes earned rave reviews when he was at Chez TJ in Mountain View, then impressed the likes of Michael Mina so much that the San Francisco mega chef tapped Skenes to open his Stonehill Tavern restaurant in Monarch Beach, CA. Bright also has a Mina connection. At 17, he started working at Mina’s Aqua restaurant in the Bellagio in Las Vegas. On his 21st birthday, he became part of the Bellagio sommelier team, before being asked to become the opening sommelier at Restaurant Michael Mina in San Francisco.

My husband and I had a chance to check out the remodeled space last week, when Skenes invited us in as his guests to celebrate our anniversary, throwing in a few extra dishes for the occasion.

One eight-course menu is offered each night for $98; with an additional $78 for wine pairings. Big spenders can get a real bird’s eye view of the cooking by sitting at the chef’s counter at the back of the kitchen for a personalized 14- to 20-course dinner that runs $300 to $500 per person, depending upon ingredients used.

A dish before it goes out to the dining room.

We sat in the dining room, where Bright was eager to have us try a surprise — his own wine, the first he’s ever made.

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