Category Archives: Bakeries

Craft Chocolate Experience, La Cocina Municipal Marketplace, and More

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Inaugural Craft Chocolate Experience

Attention all chocoholics, don’t miss the first ever Craft Chocolate Experience at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, March 6 to 8.

This sweet extravaganza will bring bean-to-bar makers, chocolatiers, pastry chefs, and cacao bean farmers from around the world for panel discussions, cooking demos, and a chocolate marketplace with more than 85 artisans sampling and selling their creations.

There’s also an opening night party on March 6, featuring a dazzling array of chocolates, pastries and cocktails.

The renowned participants include: Jordi Roca from El Celler de Can Roca in Spain; Francisco Migoya, head chef at Modernist Cuisine; John Scharffenberger, founder of Scharffen Berger Chocolate; Kenji Lopez-Alt, chief culinary consultant for Serious Eats and author of “The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science” (W.W. Norton); and founder Todd Masonis of San Francisco’s Dandelion Chocolate.

Tickets for the opening night party are $95 each; a weekend pass to the event is $145 per person.

Celebrate A Milestone For La Cocina

La Cocina, San Francisco’s pioneering kitchen incubator for women, people of color, and immigrants wanting to start food ventures, expects to open its much-anticipated food hall this spring.

Momos at Bini's Kitchen. (Photo by Eric Wolfinger)
Momos at Bini’s Kitchen. (Photo by Eric Wolfinger)

To celebrate the impending debut of La Cocina Marketplace, a landmark all-women operated food hall, the organization is hosting a Week of Women in Food, March 2 to 8. It’s a series of prix fixe dinners spotlighting the seven La Cocina chefs who will make the new food hall their home. For these special dinners, each La Cocina chef will cook alongside a well-known, established Bay Area chef.

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The Aptly Named Aphrodisiac Biscuit

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Resistance is futile.
Resistance is futile.

If Valentine’s Day is all about showering the ones you love with an overload chocolate, then this biscuit is sure to do the trick — and then some.

“Aphrodisiac Biscuit” is aptly named because it not only has chopped chocolate inside a tender interior but glossy melted chocolate spread lavishly all over its top.

This decadent treat is from “The Big Bottom Biscuit: Specialty Biscuits and Spreads from Sonoma’s Big Bottom Market” (Running Press, 2019), of which I received a review copy.

The book is by Michael Volpatt, who opened the Big Bottom Market in Guerneville in 2011, a combo retail store and cafe that serves sandwiches, salads, and of course, biscuits.

It includes more than 50 recipes for biscuits, biscuit dishes and things that go with biscuits. In short, it will expand your horizon on just what biscuits can be.

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My Top 10 Eats of 2019

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So many places opened in 2019; and so many places closed. Be it astronomical housing costs to an extremely tight labor pool and the rising price of ingredients, the Bay Area remains a challenging landscape for restaurants.

Still, they somehow manage to put their best forward day in and day out. Here are my favorite eats of the year (in no particular order) — the ones I still dream about, and the ones I’d race back for in a heartbeat. Enjoy! And cheers to even more delicious morsels in 2020.

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Going Green For The Holidays with Matcha Cream Pie

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Beyond the tree and wreath, add a little more green to your holidays with this spectacular matcha cream pie.
Beyond the tree and wreath, add a little more green to your holidays with this spectacular matcha cream pie.

With a new year dawning, let’s all be brave enough to pledge to trust our gut instincts more.

I know so many friends who agonize over situations — analyzing, re-analyzing, and plain over-analyzing — before taking action, even if they know in their heart immediately what they should do.

I’ve been there many a time, myself.

Case in point: this “Matcha Cream Pie” recipe, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal in September.

It’s a recreation of the signature dessert at Stonemill Matcha in San Francisco by Pastry Chef Mikiko Yui.

It’s a dazzler, covered in a cloud of orange zest-scented whipped cream. It’s only when you cut into it that it truly reveals itself with its dramatic deep green filling made with matcha.

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As Kneaded Is What You Need

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Bread pudding (foreground) and bostock (back) from As Kneaded Bakery.
Bread pudding (foreground) and bostock (back) from As Kneaded Bakery.

After graduating with an anthropology degree during a recession when jobs were scarce especially for liberal arts majors, Iliana Berkowitz was lucky enough to unearth her true passion in life — baking.

She took a job at a bakery, followed by a stint at a French bistro, all the while honing her bread and pastry skills.

In 2016, she started a bakery pop-up and bread club in the East Bay. Both did so well that in late-2018, she opened an actual brick-and-mortar, her As Kneaded Bakery in San Leandro.

Pain d'epi and honey rye porridge loaf.
Pain d’epi and honey rye porridge loaf.

It now supplies bread to such restaurants as Flea St. Cafe in Menlo Park and The Alembic in San Francisco. And its loaves sell at a host of stores around the Bay Area, including Bianchini’s Market in San Carlos and Portola Valley; Berkeley Bowl in Berkeley; and Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco; as well as through Good Eggs delivery.

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