San Francisco Food Blog

Hertzberg and François: A case of too much coffee?

​If the idea of baking bread seems like too much work and time, there are some experts are here to set you straight. The theory? That you can master fiber-packed bread-making at home in the time it takes to floss. Artisan breads, too. Zoe François and Dr. Jeff Hertzberg, authors of Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, will discuss their decidedly radical baking notion at Omnivore Books (3885a Cesar Chavez Street at Church) tomorrow from 3 to 4 p.m. A full hour. What we want to know is this: If you can make Aunt Melissa's Granola Bread in five minutes, shouldn't you be able to talk about it in the same time span?

Ruby C./Flickr

Bags of warm pan de sal, ready for buttering. Or not.

​The Bread Basket is a longtime staple in Daly City, a well-loved source of fresh-baked Filipino breads, pastries, and desserts. The signature item here? Pan de sal, traditional Filipino rolls, usually eaten for breakfast but scarfable any time of day. They're similar to American dinner rolls, only fluffier and sweeter. The ones here ($2 for 15) are pillow-soft -- they melt in your mouth, especially when just out of the oven. They're good enough to devour on their own, but split and spread with a little butter, the rolls' subtle sweetness really comes out. The pan de sal and other pastries emerge from the Bread Basket's ovens between 7 and 9 a.m. daily, definitely the best window for satisfying your cravings. Also check out the ensaymada ($1.50), sweet rolls topped with butter and sugar. Like the pan de sal, they're light and fluffy, and the sugar-encrusted tops are almost creamy, sweet without being cloying. You can also order the ensaymada stuffed with ube (sweet purple yam), macapuno (young coconut), or cheese. And while you can score other Filipino pastries and desserts here (cakes, muffins, empanadas, pies), the bread and rolls are the standouts.

The Bread Basket Bakery 7099 Mission (at E. Moltke), Daly City, (650) 994-7741

Outside of a Church festival every October at St. John Etchmiadzin, San Francisco has been fairly deprived of Armenian food. No more: since last July, Royal Market & Bakery (5335 Geary between 17th & 18th) has been offering a wide variety of products imported from Armenia, plus items from countries with similar cuisines, such as Georgia and Turkey.

On the grocery front, Royal has dairy products including kefir and cheeses, herring and other pickled fish, fresh and smoked fish, fresh meat including veal tongue and lamb's tounge and testicles, and seasoned meat (shown above) ready to be skewered and grilled for kebabs. The deli offers a wide variety of salads, pickles, olives, sausages, smoked meats, and prepared foods made in-house.

Chocolate bread ($2.50) is a revelation at Thorough Bread and Pastry (248 Church), the retail bakery operated by the San Francisco Baking Institute. Thick, dark chocolate chips are scattered throughout the loaf and offer bursts of extra sweetness to something that wouldn't be supersweet without them. It tastes less decadent than cake or a brownie, but maybe that's because we didn't make a sandwich out of it (this time).

If you are what you eat, I'm a loaf of Acme pain au levain (French for sourdough), made with natural sourdough starter and a blend of white and whole wheat. Even if you've never bought a loaf, you may have encountered it on the table at Zuni Cafe, downstairs at Chez Panisse (where founder-owner Steve Sullivan first plied his craft), or at one of the many other local restaurants that serve it.

This is the ideal crusty loaf for sponging up soup or pasta sauce, and for making bruschetta or open-faced grilled sandwiches.. Toasted, it's the perfect crunchy vehicle for rich, spreadable charcuterie such as pâtés, rilettes, ciccoli, and pork butter.

In my book, Acme Bread is one of the half-dozen best bread bakeries in the Bay Area, and it's the only one on that short list that's readily available at markets. You can even get a few of its breads at local branches of Costco (sour batard and olive bread last time I checked) and Trader Joe's (reportedly house-labeled organic herb focaccia, cranberry-walnut, and Italian), though whenever possible I prefer to get it direct from one of the bakeries (1 Ferry Building in SF and 1601 San Pablo in Berkeley), since it's a few hours fresher, sometimes even hot out of the oven.

Acme's pain d'epis ($2 at the bakeries), after blind comparisons with numerous other contenders, wins my prize for best baguette in the Bay Area. OK, strictly speaking it's not a baguette, but it's made from the same dough as the rustic baguette. Of the two, I prefer the epis because it has more crust, and at dinner parties or picnics I can just toss it on the table and let guests help themselves. Both loaves have a crust that's both crunchy and chewy, a tender, elastic crumb, and a yeasty, nutty flavor. There is no better bread for most cheeses.

If you're interested in learning what makes these breads so special, watch founder / owner / baker-in-chief Steve Sullivan on the PBS show Julia Child: Lessons with Master Chefs. There are two clips online: in the first, he makes the dough; in the second, he makes the loaves.

Joe and Kass Schwin started Berkeley's Vital Vittles in 1976 with the intent of selling freshly-milled, stone-ground, organic flour. They quickly switched to baking bread, but they still grind their own flour daily, which gives their products a more pronounced grain flavor and a unique nuttiness.

Their flagship Real Bread is a simple, dense, yeast-raised, 100% whole-wheat loaf that makes great toast. Most of the bakery's other breads are minor variations on that, with seeds, nuts, other grains, raisins, or corn mixed in. To me, all those breads taste pretty much alike, though the millet in the sesame-millet loaf adds a distinctive and pleasant crunch.

One exception to the taste-alike rule is the Russian Sourdough, an even denser bread made from nothing but whole-wheat flour, salt, water, and whatever wild bacteria and/or yeast ferment the dough. I prefer the Sourdough Rye, a very similar bread made with a percentage of rye flour and some caraway seeds. Sliced thin, this makes great German- or Scandinavian-style open-faced sandwiches.

You can find Vital Vittles' breads all over the area--there's a list of retailers on their Web site. They also sell at farmers' markets in Berkeley, Oakland, and Pleasanton, and at the bakery (2810 San Pablo, Berkeley).

Liguria Bakery (1700 Stockton at Filbert, 421-3786) has thrived for almost 90 years by doing a single thing very well: they make focaccia. Period.

They sell ten different kinds--plain ($4 a sheet), with your choice of eight different toppings ($4 to $4.50), and frozen bake-at-home ($3)--but nothing else (except perhaps the occasional raffle ticket to benefit local schools).

The focaccia is baked fresh every morning. If you get there early, the bread is still warm, and you can join the afficionados devouring it on the streets nearby, or on the benches in nearby Washington Square Park. If you get there late, you're likely to find they've sold out and closed early.

Hours:

Monday-Friday, 8am-2pm
Saturday, 7am-2pm
Sunday, 7am-noon

Pure Grain Bakery's pumpernickel is one of the best German-style breads in these parts. Though it's 100% rye, the bread is lighter and less sour than most of this style, and it has a wonderful nuttiness that's accentuated by toasting. I first came across it several years ago in a bread basket at a German restaurant, and was so impressed that I asked where they got it. Unfortunately, it turned out that the bakery is in Vacaville, and at the time they had no retail outlets in SF.

Now they do. Lehr's German Specialties (1581 Church) carries both Pure Grain pumpernickel and a variety of German goodies that go well on top of it, such as apfelkraut (dark, not very sweet apple butter) and quark (soft German cream cheese), a classic breakfast combo, and various sorts of liverwurst. You can also get the bread at Rainbow Grocery (1745 Folsom).