Kaylen Baker

Mole and mezcal

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arts@sfbg.com

FOOD Roughly a month after Sabrosa opened its tinted doors to flocks of the rarer type of Marina patron — one hungry for trend-pushing, flavor-forward cuisine — word got out that the plates outshine the cocktails at this upscale Mexican restaurant and bar.

With Chef Jose Ramos of Nopalito at the stove, braising up a mole-darkened storm of costilla de puerco, it’s easy to taste why. The confit pork short ribs slid off the bone with more ease than it took to scoop up mashed plantains. The Veracruzan Xico mole intertwined spices sweet, savory, and earthy all at once, imbibing the meat with a moisture so viscous (and I say this with only the highest compliments) that I mistook myself for an earthworm and the mole for luscious mud. I wanted to bottle it and drink it through a straw.

Ramos’ dishes manifest from memories of growing up as a child on a small farm in Guanajuato, Mexico. Recipes taught by his mother, aunt, and grandmother surface on the menu, recast as gourmet. The food captures a cultural authenticity of various regions of Mexico while contributing to the newest trend in local eateries: high-end Mexican. Much like the decades-old “California Cuisine” pioneered by Alice Waters, this modern twist on Mexican cooking conjures up a vision of authenticity while keeping a cactus-like claw on top of the fine dining scene.

interior

Take the salpicón de jaiba, where Dungeness crab, chayote squash, carrots, onions, and watermelon radish meld in a kindling of colorful citrus slivers over a turf of guacamole. The dish contains recognizably Mexican elements (guacamole, lime) and familiar American favorites (crab, squash). Yet it also carries hidden flavors — or perhaps creates new ones — through the pairing of exquisite ingredients and techniques.

Chef Ramos was busy the night I was invited to visit. The most I glimpsed of him appeared in the bright green of my salad, which masqueraded briefly as bell peppers, until a slight squish between teeth gave way to delightfully slick, cured nopales amid buttery avocado and sprinkles of cotija cheese. The fresh flavor combination reminded me of my own father’s home-style Mexican cooking — though neither my home nor my father are Mexican.

Matt Stanton, the bar manager, sat down to chat. After opening El Dorado Cocktail Lounge and the Noble Experiment with his brothers in San Diego, Stanton took on the challenge of playing matchmaker between drinks and food at Sabrosa, a position that could be likened to the role of connective tissue in a human body.

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First, Stanton had to match the precedence of cocktails set by the previous booze-focused venues of owners Hugo Gamboa, Adam Snyder, and Andy Wasserman. Next, he needed to create a drink menu that would highlight Ramos’ cooking — even create a sort of alcoholic baptism between the varying topographies of the aperitivos, barra fria, tacos y quesedillas, and entradas. Trickiest of all, he hoped to push past the boundaries of swinging saloon doors and run with his ideas, all the while holding hands with the traditional taste buds of the Marina.

“People love their vodka sodas down here,” said Stanton. “But that doesn’t mean the neighborhood isn’t ready to get more adventurous.” Rather than create something revolutionary, he decided to elevate classic cocktails using fresh juices and house-made syrups and grenadines. Next, Stanton incorporated ingredients into the bar that Ramos used in the kitchen, allowing the drink to lead diners into their meals. The Fillmore Añejo cocktail guides your palate into spicy dishes through morita chile-infused honey. With the Macho Margarita, a jalapeño gets lit on fire, then submerged into pueblo viejo blanco, topped with fresh lime, and ringed with cracked salt.

Most of the drinks featured tequila or mezcal, the latter a distillation of agave that many people aren’t yet familiar with. Most who’ve encountered mezcal have drunk a cheap, corn syrup-saturated variety, to which Stanton said, “you might as well stir it with your foot.” (Tip: to test the quality of mezcal, shake the bottle. Bubbles should slowly turn to pearls that cling to the glass, and take a long time to disperse.) So Stanton worked on a few introductory cocktails that would warm diners up to mezcal.

Bartender Adrian Vazquez,however, swore that mezcal is best sipped on its own, the same way it’s drunk in Mexican homes for mystic, medic, and aphrodisiac reasons. Vazquez first gave a salutation to the gods — “Dixeebe!” — then began our mezcal tasting.

Mezcal is made from many different types of agave (not just blue agave, where tequila begins), and is roasted for about five days. The proofs range wildly, as does each flavor. A 42 percent mezcal from an espadin agave grown in the mountains tasted smoky, floral, and pungent, while a 47.8 percent espadin tasted oily and dry from the desert air where it was grown. A third mezcal, smelling of leather, came from a white mountain agave called tobala that grew, as Vazquez put it in his soft accent, “under the shadow.”

When I slipped out of Sabrosa and into the shadows that night, I couldn’t decide which had impressed more: Ramos’ dishes or my newfound taste for mezcal. *

 

SABROSA

 

Open daily, 11am-3:30pm (lunch), 5:30-11pm (dinner), bar till 2am

Weekend brunch 10am-3:30pm

3200 Fillmore, SF

(415) 638-6500

www.sabrosasf.com

Carb your enthusiasm

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On a bright November afternoon, I ducked into Biondivino, a tiny but tremendously well-stocked Italian wine shop in Russian Hill, to meet John Pauley and Anna Li of Mattarello — an artisanal, handmade pasta pop-up.

Li, a Europe-raised, multilingual physician by day and tortellini-shaper by night, greeted familiar faces while pulling bundles of sage pappardelle, whole-wheat tagliatelle, parsley-garlic tagliatelle, squid ink spaghetti, saffron cavatelli, and the coveted tortellini al brodo from inside a cooler. Pauley, a former chef at several restaurants including the nearby La Folie, now works as a full-time sfoglini, or Bolognese-style pasta maker, for the couple’s two-year-old venture. If he was tired after spending five-and-a-half hours rolling out 50 pounds of dough (and subsequently stuffing and shaping it into 26 portions of thimble-sized, knotted nuggets), it didn’t show.

Walking me along the foldout table where pastas winked with specks of semolina, Pauley discussed their journey into la sfoglia. Five years ago while traveling in Bologna, a culinary capital known for parmigiano reggiano, prosciutto, mortadella, and tortellini, Pauley apprenticed with pasta makers Franco and Grazia Macchiavelli of Salumeria Bruno e Franco.

“In Bologna, pasta making is pretty much women’s work,” Pauley explained. Naturally, the women at the school were intrigued that a man would come all the way from San Francisco to learn their practice. “We all fell in love with each other,” said Pauley.

Mattarello maintains the same authentic spirit as the pasta made in Bologna. “Tortellini is as Bolognese as the Golden Gate Bridge is [San Franciscan],” said Pauley. Yet he was quick to point out that authenticity means different things to different people. In Bologna, tortellini is only eaten in broth. “To change something, you have to understand where it comes from. You start with a 450-year-old recipe for tortellini.”

In the US, Li and Pauley noticed, the bar for pasta has been set very low. Americans treat it as a vehicle for heaping on store-bought sauce and every vegetable in the pantry. On the other hand, explained Pauley, “the mistake other people make is that bringing a virgin olive oil or cheese back from Italy doesn’t make that food authentic. The spirit of cooking authentic Italian food here would mean, say, using great artisan prosciutto from Iowa.”

Pauley’s version of tortellini involves driving two hours to get the perfect farm eggs. “The hardest part is finding the right coloring. The egg yolks need to be orange to make the pasta really golden.”

He makes almost everything by hand in order to “get intimate with the pasta.” It’s not supposed to look perfect. The tortellini is stuffed with a mix of pork loin, eggs, parmesan, nutmeg, salt, and breadcrumbs; rolled; and sold the very next day.

That night I cooked the golden knots until they bobbed to the top of my boiling pot for several seconds, and slid a spoonful into my mouth. The texture alone was startling — the silk of the broth combined with an elastic, tender chew of pasta, creating a wholly new experience. The flavor came almost as an afterthought, in a delightfully grounding depth of meat, lift of nutmeg, and occasional bite of pepper, wrapped snugly between the sweet broth containing the brined memory of gently bruised vegetables. It only helped that the sky had turned dark and rainy.

The exception to Pauley’s handmade rule comes in the form of squid ink spaghetti, when he swaps the mattarello (or rolling pin, after which the pop-up was named), for the torchio, or “my torture device,” as he calls it. It began as a fun experiment after a trip to the Amalfi Coast, but customers can’t order enough, and La Folie has begun ordering it for its menu. “It’s too good of a product,” said Pauley, shrugging.

I leaned closer to the coiled ropes, noticing that they smelled strongly of the ocean in their pre-boiled state. I pinched one end of a beautiful black noodle, rubbed the Play-Doh-like string between my fingers, and took a bite. Raw, it contained an oddly tender chew. Cooked, it firmed up, yet remained fragile, pliable — I was seized with the desire to create a whole new adjective to describe these noodles, because the ones that came to mind couldn’t adequately capture what I tasted.

An epiphany: Fresh pasta is the dish. You need never wonder what you’re going to do with pasta — you’re not going to dress it, or drown it. You’re going to eat it. I ate these squid noodles in Mattarello tomato sauce for round one, which hid the essence of the sea more than I wished. I went lighter in round two, with a squirt of lemon juice, a plop of butter, a glop of olive oil, grated parmesan, and (this may sound strange) small chunks of avocado. Delectable, absolutely.

Amid San Francisco’s ultra-hip, ultra-now pop-up scene, Li and Pauley have witnessed friends turn their transitory trucks and tables into brick-and-mortar restaurants. They have business-savvy friends who tell them that now is the time to move forward.

“We know we’re at a fork, but we don’t know yet which prong we’re going to take,” said Pauley. He briefly pondered a larger pop-up, or expanding into more locations, but opening an eatery doesn’t appeal. “Anna is a doctor, and I don’t miss the restaurant scene, the appetizers, the entrées, the running around.” Pauley stops to say hi to friends entering Biondivino, then concludes, “I love making love to my dough. I love doing this.” *

Mattarello’s next pop-up is Dec. 22, noon-3pm at Biondivino, 1415 Green, SF. For future locations and pre-ordering, visit www.mattarellosf.com.

 

Chef Michael Anthony talks ‘The Gramercy Tavern Cookbook’

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The Gramercy Tavern Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, 352 pp., $50) takes you on a restaurant tour, beginning with Danny Meyer’s initial conception of opening this New York establishment, continuing past the chief steward and his wheelbarrow of fresh spring produce from the Greenmarket, around the harvest table where the floral designer pairs yellow sprays of sunflowers with splayed summer squash, into the kitchen during the staff’s family meal, past the pastry station where Nancy Olson creates her autumn peanut butter semifreddo, and ending at the dining table with a winter dish of guinea hen prepared by James Beard Award-winning chef Michael Anthony.

By the time you’ve read through this serious and seriously exquisite cookbook, ogled the colorful photos, and closed the enormous, masculine-elegant back cover, you’ve spent a whole year eating inside the Tavern. Your appreciation for the minute mechanics that run a restaurant will have widened, and your list of must-try recipes? Exploded. (I’ve already checked off the curious “Cauliflower with Quinoa, Prunes, and Peanuts” with happy results). Chef Anthony, making his first trip to San Francisco in December, spoke to me about his vision behind the book.

SF Bay Guardian Who did you write this cookbook for?

Michael Anthony For the fans of Gramercy Tavern who’ve eaten at the restaurant and have fallen in love with it over the years. Or, eventually, people who have not yet discovered it, who have heard of the name and want to become insiders. We wrote this book to translate the rich history of the last seven years — the time that I’ve been in the restaurant — to share those recipes with home cooks.

SFBG What do you mean by “translate”?

MA A professional cook uses jargon, a technical language that’s not familiar to most people who have never worked in a professional kitchen. So, we reevaluated the kinds of tools that one would use at home, the way in which I described how to execute a dish, and took into consideration the careful way I cook at home. I have three daughters, so I cook a lot at home.

SFBG Do your girls have a favorite recipe that you make at home?

MA My three daughters are 14, 11, and three and a half. The mushroom lasagna is a particular favorite of the eldest. The zucchini soup is a favorite of Colette, the 11-year-old. And Adeline eats everything [laughs].

In the book I mention this one silly scenario where I’ll wear my Japanese chef outfit and set up an open kitchen, write out the menu, and I serve [my girls] à la carte vegetable sushi at our open window.

SFBG What’s your trick to having a restaurant and a family at the same time?

MA We make an enormous amount of sacrifices to be a part of this business. The great news is there’s an amazing team at Gramercy Tavern, which allows us all to take days off, including me. And during that time at home I enjoy being home, cooking, and shopping at the Greenmarket. It’s a regular part of our lives.

SFBG You pay a lot of attention to vegetables. Where does this influence come from?

MA We have a fascination with vegetables. They’re a way for us to literally stay connected to the changing seasons and the growers. And for our guests, who, in a big city like this, can feel insulated from the changing seasons.

We’d all be a little better off if we allow ourselves to be seduced by the role that vegetables play in our dishes. It’s not about self-deprivation, not veganism, not vegetarianism — I’m not promoting that particular alternative. I’m just saying that when the vegetable component of the dish preoccupies the creative process, and the protein plays a slightly different role in the story, we eat a healthier variety.

SFBG Do you have a favorite vegetable?

MA It’s always changing. We’re just coming out of our first week of very cool, cold weather, so it’s shifted our salads to include things like roasted winter squash. Our soups are made from potatoes and parsnips and turnips. We’re serving things like sunchokes and salsify.

SFBG Tell me about the “harmonious scatter.”

MA It describes the way in which we plate food with intent. It’s not as simple as, say, Alice Waters saying that food is simply beautiful so just put it on the plate, but it’s not as forced as trying to over-manipulate the food. It’s somewhere in between. Sometimes the imperfections of seeing the cook’s hand in the dish lets you know that it’s handmade.

SFBG How does seasonality affect Gramercy Tavern?

MA When it gets warm in the spring it’s the perfect place to go for a carefully seasoned salad. Summertime when it’s sticky and hot, it’s a great place to come for a lightly grilled fish dish with a chilled cucumber garnish. In the wintertime, it’s an impressive use of the Greenmarket. It doesn’t mean the food is boring or dull, through the winter months, it just means that we have to be more creative with it.

SFBG I was drawn to the book’s Winter chapter the most, actually.

MA It’s a time when we can really draw a distinction between the way you guys [in the Bay Area] would be eating. People are always saying, “If only we had a growing season like in California.” But we don’t. So ultimately those are the times when we can really say that our food is the most distinctively different.

SFBG It’s like that moment where you think you think your fridge is empty, but you end up making something even tastier than you imagined for dinner.

MA I’m with you. Have you read Tamar Adler’s book, An Everlasting Meal?

SFBG I love that book.

MA Tamar’s a good friend, and she’s translated the notion that a meal is a continuation of a story, not the sum of a bunch of recipes. It’s how one meal forms the next. One season forms the next.

SFBG Can you interpret your term “American cooking”?

MA So, I think French food is all about harmony; there’s a very gentle feel, like looking at a wave. No sharp turns. Japanese food is actually more a state of mind. Like their language, there’s no intonation. It’s all about nature, the natural flavor with a very hidden hand of the chef.

American food is all about a lot of highs and lows. We use acidity, we use heat, as ways to make it exciting. In the same vein, we’re not bound by a lot of the traditions and rules that we learn, though we take great interest in them. We have a sense of freedom and openness to cooking … especially in a restaurant like Gramercy Tavern, anything and everything is permissible, in terms of sources of inspiration.

SFBG And American cooking at home?

MA I’ve demonstrated in the book how folks can take pleasure in cooking at home, without feeling trapped. “Oh, I can’t find that particular variety,” or “I don’t shop at the Greenmarket so I can’t do these recipes” — that’s not the case. The overriding message is cooking shouldn’t be a spectator sport. If you visit Gramercy Tavern and you like the dishes that we’re cooking, you can certainly easily find those ingredients at home.

SFBG What is the restaurant doing for Thanksgiving?

MA Well, Gramercy Tavern is closed for Thanksgiving, and that’s what we’re doing [laughs]. Everybody gets to go home and enjoy one of the few culinary holidays that we have in our culture. 

SFBG What are you doing?

MA I’m in charge of the turkey. I’m going to do one traditional slow-roasted bird, and I’ll serve that with a Swiss chard and mushroom stuffing. The other one is a spice-wrapped and apple-wood smoked turkey. With that one there’s never any leftovers. Just demolished. This year, since my in-laws are Jewish, it becomes Thanksgivingukkah. We’re including latkes, and the butternut squash soup with Brussels sprouts from The Gramercy Tavern Cookbook.

Chef Michael Anthony signs The Gramercy Tavern Cookbook Dec. 1, 11am-1pm, Blue Bottle Café, 300 Webster, Oakl; Dec. 2, he collaborates with Quince chef Michael Tusk on a special six-course dinner. For reservations call (415) 775-8500 or visit www.quincerestaurant.com/events.

Gobble online

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culture@sfbg.com

FOOD AND DRINK As Thanksgiving nears, along with the daunting task of writing up the grocery list, more food-savvy family chefs are swapping the commercially manufactured Broad Breasted White for a heritage turkey, which promises better flavor through a higher standard of bird life. Famous local grower Bill Niman of BN Ranch is trying to give his free-range, GMO-free, organic heritage birds a wider audience by offering them for order: starting at $98.98 for an eight-10 pound bird, delivered anywhere in the US, through his website, www.bnranchtotable.com. We caught up with him to ask what all the cluck’s about.

SF Bay Guardian What breeds of heritage turkey do you raise on BN Ranch?

Bill Niman Narragansett, Standard Bronze, and Spanish Blacks.

SFBG What is an average lifespan?

BN From hatching to market, probably 28 weeks.

SFBG How many do you raise for one holiday season?

BN This year we have about 8,000 heritage turkeys.

SFBG What do your turkeys eat?

BN It’s a GMO free ration. We’ve been struggling for about three years now to get something that’s GMO free, and this year we were able to do that 100 percent.

SFBG The other distinguishing factor of heritage turkeys, besides lifespan and feed, is their ability to mate on their own?

BN As extraordinary as that might sound. [Laughs.] And they can fly. And they don’t get sick. And they’re hearty. And they’re interesting, and intelligent. It’s all the things you’d expect from any animal in the barnyard.

SFBG What’s the basic personality of a heritage?

BN Turkeys are really cruel to each other, in the pecking order and whatnot, surprisingly cruel — but they’re really friendly to humans. When they’re young, 6 to 8 weeks old, they fly up and land on your shoulder, they follow you around, and in a sense we become surrogate mothers. You can call, and they follow you. I suspect these turkeys that we raise are so close to being feral, they’re so much like their wild ancestors. They could fly away anytime they want to. But they waddle up to the building, and say, “Kill me and eat me.” That’s probably how turkey became part of Thanksgiving, because they’re ready to be eaten in the fall.

SFBG How do you manage to see the turkeys as both animals and as meat?

BN You mean sending them to slaughter? Well, it is difficult, and it doesn’t get easier with numbers. What’s important is to make sure the animals only have one bad day on the farm. For me and our operations, it’s essential that we are at the slaughterhouse, making sure that it’s done as properly and as humanely as possible. We do that because we respect the animals, but we also know that there’s a very direct correlation between the eating quality of the animals and their temperament at slaughter.

SFBG What about flavor?

BN They rule in taste tests, the heritage turkeys. The entire bird, even though it has a white breast, has the wonderful characteristics of the dark meat.

SFBG Got any favorite Thanksgiving preparation?

BN Yes I do. You cook the turkey till the breast meat is done, take it out, remove the leg and thigh, put them back in covered, and roast them for an additional half an hour, while the breast stays on the carcass on the counter, warm and covered.

 

Chocolate + ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’ = irony that tastes gooooood

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When I got to work Friday morning, I found the Arts and Culture editors, along with our publisher, huddled outside a cubicle, mouths agape. I joined them. A large rectangular box sat on the desk. Reminiscent of the strange stone tablet from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), it rose up from the desk, black, and ominous, only this one gleamed with golden letters, spelling out “Catching Fire.” Inside, I found chocolate.

(Here’s a quick rule of thumb in the newsroom: You will get promotional gifts. Another one: rarely will a promo grab your attention. But my favorite is: Do not let thy promo go to waste.)

I did what any food writer would do. I tasted each and every last chocolate bar — a total of 12, one for each “District” inside the post-apocalyptic world of Suzanne Collins’ trilogy The Hunger Games. (The timing of this delivery, of course, is to whet one’s appetite for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, out Nov 22). Crafted by chocolate makers Vosges through their American farmer-sourced Wild Ophelia line, each chocolate bar incorporated aspects of American geography, on which Panem, the segregated, classist country where heroine Katniss lives, was based.

“Luxury,” a milk chocolate cashew bar, tasted mild, nutty, and easy — suspiciously easy, much like the rich, well-off citizens of District One. “Masonry” contained little grains of pecans and the liquid-gold caramel, reminding me of molten metals forged in District Two. “Technology” combined Arabica coffee, crystal salt, and dark chocolate, for a brittle texture, a deep byte — I mean bite, and a dangerous, snappy quality that the digital users of District Three would find addictive.

“Fishing” brought out the District Four ocean through sea salt and coconut. I savored it in a guilty way, as one enjoys the perplexity of vegemite or guzzles too much wine at church. “Power,” though immediately pleasing, contained caramel corn, and I conceded, like the disappointed citizens of District Five, that sometimes power is but spun sugar and air. “Transportation” contained runner peanuts, and carried a comfortable, nostalgic taste of peanut butter sandwiches that District Six children would have nibbled on the ride home from school.

(At this point in my tasting, I began to feel a strange sense of urgency — not unlike the adrenaline-filled fear Katniss experienced during the 60 second countdown to the start of the Games — as office colleagues walked past my desk and doubled back, eyes trained on the sleek packaging.)

“Lumber” tasted bad-ass, with a bright chipotle at the beginning and a spark of chili at the end. The dudes of District Seven, if they looked anything like this chocolate tasted, would be the rugged, outdoorsy, smooth-talking types. “Textiles” contained crispy rice, and could be left in the box; much like the cotton clothing District Eight citizens wear, once put on it was easy to forget. “Grain” played with the palate, as milled oats, vanilla and hemp seeds competed for my attention. I predicted this one, District Nine, would win the next Games, if their representative was as complex, intelligent, and earthy as its chocolate counterpart.

(By now, like the last remaining competitors in the Games, I became territorial. “This is an assignment, not a free-for-all! You can eat some soon — hey! Come back here with that caramel!”)

“Livestock,” tasted of smooth chocolate before the beef jerky hit, leaving behind a few puffs of smoke, like empty cattle fields after a roundup in District Ten. “Agriculture” tasted naïve, hiding harvest cherries among the dark chocolate like the lost fairy children of District 11. “Mining,” a classic, charming milk chocolate flecked with edgy salt, tasted like Katniss herself: simultaneously brave, bold, and nondescript; the every-girl we all inhabit when we read the books and watch the movies.

Some may question the chocolate’s relevancy to the The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. I suppose the characters are, for the most part, hungry. Yet I contend that the sensorial emotions each flavor presented when I took a bite reflect the same thrills, joys, and anxieties I hope to experience in the darkened theater.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkvUNfySGQU

(Take note, promotional gift senders: I do not believe chocolate is exclusively relevant to The Hunger Games, either.)

Sweet ‘n’ local: chocolate-making with Dandelion at the SF Botanical Garden

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“My name is Kaylen, and I’m a chocoholic,” I announced at the Mesoamerican cloud forest at the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society (SFBGS), where users like me met for a recent course taught by Dandelion Chocolate. But what else is there to know about chocolate, apart from learning how to quit?

A whole botanical and cultural history, as it turns out, including tribal trading spats, terroir to make a oenophile envious, and ancient medicinal remedies — so don’t stop drinking just yet. (Sound enticing? Sign up for SFBGS’s upcoming class with Dandelion Chocolate and Four Barrel Coffee on Nov. 9; more Dandelion events here.) Here’s the report.

Cacao and the cloud forest
The cacao plant thrives in Mesoamerican cloud forests, 6,000 to 10,000 feet above sea level and only 10 degrees north or south of the equator. This explains why San Francisco’s climate doesn’t agree with the picky pod. Mesoamerican botanist Dr. Joseph Barbaccia, leading the class on a tour through the cloud forest, explained, “We can grow the trees, but we can’t approximate the environmental factors.”

Nevertheless, many transplants from Mesoamerican cloud forests flourish here in the bay fog instead of down south, where cloud forest cutting has ravaged the flora and fauna. Among the high-scaling daisy trees, oaks, and pines, plants called out to Barbaccia like old friends, and he couldn’t help stopping every few feet.

“Aha! The pièce de résistance!” he said, pointing at yellow and pink flowers hanging from the Deppea splendens in overturned bouquets, shivering like limp fingers. Dr. Dennis Breedlove, the botanist who collected the initial seeds for SFBGS’s cloud forest, took seeds from this stunning, macabre flower while hiking through southern Mexico. Returning 13 years later, that plant had gone extinct in the wild … but before straying too far down this mossy tangent, it’s time to head to the classroom.

A brief history of chocolate
Dandelion chocolate makers Alice, Joey and Cynthia — not to be confused with chocolatiers, who make confections from pre-made chocolate — led the class. Joey began with a quick history lesson.

The pre-Columbian natives consumed cacao in a sludgy, half-wet, half-ground gruel of sorts. Sound appetizing? Actually, most of their meals had this consistency, and began on a stone, or metate, where Mesoamerican mamas ground maize, chilies, pumpkin seeds, and cacao. (Every household had one, like your modern KitchenAid wedding present.) Once the cocoa beans released oils, the paste was combined with herbs, honey, vanilla, spices, even dyes, as well as maize and hot water.

We ground our beans on a metate but skipped the corn meal and went straight for hot water. Traditionally, someone poured the boiling drink from one terra cotta bowl at shoulder height into another on the floor, back and forth until the drink foamed, but these chocolate makers didn’t care to get dirty. They used a whisk. “You probably don’t want to taste this,” cautioned Alice.

I took a hesitant sip. Despite her warning, I found something mildly pleasing in the thin drink. It tasted oddly like coffee — sort of beany, without the disguise of milk, sugar, and added fats. It had me thinking, does our exhaustively artisanal coffee-culture have room for a new style of mocha, made from ground cacao bean instead of overly artificial sauce?

Bean to bar
Back in 2010, Dandelion Chocolates began experimenting with chocolate-making in a garage using hair dryers and blenders, before moving their factory to Valencia Street. The open space resembles the interior of a barn, if a barn were made of glass and the animals wore aprons.

While most mass producing chocolate companies source from a variety of plantations and over-roast their beans to achieve a uniform “chocolate” flavor in every square, Dandelion makes each bar from a single bean variety, playing around with roasting and mixing until finding a sweet spot, so to speak. Ultimately, they’ve created a broad collection of bars that rival a Napa winery’s selection of pinots, cabs, and malbecs.

Nibbling, melting, slurping
I’ve saved the best for last, so let’s cut to the chase, and taste.

The first samples foiled three of Dandelion’s 70 percent darks, emphasizing the variety in beans — the boom without the frills. Joey called the Patanemo, Venezuela bar “platonic,” since it wasn’t too sweet, nor floral, citrusy, intense or bitter. So what is it? Round, warm, and buttery. It tasted of chocolate at its most classic.

The bean from Mantuano, Venezuela was grown on a women’s co-op farm, just a valley and forest away from the Patanemo bar, yet this one arched and changed on the tongue, beginning sweetly, sliding to citrus, and biting, bitterly, just before the swallow.

The Ambanja, Madagascar bar began with a deep, earthly flavor like wet, ripe fruit, rose to an acidic high, and finished “like a raisin,” said Joey, though I thought of pomegranate. If chocolate tasted like colors, this one was red.

The same Madagascar bean made up Francois Pralus’ 100 percent bar, but a different process and darker roast deafened the subtle harmonies, creating one tone. Still delicious, less interesting. Ritual’s southern Belize bar, which processes wet beans together, immediately pleased my taste buds, skipping the tang and going straight for sweet indulgence. The gritty, unrefined texture of TAZA’s bar tasted of slowly cooling desert sand and S’mores. The only milk chocolate sampled, San Francisco’s TCHO 55 percent, made for an anticlimactic, diluted finish.

Before heading back into the bracing chill, the chocolate makers passed out small cups of their Mission Hot Chocolate. It went down frothing and thick, the pasilla chili nipping at the back of my throat. Oddly, the drink lingered even longer, like an oddly pleasant after-aftertaste in my belly. It pleased and purified the same way a spicy curry cures you of the blues on a rainy day. No wonder the Mesoamericans believed in cacao divine.

Pleased to meat you: Fatted Calf Charcuterie

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If you’ve ever found yourself waiting for the 16 Express on the corner of Fell and Gough, then it’s easy to bet you’ve swiveled around on that red bench to peer through the glass wall of the charcuterie and butcher shop behind, where ruby-colored sausages, pâtés, smoked ham, bacon and meatloaf show off their curves inside a refrigerated display. Unthinkingly, you’ll have walked in.

The Hayes Valley location of the Fatted Calf Charcuterie — the store also has a Napa outpost and a weekly presence at the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market — sells a plethora of coveted artisanal delights as well, like hard cheese, house-pickled beets, dried beans, and impeccable pastas. Among the sandwiches, the coffee-bourbon barbeque pulled pork sandwich contains a moist piquancy, while the toasty Croque Monseiur, dripping of Mornay sauce and overlaid with squiggles of cured ham, is worth missing the next bus for. (Grab an extra napkin — these beasts invariably fall apart in your hands and lap.)

You can’t take the entire shop with you, but luckily owners Taylor Boetticher and Toponia Miller just published their first cookbook, In the Charcuterie (Ten Speed Press, 2013), which reads like a whole world of meat — one I’ve become enamored with, after making the Flaky Leaf Lard Biscuits. I caught up with Boetticher before the couple left on a promotional trip, asking him about their journey in charcuterie.

SF Bay Guardian What draws you to charcuterie in particular?

Taylor Boetticher I started making charcuterie when I began working at Cafe Rouge in Berkeley in 1999, and it drew me in almost instantly. I think a large part of what I liked about it was that I was doing this while working behind the meat counter, so I had a really good connection with everyone who was buying the food we were making. It’s different in that sense than working in a restaurant kitchen, you never really interact much with the people you’re cooking for even if you’re in an open kitchen.

When you’re getting feedback about a terrine or a new bacon cure two or three days after you introduce it, it enables you to really get a good sense of what’s working and what isn’t. What continues to draw me to charcuterie is that, at this point, I’m lucky enough to not only work with my wife but with a wildly talented group of individuals whose sole interest is in making the best food we can make… That and the growing interest on the part of the general public make what we do really rewarding. Not much feels better than when a customer comes back in and tells you that you had a part in one of the best dinner parties they’ve ever thrown.

SFBG In the Charcuterie is comprehensive, enlightening, and I’ll admit, a little daunting. Who did you write this book for?

TB Thanks! We wrote this book for anyone who’s a little curious about making the most out of the meat they buy and cook, from enthusiastic novices to seasoned professionals. Our goals with this book are to inspire confidence in people when they set out to make something and give them a comprehensive set of basics which will make every bite count.

SFBG Where in your book do you recommend a new-to-meat home cook should begin? 

TB I’d start with the 5 Spice Baby Back Ribs or the Gingery Braised Duck Legs. Both use relatively common cuts (chicken legs are just as awesome if you don’t have access to duck legs) but with exceptionally flavorful treatments that aren’t very complicated. They’re both good examples of how to take a very straightforward cut and really make it sing.

SFBG The book mentions a trip to Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy. How does travel inspire your work?

TB A huge part of travel for us has always been about seeing what and how other people eat, and the role that food plays in different cultures. It’s one of the few things that everyone does and shares. Travel for us is both relaxing and invigorating, just like it is for most people. Wherever we go, we try and keep open minds and eat what everyone else is eating. It’s good to just go with the flow. A lot of time we’ll try different versions of things we’ve been making already, which is always cool. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go back and change it immediately when that happens.

I think one of the most exciting things in food right now is the idea that it’s good to know how something is made in its place of origin but not have to be a slave to authenticity. Like with our pulled pork sandwich — I’ve had a lot of them, all over the country. Some are better than others, but I have zero interest in arguing with anyone about the “right” way to do it. Is it tasty? Do you and your guests like it? Those are more important than any pedigrees, in my opinion.

SFBG What is your favorite aspect or variety of charcuterie to make?

TB Tough choice. Right now it’s our brined and smoked meats — we’ve been playing around with a couple new holiday hams that I’m really enjoying. I’ll just say this — when your big experiment of the week is getting a bourbon/honey/gelée glazed smoked ham nailed down 100 percent, it’s a pretty good job overall.

SFBG What is your personal favorite recipe in the book — or what do you crave for your next meal?

TB Errr, it’s probably the meat loaf. I really love that damn recipe.

SFBG Do you have a personal philosophy on eating animals?

TB My personal philosophy on eating animals is pretty simple: make it count. There’s no such thing as cheap meat, and we have a responsibility to make the most out of anything, especially something with a heartbeat, that’s grown for food. I’d love to completely get away from factory farms in this country and have meat animals be more a part of where they started — on farms as part of a program of crop rotation and land management.

Lots has been written about the politics and money involved that make it hard for farmers to do just that, but anything that grows with fresh air, sunshine, room to move around, and good food and water is going to be healthier. And tastier. This is indisputable.

SFBG What is your number one, most essential advice to home cooks on charcuterie?

TB Start small.

SFBG What’s next for the two of you?

TB We’re doing some travel to promote the book on the East Coast and through Texas, then holiday madness will be upon us. In January, we’re hoping to take a vacation. It’s been a pretty busy year.

 

FATTED CALF (Hayes Valley location)

Open daily, 10am-8pm

320 Fell, SF

www.fattedcalf.com