San Francisco Food Blog

Uncle Lynx/Flickr

​This afternoon kicks off a weekend of harvest-related activities at the Ferry Building. Free events include an olive oil tasting, apple pressing and cider making, a Barnyard by the Bay petting zoo, and live music. Till 8 p.m. today, an organic spirits (boo!), wine, and beer tasting is going down. Tickets are $15 for five tastes, or $25 for 10, and the proceeds benefit California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), which is historically one of the oldest certifying agencies. Snazzy wine glass is yours to keep.

At tomorrow's Ferry Plaza farmers' market, there'll be harvest produce in full effect, an heirloom apple tasting and cider pressing, butter making, and wool spinning. These are free family friendly activities that run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Vendors throughout the market will also offer seasonal tastes. A combo of gypsy jazz and barnyard animals wrap the weekend's festivities up on Sunday. From 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., celebrate the harvest with face painting, and by (gently) stroking a cute little barnyard animal in the petting zoo. Gently, we said!

M. Brody

Luis Villavelazquez: The Lewis Carrol of cupcakes?

​For the inaugural outing this morning of Arlequin's pastry stand on the south side of the Thursday Ferry Plaza farmers' market, chef Luis Villavelazquez put together an intriguing lineup of cupcakes, beignets, scones, and cookies with uncommon combinations of ingredients and flavor profiles. Cocoa nib cupcakes stuffed with huckleberry jam and frosted with violet-essence icing? Fromage blanc scones studded with figs and glazed with honey, or savory wheatberry scones slicked with olive oil? We'd put the imagination of the Arlequin (and Absinthe) pastry chef right up there alongside Lewis Carroll's.We wanted to follow him down the rabbit hole and try everything, but reality intervened.

M. Brody

Scones seemed perfect for the season.

​Our favorites were perfect for the season: the dusky scone excitingly perfumed with the pungent Indian spice blend garam masala, enfolding chewy bits of persimmon, and glazed with coffee ($2.75); and the autumnal squash cupcake, happily not too sweet, stuffed with pillowy cream cheese and topped with brown butter frosting ($2.50).

We also enjoyed the very chocolaty, dense, and lumpy chocolate cherry cookie ($1.75) and the classic beignet with raspberry jam (the same ones Arlequin makes for I Preferiti de Boriana in the Ferry Building -- $2.50). The modish beignet stuffed with maple/bacon custard ($2.50) was shocking in its intensity and fattiness: perhaps better for later in the day than as an eye-opener. But we'll happily open our eyes any time of the day with the split scone sandwiched with house-made pecan butter and glazed with Rittenhouse 100-proof rye whiskey ($2.75).

Arlequin Stand at the Thursday Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market One Ferry Building at the Embarcadero; Thu, 8:30 a.m.-2 p.m., or until sold out.

M. Brody

Beignets (left) and cupcakes: lime/coconut, squash, cocoa nib with huckleberry, and chocolate chip with maple frosting.

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M. Brody

Big crowds showed up for the Eat Real Festival in Oakland.

​Some 70,000 people showed up for last weekend's Eat Real Festival, according to the event's communications director. Susan Coss said the busiest day was Saturday, which had the longest program of the three-day dual celebration of street food and sustainable food systems. "Thankfully the space was large enough to accommodate so many people so it didn't feel oppressively crowded," Coss told SFoodie.

The biggest surprise to organizers? The popularity of Saturday's Butchery Contest, which pitted three teams against each other in a high-speed hack-off. "There were thousands of people on the main lawn watching," Coss said.

Organizers plan to sit down in the coming weeks to talk about plans for next year's festival. Coss said she expects to announce next year's dates sometime in October.

Meanwhile, La Cocina director Caleb Zigas said the San Francisco Street Food Festival on August 22 raised approximately $40,000 for the Mission District nonprofit. Crowd estimates are difficult, but Zigas said police estimated 6,000-7,000 attendees per hour for the all-day festival that clogged a blocked-off stretch of Folsom. That's far more than the 5,000 total attendees Zigas was expecting before the event. "That's the reason we only got one block in the first place," he said, adding that he was "legitimately amazed" that so many people turned out for the festival. "It was an incredible boon for all the program participants and all the informal vendors."

The S.F. Street Food event was criticized for long lines and wait times for food. Zigas acknowledged that, while the criticism stung, he hoped to learn from it. "The majority of it was well taken," he said. Pretty much everybody said, We hope you do better next year."

Zigas said the $40,000 raised from food sales and the silent auction will help support general programming for the small-business incubator, which, like other nonprofits, has struggled with funding in the current climate.

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.

When I visited Boccalone to try their new sandwiches, they also gave me a tub of their new-to-me pork butter, which I was too full to try at the time. This is a concoction chef Chris Cosentino came up with to use the renderings, tasty bits of meat, skin, and whatnot left over from making lard, that would otherwise be wasted.

The renderings are puréed with olive oil, garlic, and rosemary, resulting in a creamy spread that tastes a lot like rillettes (French potted pork), only lighter. It's delicious on crusty bread or crackers, even better on warm toast. At $5 for a one-pound tub, it's one of the few bargains in the Ferry Building.

I got in touch with Boccalone because I thought it would be fun and interesting to visit their Oakland plant and shoot a video or photo essay about how they make their salumi, but apparently FDA or some local agency's regulations make it illegal for an non-employees to be present. There's even an inspector with a desk on site to make sure the rules are enforced. Instead, they invited me to visit their Ferry Building shop to taste some new sandwiches they just added to the menu.

The mortadella dog ($6.45) has two minature pistachio-laced mortadellas, in natural sheep casings for a hot-dog-like snap, with a generous helping of the best bread-and-butter pickles I've ever tasted. Often I find those pickles mushy and/or too sweet, but these are crisp and sweet-sour. Like all the sandwiches, it's served on an Acme roll made specially for the shop to be more like the soft rolls used in the East Coast subs / grinders / hoagies owners Chris Cosentino and Mark Pastore grew up eating.

By Matthew Stafford

Last week I took it upon myself to show a visitor around San Francisco. The visitor in question, a New Zealander, was on the initial leg of a year-long circumnavigation of the globe, and as a native San Franciscan I wanted her to get home several months from now and say to herself, "Well, the canals of Venice were very nice, and that Great Wall was pretty impressive, but they couldn't compare to that focaccia place in North Beach."

To that end I endeavored to show her everything worth seeing and eating in the northeastern corner of the city (District 3 to you politicos) in the space of 16 hours. We didn't hit all the hot spots, but God knows we tried.

We began with a 9 a.m. breakfast of omelets and fresh berries at Sears Fine Foods (439 Powell St.) - she wouldn't get the dollar-sized pancakes despite my admonitions - then off to the Financial District to check out a few art deco office lobbies and the Maxfield Parrish mural at the Palace's Pied Piper Lounge (2 New Montgomery St.).

Krispy Kreme has gotten a lot of patriotic attention this week with their doughnut giveaways, yet we should not forget the real fried patron saint of San Francisco: Boriana's Corner bomboloni at the Ferry Building. Yes, we talk about this hallowed hall of food often, but if you're going to taste one thing in it, let it be this sugar-encrusted offering of the gods.

Whether filled with Nutella, raspberry or (the personal favorite) custard, it's a four-bite indulgence that brings an instant flush of happiness.—Tamara Palmer

(Sugar Skulls by The Xocolate Bar of Berkeley)

By Tamara Palmer

Every year, at precisely this time, I lament the fact that it is not socially acceptable for childless adults such as myself to go trick or treating. If society were to correct this grave ill, here's what I'd ideally like to be handed when I knock on your door:

CUESA (Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture) will host its fifth annual Ferry Building Marketplace Harvest Festival. Highlights for Friday include an organic wine and beer tasting from 4-8 p.m. ($25 for 10 tastes or $15 for five). Saturday brings an afternoon of cooking demonstrations of skills such as apple pressing, butter churning and wool spinning from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., while Sunday brings out mellow jazz stylings as well as a petting zoo and face painting for the kids from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The largely free fest takes place from October 24-26 in that hallowed hall of food heaven. —Tamara Palmer

By Matthew Stafford

I've conducted several walking-and-scarfing tours down the Ferry Building's fragrant, nosh-packed central concourse since the joint's grand reopening in 2003, but I'd never systematically visited each and every food stall before I started researching the Ferry Building wrap-up that ran in last week's Eat section.

My plan was to chronicle what I encountered, venue by venue, north to south, over three corpulent days of journalistic research. Since the Ferry Building hosts 39 individual venues, more than I or my stomach were prepared to expound upon over the course of one newspaper article, I had to establish some parameters at the outset: I only visited businesses within the building itself (hence no Donna's Tamales, Aidell's Sausages and other Farmers Market stalwarts) and places that prepare and serve actual ready-to-eat-on-the-premises food items (leaving out all those cheese, olive oil, cookware and produce establishments). I also crossed off Peet's because there's already one of them just down the street from you.

So here's to a few of the entirely worthy snack items I couldn't fit into the article proper: